When Paris Went Dark (30 page)

At first, as Jacques Biélinky noted in his journal, German soldiers occasionally protected Jews against their anti-Semitic French neighbors if they were harassed while standing in lines or at soup kitchens. At one point, “in order to prevent attacks against the Jewish population of the 4th arrondissement, patrols of [French] gendarmes began to move about the streets.… This impresses visibly the Jewish population, obviously worried.”
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Yet such events were the exception. Jews soon began to realize that with general restrictions on foodstuffs, fuel, and clothing, it would only be a matter of time before they would be at the end of every line. Still, despite the weekly beat of anti-Semitic edicts and laws, life in the Jewish quarters proceeded quasinormally. But Biélinky noticed that he was hearing more frequently about Jewish suicides, about companies asking employees to sign a statement saying that they were indeed Aryan. At the same time, he noticed a “war of the walls,” in which anti-German graffiti and the defacement of German posters reminded the Jews that they were not alone in their disdain for the Occupier. Biélinky optimistically, and perhaps somewhat
naively, noted that, after the November 11, 1940, demonstration on the Champs-Élysées, “the anti-Semitism that had existed in the Latin Quarter before the war has totally disappeared today, and the relations between Jewish and Catholic students (even those on the right) are cordial.”
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Reading between his lines, we see the contradiction: he wanted to be an objective journalist, but he was a fearful Jew, too. He was searching desperately for evidence of an anodyne relationship between Jews and their state enemies. This was a common state of mind for even the worldliest Jews.

Displacement of Jewish residents took place regularly, often without arrests. Claims were put on apartments, especially large, well-furnished ones. The Germans had lists of private libraries, galleries, and art collections owned by Jews. They knew about safe-deposit boxes and items in warehouse storage, and had traced the movement of collections from Paris to private châteaus in the nearby countryside. Large mansions were immediately confiscated. A Rothschild mansion across the street from the Élysée Palace was one of the first.
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When a less prominent Jewish home was raided, it most often was sealed and the keys given to the concierge or a neighbor. Later, movers would come to take away everything in that apartment if the neighbor or concierge had not beaten them to it. When arrested, Jews were permitted to carry away almost nothing; even toys were taken from deported children and left behind, an especially cruel act.

Serge Klarsfeld, the indefatigable historian and agitator for the rights of those taken away as well as those left behind, published in 2005 a small collection of letters and memoirs that contains the woeful depiction of what happened when a man who had escaped the roundup returned to find his home empty. “My throat closed like a watertight door; I ran up the streets, looking only straight ahead; I saw no cops or Germans. Arriving in my street, French [i.e., non-Jewish] women stopped me with compassionate faces: ‘Poor man, they took your wife
and your son. You, you’re probably a French citizen, that’s why you are still free.’ I said nothing; I could not speak.”
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Other Jewish fathers and husbands, who had thought they could outsmart the French police and their German accomplices by staying away from home, would return to their buildings for belongings or a few clothes only to be told by recalcitrant concierges that the apartments had been sealed or that they were forbidden to let them in. Some, coming back a week later, would see large trucks emblazoned with
GIFTS FROM THE FRENCH PEOPLE TO HOME-WRECKED GERMANS
parked at the curb; workers were emptying the Jews’ apartments and loading their belongings onto the trucks. What was left soon disappeared into the concierge’s loge or neighbors’ apartments.

The first large roundups began a year after the Occupation, in the spring of 1941. As we observed earlier, Jews in France lived in or near large cities—Paris (with the most Jewish residents, by a large majority), Lyon, Marseille, Bordeaux, and Toulouse. The first significant raid occurred in Paris in May of 1941 (and netted about four thousand Jewish men, mostly Polish immigrants); the second was in August (especially in the 11th arrondissement), and there was another, in December of 1941—this was the first and only time that a raid was led solely by Germans. Most of the raids, as would be the case for the largest one, in July of 1942, would be organized and carried out by the French police, closely monitored by the Commissariat Général aux Questions Juives. In fact, members of the French, not the German, police performed more than 90 percent of the arrests of Jews during the Occupation. Those arrested in these raids were boys and men ages sixteen to fifty-five, and for the most part they were foreign-born, unnaturalized. (There was always a handful of French-born Jews in these early roundups, though the Vichy government resisted German demands that they be arrested en masse. As the war proceeded, the distinction between foreign-born and French Jews would slowly evaporate.) In general, the detainees were sent to concentration camps spread all over France, in the Occupied and the Unoccupied Zones. Each of these raids, too, had specific Jewish nationalities as targets, identified
according to their home country’s relationship with the Reich. For example, Hungarian Jews were generally ignored until Hitler invaded that country in 1944.

