House of Glass Page 21
J’ai l’honneur de vous faire connaître que les renseignements sur l’intéressé étant favorables, il conviendrait de lui faire savoir que je ne vois pas d’inconvénient à ce qu’il exerce la profession de couturier créateur modeliste …
When I initially found this letter in a file about Alex in a French archive, my stomach sank into my shoes. Vallat was a vicious anti-Semite who looked like a movie villain straight from central casting, having lost an eye and a leg in the First World War. He was also the most important person in the CGQJ – in other words, the man in charge of all anti-Semitic activity in France. He was the man charged with the Aryanisation of the French economy – conducted entirely by the Vichy government with no pressure from the Germans – and his passion was the elimination of Jewish culture from French life. All of this made his defence of Alex’s shop seem especially bizarre, and the first time I read it I was sure that I’d found, at long last, confirmation of my worst suspicions: Alex was a collaborator, a spy for the enemy, and this is why he was so protected.
But the morality of French politics during the war was far too blurred to be confined by simplistic black-and-white outlines, and, as various war historians later explained to me, what this letter reveals has, in fact, little to do with Alex. Instead, it shows the changing and conflicting loyalties in the Vichy government. Yet whereas most Jews in France suffered – to say the least – from these political shifts, Alex benefitted from them.
Like Perré and Pétain, Vallat was another old military vet, and while he was a massive anti-Semite, he was, above all, a Catholic nationalist, almost as anti-German as he was anti-Semitic, one who saw the sanctity of France as his first priority.[6] So anyone who fought for France was, for him, a Frenchman of honour, even if that man was a Polish Jew. Thus, because Alex was a decorated veteran of the Narvik campaign, Vallat intervened on his behalf, which was almost like the British Home Secretary stepping in to adjudicate on a small local matter, but that was how much he cared about those who fought for France, whatever their religion. Vallat’s priorities would soon prove to be his undoing. Within weeks of writing in defence of Alex, the German ambassador to Vichy, Otto Abetz, ordered Pétain to dismiss him, which he did. Vallat was all for the Aryanisation of France, but not at the cost of turning it into Germany, and his uncooperativeness became too much for Nazi Germany. They replaced him with Louis Darquier de Pellepoix, a pro-Nazi French politician who was in Germany’s pay before the war, and it was Darquier de Pellepoix who ensured the deportation of France’s Jews, including Jacques, to Auschwitz. Darquier de Pellepoix definitely did not care about Jacques’s war record, or that of any Jew, so for the Jews he was worse than Vallat, but in Vichy it was all relative. Vallat remained an unrepentant anti-Semite for the rest of his life, and there is no evidence he ever met Alex or that Alex ever knew he owed his wartime livelihood to him.
Even though Alex’s connection to Vallat turned out to be innocent, a fog of suspicion started to form around Alex in the eyes of both Vichy and his fellow Resistance fighters. He didn’t especially help himself: when General Perré came to visit the shop, Alex made a big show of presenting him with a military cap. Alex didn’t care that Perré was on the other side: he saw him as an old friend and, more importantly, a useful connection. And when Alex went to Perré for help when he heard that his cousin Josek Ornstein had been arrested, the rumours really began.
‘My Cannes branch was busy, too busy for some. People saw military officers and beautiful women there, which created doubts. Was I even kosher?’ Alex wrote.
As deeply as Alex loved France and believed in defending the Jews, there was always one cause that Alex believed in above all, and that was Alex. He would do whatever it took to survive, and if that meant being friendly with some people in Vichy during the war, well, he would say, that wasn’t the worst thing in the world. He was still, and would always be, the hungry little boy in Chrzanow, determined to scrape his way from the bottom of the sewer to reach the stars. He grew up thinking, ‘No one will help you except you.’ And that was the lesson he lived by for the rest of his life.
During 1941 and 1942, Alex and the Sizaines ran Resistance missions to Paris. Alex was one of the few Jewish members of the group, and thus he risked more than most, as it was forbidden for a Jew to go into the occupied zone. For Alex, the danger was the appeal.
