Voices from the Dark Years (41 page)

Immediately after the occupation of the southern zone, few Germans were seen in Moissac. Seeing men in field-grey walking with Frenchwomen in Montauban and Toulouse, Marie-Rose Dupont was disgusted because her father had brought her up to think of
les Boches
as the enemy, having himself been a POW in Germany 1914–18. In the northern zone, it was a far more common sight. By mid-1943 80,000 French women had claimed child benefit from the German authorities and asked that their offspring be given German nationality because fathered by a German soldier.
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One busy morning a civilian entered Marie-Rose’s salon, flashed a Gestapo ID card and asked to step into the apartment behind the salon to talk in private. She explained that it was let, without saying that her tenants were a Jewish refugee couple recommended by Shatta Simon. The
gestapiste
refused to talk in the street, because it was ‘too public’, and said he would return when she closed at noon. She could not imagine what he wanted, unless it was in connection with the grey marketing essential for running the salon. When he returned at 12.15 p.m. there was still one elderly lady under the dryer. ‘Get rid of her,’ he ordered. ‘I can’t,’ Marie-Rose explained. ‘Her hair’s still wet, but she can’t hear anything with the blower on. What can I do for you?’

He showed her a list with four names on it. The woman under the dryer pushed the hood back and shouted at the top of her powerful peasant voice, ‘Why are you bothering my daughter? Go away and leave her alone!’ To Marie-Rose’s amazement, the
gestapiste
blushed and fled in confusion, leaving the list on the cash desk. ‘That’s the way to treat those swine,’ observed her client, calmly pulling the dryer back over her head.

One of the names on the list was that of a man working opposite the salon, so Marie-Rose hurried across to warn him. He disappeared that afternoon, and presumably so did the other three, but she never knew what it had been about.

Arriving in Marseille on the same train as Oberg on 22 January, Bousquet personally supervised the cordoning off of the whole city, with 12,000 police assembled for a thirty-six-hour
rafle
that filtered 40,000 people through ID checks. Police having passed warnings, only thirty known criminals and Resistance workers were caught and interned in a special camp near Fréjus. To turn failure to triumph, 2,200 immigrants were also arrested, including numerous Czechs and Poles who had fought in the Foreign Legion during the Battle of France. Many were Jewish, and it was no coincidence that the Final Solution’s transport export Adolf Eichman was on the spot to organise their transfer to Drancy. The Old Port of Marseille, a maze of narrow streets and alleyways following medieval street patterns, which both Vichy police and the Germans considered a haven for criminals and
résistants
, was demolished by German sappers on 24 January.

On 30 January Darnand’s SOL became the Milice, backed by the Catholic credentials of politician Philippe Henriot, who proclaimed that recruitment was open to physically suitable men ‘of good will who wish to serve their country’. In a broadcast on 30 March over Vichy radio, he announced that the Milice was to be ‘an order of knighthood implementing the Marshal’s national revolution to give France back her soul’. Defying the open disapproval of cardinals Gerlier and Suhard, the
abbé
Bouillon appointed himself its national chaplain. Honoured with the rank of SS-Obersturmführer, Darnand now had his own army equipped by the Germans training alongside men of the LVF. By the end of the year, it numbered 10,000 men and women with their own training school and newspaper called
Combats.

On 11 February, 210 young Alsatians of both sexes gathered by the calvary outside the village of Riespach. Twenty-three lost their nerve and returned home but the others, armed with two hunting rifles and two revolvers, made it safely through 15km of broken country to safety in Switzerland. The following night another group from Ballersdorf – 12km further from the frontier – was not so lucky. Surrounded by German troops, the eighteen boys returned fire with four rifles. Only one escaped to Switzerland; the others were shot in the sandpit above the entrance of the nearby concentration camp of Natzwiller and incinerated there.
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On 13 February two police officers arrived in Chambon to arrest pastors Trocmé and Theis, escorting them to the concentration camp at St-Paul-d’Eyjeaux near Limoges. After five weeks’ confinement, they were released a few days before all the other prisoners were deported. It is thought that none returned.

