Chapter Five
Narrowed Lives
The Parisian now knows the condition of being “occupied” in a city that does not belong to him anymore and that offers him the schizophrenic image of an environment suddenly foreign to his gaze. Constraints and humiliations, restrictions and punishments accompany this disorientation and the upending of daily routine.
—Jean-Paul Cointet1
Narrowing and Boredom
Sarah’s Key (2007), Tatiana de Rosnay’s bestselling novel about the weight of memory and unresolved guilt during and after the Occupation, begins with the roundup of Parisian Jews on July 16–17, 1942, known as the Grande Rafle. (The French verb rafler means “to collect” or “to bring together.”) As in many novels and memoirs of the period, the sound of police—French police—beating on the door is the narrator’s most vivid aural memory. Trapped in the apartment with her two children, her husband in hiding, a Jewish mother panics. “Wake your brother. Get dressed, both of you. Take some clothes, for him and you. Hurry! Hurry, now!” The little boy does not want to go, persuading his sister to let him hide in their “secret place,” a tiny space under the eaves, its door hidden by wallpaper.
The girl could see her brother’s small face peeking out at her from the darkness. He had his favorite teddy bear clutched to him; he was not frightened anymore. Maybe he’d be safe there, after all. He had water and the flashlight. And he could look at the pictures in [his favorite] book.… Maybe she should leave him there for the moment. The men would never find him. She would come back to get him later in the day when they were allowed to go home again. And Papa, still in the cellar, would know where the boy was hiding, if ever he came up.2
The reader soon intuits the result of this childish scheme: the boy will be locked permanently in the dark hole in the wall as his sister desperately tries to return with the key to let him out. This chilling episode represents vividly one of the subjects of this chapter: the fact that secret and narrow spaces became a fixation of Parisians and their families during the Occupation.
A recurrent refrain of the memoirs written by—and interviews conducted with—those who lived in Paris then is that physical and psychological space seemed to progressively narrow. Whether because of the sight of German uniforms, the closed-off streets, the insufficient nourishment, the cold winters, crowded transportation, long lines—or just the suffocating feeling of being suspicious of one’s acquaintances, neighbors, and even family—the city seemed to be contracting, closing in on Parisian lives, as the Occupation dragged on. The very term occupation connotes “taking a place,” and the most compelling stories of this period concern how “places”—apartments, shops, subway trains, bookstores, buses, parks, cafés, streets and sidewalks, restaurants, cabarets, even brothels—were taken over by foreign soldiers and bureaucrats as well as by smug French collaborators. From physical displacement to psychological displacement is not a great leap: once you find that your body is no longer “at home,” your mind tends to feel disoriented as well. Gaston Bachelard, a French philosopher of space and its connection to the imagination, writes of spaces we conceive of as “felicitous,” those that make us feel secure, comfortable, and protected; whereas in “hostile” spaces, we feel ill at ease, threatened, off balance.3 The stories of the Occupation recount the often subtle movement from a felicitous to a hostile environment, not only for Parisians themselves but also for the Germans who were assigned there or who passed through.
The discomfort that comes from being “out of place” changes the way we comprehend, even imagine, our immediate surroundings. Imagine yourself blindfolded, touching your way through a familiar setting. You know where you are, but not quite. You feel remembered objects, but you run your fingers along others that seem unfamiliar because you have never taken the time before to touch them or look at them closely. You take cautious steps even though you have been down this hallway or around that corner countless times. Your temporary blindness not only slows you down; its very fact causes an almost paralyzing uneasiness. Memory and habit enable you to move, to reach a modest level of comfort, but nothing really seems the same as before. Parisians and their occupiers both felt this sense of spatial, tactile, and psychological unease.*
Another philosopher, the German O. F. Bollnow, has also thought about how important space is to our identity and feeling of affective security. He believes that our humanity is determined by the way we act within specific, lived-in spaces. Man needs room to move, but so do his fellows; this tension is a normal part of everyday life. But it is manifestly and uncontrollably more tense to live in proximity to an outsider, an enemy, or a culturally different group of humans. Habitual, instinctual activities such as stepping out onto the street from one’s dwelling become less habitual, less instinctual. When the individual no longer can take comfort from the predictability of movement, another set of anxieties is created. To illustrate, Bollnow addresses the notion of “narrowness”: “Narrowness… always refers to the prevention of free movement by something that restricts it on all sides.… Man perceives restricting space as a pressure which torments him; he seeks to break through it and to press forward into the liberating distance.”4
Marcel Aymé, a popular writer active during the Occupation, published in 1943 a fantasy entitled “Le Passe-muraille” (The Man Who Walked Through Walls). The tale appears in a collection of stories that rely on the Occupation for their narrative suspense. The story offers the best fictional, though indirect, description I have found of the frustration and spatial restrictions experienced by Parisians under the Occupation: a person’s isolation is leavened by a desire to resist freely, especially when one has nothing left to lose. The protagonist is a very minor Parisian bureaucrat, Dutilleul, who unexpectedly—and inexplicably; after all, the tale is a fantasy—acquires the ability to pass through walls, no matter how thick. Cautious at first, he only avails himself of this trick when he has forgotten the key to his apartment. But one day, frustrated by his boss, a martinet with a “brush mustache,” Dutilleul terrorizes him by pushing his head through his superior’s wall, threatening that “the werewolf,” as he referred to himself, was going to destroy him. The poor manager finally is taken away to an asylum, and Dutilleul’s job has no more inconveniences. Having, however, acquired a taste for surprising those who never had taken him seriously, our hero turns to burglary, escaping from prisons, and visiting beautiful women in their boudoirs. One day, as he passes into a house where a married lover awaits him, he senses something is not right: “He begins to feel an unfamiliar rubbing on his hips and shoulders, but decides not to pay attention.… On going through a thicker wall, he began to feel some [more] resistance. He seems to be moving in a fluid matter, but one that becomes pastier, taking on, as he progresses, more thickness.”5
At this moment, terror strikes him: he remembers that he had failed that morning to follow exactly the detailed prescription for a medicine that his doctor had given him; he had taken aspirin instead. He slowly realizes that his strangely acquired powers had weakened, and that he would be unable to get through the wall to his lover’s room:
Dutilleul was frozen inside the wall. He is still there, incorporated into the stone. Nightly strollers going down the Rue Norvins when the streets of Paris are especially quiet hear a muffled voice that seems to come from the other side of a tomb; they take it to be the wind whistling around the hills. But it is Dutilleul lamenting the end of his glorious adventures.… On some nights, [his friend] the painter Gen Paul, unstrapping his guitar, goes out into the silent Rue Norvins to console the poor prisoner with a song, and the notes, sent on their way by his swollen fingers, penetrate the very heart of the stony wall like drops of moonlight.6
This sense of being frozen within a narrowed space, of being unable to act, of being abandoned, with only the occasional sound of music for consolation, began by the winter of 1940–41 to describe many Parisians, and their number would increase rapidly.
The most prevalent psychological response to this narrowing might be identified as a sort of ennui. Apprehension, limitations—e.g., curfews—interruptions of normal activities, absence of nourishment, and difficulty of movement through the city: these and other phenomena imposed a new sort of boredom on Parisians, who, like many urban citizens, thrived on the actual and implied vibrancy of their city. In her journal, Edith Thomas writes in late 1941:
Who would speak now of time must speak of distress, of disgust, of boredom. And perhaps this epoch’s boredom is stronger even than our horror. Horror is a paroxysm; boredom a state of mind. One gets used to all sorts of things, even indignation, which is only the persistence of disgust.… [The knowledge that they are] impotent witnesses [to what is happening in Europe] is visible on the thin and tired faces that rush to the Métro or stand in shop queues: too passive and resigned, just waiting.7
Malnourishment, unpredictable regulations, conflicting rumors and news reports, the absence of more than a million men locked away in German stalags, suspicion of neighbors—all combined unhealthily, and the Parisian responded by shutting himself or herself down, affectively. Boredom became as much an internally imposed as an externally imposed state of mind—sometimes for reasons of survival. The slightest effort to appear different, especially if one were Jewish or in hiding or a foreigner or a Gaullist or a Communist, had to be repressed. To be recognizable was to be at risk. Victoria Kent, a Catalonian Republican immigrant hiding out in Paris, writes in her semiautobiographical narrative, Quatre ans à Paris (Four Years in Paris):
One must be neither too well nor too badly dressed, neither too well groomed nor too sloppy. To go out, one needed camouflage; so much for any singularity in one’s appearance or way of speaking or walking or dressing. If you do not want to be suspected, don’t risk giving your opinion on even the most trivial topic, for the man that you have opposite you is not you; he is in the other camp, and as soon as your singularity is evident, it becomes suspicious.… Let your appearance be like those of others, your reactions like those of others.8
All those habitual, casual actions that set one apart, that give some variety to one’s life, had to be muted. Spontaneity had to be repressed; generosity reduced.
This was especially hard for parents who had to worry about their children’s inventiveness and their artless attitudes toward official authority. Discussions between parents were muted, new codes invented; an aura of secrecy—and of an undefined danger—became a common atmosphere at home. A child’s casual remark or an adolescent’s insolent retort could bring minor as well as serious problems to his or her family. Children are easily bored, and in a world where boredom becomes a daily survival strategy, their own impatience and frustration intensify. And, of course, their enforced social isolation brings an even more unnatural atmosphere to their families and neighborhoods. For youngsters the Occupation seemed unnecessarily, inexplicably restrictive; for their parents, living in the city took on aspects of uncanniness.*
Thanks to those who had permanently left the city, either willfully or not, a large number of beautiful apartments were available during the early months of the Occupation. The middle-class Jamets (unrelated to Fabienne, the bordello madam) had the good fortune to find themselves in a spacious apartment on the Rue Vavin, in the 6th arrondissement. As we observed earlier, Dominique Jamet recalled that as an intelligent but naive young boy—Gentile and thus less personally threatened by the occupier—he was still aware of a changed Paris. For example, he wrote with amusement about the public idolatry of Philippe Pétain:
The Maréchal is everywhere. He’s on stamps. He’s on the postal calendar. He reigns from chimney mantels among family photos. He decorates shop windows; he is already in history books, and his image opens the movie news; he won the war of 1914, a good augury; he planted his marshal’s baton on coins; he’s in everyone’s head; he’s on all lips; everyone’s had it up to here with the Maréchal.9
Not only in private residences but also in public sites and on the very symbols of the French state, the venerable warrior fixed his starkly blue eyes on his nervous subjects. A new watchfulness, with its passwords—“Êtes-vous plus français que lui?” (Are you more French than he?)—became part of the social negotiations of daily urban life. Pétain’s image symbolized the moral surveillance that was endeavoring to turn Paris into a bourgeois ville de province. A visual vocabulary of the newly occupied Paris (of which Pétain and the Vichy government were part) had suddenly imposed itself.
Dominique Jamet remembers that after the shock of the defeat and the initial occupation, he felt, as a youngster, that
life in occupied Paris regained its ocean liner rhythm. Theaters, cinemas, music halls are full, cabarets and racecourses, too.… [But] the reserves of altruism are at their lowest, the fund of compassion exhausted. Families huddle together in homes that have become lairs. [It’s] everyone for himself, or for his family, or for a close circle of friends he cares about. Generosity does not run through the darkened streets.10
The quarters of Paris, geographically close, had become separated in the imagination. The young Jamet speaks of familiar neighborhoods as if they were somewhere in eastern Europe—names he recognizes, places he may have visited before the Occupation, are now only distant Métro stops on a map:
We live in a bourgeois quarter. We study in a bourgeois lycée.… The news [of the roundups of Jews] never got to [us]. The arrests made on the Rue des Écouffes, the Rue de Turenne, the Rue de Belleville, or the Boulevard Barbès did not trouble summer doldrums of the Place Saint-Sulpice, the Rue Notre-Dame-des-Champs, or the Avenue de l’Observatoire. Even less were they the subject of conversations when we went back to school in the fall.11
The quarters’ names may have had resonance for Jamet, but their physical reality remained weirdly distant and essentially unknown. Paris reverted to being a congeries of villages and lost much of its metropolitan aura. Parisians noticed many alterations to their city but remained distant from its darkest, most inhumane corners.
Narrowing—the constriction of the vital energy of a society—is a hallmark of living under military occupation and intensive police surveillance. Four years is a long time for any society to experience this state of affairs “temporarily,” and the Occupation’s length was especially cruel. There was always the hope that the Occupation would end soon, that political pressure would weaken some of the more invasive measures of the Vichy government, and that the war would come to a close. But when? How long did people have to live that way? This anxiety of longing for a resolution of a state of affairs that was obviously not temporary is perhaps the most important component of the concept of narrowing, and the Occupier knew this well.
The Apartment
The Parisian apartment figures prominently in recollections of the Occupation. An apartment was more than a place of expected physical comfort; it was also a site of psychological retreat from confusion and uncertainty. Yet at the same time the apartment could be a trap, and many wrote of feeling closed in there by events and police, always worrying about how they would escape should there be an ominous knock at the door. And there were more mundane concerns, such as how to heat and live comfortably in apartments during a time of enforced penury.
The apartment building has been a site of sophisticated Parisian life since the 1840s; it “embodied the continuity between domestic and urban, private and public spaces.”12 The private apartment, a rather inexpensive real estate investment for a rising bourgeois population, was situated among other such units in a large building or a group of buildings. From the street, a row of apartment buildings presents a facade of regularity and order; Parisian streetscapes are noted for the uniformity of their external architecture, conferring a mask of sameness on a heterogeneous collection of private dwellings. But this was only the outside; entering a Parisian apartment complex brought one often to a “courtyard, carved out of the space where the undecorated, cheaply constructed back walls of up to four different buildings met and were irregularly punctuated by [multiple doorways].”13 Later, elevators were added to many apartment buildings, as was indoor plumbing, both of which enhanced privacy. The several exits and entrances, reconfigured stairways, and hidden or seldom used spaces, often confusing to the visitor or newcomer, make the Parisian apartment building an ideal place to study the spatial anxieties of the Occupation.
