House of Glass Read online

  He tapped Héricourt on the arm and pointed up to the hole. Héricourt looked at it, then back down to his friend and nodded, understanding. While everyone else in the carriage stared, he picked up Alex, all five feet of him, and lifted him to the opening. The train was travelling fast, 90 kilometres an hour, but what difference did it make? Die trying to escape or die a passive prisoner – Alex knew which option he’d choose, every time. And so, while the whole carriage watched, Alex reached towards the small opening and punched it, making the hole a little larger. He could now fit through it, just. And then, with a helping push from Héricourt, he threw himself out of the moving train.

  ‘The shock was terrible. I landed with such force I thought at first it would kill me. And then I thought about the times I used to fall on my head out of our apartment in Chrzanow onto the rough pavement,’ Alex wrote.

  He lay there on the side of the train track, his head bleeding, his ribs broken, barely able to breathe let alone move. He heard the train speed off without him, and even though he was in so much pain what he mainly felt was the extraordinary relief of no longer being a prisoner bound for Drancy. He was right to do so: almost everyone on that train, including Héricourt, would be killed in Auschwitz. But his relief turned to fear when he heard footsteps crunching towards him and he braced himself.

  ‘What are you doing here?’

  Alex cleared the blood out of his eyes and saw a railway worker peering down at him.

  ‘I just jumped out of a train,’ Alex whispered.

  The man nodded slowly, looking at him. ‘You’re in Saint-Rambert-d’Albon. Come with me, quickly. They’ll be looking for you.’

  The railway worker, and his colleagues, were communists, and therefore very happy to help an escaped prisoner evade the Nazis. They took him back to their office and called a communist doctor to set his ribs and stitch up his forehead, which had torn so badly when he hit the ground that the skin flapped in front of his eyes like a veil. When the authorities came looking for Alex a few hours later, the railwaymen hid him in a large pile of manure, knowing that the Germans would be too vain about their uniforms to look for him there, and they were right. When it was safe, they brought him out of hiding, washed him and, when he was feeling up to it, taught him how to drive a train. Alex told them about how he and his cousins used to fake toothaches to take the train from Chrzanow to Trzebina, and they all laughed together. Then Alex thought more about his cousins and told his new friends his ribs hurt too much to laugh.

  After a few days hiding in the railway station Alex got a message – how and from whom he never said – that he should go to Lyon where someone would meet him and take him to a safe place. The railway workers, who presumably thought he was meeting his Resistance network, gave him a lift to Lyon and wished him bon courage. One of them gave him his cap, small and battered and decorated with three stars. Alex kept it for the rest of his life.

  At this point the story ends, at least as much as Alex ever told it, and the pages in the memoir ended here. Alex never talked about what he did after leaving Saint-Rambert-d’Albon, where he went, who helped him. He made vague references to ‘fighting in the Resistance’, and that was that. I had few hopes of finding any details but I contacted various Resistance enthusiasts in central France, the area between Nice and Drancy, and asked them if they knew of any stories about a Polish Jew who had escaped from a train being hidden in their area. One, Robert Picandet, wrote back:

  I am one of the heads of the Resistance Museum in Saint-Gervais-d’Auvergne and here is some information I obtained from a former resident in Espinasse. He remembers Alex Glass very well. He lived at the home of Monsieur and Madame Aymard, who have both died, but their daughter, a Madame Gustave, remembers a sporty Israelite who lived with them and later went to Paris. She still lives in the village of Espinasse and is sure this Israelite was your uncle Alex. Perhaps you would like to talk to her?

