The French War Bride (22 page)

August 25, 1944

T
he Allies are coming! The Allies are coming!” The cry echoed through the city as Yvette and I made our way through the thick throng to the Champs-Élysées.

It was a such a relief, so long overdue. The city had descended into anarchy over the previous two weeks. Paris had become a battlefield of haphazard gunfire as citizens took up the resistance cause and the Germans fired back to defend themselves, punish offenders, or simply buy time to escape. The violence was indiscriminate, with both sides firing at each other and into crowds. The carnage was terrifying and shocking.

To my mind, the insurrection of the people of Paris was completely uncalled for, because the Germans were already in retreat. But we had been under the thumb of the Boches for so long—had been so bullied and debased and disheartened—that many people felt the need to take action, even useless action.

They wanted to take back the city themselves. To that end, French citizens dug up street bricks, gathered sandbags, and built barricades. They fired on German soldiers with pistols and hunting rifles, they hurled homemade bombs, and they attacked any Boches foolish enough to go out alone or in pairs.

The violence was still occurring as the Allies marched into Paris and yet, Yvette and I and most of the city poured into the streets and headed to the Champs-Élysées.

“Look—here they come!” Yvette cried.

I tried to stand on tiptoe to see. I had gotten my shoes resoled, but due to the lack of leather, they were soled with wood. Consequently, I couldn't flex my feet, and had to settle for craning my neck to see through the crowd.

First came the French Second Armored Division. They were dressed in American uniforms, riding American Jeeps and tanks, so it was hard to tell that they were French—but when one young man bounded off a tank to hug a girl in a crowd, and another dashed from formation into a drugstore to telephone his mother, we realized they were our boys.

“Oh, isn't it marvelous! Just marvelous!” a woman standing next to me said.

“Papa!” a soldier yelled. He leapt off the back of the Jeep and ran into the crowd. An old man grabbed him by the cheeks and stared at him, then hugged him so hard and tight that the crowd eventually separated them, for fear one was smothering the other.

Yvette was crying. Everyone was crying. I put a hand to my face and realized my cheeks were wet, as well.

“At last. At last. At last!” Yvette kept repeating, grabbing my hand.

Behind the French troops came the Americans. They were for the most part taller and they all sported big, wide smiles.

“Why do the Americans smile so much?” said a lady behind me.

“Because they are happy to be in Paris,” I said. “And seeing them here makes me smile, too!”

“Yes,” the woman agreed. “Bien sûr, it is a joyous occasion!”

All in all, I have not ever seen—nor felt—such massive exultation, such collective joy, before or since. It was a force unto itself, a power that lightened and lifted us all. It was as if the law of gravity were momentarily suspended. Our hearts all soared like the highest, purest note of an aria, above and beyond us all.

“At last!” Yvette kept saying. “At last!”

Yes, at last—at long, long last.

And yet. And yet.

I am sure I was not alone in being struck, there amidst all the joy, by
all that we had lost. Yes, we were liberated from our occupiers—but life would never be restored to “before.” No one could ever give us back what the war had taken.

Paris was liberated, and my soul sang a hallelujah—but I couldn't help but wonder what meaning this really held, when everything and everyone that had made Paris my home was gone.

August 25–September 1944

T
he euphoria of the Allies' arrival was quickly followed by some of the ugliest days of the war.
L'épuration sauvage
, the savage purge, began almost immediately. The French populace was eager for revenge, and they quickly turned on the collaborators—both those who had actively helped the Boche and those who had been guilty of la collaboration horizontale
.

I walked with Yvette back to her hotel, noticing the venom with which she was treated. “
Putain
,” a woman cursed as she walked by.
Whore
.

“Collaborateur,” muttered another.

“Putain de merde.”

By the next day, the crowd had been whipped into a frenzy to do something more than merely name call. I was in my room when a knock sounded. It was a doorman from the front of the hotel. He sheepishly looked down.

“Mademoiselle, the doorman at the Hotel Paris is my friend. He told me your sister has been taken by a mob to the Place de la République.”

“Oh, mon Dieu! Why?”

His cheeks grew red. “They are punishing the collaborateurs.”

I grabbed my purse and pulled out a coin to tip him.

“No, mademoiselle. I do not want your money. I just thought you would want to know.”

“Merci. Merci beaucoup.”

He nodded. “
De rien
. I am so sorry. I, too, have a sister, and . . .” He gave little shrug and turned to go.

“Wait.”

He turned back around.

“What do you think . . . what are their . . .” I swallowed and asked the fear of my heart. “What do you think they intend to do to her?”

He lifted his shoulders again in an embarrassed shrug. “I do not know.”

I changed out of my uniform and hurried to the square as fast as my feet would carry me, leaving word with a fellow maid to please tell the supervisor I had a family emergency. I knew she would not be pleased, but so many maids had simply disappeared or not shown up after yesterday's incredible celebration that I thought I would still have a job.