A professional gatekeeper enabled the “public privacy” of the Parisian apartment building: the concierge. (Gardien and gardienne are the current, socially correct terms.) The profession of concierge takes us back to the Middle Ages and the guardians of a castle’s gates. The position soon became a sign of wealth, of separateness from the hoi polloi, and was always held by a male. With the advent of the apartment house in the mid-nineteenth century, it became obvious that a portière, or gatekeeper—later the concierge—was needed to help bring some order to the potential chaos of a large, multidomicile building often with dozens of owners, renters, and their staffs. More than any other private figure, the concierge (generally a woman, though men were also guardians) was the person—and face—offered to the outside world by the apartment house. She lived on the ground floor in her own small set of rooms, called a loge, from which she could see and hear, through her glass door, the comings and goings of tenants and their visitors. She delivered the mail, received packages, kept the public spaces clean, let in visitors, acted as nanny, and kept keys to all the apartments. The concierge was the equivalent of a public telephone, a mailbox, a message service, and a counselor. She knew who had late-night visitors, who had money problems, who was ill (and who was malingering). She knew the merchants in the neighborhood, knew other concierges (and thus was privy to what was happening in other buildings), knew children (who often told her more than they should), and was the first person the police came to when they had questions about tenants. The Occupation authorities officially obliged all concierges to help the police. For example, each had to report within twenty-four hours the arrival of a new tenant, identify “visitors” who stayed more than a night or two, and be responsible for removing any anti-German or anti-Vichy graffiti from her building or the sidewalks in front of it. If she did not inform the Occupiers of a new tenant, and that tenant turned out to be a “terrorist,” then she was liable to be imprisoned or worse. Such activities would often unfairly mark her as a collabo (popular term for a collaborator).
A concierge’s lodging. (Pierre Gaudin; CREAPHIS)
Responsibilities were expected of her from the Occupied as well as the Occupier. The concierge was an extremely useful friend for all Parisians to have. Wily, knowledgeable, often courageous in the face of pressure, she was smart enough to realize that her relationship with the Germans had to be proper if she were to be of use to herself and her tenants in cases of emergencies. Stories of the Occupation are replete with anecdotes of good, bad, and indifferent concierges. Some hid Jewish children; others betrayed Jewish families. Some protected empty apartments; others looted them, even moved into them. Some confronted the Germans fearlessly; others collaborated as much as they could. One Jewish girl remembers watching through closed shutters as a concierge across the street pointed out the apartments in the vicinity where she knew Jews lived. Another concierge betrayed her tenants so that she could get into their apartment, rummage through their belongings, and then, when they returned, blame the Germans. Yet another tells the story of a concierge who kept tabs on all empty or emptied apartments in the neighborhood so that she could move her threatened Jewish clients from one to the other, one step ahead of the police.
Hessy Taft and her Jewish parents, recently emigrated from a much more oppressive Berlin, lived in a very upscale part of Paris, on the Avenue de Messine, in the 8th arrondissement, just south of the elegant Parc Monceau. One Sunday, the family went out for a visit, and by chance Hessy’s father told the concierge, who was sitting in the sun on the stoop, “I’ll be chez your friend Jacques for a while.” Jacques had visited Hessy’s family often and had always been polite to the concierge, so she remembered him and considered him her friend, too. Within a few minutes of having arrived at Jacques’s apartment, Hessy’s family heard the phone ring. It was the concierge. “Don’t come back, monsieur,” she told Hessy’s father. “They are here waiting for you.” This phone call made it possible for the father to hide and for the family to return to the apartment innocently, sans père. Later the whole family was able to escape to America. Hessy just shook her head when hearing about concierges who had exposed or given up Jewish tenants. She firmly told me: “They weren’t all that way; I’m here because one of them respected my family, especially my father.”*
Of course, not all apartment houses were the same. Some were sturdy, well-maintained buildings providing homes to middle-class tenants. Others were luxurious, perhaps containing only two or three apartments. Then there were the apartments in poor communities, built on the same principle but much more porous and thus more easily raided. The same opportunities and constraints existed in these buildings as in the others. Proximity bred solidarity but also suspicion. Most apartment buildings in these neighborhoods were deplorable rabbit warrens of false turns, stairs leading to hidden doors—and, as the police became more diligent, specially constructed hidden spaces.* In any roundup, the French police were especially useful to the Vichy government and the Germans because many of them had grown up in such environments and knew them intimately.
Another characteristic of the apartment was its role as a prospect—that is, a site from which one could look out upon occupied Paris in relative safety. Down on the streets, expressing an undue curiosity—to walk slowly, or to look or stand for more than a minute in front of shop windows or with a group of people, or to turn around in order to avoid the inconvenience of a police control—could attract official attention. Those apartments whose balconies or large windows gave onto the street would permit their owners to catch a glimpse of the city without having to go downstairs and outside. They were frequently used, too, as lookouts for clandestine actions or as sites from which to throw leaflets. On the other hand, the open windows also exposed residents to shrapnel from antiaircraft shells exploding or missing their targets. Everyone seemed to know of a case of someone who, unluckily, had been standing at a window at the wrong time. But watching and seeing what was going on from the relative security of apartments could alleviate the ever-present sense of claustrophobia that characterized daily life during the Occupation.
Apartments and apartment buildings were the scenes of some of the most touching, frightening, and horrifying events of the Occupation. To avoid arrest and deportation, a few terrified Jewish mothers threw their children from windows and then jumped out after them; the sound of pounding footsteps—or stealthy creaking—on stairways provoked panic; neighbors betrayed neighbors, even those living on the same landing. Tales of those who were hiding Jews or downed pilots or Resistance fighters often revolved around apartments and how they could be adapted to the new exigencies. For example, in October of 1943, two young women members of the Resistance thought they were safe deep in the wealthy 16th arrondissement, on the Rue de la Faisanderie, surrounded by Germans living in requisitioned apartments. They met a third conspirator on the street and invited him back to their building, where one of the girls wanted to collect her mail. The concierge told her that everything was okay, that no one had been by. No sooner were they in the apartment than the bell rang. Suspicious of the concierge’s casual attitude, rather than answer they tried to escape by the service door, but it was stuck, and the two young women were arrested. The young man left by a window, climbed up to the next floor, and then took the elevator down. Passing by the seventh floor, he caught a glimpse of two men in the gray coats and hats of the Gestapo. When he reached the rez-de-chaussée (the ground floor), he casually walked out of the building, ignoring cries to stop from a policeman who had been left there on guard; he was arrested at gunpoint a few steps away. Fortunately, many others would evade capture, thanks to the porousness of the massive apartment buildings dotted with escape hatches.*
In another episode, on the Boulevard Raspail in the 7th arrondissement, an apartment house was used for a getaway.14 Jean Ayrol, a resister, was arrested and taken for interrogation to the Hôtel Cayré, requisitioned by the Abwehr (Wehrmacht counterintelligence). He was led to a back room, where he found three other arrested men plus three guards. They sat staring at each other for hours. Then one of the prisoners asked to go to the toilet, and a guard accompanied him. Another guard left to answer the phone: three prisoners, one guard. Overpowering the guard and taking his pistol, the three men left the room and reached the street through the hotel’s revolving doors. Knowing he had but a few minutes at most to lose himself, Ayrol walked through the first porte cochère he passed, crossed the courtyard, entered an apartment building without seeing the concierge, and, three steps at a time, rushed to the eighth floor—the highest. A curious renter opened the door to her room. (Most Parisian apartment buildings had tiny rooms right under the roof for servants; then, as now, they were rented to students or kept as maids’ apartments.) Without a word, Ayrol jumped onto a chair and pushed open the hatch leading to the attic, where he crouched to hide. But someone had seen him enter the building, and soon he heard loud voices, barking dogs, and the cries of tenants rousted from their apartments. The door to his hideaway opened… but no one saw him in the darkness, and the door then closed. Soon the noises disappeared, and he waited there, tensely. About an hour later, the door opened again, and this time he saw the face of the building’s concierge, who knew he had to be somewhere. She had been searching for him; taking him to her loge, she fed the young man and let him take a bath. Early the next morning, Ayrol slipped out and disappeared into the sleeping city. This time, an apartment building had been first a refuge, then a trap, then a passage to escape.
The Rue Lepic, in Paris’s 18th arrondissement, where Montmartre is located, rises gradually and sinuously from the Place Blanche toward the hill that gives the quarter its name. A middle-class street, it had a different clientele at night than in the daytime. Because of its bars, its bordellos, its strip clubs, and its jazz venues, German enlisted men constantly frequented the neighborhood. Living on that street, Berthe Auroy, a spinster schoolteacher, kept a thorough record of day-to-day life in Paris during these hard years. She had just retired from the all-female Lycée Jules-Ferry down the hill and had first seen German invaders in the country while visiting Chartres, an hour by car outside the capital. In the fall of 1940, she returned to Paris and, writing with the acuity and acerbity of a concierge watching every move made by her tenants, detailed the German invasion of her quarter.
The small squares and narrow streets of Montmartre had been spared the renovations effected by Baron Haussmann in Paris during the nineteenth century, and one could almost imagine, while walking through the area in 1940, still being in a hilltop village. (It even had—and still has—vineyards.) Cheap rents had made Montmartre the center of the bohemian art world in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The famous rambling Bateau-Lavoir (Laundry Boat), the building where every avant-garde painter from Picasso to Modigliani seemed to have had an apartment or studio in the 1900s and 1910s, was only a few short blocks from Auroy’s apartment building. The area’s artistic, cultural, and populist energy drew many there to escape some of the rigors of the Occupation, but it also brought together, almost intimately, Parisian and German.
Auroy’s journal, which runs from June 10, 1940, to August 15, 1945, expresses her frustration, anger, and humiliation at being locked up in her own apartment, sequestered in her own neighborhood. She pulled no punches: “The Occupation has made us like wooden robots.”15 What made it worse, of course, was that she lived alone, and her neighborhood had become a tourist and nightlife mecca for the despised Germans: “Gray uniforms are everywhere. They come out of shops, their arms filled with packages.… Every day, around 5:00 p.m., many trucks filled with soldiers park in front of the Moulin de la Galette [a nightclub just a short walk from her apartment].”16 Out spilled Germans, drenching the neighborhood with their boisterous enthusiasm.
As with other memoirs and diaries, we should pause to ask ourselves why they were written, hidden, rewritten, trusted to others, and in some cases unpublished for years. In a world where there has been a short-circuiting of normal connections, blank pages can offer the freedom that one misses in an unpredictable occupied city. But the danger always remains that a person’s writing can be found and act as an instrument of betrayal. Finding a task that would bring habit to a disrupted environment led many Parisians of all ages to keep scrapbooks in which they pasted maps, drawings, and newspaper clippings and to write secret diaries, journals, and unsent letters depicting daily life. In the past decade or so, more and more of these texts have come out of closets, attics, and forgotten chests of drawers to be published for generations that have never known a bereft Paris.
Auroy was not a dispassionate chronicler: her journal is rich with detailed examples and analysis of the anxiety caused by trying to live some sort of “normal” life in German Paris. In 1943, for example, she returned from shopping to discover that neighbors from the floor above hers had been arrested. No one knew why. They were not Jewish and had expressed no stronger anti-Nazi sentiments than anyone else. A day or two after they had been taken away, Auroy watched as Germans, or their acolytes, emptied the apartment of anything valuable. “Germans love to loot,” she observed, and she wondered what happened to the modern paintings, including one by Picasso, that had covered her neighbors’ walls. (It turned out that a cunning neighbor had saved them from the ignorant movers.) This arrest was very close to home—too close; happily, the Gestapo would never knock at her own door, but she was always on the alert for the sound of unfamiliar boots in the stairwell.
The curfew was one of the most successful—and pesky—means devised by the Occupation forces to control a population. To further discombobulate Parisians, curfew times were arbitrarily changed; Auroy and her friends often had to hurry home earlier than the announced hour in case a street might be blocked or a Métro station closed. Being caught on the street after curfew was no minor infraction. In an unpublished memoir of a British woman who had remained in Paris after the Occupation, the author relates how she had stayed past curfew at a friend’s home in the near suburbs; she decided nonetheless to walk back to Paris with a companion. Before too long, they were stopped on the near-empty streets by a French policeman and asked for their passes. They had none, but they showed their ID cards, and insisted that as British citizens they were in order, having gone each day to a police station to register. The policeman smiled, reminding them that he had the authority to have them spend the night in a police station. But taking pity, he decided to walk with them to the end of his route, pass them on to another group of cops, until they finally reached their destination. Later, our lady discovered a favorite technique of less generous policemen: they would pass innocent breakers of the curfew from one escort to another all night, making them walk miles and miles before the curfew lifted.17
Such tales must have led Berthe Auroy to reason that it was best just to stay at or close to home, in her neighborhood, within her narrow community. Wrote another observant Parisian about that period: “Occupied Paris is on its guard. Inviolate down to its core, the city has grown tense, surly and scornful. It has reinforced its interior borders, as the bulkheads of an endangered ship are closed.… Left Bank and Right Bank are not two different worlds any more, but two different planets.”18 The city was like a submarine, with major sections closed off by watertight doors. A year after the Germans had arrived, Auroy would no more have thought of casually venturing south across the river to the Latin Quarter than she would have thought of boarding a train to Berlin; she might leave for the suburbs, but venture into another Parisian neighborhood if she did not have to? Not on her life.
