Extrait de Leap into Darkness par Leo Bretholz. New York : Random House/Anchor, 1999, pp. 148-55.

October 1942

Drancy was the waiting room for Auschwitz , more than a thousand miles and four days away by lumbering freight train. Outside Drancy 's gates was a dreary working class French suburb northeast of Paris . Inside, a vast, desolate, oval complex of unfinished apartment buildings with holes where windows and doors were meant to be, ringed entirely by barbed wire and guard towers. The condemned shuffled about miserably, defeated and dreamlike. Here, one instinctively thought of escape, or imagined the war's miraculous end in the next thirty seconds, or capitulated to the idea of death…

We arrived October 22, 1942, when Drancy was already in full run. In Paris fifteen months earlier, the Germans ordered the seizure of all radio sets belonging to Jews. Then, all bicycles. Then, manhunts began. The busy eleventh arrondissement of Paris was sealed off by French police, so that German police and inspectors of the French Prefecture of police could make arrests. Four thousand Jews were taken to Drancy that August.

By the following May, Reinhard Heydrich [Obergrupenfürer de l'SS. Architect de l'Holocaust.] arrived in Paris and, with the help of the head of French police, mapped plans for the deportation of stateless Jews. Those in Drancy filled the first trains east…Then, on the morning of July 16, three months before our arrival, the French rounded up thousands more Jews in the greater Paris region…They joined the thousands of Jews who had been brought to Drancy since the previous August.

The manhunt was staged by nine thousand French police officials. It lasted two days. That week, there were reports of a hundred Jewish suicides. The Germans, hoping for twenty-eight thousand arrests, settled for about thirteen thousand.

Nearly seven thousand people were taken to a Parisian stadium, the Vélodrôme d'Hiver. Families remained there for days without food or water or sanitary facilities. Some people died; others went insane.

Those taken to Drancy found their own misery awaiting them. There were only twelve hundred beds for the initial four thousand detainees. Forty or fifty people were paced into each room. One month after their arrival, when requests were made for toilet paper and straw to lie on, they were told such shipments would arrive, but not for another month.

People began to die. Dysentery made the inmate look like skeletons. When we arrived on October 22, we were stunned at what we saw. There were one hundred and seven of us brought there by train, wearing the same rancid clothing we'd worn every day at Rivesaltes for the previous two weeks. [Rivesaltes – un camp d'internement près de la Méditerranéen et les Pyrénées dans le sud de la France.] I felt lonely and tired. I saw poor elderly souls carried into the camp on stretchers, and lonely children, and doomed couples who could do nothing to save each other.

We quickly learned the mechanics of subservience. The officers, red-faced and choleric French garde-mobiles , processed us quickly as we entered the camp, issuing yellow Jewish stars to be worn on our shirts or jackets and confiscating our valuables. Vouchers wee given, along with admonishments not lose them. Their intention was to lull us into false security, into fighting incipient hysteria which might lead t troublesome revolts. They Germans wanted to kill us when they were ready, and no sooner.

Some of the newly arrived carried photos of loved ones in their satchels. The officers tossed them to the ground for the sheer bullying pleasure of it. The photos were the last remnants of a vanished life, and the message from the [French] police was a crushing signal: Yesterday's world no longer counts for anything. Often, they tormented the elderly, some of whom were too frail to walk, or too terrified. There were no smiles, no kindness or compassion.

Drancy 's diet was watery cabbage soup that led inevitably to burning diarrhea. There was almost no water to wash and no soap if there was water. We were ushered into unfinished rooms with straw piled on concrete floors, home for lice and other vermin…There were mass latrines, a horizontal line of holes in boards, without separations for privacy. Men, women, it didn't matter.

A man who wore a suit and tie tried to imagine loopholes for himself. He'd fought for France in World War I, he announced, and his grandfather served under Napoleon III. This sort of indignity became a recurring theme among the French, who imagined they weren't like to others, the German Jews, or the Austrians or the poles. The French authorities were running these camps for the Germans; surely, French citizenship, French blood, meant more than this unfortunate business of a man's religion. Mistakes had been made; credentials would be uncovered; exceptions would surely be made.

Children walked about, searching for familiar faces. They'd been pulled out of nurseries, out of kindergartens, plucked from grammar school classrooms and told to come with the authorities, told their parents were waiting for them. Many were toddlers. Their clothing was badly soiled. They were frightened and confused and wept openly.

At Drancy , they were put by the score into bare rooms with buckets to be used as toilets, because many of the children couldn't walk down the long hallways to bathrooms, or were too frightened to go without adults. They needed to go badly. The steady diet of cabbage soup gave many of them severe diarrhea. They soiled their clothing and mattresses on which many of them lay whimpering day and night. When their clothing was removed for washing, the children lay on their beds naked, with the autumn air growing colder, waiting for their clothes to dry. They wore little wooden dog tags, so someone would know who they were.

At night, we heard them crying from their distant rooms. They called for their mothers, or cried simply because the world had been unbearably cruel to them, and crying was the only language in which they knew how to express it.

One day I saw a woman reach down to a little boy, perhaps four years old, and ask, “ Quel est ton nom? ” What is your name?

“ Sais pas ,” he said, looking into her eyes. Don't know.

What were any of our names now? The world had forgotten our names and our faces and our history. The past had closed up behind us. Behind these barbed wires, we had ceased to exist.

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[Leo Bretholz est un survivant de l'Holocaust. Il est né à Vienne, Autriche, en 1921. Fuyant devant les Nazis, il a été interné dans plusieurs camps en France, y compris Drancy. Après Drancy, il s'est évadé miraculeusement d'un transport en route pour Auschwitz. Après la guerre il a émigré aux Etats-Unis. Il habite aujourd'hui à Baltimore.]