‘Teitelboim, Abraham?’
Through the crack we see an elderly man with a beard. He shakes his head. There are tears in his eyes. He’s in his nightshirt. ‘Nein, nein, nein…’ he whispers.
‘Get everyone in your family dressed and pack some food. Please hurry.’
The man tries to slam the door on us, as if we’re hawkers with products he doesn’t want, but Gaston has his foot in the gap and pushes the door open. Children look out at us from the stairs. Total fear, fear you can never forget. My partner tries again. ‘Please stay calm. Get dressed and come with us.’ Two women start shouting at once. The waiting takes forever. What can I say? The waiting is getting on my bloody nerves. Finally they’re ready. But they start begging, one after the other. One of the women holds some jewellery in front of our noses. ‘Bitte, bitte…’
We push them out the door. On the street the chaos is complete. But as soon as people see that there are no Germans involved, resistance grows. People pull on our sleeves asking for an explanation, ‘Was haben wir getan?’ and plead, ‘Bitte, bitte…’ But also swear, ‘Bastarde! Bastarde!’ and curse us, ‘Schande über euch!’ We drag the Teitelboim family to the synagogue. One of the women stumbles while hanging off my arm to beg for mercy. I drag her over the cobbles. Gaston raises his truncheon menacingly. Meanwhile some of our fellow policemen are simply hitting them, in a total frenzy, completely alone in their rage. They’re all yelling themselves hoarse. I see one who has to be pulled off a Jew: he was beside himself and wouldn’t stop kicking him. For a moment I can’t work out who it is who is being so excessive, then suddenly I see the Finger’s bony face under his helmet. He sees me looking at him and winks. ‘Now the moment’s come,’ I read in his eyes, ‘prove you’re not a mole.’ It feels like wet shit being rubbed in my face. The Finger tries to catch my eye again, then shrugs, and resumes his kicking.
Blood on the street. People crying, scratching, biting.
‘Wilfried, careful! You almost lost one!’
I go after a boy of about seventeen. The street is closed off. He has nowhere to go. Like a child playing a game, he starts zigzagging in the hope of shaking me off. I kick his legs out from under him and try to grab him by the collar. His sudden hatred lashes out. He scores my face with his nails. I punch him. Then again. I drag him over the cobbles. His mother cries out for compassion. She hammers my chest with both hands. I grab her by the neck. We shove them into the synagogue. And so it goes on. At the next house on our list a madman spits in my face. A second later he’s on his knees begging for mercy. ‘Sir, come on, please…’ I say, again as politely as I can. I take him by the shoulder. He lets himself almost fall down the stairs, a sack of rags, suddenly hardly a man at all. Then he just walks along beside me in shame, as if he has let himself be carried away by insanity and now thinks he is acting reasonably again.
Then I see Gus, his face covered with blood. He’s standing there weeping, snot running out of his nose. The knee in my balls is immediately forgotten. Seeing someone like him like this is unbearable. I grab him by the elbow.
‘Where are you hurt?’
‘Hurt? No…’ Gus sputters. ‘We… I.’ He takes a deep breath and tries to wipe the blood off his face. Again he says, ‘We… I.’ After a few attempts he gets it out, in the middle of the enormous racket. ‘This bloke opens the door, sticks his chin out and cuts his own throat with a razor. He spurted fucking blood all over me. And inside… inside…’ Gus tries to get a hold of himself while wiping the blood off his face. ‘And inside they’re dead… All dead at the table. A woman and… five children. Dead as doornails. What is this?…’
Gaston shouts at me. ‘Come on, lad, don’t stop!’ Gus waves his hand as if he has everything under control again. ‘I’m fine. Go do your job…’
Gaston is pounding on a front door. ‘We’ll have to kick it in…’ On the third attempt the lock splinters. Someone upstairs shouts down that there aren’t any Jews here. Loud swearing follows. ‘What have you fuckers done to my door!’ We only just evade a full chamber pot that comes smashing down on the floor in front of us and then storm upstairs, knocking a small table over in our rush. A vase topples. We kick in one door after the other on the first floor. ‘I’ll file a complaint!’ shouts a skinny man with not too many teeth. He’s standing there in his pyjamas trembling with fury. His wife is quivering in bed with her face in her hands and a pink nightcap on her head. ‘Is your name Herschell?’ The man hurls his papers in my face. No, evidently not Herschell. And without the word ‘Jew’ stamped on his card either. ‘Our apologies, Mr Vanderwalle.’
‘This won’t be the last of this, you morons.’
Outside people are crying, gathered around a child who lies quivering spastically on the cobblestones. He’s drooling and his eyes have rolled back in his head as he convulses like a freshly slaughtered rabbit. One of us picks him up roughly and carries him off.
It takes hours before we’ve got them all in the synagogue. Once inside they won’t stop pounding on the door and shouting. Then