This psychologically disturbing readjustment of one’s sense of space, of having to redefine where safety was assured and where it was not, is one of the most persistent themes gleaned from those who lived in Paris during the Occupation. One’s neighborhood, the Métro, one’s apartment house, one’s private rooms: all had to be reconsidered. What had been benign now seemed strangely dangerous. Long-repressed agoraphobia and claustrophobia began to reemerge; the spatial awareness of the citizen under Occupation became almost as acute as that of the soldier under fire.
Parisians, in secret, must have taken out thousands of maps and marked them with ink or pins to show the constellation of troops grinding across the continent and, at last, the inexorable retreat of the Reich’s forces. A new geography festooned apartment walls; children learned place names because of the nervous excitement with which their parents pronounced them. After the D-day invasion in 1944, Victoria Kent wrote:
I’m looking quickly for my map. Where is my map of France? I bought it a few months ago and put it aside: it seemed a bit premature to hang it up in my room with the others. I think that if the Gestapo had suddenly burst into my room, they would have a clear idea of my life during the last four years. [My maps of Russia, Africa, and eastern Europe] were all covered with arrows, circles, and special marks that I added day after day during the war.19
Closed up in their apartments, so many Parisians, in hiding and not, used such charts and visual representations to expand their limited horizons.*
Albert Grunberg, a Jewish hairdresser, whose salon was right in the center of the Latin Quarter, on the Rue des Écoles, soon found himself a target of German interest. Fortuitously, Grunberg, who had married a Gentile after emigrating from Romania twenty years earlier, had anticipated his roundup. Seeing agents enter his shop, he escaped—barely—running next door to the adjacent apartment building and up to its seventh floor, where there was a small, semihidden room. On the same floor where he had been told earlier he could hole up were three other apartments. For the next two years, thanks to the assertive benevolence of the building’s concierge, Grunberg lived in a room of eight square meters (about eighty-five square feet).
Cramped in his hideaway, Albert Grunberg was continuously alert; his journal offers us a very good account of how life for every unhappy Parisian—in hiding or not—must have changed. Compelled to live clandestinely—always aware of his surroundings, counting the minutes, the hours, the days, and the weeks until something or someone would bring a new order—he exhibited a daunting patience. Fortunately, his friends had also drilled a hole in the wall joining Grunberg’s room to the kitchen so that he could have electricity. He had to be very careful that his radio was not heard, that lights from his bedroom were kept to a minimum, that the snoring of his brother, Sami, who after several months would join him in hiding there, not disturb his neighbors as much as it disturbed him, and that he walk only on the piles of carpets that the concierge had laid in the tiny room and in the kitchen of the neighboring apartment, which he could get to unseen. (He could not cook in the kitchen unless the neighbor was there for fear of sending tattletale odors out to the building’s other tenants.)
Parisian apartment buildings are built around an inner courtyard and maybe a rear courtyard; they form a natural echo chamber, and sound carries with startling efficiency throughout the building, especially when windows are open. There was no air-conditioning in those days, so windows were often left open, especially during the hot summer months. Grunberg could only use his one small window—which opened onto the inner courtyard and through which he could see only the apartments opposite and a small panel of the Parisian sky—to listen and watch for any disruption that might presage a raid. The Gestapo and the French Vichy police were relentless in their patrols and roundups; they received dozens of letters a day suggesting that some Jew or communist was in hiding. The Nazis would cordon off whole quarters or apartment houses or set up barricades at Métro entrances and exits, for they were under persistent orders to provide a quota of foreigners and Jews for the detention and transit camp in Drancy, north of Paris, or for work (or death) in Poland and Germany.
Even concealed, the hairdresser was still in his neighborhood, though no longer a visible part of it. He was able to see his wife almost weekly, and from his small chamber he had contact with his concierge, her family, and a neighbor or two. Awaiting safe release, Grunberg began a journal to “kill time,” writing, as many others did, to lighten the sense that he was not free. He was fortunate enough to have a radio, and half his journal is taken up by descriptions he heard on news broadcasts of the victories of the Western allies and Russia against Germany’s war machine.
Grunberg and other victims of the Occupation of Paris did not examine philosophically the effects of physical isolation, but through their writings, we can begin to fathom what was the most intangible, though most prevalent, inconvenience of living in an occupied city: that of not being able to control and order one’s time or space. This unease undermined the “spacefulness” of a richly built and lived urban experience. For these chroniclers and their fellows the pleasure of living in Paris had gradually narrowed, or diminished, and, in some cases, it had been erased.
There was a persistent dearth of food and heat sources for most Parisians between 1940 and 1945. No one starved, but the majority experienced hunger or at least an absence of satiety. Every winter seemed to last longer and be more frigid than the one before.* As a result of the scarcity of nourishment, apartment rooms and—when the temperature allowed—balconies were turned into gardens; space was given over to growing food or raising rabbits and chickens. Public parks, too, were tilled and planted. The city took on the allure of a huge greenhouse as public spaces took on practical functions.
Of the four winters during which Paris was occupied, three were exceptionally cold, colder than any winter in memory. One writer describes vividly what it must have been like to have been unable to get enough coal or charcoal, even in the finest apartments. Having received a bouquet of pink carnations, a lady placed them in a glass vase and set them on a living room table. The apartment became so cold that the glass burst, but the flowers remained fresh and bright in a block of unmelting ice. Furniture makers soon began running advertisements about a new contraption:
A tiny cabin. A sort of mini room, with wooden partitions, a door, and a low ceiling, closed on all sides; made to be placed inside an apartment, where its reduced dimensions would allow the concentration of heat. The photograph in the ad showed people wrapped in winter clothes up to their ears, seated face-to-face, as in a railcar, around a narrow, rectangular table in this very restricted space. How many buyers were attracted to this device?… Even rabbits had more room in their cages!* 20
Berthe Auroy’s memoir contains a remarkable series of entries about how her apartment shrank as she began to live in fewer rooms and finally consolidated her life in the kitchen, a place she describes with the detailed intimacy of a Balzac.
In order not to lose any heat, I live exclusively in my kitchen. I look like an Eskimo in her hut, the only island of warmth in this Spitzberg that is the apartment. The enemy [cold] is there, who watches me behind the door in order to pinch and bite me.… Dressing, undressing, toilette, meals, visits, correspondence, etc., everything happens in the kitchen. At night, I jump into my bed, heated with hot water bottles… in order to escape from the enemy, which wants to bite my nose and the nape of my neck.21
It makes little difference whether the “enemy” she feels closing in on her is the cold or the Germans; her world has become much smaller because of the Occupation and its deficiencies.
The Germans and their Vichy partners requisitioned hundreds of apartments; entire apartment buildings were even put under seal, both for housing and for looting. A protocol of “minding one’s own business” prevailed, but uncomfortable, even dangerous encounters were unavoidable. On the top floor of an elegant apartment building in the block-long Rue de Buenos-Ayres, right under the Eiffel Tower in the fashionable 7th arrondissement, a Jewish family hid in plain view. Having emigrated from eastern Europe with papers, forged by an Eastern Orthodox priest, that made them “Christians,” they had not registered when Jews were required to do so in 1940. To their despair, Germans requisitioned apartments on the lower floors of their building. For years, they would pass each other in the elevator or on the stairway, but the occupiers took no undue notice. Then, one evening, a heavy knock at their front door sounded. Gently, the lady of the home opened it to find three slightly drunk, smiling German officers on her landing. They were surprised at the sight of the woman, and she was terrified. They were just returning from a night out and, laughing out loud, excused themselves—“We are on the wrong floor. Please excuse our rudeness, madame”—as they stumbled back down the stairs. The refugee family never completely forgot this incident and how intimately they were living with those who could arrest and deport them at a whim.
A Crowded Métro
The Métro—a vast system of underground trains and stations—was only forty years old when war came to Paris. A subway system has an immutable trajectory, unforgiving as it controls the direction and the pace of the passenger. Yet it provides, too, an apparent freedom, for one can get on or off wherever one wishes. One can take any line, change cars, wait for another train to pass, ride around all day on a single ticket, or remain in a station. One can direct a glance or ignore one; avoid physical contact or encourage it; talk with others or ignore them; read, eat, sleep, daydream. Here, on these predictable tracks, Parisians experienced the most freedom from official surveillance during the Occupation. Not that there were no thefts, arrests, roundups, attacks, and assassinations on the trains and in the stations, but more than a modicum of anonymity still prevailed as one rode under the streets of Paris.
In the guidebook Wegleiter, the Métro is often described as an inescapably useful means of getting around in a city where even Germans had trouble obtaining other means of transportation (except bicycles). “The Métro is the alpha and omega in Paris,” intoned the anonymous writer.22 Be careful, he warned his readers: you may get lost in its labyrinthine underground stations, but it can be a place of adventures and pleasant encounters with the French. (This was, of course, before the roundups and assassinations that would make the Métro quite dangerous for both sides.) The soldier was advised to procure a subway map as soon as he arrived in Paris and to study carefully how to get past the ticket puncher (all Germans in uniform could ride free), how to get on and off the train, and how to find his way out of the station. He also learned that about a hundred of the 350 Métro stations had been closed (because of the “difficulty of the transmission of electricity”—only one of the reasons) but was also urged to admire that there were more than 1,800 train cars that ran over 110 miles of track and carried, in 1942, more than 1.25 million passengers.
Midcentury Métro trains. (Creative Commons)
The Métro was a subterranean microcosm of what was occurring up in the city’s streets. Using the mostly underground railway had always forced Parisians into cautious engagement with others, both familiar and unfamiliar.* Paris’s Métro trains were composed of five cars each; until the Socialists became the ruling party in 1981, the red middle car, with thin leather cushions, was reserved for those who had bought a first-class ticket for about three times what a regular ticket cost. Almost immediately after the Occupation, the Germans—who could travel free, in uniform or not—occupied that car as if by right. Two years later, in 1942, those with yellow stars were relegated to the last car, just as blacks had been from the beginning of the Occupation.
The five-car train replicated some aspects of the city’s newly reorganized society. Many were forced to take the Métro who had never taken public transportation before or who had only taken the bus, the more bourgeois conveyance. One French woman remembers her mother recounting the horror she felt when a German officer reached down to pick her up in a crowded train. “I, too, have a little girl at home, whom I miss so,” he told the tense mother. The others in the car watched, trying not to stare, as the Frenchwoman refrained from wresting her child from the grasp of the friendly officer. However trivial, these episodes raised blood pressure and thorny ethical concerns about collaboration—or Kontakt, as the Germans called it—as well as questions about the boundaries separating social interaction and political expression. A series of paintings by the artist Jean Dubuffet depict blank-faced passengers in Métro cars sitting under signs that order DÉFENSE DE FUMER and VERBOTEN RAUCHEN (No Smoking) in two languages, an innocuous linguistic reminder that French travelers were still tied to the Germans.
During the Occupation many of the stations were closed because they were used by the Germans for workshops and storage or as air raid shelters or for security purposes. Consequently, Parisians could not easily make the transfers (correspondances) that allowed them to go from one line to another; and there was of course no predictability as to when stations or lines would be open or closed. No one knew when he or she might have to walk a long distance after learning that a stop had been closed. Citizens found themselves in neighborhoods only a few blocks from their own that they had scarcely known before the war. Nonetheless the system was essential to the productivity of Paris. Without it, the city would have been shut down, for the absence of gasoline and private vehicles made efficient travel on the surface cumbersome and slow unless one used a bicycle.
Germans learning the Métro. (Wegleiter)
A Swiss journalist, Edmond Dubois, described his return to Paris in 1942 after a two-year absence. He noticed that the streets were emptier; the taxis had disappeared; there was more use of muscle than engines. But when he took a Métro train, he instantly recalled the Paris he had left two years before:
We are swallowed by a Métro entrance. The bustle of the crowd is unbelievable. We advance step by step through long corridors broken up by stairways.… In the Métro [there is] immediate contact with the new life of the capital. The first-class car, where I am, offers a perfect tableau of the equality imposed by the transportation problem. All the seats are occupied.… The first thing that strikes me is that the crowd looks healthy… because the women have remained attractive, and, despite the early morning hour, they have put on makeup, without which Parisiennes would not be Parisiennes.23
Dubois and others reveal a dichotomy that repeatedly manifests itself in accounts of the period. There was an awareness that Paris had changed, that everything, from fashion to the daily clock, had adapted to the Occupation. In spite of these disruptions, some minor, some major, Parisians felt they had shown a resistance to the invader that gave them a sense of moral comfort, necessary in any situation where one’s individual liberty had been so severely abrogated: “Everywhere possible, Parisians would ostentatiously turn their backs on the Germans. It was considered good form to use second class in the Métro, as it was to leave a museum gallery when [German groups] appeared on guided tours. Parisians never mixed with the army.”24 This is only one point of view, and a somewhat affected and pretentious one, but it speaks to the recurring question: How did the typical Parisian live under Hitler’s thumb? Dubois, amusingly, plays to the prejudices of his Swiss readers (comfortably ensconced in their neutrality), whose idea of Paris is limited to their superficial knowledge of a gay, fashionable, aloof city temporarily inconvenienced by a boorish Occupier. But he still reminds us of the daily accommodations every Parisian—except for the most cosseted—had to make with the German interlopers.
The Informer
One has only to live in a Parisian apartment for a week or so to discover how obsessive the French are about locks and doors. Lock shops in Paris are fascinating places to visit; they reflect the preoccupation that the French have always had with security, not only against the malfeasant but also against neighbors. To be offered a trousseau de clés (a key ring) is to be entrusted with the secrets of the owner; to lose a key is a minor disaster. Still, no bolts or chains could keep gossip from circulating, and the rumor economy became very robust during the Occupation. A French term for denunciation is délation, and the practice of reporting on neighbors, strangers, family members, business associates, Jews, Freemasons, Jehovah’s Witnesses, and one’s own clients—not to mention political refugees, those in hiding, and resisters—was endemic in occupied Paris.* This was another type of narrowing, the kind in which looking over your shoulder was not just a casual habit.
In late 1943, less than a year before Paris would be liberated, the film Le Corbeau (The Raven), directed by Henri-Georges Clouzot, brought in a very impressive seven million francs (selling about 185,000 tickets in just over three weeks in Paris alone). In spite of—or because of—its popularity, Le Corbeau was never shown in Germany, and the Catholic Church in France attempted to ban it. It was also immediately censored at the Liberation by Free French authorities, and not until 1947 would it be shown again in France and abroad. After the Liberation, its lead actor, Pierre Fresnay, spent six months in jail, partly for having participated in the film, which had been financed by Continental, the German-controlled French studio that made many—and many good—movies during the Occupation. Clouzot himself was not imprisoned, but he was forbidden to produce or direct films for the rest of his life, a sentence that was soon annulled. Around 1968, Le Corbeau finally became a staple in rerun houses and cinémathèques.
Le Corbeau is an unsettling film, even for today’s viewer: it depicts the moral, social, and psychological disintegration of a fictional small town, Saint-Robin, in the French provinces. Though not set in Paris, it obviously touched the nerves of Parisians. The plot line runs like this: anonymous letters begin to appear in the village’s mailboxes; they accuse a recently arrived medical doctor of adultery; then more letters (eventually dozens over the course of two months) detail the illicit and immoral activities of the town’s most important and influential politicians and professionals.
In a real-life parallel to the film, police files in the provinces and in Paris were crammed with letters of denunciation from supposedly “well-meaning” but willfully malicious informers. They were sent to authorities for a variety of reasons and were both useful and a pain in the neck for the police. Encouraged early in the Occupation by the Germans and the Vichy government, the délation, anonymous or not, lost much of its effectiveness as the war dragged on. Surprisingly, recent research has suggested that there were relatively few denunciations of Jews; that Christian French men and women were criticizing, informing on, and betraying each other, mainly for personal reasons. Most letters contained reports on those who had criticized the Germans or Maréchal Pétain, who were illicitly listening to the BBC, or who were engaged in some imagined resistance activity. Though denunciation did happen in the provinces, it was much more prevalent in cities, where collaboration was more frequent and intimate. Indeed, what makes the atmosphere of Le Corbeau so intense for viewers is that it captures the aura of claustrophobia that comes from the social intimacy of the most respected citizens of the small town. “Our city is in a fever,” offers one of its leaders. “Little squares of white paper have been raining down on this town.” And, in real life, such denunciations would of course meet counternarratives, and both would confuse and befuddle the Germans.
Whose narrative of the Occupation was going to be dominant? Was French society composed of petty snitches, focused on themselves and their personal needs and expectations? Or was that society composed of patriots who used overheard information to undermine the authority of the Occupation? One of the primary criticisms of Clouzot’s film is that it revealed a fractious France, obsessed with the narcissism of small concerns, a country that had deserved its defeat and had been conquered by a morally superior nation. Yet the soft but continuously repeated theme of moral indignation was also heard: Do we have to act this way, even though we are defeated? The film, like its plot, is morally ambiguous. For this reason, if not for its artistry, Clouzot’s Le Corbeau remains fascinating to French audiences.*
Examples of letters of denunciation have appeared extensively in print since the end of the war. The missives are often appalling in their blunt carelessness about the lives they are disrupting:
[To:] Commissioner of Jewish Questions; Paris, January 28, 1943
Monsieur le Commissaire: I am the concierge at 4 Rue Saulnier, Paris 9th arrondissement; my owner is a Jew, and I must declare to you that in the building there is an active synagogue. The owner’s name is Lucien Feist and he has left for the Free Zone.
My deepest respects, Renée Berti25
What strikes one first about this note is that the concierge signs her name, invoking the authority of her position—a concierge, someone who definitely should know what is happening in the building she is responsible for. One wonders if she has considered the possible consequences of her actions: maybe the building will be assigned to an “Aryan manager” who might have his own concierge put into place. Also, there is an assurance in the note that reveals how comfortable individuals were in exposing others. Somewhere along the line Renée Berti had learned that she had more to gain in reporting this possible “crime” than in remaining silent.
The suspicious atmosphere created by a hovering Occupation gave opportunities for shenanigans at best and malicious behavior at worst. Broken hearts, romantic rivalries, bad business relations, desire for rewards, envy among neighbors—these were just as prevalent as betrayal of one’s political or religious beliefs. There were so many incidences of denunciation—both anonymous and proudly signed—that police forces became increasingly inured to them; indeed, there were not enough officers to check every accusation. Yet the Gestapo did stay alert to charges of anti-German behavior and certainly used these letters and notes to track down Jews in hiding. Sometimes even newspaper articles or radio programs would point out “suspicious” occurrences or sites. Of course, anonymous denunciation occurs in peacetime, but the uncertainty of a military and civil occupation offers opportunities, and often rewards, that in this case produced thousands of letters, notes, phone calls, and person-to-person betrayals.
The Queue
Waiting in line is not just about waiting in line. Indeed, the psychological stress of those waiting for service or a product is a major subject of marketing research. What happens when we wait in line? Why we are obsessed with lines that move faster than ours? Why will we always choose the shorter one, even if the longer is moving and the shorter one isn’t? When standing in line, we also become more judgmental of others: the lady who opens her chaotic purse only when she reaches the cashier; the guy with expired coupons; the person who asks questions but cannot understand the answers; and so forth. Waiting in line makes us impatient and unfriendly—our greatest fear is that the line will stop right before we get to it: the cashier will take a break, or the produce we are waiting to buy will be sold out. One can only imagine how these stresses were multiplied in a period where waiting in line could mean the difference between sickness and health or even life and death. The lines were not only sources of information about supplies, but also sites of potential danger, especially if one happened to say something one shouldn’t have said. Every memoir, journal, or work of fiction about the Occupation mentions the trouble, if not anxiety, of waiting in line. Lengthy and slow lines in an occupied city reinforce the idea of being a prisoner, of having one’s will continuously thwarted. The Occupiers knew that lines were a means of control—of one’s time, one’s space, and one’s desires.