And then, in late March of 1942, the Germans, with the close support of the French police, began putting Jews (and some Communists and underground members) onto trains and shipping them from Bobigny and Drancy to an “unknown” destination in Germany or Poland.
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For the next two and a half years, thousands of Jewish women, children, and men would be sent primarily to Auschwitz but also to Buchenwald, Bergen-Belsen, and Ravensbrück. Until then, Drancy had been a transitional prison camp for those who were to be transported to French camps. Detainees might be released from time to time (after they pulled strings or paid or argued for their liberty); letters and packages could be sent and received, and even visits were permitted. But after the arrival of SS officer Alois Brunner in June of 1943, “a wind of anguish blew into the camp.”
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A protégé of Adolf Eichmann, Brunner was there to prepare the German appropriation of Drancy, which took place on July 2. Brunner forbade the wearing of sunglasses and beards and the receipt of individual food packages (all such deliveries had to go to the central kitchen). Jews were not to look directly at German soldiers or officers and were to push themselves flat against the wall if they met any in a stairwell. Unpredictable violence against internees was the norm. Prisoners who had relatives still “at large” were forced to write them, begging them to join the prisoners at Drancy—or else.

Drancy fast became known not as a final destination but a temporary transfer station until enough cattle cars could be found to load between eighty and one hundred human beings into a space for eight horses. Last letters were sent from the camp or thrown from the trains as they passed through stations on the way. Many began: “We are on
our way to an unknown destination.” It would take months, but soon the word began to come back—from camp escapees, even from some sympathetic German soldiers—that many of the deportees were being gassed right after they arrived at Auschwitz. Disbelief abounded, but soon the immensity of their fellows’ fate did sink in, and though they often refused to talk about it, even among themselves, more Parisian Jews searched for places to hide.

How did news of the camps, and eventually of the death camps, seep into the Jewish community? In the summer of 1941, Jews had been ordered to turn in their radios; as of August of 1942, they were forbidden to have telephone accounts. All newspapers remained under strict German and Vichy censorship, but there were many underground tracts distributed. One that appeared right after the Grande Rafle of July 1942 baldly stated: “We know that 1,100 Dutch JEWS, taken to the concentration camp at Dachau, in Germany, underwent experiments with TOXIC GAS and that almost all died.”
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And the grapevine was strikingly efficient, primarily because many Gentiles, and not a few policemen, helped create it. But who knew what the truth would turn out to be?

Jewish men knew that the police and the Germans were arresting males—rarely women and never children. This demographic selection probably helped to undercut those who had news of death camps in Eastern Europe. Why would the Germans go to all the trouble to round up, imprison, and transport healthy Jewish men just to kill them? They might work them to death, but that could take years, and “years” meant that anything could happen. The Germans cleverly kept the Jewish population off balance, using their roundups to identify certain national groups, e.g., the Czechs or the Poles, and the Jews themselves found a thousand excuses that would permit them to avoid thinking of the worst: “They were recent immigrants.” “They were Communists.” “They were Germans.” “They didn’t have the correct identification.” “They lived in dangerous neighborhoods.” “They didn’t have families.” The excuses served to calm, and many remained, protected at least for a while by luck and their own savvy.
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Lazy or sympathetic policemen, Gentile neighbors who were as alert as they, money to buy off bureaucrats, superbly forged
papers, and even certificates that stated that the carrier did not belong to the Jewish race saved many from arrest and deportation.

Three tales give us an intimate picture of the ways in which young Jewish girls, from three different communities, learned to accommodate themselves to a city under occupation by officials who despised them. In 1988, doing archival research for one of his fictions, the French novelist Patrick Modiano noticed an advertisement that appeared in late 1941 in
Paris-Soir,
Paris’s most popular newspaper. It read: “Missing: a young girl, Dora Bruder, age fifteen, height 1m 55cm, oval-shaped face, gray-brown eyes, gray sport jacket, maroon pullover, navy blue skirt and hat, brown gym shoes. Address all information to M. and Mme. Bruder, 41 Boulevard Ornano, Paris.”
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There in laconic prose lies a sad tale, which Modiano turns into his documentary fiction,
Dora Bruder
. A Jewish adolescent had run away from home, and her desperate parents, already lying low, had to go public to find her, thereby drawing attention to their presence in Occupied Paris.

