Chapter Eight
How Much Longer? (1942–1944)
All the prisoners of the town realized [they had been abandoned], and each was thinking that something—no matter what—must be done to hasten their deliverance.
—Albert Camus1
“You Can Come Over Now!”
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.4
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].”5 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.6
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.7
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.8
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.* 9
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.
As food vanished, so did unfortunate Parisians: the German authorities were taking larger numbers of hostages; more and more posters were appearing that announced their executions in prisons near and within Paris. Jean Guéhenno noticed that in late 1943, he began hearing more frequently on his walks through the city the playing or singing of “La Marseillaise,” forbidden by both the Vichy government and the Germans. One day a paddy wagon of French prisoners drove by him and other passersby on the Boulevard Saint-Michel; from inside the van, they could hear the voices of the likely doomed prisoners, going who knows where, while belting out the world’s best-known anthem against the invader. The witnesses of this moving event dared not look at each other as they stopped and listened, but Guéhenno hoped that at least they had their fists clenched in their pockets.
In his high school classes at the elite Lycée Louis-le-Grand, Professor Guéhenno also began to notice that nerves were fraying among his young charges. There were no draft exemptions for students once they turned eighteen, but there was hope that the reputation of this excellent institution would protect them. But what would happen if they turned eighteen in the middle of the school year? Some of Guéhenno’s students would come by his home for his advice; others left surreptitiously to join the underground, returning secretly to talk over with their prof their activities and covert plans. On the other hand, there was a more obvious assertiveness from the young men who supported the Vichy regime. In early 1943, the État français had established a paramilitary force, the Milice française (French militia), which many young, unemployed, and/or strongly anti-Gaullist men had joined. It would count more than thirty thousand members by June of 1944, of whom only about half were active and armed. Guéhenno suspected that there were a few such right-wing mouchards (sneaks, or spies) in his class, too young still to join the Milice but obvious sympathizers. Guéhenno was eventually reported for his lack of respect for the Occupier and their French comrades, and was sent to teach middle-school as a punishment. Scenes like this must have been repeated throughout Paris as the German authorities and the Vichy government became increasingly nervous.
Parisians began to remark, too, that the “blond warriors,” who had become their ideal of the perfectly drilled and accoutred German soldier, had, for the most part, disappeared. Increasingly, very young and middle-aged reservists had replaced them. Less disciplined and fearful that they might be sent off to the Eastern Front, they tended to hang out in larger groups, to drink publicly and to excess, and be more physically impolite to Parisians. The “correctness” of the first year of the Occupation had been replaced with a surly apprehension that added to the city’s discomfiting atmosphere. One youngster remembered being on an overcrowded Métro train when three rather bedraggled soldiers, perhaps on leave from the front, entered the car he was in. One of his friends incautiously said in a loud voice: “Boy, they must have scraped the bottom of the barrel for these guys!” Everyone laughed, and the Germans, abashed because they knew no French, joined them. The discipline, focus, and pride of the great Wehrmacht had begun to crack as the massive war on the Russian and Italian fronts and the devastating bombings of German cities took their toll on Nazi morale.
In the first half of 1943, the Wehrmacht’s surrender at Stalingrad, the final defeat in May of Rommel’s Afrika Korps in North Africa, the invasion of Italy by the Allies in July, and the relentlessness of Allied bombers targeting the factories and rail yards on the outskirts of Paris, all combined to raise both hope and anxiety in the capital. The liberation of Corsica in October of 1943 only made the anticipation more intense for those waiting for the continent to be invaded from the west. Where were the Allies? A repeated joke made the rounds: Stalin’s army finally crosses Germany, then France, until it reaches the English Channel. Taking up a loudspeaker, the leader of the USSR bellows across the Channel to the British and Americans: “You can come over now!”
That year—1943—may have been the most psychologically debilitating and demoralizing of the Occupation, for it offered hope that the war might end soon without diminishing the mystery of how the war would end. After intensive negotiations among the Communists, the Gaullists, and independent French patriot groups, the Resistance had finally been officially unified in May of 1943 under de Gaulle’s administrative umbrella as the Conseil national de la Résistance. The result was that resistance to German authority became bolder.* This was of course a factor that might lead to eventual victory, but it was no boon for those caught in the gears of an increasingly violent guerrilla war. More and more hostages—the innocent and the unlucky as well as the perpetrators—were being arrested, tortured, and shot. And, French Jews—not just their immigrant coreligionists—were increasingly vulnerable to arbitrary roundups.
