When Paris Went Dark (34 page)
Read When Paris Went Dark Online
Authors: Ronald C. Rosbottom
Tags: #History / Europe / France, #History / Jewish, #History / Military / World War Ii
The Grande Rafle and its fallout had made everyone—not just Jews—tenser and more concerned about when the war would end. The Gestapo had taken over the security apparatus from the Wehrmacht, and though the latter had not been gentle in their repressions, the idea that the honor and traditions of the Germany army would not serve as a moral brake on the Occupation authorities’ actions frightened even the most uninvolved citizen. Increasingly, it was the turn of non-Jewish citizens to be the focus of a stupendously hungry war machine. In the late spring of 1942, Hitler demanded that some 350,000 French workers be assigned to the Nazi effort. So many German men had been needed for the Eastern Front that almost overnight Germany found itself without enough workers for factories and agriculture. In order to make Hitler’s demand more politically palatable, the Vichy government, under the newly reinstated Pierre Laval’s urging, made what it thought was a brilliant move: to “swap” three voluntary workers for every freed prisoner of war. But the French population’s response
to requests to go work in war-ravaged Germany was tepid, embarrassing both Laval and the Germans, who had agreed to the deal. Estimates suggest that by August of 1942 only about seventeen thousand workers, mostly unemployed laborers and not the technically specialized workers Germany needed, had signed up. It remains unclear how many prisoners were liberated under this scheme, but its failure led to another piece of legislation in late 1942 that would further undermine the Vichy regime’s legitimacy, and would noticeably increase active resistance against the Germans: the establishment of the Service du travail obligatoire (required labor service). The STO, as it was commonly referred to, was in effect a national draft—imposed not by the Germans, who had enacted similar measures in other occupied countries, but by the French themselves. Every male between the ages of eighteen and fifty—and, in an even bolder move, every unmarried woman between the ages of twenty-one and thirty-five—was required to give two years’ service to the Nazi (and French) war effort. The French families affected schemed to prevent the census necessary to identify eligible workers. Whole families with boys in
collèges
(middle schools) and lycées had left Paris for the imagined safety of the countryside, and many young people left on their own to join the
maquis,
the quasiguerrilla groups living off the land. In 1939, there had been more than thirty-five thousand university students in Paris and its environs; that number was cut in half or more by 1942. Hundreds of educators had been fired because they were Jews, Freemasons, or troublemakers, or they had been deported for the STO or had gone into hiding. As a result, the school population of the city had fallen from nearly two hundred thousand in 1938–39 to only about fifty thousand in the spring of 1944. Paris was becoming soulless.
Trains for the east often left Parisian stations half empty. Still, between March of 1942 and March of 1944, more than six hundred thousand French men and women were put on them—not to death camps but to factories, farms, and public utilities in the greater German Reich (which then included Austria and parts of Poland and Czechoslovakia). Many perished while abroad, killed by bombing raids or
felled by malnutrition and exhaustion, but most returned to France after the war.
To take away fathers and sons, many of whom were the only breadwinners for their families, was considered abominably “antifamily” and thus deeply stupid of the Vichy government, which had based much of its “renaissance” of French social culture on “family values.” Not unlike the imposition of the yellow star, this decision forced Parisians of all political colors to consider that the Occupation was no longer to be endured but to be ended. “The time of homilies, [patriotic] appeals, threats mixed with seduction was over; the unruly had become rebellious, [passive] resisters [turned into] insurgents.”
2
And hope sparked, albeit amid an increasing darkness. In his journal, Jean Guéhenno wrote:
June 26 [1942]. We are doubtlessly in the most somber weeks. Germany will have new victories, in Egypt, in Russia, [and] will conquer perhaps all of the Near East. We must have steady nerves. But these victories will resolve nothing. Germany can construct nothing on this immense hatred that it has awakened everywhere. Hitler does not attract, as did Napoleon, even a bit of admiration from those he enslaves. Europe is not bewitched. She watches the increase in the power of an infernal machine that she knows will break.
3
Daily life in Paris was increasingly difficult. Rationing had been introduced early, and the availability of
cartes de rationnement
became a daily obsession. There were coupons for meat, bread, eggs, and other necessities that could be used only on certain days or by certain categories of citizens—children, workers, or nursing mothers. Use of these “coupons” was not optional; they were almost as valuable as gold itself. Just obtaining enough food for one’s growing children, not to mention oneself, could take all day, as parents went from store to store, waited in interminable lines, and often paid people to hold their places while they followed another rumor about fresh eggs, butter, or meat. Parisian babies were being born smaller and sicklier than they had been before
the war. Children’s physical development was slowed, and even ordinary diseases played harsh havoc with their young bodies. For example, doctors reported many cases of chilblains because of the absence of wool and leather for winter clothing. One woman told me of her desperation to obtain some citrus fruit—and thus vitamin C—for her infant. The markets certainly had none, and prices on the black market were exorbitant. Fortunately, she had a relative who was forced to do business with collaborators and other well-connected Parisians, so whenever they invited him to a restaurant, he always ordered tea so he could slip the lemon in his pocket for his nephew. The less connected or less entrepreneurial citizen just prayed that a sudden illness—unthreatening in better times—would not be fatal for their weakened children.
In her memoir, published in 1945, the American writer Gertrude Stein (who spent the war hiding in the
département
of Ain, in the Rhône Valley, for she and her partner, Alice B. Toklas, were Jewish) describes, in her unabashedly inimitable style, the mind-set of the French at mid-Occupation:
And now it is the first of December 1943 and everybody is cross just as cross as they can be and there is a reason why. Everybody well they did not think it but it was possible and they did hope it that the war would be over. Oh dear they say another winter, well but it is always winter in December yes but we did not think that this December would be another winter, we did not think there could be another winter and now it is December and there is another winter of war. And certainly there is another winter, everybody is so tired of having wood and not coal, of eating quite well [in the countryside at least] but always worried of having it all be such a bother and not being able to go out and buy something if you have the money and worst of all well of course it is the worst of all, that it is the worst of all, the worst of all.
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Newspapers, including the German
Pariser Zeitung
(Paris Times), were read more often for announcements about the availability of food
than for any war news, which by then was considered by nearly everyone as suspect.
*
German soldiers, and those French people with available cash or connections, continued to eat well, but the average citizen had to do with less than 1,200 calories a day; as one German reporter noticed early in 1941, “The entire Occupation was [already] ‘a question of the stomach’ [
Magenfrage
].”
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Writing immediately after the war, the journalist Pierre Audiat described the state of the Parisian body in late 1943:
Finally, the wheat harvest having been very abundant in 1943… the daily ration of bread was augmented by 25 grams per day. This “improvement” in provisions appeared derisory given that the situation was getting worse from month to month. The lack of food combined with the nervous tension brought on by [the Occupation] caused serious loss of weight; tuberculosis was devastatingly rampant (30 percent more [reported] cases than in 1939); a general debility was evident in different forms among the population, accompanied often by depression, which expressed itself through conversational pessimism.
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Counterfeit
cartes de rationnement
became, along with the black market, an important source of foodstuffs. The same children who were the most affected by these penuries were often called upon to help cheat or outsmart the system. Besides the continued use of children to cut in lines, adults found that children were becoming increasingly adept at handing over phony food tickets to unsuspecting merchants—and even, on occasion, at forging them. One boy remembered using small pieces of chewed bread to fill the holes in Métro tickets so they could be reused. Another man remembered that, as a ten-year-old, he was always hungry or cold. Fortunately his parents encouraged him to “get by in another way”:
There is almost nothing to eat, and it’s bad.… We are so hungry. We can still buy some food with tickets or on the black market, [where] you can get forged IDs for tickets. They look the same, but the paper and the color are of bad quality. We are afraid to use them.… [But] I am becoming a great artist. I am a specialist in painting the number 7. On the bread tickets, there are tickets for 50 [grams] and tickets for 750.… All you have to do is put a 7 in front of the 50! [Et voilà!] It’s not good to cheat. But we aren’t ashamed. We are cheating cheaters and thieves.
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A generation of children learned that to lie or fool people under certain circumstances would be excused by their parents and, most likely, by their confessors.
But the lack of nourishment was not the only imposition by the Germans. The latter continued their efficient looting up until the last German left in August of 1944. (In fact, many of the escaping motorcycles, trucks, automobiles, and tanks in those last days were piled high with French belongings, last-minute “retribution” for having chased out the enemy.) In 1943, in order to organize, pack, and ship off the loot from more than forty thousand apartments, the Germans, with the help of the Vichy government and Paris police, had set up three huge warehouses: one near the Gare d’Austerlitz, because of its accessibility to trains going east; one in a luxurious (Jewish-owned) mansion on the Rue Bassano, just a few blocks from the Avenue Champs-Élysées; and one in the former Jewish-owned Lévitan furniture store, in the middle-class 10th arrondissement, on the Boulevard Saint-Martin. The “clerks” they used to do the work of receiving, logging in, and organizing the looted items were Jews married to Aryans who had, for the most part, come from the Drancy concentration camp on the outskirts of Paris. There are reports that they occasionally saw their own belongings pass before them; they had to pack up their own picture frames, tchotchkes, and children’s toys as if they belonged to someone else.
A team from [Operation Furniture] would meet the removal [van] at the appointed time.… The
Préfecture de la Police
in Paris…
was informed of each removal in order to take charge of the apartments that were left empty. There were up to eighteen teams working at any one time. The vans’ contents arrived at the [warehouses]—each more or less specialising in particular types of objects—where they were sorted and packed into crates. These then left by the trainful for the Reich. When an apartment belonging to a Jew was opened, it would be thoroughly looted by the [Department of Operation Furniture], who would take away virtually everything it contained, from the largest pieces of furniture to the smallest, most everyday objects, from kitchen dressers to school exercise books, from stoves to books and ashtrays.
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Years ago, a Parisian Jew who had immigrated to New York City showed me the smaller pieces he had recuperated after the war, still with the cataloging marks the efficient Germans had used to record their massive appropriation of even the most mundane loot.
A rich novel by W. G. Sebald,
Austerlitz
(2001), implies that present-day Paris forgets what still lies beneath its placid surface. The new, futuristic Bibliothèque nationale de France on the Left Bank, in the 13th arrondissement, he suggests, sits confidently but obliteratively over one of these infamous depots:
On the waste land between the marshaling yard of the Gare d’Austerlitz and the pont de Tolbiac where this Babylonian library now rises, there stood until the end of the war an extensive warehousing complex to which the Germans brought all the loot they had taken from the homes of the Jews of Paris.… For the most part the valuables, the bank deposits, the shares and the houses and business premises ruthlessly seized at the time… remain in the hands of the city and the state to this day.
*
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The cityscape was also changing. Years of neglecting the facades of
public buildings had given them a dull look; shuttered private mansions and deserted, emptied museums suffered from a lack of personnel to keep these massive buildings in good shape. The use of gardens as parking lots, vegetable plots, and sites for guardhouses had removed much of the traditional joy of seeing another spring beat out a doleful winter. The Germans continued to build massive concrete blockhouses and bunkers throughout the city as well as put grilles and bars in the windows of the hotels they used for headquarters. The city was taking on more and more the affect of a fortress. This did not calm the minds of Parisians, who began to wonder whether, should the Allies make their way to the capital, their Occupiers would declare Paris an “open city” or whether they would defend it down to the last Nazi. Métro stations were closed with more frequency, sometimes for security reasons but also because of the absence of personnel, the lack of repair parts, and sporadic electricity. This meant that the trains that did run were filled to the brim with Parisians and Germans, increasing an intimacy unwanted by both. There were fewer motorized vehicles, including public buses, on the street; bicycles continued to be essential and thus everywhere, though their owners suffered from a paucity of tire rubber and oil. A flat tire or stripped gears could be a major event in the life of a worker or a mother responsible for her children’s welfare.
