Waiting for the Violins (29 page)

Kuba scratched his beard stubble. “Dossin isn’t much better. There’s security everywhere.”

Youra spoke up solemnly. “We can break them out during the deportation.”

Francis looked over at the stranger and frowned. “You want to raid a train? Like crazy bandits?”

“Why not?” Youra replied. “The Germans aren’t almighty. And unless they have guards in every railcar, the trains are much more vulnerable than a fortress or a barracks.”

Laura’s expression brightened slightly. “Can we get information about the deportation train, like when it’s scheduled to leave?”

Jean joined the conversation. “It’s possible they haven’t scheduled departure yet, but when they do, we can find out.”

Kuba scratched the back of his fist while he thought. “Our most important task now is getting information. We’ll need to know first whether Moishe and your friend will be on that transport, and if so, the day and time of departure. And, ideally, in which car.”

“Frankly, it sounds awfully risky to me, not to say plain crazy, stopping a train like so many bandits. But if you think you can do it, we’ll work on getting some of that information for you,” Francis said.

“Good. In the meantime, Youra, Jean, and Robert will look at the weak spots along the route,
how
to get the train to stop, and where the security is sparse. We don’t want to dash off to the rescue like dogs after a car.”

“My thought, exactly,” Françis muttered. “While you set up your attack, Laura and I will hold down the Café Suèdoise and look after our hidden airmen.”

“I’m going along,” Antonia said. “This rescue was my idea in the first place, and if you think you can stop a train, I want to be one of the ‘crazy bandits’ doing it with you.”

“Can I go too?” Celine asked, looking at both Laura and Youra. “I’m not afraid of danger.”

“I’m sure you’re not,” Antonia said. “But we need you here. If something happens to me, you’re the only other person who can use the wireless to send a message to London.”

“Then please come back. I don’t want my first message to London to be
So sorry. Sophie Lejeune is dead
.”

*

When the guards opened the door of her solitary cell two days later and handed her the clothes she had worn at her arrest, Sandrine had no idea what it meant. And when they did the same with Moishe in the cell next to hers, she feared the worst. Did it mean they were going to be executed and their prison clothing spared the damage?

But as they were marched in single file away from the punitive cells, she was relieved, for the execution yard, she knew, was to the left, and the guards led them down a corridor to the right.

More bewildering, they joined a line of some dozen men and two women prisoners already standing in the main corridor. As soon as they arrived, someone at the front called out “March,” and the line moved forward. In just a few moments, they were at the entry portal.

Intent on trying to guess where they were being taken, she almost missed seeing the new captive the guards were dragging past them into the prison.

SS men held him on both sides, and a third followed. He staggered, his head lowered, and he had clearly been beaten up before he arrived. It wasn’t until he lifted his head to look around that she saw the red birthmark covering the upper left side of his face.

Jean Corot. She stifled the urge to smile. The strategy had worked, and now he almost certainly would face the same sort of interrogation she and Moishe had endured. A sort of justice, for a man who had made a living following Jews home and denouncing them to the Gestapo.

Moishe noticed him too and glanced back quickly at her, but the barked command of their own guard caused him to look away.

On the landing outside the portal, an open truck waited, and they were prodded to climb into the back. Unfortunately, they were seated too far apart to talk.

Where were they going? To labor, another prison, or to execution? Whatever lay ahead of them couldn’t be as terrible as the torture table in Breendonk.

Chapter Twenty-nine

The Dossin military casern was part of Belgium’s military history. Like Breendonk, it was imposing, even formidable, but not in itself malevolent. It took the hand of the conqueror to turn it into a purgatory.

The transport truck passed through the portal into the courtyard at the center of the building complex. Obeying the shouted commands, Sandrine climbed down from the truck bed and lined up with the other prisoners before a clerk at a table. The clerk had a ledger open before him, and as each person stepped up and gave his name, he checked it against the manifest that arrived with the truck.

