Dr. Morell’s pills sometimes gave Strasse long lapses of memory—not that he didn’t feel well, just a little tired, but marvelous—and sometimes he wished he could take such a big dose of pills that he would lose his memory until the end of the war. Then he would take his discharge right here in Paris, and maybe he would have twenty night clubs by that time, and they could get married, and he could finally get a little of the peace and love and comfort that he was entitled to.
He told her that when he wasn’t with his mother he was lining up supplies for the clubs. She was ecstatic in her admiration for a man clever enough to own eleven night clubs. They represented everything wonderful to Yoka, just as they did to him. She had never known anyone in Holland who could afford to take her to a night club. Then, after the invasion, there were no night clubs and her parents were killed accidentally in some SS operation and she had come to Paris and gone right to work in Au Toujours Noël.
Strasse knew how she felt; in Luebeck he could never afford to go to night clubs either. Then, after he had gotten his commission with Section IV4b, he had gone to a night club in Berlin and it had changed his whole life. He couldn’t really explain it; though he and Yoka had talked about it a lot. But people who might have been weak or mean or nothing at all during the day—people who might not, say, be very nice people really—could walk into a night club and snap their ringers at a waiter and assume a power and a presence. They had a meaning in a night club. They even looked cleaner. They looked up to themselves, and that was why he put so much emphasis on service, the most obsequious kind of service, in his clubs.
At least all these things had happened to Strasse when he had gone to that club in Berlin, and so when he was in charge of the interrogation of the fourth Jew the Gestapo had arrested in Paris, on the fifth day after his arrival in the city, and he heard the man admit that he owned a night club in Montmartre, the idea of actually owning a night club had almost exploded inside his head, and he had sent everybody else out of the room.
The man was bleeding from one ear because he had fallen off the high stool where they made him stand, naked, between the artificial drownings. He was a knobby, short, skinny man with blue skin.
“You want to get out of here?” Strasse had asked sympathetically.
“You have the wrong man.” He had been saying that over and over again all morning. He was a Jew, and yet he kept saying they had the wrong man.
“That doesn’t matter, sir,” Strasse had said kindly, “we’ll kill you anyway.” That kind of talk was against regulations, but he wanted to make his point quickly and see this man’s night club. “But if you want to get out to Switzerland or Spain, with real papers and no tricks, then just sign over your night club to me and away you go. I’ll even give you five hundred francs.”
The man pretended to be confused. “My night club? It’s nothing. Chairs and tables in a loft, a few spotlights and a bandstand. No stock. What do you want it for?”
Strasse hadn’t even listened to him. “What is the name of the club?”
“El Casino Latino.”
What a name! The prisoner on the stool towered overhead, and Strasse reached up and took him by the testicles and squeezed very hard. The man screamed and swayed, and Strasse steadied him on the stool. “Do you want me to have that night club?” he asked. The man nodded. Strasse let go and said, “All right. Good. You can sit down now, sir. I’ll go and make up some papers.”
Maybe the Casino Latino wasn’t much of a club, but it was his first, and he would make it great. He got his supplies through Piocher. Piocher made sure the price was right and even lent him the money to get started. Coal was procurable from the luxe hotels accommodating officers. These hotels had worked frantically to get the army business because it was one of the most fabulously profitable in the whole war. The German Army paid them full rates, and kept the hotels open and running when there was no other business to be had. More importantly, these hotels were given purchase-order permits for food, wine, liquor, paint, textiles, wood, and coal. Each hotel was able to buy from five to eight times as much as they needed, and they resold the excess on the black market. Next to such controllers of the black market as Piocher, the operators of the luxe hotels earned the great fortunes of the Occupation. When Strasse appeared in his Gestapo uniform to buy coal, the hotels were happy to deliver it at cost. Heated night clubs did all the business to be had in Paris; they were among the few places people could go to keep warm, and there was much more room than in the bordellos.
Strasse’s other night clubs were acquired in the same manner—or rather by the same principle, because the method changed. Why wait for night-club owners to be arrested by chance? After assigning his French police to investigate the ownership of all night clubs, he inspected those owned by Jews for their locations and potential capacity, and when he had made his choice he would have the owners brought in for interrogation. He was always meticulously fair. He had sent only one man to Auschwitz for extermination, and that was because the man had deliberately kicked him in the face with his knee when Strasse had grabbed him by the testicles. The others were given their freedom and exit papers—which of course they could always sell for a good price.
Strasse prided himself on being a fair man, and he was also proud of the strength of his hatred for Jews. He had only to remember the obscene, disgusting pictures of them in Der Stuermer to make himself sick. When he talked to Colonel Drayst he wished there was some way to measure how much he hated Jews, because he knew he himself hated them more than even Heydrich or Goering. Maybe he even hated them more than the Fuehrer himself. He had worked very hard to prove this point in Paris. It was a cushy assignment, and Eichmann had called him “you lucky dog.” The only trouble was that he was exhausted. Yoka had so much passion for him that he thought she would burn the life out of him, and apart from that he had never been so busy at IV4b. Thank heaven for Professor Morell and the pills.
