Voices from the Dark Years (25 page)

At the trial of Maurice Papon in 1997, an old lady whose parents, grandmother and younger brother were deported, recalled being entrusted to a
passeur
, who raped and abused her.
³
Another veteran of 1914–18, who had spent time in a German POW camp, was Raoul Laporterie, Mayor of Bascons in Les Landes living on the Vichy side of the Line, but with four clothing stores to manage on the other side, which required him to cross and re-cross it every day. Like Chabrier, he also began by taking a few letters across for people he knew. Because this sector of the line was near the strategic Mont-de-Marsan airfield, thousands of trees were chopped down to make it more difficult for people to slink across. Laporterie decided that the best way to get people out of the Occupied Zone was to do it openly by abusing his powers as mayor and using blank identity cards and genuine rubber stamps in his office to create new identities for them.

As the Germans were suspicious of any obviously new cards, Laporterie had the brilliant idea of resurrecting the population of the cemetery to make new identities that would stand up to scrutiny. In one year, the population, on paper, of Bascons thus grew from 450 to 1,850, to the benefit of Édith Piaf’s husband Jacques Pills and André Malraux’ wife Clara, among others. It was easy enough to scuff and crease the cards Laporterie made, but an apparently old card in a new wallet attracted attention, so the ‘price’ he demanded from line-crossers was the old Cellophane wallet in which their genuine ID card had been kept.

On 10 October 1940, Laporterie’s help was sought by ‘Col Olivier’, a Free French officer parachuted back into France the previous night on a mission to survey the airfield, from where the Luftwaffe’s long-range Focke-Wulf Condors flew missions to attack Allied shipping and vector U-boats based in French ports onto convoys far out in the Atlantic. With the neighbouring race track taken over to extend the runway for Condors with drop-tanks that gave them the range to bomb Canada and the US, constant updates were required in London, the biggest scoop coming when a friend of Laporterie was handed detailed plans of the base by an anti-Nazi Austrian officer on the airfield.
⁴

As the first winter of the occupation drew nearer, country folk were better off than townspeople because their heating and cooking was mostly by wood from the forests hauled home, sawn and split by hand. Town dwellers faced a bleak, coal-less winter, Simone de Beauvoir recounting how it was so freezing in their apartment that she went early each day to the Café Flore to grab two little marble-topped tables near the stove, on which Sartre and she worked by the light of acetylene lamps.
⁵

It was for most people a sad Christmas that marked the end of the first half-year of the occupation, summed up by a rhyme parodying a Christmas carol. No one knows where it originated and there were several versions, but all went something like this:

Christmas has been cancelled, the Virgin and Child evacuated.

St Joseph is in a concentration camp and the stable has been

requisitioned.

The angels have been shot down. The Wise Men are in England.

The cow is in Berlin, the ass in Rome,

and the star has been painted blackout blue
⁶
by order of the Blockleiter.

Governments depend on the fact that most citizens quickly accept new rules and regulations. Already France was effectively two countries: to the west and north of the Demarcation Line the population was subjected daily to the sight of armed German soldiers and the rhythm of life was set by the occupation authorities; in the predominantly agricultural Free Zone, most people had yet to see their first German soldier.

In Paris and other main cities, not only was the pre-war roar of traffic absent on the first day of 1941, but so were pedestrians: the French service of the BBC had asked every patriot to keep off the streets from 3 p.m. From five minutes to the hour Germans sobering up after their Sylvesternacht celebrations found themselves in a ghost city during this uncanny demonstration that actually broke no laws and therefore could not be punished.

A rhythm that haunts the sound-track of every film set in wartime France was first heard two weeks later when Victor de Laveleye of the BBC Belgian service used the Morse code for the letter V, which is dot-dot-dot-dash, in his programme of 14 January, asking listeners to display next day a letter V – standing for
victoire
in French and
vrijheid
meaning ‘freedom’ in Flemish. The same rhythm being also the opening bar of Beethoven’s
Fifth Symphony
, the BBC adopted this, played on timpani, to begin its broadcasts to Occupied Europe from 22 March onwards.

On 3 January 1941 Paris University reopened after its two-month closure. Two days later the sound of clogs on pavements rang out once again all over France. With most leather requisitioned for boots, belts and harness for the Wehrmacht’s hundreds of thousands of draught horses, shoe rationing came into force on 5 January, after which storekeepers attempted to convince customers that wooden-soled shoes were actually quite fashionable, with compressed cork a quieter alternative for those who could not stand the noise of wood.

At the top end of the fashion market, in the
haute couture
salons, the spring collections were sparse, each designer being limited to seventy-five patterns. Rochas’ idea of economising on cloth was a daring long-sleeved dress in black taffeta with one shoulder provocatively bare. Belts were limited to a maximum width of 4cm to save cloth. Germaine Grès’ audacity in exhibiting a jersey dress using far too much material for Vichy’s austerity measures cost her license to trade – which was restored only after the personal intervention of Jean Cocteau, Sacha Guitry and a host of other luminaries.

To ease the shortages by recycling, a decree dated 23 January forbade throwing out old metal, paper, skins, rubber, feathers, bones, animal skin and leather, which had to be put out for collection by municipal employees driving horse-drawn carts. Made from traditionally secret and presumably unrationed ingredients, perfume continued to be the luxury present always obtainable by those who had the money: Schiaparelli, Guerlain and the other great names knew a boom after the arrival of the Wehrmacht.

The success of the Compagnons – by January 1941 membership had risen to 20,000 – attracted the attention of the taxman: Dhavernas was detained in Paris for several weeks to explain to the Inspection des Finances where all the money had gone. The coming spring was to see a split in the movement, reflecting the inappropriateness for town life of a daily timetable designed for tents and campfires. The emphasis on physical work in the rural
chantiers
was replaced for the town-dwelling
compagnon
by service to his neighbours, with urban companies renamed
companies normales
– in whose curriculum physical education, amateur dramatics, choral singing and organisation of morale-raising events for the population replaced labouring in the fields and forests.

Depending on the instructors, the level of achievement could be high: producer Michel Richard took his ‘gang show’ on tour with sixty-six performances in the Free Zone and also to Angers, Le Mans, Tours and Paris in the Occupied Zone and 6,000 copies of the Compagnons’ songbook were sold. With vocal training taken as seriously as the other activities, the movement’s most popular choral ensemble was named Les Compagnons de la Musique in September, eventually becoming world-famous after the war, when it toured the world initially under the patronage of Édith Piaf as ‘Les Compagnons de la Chanson’.

January also saw the first flyers produced on a child’s printing set by a group of young people who sought to rebut the political and religious differences dividing the population. For the name of their network of protest they chose the place where an unexpected victory over the Prussians had unified the French people 150 years earlier. The Valmy network’s first slogan to mushroom on walls all over the capital was, ‘We have one enemy: the invader’
.
More successful was the the second, more snappy slogan: ‘Hitler’s Hoover is emptying our country faster than you know.’

On 24 January Paris Prefect of Police Roger Langeron was arrested by the Germans for his unco-operative attitude, and divested of his office. His two successors were to suffer the same fate, because it was virtually impossible to exercise the functions of the office without becoming either a lackey or an enemy of the SD. Yet Marcel Déat, who had been a close associate of de Gaulle in 1935–36,
⁷
was not alone in wanting larger doses of Hitler. On 1 February he launched the far-right National Populaire (RNP), accusing the Vichy government of being ‘in the pay of the Judeo-Anglo-Saxon conspiracy’.

Berlin had been pressing for the reinstatement of Laval ever since Pétain engineered his resignation in December, and finally forced the resignation of Pierre-Étienne Flandin, who had replaced him in the cabinet on 9 February. Refusing to reinstate Laval, Pétain chose as his new prime minister a man whose anti-British credentials were impeccable. Charged also with the portfolios of the Interior, Foreign Affairs, Information and the Navy, Admiral Darlan was in addition designated the official
dauphin
or successor to the marshal. Travelling in appropriate style, on important visits the little admiral was preceded by a special train carrying his own chef and a band of forty musicians,
⁸
but his days as Vichy’s No. 2 were nevertheless numbered because Hitler wanted Laval back in power.

On the cultural scene, Friedrich Von Schiller having been declared a French citizen in 1792, the end of the month saw the Schillertheater company celebrate the somewhat unequal partnership of the two countries with a production of
Kabale und Liebe
at the Comédie Française. It was scant comfort for most people when fish, chocolate, tobacco, clothing and wine were rationed the following month and the French had to get used to eating swedes, used only as cattle-feed before the war. The novelist Colette, whose husband Maurice Goudeket
⁹
was Jewish, kept a low profile during the occupation, but did go public with her recipes for salads of edible weeds, recommending rubbing swede juice on the skin to prevent wrinkles and stitching a layer of newspaper into one’s winter underclothes to cope with lack of central heating. Whether working-class neighbours appreciated her advice to wear gold jewellery for additional warmth is doubtful; the luckier ones bought an over-vest of cat skin or any other fur, and hardly needed her counsel in
Paris de ma fenêtre
: ‘Go to bed. Get the meal over and done with and the household chores finished, and go to bed with a hot-water bottle for your feet.’
¹⁰

Even smart city-dwellers took to keeping rabbits and chickens, feeding them on scraps and taking them for walks on a lead to scrabble for worms and snails in the parks. Birdseed for more exotic avian species was all but unobtainable, so they got eaten. On 5 March 1941 all the oats in the
département
of Eure-et-Loire were requisitioned with the exception of the amount calculated to be necessary for sowing the next season’s crop and an allowance of 3kg per day per workhorse. Feeding oats to any other animal was an offence, the denunciation of which led to a charge of sabotage to be judged by a German military court.
¹¹

To symbolise the unreality of attending school and taking exams seriously with soldiers patrolling the streets with loaded rifles, fashion-conscious girls and boys defied clothing restrictions to create
le style zazou
, which foreshadowed post-war youth fashion, with its over-length jackets, baggy trousers and exotic hairstyles, greased with salad cream in the absence of hair oil. The girls had padded shoulders, making them look bulkier than the boys, and both sexes carried a perpetually rolled umbrella, whatever the weather. They clustered in student bars drinking fruit juice and jiving to swing music, their only outdoor sport being the baiting of public figures like gay Pétainist Minister of Education Abel Bonnard. Nicknaming him
la Gestapette – tapette
meaning ‘gay’ – they greeted him with chants of
‘Gestapette, aux chiottes!’
A polite rendering would be ‘Gestapo gay, off to the bogs!’

The marriage of French bureaucracy and Nazi regulations spawned a million different passes, permits and identity documents, one of the most coveted being the
Service Public
sticker that had to be displayed on the windscreens of the 7,000 private cars eventually licensed in greater Paris. Drivers got used to being stopped for identity and permit checks and booked for traffic violations by Feldgendarmerie NCOs toting sub-machine guns, who came down especially hard on motorists using illicit petrol coupons. Insisting that French policemen on traffic duty copy exactly their less elegant but very precise hand signals, they relaxed only on Sundays, when no private French vehicles were allowed on the streets of Paris.