Auschwitz (21 page)

Once outside on the street in the melee of police and Jews her mother told the two eldest boys, ten and eleven years old, to run away, and they vanished in the crowd. (Both of them survived the war, hidden by other French families.) Then the police forced the others on to buses and took them to a temporary holding area at the Vélodrôme d'Hiver, an enclosed cycle stadium in the fifteenth arrondissement. All the families arrested over the two nights of the raid, including 4115 children out of a total of 12,884 people, were brought here. Just seven years old at the time, Michel Muller only remembers what followed in a strong series of “flash” memories.

Annette Muller became sick in the fetid conditions and was taken to the central area inside the cycle track to lie down.

After several days at the cycle stadium, the families were taken by train to camps in the French countryside—the Mullers to Beaune-la-Rolande. “It's a pretty village,” says Michel Muller.
¹³
“It was very beautiful and hot. There was a big alley of trees and we crossed part of the village and the people
looked at us—curious.” The Mullers were among the last to arrive at the hastily arranged camp and there were no beds for them to sleep on, so they lay as best they could on straw on the floor. Even so, Michel was not concerned: “At the beginning I wasn't worried. I wasn't worried because we were with our mother and that reassured me. And I'd play with my friends.” He only had one anxiety: “We were all good students and we were concerned—are we going to be in time to get back to school?”

Despite the conditions at the camp, the great consolation for both Annette and Michel remained that they were with their mother.

“Worried as she was at home,” says Annette, “we couldn't really speak to her any more. In the camp she became very available at first. She played with us, we hugged her—the other women looked at us and laughed to see her play with us in this physical way.” But one memory of those early days in the camp with her mother continues to haunt Annette:

Days later, their mother was able to bribe a
gendarme
(they only ever saw French officials in the camp) to post a letter to her husband—an action that later turned out to be the catalyst that saved the lives of her two youngest children.

After just a few days in the camp, the women were ordered to give up their valuables. But some women preferred to dispose of their most treasured possessions in a way that they hoped would prevent their captors profiting from them. “In the latrine was a trench,” says Michel Muller, “a trench with a sort of wooden plank above it, and everybody could see us when we went to the bathroom—it scared me. It was embarrassing to go to the bathroom when everybody could see us. And there were some [women] who actually threw their jewelry into the shit.” Later, Michel saw some of the locals, who
had been employed to come into the camp to frisk the Jewish women, searching in the latrine with a stick. “That really surprised me,” he says.

While the Mullers and thousands of other families suffered in camps such as Beaune-la-Rolande and Pithiviers, a still worse fate was being planned for them. Because the initial German request to the French had been for just adults capable of work to be deported, and the children had only been added as an afterthought to make up the numbers, arrangements had still not been formally agreed in Berlin to deport the families together. But, despite the fact that the French authorities knew there would almost certainly be only a few weeks' delay before such arrangements were finalized, they agreed to separate parents from their children and deport the adults first. Jean Leguay, the Vichy police official, wrote to the prefect of Orleans saying, “The children should not leave in the same convoys as their parents”; he added, “While awaiting their departure to rejoin their parents, they will be cared for.”
¹⁴
However, Leguay betrayed knowledge that the children would shortly be leaving themselves by stating that “the children's trains begin to depart in the second half of August.”
¹⁵
The French authorities thus made no attempt to avoid the appalling suffering that was to come by suggesting to the Germans that the deportations should be delayed a few weeks until the families could leave together.

