A Chosen Few - Mark Kurlansky [26]
Icchok and Dwojra would regularly get on the metro with large net bags full of black market food and go to the diamond traders’ club on Rue Cadet. In a thickly carpeted room, they would lay out fruit, vegetables, meat, and butter from Polish farmers, on the waxed dark wood furniture. The Finkelsztajn family supported itself and even saved a little money from this.
The Finkelsztajns had returned to Paris from the Pyrenees in December 1944, during one of the coldest winters on record, a winter that further toughened the bitter battle that was under way in the Ardennes. Some winters, Parisians do not see a single snow-flake. But this winter, the streets were encrusted with a thick layer of snow. Icchok, Dwojra, Henri, and their baby had gone to 14 rue des Ecouffes, where they had left their apartment fully furnished with most of their possessions. When they opened the door, a woman holding a child stared at them, and several more pairs of young eyes peered out at them from inside.
“Excuse me,” said Dwojra. She closed the door, and the Finkelsztajns went back down the stairs and left.
Other apartments were available on Rue des Ecouffes. In the summer of 1942 the police, using the lists they had made in the fall of 1940, had sealed off Jewish neighborhoods. In the middle of the night they had pulled whole families from their apartments and put them in a sports stadium, where they wallowed in squalor until they could be deported for extermination. In this citywide operation—which yielded only 12,884 Jews, not even half of the number hoped, based on the lists—Rue des Ecouffes was one of the richer veins of the motherlode. Number 22 alone, with the work of forty policemen, had yielded five whole families and a total of fifteen children. In the winter of 1945 there were still empty apartments at number 22, and the Finkelsztajns rented one of them, a two-room apartment with a bathroom. In the Pletzl, two rooms for four people was considered a good apartment and a bathroom was a notable luxury.
Icchok, who did not want to go back to day and night labor in the hot basement of the Korcarzes’ bakery, learned of a pleasant little space that was available on Rue des Rosiers. Started by Alsatian Jews, it had been a Jewish bakery for almost a hundred years. The ovens were still in the basement, but the ground floor was big enough that the ovens could be moved up there, and the floor above had a large four-room apartment. The apartment even had enough space to build a bathroom.
The owner of the bakery was a Romanian Jew. During the war his shop had been “Aryanized.” All over Paris—in fact, all over Nazi-occupied Europe—Jewish commercial property had been Aryanized, or given to non-Jews. When the policy was instituted in 1941, more than twenty thousand Jewish-owned businesses had immediately been confiscated and handed over to those who were willing to call themselves “Aryan” in exchange for the gift of someone else's shop. But this Romanian had surprised the new “Aryan” owners of his bakery by surviving the war. He demanded back his bakery after Liberation. Since most of these “Aryans” had received their property as a reward for their collaboration, they were lucky to escape the Liberation with their lives. Yet in late 1944 there were still more collaborators than Jews living in the Pletzl. Little by little they were losing their property, but not their arrogance. They had numbers on their side, and there was little in the way of police or any kind of law to oppose them. The war was still going on, and Hitler was still in Germany