Walking past the window, I looked at my father inside the bar, a little stolen glance, that’s all; and he gave me his final smile, to indicate to me that my collar wasn’t on straight.
There was a look of urgency in his eyes that it took me years to understand, but all I have to do today is close mine and think of him for his last expression to come back to me, intact. I know that my father was sad that I was leaving, and I guess also that he sensed that we would never see each other again. It wasn’t his death he was envisaging, but mine.
I think back to that moment in the Café des Tourneurs. It must demand a lot of courage on the part of a man to bury his son while standing right next to him, drinking a chicory-blend coffee, to remain silent and not say to him, ‘Go home right now and do your homework’.
One year earlier, my mother had gone to fetch our yellow stars from the police station. This was the signal for our exodus and we left for Toulouse. My father was a tailor and he would never sew that filth on a piece of fabric.
On that day, 21 March 1943, I was eighteen years old. I caught the tram and I left for a station that doesn’t feature on any map: I went to seek out the Maquis.
Ten minutes ago I was still called Raymond; since I got off at the terminus of line 12, my name is Jeannot. Nameless Jeannot. At that still-gentle time of day, many people in my world have no idea what is going to happen to them. Dad and Mum don’t know that soon a number is going to be tattooed on their arms; Mum doesn’t know that on a railway platform, she will be separated from this man whom she loves almost more than us.
As for me, I don’t know yet either that in ten years’ time, I will recognise, in a heap of pairs of spectacles almost five metres high at the Auschwitz Memorial, the frames that my father slipped into the top pocket of his jacket, the last time I saw him at the Café des Tourneurs. My little brother Claude doesn’t know that soon I will come looking for him, and that if he hadn’t said yes, if we hadn’t faced those years together, neither of us would have survived. My seven friends, Jacques, Boris, Rosine, Ernest, François, Marius, Enzo, don’t know that they are going to die shouting ‘Vive la France’, and almost all of them with a foreign accent.
I strongly suspect that my thoughts are confused, that the words will tumble over each other in my head, but from that Monday noon onwards and for the next two years, my heart is going to thump ceaselessly in my chest to the rhythm imposed by fear; I was afraid for two years, and sometimes I still wake up in the night with that same bloody feeling. But you are sleeping beside me, my love, even if I don’t know it yet. Anyway, here is a little of the story of Charles, Claude, Alonso, Catherine, Sophie, Rosine, Marc, Emile, Robert, my Spanish, Italian, Polish, Hungarian and Romanian friends, the children of freedom.
You must understand the context within which we were living; context is important, as in the case of a sentence, for example. Once removed from its context it often changes its meaning, and during the years to come, so many sentences will be removed from their context in order to judge in a partial way and to condemn more easily. It’s a habit that won’t be lost.
In the first days of September, Hitler’s armies had invaded Poland; France had declared war and nobody here or there doubted that our troops would drive back the enemy at the borders. Then the flood of German armoured divisions had swept through Belgium, and in a few weeks a hundred thousand of our soldiers would die on the battlefields of the North and the Somme.
Marshal Pétain was appointed to head the government; two days later, a general who refused to accept defeat launched an appeal for resistance from London. Pétain chose to sign the surrender of all our hopes. We had lost the war so quickly.
By swearing allegiance to Nazi Germany, Marshal Pétain led France into one of the darkest periods of her history. The Republic was abolished in favour of what would henceforth be called the French State. The map was divided by a horizontal line and the nation separated into two zones, one in the north, which was occupied, and the other in the south, which was allegedly free. But freedom there was entirely relative. Each day saw its share of decrees published, driving back into danger two million foreign men, women and children who now lived in France without rights: the right to carry out their professions, to go to school, to move around freely and soon, very soon, the very right to exist.
The nation had become amnesiac about the foreigners who came from Poland, Romania, Hungary, these Spanish or Italian refugees, and yet it had desperate need of them. It had been vitally necessary to repopulate a France that, twenty-five years earlier, had been deprived of a million and a half men who had died in the trenches of the Great War. Almost all my friends were foreigners, and they had all experienced the repression and abuses of power already perpetrated in their country for several years. German democrats knew who Hitler was, combatants in the Spanish Civil War knew about Franco’s dictatorship, and those from Italy knew about Mussolini’s Fascism. They had been the first witnesses of all the hatred, all the intolerance, of this pandemic that was infesting Europe, with its terrible funeral cortège of deaths and misery. Everyone already knew that defeat was only a foretaste; the worst was yet to come. But who would have wanted to listen to the bearers of bad news? France now no longer needed them. So, whether they had come from the East or the South, these exiles were arrested and interned in camps.
Marshal Pétain had not only given up, he was going to collude with Europe’s dictators, and in our country, which was falling asleep around this old man, they were all already crowding around: the head of the government, ministers, prefects, judges, the police, and the Militia; each more eager than the last to carry out their terrible work.
Everything began like a children’s game, three years earlier, on 10 November 1940. The unimpressive French Marshal, surrounded by a few prefects with silver laurels, came to Toulouse to start a tour of the free zone of a country that was in fact a prisoner of his defeat.
Those directionless crowds were a strange paradox, filled with wonder as they watched the Marshal raise his baton, the sceptre of a former leader who had returned to power, bringing a new order with him. But Pétain’s new order would be an order of misery, segregation, denunciations, exclusions, murders and barbarity.
Some of those who would soon form our brigade knew about the internment camps, where the French government had locked up all those who had made the mistake of being foreigners, Jews or Communists. And in these camps in the South West, whether at Gurs, Argelès, Noé or Rivesaltes, life was abominable. Suffice to say that for anyone who had friends or family members who were prisoners, the arrival of the Marshal felt like a final assault on the small amount of freedom we had left.
Since the population was preparing to acclaim this very Marshal, we had to sound our alarm bell, awake people from this terribly dangerous fear, this fear that overcomes crowds and leads them to throw in the towel, to accept anything; to keep silent, with the sole, cowardly excuse that their neighbours are doing the same and that if their neighbours