“How did you get our country to agree to give you visas for your list?” she persisted. “They’re leftist or downright Communist, and mostly Jewish, and lord knows anti-Semitism is alive and well under the Stars and Stripes.”
Varian leaned back in his chair. “The committee sent two representatives to appeal to Mrs. Roosevelt,” he said. “It didn’t hurt that, just days before, she’d seen a photograph of her friend Lion Feuchtwanger interned at Camp des Milles—and just weeks after he’d been received by then French president Lebrun. Before our deputation left her office, she’d called her husband to assure him that if he refused to authorize our visas, German immigrant leaders, with the help of American friends, would rent a ship to bring them to Washington and cruise up and down the East Coast until the American people, out of shame and anger, forced him and Congress to permit them to land.”
Nanée waited, one of her few skills being an Evanston-bred ability to allow men permission to brag on themselves.
“I came because no one else would,” Varian said.
Dagobert tilted his head, studying Varian, then trotted over to him. To Nanée’s surprise, Varian set a hand gently on his head.
“I was in Berlin in July of 1935,” he said, “and happened upon an anti-Jewish riot, Nazis brutally kicking and spitting on a man lying helpless on a sidewalk, his head covered with blood. The police did nothing to stop it, and neither did I. I went home and wrote about it, a piece almost no one read.”
It was, she supposed, the same reason she had joined his effort—because she couldn’t live with herself if she didn’t help. He’d left a good job, a wife, a home, and friends to do it when no one else would. Perhaps there was a more interesting soul behind the Harvard tie, the I-don’t-believe-you-appreciate admonitions, and the unrelenting optimism than she’d given him credit for.
“Well, travel safely, Varian,” she said. “And do please bring back some soap.”
Wednesday, September 11, 1940
CAMP DES MILLES
Edouard lifted one of the last bricks from a pile near a guard tower and passed it on to Max, who passed it to the next person, who in turn passed it on again, the men nearly as uniform as the bricks now, with their shaved heads and their ragged clothes, their bony bodies, bony faces. The line stretched all the way across the courtyard to a growing pile of bricks by the factory door, the camp full again now that most of the men who’d nearly escaped on the ghost train were back. The good old days of Commander Goruchon and relaxed discipline were over. Theoretically, Les Milles was now the camp for internment of “foreigners of the Jewish race” who intended to emigrate, and who among them didn’t intend to leave France if only they had the chance? But the Vichy government had transferred the administration of the camp to the gardes mobiles, a particularly unforgiving branch of the French police.
Beyond the iron rails and the barbed wire, a woman walked by.
“Jumbo!” Max called out. “Your wife!”
Jumbo emerged from one of the latrines, already dropping his mop and looking toward the fence. His wife was no longer there; no passerby was allowed to stop to look in. Still, he ran full speed straight toward the wall she’d disappeared behind, and Edouard and Max gave him a boost up so he could peek over the top.
“Isabelle!”
Already, Jumbo was being pulled down by one of the guards.
Already, Edouard and Max were again moving bricks.
“Must be nice to have a French wife who comes once a week from Marseille just to walk by for a glimpse of you,” Max said, his own Leonora having sold their house in France and returned home to Spain.
Edouard rolled the bit of straw in his mouth, the most solid thing he had to chew to stave off hunger now that the toothpicks he’d made last for days each were gone. Next week he would have kitchen duty, an entire seven days of collecting potato peels from the floor at the end of the day, scraps he would try in vain to make last for the intervening weeks before he had kitchen duty again.
“At least we’re not on latrine duty today,” Max said. “This exercise is good for my sleep.”
“You sleep here?” Edouard joked, and they both laughed glumly.
“Me? No, I lie awake, trying to come up with distractions so I don’t think of the bromides they put in our food eroding my memory.”
As Edouard passed another brick to Max, he remembered waking in his bed in the cottage at Sanary-sur-Mer, soothed by the ocean as Luki slept in the room beside his. He still had no idea where she might be, whether she was living in hiding, or even if she was still in Paris. He’d had no word for three months. With the armistice, Germany had decreed there would be no mail between the free and occupied zones, leaving no way for Berthe to get word to him. Not that he could get there even if by some miracle he managed to gain release from Camp des Milles; even French citizens who were Jewish were forbidden to return to occupied France. The Nazis wanted free rein to seize their wealth for the Reich.
Edouard didn’t even know what had happened to the cottage. Had Vichy confiscated it? It was tucked so far away from the world that they might not even know it was there, or that it was empty. He wanted to claim it to protect his property, the only thing of value he might sell to raise funds for passage for Luki and him to some other country, but to inquire about it would be to invite attention, to ask to have it taken from him. The Vichy government was grabbing property left behind even by French citizens like the Rothschilds and Charles de Gaulle. And there would be no release from Camp des Milles for Edouard. The only way anyone walked out of this camp other than under armed guard now was if his paperwork to emigrate was in order, his passage paid, and his boat about to leave. And the only reason anyone’s papers were in order was because the Gestapo hadn’t yet organized the enforcement of Article 19 of the Franco-German armistice, the “surrender on demand” clause. No one was working for Edouard’s release, and this reprieve would not last.
“I’m going to work on that fresco tonight,” he said, trying to raise Max’s spirits the way Max so often did for him.
“If we’re still making art, we’re still alive,” Max said.
A guard called out, “Reverse!”
The men groaned, but they reversed the direction of the flow of bricks. In the high sun, Edouard set the one he’d just lifted from the pile back onto it, and accepted from Max the brick he’d just handed him, to be stacked right back where it had started.
EDOUARD PAINTED WITH Max that evening on a brick wall in the underground of the old tile factory. He ought to be capturing this all with his camera, the men at work and the art everywhere. Yet he couldn’t. It was getting worse, his distance from his art. At first, he was able still to look through the lens. He framed shots. Set the f-stop. Focused. He rationalized: he had limited film and no way to develop it, even the water here too foul for rinsing film.