‘I crossed the line of demarcation several times with a guide,’ he writes. ‘I was always in front to open the way. Nothing could frighten me. A rage to live burned within me. I felt invincible.’
What Alex was actually doing on these missions remains somewhat mysterious. According to letters from his cousins Renée and Roger, he was meeting up with them and his siblings, and his memoir corroborates this. Given that Renée and Roger Goldberg were in the Resistance, it looks like they were his main points of contact for passing information back and forth. He was, according to Sonia and Henri, at Mila’s bedside when Lily was born in 1942, and he repeatedly appears at Sonia’s lunches in Renée’s letters of that year. He also, at some point, managed to smuggle Chaya out of Paris and down to Cannes, where she stayed with one of his fashion clients, a Madame Armande. Alex achieved an enormous amount in his life, escaping the depths of the Polish pogroms to climb to the top of the French art world, all thanks to his cunning and determination. But that he managed to sneak his truculent, strictly kosher, non-French-speaking mother across the demarcation line was possibly his most extraordinary feat.
He also wanted to check on his business, because it was no longer his. A man called Joseph Paquin took it over in 1941, when businesses in the occupied zone were Aryanised, and Alex is as vicious about Paquin in his memoir as he is about the Nazis who killed so many members of his family, describing him alternately as ‘a rat’, ‘a bastard’ and ‘the little shit’. Alex would have hated anyone taking over his business, but the story of Paquin reveals something more about the world of French collaboration than Alex’s ego.
Born in 1873 in the small north-eastern village of Mont-Bonvillers, Joseph Nicolas Paquin also worked in fashion. He married his wife, Hélène, on 23 December 1894, and on the morning of his wedding, every newspaper had the same front page: a photo of Colonel Alfred Dreyfus who, the day before, had been unanimously found guilty by seven judges of passing on French military secrets to the Germans. As the newly wedded Monsieur and Madame Paquin began their married life, they did so against the backdrop of what remains a universal symbol of anti-Semitism.
Paquin was a less successful Paris couturier than Alex. As well as Alex’s business, he was given the businesses of three other Jewish designers – at least one of whom was then killed in Auschwitz – and he was paid 2,000 francs a month for each. Madame Paquin certainly enjoyed the financial benefits of seizing control of Jewish businesses: during the war she enthusiastically redecorated their apartment with expensive furniture and what one fellow designer described as ‘bibelots anciens’ (antique trinkets). Paquin protected his freebies: when Alex was given permission to open an Alex Maguy salon in Cannes, he wrote a cross letter to the CGQJ, saying this would create ‘confusion’ for customers and should not be allowed. (Thanks to Alex’s high-ranking friends, this letter was ignored.) Paquin drove the CGQJ somewhat mad during the war, constantly writing letters demanding more money, more help and more effective measures taken against Alex’s business in the south. As I read his letters, I understood better why Alex called him ‘a worm’: his tone was whiny and weasely. It infuriated Alex that such a man had his hands on his beloved business in Paris, and he vowed he would have his revenge. He would not have to wait long to get it.
Back in Cannes, Alex’s life continued peacefully, building his business, finding kosher food for his mother. In November 1942 the Italian army invaded Nice and because the Italians weren’t especially interested in Germany’s anti-Semitic focus, the only way Alex’s life changed was that he started to pick up some Italian vocabulary. But on 9 September 1943, the Germans took over the Italian zones a
nd Alex’s life changed in the worst possible ways.
According to Alex’s official testimonies given after the war, he was arrested three times in the south of France. Twice his powerful friends were able to help him, despite his being a foreign Jew. The third time he pushed his luck too far.
The evening of 18 September 1943 was warm, and after a long day of working in the salon Alex decided to relax in the way he’d been relaxing for two decades, which was by going to a nightclub. This time he chose the Pam Pam in Nice and, as usual, Alex had his own table and was drinking with his friends, talking with the few remaining Italians left in the city.