  One month later, I met Robert Picandet at the Musée de la Résistance in Saint-Gervais-d’Auvergne, the town near the village of Espinasse. It was a small museum, barely two rooms large, and full of memorabilia from the Maquis, a breakaway faction that was even more loosely organised than the Resistance. The Maquis was largely made up of French men and women who had gone underground to avoid Vichy’s ‘Service du Travail Obligatoire’, which required people to work in German factories. Some people in the Maquis were actively against the Germans, and some were simply hiding because they didn’t want to be conscripted off to Germany. Picandet explained that France was full of these renegades avoiding the French and German authorities, but the Auvergne was especially good for hiding because it was – and is still – so agricultural. This meant that there were lots of places to hide and, just as important, there was a special feeling of solidarity between the farmers and the resisters in the Auvergne. There had always been a cooperative tradition among the Auvergne peasants, and during the war they eagerly helped their undercover countrymen. Without the assistance of the agricultural workers, the resisters could not have survived: farmers and shopkeepers gave them food, local officials gave them false papers, the villagers would put them in touch with other resisters, the local gendarmerie gave them warnings if there was danger coming, and that danger usually came more from the Vichy police than the Germans.

  Many Jews hid around the Auvergne, so Alex certainly wasn’t unusual in coming here, Picandet told us. Several of the people hidden in the area were sent by a Vichy official.

  ‘Who was that?’ I asked.

  ‘General Jean Perré,’ Picandet replied.

  At last I had found out how Alex had got away, and why he never went into detail about who had helped him. It wasn’t the Resistance that saved his life, but someone in Vichy. Things aren’t always clear; they can be grey. But always a careful salesman, Alex knew that grey didn’t sell, so he burnished the story.

  Picandet gave me a lift in his car out to Madame Gustave’s house in Espinasse. At first I insisted he not go out of his way, but I soon realised why he made the offer: the house was down long windy paths, almost entirely hidden by surrounding forests, as far off the main road as it was possible to go. I felt like I was in a fairy tale being taken to a magic house in the woods, and when I saw the house, and Madame Gustave, I was sure of it. It was a pretty stone farm cottage in the middle of what can only be described as nowhere, with buttercup-dappled fields in front and thick woods behind. Madame Gustave herself was the tiniest adult I’d ever seen in my life, barely more than half my height, and spry and sprightly, living all on her own in the middle of the forest.

  She had lived in this house her entire life, she said, taking us into the sitting room, where she had tea and biscuits waiting for us.

  ‘So this would have been the house Alex stayed in?’ I asked.

  She looked at me, surprised I hadn’t already realised: ‘Oh yes! He was here for a long time. Tea?’

  If Alex had been looking for a hiding place, he could hardly have found a better one, but had he really found this one? It seemed almost impossible. And just as I was thinking that if this had all been a wild-goose chase it had been a rather charming one, I saw something that made me splutter my tea out on her floor: there, laid out very carefully on Madame Gustave’s table, were half a dozen photos taken outside the house I was sitting in now. They were black and white, curled with age, and Alex was in every single one.

  According to Madame Gustave, Alex arrived in Espinasse in the late autumn of 1943. General Perré made the arrangements. Quite how he had the time is a mystery, given that he was by this point the head of the Garde, Pétain’s personal guard, meaning he was in charge of 6,000 officers, as well as the protection of the head of state. He had been given the job by René Bousquet, the man who organised the Vel d’Hiv. Once the Germans invaded France the French Army was almost entirely depleted, but Pétain was allowed to keep his Garde, meaning they were one of the last visible signs of French sovereignty. Perré’s job was to be in charge of one of the las
t public symbols of French pride – an apt job for a man in Vichy who put patriotism above Nazism. The Garde was not exactly pro-German, but it was definitely anti-Resistance, as resisters were seen as upstarts against the rulers. And yet the head of the Garde was stashing Jews around the Auvergne countryside. Certainly Alex was taking a huge risk, but Perré was, too.

