Chapter Ten
Angry Aftermath—Back on Paris Time
The putting right of France, [spiritually and] economically, did not happen as rapidly as we would have hoped.
—Jacques Spitz1
Rediscovering Purity
The immediate responses to the liberation of Paris from its heavy-handed Occupiers were not pretty. At least temporarily, Parisians of all classes and political ideologies took on the same demeanor as their former oppressors. What happened during the few weeks following the hasty departure of the Germans does no honor to the liberators or to the liberated. The hysteria—there is no other term that comes to mind—that took over the crowds of Parisians as they saw the tanks, Jeeps, and uniforms, first of Leclerc’s Second Armored Division and then of the American divisions that followed them, was uncontrollable. Along with joyful release, there was a much darker side of uncontrolled mob behavior. Soon large cohorts of German soldiers, still in uniform, hands raised, were being paraded around the city. Protected by French irregulars, American troops, and French soldiers, they were still jeered at, spat on, targeted with rotten vegetables (though not many; Paris was still hungry), and harder objects. Suddenly, the excitement was invaded by a sense of paranoia and hatred that could not wait for the new authorities to calm. For a few weeks, there was literally blood in the streets, as episodes of violence became more unpredictable, more public, and more arbitrary than they had even been while the Germans were running the city.
No one knows exactly how the disorganized violence began, but this much is clear: there was a convulsion, almost an orgasm (the word was used often to describe the phenomenon) of retribution that took over the city in those first few weeks of “freedom.” Again, estimates vary, but perhaps in the vicinity of ten thousand Parisians, mostly men and some women, were victims of rapid and frequently fatal justice in the year following the D-day invasion. These judgments and executions were carried out by members of the FFI, the official Resistance army, and members of the informal, self-appointed resistance as well as by vengeful neighbors and competitors. The last gasps of the Vichy Milice were responsible as well for sudden retributive murders until they were finally eradicated a few days after the Germans had escaped. Even before the last Germans had left the city, gangs of official and unofficial armed men began to knock on doors, seeking someone to punish—anyone—even, in a few cases, those who had themselves resisted the German Occupier.
With the signs of liberation finally appearing, the desire to find scapegoats to remove the feelings of guilt and anger that had dominated the four years of Occupation and the five years of the nation’s military humiliation was too strong to repress. The first public victims of this effort to “recreate a patriotic virginity”2 were women suspected of having consorted in some inappropriately intimate way with German personnel. But men were vulnerable as well, for the newly dominant forces for order sought to exculpate themselves and their city from blame for their failure to expel the enemy over the course of four years. The difference was that men were often shot behind closed doors, or off in the woods, or even in their homes, while women had their heads shaved in public. The shaving of women’s heads—which was often accompanied by the defilement of their bodies—was immediately photographed and distributed by most of the world’s primary news organizations.
A generally held belief is that more than twenty thousand women throughout France, ages sixteen and older, were so “shorn” between late 1943 and early 1946 in retaliation for collaboration horizontale with members of the German forces. But recent studies have corrected this assumption; archival research has revealed that only about 47 percent of the punished were specifically accused of sleeping with the enemy. The rest were women betrayed, more often than not, by their female peers because they had worked with or served the Germans, because they had ended the war a bit better off than their compatriots, or because they had in other ways insulted common mores, affective and otherwise. Local jealousies and attempts at redirecting attention from some who were guiltier were often behind accusations of lack of fidelity to imprisoned husbands and other excuses for punishment.
Scapegoats. (Bundesarchiv)
Women and girls were dragged from their homes and places of work; sometimes a “trial” would be held, but generally crowd justice was immediately inflicted. Rarely did relatives try to stop the violence to their aunts, cousins, sisters, and even mothers. Frequently children would be made to stand by as their mothers were shorn and branded (generally with ink or charcoal, but occasionally actual torture was used to make them pay for their purported crimes, e.g., all body hair would be cut or even burned off). After being shorn, they were marched through the streets of their communities, some even carrying the babies that might have been the result of their collaboration horizontale. We should remember that hairstyles in those days featured long tresses, not bobbed cuts; the sight of piles of hair lying at the feet of women who had had no defenders was the result.