‘Suddenly, I heard a German song being played by the orchestra. My blood rose. Disgusted and furious, I summoned the headwaiter. “Please ask the bandleader to come speak with me. I have something to say to him,”’ Alex writes in his memoir.
When the bandleader came to Alex’s table, he loudly ordered him to ‘stop playing these goddamn Kraut songs’. Instead, they should play French and British military songs, starting with Le Boudin, the official song of the French Foreign Legion, followed by La Marseillaise.
The headwaiter begged Alex to leave, saying there were senior members of the Gestapo in the room. The Nazis had arrived in the city just over a week earlier. Alois Brunner, the notorious Jew hunter, came to Nice on 10 September and his police had already started conducting raids. The Germans seized control of the roads and train stations, and the Jews were now in what Serge Klarsfeld, then a child in Nice, described as ‘a kind of trap’.[7] Even French Jews, who had previously been able to take their safety for granted, knew that the leniency they’d enjoyed under the Italians was over. What had been happening to their friends and families in the north was about to happen to them, and every Jew in the region was terrified. But Alex refused to back down.
‘I’m a French soldier – I am not leaving,’ he replied.
‘They’re giving you five minutes to go,’ the waiter pleaded.
‘Like hell will a Kraut give me orders! I’m a Legionnaire and nothing scares me,’ Alex replied.
He looked at the table where the waiter had run over from, and saw three members of the Gestapo sitting with a woman. One of the men took his pistol out of its holster and pointed it straight at Alex.
‘Look at this coward! With a woman at his table he pulls a revolver,’ Alex crowed to the now silent room, all staring at what was going on.
The Nazi got out from behind his table and walked towards Alex, keeping his gun pointed at Alex’s head. When he got to Alex’s table, Alex stood up.
‘I am Alex Maguy,’ Alex shouted.
‘We know who you are, Maguy. You’re a Jew.’
‘That’s right, I’m a Jew and you can go fuck yourself,’ he replied.
Somehow Alex managed to escape out the back of the club without being shot or arrested, but he knew he was on borrowed time now. After checking that he wasn’t being followed, he went back to Cannes and to the house of Madame Armande, who was hiding Chaya for him. He left enough money for his mother to be looked after for the next year, and then hurried away before he led the Nazis to his mother. He didn’t even try to hide himself, perhaps out of a sense of arrogance that he would always, ultimately, be protected. Instead, the next day he went to work as usual, and waited to see what would happen. He did not have to wait long. Within an hour, the Gestapo burst into his salon on Place Mérimée, arrested him and brought him to the Hotel Excelsior in Nice, Alois Brunner’s headquarters.
BY THE TIME Brunner arrived in France, he was only thirty years old but was already known for being especially efficient at deporting Jews. He had worked as Adolf Eichmann’s assistant and overseen the deportations in Austria, Berlin and Greece; in Austria alone he was personally responsible for the deportation of 47,000 Jews. By the time the war ended, he’d sent over 128,000 Jews to the death camps. From the moment he arrived in the south of France he terrorised the Jews, and the raids he ordered in Nice were, according to Klarsfeld, the most brutal that the Nazis carried out in the whole of western Europe.[8],[9] They largely took place at night: men, women and children, dragged out of their beds, shivering in their nightclothes, terrorised and arrested. Brunner renamed the Excelsior ‘camp de recensement des juifs arrêtés, dépendant du camp de Drancy’ (camp for arrested Jews going to Drancy). He ostensibly turned it into a prison where he dumped the Jews rounded up during the raids. He then tortured them, beat them, ordered them to give the names and addresses of their families under pain of death and then put them on a train to Drancy, the French concentration camp that had taken over from Pithiviers. Brunner himself would, in a few months’ time, be in charge of Drancy, and it is estimated that he sent 23,500 Jews to Auschwitz from there.
Alex was kept under arrest for four days, and he was beaten savagely and near continuously by the guards. When he asked why he was being singled out for so many beatings, one of the guards showed him the file they had on him. ‘It was thick like a block. The spies had done their work well. I had no illusions now. I knew I would be executed like Josek was,’ he wrote, referring to his cousin. But when Alex was pushed onto the train to Drancy on 24 September, he realised he would not have a fate like Josek’s; he would have one like Jacques’s.
