One of the latest phenomena of the French novel breaks all the precepts of what must be done to succeed commercially. Its protagonist, the – shall we say – hero, is a policeman in Paris occupied by the Nazis who works with passion for the occupiers: he dedicates himself to hunting down Jews – also some communists – so that they can be sent to the camps. He abuses his power, forcing women to have sex with him, he is anti-Semitic, a torturer, pervert, corrupt… and yet he captivates readers. His name is Sadorski, Léon Sadorski, and his creator, the veteran novelist (and photographer, and filmmaker, and comic book artist…) Romain Slocombe (Paris, 1953) has already published six titles starring the guy, of which The first, El caso Léon Sadorski, has arrived in Spain
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 the Paris of the occupation, which the author recreates by fleeing from the common place and with historian’s techniques, rummaging through police files of the time. For example, “the traffic lights weren’t working, they turned them all off, and we keep seeing stories where cars stop at red lights, it’s impossible!”. Another observation referring to traffic: “German vehicles had priority. There were many accidents because they did not know the city and were driving in any way they could.”
How was the character born? “Five years before, I had written a novel – replies Slocombe, based 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 eater of Jews. I was a finalist at the Goncourt and my editors believed that the success was due to the protagonist being 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 guys 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.”
Let no one expect the usual gloomy view of the city. “This is a cliché. Busy Paris was great fun because people wanted to escape and have a few laughs. It was the time when more books were read and more people went to the cinema. The metro was full and there were many bicycles, among other reasons because there was a shortage of petrol for the cars”.
Neither is the resistance mythologized, in which “there were executions and revenge”. “Historians have made mistakes – he explains – because in the 1950s and 1960s it was not possible to consult the police files and they relied mainly on the reports of the resistance fighters themselves, which were written by the communists in Moscow after committing an attack. They threw a grenade at a shop and ran away, not staying to count the casualties. The injured, the wreckage… appear in the police file. Often there was only one wounded or dead, someone passing by, but they claimed that they had killed a dozen more important people in order to show themselves to the USSR and to 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 morgue 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, which go 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 filled with contradictions because he is a collaborationist but he does not like the Germans at all, he fought against them in the First World War. The French were educated in some myths that included Joan of Arc and they shared an idea of ??sacrifice for the homeland that today sounds strange, perhaps it is only still valid in Ukraine, the idea of ??dying for your country”.
On contemporary readings, he believes that “there are parallels. There were two types of Jews, those who had been in France for over 200 years, many from the bourgeoisie, and who mistakenly believed that the Germans would not come for them, and then the poor emigrants who did not even speak French, but Yiddish, like the Poles. It was said that they came to take away our jobs, that they brought diseases, that they occupied hospital places, that they stole… they lived crowded together in apartments without bathrooms, and the press applauded that they were taken away”.