On 15 February men coming of age in 1940, 1941 and 1942 were called up for the STO. In the southern zone, one third of them were serving in the Chantiers de Jeunesse, where de la Porte du Theil issued them with fifteen-day leave passes and written instruction to report for STO at the end of their leave. Roughly half of them interpreted this as tacit permission to desert. Resistance tracts proclaimed that going to work in Germany meant living under Allied bombs and that leaving France was treachery. For once the communists and the Church were on the same side. On 21 March Cardinal Liénart announced in Lyon that turning up for the STO was not a duty of conscience, while in the streets posters of the Feldcommandantur threatened ‘pitiless sanctions’ for those who did not present themselves at the recruitment centres and railways stations to catch their trains. One alternative was to find a job with a German agency in France, so 2,000 joined the Kriegsmarine as fitters and guards and 1,982 donned German uniform as drivers in NSKK Motorgruppen, freeing Germans for more military tasks. The Todt Organisation employed 3,000 more in uniform as armed guards for construction sites, where the labour was a mixture of local
requis
, who were paid a reasonable wage, and slave labourers from the east. On 7 October that year, Laval did another deal with Speer, under which 10,000 factories were designated ‘S’ and their workers exempted from the STO.

At Vesoul in Franche-Comté only three of 400 STO conscripts reported for duty; in the Jura twenty-five out of 850; in Seine-et-Loire only thirty-one from 3,700.
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The attitude of many police officers towards arresting defaulters was summed up by Lieutenant Theret, head of the detachment at Paris Gare d’Orsay. He warned his men on 9 March 1943 that he ‘would not find a single STO dodger and counted on them to do likewise as good Frenchmen’.
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The word
maquis
means simply ‘scrubland’, and STO runaways were said to
prendre le maquis
as in the report by Gendarmerie
chef d’escadron
Calvayrac in Haute-Savoie dated 22 March 1943: ‘No-shows for STO are so numerous that only fifty of 340 reported in. Many men have abandoned their homes, their work and their family to take to the maquis instead.’
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From there, Maquis came to mean collectively ‘those hiding in rough country’ and
maquisard
was coined to mean ‘a man hiding in remote country’.

Another expression achieving legitimacy in the Petit Larousse dictionary was ‘black market’, defined for the first time after the law of 15 March 1943 detailed severe penalties for illicit trafficking. As an example of inflation, an egg had cost 1.75 francs in 1941; now it cost as much as 11 francs in Paris – more than a skilled worker earned in an hour. When the two neologisms collided, the result was bloodshed. PCF member Georges Gingouin now effectively governed a remote area of the Limousin, where his printed communiqués, signed in his own name as ‘Prefect of the Maquis’, fixed agricultural prices and banned black marketeering. The penalty for transgression was not a fine, but a bullet. He also used traditional trade unionist methods to slow down industrial and agricultural production in the area, rather than open sabotage which invited reprisals.
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On 20 March Italian Inspector-General for Racial Policy Guido Lospinoso arrived in Nice, backed up by the debonair Under-Secretary of State for Foreign Affairs, former ambassador to the Court of St James Giuseppe Bastianini. The latter had arranged the escape of 17,000 Jews from Dalmatia when he was Governor-General of the occupied province. Lospinoso and Bastianini informed the Germans in Nice that Italy was going to take responsibility for the Jewish question in the south-east because the French were dragging their feet. The truth was quite different. On 21 March the Italian army of occupation received the following instruction: ‘The Number One priority is to save Jews living in French territory occupied by our troops, whether they be Italians, French or foreigners.’

A first convoy of 2,500 Jewish refugees was bussed from the coast to Megève, St-Gervais and other Alpine resorts, where the Italian authorities accommodated them and provided new identity cards. Italian-German relations deteriorated after Lospinoso ignored several protests from Knochen in Paris, and SS-officer Heinz Röthke planned to kidnap banker Angelo Donati, a central figure in the Italian rescue operation. André Chaigneau, the newly appointed prefect in Nice, declared his willingness to work with the Italians, but not the Germans or his own master Bousquet.

