There are some who refuse at first, then change their minds when I assure them it’s a free offer. But unfortunately not everyone is so easy to convince. That evening, for example, there was Madame Drawda, Rue Oberkampf. A widow who astounded me by her lack of awareness, her obstinate insistence about seeing me as someone dishonest.
When I offered her the papers, she was offended: “Why should I hide, I who’ve done nothing, who’ve been French for several generations?” I had time to see, over her shoulder, the table set in the parlor with four children around it, quietly eating their supper. I did everything I could to try and convince her. I explained that my network made it their business to hide children, they would be in an absolutely secure place, with decent people, out in the country, and she would even get news of them. Begging her got me nowhere; she simply wasn’t listening, didn’t want to hear what I was saying, just stood there looking indignant. What really struck me was that after having listened to me telling her what I’d seen with my own eyes when I was interned in Drancy, the thousands of deportees, whole trainloads being sent to their death, she coldly replied that the death camps didn’t exist, that she didn’t believe the lies of Anglo-American propaganda. Then, after pausing for a second, she became threatening and warned me that if I didn’t leave immediately, she would call the police. Had she not realized that the police, the ones who would come to arrest her and her children in the morning, would not be coming to protect them?
With my case and my sorrow as a double burden, I continued on my way, from door to door, counting and making lists in my head, the future clandestine Jews on the one hand, the deportees on the other. I knew already that I would always remember the latter, that I would never be entirely able to erase their names, their faces from my memory. That I would have nightmares about them. Well aware that I was perhaps the last witness of their freedom, I tried to make a little space for them in my memories.
It was no use hurrying, the glacial darkness of winter nights had finally swept away the clear February sun. After the last door of the last address had closed behind me, it was long past the time of the curfew. I had to turn into a shadow, hug the walls, avoid the light of the street lamps, muffle my steps, glide over the ground and disappear. But above all, I had to find a telephone booth to let my contact know I’d finished my sector: dial a number, leave a coded message, and only then could I go home.
After twenty minutes of walking anxiously, I finally saw in the distance the outlines of the brick building of the Young Men’s Hostel, nowadays the Women’s Refuge. At that time, it was a hostel for students and young workers. It was very cheap, and I lodged there until I could find something better. When I got to the barred entrance I rang the bell several times, but no one came to open up. I was cold, my feet were frozen, and I was locked out during the curfew. Everywhere in the darkness I thought I could see threatening silhouettes, shadows, hear voices. I felt I was in danger. Nowhere to go.
Exhausted. Having rung the bell one last time, though without deluding myself that anyone might come, I went to hide in the entrance to an apartment block, sitting on a step, hunched up, arms wrapped around me, waiting for daybreak. Unable to get a wink of sleep, startled by every gust of wind, I thought back to Madame Drawda, to all those I hadn’t managed to convince, to the children especially. I felt guilty without being able to say of what. I regretted not having been able to find the right words, convincing arguments. I wanted to continue to believe that my efforts, like those of my comrades, had not been in vain. Never give up. I wondered whether Otter had managed to finish his round before the curfew, whether he’d been able to hand out more papers than me. I hoped he hadn’t been arrested, for if he had it meant he was already dead. It was January 1944. Contrary to what it said on my papers, I wasn’t seventeen, I’d just turned eighteen. I’ve made myself a year younger in order to avoid the STO.1 After a childhood that had been abruptly interrupted by the beginning of the war, I still didn’t feel entirely grown-up, but from now on I knew for certain that there was nothing of a child about me anymore.
I knew, of course, that all the police were hunting for the Paris forger. I knew that because I’d found a way of producing such a quantity of forged documents that very quickly the whole of the North Zone, as far as Belgium and the Netherlands, was flooded with them. Anyone who needed forged papers in France knew that if they could establish contact with any branch of the Resistance, they would get them immediately. So, obviously, if everyone knew that, then the police did as well. The more we made, the more we had to redouble our precautions. The main advantage I had over the police was that they were probably looking for a ‘professional’ with machines, printing presses, a wood pulp factory; none of them could have suspected at the time that the forger they were after was nothing but a boy.
Obviously—and fortunately—I was not alone. The man in charge of the laboratory was called Sam Kugiel; he was twenty-four. We called him by his nickname, ‘Otter’. The person who’d formerly been in charge and had given that up in order to deal with the convoys of children and frontier crossings was Renée Gluck, alias ‘Water Lily’, a chemist who was also twenty-four. Both of them had taken their aliases from the names they’d had when they’d belonged to the Jewish Scouts of France (EEIF),2 where they’d met before the war. In the laboratory there were also Suzie and Herta Schidlof, sisters who were twenty and twenty-one, students at the Beaux-Arts who made a particularly valuable contribution, as much for their hard work as for their eternal good humor. That was the set-up at the laboratory for forged papers of the ‘6th’ you’ve heard so much about, a secret section of the UGIF.3 No one outside the five of us knew the address of the laboratory; even our leaders were kept in ignorance of the secret. On no account should they know, and by strictly respecting this rule we were confident of avoiding getting caught up in lots of disasters.
As cover we pretended to be painters. Our laboratory for forged papers was in a narrow little attic room on the top floor of number 17, Rue des Saints-Pères, which we had transformed into an artist’s studio. It was tiny, hardly fifteen meters square, but thanks to a skylight we at least enjoyed fine daylight. Two tables placed end to end took up the whole length of the room. On the one: two typewriters; on the other: sheets of blotting paper. On shelves fixed to the wall I had set out all my chemicals and different inks, scrupulously arranged by order of use. And, as we’d put a few brushes next to them, there was nothing to suggest that they weren’t cans of paint and solvents. In order to increase our work surface, I’d cobbled together dozens of sliding shelves that went under the two tables. Thus we could dry out a large number of documents at once with nobody the wiser. The other walls were covered in paintings that we’d dashed off ourselves and behind which we hid the forged papers we’d made, until we could hand them over to our liaison agents. Each of us kept to a set timetable, office hours, so as not to arouse the concierge’s suspicions, and from time to time we would arrive with a painter’s palette. In that way none of our neighbors came to ask about the smell of the chemicals. The same was true of the man who came to read the electricity meters. Every time he came to the laboratory, he congratulated us on our pictures. As soon as we could no longer hear his footsteps on the stairs, we burst out laughing for, you can believe me, there was nothing remarkable about our paintings.
The particular feature of our network was its having been created at the very heart of the UGIF, a governmental Jewish organization established by the Vichy regime and financed by the money and goods of the Jews that had been requisitioned by the state. Its task was to gather the Jews together; the UGIF placed minors in children’s homes, allowed them to go to school and ensured they were given appropriate food, with the result that many thought its motives were honest and genuine. In reality, the French state had found an infallible means of preparing for the systematic deportation of Jews under the cloak of morality by getting ahead of all the other occupied countries with a system of establishing files and using punch-cards: the Jews had no other place to go and, with the ban on working, were all irremediably dependent on the UGIF and residents in its charitably run hostels. Then they were put on file and rounded up almost immediately.
When they discovered that they were unknowingly taking part in all these deportations, some of the UGIF officials decided to create a clandestine section that they financed with some of the funds they had