The story Alex always told about how he survived the war was that he was arrested but he escaped from the train. ‘Escaped from the train’: I heard this so many times, and imagined it even more, that it became more than a story and more like a myth in my head. My brave great-uncle, bursting out of the train like a hero, running away from the big bad Nazis! But as I grew older I learned that fairy tales aren’t true and there were whispers in the family that maybe none of this had happened. Maybe he was never put on a train at all. Who knows? Only Alex, and no point asking him, you know what he’s like – you’ll never get a straight answer out of him. And anyway, how on earth can you prove that someone once jumped off a train?
It was easy to find the records from Drancy detailing who got off the trains from Nice in 1943, and Alex’s name wasn’t on any of them, which didn’t prove much. But to find out who actually got on the trains, I had to go to the archives in Nice itself.
Nice is still as picturesque as it was when Alex lived there – those elegant beachside boulevards, the palm trees swaying over outdoor cafés. I came to this beautiful seaside town to search through the dead. On the first day I found the work close to unbearable, especially when I saw row after row of the same name: whole families, from grandparents to eight-month-old babies, packed off on trains that led only to death. By the third day I felt my hide getting harder, casually flicking through list after list, getting almost annoyed with the names on the list who weren’t the name I wanted to see. What did I care about Gerhard Glahs? I was looking for Glass! Out of my way, Gerhard! And just as I was thinking proudly about what a tough-hearted researcher I’d become, I saw a name that undid all my efforts to stop personalising these lists: there, listed among the Poles who were put on the train to Drancy was ‘Glass, Alexandre, de 7 Place Mérimée Cannes, Juif’. Alex really had got on the train. And he hadn’t got off. Because he had escaped. Just as he’d always told us.
Alex was not the only person to have escaped from the train. When Klarsfeld was researching what happened to the French Jews he noted that there were some names who got on the train to Drancy but did not then appear on the passenger lists from Drancy to Auschwitz. Some had died. Some had been released from Drancy. But in the period of September 1943–December 1943, when Brunner was at the Excelsior and sending thousands of French Jews to the camp, there were ninety-three people who got on the train to Drancy that no one could account for. One of them was Alex.
On 24 September, Alex – by now bruised and almost broken from all the beatings – was dragged out of his cell in the Excelsior along with his cellmates and pushed by the guards towards the train station. A train was waiting for them there. But they could barely see it because their senses were so overwhelmed by the noise: the whole stat
ion was filled with the sound of men, women, children and babies screaming, crying and begging, and officers mercilessly shouting at them in French and German. The sound was so terrifying it could stop a man’s heart. But Alex marched towards the train the way a legionnaire always should, unbowed and unafraid. Alongside him was the cellmate he had become closest to during his imprisonment, a lanky Frenchman called Jacques Schwob Héricourt, and the two of them got into the same train carriage together, along with eighty other men.
‘Can we escape? They can’t treat us like sheep. We have to do something,’ Alex whispered to Héricourt. But neither of them could think of anything they could do.
As the train travelled north towards Drancy and night fell, Alex thought of Jacques. At this point he didn’t know exactly what had become of Jacques, but he had a strong suspicion, and after having worked so hard not to be like his older brother, were they to have the same fate after all? Had it all been for nothing? Passivity and defiance, both paths led to the same destination when chased by these persecutors. There were some demons you could not outrun. And just as Alex was thinking this, he noticed a patch of moonlight on the floor of the train and looked up to see where it was coming from. Up in the top corner of the back of the train there was a hole where two planks of wood had rotted away. He stared at it. He knew that Jacques would not have thought about the hole, and that was what had always broken his heart about his brother: so many times he had rejected chances, offers laid out to him on a plate, often by Alex. But he always said no. Once he’d been put on the train, Alex knew, Jacques would have stood there passively and accepted his fate. Well, he was not Jacques.