Vénissieux Camp
August 29, 1942
Klaus Barbie stared the camp director down. They had both watched the buses drive away, but the German was perplexed.
“Five hundred people? That’s all? Where are the rest?”
“Well, some were already sent, and like I said, we had to free some of them because of exemptions.”
“I’m commanding you to go get them back and deport them once and for all!” Klaus roared into Cussonac’s cowering face.
“It’s not up to me. My superiors have to remove their immunity. I’d lock them all up if I could—you know what I think of the Jews.”
Despite the coffee he had just drunk, Klaus felt dizzy. A pounding headache distracted him from his typical clarity of thought.
“Well then, you’d better get them on the phone. Wake up whoever you have to. If not, those Jews will slip away and scatter, and it’ll be much harder to track them down.”
Cussonac picked up the phone and held the receiver in his hand a moment while he took a deep breath. Then he started dialing the intendant’s number, knowing how Marchais hated to be disturbed off-hours.
Klaus stood and looked out the window. Then he turned and glared again at Cussonac, who was wiping his sweating forehead.
“Why aren’t there children on those buses?”
Cussonac put the receiver down without placing his call. He loosened his tie. “Children? What do you mean?”
“I saw a few babies, but where are the rest of the children?”
“As I reported earlier, there have been a series of exemptions.”
Klaus settled his hat on his head without breaking his cold stare into Cussonac’s eyes. “Where are the children? I won’t ask you again.”
Cussonac shrugged. He was paralyzed by fear and nerves.
Klaus pulled out his pistol and pointed it at Cussonac. “You’ll take me to where they are right now, understood?”
Cussonac raised his hands and nodded. He gingerly scooted out from behind his desk and cautiously walked to the door. He knew that if he did not give Klaus what he wanted, he was a dead man. No one would hold the captain accountable for Cussonac’s life, so it was better to obey than to die in that human garbage dump. Cussonac was willing to do what he had to in order to get out alive.
For his part, in his fury Klaus was capable of doing whatever he had to in order to satisfy his superiors. With his gun trained on the camp director, he wondered when he could go home. At his core, the whole war effort left him with a gaping emptiness inside. The more efficiently he did his job and hardened his heart, the harder it was to continue to feel nothing. Alcohol and sex partially took away the sting of deep loneliness, but he missed his wife and children. War was harsh, as he knew from his time on the Russian front, but at least his position was secure, not to mention privileged. The longer he stayed away from actual fighting, the greater his chance of survival and reaching his dreams in the Third Reich. Klaus hoped the Führer’s thousand-year promise held.