A Chosen Few - Mark Kurlansky [24]
With a grim face, Yankel told him, “Listen, Emmanuel. We haven't left much there. We don't want to do anything—risky. They have our address.” The family finally sent the letter. Then they lost contact with Paris.
When Emmanuel returned to Paris and found all three floors occupied, he went to see the owner of the building—a pleasant, polite man who explained sympathetically that he had given the man and his family the apartment because they were refugees. Their own home had been destroyed, the owner explained as he reached into a drawer and retrieved a folded piece of paper. It was an official city document clearly stating that this man and his family had lived at 19 rue Rodier until it had been destroyed.
Emmanuel had trafficked in false documents for the Resistance in Grenoble and knew better than to take official documents at face value just because they had the right form with the right stamps. He went to Rue Rodier, which was not far from Rue Bleue, and found number 19—standing whole and undamaged. These people were not refugees at all. They had simply wanted a better apartment.
All over Paris, Jewish property had been taken over. Nobody had expected the Jews ever to come back. When Emmanuel asked friends for advice they repeatedly told him not to pursue his claim. Even though he seemed to have a good case, it would take years in the French legal system to win it. He would be better off finding another place so he could start working. He could not apply to reopen his business until he had an address, and with all the shortages, if he could get into production at a new place soon, his business would boom. But still, Rue Bleue was his home.…
He went to see the gendarme who was living in the upper story of what had been the sweater shop. “Monsieur,” the gendarme told him icily, “I am here because the gendarmerie gave me this apartment, because I have a wife and child. I do not have the slightest intention of leaving.”
Emmanuel went back to the owner and said the “refugee” family on the third floor had false papers—the building on Rue Rodier had never been destroyed. The owner nodded in agreement and said with a polite smile, “But what can I do?”
“And what about this gendarme? What right does he have to be there?”
The building owner answered with seemingly irrefutable logic, “But he is there, and there is nothing I can do about that. You will have to take it up with him.”
Emmanuel went to the gendarmerie in the neighborhood, where he was told, “Well, he is living in the apartment. If he doesn't want to leave, there is nothing we can do.”
Emmanuel went to the building manager who had so courteously extracted the letter from him when he was in hiding. The manager said he would make it up to him and offered another apartment in a different neighborhood. “And why is this apartment available?” Emmanuel wanted to know.
“Ah, because the tenants left.”
“Were they Jews?”
The manager said he thought they were —“but they have not come back.” Everyone was confident that the Jews weren't coming back. But Emmanuel was not eager to grab this place. And in a few weeks, although the tenants themselves did not come back, one of their parents claimed the apartment. Then the embarrassed manager offered Emmanuel two little rooms on the sixth floor of the building on Rue Bleue. Six flights of stairs to bring merchandise in, six to take it out? Emmanuel thought. But still, it was an address, and he could apply for a permit with an address.
Emmanuel set up the sweater business there. Everything in Paris was rationed and tightly controlled after the war, but the Ewenczyks had bought large orders of wool for their business before the war, and everyone was permitted to acquire materials now based on their 1940 purchases. The same distributors were back in business, and the demand for sweaters, cloth, and even sacks was at a level that Emmanuel had never seen before.
HOW cOULD the pig-headed Emmanuel Ewenczyk ever have resisted the equally strong-willed