When Paris Went Dark (20 page)

Sarah’s Key
(2007), Tatiana de Rosnay’s bestselling novel about the weight of memory and unresolved guilt during and after the Occupation, begins with the roundup of Parisian Jews on July 16–17, 1942, known as the Grande Rafle. (The French verb
rafler
means “to collect” or “to bring together.”) As in many novels and memoirs of the period, the sound of police—French police—beating on the door is the narrator’s most vivid aural memory. Trapped in the apartment with her two children, her husband in hiding, a Jewish mother panics. “Wake your brother. Get dressed, both of you. Take some clothes, for him and you. Hurry! Hurry, now!” The little boy does not want to go, persuading his sister to let him hide in their “secret place,” a tiny space under the eaves, its door hidden by wallpaper.

The reader soon intuits the result of this childish scheme: the boy will be locked permanently in the dark hole in the wall as his sister desperately tries to return with the key to let him out. This chilling episode represents vividly one of the subjects of this chapter: the fact that secret and narrow spaces became a fixation of Parisians and their families during the Occupation.

A recurrent refrain of the memoirs written by—and interviews conducted with—those who lived in Paris then is that physical and psychological space seemed to progressively narrow. Whether because of the sight of German uniforms, the closed-off streets, the insufficient nourishment, the cold winters, crowded transportation, long lines—or just the suffocating feeling of being suspicious of one’s acquaintances, neighbors, and even family—the city seemed to be contracting, closing in on Parisian lives, as the Occupation dragged on. The very term
occupation
connotes “taking a place,” and the most compelling stories of this period concern how “places”—apartments, shops, subway trains, bookstores, buses, parks, cafés, streets and sidewalks, restaurants, cabarets, even brothels—were taken over by foreign soldiers and bureaucrats as well as by smug French collaborators. From physical displacement to psychological displacement is not a great leap: once you find that your body is no longer “at home,” your mind tends to feel disoriented as well. Gaston Bachelard, a French philosopher of space and its connection to the imagination, writes of spaces we conceive of as “felicitous,” those that make us feel secure, comfortable, and protected; whereas in “hostile” spaces, we feel ill at ease, threatened, off balance.
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The stories of the Occupation recount the often subtle movement from a felicitous to a hostile environment, not only for Parisians themselves
but also for the Germans who were assigned there or who passed through.

The discomfort that comes from being “out of place” changes the way we comprehend, even imagine, our immediate surroundings. Imagine yourself blindfolded, touching your way through a familiar setting. You know where you are, but not quite. You feel remembered objects, but you run your fingers along others that seem unfamiliar because you have never taken the time before to touch them or look at them closely. You take cautious steps even though you have been down this hallway or around that corner countless times. Your temporary blindness not only slows you down; its very fact causes an almost paralyzing uneasiness. Memory and habit enable you to move, to reach a modest level of comfort, but nothing really seems the same as before. Parisians and their occupiers both felt this sense of spatial, tactile, and psychological unease.
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Another philosopher, the German O. F. Bollnow, has also thought about how important space is to our identity and feeling of affective security. He believes that our humanity is determined by the way we act within specific, lived-in spaces. Man needs room to move, but so do his fellows; this tension is a normal part of everyday life. But it is manifestly and uncontrollably more tense to live in proximity to an outsider, an enemy, or a culturally different group of humans. Habitual, instinctual activities such as stepping out onto the street from one’s dwelling become less habitual, less instinctual. When the individual no longer can take comfort from the predictability of movement, another set of anxieties is created. To illustrate, Bollnow addresses the notion of “narrowness”: “Narrowness… always refers to the prevention of free movement by something that restricts it on all sides.… Man perceives restricting space as a pressure which torments him; he seeks to break through it and to press forward into the liberating distance.”
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Marcel Aymé, a popular writer active during the Occupation, published in 1943 a fantasy entitled “Le Passe-muraille” (The Man
Who Walked Through Walls). The tale appears in a collection of stories that rely on the Occupation for their narrative suspense. The story offers the best fictional, though indirect, description I have found of the frustration and spatial restrictions experienced by Parisians under the Occupation: a person’s isolation is leavened by a desire to resist freely, especially when one has nothing left to lose. The protagonist is a very minor Parisian bureaucrat, Dutilleul, who unexpectedly—and inexplicably; after all, the tale is a fantasy—acquires the ability to pass through walls, no matter how thick. Cautious at first, he only avails himself of this trick when he has forgotten the key to his apartment. But one day, frustrated by his boss, a martinet with a “brush mustache,” Dutilleul terrorizes him by pushing his head through his superior’s wall, threatening that “the werewolf,” as he referred to himself, was going to destroy him. The poor manager finally is taken away to an asylum, and Dutilleul’s job has no more inconveniences. Having, however, acquired a taste for surprising those who never had taken him seriously, our hero turns to burglary, escaping from prisons, and visiting beautiful women in their boudoirs. One day, as he passes into a house where a married lover awaits him, he senses something is not right: “He begins to feel an unfamiliar rubbing on his hips and shoulders, but decides not to pay attention.… On going through a thicker wall, he began to feel some [more] resistance. He seems to be moving in a fluid matter, but one that becomes pastier, taking on, as he progresses, more thickness.”
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At this moment, terror strikes him: he remembers that he had failed that morning to follow exactly the detailed prescription for a medicine that his doctor had given him; he had taken aspirin instead. He slowly realizes that his strangely acquired powers had weakened, and that he would be unable to get through the wall to his lover’s room:

This sense of being frozen within a narrowed space, of being unable to act, of being abandoned, with only the occasional sound of music for consolation, began by the winter of 1940–41 to describe many Parisians, and their number would increase rapidly.

The most prevalent psychological response to this narrowing might be identified as a sort of ennui. Apprehension, limitations—e.g., curfews—interruptions of normal activities, absence of nourishment, and difficulty of movement through the city: these and other phenomena imposed a new sort of boredom on Parisians, who, like many urban citizens, thrived on the actual and implied vibrancy of their city. In her journal, Edith Thomas writes in late 1941:

Malnourishment, unpredictable regulations, conflicting rumors and news reports, the absence of more than a million men locked away in German stalags, suspicion of neighbors—all combined unhealthily, and the Parisian responded by shutting himself or herself down, affectively. Boredom became as much an internally imposed as an externally imposed state of mind—sometimes for reasons of survival. The slightest effort to appear different, especially if one were Jewish or in hiding or a foreigner or a Gaullist or a Communist, had to be
repressed. To be recognizable was to be at risk. Victoria Kent, a Catalonian Republican immigrant hiding out in Paris, writes in her semiautobiographical narrative,
Quatre ans à Paris
(Four Years in Paris):

All those habitual, casual actions that set one apart, that give some variety to one’s life, had to be muted. Spontaneity had to be repressed; generosity reduced.

This was especially hard for parents who had to worry about their children’s inventiveness and their artless attitudes toward official authority. Discussions between parents were muted, new codes invented; an aura of secrecy—and of an undefined danger—became a common atmosphere at home. A child’s casual remark or an adolescent’s insolent retort could bring minor as well as serious problems to his or her family. Children are easily bored, and in a world where boredom becomes a daily survival strategy, their own impatience and frustration intensify. And, of course, their enforced social isolation brings an even more unnatural atmosphere to their families and neighborhoods. For youngsters the Occupation seemed unnecessarily, inexplicably restrictive; for their parents, living in the city took on aspects of uncanniness.
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Thanks to those who had permanently left the city, either willfully
or not, a large number of beautiful apartments were available during the early months of the Occupation. The middle-class Jamets (unrelated to Fabienne, the bordello madam) had the good fortune to find themselves in a spacious apartment on the Rue Vavin, in the 6th arrondissement. As we observed earlier, Dominique Jamet recalled that as an intelligent but naive young boy—Gentile and thus less personally threatened by the occupier—he was still aware of a changed Paris. For example, he wrote with amusement about the public idolatry of Philippe Pétain:

Not only in private residences but also in public sites and on the very symbols of the French state, the venerable warrior fixed his starkly blue eyes on his nervous subjects. A new watchfulness, with its passwords—
“Êtes-vous plus français que lui?”
(Are you more French than he?)—became part of the social negotiations of daily urban life. Pétain’s image symbolized the moral surveillance that was endeavoring to turn Paris into a bourgeois
ville de province.
A visual vocabulary of the newly occupied Paris (of which Pétain and the Vichy government were part) had suddenly imposed itself.

Dominique Jamet remembers that after the shock of the defeat and the initial occupation, he felt, as a youngster, that

The quarters of Paris, geographically close, had become separated in the imagination. The young Jamet speaks of familiar neighborhoods as if they were somewhere in eastern Europe—names he recognizes, places he may have visited before the Occupation, are now only distant Métro stops on a map: