A Jew Must Die (2 page)

In Payerne, in the Ischi brothers’ garage opposite the Town Hall and the cool, mysterious deer park, the youngest of the brothers, Fernand Ischi, has been a member of the Swiss National Movement for the past several years. In Georges Oltramare of Geneva, this Fernand had found a thundering leader of the extreme right, a great beguiler, crafty tactician, unscrupulous orator, provocateur and troublemaker. Oltramare has one obsessive design: the victory of Nazi Germany, and then the extermination of the Swiss Jews. In Geneva, Fernand Ischi, an unskilled helper in the family garage and occasional repairer of bicycles and motorcycles, a ne’er-do-well exiled from the town of his birth, has followed this Nazi kingpin
Georges Oltramare from meeting to meeting and has fallen under his spell.*

Oltramare singles him out, flatters him and puts him in touch with Pastor Philippe Lugrin. There follow numerous enthusiastic meetings between the perverted theologian and the apprentice Nazi Gauleiter.

“Gauleiter?” you say. “Isn’t that going a bit fast?”

From the age of sixteen, after leaving school, where he was an average student, inspired only by gym class, Fernand Ischi has been entranced by Germany, Hitler’s seizure of power, the rise of Nazism and its violence. In 1936, during the Berlin Olympics, he saw Leni Riefenstahl’s films in Geneva cinemas and developed a passion for the hard, clear propaganda ideal: the beauty of Aryan physiques, the banners, the nudity, the blond hair, the fanfares of Gothic trumpets, the blue eyes gazing up into the Führer’s ecstatic gaze... Fernand Ischi is a mass of yearning and solitude. The blinkered mentality of his native town. The rarity of his prey. A strong gymnast and enthusiastic bodybuilder, Ischi overtrains his muscles and tests his strength in increasingly demanding exercises. Of medium height - “but Adolf Hitler’s exactly”, as he
reminds anyone willing to listen - and already balding at the temples at thirty, but with a barrel-like chest, broad shoulders and biceps that bulge beneath his brown shirt, he makes quite an impression and, although married and the father of a boy and two girls, has developed a reputation as a Don Juan that makes up for his social failure. Involved for the time being in a close relationship with the female spy Catherine Joye, a member of the National Movement and an agitator, for whose activities and enthusiastic debauchery her husband Marcel Joye provides a cover, Fernand Ischi is the lover of a siren, the well-informed, efficient liaison operative from the Café Winkelried in Payerne, and certainly also of her young friend Annah, aged seventeen, whom he will soon bend abjectly to his fantasies. To the members of his party who are uneasy, and perhaps envious of these excesses, Fernand Ischi repeats with a superior smile Adolf Hitler’s saying: “There’s nothing finer than training up a young girl.”

Fernand Ischi, along with twenty or so inhabitants of Payerne, has sworn fealty to the Nazi Party. He is a braggart, full of himself, but sly, practical, well-informed, consumed by hatred, by a desire for revenge and for power. He detests
Jews, but also hates and despises the burghers of Payerne who have witnessed his poor performance in school and his subjection, in the garage, to his brothers’ authority. Since leaving school, while still very young, he has always carried a weapon, a Walther 7.65 that he flaunts to impress. To intimidate. To threaten. Once, in a club in the town where he goes drinking, Ischi shot at the bathing beauty on an advertisement for vermouth. He aimed at her breasts and vagina. Another evening, after one of Pastor Lugrin’s meetings, he gives a ride on the pillion of his motorcycle to Georges Ballotte, aged nineteen, the apprentice mechanic from the garage. The two accomplices, both armed, speed off towards La Provençale, the Bladt family’s house on the Corcelles road, where Fernand Ischi fires several shots at the windows and walls of the all too handsome residence. Getting up in haste, Jean Bladt tries to call the police: no answer; the station is empty. And the next morning, at daybreak: “It must have been the wind,” says the duty policeman. “Or a cat. An owl. Or a hallucination. That’s it. You must have been dreaming. It’s hard to see who could get any fun out of firing a pistol at your house at past two in the morning.”

With his frequent mistresses, Ischi does not disdain ritual games of domination. One relates that he whipped her, legs parted, with a Waffen SS belt. He poses, clicks his heels and makes the raised-arm salute over and over before the mirror. And he has his picture taken in Nazi uniform by Juriens the photographer.

