When Paris Went Dark (21 page)

The quarters’ names may have had resonance for Jamet, but their physical reality remained weirdly distant and essentially unknown. Paris reverted to being a congeries of villages and lost much of its metropolitan aura. Parisians noticed many alterations to their city but remained distant from its darkest, most inhumane corners.

Narrowing—the constriction of the vital energy of a society—is a hallmark of living under military occupation and intensive police surveillance. Four years is a long time for any society to experience this state of affairs “temporarily,” and the Occupation’s length was especially cruel. There was always the hope that the Occupation would end soon, that political pressure would weaken some of the more invasive measures of the Vichy government, and that the war would come to a close. But when? How long did people have to live that way? This anxiety of longing for a resolution of a state of affairs that was obviously
not
temporary is perhaps the most important component of the concept of narrowing, and the Occupier knew this well.

The Parisian apartment figures prominently in recollections of the Occupation. An apartment was more than a place of expected physical comfort; it was also a site of psychological retreat from confusion and uncertainty. Yet at the same time the apartment could be a trap, and many wrote of feeling closed in there by events and police, always worrying about how they would escape should there be an ominous knock at the door. And there were more mundane concerns, such as how to heat and live comfortably in apartments during a time of enforced penury.

The apartment building has been a site of sophisticated Parisian life since the 1840s; it “embodied the continuity between domestic and urban, private and public spaces.”
¹²
The private apartment, a rather inexpensive real estate investment for a rising bourgeois population, was situated among other such units in a large building or a group of buildings. From the street, a row of apartment buildings presents a facade of regularity and order; Parisian streetscapes are noted for the uniformity of their external architecture, conferring a mask of sameness on a heterogeneous collection of private dwellings. But this was only the outside; entering a Parisian apartment complex brought one often to a “courtyard, carved out of the space where the undecorated, cheaply constructed back walls of up to four different buildings met and were irregularly punctuated by [multiple doorways].”
¹³
Later, elevators were added to many apartment buildings, as was indoor plumbing, both of which enhanced privacy. The several exits and entrances, reconfigured stairways, and hidden or seldom used spaces, often confusing to the visitor or newcomer, make the Parisian apartment building an ideal place to study the spatial anxieties of the Occupation.

A professional gatekeeper enabled the “public privacy” of the Parisian apartment building: the concierge. (
Gardien
and
gardienne
are the current, socially correct terms.) The profession of concierge takes us back to the Middle Ages and the guardians of a castle’s gates. The position soon became a sign of wealth, of separateness from the hoi polloi, and was always held by a male. With the advent of the apartment house in the mid-nineteenth century, it became obvious that a
portière,
or gatekeeper—later the concierge—was needed to help bring some order to the potential chaos of a large, multidomicile building often with dozens of owners, renters, and their staffs. More than any other private figure, the concierge (generally a woman, though men were also guardians) was the person—and face—offered to the outside world by the apartment house. She lived on the ground floor in her own small set of rooms, called a loge, from which she could see and hear, through her glass door, the comings and goings of tenants and their visitors. She delivered the mail, received packages, kept the public spaces clean, let in visitors, acted as nanny, and kept keys to all the apartments. The concierge was the equivalent of a public telephone, a mailbox, a message service, and a counselor. She knew who had late-night visitors, who had money problems, who was ill (and who was malingering). She knew the merchants in the neighborhood, knew other concierges (and thus was privy to what was happening in other buildings), knew children (who often told her more than they should), and was the first person the police came to when they had questions about tenants. The Occupation authorities officially obliged all concierges to help the police. For example, each had to report within twenty-four hours the arrival of a new tenant, identify “visitors” who stayed more than a night or two, and be responsible for removing any anti-German or anti-Vichy graffiti from her building or the sidewalks in front of it. If she did not inform the Occupiers of a new tenant, and that tenant turned out to be a “terrorist,” then she was liable to be imprisoned or worse. Such activities would often unfairly mark her as a
collabo
(popular term for a collaborator).