The furor of a hysterical and still apprehensive population did not waste time or energy on details. On the gates leading to the city hall of the 18th arrondissement, dozens of “scalps” were hung, sending a message to all who might have even thought about collaborating that their turn might be next. Of course, “collaboration” was then and would remain a nebulous designator; where did “accommodation” end and “collaboration” begin? As we have seen, men suffered as well but were not as publicly humiliated. (One writer has suggested that the shorn women should not have complained: better to have your hair cut off than to be shot in the back in a dark alley.)
Women may have been denounced for the most part by other women, but it was mainly men who did the “shearing” (though women did participate here and there).* There is no record of a man having been publicly shaved. No one has ever cited a case of a man who slept with one of the souris grises, the German women who had accompanied the Occupation bureaucracy. That most of these punishments were done in public spoke to the community’s felt need to exorcise the souillure (filthy stain) that had besmirched French honor. In fact it was the very publicity of the event that was a major desideratum of those who were doing the punishing. Thousands of photographs were taken, posted, printed in newly liberated newspapers, and shared among friends. One cannot but think of similar publications and postcards of the lynchings that took place in the United States, especially in the South, in the 1910s, 1920s, and 1930s.
We have seen throughout this work how prominent Parisiennes were in daily life during the Occupation of their city. Throughout it all, many of them had tried to maintain an aura of self-possession in their dress and comportment. Germans remarked on the style these citizens maintained, even amid shortages of fabric, leather, and other fashion material. Shortages in chemicals meant that the exquisite attention they had given to their hair was also limited, so many began wearing turbans, with a few locks showing, in order to cover the listless tresses that shortages had forced on them. Then the poor women who had their heads shorn began to wear turbans, too, and that more benign fashion statement quickly disappeared from the streets of Europe’s fashion capital. But a terrible coincidence soon occurred: women returning from Ravensbrück and other detention camps, or from work in Germany, appeared with their heads shaved, a common remedy for removing typhus-carrying lice. Soon they adopted the turban, not knowing at first that the headpiece had become the sign of a “shorn” woman. Many, many incidents of misidentification further confused the Parisians as they tried to put upright a world that had been turned upside down and inside out. (One person who kept wearing the turban as a fashion statement was Simone de Beauvoir, but we do not know whether she did so in solidarity with her sisters or for convenience.) Women had worked bravely in the Resistance; they had kept the home front in some sort of order; they, for the most part, had stayed faithful to their imprisoned husbands and lovers. But none of these activities was enough to protect many from a blindly vengeful public during the impossibly chaotic months after the liberation of their city and their nation.
To add insult to injury, prostitutes who had provided their services to the Germans were not, in most cases, shorn. Another piece of masculine sophistry protected them: they were, after all, only doing what they were intended to do. Prostitution was legal in France, and during the Occupation there were more than thirty bordellos designated for Germans; it is further estimated that there were about one hundred thousand “underground” women and girls who regularly sold their favors to French and to Germans, the aura of commerce protecting them from accusation and retribution.* They had not “betrayed” French men. This sort of ethical parsing defined the events, along with a sense that some sort of spectacle, of communal bonding, was needed immediately to end the potential civil war that threatened France. The fact that this bonding had to occur around the humiliation of women continues to embarrass French collective memory.
Without delving too deeply into communal psychology, one can venture that these events were definitely aimed at putting women “back in their place.” The Vichy government had tried imposing a system of “family values” on French women, but without much success, given the need the country had for female labor and ingenuity during the Occupation. True, as the war wound down, Colonel Rol had offered that without women in the Resistance as many as half its accomplishments would have been impossible. His adjutant, Albert Ouzoulias, wrote in his history of the Bataillons de la jeunesse that “during the insurrection, just as during much of the Resistance, [women] played an irreplaceable role.”3 They were brilliant administrators and exceptional liaisons between separated groups; they rode bicycles for hundreds of kilometers, often under fire. They helped build barricades, worked as nurses, and coordinated efforts to assist those who were fighting.
