When Paris Went Dark (29 page)

How often was the above question asked by Jewish children aware of how anxious, protective, and suspicious their parents had become after June of 1940? At this time, there were about three hundred thousand self-identified Jews in France. About half of them, at least at first, lived in the northern, Occupied Zone, but soon tens of thousands began immigrating to the southern, Unoccupied Zone. European, North African, and Middle Eastern Jews had seen the capital of France as a “new Jerusalem” since 1791, when the Assemblée nationale had given them full civil rights, later confirmed, though with occasional bureaucratic hiccups, by Napoleon I. Beginning with the enormous political upheavals of the mid-nineteenth century across Europe, Jews from eastern Europe, and many from the Ottoman Empire and later Turkey and the Levant, sought France as a refuge. Some came because they tired of the official anti-Semitism, the pogroms, and the lack of economic opportunity in their homelands. Others came because of their progressive political beliefs. Of course, millions had to remain in Poland and Russia, in ancestral shtetls, villages, small towns, and large cities.

By 1939, two-thirds of the Jews in France lived in or around Paris.
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They were not a homogeneous group. Some had become so assimilated that they barely remembered they were Jewish. These generally lived in the western part of Paris, in the 8th, 16th, and 17th arrondissements; if they practiced Judaism at all, it was only on the high holidays. Others were highly observant and tended to settle in the Saint-Paul quarter, a quite poor area of the Marais, just a few blocks from the city hall. Jews all over Europe knew of this neighborhood, called the Pletzl, Yiddish for “little place.” Soon the 1st, 2nd, 3rd, and 4th arrondissements were chock-full of small, artisanal businesses, many operating from the owners’ own apartments. Those Jews who were more politically than religiously active—consisting mostly of leftists (but not necessarily Communists), Zionists, and others who were strongly anti-fascist—tended to congregate in the 11th and 20th arrondissements, in the former villages of Belleville and Ménilmontant. Cloth merchants and clothiers set up shop in the northern 18th arrondissement, near the enormous flea market at Clignancourt (which is still there today). The Russian Jews generally chose the 19th arrondissement, near Montmartre. All these districts, with the exception of those in the richer western quarters, were centers of low-rent, decaying, badly serviced buildings, where large families shared small apartments and where each ethnic group could hear the languages that it had brought from home: among them Ukrainian, Russian, Armenian, Polish, Yiddish, Czech, Hungarian, and German. Dozens of newspapers were available in these languages as well. Sixty percent of Jewish immigrants were artisans and craftsmen who worked from their homes and who often had carts that they pushed or pulled throughout the city.

By the late 1930s, Jews knew to keep their heads down, even before the Germans had arrived. “If we keep quiet,” they seemed to intuit, “we may just be ignored.” In November of 1938, a year before the invasion of Poland, a young Polish-German illegal immigrant blew apart the shield of anonymity that French Jews were using to hide under. Angry that Germany had deported his parents back to Poland, where they were put into camps, seventeen-year-old Herschel
Grynszpan walked into the elegant German embassy on the Rue de Lille, right behind the Gare d’Orsay, on the Left Bank. Surprisingly, he was not stopped or searched. Entering the building with confidence, he was shown upstairs to talk with one of the three legation secretaries, the young Ernst vom Rath. Vom Rath asked how he could help, at which point Grynszpan pulled from his pocket a small pistol, which he had purchased that day, and fired five times. Grynszpan was immediately grabbed by German diplomats and brought to the street, where he was handed over to the French police without a struggle. In the car on the way to their station, he calmly offered: “I have just shot a man in his office. I do not regret it. I did it to avenge my parents, who are miserable in Germany.”
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As vom Rath lay dying in a Paris hospital (he would pass away two days later), Hitler and Goebbels talked about how to react, beyond making the usual diplomatic complaints. Their response was the largest organized pogrom in Germany before the war, what has become known as Kristallnacht (Night of the Crystal, in reference to the sounds and sights of broken glass). Jews throughout Germany were arrested in large numbers; many were beaten and some killed by Gestapo and brownshirt hooligans; signs were displayed on Jewish-owned shops that declared
REVENGE FOR THE MURDER OF VOM RATH;
thousands of establishments branded as Jewish were looted and vandalized; hundreds of synagogues desecrated; whole neighborhoods ransacked. On November 17, Vom Rath was honored with an elaborate state funeral in Düsseldorf, which Hitler attended. The death of this middling young diplomat had provided the Reich with the excuse to send the strongest possible message to Jews throughout Europe that they would
not be safe under German occupation should war break out, which it did only ten months later.

Parisian Jews were appalled that this murder had taken place in the midst of their city. The event brought attention, especially through the right-wing press, to the fact that there was a large Jewish population in Paris, many thousands of whom stateless, all waiting to create confusion and havoc at the slightest provocation. (One of the ironies of the Second World War is that had the Jews of Europe actually had the economic, social, and institutional power imputed to them by raving anti-Semites, they could have easily thwarted their sworn enemies.) Another tension, too, was evident in Paris, and that was the cultural, religious, educational, and even ethnic differences among Jews themselves. When the first ukases began coming down from the Vichy government and the Occupation authorities, many French Jews did not believe that these edicts applied to them. Impatient, even angry, toward their coreligionists, they would gradually discover that, in fact, to the Germans and many anti-Semitic Vichy officials, all Jews were the same.