Laval had previously stated that his suggestion that children should be included in the deportations was made out of a “humane” desire not to separate families. That statement, already reeking of the same hypocrisy that informed the Slovakian decision to ask that whole families be deported for “Christian” reasons, is now shown to be a blatant falsehood. Nothing could be less “humane” than the policy now outlined by Leguay—that children be snatched from their parents in the camps of Beaune-la-Rolande and Pithiviers. As the historian Serge Klarsfeld wrote: “Leguay closes his eyes to the real significance of the deportations, which he contributes to making even more atrocious. His principal preoccupation in his sunny office on the Rue de Monceau is to fill the deportation trains scheduled by the Gestapo.”
¹⁶

Rumors circulated at Beaune-la-Rolande in early August that the adults might be taken away. “I remember she [my mother] sewed money into the shoulder pads of my little suit,” says Michel Muller. “It was my little Sunday
suit, with a vest and some shorts—I think it was like golf shorts, and I was very proud of them. She sewed the money in and told me to be careful. The next day was the round-up.”

The French police entered the camp and gathered everyone together. Once they announced that children were to be separated from their parents, there was mayhem. “There were a lot of children who held on to their mothers,” recalls Michel. “They were really difficult moments—the children hung on to their mothers screaming and crying, and the
gendarmes
were overwhelmed.” Annette explains: “The police very violently beat the women back. The children were holding on to their clothing. They [the
gendarmes
] soaked people with water. They tore the women's clothes. And there was a lot of screaming, crying. It was a lot of noise, and then all of a sudden a big silence.” A machine gun had been placed in front of the women and children and the threat was clear. Annette recalls,

After their parents left, conditions in the camp for the children quickly deteriorated. Without their mothers to care for them they became filthy and their clothes were soiled. Because of the diet of weak soup and beans many suffered from diarrhea. But it was the emotional loss that was hardest to bear. “The most difficult thing was in the evenings,” remembers Michel Muller. “It was evening when normally Mother would tell us stories, and then when she was gone we had to do it alone.” Annette adds,

At the age of seven, Michel took on the role of protector of his sister. But he faced huge difficulties. Annette was sick and couldn't queue for soup, and the experiment of eating grass—Michel thought that grass might taste like green salad—was not a success. However, his biggest problem was that, at seven years old, he was younger and smaller than many of the boys who competed for food at mealtimes.

Michel realized that he had to change their situation dramatically if they were to survive—both he and his sister were growing weaker with each succeeding day. So when he saw a sign outside the camp infirmary he decided to act:

What marks this episode out as one of particular poignancy in a history that is full of atrocity is not so much the snatching of the children from their parents as the treatment of the children by the French authorities once they were left in their “care.” It was not only that the children suffered neglect—they
were badly fed and emotionally cast adrift; at this moment in their lives, when they were at their most vulnerable, they were humiliated as well. Despite the hunger, despite the filth, it was the casual humiliation he suffered at Beaune-la-Rolande that affected Michel Muller most.

Michel's appearance was so appalling that it shocked even his nine-year-old sister.

After a few days the
gendarmes
finally finished the job and shaved the sides of Michel's head too. They had enjoyed their fun, and Michel had endured emotional trauma that he remembers to this day.

By the middle of August 1942, arrangements had been put in hand to enable the French to deport these children and make up the numbers they had promised the Germans. The plan was to transfer the children from Beaune-la-Rolande and Pithiviers to Drancy detention and assembly camp in a northeastern suburb of Paris. From there the children would finally be sent to Auschwitz, among convoys of adults—they would thus travel to their deaths in the company of strangers.

On August 15, a forlorn column of children made their way back down the tree-lined streets of the pretty village of Beaune-la-Rolande to the railway
station. They looked very different from the relatively healthy boys and girls who had entered the camp with their mothers just over two weeks before. “I remember that the people of the village looked at us,” says Annette Muller.

Nonetheless the children sang as they walked to the station, because, as Annette says, “We were sure that we were on our way to see our parents.” But they were en route not to home but to Drancy, the conduit through which more than 65,000 people were eventually sent to the death camps in the East—more than 60,000 of them to Auschwitz.

Odette Daltroff-Baticle,
¹⁷
who was imprisoned in Drancy in August 1942, had volunteered along with two friends to take care of the children from Beaune-la-Rolande and Pithiviers: