An Infinity of Mirrors (31 page)

Due to haste or oversight, the French police and the Gestapo had neglected to check on the water-supply system in the Vélodrome. After the twelve thousand eight hundred and eighty-four had been locked into the stadium, it was discovered that only one faucet worked. It was not until late Friday morning before the matter could be brought to the attention of anyone with the authority to send for a plumber. When the plumbers did arrive on Saturday afternoon it was discovered that the supply of drinking water could not be increased. For the same reasons, there were only six working toilets available for the twelve thousand eight hundred and eighty-four people.

The internees were ordered to sit on the cold stone tiers all around the track. The others packed into a thick ring in the circle outside the board running track, and those who were clearly dying lay on rows of stretchers all over the infield. Paul-Alain, huddled behind a screen of men and women, had seated himself on the floor with his back to the wall in front of the first tier of seats of the arena. His fever was high; the shapes around him seemed to move in slow motion and soft focus, as through a steam of smells, and the inexorable sound of the strident warning from the loudspeakers, repeating over and over its message which pierced his ears and hammered at his nerve ends, produced steady physical pain.
“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!”

Because of the wall at his back, Paul-Alain was able to sleep fitfully. The thousands on the stone tiers had to work to sleep and work to stay awake. They fell over forward; they slumped unconsciously on their neighbors; they got cramps and exchanged body lice.

Only the most experienced among the perpetually persecuted had known enough to insist upon their right to bring food. The Gestapo had expected to move the internees out to the transit camps more quickly, but the argument between Berlin and Vichy was still raging. On Friday afternoon, at one-thirty
P
.
M
., the Quakers' teams were allowed to bring in food, but this was no more effective than the one water faucet; the prisoners, particularly the children, were so frantic with thirst that food didn't interest them at all.

On Thursday and Thursday night many of the children had been diverted by the novelty of their surroundings. They had made friends despite the language barriers and organized games in little communities in all parts of the arena. Little girls had made dolls' houses out of luggage or rolled a ball back and forth among friends, and the boys had played football with wadded newspapers. But by Friday the oppression had become too much even for the children. The plumbers worked frantically, as perhaps they had never worked before, from two-thirty in the morning until one o'clock the next afternoon, but the pipes were either rotten or had been ripped out, and when they finished there was still only one faucet to quench the thirst of a long line of never fewer than eleven hundred parched and patient people who filled hats, shoes, and bottles to take back to their families, and then returned to stand in the line again. On Saturday morning, another water source was added when firemen connected a hose to a city hydrant and ran it into the arena. With only six toilets children and sick people could not wait, and small children could neither be washed nor changed.

Thirst in that airless auditorium was a worse pain than hunger and Paul-Alain's sense of heat was magnified by a rising fever. He dreamed of water, but he was aware that he was drinking in a dream and he would cry out and wake up wild-eyed. The sounds all around him had dropped below the level of language. A young policeman had to be clubbed into unconsciousness near the main door when he tried to shoot a Gestapo agent who said that one water tap was good enough for thirteen thousand Jews, and that it was even generous because, after all, they had been expecting twenty-two thousand. Hysterical, shouting, shrieking women walked up and down the stone tiers yelling the names of lost children, unable to ask anyone for help in Ivrit, Yiddish, Tagvy, Lithuanian, Ladino, Lamut, German, and Rumanian in this Babel of despair.

The dying began on Friday evening, at first from scarlet fever, advanced tuberculosis, and pneumonia. Thirty-two were dead by eleven
P
.
M
. Friday night, and the bodies lay in the heat for fourteen hours while the sun pounded upon the metal roof of the arena, and the body heat and the breathing of the living halved the available air. After Friday no guard would stay inside the place because of the heat and the stench and the terrible noises which burst from the throats and hearts of the thirteen thousand caged human animals.

The only illumination was a single work light which hung from the ceiling over the infield. The public-address system never ceased its mindless shouting:
“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.”