“It’s hard to see...” said the policeman in charge of the station at daybreak. But yes, they see. They’d rather cut out their tongues, rupture eyes and ears, than admit they know what is being plotted in the garage. In the back rooms of certain cafés. In the woods. At Pastor Lugrin’s. The scheming, intriguing and networking by the German Legation in Berne providing inspiration and support for the Swiss Nazis, above all Oltramare in Geneva and Lugrin in the Vaud. And the activities of the SNM, the powerful, vindictive Swiss National Movement, the Payerne cell of which has been revived by Ischi, who rules it with the iron fist of a Gauleiter soon destined for power.

Following these exploits with the poster and the Bladt house, Fernand Ischi and Georges Ballotte, his apprentice, write anonymous threats and send them to Jewish
families around Lausanne and La Broye. Then, on Lugrin’s orders, they plan two attacks on the synagogues in Lausanne and Vevey. “We’ll send it sky-high, their tabernacle!” sneers the sinister pastor, smoothing his brow with both hands, his gesture of serene satisfaction. These attacks will never be carried out for lack of time and local accomplices. In Vevey, and Lausanne especially, the Jewish community is more substantial and better organized than in Payerne. Anyway, the anonymous letters, intimidations, telephone threats, plans to dynamite or set on fire, all these activities will be ordered and overseen by Pastor Lugrin, who will continue to provide the conspirators in Payerne with lists and maps.

To relax properly in peace from his responsibilities, Fernand Ischi very often awakens the young Annah in the middle of the night and terrorizes her, forcing her to act out sadistic scenarios.

“On your knees, Annah. Let’s pretend you’re a Jewess. On your knees, Annah. You’re a Jewess, Annah.”

“You’re completely crazy,” says Annah.

She is naked. Trembling, she obeys.

The belt whistles, biting into the girl’s back and thighs. Blood spurts. Kneeling by her, Ischi licks the blood that has flowed: “Your Jewess’s blood, Annah, a sow’s blood.”

Beyond closed frontiers, very far and very near, the
Panzerdivisionen
and Luftwaffe have obliterated every defence. Poland has fallen, as have Czechoslovakia, Hungary, Romania, Belgium; France is occupied; Italy is an ally; Japan has joined in the dance; now the Panzers, the black, indestructible Panzers, have been thrown against Stalin. Death to Judeo-Bolshevism! Total victory is only weeks away. A few months at most. By the end of this year, 1942, all Europe, and Russia, will be in Hitler’s grasp. Let his dominion begin. And let it be right here in Payerne that the first steps are taken towards Nazi rule in Switzerland, a dominion within his dominion, of which Gauleiter Ischi, with his party of brave men, will be the cleansing chief.

7 p.m., Monday 6 April 1942. The sun is setting in the sharp, buoyant, spring air. Ischi has taken his motorcycle and set out for the hills that dominate Payerne to the east. He stops in the hamlet of Trey. Now he is gazing
at the vast plain lit by scattered sunlight. What can he be thinking, Fernand Ischi, at this melancholy moment of spring, facing this expanse bathed in mist and the hills that rise and fall to the horizon at Surpierre, to the crests of the forests by Lucens? Is he moved to the depths of his spirit by the memory of his family, good people, loving people, on whom, by committing his hideous crime, he is about to inflict the greatest sorrow of their lives? So many friends have already turned their backs on him. His anguished wife has so often begged him to abandon his plan. And his children... their entire future. But at this word “future” Ischi feels a surge of energy; he baulks, gets a grip on himself and immediately reproaches himself with his moment of weakness. The future is the German victory. The future is the Northern Province with him as its Prefect, its unchallenged, efficient Gauleiter. The future is Adolf Hitler and the triumph of the New Order over a Europe rid of its vermin and united into a Great Reich. So what of these small hills, with these little evening vapours that soon dissolve from their outer edges? With a wave of his hand he dispels these old daydreams like the mists, gets
back on his motorcycle, a rugged hero, and pays a visit to young Annah, her buttocks striped by the lashes from a belt, in the one-room apartment on Rue des Granges lent him by the waitress in the Winkelried.

 

 

 

 

Note:

 

Subsequently, living abroad in occupied France from 1941 to 1944, Georges Oltramare became a newsreader and presenter on the Nazi-controlled Radio-Paris. He had a regular spot under the name Dieudonné.

In 1942 several Jewish families are living in Payerne, including the Bladts, the Gunzburgers, who sell cloth and work clothes, and the Fernand Blochs, who have brought their parents from Alsace to live with them. Mme Bloch has to suffer the sarcastic, threatening remarks of the official in the municipal offices whenever their residence permit has to be renewed. Very often the Bloch’s son is insulted and set upon on his way home from school. Stones are thrown at him; he is struck with tree branches. “Filthy Yid,” shout the boys, whose efforts their parents continue with jeers and blows. Terrified, young Bloch goes to earth at home and refuses to return to school.