  Alex was met at the train station, probably by a farmer’s wife, who brought him to the local Maquis. Despite his injuries from having jumped off the train, he was obviously strong and in good shape, and so it was decided that Alex could pass as a farmhand. For the next five or so weeks, Alex was moved from farm to farm, as the more he moved in the first few weeks the less chance there was that he might be denounced and caught. But Alex was always terrible at keeping a low profile and from his first day in town he went around and introduced himself to everyone, telling them his name was Alex and he came from Cannes. He didn’t even hide that he was Jewish, which made people suspect he had friends in high places protecting him. Then one day he did something that ensured everyone knew who he was: he got into a fight outside the village bakery and knocked out someone’s two front teeth. If he had wanted everyone to know that no one could mess with Alex Maguy, then he succeeded, but he also drew a lot of attention to himself, and this story is, still, seventy years on, something of a legend in Saint-Gervais-d’Auvergne. So it was decided that he needed to be put somewhere a little more out of the way. As it happened, a friend of Alex’s, called Imre, had also recently arrived in town, and the two wanted to stay together. Was there a farmhouse, a little off the beaten track, where they could both stay?

  Jeanne Aymard, as Madame Gustave was known then, first learned that Alex was coming to live with her when a friend at school told her: ‘Hey, two men are staying at your house now!’ The teacher hurriedly told them both to be quiet.

  Alex and his friend Imre moved into the Aymards’ attic; the Aymards had never taken in any lodgers before, resisters or otherwise, and they never took in any again. To this day Madame Gustave doesn’t know why her parents took in Alex and Imre. In the attic they set up two small beds and a desk for them, and there is a little window with a view of the fields. The staircase to get up to the attic is behind a hidden wall in the kitchen and there is also a second staircase from the garage so Alex and Imre could run down one if they heard the police coming up the other. The attic today is still cosy and pretty, with slanted ceilings and only the sound of birds outside. As Alex looked around it for the first time he must have felt the same rush of relief as when he was lying on the train tracks after making his jump. Here, at last, he would be safe. Both he and his friend.

  Imre’s full name was Imre Partos and he was an aspiring fashion designer whom Alex had become close to in Cannes. They had met in Paris through Dior, and after the war Partos would work for several years with Dior, helping him create the designer’s famous New Look collection of 1947 that would make the design house’s name. But it was Alex who became his truly great friend. There were obvious surface similarities between them: they both loved fashion, both were eastern European Jews (Partos came from Budapest) and both were short – Imre was five foot three at a generous estimate. But Imre was more classically handsome; in fact, he had the delicate, fine-boned looks of Jacques. He was also more relaxed than Alex, and more refined, too, and was occasionally horrified by his friend’s coarse manners: he often apologised to the Aymards for his friend’s ‘pig-like character’.

  Another difference was that Partos was openly gay, but when I asked Jeanne if there was ever any suggestion that he and Alex were in a relationship she looked so shocked that it was clear this was the first time she’d ever even considered it.

  ‘No, never, never. Of course, I was only ten. But I never heard anything,’ she said.

  Whatever their relationship, the two men were extremely close: they were together the whole day, every day, sleeping together, eating together, working on the local farms together. One photo from that period shows them lying together in a field, dressed for what looks like autumn so probably quite soon after they moved into the Aymards’. They’re finishing lunch and Imre is looking towards Alex and Alex is looking into the distance. They are both smiling, happy.

  They rarely, if ever, spoke of home. Instead, Alex and Imre spent much of their time talking about fashion: who was good, who was a hack, who knew how to sew, who knew how to style. Alex invariably won these arguments. ‘Alex was quite bossy, assertive. Definitely a man who got what he wanted,’ Madame Gustave said, squashing any tiny doubts I might have still held about whether it was actually my great-uncle Alex who had stayed in her house. Many decades later, after Imre – or Emeric Partos, as he became known when he anglicised his name after the war – had become a world-famous designer with a celebrity clientele that included his friend and neighbour Katharine Hepburn, Alex was credited with getting him interested in fashion.

