I walk into Jules’s room. He’s gaming online. He doesn’t hear me: he’s got his headphones on. I watch him mowing down German officers. Well, I think they’re German. I end up tapping him on the shoulder. He jumps. Turns around. Takes off his headphones.
“I need you to look something up.”
“Right now?”
“I need a date. Type in ‘Kommando Dora.’ Kommando with a ‘K.’ Dora like Dora the Explorer.”
“What is it?”
“An underground factory set up by the Nazis. Their prisoners manufactured missiles.”
Jules looks at me as if he doesn’t understand.
“Why are you looking into that?”
“Because I know someone who was deported there in December 1943.”
“Who?”
“You don’t know him. He was part of the Compiègne convoy in December 1943.”
Jules won’t look anything up unless I tell him more.
“Lucien Perrin, Hélène Hel’s lover, was interned in a transit camp called Royallieu. And then he was deported to Buchenwald.”
Jules types in “Kommando Dora.” And we see the list of the deported and the various deportations.
“December 14, 1943. The convoy arrived two days later at . . . [he struggles to pronounce it] . . . Buchenwald.”
“Yes. And from Buchenwald he was immediately deported to the underground factory, Dora.”
Jules reads the description of living conditions there. Daylight never seen.
Silence falls between us. The last time that happened, silence between us, was when our speakers were broken.
Suddenly, we hear explosions coming through his headphones. From his video game, Faces of War.
“Lucien was able to do everything in the dark. He must have withstood the darkness better than the other prisoners.”
Jules appears not to believe me.
“But those prisoners . . . nearly all of them died. How did he manage to survive?”