Scheisshaus Luck (5 page)

‘‘Raise your hand when I call your name,’’ he barked.

When he came to Pierre Berceau, I held up my arm.

‘‘Stella, Ruth, and Emile Binda. . . .’’

The captain stared at Mr. Binda, then looked down at his feet.

Mr. Binda shook his head.

PART I | DRANCY

21

‘‘He used to stand at attention and salute me when I entered the ministry building,’’ he whispered to his family.

‘‘
Raus!
’’ The two SS guards waved us off the bus.

As I helped an elderly couple with their luggage, Frenchmen with red armbands directed us to the center of the courtyard, where they had us line up three deep. These red armbands were the camp police, the Nazis’ lackeys, mainly well-educated professionals but prisoners just like us. They received certain privileges for administrating the camp. It was the efficient Teutonic way of saving their manpower for the battlefield.

The buses pulled out and the
gendarmes
closed the gates. A red armband, whose mannerisms made me think he had been a school-teacher, briefed us.

‘‘You’ll be housed in the building to your left. The construction of all these buildings hasn’t been completed, but for lodgings they are more than adequate. The connecting building at the end of the yard is off limits. It’s quarantined. We have a scarlet fever epidemic here in Drancy, but there’s no reason to be alarmed by this. All those that have been stricken are quarantined. Now, if you have had scarlet fever, please step out.’’

Without thinking I stepped forward.

‘‘Only one?’’ the man asked. ‘‘Don’t be afraid. We need you because you’re immune. You cannot catch it twice.’’

I started thinking I had been foolish, and then I found Stella standing next to me. Only a handful of us stayed in Drancy. The rest, mostly Jews, gave the Nazis the twelve hundred inmates they needed to fill a train. The Germans would never waste coal on a light load. To Stella’s relief, her parents were able to avoid the deportation because of her assignment in the quarantine ward.

Stella and I spent many hours together in that ward. While she attended to the needs of the stricken, I carried the pails that their bedpans filled down to Le Chaˆteau. Our shithouse got its presti-gious name because of the castle-like crenellations at the top of the walls. Every day I emptied one hundred and ten pails, making fifty-five trips up and down four floors. My legs must have thought I was 22

SCHEISSHAUS LUCK

living in the Eiffel Tower. And at the end of every shift I scrubbed the stairs to erase the double yellow line created by the sloshing pails.

I would watch Stella with admiration and warmth as she fed patients whose hands were too shaky to hold a spoon, applied ointment to bedsores, and sponged down bodies that were wracked with fever. There wasn’t a single patient who died whom she didn’t shed tears for.

‘‘You cannot cry for everyone,’’ I told her.

‘‘Someone should.’’

‘‘You’re going to make yourself sick.’’

‘‘I can’t help that it acts on me this way,’’ she shot back. ‘‘Anyway, they said we couldn’t catch it again.’’

‘‘But there are a lot of other things you might catch.’’

‘‘Don’t worry about me. I’ll be fine.’’

I could make her laugh and evaporate some of her tears with my Laurel and Hardy impersonations. I was never sure if she was giggling at the jokes or just found me incredibly silly. Regardless, it seemed to distract her from the sadness that surrounded her.

Stella also enjoyed my recollections of my mother’s singing.

She felt it was a pity that my father had stopped her from touring, but she thought it must have been magical to grow up in a house echoing with arias. She missed her violin and was overly concerned that she would lose her ability to play.

‘‘If you’ve been practicing since you were six, there’s no chance of that,’’ I reassured her.

Emptying the buckets wasn’t my only task. I was in charge of cleaning Le Chaˆteau, too. Marius, the Corsican plumber, gave me the title ‘‘
Roi du Chaˆteau
,’’ or ‘‘King of the Shithouse.’’ To keep the long row of concrete squat toilets disinfected, twice a day I would sprinkle lime around the funneled holes in the floor. Easy enough, but some prisoners had got into the habit of painting the ceiling with their feces, especially in the women’s section. This exercise in frustration and animosity toward the Nazis made my life a stinking hell. It was impossible to escape the brown raindrops as I struggled PART I | DRANCY

23

to unglue their mess with a garden hose and broom. I had only the clothes that I had been arrested in, and the stench on them became unbearable for everyone. When Stella stopped brushing up against me I knew something had to be done. Thankfully, one red armband took me to a storeroom full of suitcases and clothing.