On 5 April Vichy handed Daladier, Blum, Reynaud, Mandel and Gamelin over to the Germans as VIP hostages. On 11 April the Vel d’Hiv was packed with thousands of uniformed PPF members reaffirming their loyalty to the party with Hitler salutes in protest at Allied bombing raids. On 15 April, to combat the rise in the prices of goods wanted by the German purchasing agencies, all German offices closed at midday, cancelling all pending deals. Although that day was a Thursday, to get around a ban imposed by the Feldkommandantur of Dunkirk, a memorial mass was celebrated there for René Bonpain, who had been the parish priest in the suburb of Rosendaël. An enormous crowd of believers and unbelievers stood in and outside the church of St-Martin in silent tribute. Bonpain had been condemned for his intelligence-gathering activities. After prolonged torture by the Gestapo in neighbouring Malo-les-Bains, he had been shot with three other members of the Alliance network the previous month.
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In Paris on 16 April 1943 a second agreement was signed between Bousquet and Oberg, with Article 5 stipulating that the Feldgendarmerie would henceforward deal only with discipline and protection of German personnel, while the French police services would take over repression in both zones. Whilst the agreement was being signed, at 4.08 p.m. British bombs rained down again on Nantes. Whatever had been the theoretical target, 600 civilians were sufficiently injured to be taken to the main hospital, where thirty-six doctors and nurses lay dead in the ruins. The total number of deaths rose to 1,150, plus injured who had lost limbs, eyesight or otherwise had their lives blighted.

Also in April the daily ration of bread was reduced to 120g per adult – the quality can be judged by the requirement that bakers produce 134kg of bread from 100kg of flour, with additives that include sawdust. By early summer 1943 green vegetables were rationed, meat was unobtainable except on the black market and 1kg of butter cost 350 francs, as against 250 in May 1942. With salaries frozen at the 1940 level, 71 per cent of Parisians’ income was devoted to food, if one can believe the statistics produced at the time. The Institut Dourdin published its survey of incomes on 5 July: of 2,600 sample households totalling 6,729 people, 83 per cent had more than one wage-earner and more than 30 per cent had supplementary pensions or allowances. The most telling statistic was that the average monthly income was 876 francs, the equivalent of just 2kg of butter on the black market! Deaths from malnutrition, hypothermia and lack of medicine – pushing civil mortalities to 169 per cent of pre-war levels – so alarmed the Propaganda Staffel that it recommended a forced exodus to remove 1 million ‘useless mouths’ from the capital.
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Aperitifs, tobacco, bed linen, shoes, torch batteries and shaving cream had become unobtainable in shops. The money economy was failing; barter became the rule, with people rhyming, ‘The cobbler’s got some ribbon, the hairdresser’s got cheese. Everybody’s got to swap in times like these.’

On alcohol-banned days, known as
les jours sans
(‘days without’), regular patrons at a café or restaurant in Paris ordered ‘my usual coffee’ with a wink to the waiter and were served a black market
digestif
or
apéritif
. Cartoonist Aldebert drew a smirking waiter whispering in a client’s ear, ‘In the soup, Monsieur, you’ll find a whole chicken stuffed with two mutton chops’. People joked, ‘Save paper! Don’t throw away your used Metro ticket, but use it to wrap your weekly meat ration after sealing the perforations, so the meat doesn’t fall through.’
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Behind the jokes was a national propaganda campaign against the black market.

Nobody lucky enough to have cigarettes threw away the dog-ends, which were kept to re-roll for another smoke. Extraordinary
ersatz
tobacco mixtures were sold, the most bizarre being ‘Belgian tobacco’, a concoction of gossamer spider silk said to resemble ‘the pubic hair of Venitian blondes’!
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Real soap had disappeared, and the substitute blocks disintegrated to a gritty paste on contact with water. Workers in dirty jobs had the right to extra ‘soap’, but the repeated queuing to collect it took up a working day, which they could ill afford. No wonder that in July 1943 Captain Flouquet of the Lyon gendarmerie reported: ‘the mood of the population is very negative. People criticise every initiative of the government and listen favourably to English radio. They consider the Germans to be the main enemy.’
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