One of the latest phenomena of the French novel breaks all the precepts of what must be done to succeed commercially. Its main character, the –let’s say– hero, is a policeman in Nazi-occupied Paris who works passionately for the occupiers: he hunts down Jews –including some communists– so they can send them to the camps. He abuses his power, forcing women to have sex with him, he is anti-Semitic, torturer, perverted, corrupt… and yet captivates readers. His name is Sadorski, Léon Sadorski, and its creator, the veteran novelist (and photographer, and filmmaker, and comic artist…) Romain Slocombe (Paris, 1953) has already published six titles starring the guy, of which Spain has arrived first, The Léon Sadorski case
With references such as Simenon or Modiano, the important thing here is not to discover any murderer but the meticulous reconstruction of day-to-day life in Paris during the occupation, which the author recreates fleeing from the commonplace and with historian techniques, delving into police archives of the time. For example, “the traffic lights weren’t working, they were all turned off, and we keep seeing stories where cars stop at red lights, it’s impossible!”. Another observation referring to traffic: “The priority was given to German vehicles. There were many accidents because they did not know the city and circulated in any way”.
How was such a character born? “Five years earlier, he had written a novel – answers Slocombe, sitting in a Barcelona bookstore – in which the protagonist, a French academic, denounced his Jewish daughter-in-law. The policeman who made him sing was based on a real character, Sadorski, called ‘the Jew-eater’. I was a finalist for Goncourt and my editors believed that the success was due to the fact that the protagonist was a real bastard, so they asked me to continue there, and I developed the policeman, who went from secondary to main”.
He couldn’t be a nice cop because “the nice ones were arrested or deported. The police were absolutely Nazi. Those who remained were mostly people who did not want to complicate their lives, officials who obeyed orders. But there was a minority that actively and passionately participated in the repression of the Jews.”
Nobody expects the usual gloomy vision of the city. “That is a cliché. Occupied Paris was a lot of fun because people wanted to get away and have a laugh. It was the time when more books were read and more went to the movies. The metro was full and there were many bicycles, among other reasons because there was a shortage of gasoline for cars”.
Nor is the resistance mythologised, in which “there were executions and settling of scores.” “Historians have made mistakes – he explains – because in the 1950s and 1960s police files could not be consulted and they relied mainly on the reports of the resistance fighters themselves, what the communists wrote to Moscow after committing an attack. They threw a grenade at a store and ran away, they didn’t stay to count the victims. The wounded, the damage… appear on the police file. Often there was only one wounded or one dead person, someone passing by, but they said that they had killed a dozen more important people to give the USSR a clue and send them more money”. For Slocombe, the stories of resistance to the Nazis “are the national western of the French. Instead of the saloon, the gravedigger or the sheriff, we have the Gestapo, resistance fighters, deportations…”.
At the moment, six novels by Léon Sadorski have already been published in France, grouped into two trilogies, ranging from the occupation to the liberation “and the subsequent purification, all of which almost triggered a civil war between the French. And there will be a third trilogy.”
Sadorski, of Tunisian origin, “is full of contradictions because he is a collaborator but he doesn’t really like the Germans, he fought against them in the First World War. The French were educated in myths that included Joan of Arc and shared an idea of ??sacrifice for the homeland that today sounds strange, perhaps it is only still valid in Ukraine, that idea of ??dying for your country.
Regarding contemporary readings, he believes that “there are parallels. There were two types of Jews, those who had been in France for more than 200 years, many from the bourgeoisie, and who mistakenly believed that the Germans would not come after them, and then the poor emigrants who did not even speak French, but rather Yiddish, like the poles. It was said about these that they came to take away our jobs, that they brought diseases, that they occupied hospital beds, that they stole… they lived overcrowded in apartments without bathrooms, and the press applauded that they were taken away”.
