Voices from the Dark Years (57 page)

Vichy, however, was not liberated until 26 August. Six days after Pétain’s forced departure, Xavier Vallat was the last cabinet minister left in the Hôtel du Parc, deserted apart from him and a small detachment of guards on the ground floor. Limping next door to the Majestic for lunch, Vallat saw French flags being hastily removed from the façade – a measure of prudence sparked by rumours that a German column was heading that way. About 4 p.m., standing on the balcony of his office, Vallat watched demonstrators in the street chanting
‘Vive de Gaulle!’
while a sad little cluster of Pétain’s faithful quietly intoned the anthem ‘
Maréchal, nous voilà!
’
¹³

N
OTES

  
1.
  L. Chabrun et al.,
L’Express
, 10 October 2005.

  
2.
  Thornton,
The Liberation of Paris
, p. 146.

  
3.
  From the French for ‘tank’, which is
char d’assaut
.

  
4.
  Laval,
Unpublished Diary
, p. 175.

  
5.
  The French title is
Huit Clos
.

  
6.
  Personal communication with the author. Name of informant changed.

  
7.
  Personal communication with the author.

  
8.
  Letter from police commissioner to his superior in Toulouse dated 7 December 1944, quoted in Boulet, ‘Histoire de Moissac’, p. 155.

  
9.
  Police report dated 27 December 1944, quoted in Boulet, p. 155.

10.
  Interview with the author.

11.
  Nossiter,
France and the Nazis
, pp. 52–5, 70.

12.
  G. Penaud,
Histoire Secrète de la Résistance dans le Sud-ouest
(Bordeaux: Éditions Sud Ouest, 1993), pp. 245–62.

13.
  Nossiter,
The Algeria Hotel
, pp. 217–18.

24

A C
ARPET
OF
W
OMEN
’
S
H
AIR

Though Wehrmacht communications were almost non-existent in France on the evening of 24 August, fortunately the French telephone system was still working in Paris, enabling Von Choltitz to take a call from the local Luftwaffe commander, who had been ordered to bomb the capital.

‘By daylight, I presume?’ Von Choltitz queried.

‘That’s too dangerous. It’ll be by night.’

‘In that case, you’ll miss the targets.’ Von Choltitz knew the lines were monitored by the Gestapo. ‘I’m not going to have my soldiers killed by German bombs, so I’ll have to withdraw them. Will you accept responsibility for that?’

The answer was a categorical,
‘Nein, Herr General!’

On such a slender thread hung many lives on the final night of the German occupation of Paris. Next morning a Free French army lieutenant entered Von Choltitz’s room and asked if he would order the ceasefire. Relieved that his lonely mutiny was over, the last military governor of Paris replied without quibbling over their difference in rank: ‘Since you are already in my bedroom, it’s a bit late for that.’

Escorted outside, the small party of German officers suffered catcalls from civilians in rue de Rivoli before being ushered into a Red Cross van and driven to the Préfecture de Police. Expecting to be shot, Helmut Rademacher was surprised to find his captors polite and correct. In return, he agreed to accompany a Free French officer in uniform to a number of strongpoints where Wehrmacht personnel were still holding out, since there was no other way to cease their resistance.

There were actually two surrender protocols signed in Leclerc’s temporary HQ, a draughty little office at the Gare Montparnasse. On the first, he insisted that, as senior officer present, his signature covered all French forces. With an eye to history, Rol and Kriegel-Valrimont argued that Rol was commander of all FFI units in Greater Paris and not Leclerc’s subordinate. To avoid the danger of their men refusing to cease fire, Leclerc signed a second copy of the document below Rol’s signature.

Predictably, there were some incidents when unarmed Germans were attacked and killed after surrendering. In the worst, a grenade was thrown into a column of prisoners near the Place de l’Étoile, after which a lone machine gun mowed down several survivors. At 4 p.m. de Gaulle was driven into Paris in an open-topped car and spent the night in the War Ministry, where the office out of which he had walked as Under Secretary for War in May 1940 was as he had left it, right down to the names on his internal phone buttons.

His walkabout next day down the Champs Elysées defied sniper fire from rooftops. The official line was that this was the work of German stay-behinds. In fact, some
miliciens
reckoned they had nothing to lose by a ‘heroic last stand’, and on 29 August nine of them were lined up and shot without trial in Paris’ Roman amphitheatre by the Hotel Lutetia. However, since the main bursts of firing on the day of the walkabout were co-ordinated at 5 p.m. on the Place de l’Étoile, the Hôtel de Ville and Place de la Concorde,
¹
it was widely accepted that the snipers were PCF hardliners deterring the population from going into the streets to manifest support for de Gaulle as enthusiastically as they had cheered Pétain sixteen weeks earlier. The ploy succeeded.

At Troyes prison in central France, detainees tapped out on the heating pipes ‘American tanks are in Paris!’ But the SS guards continued like automata calling out the names of men to fill their last remaining truck, driven to the peaceful fields of Creney just outside town, where they were machine-gunned before their killers returned for another insane ‘selection’. Hostage Roger Bruge bade farewell to the men in his cell one by one as they were taken away, leaving him alone. When the footsteps returned and his cell door was thrown open, he braced himself. But this was no guard. In the corridor stood a volunteer firemen and a blonde girl, who hurried him away. In the confusion of people running along the corridors, a distraught man caught up with them and asked for news of his brother.

