An Infinity of Mirrors (30 page)

None of the seventeen passengers in the bus could communicate with each other or with the policemen, except in cases of parents and children. They were all foreign-born Jews who had fled to France for sanctuary and they were gabbling in German, Lithuanian, Italian, and Hungarian, and in dialects of some of those languages. Because they could not speak or understand French there had already been misunderstandings, and these promised to get worse as the day wore on.

Cours Albert I was stately in its elegance. It had once entertained Henri IV at a dinner party given by Nicolas Chabouille. Its plane trees filed along the river bank from the Pont des Invalides to the Pont de I'Alma.

Mme. Citron was startled and indignant when she opened the front door and found the two policemen. She wore a peignoir and her nightcap was askew on her head. “Are you drunk?” she said, thereby offending the older policeman. “Take your hand off that doorbell—there's a sick child here.”

The older policeman looked at the card again. “Paul-Alain Rhode-Bernheim.”

“What about him?”

“Is he here?”

“Of course he's here. Where else would he be?”

The young man with acne was peering past Mme. Citron at the magnificence of the apartment. The older one shrugged. “Bring him out, please,” he said. Both men were feeling illtempered because they hated the duty, and because Grosjean—and his talk about principle—had been making it worse for them all morning.

“Bring him out? He is sick. He is a little boy eight years old.”

Clotilde heard Mme. Citron as she came rapidly across the entrance hall in a flannel nightgown, without slippers. “What is it, Madame?” she asked.

“These
flicaille
have Paul-Alain confused with some criminal of the same name.”

“Listen, Madame,” the acned young man said. “Is he a Jew?”

“Yes.”

“Then there is no mistake. This is a razzia for Jews.”

“My God, his grandfather was Paul-Alain Bernheim!”

“Where was he born?” the young policeman asked.

“In Germany.”

“Then get him out here, please. This is taking too much time.”

“Please,” Clotilde said. “He is a sick little boy. He has been awake most of the night with a fever. Please.”

The young man shouldered his way between the two women. “All right, if you won't bring him out we'll take him out. We're only doing our rotten job.”

“Where is the boy?” the older one said sharply to Mme. Citron.

“This boy's father is Major-General Wilhelm von Rhode of the General Staff of the Military Governor,” Clotilde said angrily, but the older policeman looked at her sadly and said, “It's no use, dear. This is an SS operation. Now, do you want to dress the boy or will we?”

Clotilde's eyes filled with tears. “We will dress him,” she said firmly. She moved down to Paul-Alain's room, Mme. Citron trailing behind in bewilderment. The young man shouted after them to move quickly, please.

Clotilde asked Mme. Citron to get Paul-Alain ready while she called the General. She went to the telephone in the study, dialed the number of the Royal Monceau and asked for General von Rhode. He was not in. Well, when would he be in? The hotel did not have such information. When she called the Hôtel Majestic the number rang thirty-one times before anyone answered, and when she asked for General von Rhode the voice said that generals did not appear until eight-thirty at the earliest and hung up.

Clotilde ran along the hall to Paul-Alain's room. It still smelled of the paregoric she had given him for his stomach during the night, and she could hear his querulous voice from the bathroom. He was complaining about having been woken, but his voice was dull and apathetic.

“I'll dress him now, Madame,” Clotilde said. “You go out and talk to them, please. Offer them a glass of wine and try to take their minds off him.” Muttering, Mme. Citron left the bathroom as Clotilde knelt in front of Paul-Alain and nuzzled his soft cheek. “You are going to have a great adventure, Paul-Alain,” she said.

“My stomach hurts. I feel dizzy, Clotilde.”

“That's the way it is with soldiers and with generals. Often they don't feel well before a battle, but they must be brave all the same.”

“A battle?” he asked dully.

She finished dressing him. “Like a battle. You will be playing prisoner-of-war.” She wiped his face with a cold, damp cloth. His skin was hot and dry. “In war, these things happen,” she said, large tears falling down her cheeks. “They always come for the men, you see, and that is why I cannot go with you. But it will be for only a short time, because the moment I tell your Papa he will land on their backs with both boots and they'll be sorry they ever did such a thing. You'll see.”

“Will they let me lie down?”

She fought her tears and her fear and her panic at not being able to save Paul-Alain. She drew him to her tightly. “I know you will be a good boy, Paul-Alain, because you want to make your mother and father proud of you.” She stood up and took his hand and they walked down the corridor.

The older policeman scrawled his name and number across a slip of paper, ripped the page off the pad and handed it to Clotilde as a receipt for the merchandise. Then he took Paul-Alain's hand, and in an instant they were gone.

“What are we going to do?” Mme. Citron asked over and over again. “What will we do?”

Clotilde ran to the door and raced into the hall to lean over the balustrade. “Please! Where are you taking him?” she yelled into the stairwell. “Where will he be?”

“None of your business!” the young cop shouted up to her in a fury of conscience. She ran back to the apartment and read the slip of paper. “They are from the commissariat in the rue C1ément-Marot,” she told Mme. Citron. “I can't read his name, but that is all General von Rhode will need to know.”

“What did the General say when you told him?”

“I couldn't reach him. Not until eight-thirty.”

“Two hours? Oh, Clotilde, Clotilde. His stomach was so hard and swollen.”

Clotilde set her jaw. “I will go to the Hôtel Majestic and wait until he comes there,” she said grimly. “That will be the quickest way. Such a little boy! My God, what is happening to France?”

The bus reached the Vélodrome d'Hiver at one twenty-three
P
.
M
. with ninety-one passengers. Paul-Alain was sitting on the long back seat between a large, brown man who spoke steadily to everyone in Csano, a Hungarian dialect of Bukovina near the Carpathians, and a despairing Italian woman who wept unceasingly. The air was foul and the summer sun pounded on the roof. The bus had been forced to move slowly, stopping frequently, and it seemed to wait longer and longer while the police assembled its cargo. Shortly before noon Agent Grosjean had ripped off his tunic and cap, flung them on the street and walked off cursing toward the Boulevard Haussmann.

Paul-Alain sat listlessly, battered by the strange sounds and smells all around him. He stared dreamily out of the window as the bus started and stopped, but he did not pay much attention because they did not seem to be going anywhere. Images of shimmering people in soft focus hovered around and above him. He sweated heavily.

At eight-thirty Clotilde approached the barricade guarding the military headquarters at Avenue Kléber. When an armed guard stopped her she said she worked for General von Rhode and that she brought an urgent message for him. He asked for her pass. She did not have a pass, she said, but it was a matter of life and death that she see General von Rhode. The guard said he could not admit her without a pass. Well, would he telephone from the sentry house so that General von Rhode could approve her admission? General von Rhode had not passed the checkpoint that morning, so there was no point in calling him. Then could she see General von Stuelpnagel? Did she have a pass? No, but it was an exceedingly urgent matter concerning General von Rhode's small son. The sentry was sorry, but she would have to have a pass. Would he call General von Stuelpnagel from the sentry house? That would not be possible. How could she reach either General? She must send a written request and the matter would be given fullest attention and a reply issued within five days.

Clotilde walked slowly toward the Etoile, tearing a small handkerchief into small pieces as she walked, staring at the Arc de Triomphe but not seeing it, and trying to decide what to do next. Finally she went to the post office behind the Hôtel Majestic and sent a telegram to General von Rhode, spelling it in German with difficulty. She paid for the telegram, then she walked home as quickly as possible, to wait beside the telephone.

The telegram was delivered to General von Rhode's office within an hour and the duty sergeant placed it on the thin pile on the secretary's bare desk. It remained there unopened, because the secretary had been given leave during the General's absence from Paris and all correspondence was being handled from the General's other office in the Hôtel Meurice.

The Vélodrome d'Hiver had opened in 1910, on the site of the old Galerie des Machines. It was built to be used for bicycle races, but in time, after the craze for six-day bicycle races had passed, the enclosed stadium was used for ice hockey and for political meetings. In 1931, it became the Palais des Sports, though no one referred to it by any other name but the Vélodrome d'Hiver until after the razzias. It had a capacity of twenty thousand people, who sat on stone steps as in an ancient amphitheatre. Since the Occupation the Vélodrome had stood idle, and its facilities had fallen into rusty disrepair. In the agreement to lease the premises to the Germans, the only restrictions the owners made was that no one wearing ordinary shoes be permitted to walk upon the banked board track. This obligation was strictly observed by the Germans who, in their thorough way, made a recording in French, which was to be broadcast over the public-address system whenever the danger threatened.

On the Thursday evening, July 16, 1942, of the first big razzia, when twelve thousand eight hundred and eighty-four Jews, including four thousand fifty-one children under fourteen years of age, most of whom could not understand French because they were refugees from seventeen different nations speaking forty-two dialects, were locked into the arena, the loudspeaker system went wild with outrage. Over and over again the same message poured down upon these bewildered people in a language few of them understood:
“Attention! Attention! Walking on the board track while wearing shoes is strictly forbidden. Attention! Those who walk upon the board track with shoes on will be immediately and severely punished!”
Police, who were extremely resentful of the assignment, were posted with leaded sticks all around the edge of the board track to beat back the people who doggedly kept walking on the boards with shoes.

The Gestapo checkers were more angry with the French police than the Jews when they discovered how miserably the French had failed to meet the minimum requirements of twenty-two thousand ordered by Berlin. Captain Strasse had actually been hoping for twenty-eight thousand. The Gestapo's handling of the Jews became more brutal as the evening wore on and an approximate yield of only thirteen thousand was confirmed, and they did everything but spit upon the police who had let them down.

That was the tactical dispute. A greater, strategic argument between Captain Strasse and the Vichy brass was raging in Strasse's office. The French wanted the children stored in orphanages around Paris. The Germans not only pointed out that there was inadequate space in segregated orphanages, but that they could not tolerate having other children contaminated by Jewish children. The argument was extended to Pierre Laval in Vichy and to SS Captain Dieter Wisliceny, Eichmann's aide in Berlin. The specter which clouded both sides of the argument was transport. When Wisliceny said that the problem had become overwhelming for Franz Novak, the transportation executive, Strasse asked maliciously if the razzias had come as a surprise to Novak. Suddenly Eichmann's voice bellowed into the telephone; Strasse was not to criticize Novak, who had accounted for more Jews than Strasse would in a lifetime. Novak was fighting Ley, the Wehrmacht, the Ministry of Transportation, the Ministry of Agriculture
and
the Reichsmarschall, who was diverting trains for loot which should be carrying Jews instead. If the interference and the criticism continued Eichmann said that he would ask that the matter be brought directly to the attention of the Fuehrer.

Strasse interrupted to ask for an official decision on the French objection to shipping children under sixteen years old to the extermination camps. Wisliceny's voice broke into the conversation to demand hotly how the French could take such a stand when only three weeks ago the Reichsfuehrer SS had honored France with the top priority for the elimination of their Jews only because the Vichy government's legislation had shown such insight into the Jewish problem.

Eichmann cut in again. “Strasse, I must be protected on this—a scandal could come out of this.”

Wisliceny said he would like someone to explain to him the difference between a ten-year-old Jew and a forty-year-old Jew. Strasse said he would report the Vichy position as soon as possible. “Heil Hitler!” he shouted, and hung up.

Because they had taken their shoes off, the Quakers' assistance teams were permitted to move the very sick to the infield at the Vélodrome d'Hiver. Most of the internees had brought no food with them, and though the Secours National offered to feed them this was refused by the police until the end of the second day. The Red Cross was authorized to provide medical aid under special conditions. The sick could only be evacuated by permission of the doctor at the prefecture who had to be consulted in each individual case by telephone. When he was told that one child had caught scarlet fever and that two others had measles he replied that the symptoms of the diseases, as described to him, were not clear enough. As a result an epidemic of diphtheria, scarlet fever, and measles broke out in the packed arena.