They organized the new life born of the insurrection; they concentrated their attention on the most difficult problems, such as the nourishment of children and of those unable to fend for themselves.… Their civil rights [e.g., the right to vote] were not given to them; they won them in the Resistance and in the struggles for Liberation. No one can take away what we owe them for the Liberation.4
The FFI itself tried to stop the tontes, calling them illegal. Yet France needed to reassume, and quickly, its virility, and the most symbolic way of doing that was to remind everyone that the disasters it had undergone had been the fault of women who had had sexual relations with the Occupier. Paris, the center of fashion, feminine style, and beauty, became for a brief period a center of misogynist scapegoating.
American, Canadian, and British soldiers, especially, found the practice repugnant, and at times they would interfere to protect the victims; we have reports, letters, and interviews with them in which they show how much respect they had lost for the French. All this soon pushed the practice and its recording onto a back burner as the French tried to regain the moral upper hand by reminding the world that Paris was free and was putting itself back together with special attention to a resuscitated joie de vivre. The vehemence that had appeared in newspaper reports, gleefully accompanied by photographs of embarrassed women, began to fade into a general list of excuses, a common response during those chaotic days. Once the visceral need for some sort of justice had been sated, there generally followed an immediate feeling of guilt or embarrassment.
Despite de Gaulle’s very serious efforts to bring order quickly to the city, chaos was unavoidable, for the civil war that had been smoldering persistently just below the surface of the French polity needed only a spark to become a conflagration. Numbers are contradictory, but we know that hundreds of summary executions were carried out in Paris, while the same sort of denunciations that had peppered the years of the Occupation continued. Based often on surmise, or personal jealousy, or bad information, these accusations nonetheless served to bring many French men and women to “justice” before kangaroo courts that were set up on street corners, on truck beds, on specially built platforms, in public gardens, in cafés, in back rooms, and in quickly emptied offices throughout the city. No one knows exactly how many were involved in these countless expressions of repressed anger, guilt, and a deep belief that justice must be had. The effects of this period of épuration (purification), which had begun in October of 1943 in Corsica, the first French département to be liberated, still resonate in Parisian memory. Memoirs, fiction, and essays that appeared right after the Liberation often describe a disoriented population caught up in the social and political dislocation that defines any postwar society.
That this urge to rehabilitate French virility and honor was visited on the bodies of women has been much studied by sociologists and historians. Despite the successes the Free French forces enjoyed on the battlefield up until the final defeat of Germany, and despite their participation in the liberation of Paris and other towns, many who had lived through the debacle of 1940 had not forgotten their army’s pathetic defeat. More than a million French soldiers were still in the hands of the Germans, and though they would begin trickling home soon, their neutralization by a more powerful army still rankled. One historian has referred to these embarrassing events as a “rite of passage,” necessary when a society moves violently from a period of forced quiescence to find itself immediately free to express years of repressed anger.5 Yet it was only around the turn of the twenty-first century that major analyses of the events began to correct hoary assumptions—assumptions that tended to protect those who acted illegally, vindictively, and spontaneously after the evacuation of the Germans from French cities and eventually from French soil.
One of the earliest rumors that took hold in Paris while the tanks were rolling in to liberate the city was that members of the Vichy Milice and die-hard German defenders were firing on civilians as well as on armed troops from the rooftops. Looking for marksmen, the city’s eyes were turned to the typically low and uneven roofs and high windows of apartment houses. Though there were definitely examples of such activity, la guerre des toits (the rooftop war) became a formidable myth that persisted for a month after the liberation of the city. The first civilians targeted by vengeful “liberators” were often those suspected of being on the rooftops taking shots at the celebrants. There are a few eyewitness accounts of what happened at first to those who, for whatever reason, were seen as having not been celebratory enough in welcoming the city’s liberators or who had the misfortune to live on one of a building’s top floors, especially in southern Paris, where the first French soldiers were welcomed.
