The Romanichelles

Village of Thiery-Sur-Mer, occupied France, 1943

A scream sliced the silence. Just like that everything changed.

We’d been lying on the rusted steel floor of the Wermacht truck, Jacob and I, our wrists and feet bound together in ligatures so tight we could no longer feel our hands.

They’d picked us up right outside the main road, by the old railway station. We weren’t supposed to be out of the house, especially not Jacob. We were best friends for as long as I can remember, but Jacob is Jewish. He’d been at my house when the SS came for his family six months ago and put them all on a train to the eastern camps. We kept Jacob hidden and he wasn’t supposed to be outside at all. He’s eleven and I passed my twelfth birthday a week ago. We’d sneak out of the house at night, when Gran’Papa thought we were asleep, me in my bedroom, and Jacob in the attic hide-away.

We had been spotted and caught by the worst possible people. I’d heard rumors that they were the 7th Einsatzengruppen. They had German Army tunics without insignias, except for Colonel Hans Gudrow. He wore an SS uniform with twin lightning streaks and “Totenkaupf” death-head insignia. I knew his name because I heard his men calling him. I recalled my uncle saying they had been sent back from the Eastern Front where they massacred thousands of civilians. They were expected to do the same here in Southwest France, to terrorize the population so there would be no partisan action when the expected allied invasion came.

They had questioned Jacob and I, laughing and beating us. The brutality was even more frightening because it was so casual. Colonel Gudrow raised my head and forced me to look into his eyes. I gazed into a maelstrom of insanity, and yes, at that age I recognized an unspeakable combination of sadism and pederasty.

The men laughed as the Colonel told them the two little Jews - us, would join them tonight, and share the fate of those sub-humans gypsies, the Romanichells. I thought there’d be no room left for more fear, but I was wrong. When he said Romanichells, I thought of Misha.

She was the most beautiful woman I had ever seen. Even though she was at least fifteen years older than me, I loved her with the intensity of a twelve-year old undergoing his first sexual awakening.

Misha would come to our house about twice a month. She’d bring a variety of items, pelts, buckets of resin from the great pine trees that populated the Landes forest where she lived with her family, the Romanichells. In return my grandparents would trade homespun clothing, tools and varied foodstuff. Once my Gran’Mama overheard me telling Jacob that I was going to follow Misha home so I could visit her.

My grandmother grasped me by the shoulders with such intensity that I had never seen before in her usually gentle demeanor.

“You must never, ever follow Misha, do you understand, Patrick? Swear that you will never go into the Landes, never try to find her, swear it right now.”

I obeyed, never did try to find her. But now here we were, trussed in the back of this truck, our faces pressed against the cold, rusting steel. Six men sat on the benches lining the truck bed. The vehicle itself was a covered lorry, a troop transport. The men all carried submachine pistols. Their eyes were cold dead things, denuded of any human emotions by thousands of killings. They passed around a bottle of Schnaps and pushed their jackboots on our sore bodies. Another lorry followed us with seven more armed men.

The trucks turned off the main road into a wide dirt trail. I heard the men laughing at the torture they had meted out to an elderly couple. The old folks had told them where the Gypsies were before Gudrow had finally killed them.

The lorries continued down the sandy road, deeper into the Landes Forest. A gibbous moon hung above and slivers of pale light penetrated the top of the big pines, reflecting on the trunks like graveyard mold. Pools of viscous darkness populated the spaces between the trees and I imagined dark shapes slinking between the shrubs.

There was stillness to the night, a thickening of the air. The men must have felt it as they nervously thumbed the safety from their guns and chambered rounds.

As the trucks turned off the road into a clearing, the passing of their headlights illuminated a shabby group of huts. It appeared deserted. Nothing moved. The vehicles stopped and colonel Gudrow came out of the front passenger compartment. Commands filled the air, harsh and guttural. The men all jumped out while we remained huddled on the floor, awaiting our fate.

Although we could no longer see the men, the noises told us of the horrors about to visit the sleepy homes of the Romanichells. The woods echoed to crashing noises as doors were battered. We heard the staccato rap of machine guns and the deeper crack of rifles.

Then quietness descended as if the very woods held their breath, unwilling to witness the hideous events to come. A scream sliced the silence, and everything changed. More gunshots exploded followed by shrieks and wet rending noises. Once again the night became still and a scraping noise reached the side of our truck.

A great tearing noise came and we looked up into a gap ripped from the canvas side of the lorry. Colonel Gudrow’s head appeared in the opening. His blood-spattered face held eyes that had been filled with hate only moments before. Now there was a frantic panicked quality to them. They were the eyes of one about to be called to account for deeds of unspeakable darkness.

A hand the size of a shovel appeared over Gudrow’s head and enveloped his skull. The fingers were large, covered with fur and ending with long nails curved and sharp as scimitars. They curled over the Colonel’s face and the long nails penetrated the sockets, crushing the eyes like so many raisins.

Gudrow’s scream rang out as his savaged face disappeared. An agonized shriek erupted, suddenly cut short by a soggy, tearing noise. I remembered the stories told by my cousins, around the hearth in the dead of winter, the stories of the Romanichells, the Gypsy clan that had found its way to France. The stories told of how they were related to the Loup-Garous, the great werewolves of Eastern Europe who roamed the desolate reaches of the Carpathian Mountains.

In the ensuing quiet, we heard the groan of the truck’s springs as it sagged. A hulking form had just jumped on the tailgate. The creature stood regarding us in silence, its bulk blocking out the moonlight. But in that pale light I recognized Misha. The features had changed as if she hadn’t quite returned from some transformation. Her face was elongated, the eyes oval and gleaming yellow as if lit from a hellish fire within. She smiled and her mouth was studded with fangs. A small piece of bloody flesh clung to the tattered fabric covering her shoulders. A musky, feral smell hung about her.
She reached out with impossibly long arms.

Fingernails as serious as a barber’s straight razor gently caressed my cheeks. Her hand slashed down so fast our eyes couldn’t follow. We whimpered like puppies having a bad dream, but our ligatures fell away, slashed by those terrible nails.

When she spoke her voice was like the rumbling of distant earthquakes.

“Run, children. Do not look back. You will be safe.”

And just like that, she vanished.

We jumped from the truck and our legs collapsed from having been cramped so long. We got up and out of the corner of my eyes I saw sprawled shapes laying in satiny blood, gleaming black under the moon, soaking into the thirsty soil of the Landes Forest. Shapes dark as a Stygian night hovered over them, feeding.

We ran like the wind. We didn’t slow down until we reached the main road and the moon had vanished, replaced by the first orange tendrils of a rising sun.

Many years later I read the accounts of Simon Wiesenthal, the Nazi hunter. One paragraph riveted me:

Mystery Unsolved After Fourteen Years
Not even the Wiesenthal organization has been able to clear one of World War Two’s most intriguing mystery. The 7th Einzatsgruppen has been charged with over five thousand genocide murders in occupied Russia during 1942. In early 1943 the group was sent to Southwest France in anticipation of the allied invasion. On the night of January 12th, the entire group, eleven men and two officers vanished without a trace. Mr. Wiesenthal believes that partisans ambushed them. Yet no witness has ever come forth. It is unlikely that these partisans were all killed during the battles that raged in the area after the Normandy invasion. At this time it appears that no one will ever know.

But we know, Jacob and I, we know.