Through the city, shots still rang out. I do not know if it was fanatical German snipers, the Vichy equivalent of the SS, or a trigger-happy FiFi—a member of the Forces Françaises de l'Intérieur, as the Resistance was now called—but I kept going. I did not think that I was a target. I tried to maintain a profile like the “Brown Mice,” as we called the German women who had been office workers under the Wehrmacht; I tried to be unobtrusive and bland and small, to blend in to the environment, to not stand out in any way or call attention to myself.

I heard the rumblings and jeers of the crowd from two blocks away. I turned onto the rue Beaurepaire, and gasped.

A makeshift platform had been set up. On it, three women, stripped to their undergarments, were seated in chairs, their hands tied behind them—as their heads were forcibly shaved.

Two of the
tondeurs—
shearers—were bearded men with cigarettes dangling from their mouths. The third was, shockingly, a woman—a woman with shoulder-length black hair that was curled and coiffed. She yanked her victim's head around by her remaining hair, more roughly than her male counterparts. The poor victim's scalp was nicked with cuts and gashes.

Tears poured down the flaming cheeks of the poor shorn women, who sat, miserably still, not daring to move for fear of their scalps being cut or of angering their captors to commit further violence against them.

They could do nothing but submit. Shame seemed to ooze from their very pores and hovered around them like a cloud of cigarette smoke.

As I watched, one of the tondeurs raised his hand, brandishing his razor in the air. “Voilà!” Two other Frenchmen immediately stepped forward and yanked the shorn victim, a rather flat-chested woman in her mid-thirties, to her feet. A woman from the crowd, a blonde wearing a red dress, ran up the steps, pulled a lipstick from her pocket, and drew a bright red swastika on the woman's forehead.

“There! Do you think a Boche would want to shove his filthy sausage in you now, eh?” the woman asked.

“Putain!” screamed someone in the crowd. “Ugly whore!”

“Just look at your mother, Ursule.” The woman who'd painted the swastika—a woman who must have had some kind of axe to grind, I thought—grabbed the victim by the jaw and directed her head out to the crowd. “You are killing her. She is dying a thousand deaths from shame.”

I could not see the poor mother in the crowd. The shorn woman on the platform sobbed, her bald head lowered so that I could not see her face.

Another woman wearing only a slip was roughly pulled onto the stage and pushed into the freshly vacated chair. Taunts, rude suggestions, and horrible curses erupted from the onlookers. Horrified, I covered my mouth with my hand and scoured the crowd for Yvette.

I was too short to see above the heads in front of me. Determined, I elbowed my way nearer the platform. At the very front, I saw a man and two women yanking the clothes off a familiar blonde.

“Stop!” I yelled, running toward her, pushing people out of the way.

Hands grasped at me, trying to hold me back. I wrested away and plunged through the crowd until I reached Yvette's side. I tried to pry the woman's hands off Yvette's rose dress—one of Yvette's favorites. It tore as she yanked it off Yvette's back, ripping the fabric.

Someone strong—a man—grabbed me from behind and held me in a choke hold.

“She was with the Resistance!” I gasped, trying to break free from his hold. “She worked for France!”

“She worked for the Germans—on her back,” someone called.

The crowd laughed and catcalled.

“She lived at the Hotel Paris, feasting on German food while we starved,” said another woman. “Look how plump her breasts are. Her belly was full, while I was too thin to make milk for my baby.”

“You don't understand,” I said. “She was a spy!”

“The Résistance did not need information on German dicks,” said a man.

The crowd roared.

“And you . . .” The man holding me twisted me around to face him. He was older than I supposed, with weather-beaten skin and yellowed whites in his eyes. His breath was foul, scented with garlic, stale cigarettes, and rotten teeth. “I suppose you were a spy as well?”

“I—”

“She's one of them,” said the woman who had torn off Yvette's dress. “I've seen her often at the hotel.”

I felt the rip of fabric. The next thing I knew, my dress was gone. I stood there in my brassiere and panties. I had dressed quickly and had not put on a slip. I tried to cover myself, but my arms were quickly yanked behind my back. Terror and mortification waged a battle for the upper hand. I feared my pubic hair showed through the front of my panties.

“Please—leave her be!” Yvette pleaded. She was on the stage, being forced to sit in a chair. “She is a good girl. She had nothing to do with the Boches.”

“Oh, you call them that, now, eh?” said the woman. “Before you simply called them
chéris
.”

The crowd roared again.

“Do what you will with me, but leave her alone,” Yvette begged.

She might as well have saved her breath. Rough hands guided me up bricks to the platform and shoved me into a chair. Sweat covered me like a film.

“Open your legs,” yelled a man. “Show us what you showed the Krauts.”

Oh, mon Dieu. I could not believe this was happening.

Yvette shot me an anguished look as she was forced into the chair beside me. “I'm so sorry,” she whispered.

“Such beautiful hair,” said the man with the razor, lifting Yvette's blond mane. “Such a shame!”

“
S'il vous plaît
.” Yvette turned and looked at him, her eyes imploring. “
Ayez pitié de nous
.” Have mercy on us.

“Why should he?” called out someone from the crowd.