  ‘[Partos] became an operative in the French underground. There, he met Alex Maguy, a couturier who also designed for the theater.[10] Mr Partos joined him as a coat designer and did an occasional stint costuming ballet,’ Angela Taylor wrote in his obituary in the New York Times.[11] (This was not entirely correct: as Alex says in his memoir, the men had met years earlier in Paris.) And unusually for Alex, he stayed friends with Partos for the rest of his life. Among my grandmother’s shoebox papers I found a letter from Alex dated 7 December 1975: ‘My dear sister, I’ve just learned with great sadness of the death of my dear friend, Imre. What a wonderful guy he was. To think that we telephoned each other several times lately and the bad weather kept me from seeing him – ah, that’s life. Let’s talk of nicer things …’

  That Alex was a fashion designer was the beginning and end of all the Aymards knew about their lodger. He lived with them for a year but he never put up any photos of his family, never talked about his life before the war, never even explained what he was doing there. He was always polite, even formal, but the word that really described him was private: he kept himself entirely to himself.

  ‘He seemed “très soupe au lait” at first,’ Madame Gustave said, using an old-fashioned French expression for rapidly changeable (the English equivalent would be ‘he went from 0 to 60 mph’). ‘But he was always very, very sweet with me, pinching my cheek and calling me “ma petite Jeanne”. His habits were totally irregular, more so than Imre’s. Sometimes I would find him in the woodland outside but you never knew where he had come from.’

  He was probably coming from meeting other resisters who were hiding in the woods; remnants of secret cabins and lookouts are still scattered around the Auvergne, and Picandet showed me some very close to Madame Gustave’s house.

  I asked Madame Gustave if Alex did anything odd while he was staying there, and she laughed.

  ‘Oh yes, he could be very odd! He once asked my mother for some butter and then rubbed it all over his body and went out to work without a shirt – we were worried the bugs would be after him!’ she said, pointing to a photo of him in which he was indeed topless and shiny with grease. ‘He said it helped him work better’, she shrugged.

  I noticed that he was often topless in the photos she showed me of him and Madame Gustave laughed again.

  ‘He was always taking some item of clothing off – his shirt, his shoes, his socks. I never saw him with all his clothes on here. We just thought, Oh well, I guess that’s what Bohemians are like!’

  But as I looked at the photos of Alex, shirtless, pushing around a horse and cart and working in the field outside Madame Gustave’s house, he didn’t look like a bohemian artist: he looked like a peasant. After having run away from Chrzanow so fast as a teenager, suddenly he found himself back living the kind of rural life he thought he’d left behind. And after decades of disparaging that world, referring sneeringly to ‘Polish peasants’, it’s clear from the photos how much he loved living in Espinasse. In all the photos he’s grinning delightedly, clutching his tools, ready to work.

  ‘We had ver
y happy times here – Alex liked being here a lot,’ agreed Madame Gustave.

  Coming to Espinasse had allowed Alex to love his past. No longer did he have to spit when he talked about it, associating the rural life with pogroms and stasis and death. He didn’t have to build a bulwark of glamour around himself for protection, filling his world with fabulousness out of fear he would otherwise end up like his father. Even though the Second World War was still raging and Alex had just escaped from a train taking him to a concentration camp, when he was in Espinasse Alex felt more relaxed than he had in decades, possibly ever. Here, he could simply enjoy a life in which his breakfast came from the barnyard outside and not worry about pushing ever forward, away from where he’d come. He could just sit still in a field, enjoying a life his father and brother Jacques would have liked for themselves, had two world wars not swallowed them up.

  So was Alex just sitting in a field here or was he actually in the Resistance?

  ‘We never heard he was in the Resistance,’ Madame Gustave insisted.

  But Picandet had his theories.

  ‘The British were very keen to hear about French people’s morale, so it is likely Alex was writing reports on that and sending them to Britain.’

  ‘Perhaps he was just communicating with the Sizaines?’ I suggested. But what I really meant was, maybe he wasn’t doing anything at all. Maybe he was just having a nice year in Espinasse with Imre. Not every Frenchman, after all, was a member of the Resistance, no matter what they said after the war.