We didn’t have a telephone. My mother also took the train to warn him before it was too late. “I’ll be coming right back. ’Bye kids.” Then life went on again, with all the little problems of daily routine. The shortages. You couldn’t find anything anywhere, even the most basic necessities, and stocking up on things was getting more and more difficult. With my chemical lab I now knew how to make soap from carbonate of soda, candles—much in demand because of the power outages—from paraffin, wax polish.
Brancourt, the pharmacist, regularly passed on to me orders for bars of soap to treat scabies, which had reached epidemic proportions in the region. I also found a supplier in Flers who gave me all the products he hadn’t managed to sell, which allowed me to distribute the whole of my production free of charge. One day he gave me hundreds of kilos of salt rendered unfit for consumption by the addition of iron oxide.
Everyone was short of pure salt because the Nazis had controlled the sale to stop farmers salting their pork to keep it hidden instead of being requisitioned and sent to Germany. I dissolved the salt and filtered it, allowing the iron oxide, which was heavier than the salt, to form a deposit on the bottom; then I recovered the salt on the surface to let it dry and re-crystallize. A few days later it was pure again. I had such a large quantity to purify that I shared the salt out among the farmers and demonstrated the procedure to them. Everyone was at it, for months on end. Thanks to that, for a good while we were a little less hungry in Vire than elsewhere.
With all this to occupy me on top of my work, I didn’t spend much time at home. My mother hadn’t come back, and a week later my father and Paul went off to find her. They came back after two days and reassured us. She’d contracted some microbe or other and was in hospital in Paris. Nothing serious, apparently. And then the days passed without them saying anything more about it.
My reputation as a manufacturer of free bars of soap was soon all around town.
The women, in particular were short of it for the washing. I used to go around the houses on my bike, which allowed me to see Dora again, the girl I used to walk to school with. The poor thing had had to give up school to look after her father, who was very ill and, with the passing of time, no longer frightened me. And it was my bars of soap that also kept me in contact with my former colleagues at the factory. I really liked seeing Cécile again. Even though times were hard, she was still as funny as she used to be. Except one time when she greeted me looking really down in the mouth.
“Hi, it’s you. Would you like a cig?”
“No thanks, I don’t smoke.”
“Pooh… It’s because you’re still not a man. You ought to try it. On my sad days, I smoke even more.”
“Sad? Why?”
“You haven’t heard?”
“What?”
“Jean Bayer, from the factory.”
“What’s he done?”
“Gone and gotten himself executed by firing squad.”
It was a rainy winter’s day at the end of 1940. I left on my bike and pedaled like mad, not going anywhere in particular, across the plain of Normandy. Jean Bayer dead. The first person dear to me that the war had torn away. Him with his cynical jokes, the eternal cigarette butt stuck in the corner of his lips, his offhand manners. I went through all the times I’d spent trying to be like him. I was pedaling against the wind. And then, lost in the tumult of memories, I suddenly realized the worst thing of all. My mother was dead. I realized just like that. A lot of water poured down my cheeks that day, and it wasn’t rainwater. It had taken Jean’s death to stop me being blind. What illness could have kept her in hospital all this time? Since my father had told us the story about some microbe, he had withdrawn into total silence. How could I not have understood? Even my little sister Pauline, who was only ten, had clearly expressed her concern.
When I got home, I asked my father straight out, and he confessed. The railway company had found her body on the line. She was on her way back from Paris after having warned Léon, who’d disappeared at once. Paul had gone with my father to identify the body, which was why they took two days. Paul had been so traumatized at seeing “her head separated from her body and the bits of brain,” that he’d preferred to say nothing to us, the younger ones. But my father ought to have informed us. The detectives carrying out the investigation claimed she’d opened the door of the train while it was traveling, assuming it was the toilet door. And that’s what Paul preferred to believe, and still does today. My father brought in a Parisian lawyer to clear the matter up, but he was a Jew and was arrested and deported not long after. I have nothing but contempt for the accident theory. As far as I’m concerned, she was pushed; it was an assassination.
“But no one can prove it?”
Now you tell me: if someone told you I’d fallen out of the train because I’d confused the outside door with that to the toilets, what would you say?
So there you are. That’s just the way it was. Anyway, a few days later something happened that corroborated my view: a letter from the Kommandantur ordering us to leave Léon’s house, which had been requisitioned by the German Military Administration and allocated to the Demoys for a price fixed by the Mayor’s office. The Demoys were taking their revenge. The house, transformed into an officers’ brothel, was never empty throughout the war. People say that the drinks and the girls there were delicious, and cheap.
We were allocated accommodation by the Mayor’s office, on Place de la Gare with an old lady who had no say in the matter. Almost every day I went to see Brancourt, the pharmacist. After my mother’s death I threw myself body and soul into chemistry; it was my only reason for living. Brancourt was ready to help me every time I hit a snag in my research—he gave me loads of advice. But not just that, we talked about everything, especially the war. He was very humane, he was a good listener and gradually he became a kind of father in spirit.
An announcement on Radio London during the summer of 1942 was the first news that gave us some hope. The Battle of Stalingrad. The German army was finally coming up against resistance. I also heard rumors that the sabotage of the German convoys was intensifying, groups were being organized. In response to these attacks, the German Administration decided to requisition all the men in the town to take turns in keeping a watch on the railway lines at night. In a way they were hostages because if there was an attack on the railway, those on watch were executed by firing squad. I wasn’t old enough yet but I went all the same in place of my father and Paul, so that I could see Brancourt. I can’t say how, but in the course of our discussions I eventually realized that he was an agent for de Gaulle’s intelligence service and for which the pharmacy was just a cover. He was in contact with the groups organizing acts of sabotage in the Normandy sector. I didn’t want to mourn my dead without doing anything, and he knew that. One night, as we were drinking ersatz coffee and watching the lines while struggling against sleep, he said, “If I showed you how, would you be willing to make some things for me that are a little more dangerous than bars of soap?”
How long had I been waiting for that proposition without daring to mention it out loud!
“Now listen carefully, it’s complicated work. You have to take the greatest care about the quantities.”
From that day on as well as bars of soap, candles and salt, I made more harmful products that corroded the transmission lines, made railway parts rust, and little detonators as well. Being involved in the sabotage meant that for the first time I didn’t feel entirely impotent following the death of my mother and my friend Jean. At least I had the feeling I was avenging them. And I was proud; I was in the Resistance.
1. The general union of Jewish workers in Russia, Lithuania and Poland.
2. An uprising in Paris following the French defeat in the 1870-71 Franco-Prussian War. [MM]
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