From the beginning Strasse organized his work carefully, going partly by the book and partly by his own intuition and his hatred. He had offered money and power to the French anti-Semites to set up an Institute for the Study of the Jewish Question and had installed it on the Boulevard Haussmann, in a substantial building he had requisitioned from a Jewish business. Once they were his lodgers, such Frenchmen as Captain Sézille and Darquier de Pellepoix became the most active campaigners for total extermination. In 1941 he had been able to persuade Pucheu, Minister for Home Affairs, to set up a special police department for Jewish problems called PQJ. In addition, he had guided the amateurs at the Propaganda-Staffel in setting up the Young Front Headquarters. This consisted of a hundred young toughs who were given a complete wardrobe of dark shirt, tie, boots, badge, beret, crossbelts, and trousers, and a comfortable clubhouse at 36 Avenue des Champs-Elysées. The lads were used to smash Jewish shops, beat up their owners and, in general, work hand-in-hand with another of his inspirations, the anti-Semitic newspaper, Le Pilori.
On the 23rd of June, 1942, the Reichsfuehrer SS had issued an order demanding the evacuation of all Jews in France at the earliest date. The greatest pressures were put upon Strasse. Thank heaven he had completed his model index, entirely cross-filed, of all Jews by alphabet, streets, professions, and nationality. He would be ready in two weeks. But there were so many details to oversee! He even had to straighten out the Commander General of the Army about the proper wording of the directives. The Wehrmacht now understood that they must not refer to transports as being sent “to the East.” And the term “deportation” could not be used either, because it recalled the Tsar’s infamous deportations to Siberia. In the future, the term would be “sent to do forced labor” and one hundred thousand Jews were the quota from France—with the French government paying for the transportation—and Strasse wanted them to go as quietly as possible. Because he did not want to interfere with the enlistment of genuine French forced labor, his directive to the army provided that in the future all deportations should be called “transp
lantations.” The term was an inspiration; the Jews might even begin to feel secure, to send for their children under eighteen and go more quietly.
Strasse had gone over the disposition of the children carefully with Eichmann, and they had decided that as soon as possible convoys should be dispatched with a ratio of five hundred children to every seven hundred adults.
But every irritation was put in his way. The damned French police had been so negligent in carrying out his orders that a great number of Jews had been registered as Turks, Armenians, and Greeks, and as far as certain police were concerned, the law forbidding Jews to engage in trade seemed to exist only on paper. He even had reason to suspect that certain French police intentionally furnished Jews with opportunities to contravene the law. In his circular letter of the 26th of June to the French prefects of police, Strasse carefully outlined once more his directions for the transplantation of Jews, based on pregrouping before departure so that each train must have at least one thousand Jews; and it was forbidden for transplantees to take anything with them except ration cards, wedding rings, and—as a sentimental gesture—pets. The railroad cars must be neat and clean on arrival in Poland, and a Jew in each car must be held responsible for this. All lists must be in quadruplicate, and Section IV4b must be notified by telephone at PASsy 54–18, or telegram, of the number of women in each transport, the name of the transport leader, and the nature and quality of the food included.
It was certainly bad luck, Strasse thought, that the greatest Jewish raids coincided with the arrival of hordes of furloughed soldiers as rich and wide-eyed as tourists. For the last ten days he had been getting along on two hours’ sleep. Night clubs needed constant supervision, no doubt about it; there were a thousand details to such a profession. Recently he had discovered that his doorman at La Bonne Bouche was actually a leper, and the attendant of the ladies’ room at La Petite Tahiti had been doing a brisk abortion business in Strasse’s washroom until he had burst in on her in search of the cigarette girl whom he had just learned was selling narcotics to favorite customers.
And the whole problem of his clothes was crazy. He couldn’t wear his uniform, partly because of Yoka and partly because the soldiers wouldn’t have any fun if an SS officer was standing around. So he would work in his “Danish” civilian clothes, then go home with Yoka, undress, and later get dressed again, then go to his apartment to undress again and change into his uniform. Six times in and out of clothes was exhausting all by itself.
Strasse had organized the big razzias, the biggest raids of his career, to be handled entirely by the French police, under his supervision. It was a model plan and he was proud of it. Drayst had told him that it was a little masterpiece. Twenty-two thousand Jews, one-fifth of the number in Paris, were to be delivered for extermination to the designated Paris transit camps. They had been divided proportionally by arrondissement so that in the future they could be transplanted geographically. Berlin wanted three trains a week, thirteen a month, each carrying one thousand Jews from Paris to Poland. It was a terrible problem to get enough rolling stock, because of the bombings and sabotage. For each shipment he needed ten boxcars or cattle trucks into which one hundred and twenty transplantees could be packed for the sixty-hour journey (the trip usually killed eighteen to twenty-one per car en route).