“Sandrine Toussaint,” she said, dutifully, and the clerk wrote her name into the ledger before passing her on to another line to enter the building. She had to surrender her identification papers but could keep any personal luggage, though, as a Breendonk prisoner, she had neither one. Like the others, she received a card on a string to wear around her neck. It listed name, date of birth, prisoner registration number, and number of the convoy to which she was assigned. She was number 983, she noted, and she was to be on the twentieth convoy.

The regimentation was meticulous, and in the line that shuffled along the corridor, she found herself once again two prisoners behind Moishe. A guard prodded them both into a barracks room on the right and counted off thirty people.

Her assigned room held rows of bunk beds along two walls, and she understood now why the guard had counted. Exactly thirty bunks filled the room, each with a straw mattress and a blanket. Filthy as they seemed, they were vastly better than a short wooden bench.

Mothers and children were among the thirty people in her barracks room, obviously brought in from a street raid rather than a prison. She thought of Rywka. Was she still somewhere in the casern?

The room buzzed with conversation, but the noise faded when a guard called them to attention and directed them to file into the north end of the court, which now functioned as a dining area. Supper was soup and bread and, compared to the swill she’d eaten at Breendonk, was actually tolerable. She looked for Moishe, but he’d left his place in the line and she lost sight of him.

After the allotted hour, they returned to the barracks room, and as soon as they were in their bunks, the lights went off. The door was shut, but a light burning in the corridor shone through the overhead windows on the inside wall and cast the room in a sort of purgatorial semi-darkness. A figure approached, and Sandrine recoiled, drawing up her knees.

“Ssshh, it’s all right,” the form hissed. “It’s Moishe. I want to talk.” He bent down to crouch on the floor at the side of her bed, only his head visible at her feet.

“What’s wrong?” She realized the absurdity of her question. Everything was wrong. “What do you want to talk about?”

“Thank you for the name Corot. I ‘confessed’ it after the first jolt, and it probably saved my life.”

“I’m glad. Then they didn’t have to torture you long?”

“No. I mean yes. They tortured me a long time. They wanted more.”

“Dear God. Could you hold out?”

“Yes and no. I did give them another name. Yours.”

“Mine?” She was aghast. “You betrayed
me
?”

“I knew they’d gotten a confession from you, about Corot, so I said we both worked for him but were new at it, and that was as much as I could tell them. They seemed proud of themselves to have gotten two names. In any case, they stopped. If they’d gone on much longer, I’d have broken.”

“I would have too. That was smart, to simply confirm what they’d already gotten from us. We saved a few of our friends. I’m glad.” She shrugged, though she knew he couldn’t see her. “It was a good, brave run, but I think it’s over for us now.”

He exhaled slowly. “I used to feel sorry for myself, you know? Always alone, while Aisik had a nice family. I had no idea how rich I was. And now it’s all gone.”

She was silent, for he could have been speaking for her too. How incredibly lucky and self-indulgent she’d been, cultivating her money and her estate yet lamenting her loneliness. When her arrest swept it away, both the indulgence and the self-pity seemed ridiculous. “So, where does it go from here?”

“Deportation. To a camp called Auschwitz, someone said.”

“Not much better than execution. Everything I love and care about is left behind.”

“Lucky you. I have nothing left behind now at all.” He struggled to his feet and shuffled back to his own bunk.

For her part, she uncurled and dropped down onto her mattress, the first one she’d lain on in four days, and fell asleep immediately.

The guard shouting from the doorway awakened her, and the reaction of the entire barrack room was immediate. Through the barred window, she could see that it was barely dawn. She was already dressed, having no other clothes, so simply slipped on her shoes and filed out of the room. After the regulation three minutes in the public toilet, she rejoined the line going into the courtyard. Roll call was by room and assigned number, and when she heard Moishe’s voice call out after 980, she felt a great comfort knowing he was there, like a brother. A moment later she heard her own number and called out “Present!” The line then filed past a camp table where someone handed them a cup of ersatz coffee and a slice of gritty bread.