A witness tells a tale that matches in horror all that had happened in the city during the Occupation: an innocent man went to his balcony with a telescope to look across the rooftops and down at the victorious Allied troops. All of a sudden, someone in the street looked up and yelled: “There’s one of them, with a rifle. He’s shooting at us!” Quickly, young armed men, wearing their FFI armbands, rushed up to the building’s top floor, burst in, but found no weapons. No matter. They forced the bystander down the stairs; he, and some of his neighbors, pleaded with the gang, telling them that he had hidden Jews as well as downed pilots and had been active in his neighborhood resistance, but the lust to find enemies to bring to justice prevailed. When the group reached the street, other neighbors and bystanders grabbed the poor man, lifted him, and threw him under the treads of the advancing Sherman tanks. The smear of his carcass on the pavement caused a combination of revulsion and a perverse sense of retribution. Embarrassed, the crowd turned and walked away.
The Conseil national de la Résistance, under the general standard of the loosely Gaullist FFI, had been coordinating resistance activities since mid-1943. Coordination was the order of the day. The Communist militant Henri Tanguy (Colonel Rol) was in fact the commander of the FFI in the département of the Seine, which included Paris and its immediate environs.* He had been selected by the Gaullist forces to lead the Parisian secret army because of his extensive combat experience in Spain and during the war. A leader respected by all sides, he nonetheless could not stop the freewheeling, unpredictable, and violent acts of retribution that took over the city for about a month after the Liberation. What made his job more difficult was that many young hoodlums, looters, and even pro-fascists had taken on the aura of being “freedom fighters.” Gangs quickly formed all over the city, and for a variety of often contradictory reasons—ideological, personal, pecuniary, and to create camouflage for previous sins of collaboration—there was “blood in the city” for the two months following the departure of the Germans.6 Among the first to “purify” their ranks were the police, who used accusations, quick judgments, and executions—as well as frequent attempts at hiding their own members’ histories of cooperation and collaboration—as acts of retribution. Soon the camaraderie that had defined the Resistance began to fray, then tear, as Communists, Gaullists, and even some former Vichy supporters began to struggle for power in the new government. Not only did these groups quarrel with each other, they often had internecine disputes as everyone sought political purity. Communist turned on Communist; former Vichy bureaucrats denounced each other; and Gaullists who had spent the war abroad nervously watched those who had been fighting on French soil. The FFI and Gaullist leadership immediately tried to compel these groups to cooperate, to surrender arms, to stop the arbitrary arrests, punishments, and executions. But they were initially unsuccessful, and the “false FFI” men continued to engage in blackmail, armed robbery, swindles, and other “normal” crimes.
“Kill All the Bastards!”
With the Liberation, the most innocuous places in Paris became, as they had under the Occupation, sinister. A commandeered dental school in a lower-middle-class arrondissement is one example. There, for about two weeks, the Franc-tireurs et partisans (FTP), an armed branch of the Communist Party, mirrored what the Gestapo had done for the previous four years. Individuals were arrested—or, rather, rounded up—for a variety of unclear reasons: being in the wrong place at the wrong time, being suspected collaborators (whatever that meant at the time), being on the wrong side of the Communist Party, or being on the wrong side within the party. Whatever. A further manifestation of the scapegoating was even more violent, though it remains one of the least understood events in histories of the period after the Liberation. No photographs were taken; public humiliation was not part of the terror; all was done in private, and the evidence, the cadavers of the victims, was thrown into the Seine, which threw them back on shore over the course of the following two months.