The Plague
Albert Camus. (© Roger-Viollet / The Image Works)
Albert Camus had left Paris, where he was a journalist for Paris-Soir, in 1940, just a few days before the Germans arrived. Following his colleagues first to Clermont-Ferrand, then to Bordeaux, he searched for a means to get back to his native Algeria, away from a France where “life had become hell for the mind.”10 Eventually, in January of 1941, he caught a ship from Marseille to North Africa, where he would remain until July of 1942, when he returned to France. During his stay in Algeria, he thought about “doing something” to resist the Vichy government then in control of Algeria, but mostly he wrote his great trilogy: Caligula (a play), L’Étranger (The Stranger, a novel), and Le Mythe de Sisyphe (The Myth of Sisyphus, a philosophical essay). The novel had passed German censorship (it was read and approved by Gerhard Heller, who found the work apolitical and asocial and therefore of no interest to Nazi sensibilities). It was published openly in 1942, along with The Myth of Sisyphus, a treatise on the metaphysical absurdity of existence, specifically, the moral uselessness of suicide.* Postwar, we can read these two morally rigorous books as excursuses on the war itself and the moral decisions it forced on even the most neutral citizen.
In July of 1942, on his doctor’s orders that he spend time in the mountains of France, Camus left for the mother country. He traveled immediately to the Vivarais region’s high plateaus, south of Lyon, where he could breathe more easily and where he and his wife could find healthier food than had been available in Algeria. In January of 1943, the twenty-nine-year-old author finally reached France’s publishing capital, where he was feted. Both The Stranger and The Myth of Sisyphus had drawn much attention—some negative, but mostly positive—and made Camus a star on the French literary scene. Suffering from recurrent tuberculosis, however, he soon left the city and spent much time in the mountains, where he worked on several versions of his major novel, The Plague (La Peste), finally published in 1947. Later in 1943, Camus returned to Paris, where he would remain until the Liberation. This time, he actively joined the Resistance (although, as he emphasized then and after the war, he never carried a gun) and edited the most influential clandestine newspaper, Combat, until after the end of the war.*
In Paris, he took up residence in the Rue Chomel off the Boulevard Raspail, in the 6th arrondissement, just a block or two from the Lutétia hotel, headquarters of the Wehrmacht’s intelligence service, the Abwehr. From that small apartment, he stayed in contact with a host of acquaintances from Picasso to Simone de Beauvoir, wrote stunning editorials for Combat, and completed the final version of The Plague.
The novel is presented to the reader as a diary kept by a medical doctor as he lives through the sudden arrival—and, eventually, the sudden departure—of bubonic plague in Oran, a major port city in Algeria. Through this allegory, Camus analyzes what it is like to live in a beloved familiar city that has become unfamiliar by virtue of the massive presence of a foreign host—in this case, rats carrying a devastating bacillus. It would be too simplistic to merely equate the gray vermin that spread the plague in Oran with the gray-uniformed Germans who occupied Paris—Camus’s vision of occupation and of the quarantined citizens’ reaction to that situation is much more subtle—but that has not kept generations of French readers and others from using it as a convenient fable for a morally complicated time.
In the novel, Camus repeatedly suggests that there are two major sentiments shared by those living through a plague and those under military occupation in a city: notions of exile and solitude. At first, after the shock of a deadly invasion, some residents seek to flee their theretofore comfortable environment. Those who stay soon find the city quarantined, cut off from the rest of the world; consequently there develops a fear of being forgotten by the outside, healthier world. As more of their fellow citizens die, survivors identify a variety of causes for what is happening to them and invent the most flimsy reasons why they will not succumb, too. Confidence in the medical profession weakens, as does belief in religion and social relationships, all previously trusted means of confronting and vanquishing an unexpected imposition on one’s life. Death and illness make few exceptions among a wary, then terrified, city, and in silent persistence, a notion of being out of place crawls deeply into the thoughts and actions of the residents of Oran:
It was undoubtedly the feeling of exile—that sensation of a void within [that] never left us, that irrational longing to hark back to the past or else to speed up the march of time, and those keen shafts of memory that stung like fire. Sometimes we toyed with our imagination, composing ourselves to wait for a ring of the bell announcing somebody’s return, or for the sound of a familiar footstep on the stairs, but… that game of make-believe could not last.… We realized that the separation was destined to continue, we had no choice but to come to terms with the days ahead. In short, we returned to our prison-house, we had nothing left us but the past, and even if some were tempted to live in the future, they had speedily to abandon the idea… once they felt the wounds that the imagination inflicts on those who yield themselves to it.11
Camus’s sensitivity to what it must feel like to make a life under enemy occupation is uncannily perceptive—especially for someone who did not live in Paris during most of the war.
In Oran, Camus describes a mundane, boring, unattractive city, even though it is situated beside one of the most beautiful seas of the world; a city that is French, but not really; Arab, yet not quite; sophisticated, but only in its own eyes; caught amid many cultures, histories, religions, ethnic groups, and classes:
The town itself, let us admit, is ugly. It has a smug, placid air and you need time to discover what it is that makes it different from so many business centers in other parts of the world. How to conjure up a picture, for instance, of a town without pigeons, without any trees or gardens, where you never hear the beat of wings or the rustle of leaves—a thoroughly negative place, in short.12
Oran might be passionless, banal, and modern—the antithesis of Paris—yet Camus understands how the mundane and the exceptional are bound together when a foreign host invades.
The plague forced inactivity on [our townsfolk], limiting their movements to the same dull round inside the town, and throwing them, day after day, on the illusive solace of their memories. For in their aimless walks they kept on coming back to the same streets and usually, owing to the smallness of the town, these were streets in which, in happier days, they had walked with those who now were absent.* 13
The longer the “plague” lasts, the more solitary, the more “exiled,” the citizens feel. Who will help us? Where are they? Parisians had given up on their spiritual mentors—bishops, priests, preachers—who only mouthed platitudes; they had given up on the Resistance, which was, if anything, making things more difficult (ten hostages for every German killed). They had given up on the Allies. When, for God’s sake, would they open the second front? Had France been overlooked or forgotten because of its attachment to the Vichy regime? Like the citizens of Oran, Parisians felt that such uncertainty had become almost as harmful as the plague itself.
Camus worried in his notes about what to call his novel, and at one point he almost threw away its present one: “Don’t put ‘the plague’ in the title. Something like ‘the prisoners.’ ”14 Further on, he considers titling the book “Journal of the Separation” and “Diary of the Separated Man,” for he wanted to present a topography of apprehension, where helpless citizens of a vibrant city are threatened with the loss of solidarity. Camus was almost certainly thinking of occupied Paris as he wrote, both when he lived in the provinces and in the city itself. He was fascinated with the ways in which individuals react morally to sudden or swift changes in their environments and to moments when the comfort of habit is taken away. For him, the new philosophical response to the horrors of an absurd world, Existentialism, was indeed about situational ethics: we are placed in situations—physical and psychological—that force us to act or compel us not to act, both of which are inescapably moral choices. There is no such thing as an “innocent” choice, or, for that matter, not choosing, which was itself a choice. Using the plague as his dominant metaphor, Camus exquisitely suggested that a nation needs a firmer commitment to justice and fraternity than France had had in 1940 to withstand such an attack.
“No longer were there individual destinies; only a collective destiny, made up of plague and the emotions shared by all. Strongest of these emotions was the sense of exile and of deprivation, with all the crosscurrents of revolt and fear set up by these.”15 The phrase “exile and deprivation” sums up not only Camus’s major theme—the effects of a “plague”—but also the general psychological and physical situation of most Parisians by the third year of the Occupation. Paris was, after all, still their city, but the Occupiers’ wear and tear on its environment and on the residents’ bodies and minds had made it less a place of solace than an unreadable facade. Were Parisians having the same reaction to a changed Paris that Hitler had felt when he first met its stony indifference? Though Camus was actively engaged in the Resistance for the rest of the war, his sense of solitude and loneliness in an Occupied Paris never completely abated; he, too, despite his assertive philosophy, felt himself an outsider in the damp grayness of northern France.
Observers from the Palace
“Plague had killed all colors, vetoed pleasure,” wrote Camus’s fictional diarist.16 And in her cramped apartment in the Palais-Royal, that protected bubble within a bubble in the center of Paris, the indomitable Colette added a last chapter to her earlier newspaper articles, giving us another subtle analysis of what Paris had become after four years of military occupation. Not unlike the sleepwalkers that Camus describes, Parisians seemed to be going through the motions of life without living at all. Colette had early on decided not to leave Paris for the country; the city, even in anxiety, continued to provide inspiration for her work, giving her insight into how people love and live under depressing circumstances. “What a trail it leaves in our hearts, four years of war,” she intoned.17 From her window she had noticed that children had lost a good part of their youth; benumbed by hunger and constant, unconsummated threats, they laughed and mimicked the sounds of the air alerts rather than leave the gardens. They used indecorous language, for which they would have been slapped before the war, but who could blame them, when so many adults were likewise accommodating themselves to disruptive circumstances? Those on the cusp of adolescence, she noticed, did not try to hide their clumsy sexual groping and passionate kisses; in the Métro, Colette sees them pressed up against each other, oblivious to those around them. Girls try to dress like women, women like girls. The war has scratched away at the veneer of decorum, so important to a society’s stability. It was not prudishness that inspired Colette to describe a changed Paris but rather a desire to record, as a journalist, signs of the wearing down that war had caused. And it was literal:
New and sad signs are becoming more common: the right elbow of a man’s jacket is [a shade lighter] than the left. Almost all the handles of overused shopping bags are threadbare, covered with string. You can still see, covering women’s svelteness, many dark blue “suits.” But don’t be put off that the skirt was not dipped into the same blue as the jacket.18
And there was the new sound of the wooden-soled shoes of a group of girls running through the Palais-Royal’s arcades on their way to stand and giddily scream “Jeannot” under the window of the apartment where Jean Marais, the brilliantly handsome movie actor, lived with his lover, Jean Cocteau, Colette’s neighbor.
A flirtatious playwright, artist, and novelist, Cocteau produced his own journal after the war. In it he reveals another view of the tired, dejected, suspicious Paris that most memorialists depict. In his rather superficial jottings, he unapologetically describes the life of one of the most successful occasional collaborators during the Occupation—his own. There is no mention of the penury that afflicted so many of his urban compatriots; he ate, drank, and partied continuously for four years. Nor is there any of the self-flagellation, retrospective guilt, or apology one finds in the postwar memoir of another “fellow traveler,” the theatrical actor and film director Sacha Guitry. Openly and comfortably gay, Cocteau moved in all the best circles, always in motion in a Paris noted for the absence of easy transportation. (He mentions a bicycle only once.) His need for attention and his easy morals probably got him rides in the limousines of many wealthy Parisians and Occupiers who found him amusing. At the same time, he kept in close touch with his less obnoxious artistic colleagues, signing, for instance, a letter to the Occupation authorities asking for the release of his friend the poet Max Jacob from Drancy. (Jacob would die of ill health before that release could be effected.) Cocteau fretted about air raids, but only because they kept him from parties; he panicked when Life magazine listed him among collaborators who must be chastised after the war. But he could not help himself. The Paris he maps in his journal is a sort of ego map, one that enables us to see how distant collaborationist Paris was from the rest of the city. At the end of the war, many thought he would be “purged” along with other artists who had flown too close to the flame of Nazi fascism. Yet his extraordinary naïveté most likely protected him, and he was barely touched by the postwar “purification” trials. He died in 1963, a few hours after having learned of the death of his friend Edith Piaf.
As one reads these memoirs, it becomes clearer how many strategies were used, especially among those influential enough to protect themselves through their own notoriety, to effect a modus operandi during a period of social upheaval and inconsistent alliances. There were a handful of important Parisians who, unlike Camus’s diseased Oranians, were not ethically troubled by their comparative freedom to continue living their lives under the Occupation. Celebrities such as the chameleon dramatist and actor Sacha Guitry; Serge Lifar, head of the Opéra ballet; the movie star Arletty (who famously said, “My heart is French, but my ass is international!”); Coco Chanel; and Maurice Chevalier, who, along with Cocteau and many others, skirted these ethical difficulties by repeatedly assuring all who would listen that they were French patriots and that their best moral choice was to continue to entertain all those French citizens less fortunate than they, keeping their spirits high.19
Signs of Defeat
Memorialists, diarists, and other witnesses had noticed for the last few months of 1943 and early 1944 that the soldiers of the Wehrmacht were certainly not of the same quality as those who had invaded the city in 1940. The best had suddenly been shipped off to the Eastern Front. (Even bordello madams noticed the change.) Some Parisians remember the sadness on the faces of the departing young men who had felt so keenly their luck at having been assigned to Paris. Their apprehension touched even those who were happy to see them leave and even happier that the Soviet Union was demanding so much from the arrogant Occupier. Germany needed even more than before the wealth of France, especially its food production, its manpower, and its still not inconsiderable industry, but for the Eastern Front there was no substitute for German bodies. Sadly, the Gestapo stayed and took more brutal control—in the form of increased arrests, confiscations, torture, and executions—of a city that had become restive. The distinction between a military occupation and a police occupation became sharper. As Allied bombs fell with more frequency and regularity, and as their troops came closer and closer to Paris, the Nazis dug in, resisting anyone who would challenge their authority. The orders from Berlin were clear: keep Paris as long as you can; its rail centers, its industries, and its large population were still important assets to the Reich.
Beginning in mid-1943, the Occupation authorities changed how they addressed the increasing number of attacks against its personnel. Rather than blatantly reporting attacks and their consequences through newspapers, radio, and by plastering posters across the city, it toned down the rhetoric. The Germans had realized that rather than being cowed by the taking of hostages and the other repercussions of resistant activity, the population was, rather, paying closer attention to the actual disruptions. German anxiety increased as, for the first time since they had arrived in 1940, the idea of an urban insurrection seemed less theoretical. It would not take much, they surmised, for a housewives’ strike to grow into a series of violent street riots.
The occupier manifested a noteworthy nervousness and anxiety… [it] took security measures that appeared so extreme as to be laughable to Parisians; the sites where Germans assembled, previously lightly guarded, now were transformed into redoubts, even fortresses. Not only were barriers raised around even the smallest hotel, a special cadre of French police guarded them day and night; the detours that pedestrians had to take around these improvised bastions were wider.20
Parisians were also amused that the combination of less experienced troops, many not battle-hardened, and this ambience of trepidation would sometimes manifest itself in the very behavior of the patrols that still marched through the city. The more nervous they became, and as the distressing news of German reversals on the front increased, the louder the marching platoons would sing, as if they were whistling past the graveyard. After three-plus years of Occupation, Parisians had become fine-tuned analysts of any change in their previously arrogant, carefree wardens. The Parisians were not the only ones who were feeling exiled and solitary: as the news of Germany’s defeats in Africa and Stalingrad, of their reversals in Sicily and Italy, percolated through the ranks, the proud flanks of the Wehrmacht begin to feel more defensive, more threatened, and less cocky than before. Just a smirk or two from a local a day or two after a Nazi reversal would be enough to tell those assigned to Paris that although the city might have been “without a face” it was not without an opinion. Casual contact between the Occupier and the occupied, already tense, became a minefield.
One tongue-in-cheek anecdote describes just such an encounter. A crowded city bus swerves unexpectedly, and a booted Wehrmacht soldier inadvertently steps on a Frenchman’s foot. Instantly, the Frenchman slaps the soldier in the face. The bus passengers become very quiet, but from the other end of the vehicle, a small, elegantly dressed gentleman pushes his way toward the antagonists, and he, too, slaps the German. The passengers gasp; the conductor calls for the bus to stop; the police come to take the three men to the police station. The German soldier complains that both gentlemen had slapped him in front of the other passengers. He demands justice. Impressed that the soldier would come to the French police rather than report the event immediately to his own superiors, the captain moves immediately to resolve the issue. Turning to the first man, he demands: “What possessed you to slap this soldier? Don’t you know that’s against the law?”
“Oui, monsieur le commissionaire,” answered the nervous man. “But, you see, I have very sensitive feet, and when the bus turned abruptly, the soldier stepped on one of them. The pain was intense, and I spontaneously slapped him. I apologize sincerely for my action.” The German agrees that it was an accident and accepts the man’s apology. The commissioner turns to the prim elderly man and asks: “But why did you walk all the way to the front of the bus to slap this soldier? He didn’t step on your foot!”
“No, indeed he did not, but when I saw this gentleman slap a German soldier, I wanted to do the same, for I thought that meant the Allies had landed!”
One of the most difficult things to understand about this period is why the Germans, anxious about the impending loss of Paris, continued their roundups of Jews and why they continued to execute hostages. Not only were convoys leaving Drancy and Bobigny for Auschwitz up until the last minute, the Gestapo, the Wehrmacht, and the Vichy Milice continued to track down those preparing for the inevitable fall of Paris. In his book Nazi Paris, Allan Mitchell has an interesting theory about this obsession to keep maintaining protocol and order. Up until the moment when the last German truck and the last motorcycle would leave Paris, it was important for the authorities to show that they were still in charge so that the populace would not dare to rise up. Given the fact that the city had been controlled rather successfully by a powerful bureaucracy for more than four years, given the number of false alarms that Parisians had already had about an impending liberation, this theory makes sense. The German fear of showing weakness or debilitated commitment to the Reich’s successes reinforced their strategies of occupation until the very end.
Nine days before the city would be free of its nemesis, one of the worst antiresistance actions occurred. Three groups of young résistants were anxious to get their hands on weapons, the greatest need of underground fighters. (The Germans had been stunningly efficient and effective at controlling access to arms heavier than pistols and grenades.) But the teams broke one of the cardinal rules of clandestine groups: they moved too fast, bringing into their confidence others who turned out to be spies for the Abwehr, German military intelligence. Betrayed, the would-be fighters were arrested en masse, interrogated, then loaded into trucks that took them deep into the Bois de Boulogne, the large wooded park on the western border of Paris. There the thirty-five young men were ordered out of the vehicles, and as they descended they were machine-gunned. After the fusillade, three grenades were thrown into the pile of bodies as a clumsy coup de grâce. The gory scene took place near an artificial waterfall (cascade) in the park, not far from the famous Longchamp racecourse. Ten years later, a member of another group described the way in which the crime was discovered: park personnel had heard machine-gun fire the night of August 16 but had waited until daylight to find out what had happened. The pile of bodies told the macabre story. “A few cadavers were still warm that morning, which suggested how long and painful their agony had been. We found no papers or IDs on the victims.”21 A memorial plaque now looks over the site of this massacre of unarmed potential liberators. Once the city had been freed, other sites—including the Jardin du Luxembourg, in the center of Paris, as well as quickly emptied prisons—would reveal the hastily buried bodies of those the Germans and the Milice had considered “terrorists,” and whom they executed as they left town.
Memoirs, letters, novels—they at best present a broken mosaic, and when one tries to piece it together there is always a tendency to give coherence when there was none. Contemporary journals and diaries are perforce focused on the daily lives of their writers and the happenstance of those lives; there is often much depth, but from a narrowly focused personality. Official documents—of the Resistance, of the Germans, and of the Allies—are disparate, and often reflect the confusion that is the handmaiden of war. Uncertainty reigned on both sides—or all three sides—of the major players in Occupied Paris. The city was an island of relative peace in a continent being torn apart; yet there were many within the city who challenged the authority of the Occupiers. It was a city where Jews were being hunted down daily, but in July of 1943, a bureaucrat from the Vichy Commissariat Général aux Questions Juives had complained to his German partners that “there were thirty-two Jewish pharmacies still operating in the Paris region [and] dozens of Jewish physicians still practicing.”22 There was a continuing effective control of resistance efforts by the police, but there was, too, an increasing number of attacks against the Occupier. Even Allan Mitchell, a very precise historian, hesitates when describing the atmosphere of Paris in 1942–44. In his concluding pages, he writes, “Until the very last days of the Occupation, Paris was remarkably quiet, occasional bomb attacks and assassinations notwithstanding.”23 These inconsistencies reveal how complex daily life was, both for the Parisians and for those directly involved in the repression that defined the Occupation.