“Money,” the guard repeated.
Edouard handed his money to the man, who turned to searching his suitcase with no attempt at thoroughness.
“I can’t stay here,” Edouard insisted. “Luki is in Paris with a friend who—”
“You are number one hundred and thirty-two. Next!”
“But you don’t understand. I—”
He sensed, then saw in his peripheral vision, a well-armed guard, gun drawn.
He was not a prisoner. He could not be a prisoner. He was no danger to France. This was all a mistake.
He gathered his things and followed the line into the factory building, stopping to let his eyes adjust to the dim light, dust already lining his throat and burning his eyes. He crossed a floor so thick with brick dust that it was lumpy. At the back wall, dark wooden stairs led into the bowels of the abandoned factory.
THE CAMP WAS full of others Edouard knew by reputation or more—artists and intellectuals from Germany who’d settled in Sanary-sur-Mer and Arles and elsewhere in Provence. It had been Max Ernst at the easel in the courtyard, painting with supplies brought to him by his artist-mistress. Fellow photographer Hans Bellmer was here. Nobel Prize winner Otto Meyerhof. Lion Feuchtwanger, who must have been taken into custody in Sanary-sur-Mer while Edouard was too busy packing to join friends at the café. Along the whole long length of the hallway where the kilns had once fired tiles, hundreds of men tried to create art of one sort or another.
“Work staves off hunger and anger in equal parts,” Hans Bellmer said.
Max Ernst added, “Lest we become brick debris ourselves.”
The two were working together on an odd mural: two women hunched over two dead men, with one of the men’s arms hanging out of a painted frame to grip the ankle of a surreal giant skeleton that was all pelvic bone and legs trying to escape to a high-heeled boot twice the size of the rest of the painting. Maybe art was a mirror held up to reality or maybe it was a hammer with which to shape it, Edouard wasn’t sure. He thought art might serve any purpose, and at its best it did reveal the truth of our own individual hearts. But he wished in this moment to wrap his fingers around the grip of any hammer, artistic or not, and swing it in every direction, not to shape this reality but to smash it to bits.
If others felt this anger, though, they didn’t show it. In a nearby cavern, actors rehearsed plays and even opera, while around them writers scribbled in journals, tiny print to preserve their paper. Poets. Playwrights. Translators. There were sculptors and architects here too. Film directors. Conductors. Songwriters and composers. Pianists and singers and musicians of every kind. University professors offered classes and lectures. Comedians shared jokes, although now everyone was a comedian, much of the art they created ironic. Art and intellect and humor—they washed away boredom, maintained morale, and allowed, somehow, a modicum of dignity. Only a few here weren’t creating art of one sort or another, and even they sat easily on piles of bricks, absorbed in games of chess played with pieces carved from spare bits of wood on boards scratched into the floor, or stood in heated discussion in a kiln that bore a DIE KATAKOMBE sign, a nod to the Berlin cabaret that had been a hotbed of political thought until Joseph Goebbels shut it down.
That night, after Max and Hans set down their paints, everyone put on their best clothes, as if headed for a night at the theater, and gathered in the camp’s hanger in the center of the tilery, where a makeshift stage, orchestra pit, and pseudo-seats had been set up. Even the camp staff came to watch.
Adolf Sieberth, who’d been head of Radio Vienna at twenty-four, waited for everyone’s attention. “‘Courage,’” he announced. He turned to the musicians, his back to the audience, and began to conduct his refugee orchestra with as much dignity as if they were in a real symphony hall.
“Courage always, and forge ahead,” they played and sang, the beginning of a performance that would have been lauded in any of the world’s most famous venues. Comedy. Parody. Theater. The man the performance was dedicated to, camp commander Charles Goruchon, gave the internees there as much freedom as he could: Observant Jews prayed in the central courtyard. Internees received letters and packages. They bought things from a little camp store and received visitors. They spent whole evenings creating and sharing, imagining for a few hours that crystal chandeliers illuminated their art in some world other than this French internment camp surrounded by a barbed-wire-topped iron fence.
WHEN THE DAY’S-END call sounded that first night, Max Ernst suggested Edouard set up next to him, and because everyone admired Max, the men shifted their straw mattresses on the hard factory floor—an entire level of the building dedicated to row after row of straw sleeping mats. Men contributed bits of their own straw to make a mat on which Edouard spread the blanket he’d brought. He opened his suitcase to his pajamas neatly folded on top. His day clothes were filthy, but warmer. He was filthy, his very pores filled with brick dust.
“Stay with your routine as much as possible,” Max said. “It pays to remember we’re human. Use your suitcase for a semblance of privacy.”
Edouard took the framed photograph from the pocket of the jacket he’d worn since being taken from Sanary—Elza’s impish mouth and direct gaze, Luki just six months old, and Edouard’s face above theirs, looking to the camera. The photo had been taken more than a year after the German military stood by as Hitler conducted his R?hm Purge, murdering the military leaders and the prior chancellor, along with dozens or perhaps even hundreds of anti-Nazi journalists. Within weeks the military was swearing unconditional obedience not to Germany or its constitution but to Hitler. How had he not seen then that it was time to flee? How had he not seen how much he was putting at risk? He’d had this grand idea that his photos might bring the world to his country’s defense, his one single camera, when all of Europe could not stop the madness that was Nazi Germany.
Edouard quickly stripped and pulled on his nightclothes. He carefully folded his day clothes and tucked them into his suitcase, under the clean things. He pulled out his Leica and stationery and pen, then set the suitcase like a low wall between Max and him. He placed the framed photograph atop the suitcase and sat on his straw mat, glad to be under one of the vast room’s three bare bulbs, the only light the dim factory floor offered. He touched a finger to the photo, then to his camera, imagining Luki in Paris, wondering where he was. My Luki, he wrote. Perhaps it was just as well that she was far away. How very frightened she would be to see him like this.
“Lights off now,” came the call from the bugler.
First one, then another of the three bare bulbs that lit the room were turned off with a pull of a string, leaving only the one above Edouard as a barrier against the dark.