Alex's Wake (30 page)

The River Tarn, which flows through Montauban, has long been the source of the worst flooding in all Europe, with the possible exception of the Danube. In March 1930, following a winter of high snows near the river's source in the Cevennes Mountains and exceptionally heavy spring rains at lower altitudes, the Tarn flowed deep and fast through Montauban, rising more than fifty-six feet above its normal level in just twenty-four hours. In what was subsequently termed a millennial flood, about a third of the surrounding
departement
was under water, thousands of houses were swept away, much of the low-lying regions of Montauban were destroyed, and more than three hundred people drowned.

Many of the town's inhabitants helped to save the victims of the flood, including Adolphe Poult and René Bousquet, each almost twenty-one years old. The two friends saved dozens of lives in nearly thirty-two hours of continuous exertion. Then, his judgment probably compromised by exhaustion, Adolphe misstepped, fell into the raging river, and was swept away. His body was never recovered.

For what were termed his
“belles actions,”
Bousquet became something of a national hero, awarded both a gold medal and the Legion of Honor. He also won the undying affection and loyalty of his friend's
father, Emile, who was devastated by the loss of his son and embraced young René as his surrogate heir.

Over the next ten years, Bousquet quickly rose from one high-profile position to the next, initially boosted by his celebrity and then well served by his unerring ability to cultivate mentors. Bousquet began as the protégé of Maurice Sarraut, a socialist senator and the publisher of an influential newspaper in nearby Toulouse. In April 1938, Sarraut became minister of the interior in the government of the Popular Front and appointed his protégé to the position of
sous-préfet
, or ministerial representative, for a city in northern France. In 1940, shortly after the armistice, Bousquet, at age thirty-one, was serving as prefect. But Sarraut had been swept out of power with the rest of the Third Republic. In order to remain in favor with his new superiors in Vichy, Bousquet knew that he would have to do something to catch their attention.

He saw his chance in the edict of October 4, which gave prefects the authority to intern or place under house arrest any foreign-born Jews within their jurisdiction. Bousquet did some research and found that in the nearby
departement
of Vosges, there were sixty German Jews living in a camp in Sionne. He quickly called his counterpart in Vosges and offered to take these “undesirables” off his hands. The other man agreed, leaving Bousquet with a nice cache of refugees but with no place to house them. Bousquet asked Émile Poult, now a powerful figure in the largely right-wing French business world, if he knew of a space sufficiently commodious to house sixty Jews for a few weeks. The older man offered his dear young friend the use of his factory in Montauban. The area within the factory gates where trucks were loaded with their daily shipments of cookies and cakes was large enough for sixty cots, with extra space for exercise. The high walls that surrounded the factory would make escape unlikely and its location was highly convenient: just a few hundred yards down the street from the Montauban railway station.

Thus, on October 13, 1940, Grandfather Alex and Uncle Helmut arrived at the Gare de Montauban-Ville-Bourbon on a train from the north. They and their fifty-eight fellow undesirables were quickly marched about two blocks down the Avenue de Mayenne, turned right,
and walked through the open gate of Biscuits Poult, which would serve as their address for the next four weeks.

I really have no idea how Alex and Helmut spent that month within the walls of the cookie factory. I like to think that they were allowed to walk around the lot several times a day, that they were fed generously, and that M. Poult begrudged them at least one wafer or tartelette from his vast inventory at each meal. I cannot imagine how they came to terms with being prisoners held behind secure walls after the comfort of their initial warm welcome in France. I know that on November 6, Marshal Pétain, on a tour of the Unoccupied Zone, made a stop in Montauban, where he gave a speech in the Place Nationale before a wildly cheering crowd. Perhaps Alex and Helmut could hear bits of the celebration from the open-air Poult courtyard. I know that two days later, on November 8, the prefect of the
departement
of Tarn-et-Garonne sent a memorandum to the chief of police of Montauban that stated, “Per our telephone conversation, I have the honor of requesting from you a patrol to accompany sixty foreign Jewish refugees to Camp Agde. Those individuals will assemble at noon in the custody of the municipal police at the Poult building. The train is due to depart for Agde at 3:30 p.m.” Indeed on the following day, November 9, 1940, two years to the day after
Kristallnacht
, under the watchful eyes of the police, Alex and Helmut walked back up the Avenue de Mayenne to the station and boarded a train heading south to the shores of the Mediterranean Sea, as their forced odyssey through France continued.

René Bousquet, whose friendship with Emile Poult brought my relatives to Montauban, continued his rapid rise through the ranks of the Vichy regime. Less than two years later, he was made secretary-general of the national police. In that capacity, he planned and carried out the infamous roundup of more than thirteen thousand Jews on July 16 and 17, 1942. His victims were first held for five days at an enclosed bicycle track in Paris—the
Vélodrome d'Hiver
, or Winter Velodrome—and then shipped to various extermination camps. After the war, Bousquet was tried on charges of “compromising the interests of the national defense” and received a sentence of five years of
dégradation nationale
, or a ceremonial loss of rank. But that judgment was
immediately lifted because Bousquet made a convincing case that, while appearing to collaborate with the Nazis, he had been secretly assisting the Resistance all along. After lying low for a while, Bousquet returned to politics and helped finance François Mitterrand's successful campaign for president in 1981. Then, in the late 1980s, the Romanian-born Nazi hunter Serge Klarsfeld filed a complaint against Bousquet for crimes against humanity. After many delays a trial date was set, but before Bousquet ever saw the inside of a courtroom, he was assassinated in his own home on June 8, 1993. The gunman was reportedly a right-wing sympathizer who did not want the full story of René Bousquet to be revealed.

Bousquet's imprisonment of the Jews at the Velodrome in Paris in July 1942 was one of the shameful preludes to the mass deportations that began the following month when the Vichy government approved transports that delivered the Jews of France to the killing centers of Germany and Poland. In late August 1942, the spiritual descendant of the bishop of Montauban, the gentle man who welcomed the Osage and helped them return to their homeland in 1830, raised his voice in protest. Pierre-Marie Théas, bishop of Montauban since 1940, wrote a pastoral letter condemning the deportations, declaring, “I give voice to the outraged protest of Christian conscience and I proclaim that all men and women, whatever their race or religion, have the right to be respected. Hence, the recent antisemitic measures are an affront to human dignity and a violation of the most sacred rights of the individual and the family.” He planned to mail his letter to his fellow priests in the surrounding parishes so that they could help amplify his protest.

But his secretary, Marie-Rose Gineste, warned the bishop that if he put his remarks in the mail, agents of the Vichy government would no doubt intercept the envelopes and destroy their contents. So she made multiple copies of his letter, which also implored parishioners to save Jews from deportation, mounted her bicycle, and over the next four days pedaled more than sixty-five miles over hilly roads through towns, villages, and hamlets to each parish in the surrounding region. On the following Sunday, August 30, Bishop Théas's letter was read from every pulpit to packed congregations, the only exception being a church with
a Vichy sympathizer as its priest. In response to the call, many French families began to shelter Jews in their homes.

Bishop Théas was arrested by the Gestapo in 1944, and sent to the concentration camp known as Stalag 122, which was located near the forest of Compiègne, the site of the French surrender. He survived the ordeal and died of natural causes in 1977 at the age of eighty-two. Marie-Rose Gineste took an active role in the Resistance, hiding Jews, forging identity cards, and leading many Jews to safe houses in the surrounding countryside. She remained in Montauban and continued to ride her sturdy little bicycle until she was eighty-nine years old. Then, in December 2000, she donated the bicycle to the Holocaust memorial at Yad Vashem in Israel. She died in the summer of 2010, aged ninety-nine.

For their efforts on behalf of humanity, Bishop Pierre-Marie Théas and Marie-Rose Gineste were both named by Yad Vashem as “Righteous Among the Nations.”

T
HURSDAY
, M
AY
26, 2011. I learn all this during two rich, full days under the hot southern sun of Montauban, in the bracing company of Jean-Claude and Monique. Wednesday begins with a tour of the town. Jean-Claude points out local landmarks. We see the bullet holes that remain in the stone walls of the church of St. Jacques, where the outnumbered Occitan irregulars were defeated in 1621. There are the slightly raised cobblestones in the Place Nationale where tumbrels paused so that townspeople might jeer and hurl vegetables at the condemned victims of the Revolution on their way to the guillotine. Next is a little stone plaque on Rue Adolphe Poult, almost invisible on an embankment by the River Tarn, heralding the bravery of the young man during the great flood of 1930. Jean-Claude also takes us to the
Place des Martyrs
, where the four members of the Resistance were hanged in 1944. The public square still contains the withered stump of one of the four trees.

We visit the Musée de la Résistance et de la Déportation, which displays posters from the Pétain era illustrating the dangers of the international Jewish conspiracy that the National Revolution was determined to defeat. In one poster, taken from an exhibition called
Le Juif et la
France
, a bearded man with an enormous nose, his eyes popping and beads of lascivious sweat breaking out on his forehead, fondles with clawlike fingers a globe of the world. In another, a righteous French policeman holds two wriggling, shifty-eyed men by the scruffs of their necks. They, too, sport oversized noses and are both clutching bags that are presumably filled with ill-gotten money. The poster is captioned with a single word:
Assez!
or Enough! When I ask Jean-Claude if he recalls seeing this sort of ugly propaganda in his youth, he sighs and says, “Everywhere.”

Our next stop is the Montauban city archives. There, in the police files from 1940, we find the index cards that helped me trace the movements of Grandfather Alex and Uncle Helmut. Both cards feature a red letter
J
in the upper-left corner, along with the assurance that the local prefect examined the cards on October 25. The cards note their arrival in Montauban on October 13 and their departure for Agde on November 9. They list Helmut's profession as student and Alex's as salesman and poultry farmer, revealing that my grandfather must have retained pleasant memories from his brief months in Martigny-les-Bains. Both cards indicate that Alex and Helmut's address while in Montauban was the “Cantonnement Poult,” or the temporary quarters provided by the proprietor of the cookie factory.

Again, I experience that curious mix of excitement and sorrow that always seems to accompany any tactile evidence of my relatives' existence. I cherish them because I possess so few items that speak to their once having lived, breathed, and walked this earth. Yet virtually everything I discover along this journey is another strand of the net that slowly but inexorably closed around them during their time in France. I hold the cards close and, when no one is looking, kiss them quickly, one after the other.

Our final destination for the day is another public square in Montauban, this one dedicated to the memory of the French soldiers who fought in the wars of the twentieth century. There are separate monuments for each of the world wars, for Algeria, and for Vietnam. The square is dominated by a twenty-two-foot statue called
Hope Chained
, a monument dedicated to the thousands of people deported to their
deaths in Eastern Europe during the 1940s. I am humbled and honored to learn that Jean-Claude has organized a small memorial service in memory of Alex and Helmut.

From the files of the central police station of Montauban in 1940, the identity cards of Alex and Helmut. The father is listed as a salesman and a poultry farmer, the son as a student. Probably more important to the authorities, though, was the defining “J.”