‘Taken away an hour ago,’ Bruge replied.

‘Hurry,’ said the blonde girl. ‘They may come back.’

The SS returned just after the last prisoner had fled, but forty-nine still-warm bodies lay in the fields at Creney.
²

On August 30 ‘Madame Robert’ saw the first US troops arrive in Villiers-Adam. Disappointed that they were not English or French, she hurried to greet them, but the sole fell off one of her worn-out shoes. Hobbling back into the house, she re-emerged to embrace an American officer, who was relieved to find someone who could speak English and he told the villagers through her to take down homemade Allied flags hung at their windows, in case a German unit chanced through, as the front was still very fluid. Sweets for the children and cigarettes for the adults from the soldiers were reciprocated with fruit from the villagers and well water to drink. There had been no piped water for days, nor electricity, so this was the first ‘Madame Robert’ heard about the liberation of Paris on 25 August. The last candles having been used up long since, people went to bed at nightfall as usual.

Life for ‘Madame Robert’ changed, as did her identity, when a British officer walked up the garden path and introduced himself as Victor Rothschild, whom she had known as a child. Freshly arrived as British ambassador in Paris, Duff Cooper had asked him to ‘drop in’ and tell her it was safe to return to the capital. After travelling back in her old clothes and shoes on a train crowded with refugees, life resumed pretty much where it had left off in June 1940 the moment she walked into the de Rothschild mansion on Avenue Marigny and she became the elegant Madame Cahen D’Anvers again. Even those lucky enough to be invited into a de Rothschild residence had to wait until Saturday for a bath, because there was no hot water for anyone on other days. Her greatest joy was the reunion with her daughter Renée and granddaughter Françoise. After a journey of thirty-six hours from Montauban, which included crossing the river at Tours on a temporary footbridge because both road and rail bridges over the Loire had been destroyed, they brought the news that no one in the immediate family had been killed or deported during the occupation, although many other relatives were dead.
³

Back in Moissac after nearly two weeks’ confinement in Lauzerte, Marie-Rose Dupont was interrogated violently by FFI men hunting a
collabo
who had gone to ground. Unable to tell them anything, she emerged with cuts and severe bruising on her legs from blows with the butts of their rifles. On the Sunday – exactly two weeks after the liberation of the town – she and three other female detainees were taken out of the
collège
and led through the streets to the square in front of St Catherine’s church, where a wooden dais had been erected. Praying that none of her family was there, Marie-Rose stared straight ahead as she was led through the large crowd waiting to see the fun.

A colleague of hers who ran a barbershop in the town was supposed to shave the women’s heads, but could not bring himself to do this to Marie-Rose, with whom he had been at school. Unable to look her in the face, he handed the clippers to one of the FFI men, who did not know how to handle them. Her public humiliation was thus clumsy and painful as she tried to block out the ugly noise of the crowd’s insults by praying to the Virgin Mary. Keeping her eyes raised to the sky, she avoided looking at the people below, but recalls that one of the girls on the dais was an 18-year-old prostitute from a local
maison close.
Since, in general, whores were not troubled, presumably this girl’s crime was to have fallen in love with a German client. It is interesting that well-connected Madame Delmas, at whose
dîners dansants
Marie-Rose had met Willi, was denounced neither then nor later.
⁴

Armed FFI men roughly bundled the women off the platform and onto the back of a flatbed truck with two armed guards. Their shame was then paraded around Moissac for two hours, the klaxon blaring to attract maximum attention. For the same reason, the driver made a long halt outside the hairdressing salon, where a number of Marie-Rose’s clients were watching. None of them showed what they were thinking, but the mild-mannered little music teacher who had taught her in the
collège
came up to the truck and took both her hands in his. Ignoring the FFI men and the crowd staring at them, he said,
‘Courage! Ça va bientôt se terminer’
(‘Bear up, it’ll soon be over’).

It was his sympathy that broke the dam of her self-control. Tears streaming down her face, Marie-Rose was driven away with the other shorn women and again locked up in the
collège.
A guard she knew told them their ordeal was over and they would soon be released. Neither of her parents came to visit Marie-Rose, but her brother brought food several times during the next four days’ confinement. At 6 a.m. one morning, the women were released, the time being chosen because few people would be in the streets. Setting out to walk the few miles back to her parents’ home, Marie-Rose was given a lift by a Spanish refugee who had lived in Moissac since the civil war. On the way, he tried to comfort her with the reflection that most people soon forget everything, both the good and the bad.

For a week she dared not set foot outside, but then courageously decided that the first step in restarting her life was to make herself a wig and get back to work. As she says, ‘I was lucky. At least I knew how to do that for myself.’ Reopening the salon, she found that far from losing customers, all the regulars came back as though nothing had happened and a whole crop of new customers booked appointments as a tacit gesture of sympathy from the women of the town.
⁵