Given the situation, the Parisians’ famous système D (système de débrouillage; a system for getting by) kicked in, and myriad methods were invented for beating the lines. Professional “waiters” offered for a fee to stand in line; others brought small chairs on which to sit; children were used as placeholders; some, if able, even rented hotel or other rooms near popular bakeries and butcher shops. One concierge rented out her basement for those who wanted to be first in line for the horse butcher across the street. Then there were the bumptious, who broke in line or used pregnancy, military or civil decorations, or a physical handicap to push ahead. Complaints to the French or German police often led to shouting matches and threats of fistfights or hair-pulling. Vichy, always sensitive to public opinion, was especially nervous about the threat of civil unrest. They believed that arbitrary action by the Germans would pit the French state against its own people, further weakening its slowly declining prestige. Low morale—brought on by having to wait in line for inferior or unavailable products—could lead to a resistance that would reveal the tenuousness of the Vichy state’s control of the French.
In a remarkably prescient 1941 book, La Queue (The Line), censored and thus unpublished during the Occupation, the journalist and novelist Paul Achard described the pervasiveness of standing in line as part of Parisian culture during the war. He presents conversations overheard while waiting in line, suggesting, among other things, that those interminable periods, those lost minutes and hours, provided the gossip necessary to overcome the paucity of credible news from official reports, radio broadcasts, and newspapers. A new type of solidarity was implicit in queuing up, a replacement for forbidden political gatherings. The lines forced people, mostly strangers, to be close to each other, which meant that Parisians were more sensorially aware of those around them. Queuers could check out clothing to see how their fellows were making do in a city known for fashion. They caught each other’s scent, touched each other, and exchanged meaningful glances. Social hierarchy became muddled. It was often unwise to talk about anything in line other than the weather; but waiting in line was infinitely boring if one could not chat. Parisians endured the queue, so derided and hated, as “a course in philosophy, [fomenting] eloquence, self-control, courage, and patience. Its motto should be ‘Wait [in order to] do without.’ ”26
Lines, lines, lines… (Roger Schall / Musée Carnavalet / Roger-Viollet / The Image Works)
The line was a sign, too, of how much a wealthy agricultural nation had been looted by a foreign enemy; a reminder of the scarcity, lack of choice, and humiliation imposed daily on a proud populace that had theretofore been vigorous and selective. Waiting in line had its own rules; casual conversation—especially complaining—was at first forbidden in the lines. Orderly queues must be maintained; a slight infraction could mean being asked to leave. There are many tales of breaking curfew in order to be first in line, of having to pay someone to hold your place while you went to stand in another queue for another product, and of having to keep your children close at hand in the cold or rain because there was no one with whom to leave them. The French police often watched lines closely. Body language and whispering became the primary modes of communication. As the Occupation continued, official Paris viewed lines as potential congregations of malcontents.
Most of those in line, of course, were women. As noted earlier, Paris—indeed, all of France—had been severely “de-manned” by the war and its effects. By the fall of 1940, more than a million men were in stalags and oflags (for officers) in Germany, far from their homeland; about two-thirds of them would remain five years in captivity. In addition, women had few political or financial rights in France during this period, so they had to learn how to “be a man” in a very short time while continuing their traditional roles as homemakers and nourishers. In the countryside, they were responsible for everything from clearing fields to bringing in harvests. In the city, they were forced to leave their homes, often in the face of criticism from traditionalists, to earn a living. Taking care of young ones was difficult, especially when school was not in session. Despite the Vichy regime’s emphasis on maternity and the hearth as the centers of French life, the state provided little social or financial support to these overwhelmed women. It is no wonder that so many “little Fritzes,” offspring of French women and Germans, were born during this period. Finding succor demanded compromises that would not be respected at the war’s end.
The food line was where female solidarity had its most palpable manifestation. More concerned about unhappy men—released and wounded prisoners, crucial employees, and others—the Germans and their Vichy supporters overlooked the potential for disruption inherent in a line of tired, frustrated, and angry women. Since everyone—or at least everyone who was not actively cooperating with the Germans or the Vichy government—had to wait, social orderliness and excessive politeness were imposed on those who lined up. But there was also a barely hidden assertiveness required to maintain one’s place or even to squeeze up. (This collective cultural memory affects Parisians even today; it does not pay to allow your mind to wander when waiting in a French queue.) Standing in line was useless unless one had “tickets,” or ration cards, with their scissorable sections marked with dates and amounts. The merchants wore scissors around their necks, tools soon recognized as the symbols of the inevitable amputation of one’s access to food or clothes or shoes or fabric. The daily papers were filled with warnings and stories about stolen packets of tickets, counterfeit tickets, and the black market for tickets. Elsa Triolet, poet and wife of the poet Louis Aragon, wrote that tickettomanie (ticketmania) had taken over France.27 That’s all people wanted to talk about, she reported; some even waited in line because it broke the monotony of their day. Others took tickets worth nothing in their own provinces and traveled to places where they were worth more. Dinner invitations would often have a request printed next to the RSVP that asked the guest to bring tickets for 250 grams of bread.
Standing in line was not optional; it was a necessity of daily life. And it exposed the individual citizen by taking her out of the relative comfort of her home. If a mother could not find a friendly neighbor or concierge to take care of her children, they had to accompany her. To lose one’s place in line was a small tragedy, so children had to learn to stand like soldiers, holding hands, not daring to leave their mothers or fathers. Often children were sent to stand in line themselves, but there was always the danger that adults, including merchants, would take advantage of them. Because of their small hands, easily adaptable to the minute artisanry needed for forgery, some children were urged to counterfeit the stamps necessary to print phony tickets. Merchants were often sharper at discerning these games than the officials themselves.
“Everything is heard in line,” wrote Achard, and this, of course, is where rumors could most efficiently be passed on.28 Parisians were desperate for news affecting them directly—news about curfews, shortages, arrests, the war, the progress of the Allies—and the effectiveness and speed of reports true and false remain stunning to students of the period. But there were also spies in those lines, official and unofficial police and Gestapo informers. Jean Galtier-Boissière, a French journalist, recounts a “true” story: a formerly rich old lady, down on her luck, registered at a “Society for the Help of the Middle Class,” run by a respected Vichy officer. The organization furnished jobs for petits bourgeois under economic stress, and a few days later, she was called to the Kommandantur (headquarters of the Occupier’s bureaucracy), where officers proposed that she denounce anti-German comments she might hear in lines; for this she would receive sixty francs a day.29 We do not learn if she agreed or not, but the story speaks at least to the paranoia of the Parisian line stander as well as to the ingenuity of the Occupation bureaucracy.
For millions of French men and women, the bars and confinement of prisons were replicated in the city by means of ukases, posters, radio announcements, layers of police authorities, reported gossip, and denunciations. So, too, followed their sisters, agoraphobia and claustrophobia; with fear came an insistent desire to avoid what caused it. The result was just what the Occupation authorities desired: a potentially powerful adversary—the French citizen and patriot—was intimidated, frustrated, and disheartened. But not everyone was willing to stand silently in line.