THE PROBLEM NOW was to put together a small team: we needed at least three extra men in order to carry out Operation Lischka.
We found two of them by pure chance. Talking about the situation in a restaurant, we were overheard by the two Jewish men at the next table, who interrupted our conversation to announce they would be proud to help us. Their names were Marco and David. Not only that, but Marco knew a photographer, Élie Kagan, whom he thought might well agree to take part in the abduction. He gave us Élie’s number.
Beate and I met him in a bar in the eighteenth arrondissement. Élie could not believe that a man who had signed the order for the Vél’ d’Hiv roundup could be living peacefully in Cologne under his own name. But we showed him the Lischka dossier, and he was soon convinced.
The five of us began our preparations by studying the plans that Beate had put together. It was all very professionally done, with a detailed map of the area and observations of Lischka’s habits, what time he left the house in the morning, and so on.
We also needed to equip ourselves with the necessary materials. First, we needed a club to knock out Lischka. Élie showed us his. It was so tiny, we all laughed. Élie got angry. “You don’t know anything about it! I can bring down a mammoth with a little club like this!”
Still, we also needed a more intimidating weapon. Élie had an old pistol; we rendered it harmless by removing the hammer. But at least, if things went badly, we would be able to show that we meant business. I also bought a pair of handcuffs and rented a Renault 16 for our expedition.
We left Paris on the night of Saturday, March 20, arriving in Cologne at 3:00 a.m. That morning, we ate breakfast together, but by the time we went to pick up our second rental car—a five-door Mercedes 220, the most common car in Germany at the time—we were already a few hours late. That delay was fatal: Hertz had rented the car to someone else.
In the end, we had to be content with a three-door Mercedes 280, a luxurious cream-colored automatic. This vehicle had Frankfurt registration plates, too, which made it especially conspicuous, and the lack of back doors made the logistics of the abduction a whole lot harder.
We had come up with a good plan, and now we began to rehearse the ballet of cars that would enable us to abduct Lischka. From the place where we snatched him, we would drive the Mercedes to a little forest nearby. Here, we would transfer Lischka to the Renault. The forest was completely isolated, and to get there you had to take narrow roads, making it easy to find out if we were being followed. Yet once we reached the spot where the transfer would take place, we were only about five hundred yards from the highway that skirted Cologne and would take us to the Belgian border.
On Sunday, we checked out these locations and finalized our plan of action. We left the apartment. David drove the Renault, and Marco the Mercedes. Almost immediately, the two cars became separated, and it took half an hour before we found each other again outside the apartment. We skipped lunch that day, which annoyed Élie. Our photographer had an extraordinary and somewhat exasperating capacity to focus on pointless details, while the rest of us were obsessed with the risky operation we were about to carry out. We decided to prepare ourselves psychologically: each of us had to repeat every tiny movement we would make, in order for it to become second nature.
In hindsight, we clearly didn’t prepare thoroughly enough, because, when the time for action came, nothing at all went according to plan.
* * *
TO PRACTICE CAPTURING our victim and shoving him into a car trunk, we went to the beautiful forest near Cologne. We found a quiet spot deep in that forest, as obviously we did not want to be seen. David played the role of Lischka. One of us had to grab Lischka under his arms while two others took his legs. The driver would remain behind the wheel. Everyone carried out their task to perfection, and David found himself locked inside the trunk within a few seconds. Only then did we remember something important, however, as we heard David yell from inside the trunk, “But I’ve got the keys!”
Thankfully, it turned out that the trunk could be opened with a lever inside the car. We had a moment of panic before we realized that, though: it would certainly have been hard to explain to a locksmith why there was an Orthodox Jew locked inside our trunk …
Our trials were not at an end, however. When we got back to the apartment, the owner called us to say he was coming back earlier than expected, so we wouldn’t be able to stay there. We had to find a hotel, but we knew we couldn’t give our names, as that would put the police on our trail. Beate found us a hotel on the Hansaring, and as it happened the young bellman had heard about her before and was sympathetic to her cause. While she chatted with him, we slipped upstairs to the room without filling out the usual forms. Inside the room, we got the club out again and began joking around as we trained for the next day’s kidnapping. We had barely fallen asleep when Beate told us it was time to get going. It was 6:00 a.m. She was in a bad mood because it was too early to get breakfast at the hotel, and she would have to go into battle on an empty stomach.
Arriving outside Lischka’s apartment at 7:00 a.m., we took up our positions. We had to stand on either side of a tree-lined street that Lischka walked along every morning to catch his tram. I hid in the doorway of a church, while David hung about outside some garages. We had parked the Mercedes on the sidewalk. While we waited for Lischka to emerge—he was supposed to leave his apartment building at 7:25 a.m.—we became anxious at the sight of all the people catching the tram only a few yards from where we stood. In our panicked state of mind, their presence struck us as extremely compromising.
Élie was supposed to grab Lischka from behind and immobilize him; Marco, who was pretending to fix the Mercedes’s engine, had to help him out while David approached Lischka from directly in front, threatening him, and I surged out from the side. Beate’s job was to give the signal when Lischka left his apartment by taking off her fur hat.
There was an incessant coming and going of cars. Men, hands on steering wheels, waited there for their wives and children. I had left the Mercedes’s engine on. Suddenly, Beate lifted up her hat. A tall man whom we immediately recognized walked past the street corner and came up alongside the Mercedes. Marco, seeing that Élie had not moved, was taken by surprise and realized that the opportunity had been lost. Lischka kept walking. When he reached the tram station, he turned around furtively, as if he had spotted us, and we all felt a stab of despair. On top of everything, it started raining. Sheepishly, we drove the Mercedes to the center of Cologne. No one dared speak or even look at one another. The air was thick with guilt and failure.
After parking the car outside the cathedral, we ate breakfast in the hotel opposite the train station. There, I tried to lift everyone’s spirits. I explained that, even if we failed to kidnap Lischka, the aim of the operation was to raise public awareness about Lischka and to make former Nazis realize that they were not safe anymore. So the minimum objective was to at least attempt the abduction. Even if we didn’t manage to get him over the border, a failed kidnap attempt could still be considered a success as long as it caused a big stir.
Beate’s research told us that Lischka took the 1:25 p.m. train home. We decided to try again in the afternoon, hoping that Lischka had not seen us that morning.
All the same, we were worried. If he had spotted us, he might come back armed or with friends or accompanied by the police. Who knows, he might even shoot us, given that it would probably be considered “legitimate self-defense.”
* * *
AT 12:45, we are back outside the tram station, determined to act this time, with no thoughts of discretion or caution. The car’s engine purrs as we stand next to it and chat. We are trying to act like four policemen, there to arrest a criminal—which is, in a sense, what we are.
A flood of passengers pours from the tram stop every ten minutes. We watch them anxiously. Suddenly, Lischka appears, detaching himself from the crowd as he walks toward us. Marco rushes up to Lischka, who is about a hundred feet from the car. Two seconds later, I run over, too. We are each holding one of his arms, and Marco is yelling, “Komm! Komm!”
Unthinkingly, Lischka takes a couple of steps toward the waiting car before he notices that something very strange is going on. David and Élie arrive, and Élie hits him over the head with the club. We realize we are unlikely to be able to drag him all the way to the car. He is impossibly heavy. Passersby see what is happening and come up to us, while Lischka, terrified, screams, “Hilfe, Leute, Hilfe!” He stands sturdy as an elephant as Élie hits him again, then slowly crumples to the ground. But we are surrounded now. One of the passersby shoves a police badge in our faces. He must think we’re colleagues of his. Thankfully, he is not armed. We ask him, in French, to leave.
I am starting to fear that the Mercedes will be blocked in when we get to it. There are so many other cars around, and I left the keys in the ignition of the empty car. All it would take is for one of the spectators to remove the key, and we would be caught in a trap. I yell, “The car! Let’s go!”
Élie is still holding Lischka’s hat, and the little policeman runs after him, saying, “Den Hut, bitte, den Hut!” Élie does not understand that he just wants the hat. He turns back to him, and the policeman points to the hat in his hand. Élie gives it to him, and the policeman says, “Danke schön!”
Lischka is lying on the sidewalk. Inside the car, I calm down. Beate now has the platform to launch a campaign against Nazi criminals. Three minutes later, we are in the little forest, and we have switched cars. We are supposed to wait here for Beate, but we hear police sirens in the distance and decide to leave her to her fate. I feel certain she’ll make it to the train station without any problems. We throw the syringes and vials of chloroform out the window as we speed down the highway. When we reach the border, everything goes smoothly. As for Beate, she simply catches a train back to Paris.