The Institut dentaire George-Eastman, in the 13th arrondissement, had served as a German hospital for the entire Occupation. Once evacuated by Hitler’s troops, it provided an excellent, well-protected building in which acts of retribution against one’s enemies could be carried out without public knowledge. FTP members tied the hands of each victim with the same type of cord they used to hang a large limestone cobblestone around the murdered victim’s neck before disposing of them in the Seine. It turns out that these stones would not be heavy enough to keep the corpses under water; most of the cadavers, fished from the Seine by the police, had signs of having been tortured before being shot. At first officials thought these were among the final victims of the Gestapo, furious at having to give up Paris. But soon the word spread that they were considered to be enemies of the Communist Party. Old scores had been settled; retributive vengeance had been imposed; an appropriation of judgment had given the party members a sense of ethical superiority over those who were already negotiating with collaborators to remake the city. Up until late December of 1944, bodies would be found, with the signature method of disposal, as if those who did the deed wanted their actions to be recognized and thought about. The whole story is still not known, though recently historians have provided us with much more information about this month of terror: dozens of individuals were picked up, brought to the Institut dentaire, and tortured. More than two dozen of them were so murdered.7 The victims seemed to have been chosen at random—subjects of rumor, envy, personal grudges, and differing views of what constituted collaboration. Concierges who had been seen scrubbing off anti-Vichy and anti-German graffiti (which they were required to do), café owners and waiters who some thought too close to the Occupier, anti-Communists, pacifists, reputed mistresses of Germans: no one seemed safe once the attention of a vengeful FTP eye was turned on him or her.*
One of the most touching stories concerns a park monitor in late middle age who had been caught up in an FTP assassination attempt a year earlier. In August of 1943, an FTP team had plotted to kill an important German officer in the Parc Monceau, beautifully situated in the heart of the luxurious 8th arrondissement. A partisan fired and hit the major in the thigh, who immediately started to yell in excellent French that he had been attacked. A fifty-one-year-old park guard, Gustave Trabis, having use of only his left hand because of a World War I injury, ran to the wounded German’s aid and grabbed at the assailant’s bicycle; the shooter managed to escape without having finished the job of killing the major. Sadly for the unfortunate park monitor, the Vichy-controlled press made a big deal of his effort, something he later regretted when he learned that a Paris resistance group had carried out the attack. Nevertheless, he was arrested a year later by the outlier group of résistants, tortured, and killed with a blow to the head. His body, like those of the others, was thrown into the Seine. The FTP and other groups were especially diligent at finding Parisians who had impeded résistants while carrying out their missions. Instinctively, many bystanders would help police officers apprehend those whom they thought were common thieves. But their names were often written down, and many paid with severe punishments during this interregnum of terror that besmirched the exultation and relief of the Liberation.
But those actions against those seen to have collaborated with, or at least cooperated with, the Occupier were carried out haphazardly. Marcel Jouhandeau was a minor author and a minor collaborator who had written a few anti-Semitic pieces and one pro-Vichy article early in the war. He left a diary that describes the anxiety with which he lived for about six months after the Liberation. Jouhandeau, like many others considered to have been too cozy with the Occupiers (and we must keep in mind that the French had not yet decided exactly what collaboration entailed, so almost any interaction with the Germans could have been so designated), had already received little coffins in the mail as well as ominous telephone calls (“We know who you are and where you live”). His wife, Elise, was always on the verge of hysteria, and these insistent reminders that they had been perhaps living too well during the Occupation only added to the couple’s fright. The Jouhandeaus did live in one of the most chic quarters, the 17th arrondissement, near the Bois de Boulogne and the Porte Maillot, a major German strongpoint. As the citizens of Paris became more emboldened, and as the Germans were obviously abandoning the city, Jouhandeau noticed that he was being watched more and more by passersby. He had friends in the literary world who were in the Resistance, and many promised to protect him, but on a day-by-day basis he felt increasingly vulnerable.
One morning during the Liberation, he learned that his name had been put on a list of collaborators who were to be rounded up. For more than thirty days after the Germans had left, Jouhandeau and his wife moved from friend to friend, from acquaintance to acquaintance, only occasionally sneaking back to their apartment. They kept waiting for a knock at the door, especially since friends were telling them repeatedly that they had been inquired about. They had to learn which concierges they could trust, which ones they should ignore. There seemed to be a fever of counter-denunciation going on in Paris; for every denunciation of a Jew or a Gaullist that took place during the Occupation there appeared to be a corresponding denunciation of a collaborator after the Liberation—even someone who had done something as innocuous as talk with a German. One day, as he was crossing a busy street, a car marked with the large white letters FFI stopped beside him. A young man called out: “Professor Jouhandeau.” It was one of his mediocre students, who remembered him well and who offered to take care of him during this period of retribution. Did he now need such help? Were they that close to arresting him? Jouhandeau’s fears were enhanced when he heard that many political prisoners were being held and being mistreated at Drancy by the FFI. Another source told him about the acts of humiliation being visited on women who had fraternized with Germans and on collabos who had looked down their noses at the Occupied: they were being beaten, tattooed, shorn, and otherwise tormented. One young man, in Jouhandeau’s presence, asked a member of the literary resistance if there was any newspaper that would publish his article about how political prisoners were being treated by the FFI. “None,” answered the sympathetic publisher. “But it’s just as it was before,” said the debutant journalist. “Yes,” answered the publisher, “just backwards.” Jouhandeau soon began to whine—to himself, to others, to his readers—that he was like Christ, a persecuted but innocent man. He refused to admit that the opinions of those who found him repulsive might have had any validity whatsoever. “After the Liberation,” he brilliantly observed, “formalities are infinitely more complex than under the Occupation.”8 Well, yes.