‘I am Alex Maguy,’ Alex shouted.
‘We know who you are, Maguy. You’re a Jew.’
‘That’s right, I’m a Jew and you can go fuck yourself,’ he replied.
Somehow Alex managed to escape out the back of the club without being shot or arrested, but he knew he was on borrowed time now. After checking that he wasn’t being followed, he went back to Cannes and to the house of Madame Armande, who was hiding Chaya for him. He left enough money for his mother to be looked after for the next year, and then hurried away before he led the Nazis to his mother. He didn’t even try to hide himself, perhaps out of a sense of arrogance that he would always, ultimately, be protected. Instead, the next day he went to work as usual, and waited to see what would happen. He did not have to wait long. Within an hour, the Gestapo burst into his salon on Place Mérimée, arrested him and brought him to the Hotel Excelsior in Nice, Alois Brunner’s headquarters.
BY THE TIME Brunner arrived in France, he was only thirty years old but was already known for being especially efficient at deporting Jews. He had worked as Adolf Eichmann’s assistant and overseen the deportations in Austria, Berlin and Greece; in Austria alone he was personally responsible for the deportation of 47,000 Jews. By the time the war ended, he’d sent over 128,000 Jews to the death camps. From the moment he arrived in the south of France he terrorised the Jews, and the raids he ordered in Nice were, according to Klarsfeld, the most brutal that the Nazis carried out in the whole of western Europe.[8],[9] They largely took place at night: men, women and children, dragged out of their beds, shivering in their nightclothes, terrorised and arrested. Brunner renamed the Excelsior ‘camp de recensement des juifs arrêtés, dépendant du camp de Drancy’ (camp for arrested Jews going to Drancy). He ostensibly turned it into a prison where he dumped the Jews rounded up during the raids. He then tortured them, beat them, ordered them to give the names and addresses of their families under pain of death and then put them on a train to Drancy, the French concentration camp that had taken over from Pithiviers. Brunner himself would, in a few months’ time, be in charge of Drancy, and it is estimated that he sent 23,500 Jews to Auschwitz from there.
Alex was kept under arrest for four days, and he was beaten savagely and near continuously by the guards. When he asked why he was being singled out for so many beatings, one of the guards showed him the file they had on him. ‘It was thick like a block. The spies had done their work well. I had no illusions now. I knew I would be executed like Josek was,’ he wrote, referring to his cousin. But when Alex was pushed onto the train to Drancy on 24 September, he realised he would not have a fate like Josek’s; he would have one like Jacques’s.
The story Alex always told about how he survived the war was that he was arrested but he escaped from the train. ‘Escaped from the train’: I heard this so many times, and imagined it even more, that it became more than a story and more like a myth in my head. My brave great-uncle, bursting out of the train like a hero, running away from the big bad Nazis! But as I grew older I learned that fairy tales aren’t true and there were whispers in the family that maybe none of this had happened. Maybe he was never put on a train at all. Who knows? Only Alex, and no point asking him, you know what he’s like – you’ll never get a straight answer out of him. And anyway, how on earth can you prove that someone once jumped off a train?
It was easy to find the records from Drancy detailing who got off the trains from Nice in 1943, and Alex’s name wasn’t on any of them, which didn’t prove much. But to find out who actually got on the trains, I had to go to the archives in Nice itself.
Nice is still as picturesque as it was when Alex lived there – those elegant beachside boulevards, the palm trees swaying over outdoor cafés. I came to this beautiful seaside town to search through the dead. On the first day I found the work close to unbearable, especially when I saw row after row of the same name: whole families, from grandparents to eight-month-old babies, packed off on trains that led only to death. By the third day I felt my hide getting harder, casually flicking through list after list, getting almost annoyed with the names on the list who weren’t the name I wanted to see. What did I care about Gerhard Glahs? I was looking for Glass! Out of my way, Gerhard! And just as I was thinking proudly about what a tough-hearted researcher I’d become, I saw a name that undid all my efforts to stop personalising these lists: there, listed among the Poles who were put on the train to Drancy was ‘Glass, Alexandre, de 7 Place Mérimée Cannes, Juif’. Alex really had got on the train. And he hadn’t got off. Because he had escaped. Just as he’d always told us.
Alex was not the only person to have escaped from the train. When Klarsfeld was researching what happened to the French Jews he noted that there were some names who got on the train to Drancy but did not then appear on the passenger lists from Drancy to Auschwitz. Some had died. Some had been released from Drancy. But in the period of September 1943–December 1943, when Brunner was at the Excelsior and sending thousands of French Jews to the camp, there were ninety-three people who got on the train to Drancy that no one could account for. One of them was Alex.
On 24 September, Alex – by now bruised and almost broken from all the beatings – was dragged out of his cell in the Excelsior along with his cellmates and pushed by the guards towards the train station. A train was waiting for them there. But they could barely see it because their senses were so overwhelmed by the noise: the whole stat
ion was filled with the sound of men, women, children and babies screaming, crying and begging, and officers mercilessly shouting at them in French and German. The sound was so terrifying it could stop a man’s heart. But Alex marched towards the train the way a legionnaire always should, unbowed and unafraid. Alongside him was the cellmate he had become closest to during his imprisonment, a lanky Frenchman called Jacques Schwob Héricourt, and the two of them got into the same train carriage together, along with eighty other men.
‘Can we escape? They can’t treat us like sheep. We have to do something,’ Alex whispered to Héricourt. But neither of them could think of anything they could do.
As the train travelled north towards Drancy and night fell, Alex thought of Jacques. At this point he didn’t know exactly what had become of Jacques, but he had a strong suspicion, and after having worked so hard not to be like his older brother, were they to have the same fate after all? Had it all been for nothing? Passivity and defiance, both paths led to the same destination when chased by these persecutors. There were some demons you could not outrun. And just as Alex was thinking this, he noticed a patch of moonlight on the floor of the train and looked up to see where it was coming from. Up in the top corner of the back of the train there was a hole where two planks of wood had rotted away. He stared at it. He knew that Jacques would not have thought about the hole, and that was what had always broken his heart about his brother: so many times he had rejected chances, offers laid out to him on a plate, often by Alex. But he always said no. Once he’d been put on the train, Alex knew, Jacques would have stood there passively and accepted his fate. Well, he was not Jacques.
He tapped Héricourt on the arm and pointed up to the hole. Héricourt looked at it, then back down to his friend and nodded, understanding. While everyone else in the carriage stared, he picked up Alex, all five feet of him, and lifted him to the opening. The train was travelling fast, 90 kilometres an hour, but what difference did it make? Die trying to escape or die a passive prisoner – Alex knew which option he’d choose, every time. And so, while the whole carriage watched, Alex reached towards the small opening and punched it, making the hole a little larger. He could now fit through it, just. And then, with a helping push from Héricourt, he threw himself out of the moving train.
‘The shock was terrible. I landed with such force I thought at first it would kill me. And then I thought about the times I used to fall on my head out of our apartment in Chrzanow onto the rough pavement,’ Alex wrote.
He lay there on the side of the train track, his head bleeding, his ribs broken, barely able to breathe let alone move. He heard the train speed off without him, and even though he was in so much pain what he mainly felt was the extraordinary relief of no longer being a prisoner bound for Drancy. He was right to do so: almost everyone on that train, including Héricourt, would be killed in Auschwitz. But his relief turned to fear when he heard footsteps crunching towards him and he braced himself.
‘What are you doing here?’
Alex cleared the blood out of his eyes and saw a railway worker peering down at him.
‘I just jumped out of a train,’ Alex whispered.
The man nodded slowly, looking at him. ‘You’re in Saint-Rambert-d’Albon. Come with me, quickly. They’ll be looking for you.’
The railway worker, and his colleagues, were communists, and therefore very happy to help an escaped prisoner evade the Nazis. They took him back to their office and called a communist doctor to set his ribs and stitch up his forehead, which had torn so badly when he hit the ground that the skin flapped in front of his eyes like a veil. When the authorities came looking for Alex a few hours later, the railwaymen hid him in a large pile of manure, knowing that the Germans would be too vain about their uniforms to look for him there, and they were right. When it was safe, they brought him out of hiding, washed him and, when he was feeling up to it, taught him how to drive a train. Alex told them about how he and his cousins used to fake toothaches to take the train from Chrzanow to Trzebina, and they all laughed together. Then Alex thought more about his cousins and told his new friends his ribs hurt too much to laugh.
After a few days hiding in the railway station Alex got a message – how and from whom he never said – that he should go to Lyon where someone would meet him and take him to a safe place. The railway workers, who presumably thought he was meeting his Resistance network, gave him a lift to Lyon and wished him bon courage. One of them gave him his cap, small and battered and decorated with three stars. Alex kept it for the rest of his life.
At this point the story ends, at least as much as Alex ever told it, and the pages in the memoir ended here. Alex never talked about what he did after leaving Saint-Rambert-d’Albon, where he went, who helped him. He made vague references to ‘fighting in the Resistance’, and that was that. I had few hopes of finding any details but I contacted various Resistance enthusiasts in central France, the area between Nice and Drancy, and asked them if they knew of any stories about a Polish Jew who had escaped from a train being hidden in their area. One, Robert Picandet, wrote back:
I am one of the heads of the Resistance Museum in Saint-Gervais-d’Auvergne and here is some information I obtained from a former resident in Espinasse. He remembers Alex Glass very well. He lived at the home of Monsieur and Madame Aymard, who have both died, but their daughter, a Madame Gustave, remembers a sporty Israelite who lived with them and later went to Paris. She still lives in the village of Espinasse and is sure this Israelite was your uncle Alex. Perhaps you would like to talk to her?
One month later, I met Robert Picandet at the Musée de la Résistance in Saint-Gervais-d’Auvergne, the town near the village of Espinasse. It was a small museum, barely two rooms large, and full of memorabilia from the Maquis, a breakaway faction that was even more loosely organised than the Resistance. The Maquis was largely made up of French men and women who had gone underground to avoid Vichy’s ‘Service du Travail Obligatoire’, which required people to work in German factories. Some people in the Maquis were actively against the Germans, and some were simply hiding because they didn’t want to be conscripted off to Germany. Picandet explained that France was full of these renegades avoiding the French and German authorities, but the Auvergne was especially good for hiding because it was – and is still – so agricultural. This meant that there were lots of places to hide and, just as important, there was a special feeling of solidarity between the farmers and the resisters in the Auvergne. There had always been a cooperative tradition among the Auvergne peasants, and during the war they eagerly helped their undercover countrymen. Without the assistance of the agricultural workers, the resisters could not have survived: farmers and shopkeepers gave them food, local officials gave them false papers, the villagers would put them in touch with other resisters, the local gendarmerie gave them warnings if there was danger coming, and that danger usually came more from the Vichy police than the Germans.
Many Jews hid around the Auvergne, so Alex certainly wasn’t unusual in coming here, Picandet told us. Several of the people hidden in the area were sent by a Vichy official.
‘Who was that?’ I asked.
‘General Jean Perré,’ Picandet replied.
At last I had found out how Alex had got away, and why he never went into detail about who had helped him. It wasn’t the Resistance that saved his life, but someone in Vichy. Things aren’t always clear; they can be grey. But always a careful salesman, Alex knew that grey didn’t sell, so he burnished the story.