A Paler Shade of Red: Memoirs of a Radical. W. E. Gutman
The infamous ordeal, better known as waterboarding, would be resurrected in American torture chambers.
“Waterboarding induces panic and suffering by forcing a person to inhale water into the sinuses, pharynx, larynx, and trachea. The head is tilted back and water is poured into the upturned mouth or nose. Eventually the subject cannot exhale more air or cough out more water, the lungs are collapsed, and the sinuses and trachea are filled with water. The subject is drowned from the inside, filling with water from the head down. The chest and lungs are kept higher than the head so that coughing draws water up and into the lungs while avoiding total suffocation. His sufferings must be that of a man who is drowning, but cannot drown.”
Thanks to Masuy’s intelligence the Germans were able to confiscate 54 radio transmitters and over 20 tons of weapons. Informers also helped destroy at least seven French insurgency networks, many of them, to the delight of Marshal Phillipe Pétain, Freemasons. “A Jew is not responsible for his birth,” Pétain had declared, “a Freemason is: he makes a conscious choice.” The seizures and arrests dealt a severe blow to France and the Allies.
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Masuy was dubbed “the most implacable foe of the Résistance” but it was Lafont’s band of killers that spread terror. Described by the post-war French press as a “picturesque gangster,” Lafont had escaped from prison with a number of German agents and petty criminals recruited by the Abwehr during their incarceration. At his request, the Germans released twenty-two former inmates from Fresnes Prison, outside Paris. Now headquartered on fashionable rue Lauriston, and sporting the silver braiding of an SS captain, Lafont specialized in kidnappings, torture and, when necessary, murder.
Lafont’s crew was credited with the disabling of an important French underground network and, later, with the arrest of Geneviève De Gaulle, niece of the French general. A fellow student had betrayed her for 100,000 Francs.
Accompanied by his most trusted disciples, among them the noted soccer player, Villaplane, and backed by a detail of Algerian killers-for-hire, Lafont also took part in daring raids against the Maquis. Named after the expanses of dense underbrush where its members took cover, the network of French saboteurs (maquisards) eventually recruited my father as a field physician.
Shortly after the liberation of Paris in 1945, Lafont was handed to the police by his trusted colleague, Joanovici. Joanovici, plea-bargained his way to freedom and lived to enjoy -- temporarily -- the fruits of his rackets.
Many of the “fanatic imbeciles” who had bloodied their hands during the German occupation were lined up against a wall and shot for having followed orders. Henri Lafont was executed for issuing them. He refused to be blindfolded. He is said to have ordered the firing squad to “let the sun shine upon my face until the end. Please aim well. Deal me death if you must but make it swift and painless.”
“Even scoundrels can die like heroes,” a witness remarked.
Men can negotiate everything but their past.
KABBALAH AND BOILED POTATOES
Nothing turns common folk into polyglots like war, annexation, colonization, deportation, expatriation. Born in the northern Transylvanian town of Sighet, a province claimed and reclaimed as shifting fortunes redrew Austro-Hungary’s map, my father had mastered Romanian and Hungarian by the age of six -- not counting Yiddish, spoken at home since birth. He also spoke Hebrew, practiced daily in heder and during prayers, and German, taught in public school and widely spoken by an elite minority who deemed the other local idioms to be lacking in refinement.
A gift for languages is the tribute vanquished people pay.
Though he later conquered French and English, it was Yiddish, with its rich blend of Hebrew and medieval German, its earthy sonority, inflections and colorful imagery with which he felt most at ease.
“Yiddish is the language of folk tales told and retold by my father. In it I hear the gentle lullabies sung by my mother as she rocked the children to sleep, the heated arguments, shrewd observations, snappy repartees, the sardonic asides and words of love murmured with such tenderness and grace as to melt every trace of rancor, dry every tear.”
Yiddish has a sound, an aroma, a taste, a feel like no other language. It’s a tongue full of familiar tunes. Every note in its inexhaustible register is a melody. Now spoken by fewer and fewer Jews, Yiddish has a taste for nimble blasphemy:
May your wish come true when you can no longer enjoy it.
Or for bitter reproof:
When one must at all cost sully something, one can sully even God.
If nostalgia tinted many of my father’s memories, he was careful not to wax rhapsodic about his childhood. His father -- my grandfather -- was seldom gainfully employed.
“He had no real trade. He kept a small candle-making business but he was too proud to work. He spent much of his time at the synagogue or immersed in his precious books -- the Torah, the Talmud, the Kabbalah -- or strolling up and down Sighet’s main artery, deep in thought and attired in fine three-piece suits bought on credit and rarely fully paid for. He also kept my mother endlessly pregnant. We were nine in a three-room house -- two adults and seven young hungry mouths to feed, seven growing bodies to clothe, seven pairs of feet constantly in need of shoes, ribbons and petticoats and combs for the girls -- Helen, Malku, Lilli -- new knickers and frocks and prayer shawls for the boys -- Yosi, Leibi, Favish and me.
“We ate lots of potatoes; potato soup for breakfast, potato pancakes, salted or daubed with thin layers of homemade plum preserves at lunch, and we often dined on boiled potatoes, sautéed onions dressed in melted chicken fat and moldy crusts of black bread. Meat was a rare and welcome treat. I don’t remember ever feeling full at the end of a meal. It was a miserable existence.”
Lost in inscrutable mystical abstractions, sustained by rigid Orthodox discipline and endless devotions, my father's father seemed indifferent to his family's plight. My grandmother withstood multiple pregnancies, penury and privations with a stoicism and self-effacement that often made my father weep with anger.
“How can you take it, mama,” he asked, grabbing her by the shoulders and shaking her.
“Shh, it’s alright, son, that’s life, you know. We must accept our lot. We’re in God’s hands. But things will be better, you’ll see,” she’d whisper. “Study hard and maybe you can leave all this behind one day.”
It was shortly after his Bar Mitzvah that my father, in a fit of youthful rebellion, cut off his peyot, the curly ear locks that had adorned his temples since childhood, repudiated his mother’s fatalism, rejected predestination, renounced God and began to defy the nearly insurmountable obstacles of youth, indigence and anti-Semitism. It was also at that time that he decided to become a doctor, “to treat humankind’s tangible afflictions and to snatch my family from the clutches of poverty.” My father would later claim that it was not at all a question of indebtedness -- “Children don’t really owe their parents anything, they don’t ask to be born” -- but a rage against life’s Sisyphean absurdity and an acute sensitivity toward the suffering of others. Engaged and combative, incorruptible and iron-willed, he would spend the rest of his life fighting intolerance, denouncing hypocrisy, speaking for the voiceless and defending the weak. These contests would keep him in a perpetual state of frustration. He understood the futility of his principles and often voiced bitter disappointment at the shortcomings of those in whom he had placed his trust. When he died in 1987 at the age of 83, widowed for over fourteen years, he’d become a misanthropic recluse.
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One day, on his way home from an errand, my father saw a high school senior set upon a small boy, pinning him against the ground, beating him about the face and pulling at his ear locks with such force that the boy shrieked in pain. Taking pleasure in the pain he caused, the bigger boy pulled harder, battering