19    

LEON KNEW NOTHING of the events in Żółkiew, Lemberg, and Vienna. Rita had been with him in Paris for a year, but their situation was precarious as they took steps to avoid regular roundups of Jews, the rafles. A year earlier, in July 1942, thirteen thousand Parisian Jews were interned at the Vélodrome d’Hiver, then deported to Auschwitz.

That summer, Leon and Rita obtained official documents. Two tiny identity cards were issued on July 6, 1943, in Courrières, a small town in northwest France, the site of Europe’s worst mining disaster forty years earlier. The cards were in Leon’s papers, each with a diminutive photograph and two sets of fingerprints, one for each hand. Leon’s card was No. 433, citing his birthplace as Lemberg, in the département of “Autriche”; Rita had card No. 434, her maiden name misstated as Kamper (not Landes as it should have been), with an obviously false signature. Both cards stated their nationality to be French (untrue) and misspelled their surnames as Bucholz (omitting an h).

Leon and Rita’s identity cards, 1943

The cards folded to close, thin blue card, and cheap. When I contacted the mairie in Courrières, I was told that the SS destroyed the town hall on the rue Jean Jaurès in May 1940 and executed dozens of local residents who resisted the German advance. Monsieur Louis Bétrémieux, a local historian, told me the cards could not be genuine; they were almost certainly forgeries; because the town was a center of the French Resistance, many forged cards were being issued. Thus did I connect Leon to an underground life.