The Masks of Evil

On the night of November 25, 1942, Lieutenant Schreiber, guided by a smuggler, crosses the Franco-Spanish border after walking for five hours over mountain trails. Apprehended by the police, he is brought to the prison in Figueres where fifty other Frenchmen are detained. At the end of one week’s incarceration, they are put into a cattle car. A forty-eight-hour journey to the Miranda de Ebro concentration camp.

Another hell created by men: 3,500 people squeezed against one another in unsanitary shacks hastily divided into “blocks” with pieces of cardboard and blankets; hunger, disease, and overcrowding that forces prisoners to sleep on the floor.

“No, there can be no comparison with the Nazi camps,” Jean-Claude is quick to clarify. “It was no gulag, either. Though, as luck would have it, I caught a dreadful staphylococcus there! What else would you expect? Even back at Figueres the prison had been swarming with vermin, and then in the camp we were drowning in filth. Not a drop of water to wash with. My health was deteriorating and I had huge boils under my arms. Fortunately, among the prisoners there was a doctor, a Hungarian Jew. He offered to lance the most menacing of the boils for me. His scalpel was a thin piece of glass cut from inside a jelly jar and sharpened on a sliver of brick…. I was sharing my ‘block’ with some young French factory workers, communists who had been able to escape the camp in Châteaubriant. They decided to give me a hand during the operation. Those guys thought I was a soft bourgeois who would pass out immediately and need to be carried back to my pallet, unconscious. So they had designated one of their comrades to accompany me. Oh yes, a brief suspension of class warfare! Well, when the Hungarian pierced my boil, it was the commie, my ‘helper,’ who had to turn his head away, and I was forced to drag him home on my back. ‘For a bourgeois, you’re not so bad!’ his comrades told me.”

It is out of the question to dwell on the miseries he experiences as a prisoner. Especially since that prisoner has always been considered by Spanish authorities to be an American officer (the three years spent at Oxford make young Schreiber’s alibi more plausible). In the spring of 1943, the military attaché from the United States is able to dispatch his “compatriot” to Gibraltar. There, the English intelligence services examine the case of this peculiar “American” officer: a search, interrogations. Reassured that returning to Franco’s dungeons is no longer possible, Lieutenant Schreiber then plays his card: he tears open the seam of his epaulette where his French military papers are hidden.

Some time later, transferred to Algiers, he finds Commander Rouvillois from the Fourth Cuirassier Regiment; a living memory from his first campaign, the Battle of France, May–June 1940. Rouvillois is serving in the Fifth African Chasseur Regiment, a regiment commanded by Colonel Desazars de Montgailhard, the man Lieutenant Schreiber had such thunderous arguments with during their imprisonment in Spain. It’s a small world. The colonel claims to know what he’s talking about when it comes to men. Lieutenant Schreiber is reinstated.

The routine of service begins again: practicing in tanks (no longer the Hotchkiss and Somas of 1940, but instead heavy American Shermans), training in mine clearance techniques, and preparation with the aim of a future landing.

A “political” incident breaks up the monotony of the days. One evening, Captain Arnaud de Maisonrouge sends Jean-Claude an invitation to dinner from a colonel (we are still in French Algeria). The officers take their places around the beautifully laid table and only Lieutenant Schreiber remains standing behind his chair.

“Schreiber, are you trying to get taller?” Maisonrouge exclaims. “Sit down!”

“My captain, there is one man too many among us!”

Every eye follows his gaze toward a large portrait of Maréchal Pétain. “I was in the Resistance, my captain. I lay rotting in a concentration camp. I will not dine under the eyes of the man who is hunting my comrades in France!” A tense silence. The colonel, conciliatory, takes down the portrait.

I have heard Jean-Claude recount this Algerian episode often. One has the impression of listening to a story with two strands: the young lieutenant hammering in his refusal while, at the same time, the old storyteller searches for words to express the complexity of what he thinks now about that coarse exchange beneath the Maréchal’s portrait.