… Jouhandeau ultimately escaped any chastisement for his happy cooperation with the Germans after the war, except for his panic during those months. His case was closed, and he continued to teach in Paris.*
These and other recollections of the way justice was arbitrarily assigned in the months after the Liberation use the same metaphors and images of those who recall what it was like to live under the Germans and their Vichy servants: stomachs knotting when a heavy tread is heard on the stairs; doorbells ringing at odd hours; suspicion of one’s neighbors; anonymous letters appearing in one’s mailbox, threatening some violent action; clandestine phone calls to friends to find out the latest news; reading with apprehension the newspapers to see who had been arrested and for what; fear of any interaction with official authority—the syndrome of fearful anticipation did not disappear with the disappearance of the Occupier. Almost like a mirror reflection, behavior was the same, only the objects of punishment had changed. If the Occupation affected Parisians, if the memory of their own and others’ actions haunted them, the same could be said for the immediate period following those events. For years, decisions made and actions taken during those terrible months would have the same befuddling impact on Parisian collective memory as had the Occupation itself.
The Return of Lost Souls
In April of 1945, a well-dressed middle-aged woman was sitting comfortably on a bus when she looked up to see a startling apparition: a walking skeleton had just mounted the steps to board. The other passengers were silent, some staring, others looking away. The man, whose age was difficult to determine, was wearing clean clothes, but they swallowed him. What passengers noticed first were his shaved head and his baleful eyes, staring into the middle distance. Moving with caution, holding on to the bus’s poles, he shuffled rather than walked. Immediately the woman rose to offer him her seat, which he took with a slight smile and a merci. Prisoners of war were making their way back home. As well those who had been deported for political, racial, or economic reasons were, almost overnight, revisiting liberated Paris. Now explanations had to be heard, excuses given, dramas relived, and lives begun again.
On a corner opposite the Gare de Lyon, as trains and trucks dropped off hundreds of returning Parisians and other French citizens, crowds would gather to gape. Janet Flanner (writing as Genêt), the inimitable Paris correspondent for The New Yorker, described in a cable dated April 1945 one especially moving arrival:
The first contingent of women prisoners arrived by train, bringing with them as very nearly their only baggage the proof, on their faces and their bodies and in their weakly spoken reports, of the atrocities that had been their lot and the lot of hundreds of thousands of others in the numerous concentration camps our armies are liberating, almost too late. They arrived at the Gare de Lyon at eleven in the morning and were met by a nearly speechless crowd ready with welcoming bouquets of lilacs and other spring flowers, and General de Gaulle, who wept.9
One of those waiting was Marguerite Duras, the novelist (Americans know her best as the author of The Lover) and member of the Resistance. Her husband, Robert Antelme, had been arrested by the Gestapo in a trap from which she had escaped with the help of her resistance group’s leader, François Mitterrand, future president of France. Antelme had been deported to Buchenwald, then Dachau, and she had heard no word of him. Her memoir, La Douleur (Painful Sorrow), recounts the anxiety that had taken over the City of Light as the deported began coming back. Surviving Jews, political prisoners, captured soldiers (most of whom had been in prison since surrendering in the spring of 1940), and other men and women were being dropped off at railroad stations, such as the Gare de Lyon or d’Orsay, and especially at the Lutétia (still the only major grand hotel on the Left Bank), the just-vacated site of the Abwehr, the Wehrmacht’s intelligence service. Like Duras, many had waited days and weeks and months to see who had come back, bearing photographs of missing relatives, begging for information. When they did find their loved ones, they were often unrecognizable, for their trauma had lasted for so long. The city offered little solace to the waiting. Writes Duras in her memoir:
No one has anything in common with me.… At this moment there are people in Paris who are laughing, especially the young. I have nothing left but enemies. It’s evening. I must go home and wait by the phone. A slow red sun over Paris. Six years of war ending.… Everything is at an end. I can’t stop walking. I’m thin, spare as stone.10
She wandered in melancholy from train station to train station, from the Lutétia back to her apartment in Saint-Germain-des-Prés; she was regularly phoned or stopped on the street by friends who asked, “Any news?” And she returned compulsively to the Gare d’Orsay to watch in apprehension and pity as “old men” were helped off trains and trucks by Boy Scouts. But they were not old; they were exhausted, ill, starved. Many were still in their twenties, and many of those would die before they got home, weakened irreparably. No matter how hungry Paris had been, there had been no scenes like this in its streets; for the first time, Parisians had an inkling of how fortunate they had been, in their bubble, as the rest of Europe had turned into a charnel house. The scenes were emotionally draining as well as morally agonizing: How could humans do this to one another? How could the French have supported this Nazi insanity?