She had scarcely finished her sparse meal when the order came, to march back indoors. Once inside, to Sandrine’s surprise, the prisoners could mingle and talk to one another, though everyone spoke softly, as if fearing to be caught. She caught Moishe’s eye and waved him over.

She looked around glumly. “I wonder how long we’ll be here. And do you suppose our people know where we are?”

“I’m not sure. Even if our comrades track us down, they can’t do much to break us out. Some Resistance people are supposedly in here, and I’m looking for them, but I think we’re on our own.”

A prisoner came into the barracks with a mop and bucket. Sandrine watched him, and though he seemed sullen, she noticed that he stopped at certain bunks and mopped more thoroughly than at others.

When he reached Moishe, she understood why. “The convoy is in two days,” he said under his breath. “Collect anything sharp you can. Saws, knives, hammers, anything. If you want to get a message out, give it to me tomorrow.” Then he moved several bunks down the row and muttered the same message.

“But how do we get our hands on tools?” she asked.

The man from the nearest bunk overheard and approached. Gaunt and intense, his large eyes bright with desperation, he nodded nervously. “They do repairs here, and they don’t watch utensils during the meals. I plan to grab anything I can.”

“To do what with? What good will a knife do you? They all have guns.”

He kept nodding, and she could feel his determination like a heat rising from him. “Yeah, but they won’t be anywhere near us. Haven’t you heard? This time, they’re putting us in freight cars. I don’t know what’s gonna happen, but I tell you, I’m not going to sit and do nothing between here and Germany.”

Sandrine remembered the freight cars they’d seen at the Gare d’Austerlitz in Paris. Windowless cars that stank of livestock. If that was the case, she wasn’t going to sit and do nothing either. She approached the guard in the corridor.

“Is there a workshop? Carpentry? Sewing? I’d like to work. It’s better than staring at the wall all day.”

He looked at her as if she were insane but then said, “I’ll tell them. Go back to your bunk.”

*

She was amazed at how easy it was to obtain work. The Flemish SS troops that managed the barracks seemed obsessed with keeping good military order, and if anyone actually volunteered for work, that was a plus. She was assigned the same evening to the workshop on a lower floor. A senior prisoner handed her a roll of burlap and instructed her on how to fill it with straw and sew it shut. She worked, surveying the workshop, studying where each object was stowed or hung, in particular the scissors, and when the work period ended, she snatched a pair of them and slid it inside her prison dress.

Once back in the barracks, she hid it inside her own mattress. That evening, they were summoned for supper again, her second at Dossin. While she ate her soup, she watched Moishe slide a butter knife under his prison jacket. Then he wandered off.

When he returned to the barracks at the end of the meal, he was flushed with excitement. “Aisik is here. Rywka too. I caught sight of them on the other side of the casern. I’ve got to find a way to get to them.” He fretted awhile. “Rywka looked terrible. Bent over like she’s sick.”

“Can you talk to them tomorrow at breakfast?”

“They’re on a different roll call and go out before us. But I’ll figure something out.” He went back to his bunk, brooding, and she knew not to try to talk to him. In any case, half an hour later, the lights went out and it was time to sleep.

The next morning at the breakfast line he took his ersatz coffee and bread and threaded his way through the milling prisoners toward the other side of the casern. Though she waited, staring in the direction he’d gone, he didn’t return. When her group filed back into their barracks, she saw with a shock that prisoner number 980, three persons ahead of her in line, was a complete stranger.

It took her a moment to reconstruct what had happened. Moishe must have located his brother and negotiated an exchange of numbers. The guards didn’t seem to care, as long as there was a person for every number. She dropped down onto her bunk, desolate. She understood that his family took priority, but she felt abandoned.

Her only solace was the scissors she could feel under her back in her mattress.

A guard appeared at the door. “Line up, everyone!”

“The trucks are here to take us to the trains,” the man on the next bunk said. “I hope you have something. I’ve got this.” He lifted his shirt just enough for her to see a small saw blade.

“How did you get that?”

“Same as you. Volunteered for work. Carpenter’s shop. They don’t count their tools.”