When Paris Went Dark (28 page)

In a second, even shorter letter to his friends, again addressed in care of a concierge (probably to avoid giving away addresses), he writes, again with laconic sensitiveness:

Hélène Elek was an extraordinary mother. She knew from the time he was sixteen that her elder son was resisting the presence of the Germans in Paris. She had worried but decided that the more she helped him and his leftist friends the more control she could have over his actions. Like any young teenager, Tommy was impulsive, naive, and often incorrigible, and his mother’s presence had given him some stability. He was proud of his Jewishness. Wrote Hélène: “Thomas knew perfectly that he was Jewish. He had learned it by looking at his thing. He was circumcised; I had had it done when we were in Hungary. Not to be religious, but because I thought it was healthier. And then, when he was five, he was in kindergarten in Budapest, and he had to announce his religion. He knew it well.”
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Hélène’s son told her almost everything, stories to make a mother faint. Street stops were becoming more frequent; anyone who looked like a foreigner would be searched even down to his genitals, but not Tommy—he just looked
too Aryan. Elek recounted another story in which he and a fellow underground member were stopped on the Métro by a French cop. His friend was carrying a satchel containing ten grenades. “What do you have in that bag?” demanded the policeman. “Grenades,” answered the young man. “Smartass,” retorted the cop. “Be careful what you say; someone else would’ve arrested you.” Then he let them go.

Once Tommy’s photo appeared on the Red Poster and the name Elek became known to everyone, his mother had to go even deeper into hiding, especially because she began to work more diligently for the Resistance. In her memoir, published thirty years after the events, Hélène pulled no punches. Had it not been for the enthusiasm, as clumsy as it might have been, of her young son and his leftist friends, early resistance would have amounted to nothing: “And I can assure you that it was the left that resisted. I’m not saying that de Gaulle’s call to arms meant nothing; it was a good trick, in effect. But the Resistance was here, right here in Paris, thousands of young seventeen-to-twenty-year-olds who risked their skins every day.”
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For about a year after her restaurant was closed she managed to keep on the move (she wrote that she had found sixteen different hiding places for her family and was about to look for another when the Germans left Paris). She lived almost invisibly in Paris, thanks to the support of friends, Gentile and Jewish, and to her extraordinary sangfroid. She and her family were among those forty thousand Jews who were living in Paris, many with their yellow stars still affixed to their clothes, at the end of the Occupation. Given the zeal of the combined police forces of the Reich and of Vichy, this is an extraordinary number. Much of the credit for their survival is due to the courage of those people, Jews or not, who stayed with, went to the barricades for, and never gave hope up for the Resistance. But what we learn as we study this period and its unknown actors more closely is how diligently, imaginatively, courageously, and successfully young Jews resisted. As a fine historian concludes in her history of Jews in France during the Second World War: “The proportion of Jews in the Resistance was greater than that for the French population as a whole.… [The underground] remained an alternative society that had taken in Jews on an
equal basis and offered them a chance to act without changing any part of their identity.”
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Why had the Manouchian Group rattled the Vichy and German Occupation authorities so much that they worked diligently to paste thousands of copies of the Red Poster in large and small cities across the whole of France, almost overnight? How did a team of about twenty-five persons, most in their twenties, become literal poster children for a defiant resistance to increasingly uneasy Germans? The group was in effect a carefully planned effort by the Communist Party and other leftist resistance groups convinced that there had to be a relentless campaign not only of propaganda but also of organized violence if the Nazi propaganda machine were to be neutralized. The Germans took stark notice.

Of those arrested by the Brigades spéciales, we must note and remember that there were dozens of young women. Without the help of women and girls, the Parisian resistance, no matter its ideology, could not have been as successful as it was. We have already noted that Paris had become a city where many, many young and middle-aged men were in prison, concentration camps, in hiding, or in the underground. Women were holding together households, in many of which there were several children, with string and baling wire. They were often outspoken about the deficiencies in the distribution of food and consumer goods, sometimes taking to the streets to voice their concerns, Germans or no Germans. And they were especially active in underground movements:

Hundreds of women took in Jewish children during the most oppressive years, 1942–44. Pretty French girls would flirt with the Occupier while carrying forbidden stencils in their bicycle pumps; they would smile brightly as they passed the French police with tracts, or even munitions, hidden in their prams under their babies’ bodies or under skirts that made them look pregnant.

Girls were often the boldest when confronted directly, as they were in the matter of the imposition of the yellow star. Many of the Gentiles who confronted the Germans with their own stars, making fun of this ukase, were young women. And they were arrested and incarcerated for months. Françoise Siefridt’s recently published memoir,
J’ai voulu porter l’étoile jaune
(I Wanted to Wear the Yellow Star), reveals the honesty and passion of a nineteen-year-old. On the Sunday morning following the mandated deadline for wearing the bright yellow stars, she and a fellow Christian friend proudly walked down the Boul’ Mich’ (an age-old popular abbreviation for the Boulevard Saint-Michel, which cuts right through the Latin Quarter, on the Left Bank of Paris). She wrote that they were insolently displaying “a magnificent yellow star that we had crafted. I had written on mine
PAPOU
[from Papua New Guinea]. Passersby said ‘Bravo’ or gave us an approving smile. But a [French] policeman whom we had just passed made a sign to us: ‘What if I took you to the station?’ Another in civilian clothes who was behind us added: ‘Take them to jail’; and, as if he feared that the uniformed officer would let us go: ‘I’ll go with you.’… I followed them
without any concern, convinced that after a good talking-to we would be let go.”
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The young women soon found themselves sitting on benches in the precinct’s waiting room, imagining their punishment. A young Jewish girl was brought in with a male African friend who had been insulted by a German.
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The girl had insulted the German in return, and she was immediately locked up; the black man was sitting there waiting to see what would happen to him. Françoise’s father immediately appeared at the station; he was allowed to embrace her but not to speak. By his look, though, she knew that she was in more trouble than she had imagined.

Soon the girls were transported in a Black Maria (police van; the French call them
paniers à salade:
salad baskets) to Tourelles prison, in the northeastern part of Paris, then the official jail where Gentiles who publicly supported Jews were interned. Françoise saw a few other young Gentiles there, too, because they had made fun of the yellow star. Put into cells at first with Jewish girls, Françoise noticed that these latter did not remain long in the cells; they were being separated from their Gentile friends and sent off in convoys to Drancy. On June 20, “the ten Aryans who are in the camp for having worn the yellow star on June 7 are ordered to wear [in prison] the Jewish star, plus an armband inscribed
FRIEND OF JEWS.
”
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Two weeks later, a German officer appeared in the camp; concluding that their armbands were not big enough, he ordered them enlarged. At the same time that she was being punished for having mocked the Occupation authorities Françoise watched as Jews were being brought in for not having obeyed the yellow star edict, witnessing firsthand what many Parisians were ignoring or refusing to see:
namely, that their fellow citizens were being reported, picked up, and imprisoned for ethnic reasons. If Françoise had been a casual “friend of the Jews” before, she was a formal one now.

In prison for two months, Françoise was never told when she would be released; on August 13, she and her Aryan friends were also transported to Drancy. It is unclear why the Germans—or the French—treated French teens this way; after all, they did not want to upset the French bourgeoisie unnecessarily. Perhaps it was just a bureaucratic mistake, but it must have been terrifying, not only for Françoise and her comrades but also for her parents and relatives.

Finally, on August 31, Françoise was freed, after almost three months in captivity: “I look through the windows [of the bus]. Passersby are freely walking. The sky is blue. I’m free! How beautiful liberty is! My God, thank you.”
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So ends her brief memoir. We do not hear another word from her and are left to wonder how her experience affected the rest of her life as a young woman in Paris. We also wonder how her parents and their friends felt.

Obviously, many of the German Occupiers had no sense of humor, which put adolescents at a special disadvantage when they played their careless games; they had no patience with adolescent rebellion, for they were petrified that the shenanigans of young Parisians would infect the apparent complacency of the city’s population. Yet their intolerance only exacerbated the Parisian’s sense of humiliation. Adolescents were doing what more seasoned adults should have been doing, an opinion that only added to the then moribund sensibility of French honor.

In late October of 1944, after Paris had been liberated but before the war was over, the surrealist poet and editor Lise Deharme wrote in a Communist literary magazine about the role of young women during the Occupation. She deftly describes one of their subtlest tactics, which was to remind the Germans that though they may be in Paris they did not control it. She describes those Parisiennes who, with

After the war, many longtime members of the Resistance, and quite a few who had joined only much later, rushed to get out their stories of sacrifice for France during its darkest period. At the same time, former Resistance groups were fighting among themselves about who had done the most, or had been the most courageous, or had visited the most effective damage upon the German and Vichy occupations. The Communist Party, referring erroneously to itself as the “party of the executed seventy-five thousand,” was riven by internal debates over who had followed the party line and who had deviated. As a result, the stories of the Resistance immediately following the liberation of French territory were muddled. Efforts were made by postwar governments, institutions, media, and politicians to attenuate these divisions; the result was instant “legendification” that was not troubled again until the 1970s, when, in order to understand more deeply what had
happened, filmmakers, historians, and novelists began evaluating the contradictory stories of resistance and of collaboration. Doubtlessly there was intimacy, trust, and honor among those who fought the Germans, armed or not. Fear of failing was stronger glue for the group than blood; the death of a comrade demanded that his memory be engraved indelibly in that of his surviving brothers. But such utopian recollections covered errors and compromises, so the myth of a solidified, fraternal, and eminently successful resistance against the German occupation and its Vichy servants lasted a very long time.

If we stop to think what it took to resist an implacable, insecure, yet ideologically certain foe, we wonder why anyone would not just wait it out. Yet the historian Adam Rayski has written: “On History’s clock, the hands moved faster for Jews than for the other populations of occupied Europe. Time for others was not exactly our time.”
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We have seen how the Berliners set Paris on Prussian time, and even on Prussian summer time, thus bringing the French into the temporal current of Nazism. But the historian Alya Aglan and others have argued that one of the major objectives of the Resistance, perhaps even without the participants’ knowing or understanding it, was to bring France—and Paris—back into their temporal normalcy: “The Occupation was lived as a waiting period, a timeless time, and the Resistance was a desire to exist beyond this blocked period. Totalitarianism negates time, but Resistance creates it.… The Occupation generated a fragmented [and thus ersatz] time, with its own temporal density.” One could then read this period—with its constantly manipulated curfews, its inconsistent train, Métro, and bus schedules, and especially its constantly revised daily timetables governing when Jews could shop, go out, and conduct their business—as a struggle over time. The Occupier may have had rules and have been able to enforce them efficiently, but somewhere and somehow alternative temporal avenues had been discovered, and, for a brief moment, some Parisians experienced, through a type of resistance, the liberty that would not be theirs for another few years.

Later, as we sit comfortably in our armchairs, trying to understand why anyone would resist rather than just wait for liberation, it seems unseemly to gauge the responses of those who lived through those
awful years. Once we realize how disrupted and ruined was Parisians’ daily existence; how much they suddenly, almost overnight, had to worry more immediately about those they needed to protect; how much they had to bow before an implacable foe; then who are we to judge? Yet as with any human endeavor, both victims and witnesses of violence want their voices heard. They call for some sort of judgment from us. This is the tension created for any student of this era. The question, then, is not who “gets credit” but rather whether
you
(living in a world that I can only begin to fathom) interrupted or enabled what happened. How comfortable did
you
feel with your excuses? For we, more than seventy years later, hesitate to judge.