Duras was disgusted with Charles de Gaulle’s haste to forgive and forget. Forgiveness accompanied a refusal to know, to remember:
On April 3 [1945] he uttered these criminal words: “The days of weeping are over. The days of glory have returned.” We shall never forgive.… De Gaulle doesn’t talk about the concentration camps; it’s blatant the way he doesn’t talk about them, the way he’s clearly reluctant to credit the people’s suffering with a share in the victory for fear of lessening his own role and the influence that derives from it.11
De Gaulle was far from alone in feeling a sense of ownership of the tragedy; many groups claimed their story in the resolution of and the costs of the war and of the Occupation. But Duras touches on perhaps a major legacy of the Occupation and the war, namely, that institutions, no matter how much they will try, cannot forgive, forget, or remember on behalf of affected populations: only those who suffered have that right.
In one of the most remarkable stories that come from this period, François Mitterrand was visiting officially the newly liberated Dachau concentration camp when, from a pile of cadavers and dying inmates, he heard a weak “François, François, c’est moi!” The voice was that of Robert Antelme, ill with typhus, starved, and dying. Quickly, Mitterrand had him transported home to Paris, expecting at any moment that he would pass away before Marguerite Duras saw him. Telephoned by another friend with this news, she waited at the apartment door to see the man for whom she had been waiting, searching, and dreaming of for months. She rushed down the stairs and witnessed Robert being helped to the first landing. “I can’t remember exactly what happened. He must have looked at me and recognized me and smiled. I shrieked no, that I didn’t want to see. I started to run again, up the stairs this time. I was shrieking, I remember that. The war emerged in my shrieks. Six years without uttering a cry.”12 I know of no more devastating scene as the imagined world of war’s horrors confronts the actual. Duras had studied photographs and had watched as “old men” arrived at the train stations; she knew what to expect. But when looking directly into the eyes of her husband, then at his ravished body, she had to let all imagined horrors be replaced by a very intimate one. Such reactions were occurring daily in Paris after August of 1944 and, especially, after the end of the European war, in May of 1945, as those coming home were suddenly, insistently there, or as the idea sank in that others would never be returning. The joy of the Liberation had been replaced by, or at least had to stand side by side with, the reality of a still barely perceived Holocaust.
In her descriptions of the anticipated legacies of the war and the Occupation on her beloved city, Duras envisioned a mass grave, a “black ditch” that had inscribed itself on the Paris cityscape. “Beside the ditch is the parapet of the Pont des Arts, the Seine. To be exact, it’s to the right of the ditch. They’re separated by the dark. Nothing in the world belongs to me now except that corpse [of my missing husband] in a ditch,” she wrote. Later: “No one can know my struggle against visions of the black ditch.”13 A personal image, yes, but a powerful one for the city of Paris itself as it crawled out from under the devastations of the Occupation. It is as if there were a dark line drawn across the memory of the city, separating gai Paris (if it ever were truly so) from a metropolis hollowed out by fear, guilt, regrets, and anger. The events that had immediately followed the departure of the Germans would mark the city and its residents as indelibly as had the black years of the Occupation itself.