Stella and I quickly found ourselves acting like boyfriend and girlfriend. We never discussed it or announced it to anyone, but we were an item. Hell, the fifty men I shared sleeping quarters knew she was “my Stella.” How could we not become involved? It was inevitable. In each other’s arms, we forgot for a few sweet moments the gravity of our predicament and dreamt of fairytales futures.
As the weeks went by Stella and I made more time to sneak off into a staircase or the corner of a comatose patient’s cell to kiss and caress. As long as we performed our duties nobody paid attention to us. I loved the way she felt, smelled, and tasted. She liked that I had some experience. I didn’t tell her that it had been a thirty-six-year-old woman who had initiated me at fourteen. The wine they gave us with our meals was spiked with saltpeter because sex between “undesirables” was verboten, but it hardly had any effect on the two of us. Stella could be pretty bashful, though. One time I knelt, raised her dress, and began kissing her thighs. Realizing my intentions, she became embarrassed because she hadn’t washed yet, but I didn’t care. Afterwards, she wanted to try on me, but I finished before she could start. Tears welled in her eyes. She thought she had done something wrong. Holding her hand, I reassured her that that wasn’t the case at all. I brushed my thumb over a pyramid-shaped scar above the knuckle of her left index finger.
“A parrot, a big Macaw, bit me when I was in kindergarten. I thought he was going to bite off my whole hand. Oh, I cried. And I hit that bird so hard that I stunned him. I thought I killed him,” she giggled.
One day I came out of my castle and found Mr. Binda standing in the courtyard. I had been avoiding him and his wife so I wouldn’t have to answer any questions about my relationship with their daughter. He grabbed me by the arm. “Let’s go for a stroll.”
We walked in silence and I began to sweat. Had Stella let something slip about our relationship? “I want to thank you for being such a good friend of Stella’s. It’s been traumatic for her.”
“I know. I wish I had met her, all of you, under other circumstances.”
We came to the gate. A jovial group of gendarmes were standing there.
“Those dirty sons of bitches. Don’t they have any shame? I would rather die than be in their boots,” I said.
“Don’t judge them too harshly. They’re professional soldiers trained to take orders from whoever’s in charge. Believe me, some of them are working hand in hand with the resistance.”
“Yes, I know one in Nice who notified our network and some Jewish families on impending raids.”
“I may know him, too.”
“One of the gendarmes told me that he would close his eyes if I slipped through the wire on his shift.”
Mr. Binda shook his head. “You can’t chance it. He may be a rotten egg hunting for a promotion.”
“That’s why I’m still here. There’s no sure way to candle the good eggs from the bad ones.”
On Christmas Eve, I had emptied my first two pails when a red armband approached me.
“Wash your hands and come with me.”
“Why? Where to?” I asked.
“To the administration building, but don’t ask me why.”
My stomach instantly knotted up. Being escorted to the Nazis’ offices meant only one thing—trouble. A gendarme escorted us out the gate and to a high-rise building across the street. We went down a hallway on the first floor and stopped at a door where a large cardboard box was sitting. After knocking, my two companions entered the office. As I stepped into the doorway an SS officer sitting at one of three desks barked in French.
“Stay there! You’re contaminated.”
Looking over papers at another desk was that Austrian Gestapo officer wearing the same black leather coat. His black hat was hanging on a coat rack. Now I knew I was in trouble. The question was who squealed on me and for what? Oddly, the Austrian looked up at me puzzled.
“Warum ist dieser gute Lügener noch hier?” (Why is this good liar still here?) he asked the officer.
“He’s our orderly in the ward. You know him, Herr Brunner?”[1]
The officer asked.
Again the Germans arrogantly assumed I couldn’t speak their mother tongue.
“He’s an accomplished liar.” He stared directly at me. “Someone sure did a lousy job burying a box of jewelry and gold watches in the basement of that house.”
I kept a blank look on my face. Obviously he hadn’t found Claude or the message in my pump, but he had kept his promise and returned to our house. After hearing that the Nazis were emptying every safe and bank in Nice, I took it upon myself to bury my mother’s best jewelry along with my father’s gold watches in the dirt floor of our basement.
The Austrian went back to his paperwork.
“Ship him out when the crisis is over.”
“I was going to send him to Compiègne. The kid is a political. He’s not circumcised,” the officer replied.
“No. Put him on a transport to Ausch… Germany.”
The officer nodded, then turned to me.
“Take that box of supplies to the infirmary.”
What a Christmas present, I thought as I walked back, a train ticket to a German prison. If only I could figure out a way to infect the incoming prisoners with the fever, then Stella and I could work in the infirmary until the end of the war.
Finally the dreaded moment came. All the scarlet fever patients were either cured or dead. The quarantine ward was empty and our deportation date was set. The honeymoon was over.
“Don’t drink the wine anymore,” Stella instructed.
“Why?”
“I want to do it like it’s supposed to be. I want to be a real woman.”
I wanted Stella so much, but had never attempted to make love to her and had never brought up the subject because of my fear of losing control, as I did on the staircase. Pregnancy could be a disaster for a female prisoner. There had been two sisters in the camp and one of them had been pregnant. The other wanted to tell the Germans about her sister’s condition, believing it would prevent her from being deported. A red armband quickly straightened her out.
“How can you be so naive? She won’t be able to work and she’s creating another mouth for them to feed. She will be the first on the train.”
So I kept drinking the awful-tasting wine. But Stella became impatient, nearly frantic. There was an urgency in her eyes that puzzled me. I mulled over the possibility that she had had a premo-nition, but something stopped me from asking.
At the first opportunity, I snuck into the camp’s administration office and stole the key to the storeroom. Late the next afternoon, after I had finished my shift, Stella led me down the hall. I turned on the light. We stretched out on a pile of coats among the stacks of suitcases and quickly pulled down our clothes.
“Make love to me.”
She was biting her lip and her face was flushed with anticipation. I kissed her as I slid on top of her. I felt a resistance. She whimpered. I couldn’t believe that as I entered her my mind drifted.
When would we be able to do this again? Where were they shipping us? Would we stay together? How could I face her parents?
Stella started moaning softly. We had to keep quiet. I muffled her mouth with my hand, and suddenly she sounded like Kiki, my pet guinea pig. Stella held me tight, her fingernails digging into my back. She let out a subdued groan, trembled, then relaxed. I pulled out just in time.
Her eyes closed, Stella smiled. “Now I won’t die a virgin.”
Stunned, I blurted, “Don’t be silly. You’re going to live a long life.”
1
SS Captain Alois Brunner was the Commandant of Drancy from June 1943 until August 1944. When the Germans took over the Italian zone of France, he was sent to Nice to oversee the roundup of Jews. Brunner was responsible for deporting 24,000 people from Drancy to the extermination camps.