Meanwhile Pastor Lugrin will convince Ischi and his Nazis to act. The time is ripe for the band to set an
example for Switzerland and for the Jewish parasites on its soil. So a really representative Jew must be chosen without delay, one highly guilty of filthy Jewishness, and disposed of in some spectacular manner. Threats and warnings. A good house-cleaning. Purification. A means to hasten the final solution.
Sieg heil!

Only the victim is lacking. One of the Yids in Payenne? Jean Bladt tops the list. Anyway, like all these parasites, his turn will come. And the sooner the better. Avenches? That would create less of a sensation than Payerne, where they must strike hard, for it is to be the seat of the new government.

In the end the heinous choice falls on the devout, well-to-do Arthur Bloch, a Jewish cattle-dealer from Berne, well known to the farmers and butchers throughout the area, making him an obvious and exemplary victim. The next livestock fair will take place in Payerne on Thursday 16 April. Arthur Bloch will attend. That is where they must act. That will be the day to set a resounding example.

The idea comes from the Marmier brothers and their farmhand, Fritz Joss. But who are the Marmier brothers? In the garage, a disreputable group has quickly formed
around Gauleiter Fernand, and among its members are two ruined small farmers, the brothers Max and Robert Marmier, and their burly farmhand Fritz Joss, a taciturn, strapping fellow from Berne, who blindly follows his masters. Fritz Joss is your perfect henchman, a hard, tireless worker. The Marmier brothers managed their farm poorly. A ferment of vengeance. They turned to carting, offering to convey provisions between farms, markets and the recently constructed barracks at the military airport, three miles outside town towards Grandcour. Business has improved somewhat over the past two or three years, but the Marmiers cannot get over the loss of their farms and fields. Still, they have bought a
rural,
a small farm building, in Payerne itself, on the old Rue-à-Thomas. As we shall see, these very modest premises will very soon take on a sordid significance in this story — a story infused with the poisonous breath of Pastor Philippe Lugrin, the evil genius of the Movement, who perpetually adds new names to the list of Jews to be terrorized, who regularly summons Fernand Ischi to his office in Prilly to dictate to him orders from the SNM, who, on three long evenings each week,
harangues and indoctrinates the Movement’s members and sympathizers in Payerne and around, and who acts as liaison with the German Legation.

On Saturday 4 April, he summons Fernand Ischi to Prilly. “The time has come,” Lugrin tells him. “We can’t wait any longer.
Heil Hitler!”

Elated, as he is on each of his visits to Prilly, Fernand Ischi looks at the wall with its Nazi trophies, decorations and large portrait of Hitler in his brown uniform, Iron Cross on his chest, wearing the Nazi armband. On the wall and on the bookshelves he can see the photos of Rosenberg, the theoretician of Nazism, Himmler, Albert Speer, Dr Josef Goebbels and the indomitable Riefenstahl. To beguile him, the pastor invites him to sit opposite him in his study shaded by a lime tree with fresh green leaves, offers him a packet of Laurens Reds, Ischi’s favourite cigarettes, and opens a bottle of Rhine wine, a gift from the German Legation. Lugrin approves the choice of Arthur Bloch. He smooths his forehead with the long, slim fingers of both hands, and smiles at Ischi, who is on edge. “Good plan,” he says flatteringly. “Clever strategy. In Payerne everyone knows Arthur Bloch. A
household name! And before long the town’s precious sacrificial victim!”

Fernand Ischi returns home from Prilly highly elated and brimming with pride. At last, the proof expected of him. A Jew, as an example. Recognition. Now there will be no mistake. Time for the Jewish community in Switzerland to realize what awaits it. And just at the right moment, you might say. On 16 April Arthur Bloch is disposed of. Adolf Hitler’s birthday falls on 20 April. They can be sure the German Legation will announce the glad news to the Führer that very day; he’ll remember the gift when the New Order, now so close at hand, arrives.

Arthur Bloch is sixty. Wide mouth, thick lips, round cheeks and a high forehead surmounted by a head of smooth hair, still black and shining, neatly parted on the left. Medium height, stoutish, always soberly dressed with a waistcoat and black tie, his suit jacket buttoned all the way. He has his clothes made by M. Isaac Bronstein, a tailor in the capital, so that he can have many inside pockets in his jackets and overcoats. Not liking to be burdened with an attaché case or briefcase, he always carries the large banknotes needed for his purchases tucked in his wallet. A watch chain bare of trinkets lies across his stomach.