“Slut. Whore. Collaborateur,” hissed the woman who stood behind me, razor in hand. She roughly yanked my hair from my neck. “You are a disgrace to France.”

The razor nicked my scalp. I jumped. “The more you move, the more you bleed,” the woman said.

I wished that one of the men were shaving me. My
tondeuse
seemed filled with a vitriolic hatred.

“Sit still,” Yvette murmured. “It will soon be over.”

I folded my hands in my lap and bent my head. As my hair fell in my lap, I grabbed a fistful of it, and clutched it as if it were a magic talisman.

—

But it was not over after the shearing. The men piled
les femmes tondues
, about ten in all, into the back of an open-back lorry and trucked us slowly through Paris. Our tormenters insisted that we face outward, the women at the front of the truck bed seated, the rest of us standing, so we could all be seen by the crowds. We hung our heads and refused to meet the gaze of the onlookers—all of us except for one big-boned girl, who stared back with blazing hatred and hurled epithets right back at her mockers.

“Shut up,” yelled the woman who had shaved me, who was in the back of the truck, holding a rifle. A man with a gun stood with her, as well.

“You are only mad because your husband slept with me,” the large-boned woman said.

“You are a liar,” the tondeuse said.

“You are angry because it is the truth.”

The woman hit her with the butt of the rifle. She collapsed on the bed of the truck, knocking another
femme tondue
into me, causing both of us to fall.

Yvette helped us to our feet. The man guarding us rapped on the roof
of cab, and the driver stopped. He came around to the back, and the two men pulled the unconscious, big-boned woman out of the truck and tossed her onto the pavement like a sack of potatoes. Her head hit with a nauseating thud.

“Is she dead?” asked a tondue, who had buried her face against my shoulder.

“If she was not before, she probably is now,” Yvette said grimly.

It was hard, but I stood still. Years of watching the unthinkable had schooled me to follow the Resistance's advice: do not risk your life to save a comrade if he or she is already dead.

The truck resumed moving. The coiffed brunette prodded me to face the public, along with the trembling girl beside me. I could not believe the anger hurled at us. We were spat upon, hit with garbage, and doused with dishwater from balconies above. The hatred came from men, from women, and even from children—but the women were the worst.

Later that day, Yvette and I talked about it. “They are angry because they are jealous,” she said.

“Non!”

“Yes. They were not attractive enough to be chosen by a German. They are furious we had an option that was closed to them.”

I was not sure that I agreed with her, but I stayed silent. Perhaps it was Yvette's truth, something she needed to believe in order to deal with being bald. “Our hair will grow back and we will be pretty once again,” she said. “They can have hair down to their waists, and it will not make them desirable.”

When at last the horrible, nightmarish ride was over—I overheard a conversation among our captors about the scarcity of gasoline, their need for a bathroom, and a desire to eat—they stopped the lorry and just walked away, leaving us standing in the back.

“What do we do now?” I asked.

“We run,” Yvette said.

We leapt down from the back of the truck and hurried through the streets. We must have made quite a sight. We were practically naked—me in my bra and panties, Yvette in her slip—and our heads were bald and
bleeding. People pointed and laughed. American and British soldiers made rude propositions.

After hours of being jeered at from the back of the truck, you would think we would be inured to insults and threats, but that walk, with just the two of us, was worse. A path cleared and people lined up to gawk and stare and catcall and comment.

After what seemed like an eternity, we arrived back at Yvette's hotel.

The doorman stood unmoving in front of the entrance. “You cannot come in here.”

“It is I, Jean-Paul,” Yvette said. “I have a room!”

“I am sorry.” His gaze was cold and distant. “You cannot be in the lobby in that state of . . .
deshabille
.”

“Let's go around back,” I urged. Every hotel, I had learned, had a staff entrance. We marched in, pretending not to see or hear the gasps, guffaws, snickers, and pointing fingers. I held my breath as we made our way to the service elevator.

The elevator operator, a small man with wire-rim glasses blinked at us. “You can't . . .”

“Fifth floor, please,” Yvette said imperiously.

“But you're not . . . you shouldn't . . . you can't . . .”

“For God's sake, close the door and take us up,” Yvette hissed, “or I will tell your management about the silver you helped the Nazis steal.”

The slight man slid the metal wire gate shut, then the door to the elevator. We slowly ascended, the air so thick and hot with acrimony it stung the back of my throat to breathe.

“Thank you,” Yvette said when we'd stopped in front of the numeral five and he'd slid the cage, and then the door, open. She stepped out as if she were a queen, her bald head held high.

I followed her down the hall, my hands folded in front of my crotch, and waited until she pulled a key out of her brassiere. She held the door and let me go in ahead of her, then she quickly entered and latched the chain.

“Oh, mon Dieu!” She froze in front of the bureau mirror. Her hands went to her head. “Mon Dieu! Look at me!”

Fresh tears formed in my eyes. “I know, Vettie. I know.”

“And look at you!”

I didn't want to see, but she grabbed my hand and pulled me in front of the mirror with her. I stared at a girl I did not know—a girl with sad eyes and black stubble all over her scalp.