With the outbreak of war in September of 1939, Germans and Austrians who had fled to Paris were rounded up by French authorities and put into concentration camps. They were sitting ducks when the Nazis took over and began roundups of their own recalcitrant German compatriots—e.g., Communists, Socialists, labor leaders, and Jews.
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The Vichy government, before the Germans had unpacked their bags, began to issue edicts aimed at putting Jews in their place. Between July of 1940 (only a month after the Occupation) and October of that year, they passed edicts that repealed naturalizations granted after 1927 (thereby depriving thousands of immigrants of citizenship). They regulated medical professions (a foreshadowing of the delicensing of Jewish
doctors), repealed a law against racial defamation, and passed legislation that limited membership in the legal profession.

There was also a law passed in October that defined what a Jew was; another permitted departmental prefects to lock up Jewish immigrants so as to reduce the “excess of workers in the French economy”; yet another removed citizenship from French Jews of Algeria, up to then considered French. In September of 1940, the German authorities (still controlled by the Wehrmacht) published an ordinance defining a Jew as “a person belonging to the Jewish religion or having more than two Jewish grandparents (in other words, who also belonged to the Jewish religion).”
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The Vichy government a few days later published a similar ordinance; for the first time since the Revolution, the French government was officially identifying ethnic groups. Though Vichy took care not to speak of Judaism per se but rather of lineage, the difference was barely noticed by the Jews themselves or, for that matter, by most French people. The German ordinance also instructed that all Jews in the Occupied Zone must report to their local police station and register as Jews before October 20; by October 31 all Jewish stores were to have affixed to their businesses a sign in German and French:
JÜDISCHES GESCHÄFT
and
ENTREPRISE JUIVE
(Jewish business). Between October of 1940 and September of 1941, the Vichy government had published twenty-six laws and thirty decrees concerning Jews.
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The drip, drip, drip of these edicts, accompanied by officially approved radio programs and newspaper editorials excoriating the smothering effect of the Jewish race on French culture, religion, and the economy, immediately divided most Jews into two camps: those who tried to leave, and soon, and those (the majority) who had to stay or could not believe that they were personally in danger if they just followed the rules.

It may surprise us today that by the end of October in 1940 about 150,000 Parisians had docilely trooped to Parisian police stations and registered as Jews. (Remember that these were only those residing in the Occupied Zone, for the Vichy politicos had not agreed to the German request that they do the same in the Unoccupied Zone.) But it is understandable if we put ourselves in their shoes: What other options did they have but to follow the laws of their own government and the
powerful Occupier? The repression was relentless, and escape was far more complicated than it might seem today. Soon Jews were forbidden to serve in positions where they would have to meet the public (which meant that no Jew could be a concierge); Jewish bank accounts were frozen and lockboxes opened. Apartments were seized, requisitioned, and looted, either by the police or by their neighbors. Writes one historian, “By the summer of 1941, according to [an] estimate made at the time, almost 50 percent of Jews found themselves cut off from all means of earning a living.”
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For every injunction or law or requirement Jews followed, another was introduced.

The propaganda campaign against Jews and Judaism raced toward an apogee of hatred. Taking clues from ten years of anti-Semitic vitriol in Nazi rhetoric, the Vichyists produced their own campaign of misinformation: cartoons, posters, photographs, and newspaper diatribes unencumbered by any sense of decency. Jews who at first thought that France would protect them from the Nazi ideology discovered the opposite. In September of 1941, on every Parisian kiosk appeared huge posters that announced a massive exhibition at the Palais Berlitz, in the city’s 2nd arrondissement:
Le Juif et la France
(The Jew and France). This exhibition’s raison d’être was to show the French how to recognize the “racial” characteristics of Jews: they had already heard that the Jews were behind Bolshevism, capitalism, and the British Empire, but now they had to know how to discover those who had changed their names (forbidden by edict in February of 1942) and those who were otherwise trying to “pass” as Aryans. Professor Georges Montandon, author of
Comment reconnaître le Juif?
(How to Recognize the Jew, 1940), curated the exhibition and would be appointed in 1943 the director of the Institute for the Study of Jewish and Ethno-Racial Questions. A hit, the show attracted more than two hundred thousand Parisians (among them, quite probably, were many Jews fascinated with the depiction of their “race” by the Nazis).
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Just a few months earlier, French movie screens had begun showing
Veit Harlan’s film
Le Juif Süss
(The Jew Süss), produced by Goebbels and his propaganda ministry. It depicts a famous Jewish courtier of eighteenth-century Germany as a conniving, manipulative, greedy, and sexually obsessed paragon of his race. More than a million French citizens would view this juggernaut of anti-Semitism by 1944. However, many who went to see it were appalled, and small, unplanned demonstrations, especially among students, occurred throughout France wherever it was shown. Nevertheless, events such as the exhibition and the film continued the deadly drumbeat of anti-Semitism that became part of the weave of French society during the Occupation.

The Jew in France: Vichy Propaganda.
(Bundesarchiv)

The level of anxiety rose as families argued about whether to leave for the Unoccupied Zone or the Italian Occupied Zone, known for its more casual attitude about bureaucratic control of Jews. Should they send the children into hiding? Should they find a hiding place in Paris? Whom could they trust? One of the main problems was that these families were often large; not only did they have children to worry about, they also had their fathers and mothers and aunts and uncles, who were not as easily moved. There is one story of a grandfather who took his own life so that his family would not be encumbered and could slip south into the Unoccupied Zone. For a time, the richest Jews could pay their way into Switzerland, Spain, or Portugal (not all had enough foresight to do so). But what about those without comparable resources? Perhaps they could find a cheaper way, such as someone who could get them over the Demarcation Line, in the center of France, between the Occupied and Unoccupied Zones. But the Germans soon closed off that option, too: Jews were not allowed to move, period.