It might be necessary for the Fuehrer himself to order the Wehrmacht to release trains. Wherever possible, Strasse did his best to use trains from the Vichy zone, but the French were absolutely impossible about giving up trains. Razzias? Fine. Have all Jews declared stateless the instant they crossed into the Reich? Fine. But when it came to taking their trains they were impossibly stubborn. He had been forced to take the matter all the way to Laval, who had agreed to release the trains, but only on the condition that Jewish children under sixteen years old from the unoccupied zone would be transplanted in the company of their parents. Fortunately, the question of children in the occupied zone did not interest Laval.
On arrest, the Jews were to be grouped together in the official hall of their arrondissement, then driven to the assembly point at the Vélodrome d’Hiver for removal to the transit camps at Drancy, Compiègne, Pithiviers and Beaune-la-Rolande. Searching for Jews took time, but if the techniques in Strasse’s plan were followed one convoy a week could leave each camp, and he would be running four trains a month over his quota.
That morning, before going over to Colonel Drayst’s office for their ten-o’clock meeting, Strasse had been over the plan for the razzias with his twelve French police inspectors, good men all. Every Jew on every card must be sent to the Vélodrome. Where all the inhabitants of a flat or a house were arrested, the gas, electricity, and water must be turned off. Those pets not taken should be left with the concierge, the keys to the flat must be handed to the concierge or a neighbor, and these persons were to be held responsible for the property. On no account could children be permitted to be left with neighbors.
Strasse was particularly annoyed because the cards were producing Jews almost entirely from the lowest strata. Why had not Jews of high social standing been listed? Someone was making money out of this, he thundered. (He knew it was that Gestapo bastard Sperrena, who would let anyone loose if they paid him enough.) Then an argument had started about the children. He had stood up and beat both fists rhythmically upon the polished table top yelling, “Stop it! Stop it!” And then he’d had to leave the meeting for a few minutes while he took two of Professor Morell’s pills. They worked instantly, and because he had felt about two feet taller when he returned, he had disposed of the matter calmly and judiciously. The director of the prefecture and the general delegate of the French police wanted the Jewish children put in homes around Paris. But had they considered the cost in petrol, manpower, and time for such a notion? No, of course not. Naturally, Darquier de Pellepoix, the Vichy Commissar for Jewish Affairs, had agreed with him. Strasse made a counter-proposal: that “an effort be made” to see that the children were not separated from the parents, and that, when necessary, such children be sent to the transit camps at Pithiviers and Beaune-la-Rolande. The police inspectors had objected to this so violently that he could shut them up only by saying that it would be necessary to refer the entire matter to Berlin. But he knew what their decision would be. Kill old Jews and let young Jews grow? Were these people crazy?
Strasse told his inspectors that they must aim for a goal of twenty-five thousand transplantations from France to Poland by September 1st. He was counting on them, he said, and of course they all swore that it would be done.
Eleven
Since the evening of the Grimaux reception, over a year before, Colonel Drayst had been telephoning Madame von Rhode at random hours of the day and night to talk obscenely to her and to recapture some of the sense of power and sexuality he had felt as a young ensign at Kiel. This act gave him feelings which he had never been able to set down successfully in his diaries; the closest he had come to capturing its ecstasy was when he had gone deer hunting once: all of the possibilities to destroy with no possible chance of the destruction turning against himself. She never spoke to him, and within a few seconds she would hang up.
Drayst was in no hurry. The delay was exquisitely exciting. He wanted her only once; after that it would be too late for her or anyone else. But the time was getting much closer; attitudes were changing in France and they were changing him. More and more Jews were being interrogated, and when he knew that women were being questioned, he could not stay away. The war inside his head would start and lurch out of his control. When night came with its soothing darkness, he would change his clothes and go out to find them, to weep on their breasts and to beg them for love until he had to kill to keep his sanity. But they were only the symbols of Frau General von Rhode, who lived inside his skin.
It was ten o’clock; Strasse must be waiting outside. He called Fräulein Nortnung and told her to send him in. As the captain entered he held up the police card. “What’s this for?” he asked.
God, what an oaf Strasse is, Drayst thought. “First, good morning. Sit down, relax. You work too hard.” He was a desperate little murderer, Drayst thought as he smiled; Strasse must drive himself because if he ever stopped he would know what everyone else knows—that he is nothing.
“I’ll sit, but I have no time to relax,” Strasse said.
“About the card. Listen, Strasse, I want to ask you to do me a favor. A personal favor.” Drayst knew that the only way he could get what he wanted from Strasse was to put a price on it.
“I am always happy to oblige,” Strasse answered. “That is how life moves along. A favor for you, then a favor for me.”
“The big razzias start next Thursday, is that correct?” Strasse nodded. “Well, as you will see, I have filled in a name on that card.” Strasse looked down at it casually. “This is my favor, Strasse. You will think I am some kind of romantic milksop, I suppose, but what must be must be, et cetera.”
“Romantic?”
“There is a certain lady.”
Strasse snorted. He was having a few problems himself, after all.
“I cannot seem to make her know I exist,” Drayst continued smoothly. “I want to arrange matters so that she must come to me for an excruciatingly important favor, so that when I grant the favor she will be very, very grateful. Do you follow me?”