When Paris Went Dark (55 page)

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I was especially fortunate to be offered a collection of high school notebooks filled with newspaper clippings, drawings, and photographs. The young student who kept this journal, Philippe Lemaire, was meticulous in following the trajectory of the war as the Germans were pushed back home.

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In interview after interview, I would first be told, without fail, about how cold it was in Paris in the early 1940s, how large apartments became smaller as rooms were closed off, how few public spaces—cafés, churches, offices—were adequately heated. When I began to wonder if this was just a strategy to keep from talking about more controversial topics, an interlocutor retorted: “Being cold and hungry often pushes other considerations—political, ideological—to the side.”

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In Jean-Pierre Melville’s captivating film about the French resistance,
L’Armée des ombres
(Army of Shadows, 1969), there is a long scene that takes place inside one of these compartments within a cold apartment.

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Aside from the Métro lines, there were more than two thousand kilometers of sewers and underground caverns (most left over from centuries of limestone mining) underneath Paris; these places could be reached through more than five thousand entrances. During the first half of the century, many of the caverns had even been major mushroom-producing farms. Many had been mapped and were known; others were secret, forgotten, or had never been discovered. Today, Parisian police still keep an eye on these underground paths and rooms, for young people use them as art colonies, movie theaters, performance spaces, and places to smoke, drink, dance, and do other interesting stuff.
Cataphiles
(cave lovers) of all types roam these spaces, which were not unknown to the Germans: they used them for storage, just as the Resistance used them to hide their meager arms supplies. For example, between September of 1941 and March of 1942, German and French police said they found thousands of revolvers and rifles and even nineteen machine guns in subterranean Paris. As in Hugo’s
Les Misérables
(1862), those seeking safety took to the underground, either surreptitiously or legally, this time on the Métro.

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The Freemasons threatened the Nazi regime because they were believed to be heavily influenced by Anglo-Saxon values, defenders of a bourgeois parliamentary democracy, and adversaries of the Catholic Church (and thus of any totalitarian regime). They counted among their membership, especially in Germany and eastern Europe, where they were very strong, influential Jewish intellectuals and financiers. Right-wing adherents believed, without a doubt, that Masons were part of a plot to destroy Christian “democracy.” Jehovah’s Witnesses, of course, admit to no temporal power higher than God and his Son.

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Amusingly, the
Wegleiter
gives a positive review of this subversive film. Calling it a
policier
(detective story), the reviewer writes that the anonymous letters “are amusing unless one is the target!… The ending is surprising and very satisfying!” See Laurent Lemire, ed.,
1940–1944 Der Deutsche Wegleiter
(Paris: Alma, 2013), 119.

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I have endeavored to capitalize “resistance” whenever the term refers to the organized, quasimilitary opposition to the Occupation by French irregulars. I do not capitalize it when I am referring to the concept itself or to those who were not part of a formally recognized group. Many of the sources I cite do not make these distinctions, and, indeed, I occasionally slip up, too.

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In fact, until 1944, the Free French themselves referred to the combination of guerrillas and nonviolent members of resistance movements as
une armée secrète,
changing the name later to Forces françaises de l’Intérieur (the FFI, or Fifis).

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The best known of these reprisals was the massacre in June of 1944 of almost all the residents of Oradour-sur-Glane, in south-central France, and the destruction of the village itself. Das Reich, a division of SS soldiers rushing north to Normandy after the D-day invasion, reacted to suspected Resistance actions by rounding up, mowing down, and burning alive 642 men, women, and children; only five inhabitants escaped to tell the story. The new town was not rebuilt on the site of the martyred one but next to it; the destroyed village stands today as an official state monument to victims of Nazi war crimes.

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At the end of the nineteenth century, it was known especially for its neurological institute, the place where Jean-Martin Charcot, the creator of modern psychiatric research, practiced and where Freud studied as a young man. It is known today as the hospital in which Princess Diana died after being rushed there from her accident, which took place farther west, on the Seine
autoroute
. Josephine Baker also died there of a stroke in 1975.

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The young French “colonel” would be killed in a mine-clearing accident in Alsace-Lorraine in 1945.

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This was an especially trying time for the party, founded in France in 1920. It had gained support during the 1920s and early 1930s and was an important and an active participant in the leftist
Front populaire
government (1936). Many of its members had gone to Spain to fight alongside the Republicans against Franco’s coup d’état. They were well organized, many with battle experience, but Stalin’s Machiavellian pact with Hitler had sidelined them during the early days of the Occupation.

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Its sister lycée for girls, Jules-Ferry (where the diarist Berthe Auroy had taught), was a few blocks away. The kids would meet midway, on the Boulevard de Clichy, for their rendezvous.

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Jacques Lusseyran was finally arrested in 1943 and sent to Buchenwald. He survived there mainly because of his knowledge of the German language and, strangely enough, his blindness, which separated him from the harsher sections of the camp. He was liberated in 1945.

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After Germany attacked the USSR in June of 1941, the French Communist Party no longer felt bound by the German-Soviet Pact of August 1939; in fact, Moscow ordered their French comrades to set up an armed resistance to the German Occupation of France. And they were ready and eager to do so.

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There were a substantial number of black residents in Paris at the time. Some were American veterans of World War I who had stayed on rather than return to the Jim Crow atmosphere in the United States. And there were many West Africans coming from French colonies on that continent. The Germans despised people of African descent; they casually shot African members of the French army and initiated regulations against them even before they got around to doing the same against the Jews.

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The young assassin almost escaped German incarceration after June of 1940. French police spirited him off to the Unoccupied Zone, but he was betrayed by a Vichy sympathizer, turned over to the Germans, and taken to Berlin, where a show trial was prepared. For reasons that are still unclear, the trial was forgone, and Grynszpan disappeared into the “night and fog” of the Reich’s bureaucracy. Some think he survived the war, but that is most likely a myth. An informative book by Jonathan Kirsch,
The Short, Strange Life of Herschel Grynszpan
, gives a formidable narrative history of this complex and important episode.

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Increasingly studied, these French camps played important roles during the late 1930s, when they were used for Spanish refugees, and during the war, when they were used first for German nationals and then for enemies of the Vichy regime, including Jews. Some of the best-known camps were at Beaune-la-Rolande, not far from Paris, and in the south, at Gurs, Rivesaltes, and Les Milles. The most notorious was at Drancy, outside Paris, which was eventually requisitioned by the Germans.

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After his name had been published in a clandestine newspaper, Montandon was attacked by
résistants
in his home in early August of 1944. Wounded, he was transferred to Germany, where he most likely died of a combination of cancer and the wounds.

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On his return to Paris after the war, the Baron Élie de Rothschild asked his maître d’hôtel (chief butler) who had visited the German residents of his home while he was a prisoner of war: “The same ones who came when you were here, monsieur le Baron.”

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At first they were put into third-class cars with seats. This did not last long, and cattle cars soon replaced those.

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Brunner has been the target of Nazi hunters ever since the war. Like Eichmann, he escaped from the Allies and wound up in Damascus, Syria, where he was afforded protection until his (putative) death.

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Kofman’s memoir is all the more poignant because she took her own life at the age of sixty, soon after having written it. A brilliant teacher and philosopher, she most likely still felt deep guilt at having survived by rejecting her birth mother and the traditions of her rabbi father.

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The street names are, coincidentally, quasihomonyms of
ordinaire
(ordinary) and
là-bas
(over there).

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As fortune would have it, the short avenue was the address also of the famous playwright, actor, and director Sacha Guitry, who was among those French artists, including Jean Cocteau, closely associated with the Germans and their Vichy collaborators.

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In order to avoid distribution problems, the Germans in Belgium had used a
J
for both the French
Juif
and the Flemish
Jood
, thereby having to print only one model of star. One is always amazed at the German knack for bureaucratic precision and efficiency.

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Annette’s thirty-four-year-old mother would be deported and killed before two months had passed.

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It is just plain luck that the correspondence exists. First, Sophie’s mother fortunately kept copies of her own letters to France as well as her daughter’s originals. Sophie’s older brother wanted the whole correspondence destroyed after the war in order to prevent young Gerard, who had escaped arrest and immigrated to the United States, from being wounded by the memory of his ordeal. But Sophie’s younger sister, living in Sweden, intervened, and Caspary, an accomplished medieval historian, spent the last years of his life annotating the correspondence, which proved to be a consolation to him as a survivor. I am grateful to Robert Weil for offering me this remarkable manuscript, and for encouraging me to write about it.

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Caspary also remembered that two years later, after the war, before he left for exile in the States, he returned to thank the principal for having stood by him. But “he was quite angry with me that I was leaving France”—that Caspary was not returning a patriotic Frenchman’s kindness with loyalty to the nation. Such a country and such an accusation must have seemed strange to that sixteen-year-old boy.

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In 2012, the city of Paris organized an exhibition, with the help of the Mémorial de la Shoah, called
C’étaient des enfants
(They Were Children). The stunning thoroughness of the Occupier at rounding up, imprisoning, transporting, and murdering French and non-French Jewish children (and many had been born in France, though of foreign parents) made the exhibition mesmerizing and completely dispiriting. Some of the anecdotes I recount come from the catalog for the exhibition, edited by Sarah Gensburger (see bibliography for details).

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Perhaps as many as ten thousand Jews, especially children, escaped this roundup; they just happened to be out or were hidden by Gentile Parisians or other Jews and later moved out of Paris into the countryside. Also, those who had children less than a year old or who were pregnant, were, strangely enough, exempted.

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The Mémorial de la Shoah in Paris is found on the Rue Geoffroy l’Asnier, in the Right Bank area known as the Marais. On entering the memorial, one passes by marble slabs engraved with the names of all those Parisian Jews who were deported between 1942 and 1944. Running your fingers across those marks, it is impossible to avoid seeing the birth dates of the victims: 1936, 1937, 1939, 1940, and 1941. For the extant letters of those who wrote from the arena, see Taieb and Rosnay,
Je vous écris du Vél d’hiv.

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A quite melodramatic film about the Grande Rafle by Roselyne Bosch was made in 2010.
La Rafle
has some startling improvised sequences filmed at a re-created Vélodrome d’Hiver.

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The best-known Vichy official who went over to the other side was, of course, the fourth president of the French Republic, François Mitterrand, whose “confession” of his Vichy activities (he was minister of prisoners of war) cast a shadow over the last years of his presidency.

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One of France’s most engaging social critics, Pierre Bayard, has written a fascinating analysis of what might have been necessary for the average Gentile Frenchman to begin immediately resisting the Germans:
Aurais-je été résistant ou bourreau?
(Would I Have Been in the Resistance or an Executioner?, 2012).