Modiano imagines Paris as it must have appeared to Dora, an unhappy teenager in a city that no longer provided the cocoon of familiarity and that was threatening to her and her family. The familiar Métro lines might have comforted Dora. When all else is mystery or danger, the predictable Métro might offer a sort of mental emollient. The labyrinthine city beckoned this teenager with its promise of experimentation in anonymity. Not even the stark fear of being discovered by an implacable police force daunted young Dora, or raised the idea, had she entertained it, that her parents’ concern could lead them to danger. It does not take much for a youngster to explore, even irresponsibly: “The sudden urge to escape can be prompted by one of those cold, gray days that makes you more than ever aware of your solitude and intensifies your feeling that a trap is about to close.”
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But this freedom is nothing but a seductive lure, and Dora must have at least intuited that she had been “placed in bizarre categories [she] had never
heard of and with no relation to who [she] really [was].… If only [she] could understand why.”
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We never learn where she spent the months she went missing, but we are moved by the fact that, possibly, she finally might have met her concerned parents again at Drancy, where they all waited for deportation.

In another memoir of the Occupation, the philosopher Sarah Kofman’s
Rue Ordener, Rue Labat
(1994), we read of a young girl, as she grows from the age of about eight to ten, who has to deracinate herself, geographically, ethically, and relationally, in order to survive.
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When her father, a rabbi, is hauled off to the Vélodrome d’Hiver in the infamous roundup of July 1942, Sarah’s mother has to find a new apartment, at least temporarily, until she can get to the Unoccupied Zone (perhaps because there was a two-year-old at home, she and her six children were not arrested). Fortunately, a Catholic friend who lives only a few blocks away invites her and her children to stay there. Soon, though, other arrangements must be made, and little Sarah is left alone with this woman, who lives on Rue Labat and whom she calls Mémé.

The memoir recounts young Sarah’s move from “Rue Ordinaire,” as she called her former home on Rue Ordener, to “Rue Là-bas,” her name for the home on Rue Labat.
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Though only a street or two apart, this distance is psychologically enormous: “One Métro stop separates the Rue Ordener from the Rue Labat. Between the two, Rue Marcadet; it seemed endless to me, and I vomited the whole way.”
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At the cusp of adolescence, Kofman is bewildered, bereft, and frightened, unprepared for the “liberty” that is being forced on her. Immediately, she is thrown into conflict: she comes to love her new “mother” as much or more than her birth mother. She becomes a perfect little Gentile disciple, eating pork and horse meat and breaking Shabbat decorum while listening to Mémé casually reprove the Jews. This sudden, new
freedom, at first scary, then exhilarating, soon becomes suffocating, for now she has two mothers, each asking that she choose between identities: a Catholic or a Jew, French or foreign, young woman or child.

The only times that she feels free are when she walks the streets of the 19th arrondissement or takes the Métro. There is scarcely a page of this memoir that does not have a geographical reference—the name of a street, an impasse, a boulevard, a Métro stop, a
quartier
, a monument. Kofman, remembering a traumatic adolescence, literally “renames” Paris as she tries to buttress, as an adult, her own continuing sense of namelessness, her loss of a stabilizing identity. The names of Paris have not changed; clinging to them helped dilute her unease at having to live in a city under occupation, either by Germans or irrepressible memories.

Hélène Berr, college student.
(Mémorial de la Shoah)

In 2008, there appeared on the shelves of French bookstores a book whose title was simple—
Journal
—and whose cover featured the photograph of a beautiful young girl, the sort of photo that one would give a close friend. The author was Hélène Berr, and through her, we receive yet another new geography of the occupied city. Indeed, her diary entries are so specific about topographical data that one can map easily “her” Paris. There are well over two hundred specific site references in her work—streets, bridges, Métro stations and lines, buildings—which emphasizes how much her sense of freedom depended on her constant comings and goings, marked by familiar names and places. Her diary covers but two years—from the spring of 1942 until the spring of 1944, with a ten-month break—yet it offers its readers a glimpse of how a young person attempted to lead a normal life in an increasingly threatening environment. Hélène was searching, through writing, to transform the threats of occupied Paris into an imagined city, one where she had once been secure and free. It was in the Latin Quarter, among her fellow students, that she felt the safest, even after the imposition of the yellow star. There she intuited that the neighborhood’s intellectual cosmopolitanism could somehow protect her from the tacky provincialism of the Occupation. In the Sorbonne’s amphitheaters, she was just another student. In the courtyards of the Sorbonne, she fell in love. In the library of the English studies department, she answered polite questions of German soldiers. Her friends had conspired to create ersatz “stars” to show their solidarity. She copies verses of Keats to push the Occupation from her thoughts.