‘‘Take anything that fits. These belonged to the departed.’’

I didn’t ask if ‘‘departed’’ meant dead or deported. The armful of tailor-made suits I quickly chose got me the nickname ‘‘the Dandy of the Shithouse.’’

I was also responsible for emptying the pails of those prisoners in solitary confinement, who were held in the same building those in quarantine. This was where the SS and Gestapo tortured men and women. Many times I would find a mangled corpse instead of the living person I had spoken to the day before. Standing over these corpses, I would ponder if they had died because they refused to reveal their contacts in the Maquis or because they wouldn’t disclose the hiding places of their art collections, jewelry, or other coveted valuables. To me, it was foolish to die for a painting or diamond ring, and it was sad that those Resistance members probably knew nothing more than the names of their contacts, which were more than likely false names.

Stella and I quickly found ourselves acting like boyfriend and girlfriend. We never discussed it or announced it to anyone, but we were an item. Hell, the fifty men I shared sleeping quarters knew she was ‘‘my Stella.’’ How could we not become involved? It was inevitable. In each other’s arms, we forgot for a few sweet moments the gravity of our predicament and dreamt of fairytales futures.

As the weeks went by Stella and I made more time to sneak off into a staircase or the corner of a comatose patient’s cell to kiss and caress. As long as we performed our duties nobody paid attention to us. I loved the way she felt, smelled, and tasted. She liked that I had some experience. I didn’t tell her that it had been a thirty-six-year-old woman who had initiated me at fourteen. The wine they gave us with our meals was spiked with saltpeter because sex between ‘‘undesirables’’ was
verboten
, but it hardly had any effect on 24

SCHEISSHAUS LUCK

the two of us. Stella could be pretty bashful, though. One time I knelt, raised her dress, and began kissing her thighs. Realizing my intentions, she became embarrassed because she hadn’t washed yet, but I didn’t care. Afterwards, she wanted to try on me, but I finished before she could start. Tears welled in her eyes. She thought she had done something wrong. Holding her hand, I reassured her that that wasn’t the case at all. I brushed my thumb over a pyramid-shaped scar above the knuckle of her left index finger.

‘‘A parrot, a big Macaw, bit me when I was in kindergarten. I thought he was going to bite off my whole hand. Oh, I cried. And I hit that bird so hard that I stunned him. I thought I killed him,’’

she giggled.

One day I came out of my castle and found Mr. Binda standing in the courtyard. I had been avoiding him and his wife so I wouldn’t have to answer any questions about my relationship with their daughter. He grabbed me by the arm. ‘‘Let’s go for a stroll.’’

We walked in silence and I began to sweat. Had Stella let something slip about our relationship? ‘‘I want to thank you for being such a good friend of Stella’s. It’s been traumatic for her.’’

‘‘I know. I wish I had met her, all of you, under other circumstances.’’

We came to the gate. A jovial group of
gendarmes
were standing there.

‘‘Those dirty sons of bitches. Don’t they have any shame? I would rather die than be in their boots,’’ I said.

‘‘Don’t judge them too harshly. They’re professional soldiers trained to take orders from whoever’s in charge. Believe me, some of them are working hand in hand with the resistance.’’

‘‘Yes, I know one in Nice who notified our network and some Jewish families on impending raids.’’

‘‘I may know him, too.’’

‘‘One of the
gendarmes
told me that he would close his eyes if I slipped through the wire on his shift.’’

Mr. Binda shook his head. ‘‘You can’t chance it. He may be a rotten egg hunting for a promotion.’’

PART I | DRANCY

25

‘‘That’s why I’m still here. There’s no sure way to candle the good eggs from the bad ones.’’

♦ ♦ ♦

On Christmas Eve, I had emptied my first two pails when a red armband approached me.

‘‘Wash your hands and come with me.’’

‘‘Why? Where to?’’ I asked.

‘‘To the administration building, but don’t ask me why.’’

My stomach instantly knotted up. Being escorted to the Nazis’

offices meant only one thing—trouble. A
gendarme
escorted us out the gate and to a high-rise building across the street. We went down a hallway on the first floor and stopped at a door where a large cardboard box was sitting. After knocking, my two companions entered the office. As I stepped into the doorway an SS officer sitting at one of three desks barked in French.

‘‘Stay there! You’re contaminated.’’

Looking over papers at another desk was that Austrian Gestapo officer wearing the same black leather coat. His black hat was hanging on a coat rack. Now I knew I was in trouble. The question was who squealed on me and for what? Oddly, the Austrian looked up at me puzzled.

‘‘
Warum ist dieser gute Lu¨gener noch hier
?’’ (Why is this good liar still here?) he asked the officer.

‘‘He’s our orderly in the ward. You know him, Herr Brunner*?’’

The officer asked.

Again the Germans arrogantly assumed I couldn’t speak their mother tongue.

* SS Captain Alois Brunner was the Commandant of Drancy from June 1943 until August 1944. When the Germans took over the Italian zone of France, he was sent to Nice to oversee the roundup of Jews. Brunner was responsible for deporting 24,000 people from Drancy to the extermination camps.

26

SCHEISSHAUS LUCK

‘‘He’s an accomplished liar.’’ He stared directly at me. ‘‘Someone sure did a lousy job burying a box of jewelry and gold watches in the basement of that house.’’

I kept a blank look on my face. Obviously he hadn’t found Claude or the message in my pump, but he had kept his promise and returned to our house. After hearing that the Nazis were emptying every safe and bank in Nice, I took it upon myself to bury my mother’s best jewelry along with my father’s gold watches in the dirt floor of our basement.

The Austrian went back to his paperwork.

‘‘Ship him out when the crisis is over.’’

‘‘I was going to send him to Compiègne. The kid is a political.

He’s not circumcised,’’ the officer replied.

‘‘No. Put him on a transport to Ausch . . . Germany.’’

The officer nodded, then turned to me.

‘‘Take that box of supplies to the infirmary.’’

What a Christmas present, I thought as I walked back, a train ticket to a German prison. If only I could figure out a way to infect the incoming prisoners with the fever, then Stella and I could work in the infirmary until the end of the war.

♦ ♦ ♦

Finally the dreaded moment came. All the scarlet fever patients were either cured or dead. The quarantine ward was empty and our deportation date was set. The honeymoon was over.

‘‘Don’t drink the wine anymore,’’ Stella instructed.

‘‘Why?’’

‘‘I want to do it like it’s supposed to be. I want to be a real woman.’’

I wanted Stella so much, but had never attempted to make love to her and had never brought up the subject because of my fear of losing control, as I did on the staircase. Pregnancy could be a disaster for a female prisoner. There had been two sisters in the camp and one of them had been pregnant. The other wanted to tell the PART I | DRANCY

27

Germans about her sister’s condition, believing it would prevent her from being deported. A red armband quickly straightened her out.

‘‘How can you be so naive? She won’t be able to work and she’s creating another mouth for them to feed. She will be the first on the train.’’

So I kept drinking the awful-tasting wine. But Stella became impatient, nearly frantic. There was an urgency in her eyes that puzzled me. I mulled over the possibility that she had had a premo-nition, but something stopped me from asking.

At the first opportunity, I snuck into the camp’s administration office and stole the key to the storeroom. Late the next afternoon, after I had finished my shift, Stella led me down the hall. I turned on the light. We stretched out on a pile of coats among the stacks of suitcases and quickly pulled down our clothes.

‘‘Make love to me.’’

She was biting her lip and her face was flushed with anticipation. I kissed her as I slid on top of her. I felt a resistance. She whimpered. I couldn’t believe that as I entered her my mind drifted.

When would we be able to do this again? Where were they shipping us? Would we stay together? How could I face her parents?

Stella started moaning softly. We had to keep quiet. I muffled her mouth with my hand, and suddenly she sounded like Kiki, my pet guinea pig. Stella held me tight, her fingernails digging into my back. She let out a subdued groan, trembled, then relaxed. I pulled out just in time.

Her eyes closed, Stella smiled. ‘‘Now I won’t die a virgin.’’

Stunned, I blurted, ‘‘Don’t be silly. You’re going to live a long life.’’

She stared at me as if she hadn’t heard my fairytale words, then she cuddled on my chest. To classmates and friends I had always proclaimed with some bravado that I was a fatalist, and here I was unnerved by the girl whose virginity I had just taken. What she was hinting at was darker than anything I dared to imagine.