One hundred and twenty-six children and adults had died by Saturday afternoon and thirty-one babies were born, alive and dead. The old people prayed over them.

Paul-Alain had departed into his memory. He was reliving those afternoons with his beautiful Mama in the Schlossgarten. He was riding in the open carriage through the Bois with his thrilling Papa, and hundreds and hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of soldiers were saluting. His hands never relaxed their tight grasp upon his lower stomach. His eyes could not have been seeing their surroundings any more because he was continually smiling.

On Saturday the police came in hasty force and herded over four thousand of the people out of the arena. But they refused to allow anybody under sixteen to leave because the matter of their disposition had not yet been settled. Mothers were brutally beaten with leaded batons when they tried to drag their children along with them. Approximately three thousand adults and all four thousand and fifty-one children were left behind in the Vélodrome. Most of the adults were the sick, the mad, and the aged. On Saturday evening the Red Cross was allowed to send in a team of six people, who spoke only German and French among them, to offer to take messages to the outside from the remaining internees. Fifteen volunteers from the Quakers and the Secours National were permitted to move among the heaps of people to look for the ill and, when they found them, to try to decide which ones most needed a doctor. After a horrified survey the three agencies protested to the police, who reported back to Strasse, who finally agreed to allow doctors to go in—providing they were Jewish doctors—because there were sixty-one cases of measles, one hundred and thirty cases of whooping cough, and one hundred and eighty-four cases of scarlet fever, and there was no way to isolate these cases. Late on Saturday night the Jewish doctors received an authorization to evacuate the most gravely ill, but the French police countermanded the order on Gestapo instructions.

While the children watched death after death on one side of them and birth after birth on the other, in the heat of a most arid hell, arrayed on stone shelves, lying among their bodily foulness, the great voice called down from heaven:
“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.”

Paul-Alain was hemmed in by four sisters from Alsace, each one over seventy; by a huddle of eight unrelated children, three with scarlet fever, two with measles and two with whooping cough; and by two stout men in their fifties who sat, starkly mad, facing Paul-Alain, strapped by hand and foot to a heavy wheelbarrow and singing something tonelessly over and over again in a strange dialect. They saw nothing outside their minds, for they had been arrested in a mental hospital at Argenteuil.

The screen of bodies around Paul-Alain prevented the Quakers from finding him until two forty-five
A
.
M
., Monday. He had not eaten nor drunk since Thursday, his eyes shone like torches, his clothes were sodden with filth, his skin was red, burning hot and dry, and he whimpered fitfully as he slept clutching his right side.

The doctor knelt beside Paul-Alain for five minutes. “Scarlet fever,” he said, looking up at the red-eyed Quaker woman with the crumpled face who had been working without sleep for three days, “and acute appendicitis. It may have burst. His temperature is forty point five and if the evacuation order does not come in an hour I will have to operate on him here.” He stood up, lifting the boy, and they walked with him across the board track, each of them wearing shoes, to an empty spot under the dim, hanging light over the infield.

The Red Cross finally got word to its Swiss headquarters, which demanded that the French and Germans look upon the horror in their midst. The evacuation order was given by SS Colonel Drayst at three-ten
A
.
M
. on Monday.

Thirteen

Paule had had a glorious holiday. The weather had been marvelous and, as always, Miral had been a perfect companion. For the third time he had asked her to marry him. He was being recalled to Madrid, she was the only meaningful thing left in his life, and he would prefer to be married in Paris but would settle on a ceremony anywhere.

Paule loved Miral and because she was able to fulfill him, she loved him more. “If there weren't this war,” she said as she lay in his arms, “I would marry you tonight.”

“Why should the war change that? I'll take you and the boy out of the war.” He kissed her temple. “Anywhere you say. Lima—is that far enough away? Buenos Aires?”

“I couldn't go anywhere without Paul-Alain, and Paul-Alain cannot leave Paris because his father has had a far, far worse time than even he knows. The greatest medicine for him is Paul-Alain. His son is what he lives for now.” The conflict never left Paule's mind, because she had never been able to resolve it. “Everyone is waiting because of this war, darling. Millions of men are waiting to be civilians and I must wait to be a duchess.”

He sighed.

They left the Loire valley at seven o'clock on Monday morning and Paule was back at the Cours Albert I at twenty minutes to ten. She was glowing with sunburn and euphoric with a successful love affair as she slipped her key into the lock and entered the apartment, bursting to see Paul-Alain again.

“MADAME!”
Mme. Citron's scream sent Paule into rigidity in the doorway. From every corridor it seemed that footsteps and sobbing were racing toward her. Clotilde reached the entrance hall first, stopped short, and stared haggardly, her face swollen and the color of porridge, her hair uncombed. She was unable to speak, and Mme. Citron and the waitress and the two housemaids silently stood in the other doorways like corpses. Paule stared at each one in turn while a fear greater than any she had ever felt flooded her mind and stopped her heart. She wheeled again to Clotilde.

“What has happened to Paul-Alain?”

“They took him away.”

“Who?”

“The police.”

“When?”

“Thursday morning.”

“Thursday?
Thursday
morning?”

“Yes.”

“Where is he now?”

“I don't know, Madame. I don't know, I don't know, I don't know.” Clotilde was weeping bitterly.

“But his father—?”

“The General is away. I tried and tried. I went to his hotel, I went to his office. I have telephoned, I have sent a telegram, but—”

“Oh, my God. Oh, my God.”

“He was so sick when they took him, Madame,” Mme. Citron moaned. “We tried to make them stop—”

“Sick?”

“His little stomach was hot and hard and swollen. He had a fever.”

“Who took him? You must know that?” She still stood in the doorway.

“The police gave us a receipt,” Clotilde said. “They were from the rue Clément-Marot.”

“Did you go there?”

“No, madame, you see—”

“Clotilde, how could you not go there?”

“I told them who Paul-Alain's father was, Madame—”

“We told them who his grandfather was, Madame,” Mme. Citron sobbed.

“And they said it was no use because this was the SS. There has been an enormous raid. They have taken thousands and thousands of Jews.”

“Weren't they looking for me? Were they looking for me and they took him? Oh, my God, my God.”

“No, Madame. They asked only for him, only for him.”

“They had his name on a card,” Mme. Citron said. “I answered the door and they looked at this card and they asked me for him.”

Finally Paule moved. She ran into the main salon, took up the telephone and rattled the hook frantically. “Military Headquarters for France,” she said. When the military operator answered she spoke in German in a loud, harsh, parade-ground voice. “This is Frau General von Rhode. Get me General Stuelpnagel. At once!” Waiting, she covered her eyes with her hand and whimpered and then fought for control of herself.

At last, the Military Governor came on the telephone and was greeting her warmly when she interrupted him. “My husband is not in Paris, as you know. I have been out of the city for four days, on a holiday. Yes. Thank you. On Thursday morning the SS had the police arrest my son. He is eight years old.” She listened, then gave him her address. Her voice quavered, but she was able to control it. “Thank you. Thank you, General. I shall be waiting on the street in front of the building.”

General von Stuelpnagel walked rapidly from his desk to the door of his office and flung it open. “Send a car to Frau General von Rhode and bring her here at once.” He gave the address. “Then get me the BdS and send Ernst or Blanke in here on the double. Then send out an alarm to every communications post on the coast ordering General von Rhode to report to me at once.” In pain, Stuelpnagel walked back to his desk. Rhode's father had been his great benefactor; Rhode was his friend and protégé, Rhode was the old army. They had killed Jews before his eyes, and they had laughed in his face when he had complained, but it had never come to this. Rhode had given his country almost everything—an arm, a wife, an eye, a face, and now a son who was a child. It had come to this.