Hélène Berr’s home in Paris

Yet she had daily to return home, to an apartment where her father was constantly in danger of being arrested, where the phone rang regularly to inform her mother of another Jewish family caught up in the sticky web of Nazi and Vichy anti-Semitism. The mundane doorbell was no longer a harbinger of pleasant visits; it could announce, heart-stoppingly, the police. “If they ring the bell, what do we do?”
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About a month before the imposition of the “star” in late May of 1942, Hélène came to terms with the knowledge that she was being identified as a pariah.

She is still a Parisian, still a student, still a young woman in love, but she no longer completely belongs to the changed cityscape. After the star edict she notices how people look at her as she walks through the streets wearing her emblem: some are sympathetic and give her a thumbs-up sign of solidarity; others turn away; others look at her
in disdain. She is proud; she is resolute; she is still French, but “out of place.” She has been exiled while remaining in her city.

The Occupation authorities tried mightily to restrict movement in the city of Paris—for everyone. Walking freely might have been the only form of resistance available to those living in a tightly controlled city, and Berr walks everywhere. She also takes the Métro, but there she is reminded constantly of the Jewish laws (once “starred,” she is unable to ride anywhere but in the last car) or of the possibility of identity checks at the exits. Berr not only describes where she goes and why, she details how she gets there, as if she is using Ariadne’s thread to keep her connected to her family and to the security of the apartment. The young girl analyzes her affective relations, but she also hints at something more sinister, a time where all Jews will be caught in the web of self-deceit, of deceiving others, and of feeling less free, “attached” by invisible cords to a plan of movement that will limit their physical and psychological liberties.

Berr lived on the Left Bank, close by the Seine, and she often refers to the river as a place of solace and contemplation. Its continuous, inexorable movement toward the sea attracts her. Its bridges give a weak promise of escape from an Occupied land, though she knows that the Germans are “over there” as well as “over here.” The street—Avenue Élisée Reclus—where her family resided is in one of Paris’s most coveted neighborhoods. Named for a French geographer, the name also suggests the safety that many French Jews sought immediately after the Occupation—a “hidden Elysium.” Quiet and shaded, the road runs along the side of the Champ de Mars, almost under the Eiffel Tower. Its neighborhood is about as far away as one could get imaginatively, if not geographically, from the teeming Marais or the 20th arrondissement, where so many foreign and poor Jews lived. When one walks the street today it is hard to believe that such a peaceful place would not have protected a family from the Occupiers.
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The Left Bank did seem to be less “Occupied” than the Right, primarily because of the large number of
offices of the Occupation bureaucrats in the latter. And, of course, it seemed that way because there was still some security to be found or at least dreamed of in the Latin Quarter: “I walked down Boulevard Saint-Michel beneath the glorious sun among the milling throng, and by the time I got to Rue Soufflot all my usual marvelous joy had returned. From Rue Soufflot to Boulevard Saint-Germain I am in an enchanted land.”
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Berr creates an imaginary map of the Latin Quarter, and as she writes those familiar street names in her diary, she reassures herself that there is some overlap between this imagined view of an unbeaten Paris and the real one, between a “safe” and an “occupied” city, that her “own” map is more real than the actual one. She senses that the heart of the Latin Quarter protects her with its intellectual armature and history, even though Jews had been forbidden to register officially for classes at the Sorbonne since June of 1941. Seeing her friends provided “the only glimmer of peace in the hell in which I live, the only way to hang on to real life, to escape.”
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There, her mind is not Jewish or “occupied” as she sits in class; the Sorbonne is a temporary but ultimately illusory haven of freedom. Berr walks, walks, walks through Paris, as if to imprint her body on the city, ensuring that it remain the same despite the threats that increasingly cloud her life and that of her family. She sits in the Jardin du Luxembourg and the Jardin des Tuileries, soon to be closed to Jews. She runs errands all over Paris, on both Right and Left Banks; she returns almost obsessively to the Sorbonne; she rides the Métro, though she finds it smelly and stuffy.

Her final letter, written from a detention camp on the day she and her family were arrested, is to her sister Denise (who was safe) and says that the event they had feared had finally occurred. It returns to the image of a threatening doorbell: