A Paler Shade of Red: Memoirs of a Radical. W. E. Gutman
officer of the Third Reich -- on our way to rescue a Résistant from the clutches of the collaborationist French police. Farfetched. Preposterous. Yet here we were, my mother and I, being waved through one heavily guarded checkpoint after another as we sped toward Fresnes, France’s second largest prison located about ten kilometers northeast of Paris. This would not be the last implausible episode in a string of chance events that brought us ever closer to catastrophe. An even more bizarre odyssey awaited us about two years later when we crossed warn-torn Europe by train under Red Cross escort.
*
We arrive at Fresnes. A guard lifts the heavy wood barrier. Lafont gets off and disappears into the sentry box. Impeccably attired in his finely tailored uniform and shiny black leather boots, he oozes confidence and authority. He can be heard placing a call to the office inside the compound.
“This is Capitaine Lafont. Dr. Gutman was picked up yesterday. Yes, 2, rue du Pont Neuf. Release him.”
There is a brief pause.
“Don’t argue I tell you. I have the papers. Let him go. We’re waiting. We’re at the gate. Hurry up.”
Escorted by two guards, a human figure emerges from a building at the far end of a gloomy courtyard and heads our way. We get out of the car.
“Where’s papa,” I ask.
“Look,” Lafont replies, smiling. “That’s him right there. He points at the human figure with a gloved finger.
I look but all I see is a shadow of a man, disheveled and haggard, his clothes in disarray, his lips cut open and bleeding, his eyes nearly shut, limping toward us. My mother runs toward him.
“Ari, Ari, what have they done.”
Incredulous, bewildered, uncomprehending, my father spreads his arms and weeps. We rush to embrace him. He kisses my mother then drops to his knees and hugs me. He has received a horrific beating, his face is swollen, two front teeth are missing, but it’s him, my beloved father, my papa.
“Docteur,” says Lafont, “you’re free. Let’s go. You must leave Paris right away. There’s no time to waste.”
“I appreciate what you’re doing, Henri, but two other men were picked up yesterday by the Brigades. They’re being shipped to the east tonight. Arrange their release and I’ll leave.”
Lafont is livid. “You can’t be serious.”
My mother tugs at my father’s sleeve. “Ari, don’t....”
“Henri, I rode with these men in the paddy wagon. I don’t know who they are but I know and feel their faces. They look just like me. See what bare fists and a mean heart can do. After the beatings we were all thrown into the same cell. We cried. We cursed. We threw up. We pissed in long fitful spasms from the blows to our kidneys and bladders. Tears and blood and vomit and urine coalesced on the bare floor in one ugly, agonized mass of mortal matter. Look at me, Henri. I am them and they are me. But by some providence, I’m here, alive and offered freedom -- as you were when I treated you, remember? They’re still locked up, wallowing in slime, desperate, overcome with fear and about to take their last journey, in a cattle car, to one of the Fuhrer’s slaughterhouses. I beg you. Two lives, two miserable souls. Surely, they can’t amount to very much in the scheme of things. Why not let them live? Free them Henri. You can do it.”
“Gutman, you’re crazy. I know I owe you my life but what you’re asking is insane. They’ll have my neck. And they’ll have yours too if you don’t get the fuck out of here.”
“Henri, you owe me nothing. It’s what you owe yourself. Do you think this horror will last forever? What will happen to you when this is over?”
Lafont pushes back the visor of his cap and wipes his brow.
“What do you mean? I’m now up to my neck. What more do you want?”
People never ask for advice without hoping for moral support.
My father had learned early in life that while fresh, hope is full of promise. He could let it wilt. He gently grabs Lafont by the shoulders and draws him close, close enough to smell fear on his breath.
“Do it, Henri. Life is short but memories linger. The war will end one day. Be practical if you can’t be noble. Buy yourself some ‘soul’ insurance. Perhaps history will take note of your magnanimity.”
He who walks backwards risks tripping on his future.
*
So Lafont pulled it off. He ordered the two men released in his custody on some pretext. My father asked that they be taken back to Paris but Lafont refused. Instead, he let them loose in the Enghien forest. He would claim they’d contrived to break free.
“Then?”
“Then he drove us back home, pressed us to pack and ‘decamp.’ He gave us a laissez-passer to Lyon. We never saw him again.”
*
Lafont had told my father:
“You drive a hard bargain, Gutman.”
“Yes, but you were man enough not to dicker in the end. I don’t know how this will all pan out but maybe posterity will concede that a sin does not a sinner make if he has shown some decency along the way.”
Lafont said nothing. He shook his head, shrugged, smiled pensively and drove away.
Posterity concedes nothing that contradicts the useful or the opportune.
Lafont found it useful and opportune, as many Frenchmen did, to embrace the enemy, to merrily goose-step to its Teutonic leitmotif. It was useful and opportune for the French -- some of whom had danced with him cheek-to-cheek -- to execute Lafont at war’s end as it was for Hitler’s Germany to massacre millions in its lunatic drive toward world domination.
It would be useful and opportune for the evil that men do to be interred with their bones. But evil, like matter, cannot be destroyed. It is reborn, its face transformed, its essence unchanged and immutable.
Some people find all sorts of excuses to avoid doing the right thing. It’s as if they’re ashamed to be clean.
IN THE MAQUIS
We arrived in Lyon in the evening, worn out and destitute, save for a few clothes hastily bundled in two small cardboard suitcases, my father’s medical satchel, and trinkets my parents hoped to sell for much needed cash along the way.
Abandoning the apartment on Rue du Pont Neuf was especially hard on my mother. She’d grown fond of it, felt at home. She’d described it as “cheerful and charming, a nest with windows on the most beautiful city in the world.” I have only a dim recollection of the place.
My father, who had viewed the war as an unsustainable aberration, thought that “revulsion and sheer exhaustion” would soon wear the antagonists down, bring them to their senses and put an end to the madness.
“No sane man can possibly countenance war. No sane man wants to die,” he argued. “Surely, when a man finds himself in the thick of battle, when the trenches fill with blood and the air resonates with the screams of the wounded and the dying, it will become apparent that he was put there by other men who will never shed a drop of their own blood, never lose their lives for the causes they espouse.”
He reconciled the incongruity of his own involvement in the war by viewing his role in the Résistance as a means of hastening the enemy’s demise. What he’d wanted most was to resume his medical practice, to heal, to alleviate suffering. His friends’ assassination, the unraveling of his underground network, his own arrest, the vicious beating he’d endured, and his narrow escape from certain death in some camp in Germany, Poland or the Ukraine, tempered his optimism, shook his faith in happy endings and altered his concept of sanity.
*
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