A concierge’s lodging.
(Pierre Gaudin; CREAPHIS)

Responsibilities were expected of her from the Occupied as well as the Occupier. The concierge was an extremely useful friend for all Parisians to have. Wily, knowledgeable, often courageous in the face of pressure, she was smart enough to realize that her relationship with the Germans had to be proper if she were to be of use to herself and her tenants in cases of emergencies. Stories of the Occupation are replete with anecdotes of good, bad, and indifferent concierges. Some hid Jewish children; others betrayed Jewish families. Some protected empty apartments; others looted them, even moved into them. Some confronted the Germans fearlessly; others collaborated as much as they could. One Jewish girl remembers watching through closed shutters as a concierge across the street pointed out the apartments in the vicinity where she knew Jews lived. Another concierge betrayed her tenants so that she could get into their apartment, rummage through their belongings, and then, when they returned, blame the Germans. Yet another tells the story of a concierge who kept tabs on all empty or emptied apartments in the neighborhood so that she could move her threatened Jewish clients from one to the other, one step ahead of the police.

Hessy Taft and her Jewish parents, recently emigrated from a much more oppressive Berlin, lived in a very upscale part of Paris, on the Avenue de Messine, in the 8th arrondissement, just south of the elegant Parc Monceau. One Sunday, the family went out for a visit, and by chance Hessy’s father told the concierge, who was sitting in the sun on the stoop, “I’ll be
chez
your friend Jacques for a while.” Jacques had visited Hessy’s family often and had always been polite to the concierge, so she remembered him and considered him her friend, too. Within a few minutes of having arrived at Jacques’s apartment, Hessy’s family heard the phone ring. It was the concierge. “Don’t come back, monsieur,” she told Hessy’s father. “They are here waiting for you.” This phone call made it possible for the father to hide and for the family to return to the apartment innocently,
sans père.
Later the whole family was able to escape to America. Hessy just shook her head when hearing about concierges who had exposed or given up Jewish tenants. She firmly told me: “They weren’t all that way; I’m here because one of them respected my family, especially my father.”
^*

Of course, not all apartment houses were the same. Some were sturdy, well-maintained buildings providing homes to middle-class tenants. Others were luxurious, perhaps containing only two or three apartments. Then there were the apartments in poor communities, built on the same principle but much more porous and thus more easily raided. The same opportunities and constraints existed in these buildings as in the others. Proximity bred solidarity but also suspicion. Most apartment buildings in these neighborhoods were deplorable rabbit warrens of false turns, stairs leading to hidden doors—and, as the police became more diligent, specially constructed hidden spaces.
^*
In
any roundup, the French police were especially useful to the Vichy government and the Germans because many of them had grown up in such environments and knew them intimately.

Another characteristic of the apartment was its role as a prospect—that is, a site from which one could look out upon occupied Paris in relative safety. Down on the streets, expressing an undue curiosity—to walk slowly, or to look or stand for more than a minute in front of shop windows or with a group of people, or to turn around in order to avoid the inconvenience of a police control—could attract official attention. Those apartments whose balconies or large windows gave onto the street would permit their owners to catch a glimpse of the city without having to go downstairs and outside. They were frequently used, too, as lookouts for clandestine actions or as sites from which to throw leaflets. On the other hand, the open windows also exposed residents to shrapnel from antiaircraft shells exploding or missing their targets. Everyone seemed to know of a case of someone who, unluckily, had been standing at a window at the wrong time. But watching and seeing what was going on from the relative security of apartments could alleviate the ever-present sense of claustrophobia that characterized daily life during the Occupation.

Apartments and apartment buildings were the scenes of some of the most touching, frightening, and horrifying events of the Occupation. To avoid arrest and deportation, a few terrified Jewish mothers threw their children from windows and then jumped out after them; the sound of pounding footsteps—or stealthy creaking—on stairways provoked panic; neighbors betrayed neighbors, even those living on the same landing. Tales of those who were hiding Jews or downed pilots or Resistance fighters often revolved around apartments and how they could be adapted to the new exigencies. For example, in October of 1943, two young women members of the Resistance thought they were safe deep in the wealthy 16th arrondissement, on the Rue de la Faisanderie, surrounded by Germans living in requisitioned apartments. They met a third conspirator on the street and invited him back to their building, where one of the girls wanted to collect her mail. The concierge told her that everything was okay, that no one had been
by. No sooner were they in the apartment than the bell rang. Suspicious of the concierge’s casual attitude, rather than answer they tried to escape by the service door, but it was stuck, and the two young women were arrested. The young man left by a window, climbed up to the next floor, and then took the elevator down. Passing by the seventh floor, he caught a glimpse of two men in the gray coats and hats of the Gestapo. When he reached the
rez-de-chaussée
(the ground floor), he casually walked out of the building, ignoring cries to stop from a policeman who had been left there on guard; he was arrested at gunpoint a few steps away. Fortunately, many others would evade capture, thanks to the porousness of the massive apartment buildings dotted with escape hatches.
^*

In another episode, on the Boulevard Raspail in the 7th arrondissement, an apartment house was used for a getaway.
¹⁴
Jean Ayrol, a resister, was arrested and taken for interrogation to the Hôtel Cayré, requisitioned by the Abwehr (Wehrmacht counterintelligence). He was led to a back room, where he found three other arrested men plus three guards. They sat staring at each other for hours. Then one of the prisoners asked to go to the toilet, and a guard accompanied him. Another guard left to answer the phone: three prisoners, one guard. Overpowering the guard and taking his pistol, the three men left the room and reached the street through the hotel’s revolving doors. Knowing he had but a few minutes at most to lose himself, Ayrol walked through the first porte cochère he passed, crossed the courtyard, entered an apartment building without seeing the concierge, and, three steps at a time, rushed to the eighth floor—the highest. A curious renter opened the door to her room. (Most Parisian apartment buildings had tiny rooms right under the roof for servants; then, as now, they were rented to students or kept as maids’ apartments.) Without a word, Ayrol jumped onto a chair and pushed open the hatch leading to the attic, where he crouched to hide. But someone had seen
him enter the building, and soon he heard loud voices, barking dogs, and the cries of tenants rousted from their apartments. The door to his hideaway opened… but no one saw him in the darkness, and the door then closed. Soon the noises disappeared, and he waited there, tensely. About an hour later, the door opened again, and this time he saw the face of the building’s concierge, who knew he had to be somewhere. She had been searching for him; taking him to her loge, she fed the young man and let him take a bath. Early the next morning, Ayrol slipped out and disappeared into the sleeping city. This time, an apartment building had been first a refuge, then a trap, then a passage to escape.

The Rue Lepic, in Paris’s 18th arrondissement, where Montmartre is located, rises gradually and sinuously from the Place Blanche toward the hill that gives the quarter its name. A middle-class street, it had a different clientele at night than in the daytime. Because of its bars, its bordellos, its strip clubs, and its jazz venues, German enlisted men constantly frequented the neighborhood. Living on that street, Berthe Auroy, a spinster schoolteacher, kept a thorough record of day-to-day life in Paris during these hard years. She had just retired from the all-female Lycée Jules-Ferry down the hill and had first seen German invaders in the country while visiting Chartres, an hour by car outside the capital. In the fall of 1940, she returned to Paris and, writing with the acuity and acerbity of a concierge watching every move made by her tenants, detailed the German invasion of her quarter.

The small squares and narrow streets of Montmartre had been spared the renovations effected by Baron Haussmann in Paris during the nineteenth century, and one could almost imagine, while walking through the area in 1940, still being in a hilltop village. (It even had—and still has—vineyards.) Cheap rents had made Montmartre the center of the bohemian art world in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The famous rambling Bateau-Lavoir (Laundry Boat), the building where every avant-garde painter from Picasso to Modigliani seemed to have had an apartment or studio in the 1900s and 1910s, was only a few short blocks from Auroy’s apartment building. The area’s artistic,
cultural, and populist energy drew many there to escape some of the rigors of the Occupation, but it also brought together, almost intimately, Parisian and German.