Then there was the war, and I married it because there was nothing else when I reached the age of falling in love.
—GUY SAJER, YOUNG GERMAN SOLDIER, ON HIS WAY TO RUSSIAN FRONT
Just as many more Americans “remember” being at Woodstock or at Martin Luther King’s “I Have a Dream” speech than were actually there, so have many French adults “remembered” being routed on the Champs-Élysées by Germans and French police at the aforementioned demonstration on November 11, 1940. That event remains one of the key dates of adolescent resistance to the German Occupation and the new French state.
The fall of 1940 had been as beautiful as the summer; no one was expecting the vicious winter of 1940–1941, which the Occupation would exacerbate. School had been in session about a month. For the first time since the armistice the previous June, students were gathering up and down the Boulevard Saint-Michel in the Latin Quarter to debate what had happened and either to devise options for resisting the Occupier or to shout in resistance to the resisters of the new French state. In general, most university students were from upper-class families, and except in the humanities and the social sciences, most faculties, unlike those from the more egalitarian lycées, were politically center or center-right. This student district had not yet been identified with open rebellion, though the number of high schools with hundreds of restless students did concern the authorities. Still, the country had been relatively passive over the past four months, with only a few attacks against German telecommunication centers and no serious attacks against German personnel. Especially after la Rentrée (the return—both the beginning of the school year and the beginning of the professional year), youngsters would ride their bikes wildly in the streets, hooting and whistling at Germans in their fancy cars or sitting languidly in sidewalk cafés, but that was to be expected by the authorities, who held their breath that nothing more serious would disrupt the order and security they were commissioned to maintain.
In his detailed book about the events on and around November 11, 1940, the historian Maxime Tandonnet states plainly that “the French Resistance was born in the autumn and beginning of winter 1940”; the first major street demonstrations occurred in the Latin Quarter at that very moment.1 The spark was the arrest on October 30 of Professor Paul Langevin, an eminent physics professor, a supporter of Dreyfus (the Dreyfus Affair had been “resolved” barely three decades before), and a strong believer in pacifist diplomacy. Langevin’s public stands against fascism made him a target of the early Occupation, a period when such prominent “troublemakers” (not yet “terrorists”) were quietly silenced.* The arrest and dismissal of Langevin brought the arguments and debates about the Occupation to a head. Left- and right-wing students began harassing each other, and signs and posters appeared on the walls of the universities and the lycées.
Word spread that there would be a gathering outside the Collège de France, where Langevin had held a prestigious professorship, on the Rue des Écoles, in the center of the Latin Quarter. That demonstration, though small, was loud and at times violent as students supporting Langevin tried to gain entry into the Sorbonne and surrounding buildings. Soon bigger plans were concocted, and rumors grew that there would be a major student march on the Champs-Élysées on November 11, the anniversary of the French victory over the Germans in the Great War. Of course, these plans also reached the ears of the university authorities, who immediately published an announcement to all academic rectors, deans, and heads of faculty:
You know that the government has decided that this year, because of our nation’s mourning [over the defeat], academic work will continue on November 11. . . . There will be no ceremony. The government counts on you to make sure that our students abstain from any demonstration, either on campus or off, which could harm the gravity of our mourning, but as well the respect we all have for our work.2
Imagine the response of professors who received this admonition from higher up. Most of them were not in any way engaged in actions against the Occupier or Vichy; they wanted to keep their jobs and continue to educate their students in the bubble of the Latin Quarter. Yet they knew, better than their leaders, that their students were increasingly concerned about the future of the nation—on both sides—and that to ignore what was happening would only bring this anxiety to the surface.
Not unexpectedly, student-produced tracts appeared that called for public demonstrations to protest the dismissals of Langevin and other professors and to warn the university leaders that such arbitrary acts by the Germans would be met with loud objection, if not something more serious. On the student-filled streets of the quarter, one poster read:
STUDENT OF FRANCE!
November 11 is still your national holiday!
Despite orders from the oppressors, it will remain a
DAY OF REMEMBRANCE!
Attend no classes.
Join in honoring the Unknown Soldier at 5:30 PM.
November 11, 1918, was the date of a great victory!
November 11, 1940, will mark an even greater one!
VIVE LA FRANCE!
(Recopy these lines, and distribute them!)
By noon on November 11, students—and others—began arriving at the Rond-Point des Champs-Élysées, less than halfway up the long avenue from the Place de la Concorde, where they would start a slow march westward to the Arc de Triomphe. At this rotary stood a statue of a vigorous Georges Clemenceau that had been placed there in 1932, two years after the square was named for “the Tiger.” The crowd grew larger as young people and their elders poured out of the side streets, which led primarily from the direction of the Left Bank to this special spot on the Right. Protest signs were raised, and kids carried two fishing poles, called gaules—that is, deux gaules = de Gaulle. The V sign was raised by hundreds of hands. Flower wreaths were respectfully laid at the foot of Clemenceau’s statue, and the students sang the outlawed “La Marseillaise” (and the young communists sang the “Internationale,” the anthem sung all over Europe by communist and socialist students). The mood was celebratory; almost every lycée in central Paris had representatives, and professors mingled with students. As they passed by the numerous cafés that lined the avenue, they would notice and wave at the dumbfounded German soldiers who were lounging there, most on leave from less glamorous assignments, stunned to silence as they watched such a casual yet large opposition to their presence. (Estimates range between three thousand and five thousand marchers; there are no records or photographs that allow a firmer figure.)
There could no longer be any doubt: a major file of Parisian citizens was marching in opposition to Pétain’s unfortunate armistice and to the presence of German soldiers in the capital city. Quickly, the French police began forming into groups of baton-carrying thugs, trying to disperse what was becoming a much larger crowd than had been predicted. Finally, whether called by the French or on their own initiative, German troops arrived. Much less patient with the crowd, they used their trucks and motorcycles to break it into groups; then machine guns began firing, first into the air. The crowd panicked and began running down the same streets that had brought them to the grand avenue, rushing to get back to the neighborhoods they knew better. But by then the French police had been reinvigorated; they followed, beat, and arrested dozens of young people.
The writer and professor Jean Guéhenno left an invaluable journal that he kept during the Occupation. He describes what happened next:
Around 5:30 on November 11, Armistice Day, I went to the Champs-Élysées. I saw French policemen following German orders and taking away the flowers that passersby had thrown at the foot of the statue of Clemenceau. I saw German soldiers charge young people from the schools on the sidewalks of the avenue with their bayonets, and [French police] officers throw them to the ground. Three times I heard machine guns firing.3
Besides dozens of arrests, the Germans also closed down the Latin Quarter the next day. Guéhenno describes what that day felt like:
Today the Sorbonne is closed. The students have been sent back to their provinces. Students from Paris are required to show up at their local police stations every day. I feel such disgust that I cannot even write in detail what I saw. Submerged by idiocy. At a moment like this I don’t even know what I think anymore. I no longer have any desire to think anything. I need to start over from zero, and rebuild a mind and a soul once again.4
Miraculously, and despite contrary charges from both sides, it appears that no one was killed or even seriously wounded. A few hundred young people were rounded up and sent, not to the local jails of the French police, but to the most notorious prisons in Paris. And as Guéhenno noted, the German military authorities came down on the students like a load of well-stacked bricks:
1. Classes are forbidden in all the universities and graduate schools of Paris until further notice. (Individual research of professors may continue.)
2. All students who live with their parents in Paris must return home, and remain there until further notice. All French students living in Paris must report daily to their local [meaning their home] police station.
3. All police commissioners must daily report which students showed up for this requirement.
Since only a small number of lycée and university students had been involved in the march up the grand avenue, and only a handful arrested, the rest, who thought they were minding their own business, were stunned by the austerity of the punishment. Of course, this insult to their good behavior would only serve in the long run to bring more of them into the ranks of clandestinity, either benign or violent.
The significance of this march and the subsequent clash was underestimated at the time; the demonstration was seen as a useless provocation by a disorganized group of students. But there are several reasons why this was a misinterpretation. First, de Gaulle had recently complained that the French seemed to be passively accepting the consequences of the Débâcle. Yet here was the first major, and peaceful, show of resistance to both the Germans and the palliating propaganda of the Vichy regime. Second, through their chants and songs, the students boldly brought the name of Charles de Gaulle, along with his symbol, the Cross of Lorraine, to a larger public. (One of his closest aides has written that when he heard the story of the deux gaules, tears suddenly appeared in his notoriously emotionless eyes.) Third, the demonstration revealed the perturbation that was spreading through the lycées, even more than through the universities, as high school students became increasingly serious about confronting a pitiless government. The youth of France could no longer be ignored in their attempts to awaken the nation to the nefarious presence of the Germans. The very impudence of the youngsters as they poured into the Champs-Élysées was palpable evidence that the pleas, threats, and propaganda of the Vichy regime had so far had little effect on them, but in fact had been diluted by the experience of resisting and by the persistent mentoring of some of their most revered teachers.
Fourth, the parade had shown that the French Communist Party, even though outlawed, was still the best organized opposition, and the most successful at recruiting youngsters of both genders to its ranks. Though the parade was not a communist affair, the presence of communists would be used later as evidence of their passion and commitment to a cause larger than the rescue of France itself. And fifth, for the first time it was obvious to those who watched what happened, and to those who experienced it, that the French police were allies of the German Occupation Authority. For the most part, arrests were made by the French, and frequently the captured were sent into the hands of the Germans for questioning.
This event would leave an indelible memory for those who were there or who learned of it, for they were poised to resist the abolition of the Third Republic and the humiliations of the German Occupation of their nation. Many citizens, and many youth, had tested the authorities, measured their reactions, and their appetite for resistance had taken on a new edge.
In August 1941, a bit less than a year later, Germany was approaching Moscow at unheard-of speeds for a massive army. Stalin had released all communist parties throughout Europe from the shackles of the August 1939 treaty with the Third Reich. At first, early resistance by youngsters was disorganized, haphazard, and generally ineffective, but the Occupying Authority was sensitive to it, for they knew that, if supported by the populace, it could grow. In particular, they feared that a steadily strengthening resistance would require more troops in France, thereby affecting Germany’s pressing military needs elsewhere. The war in the east took precedence over chasing young boys and girls around the streets of large French cities. So the Occupying Authority called on the French police and gendarmes to do their work for them and monitor young “terrorists.” Not until 1941 did reprisals against partisan activities become severe, but by that time the earlier groups had also become bolder, better organized, and more efficient at clandestine communication.
* * *
The boy was handed a pistol compact enough to fit comfortably in his small hand. It was probably a Beretta 6.35, about six and a half inches long, with a barrel of less than four inches. Some called it a “lady’s pistol,” for it was accurate for only a few yards, but it was easy to conceal. He was only fifteen (born in 1926) but looked twelve, yet he had about him an air of seriousness that had impressed the older members of a resistance team. Having had some training in grenade-throwing (with rocks) but probably none in the use of firearms, he answered his adult supervisor, who had queried his preparedness, “In order to kill someone, you just fire, and that’s it.”5 His friends laughed nervously and suggested that two of the band go with him in search of a German soldier whom young André Kirschen was to shoot. No, he would be less conspicuous alone, he countered. Not chary of killing an army or SS officer, the young communist did not want to shoot an enlisted soldier or a communist one like himself. No matter, his comrades answered, “just shoot a German.” Putting the small arm in his pocket, he accepted the challenge.
Kirschen attended school the next morning (with the pistol in his pocket), and when classes finished, he set out in search of a target. (If the way violent resistance was integrated into mundane daily activities shocks us, then we should recall that such was life for many during the Occupation.) The previous week one of his comrades had fired three times at an officer, but none of the bullets had reached their mark. In fact, it was this failed assassin who had lent André the pistol he was now carrying. Walking up and down the streets of Paris, the young teenager at first had no luck; the only Germans he saw were walking in pairs. Perhaps his predecessors had been right: killing a German was not as easy as it sounded. Then, suddenly, he noticed
a magnificent German soldier descending the stairs to the Porte-Dauphine metro [on the western edge of the city in a posh neighborhood]. Doubtlessly an officer, with a very good-looking uniform, wearing a dagger. I follow him. No one in the corridor [leading to the tracks]. No more excuses not to complete the act.
I took out my arm, placed it on my hip, and shot him in the back. I was two meters from him. He fell into a heap. It took me a bit to realize what had happened. I looked left and right: no one. I ran toward the exit, scrambled up the stairway, and took the first street to my left, then the next on the right, and so forth. In a few minutes, I was far from the metro stop. . . . I rendezvoused with my pals, and said something stupid, as I handed over the pistol: “One bullet’s missing.”6
How had a fifteen-year-old boy, in 1941, become a would-be killer?*
Direct, credible, and moving, Kirschen’s oral autobiography, La Mort à quinze ans (Death at fifteen), composed when he was almost eighty years old, is one of the most intimate accounts of how a young teenager found himself drawn to those who would violently confront the Germans during the Occupation.* The communist youth groups that André frequented were relatively homogeneous politically, but their members were of different nationalities and spoke several languages, with Yiddish tending to be the lingua franca. Again, not unlike young Ruffin, André found himself moving from the margins to the center; he was one of those who wanted to take more effective action than pasting notices on Parisian walls. The French Communist Party had spent the decade of the 1930s building a community of young, eager adherents—male and female—who forged tight friendships. Maroussia Naïtchenko, Thomas Elek, André Kirschen, his brother Bob, and Guy Môquet had all known each other. In June 1941, when the Party ban against resisting the Germans in France was lifted, these small, cohesive groups were ready and primed to move directly to action.
* * *
Back in the summer of 1940, young André (called Hank by his family) had been surprised when his older brother, Bob, a diligent, intelligent student, confessed to him that he was a member of a clandestine communist group and was considering becoming more active in the Resistance, despite the admonitions from Moscow to avoid any antagonistic actions against the German army. Then came the question: would André like to be a member of the group? André’s acceptance of this invitation was most likely not politically motivated; he was elated to hang out with the “big boys,” alongside his revered older brother. Bob showed him that he had a cache of hidden tracts in his room, and André suggested that they use a toy printing press to publish more of the leaflets. (These little printing presses soon disappeared from toy shops across Paris as other teenagers had the same idea.) Such modest acts of resistance were still a lark for many of the adolescents involved, but the next steps taken would have heavy consequences for André and his family.
A tight group of fervently communist youngsters began meeting regularly in Bob’s room, among them Maroussia Naïtchenko. The Kirschen apartment was in the upper-class sixteenth arrondissement, between Avenue de la Grande Armée and Avenue Foch, where many of the luxurious apartments had been confiscated by senior German officers and diplomats. The neighborhood was not far from the Hôtel Majestic, Wehrmacht headquarters for all of Occupied France. To say that these youngsters were operating under the noses of the Gestapo, the SS, and the Wehrmacht is not to exaggerate. At first, there were games of hide-and-seek with the French police as the youngsters shouted out at public meetings or mingled in crowds of supportive students after professors at the Sorbonne had been fired, or they brought flowers to the Père-Lachaise graves of those who had established Europe’s first communist government in 1871. At the movies, when the newsreels of German propaganda came on, they would boo and stomp their feet until the lights went up, and the projectionist stopped. André Kirschen recounts that they were not afraid, for the arrests and executions that would mark most of the Occupation had not yet begun. And as Kirschen later reflected: “We were not aware of the gravity of what was waiting for us.”7
It was fun with frissons. The youngsters also enjoyed the solidarity of their peers and the umbrella of adult approbation that came from the leaders of the French Communist Party. At the same time, they couldn’t have cared less whether a comrade was a Stalinist or a Trotskyist, or whether Engels or Marx was the most important theorist. Like the Catholic, Jewish, and Protestant members of the group, they were interested in hanging out while devising uniformly naive schemes to harass the new French state and the Germans. As the historian Gilles Perrault observes in his interview with Kirschen: “The young Communists in the working-class neighborhoods of Paris lived in a bubble created for them by the Party. They saw it as living in a people’s commune.”8
But reality interrupted this adolescent idyll. One day in November 1940, returning from school, André saw a band of police in his apartment house’s stairway. He followed them up to his parents’ apartment, where his brother was being interrogated. Compromising tracts and pamphlets had been found in his room. Bob could not deny his participation in an underground group. He had not been betrayed, but the arrest of a group leader had revealed the organizational chart of the team, and Bob’s name was prominent. It was only his age that kept the younger Kirschen from being dragged down to the police station as well. Bob was found guilty and sentenced to ten months in prison for “illegal” actions against the state—mostly, in his case, for passing out clandestinely printed leaflets.*
At the time, it was not yet generally known that to be arrested and convicted to a relatively minor sentence was often a path to death. The boys justified to themselves that the posters the Germans put up naming those executed as “terrorists” did not apply to them. They seemed oblivious to the ad hoc “hostage code,” promulgated in the tense year of 1941–1942, that had doomed other youngsters, such as Guy Môquet. The code called for the arrest of miscreants and their possible execution as hostages whenever a German soldier was shot or attacked. For Bob, branded as a communist, Jew, and “terrorist,” this meant being transferred, after serving his ten-month sentence in the harsh environment of La Santé prison, to Les Tourelles, a better prison camp, and finally to the notorious transit camp outside of Paris, Drancy, where hundreds of Jews waited unknowingly for transport to the death camps in the east, especially Auschwitz.
Even when arrests became more frequent and friends of his disappeared for a while—or forever—André, taking advantage of his very youthful appearance, continued his resistance work. Several friends would later cease their clandestine activities, afraid of what might happen to them or to their families, but he persevered. Decades later, Kirschen wondered why his parents had not insisted that he stop his own underground activities after the arrest of his brother. They worried, he knew, but his passion was strong enough to counter parental dissuasion. At any rate, they did not prevent him from leaving and returning at odd times during the day and night. He also intuited that his parents were secretly proud of him for his efforts.
As his bold exploits continued, André became well known among young communist high schoolers. He would speak to groups and encourage them to stand firm. Again, he did not see the promulgation of Party propaganda as his mission, but rather the encouragement of young people to resist, to stand against the increasingly violent representatives—both German and Vichy—of evil. There were few communist families in the sixteenth arrondissement, but they were an influential group who came from wealthy bourgeois families, lived in large apartments, and were well educated. These would be the leaders, he thought, of a powerful new force of resistance. But it was a small number, and until June 1941, the accursed Soviet Union–Third Reich treaty remained a strong brake on anti-German activity.
* * *
Violent actions increased in number in 1941–1942 and were not limited to the young communist cadres. Paul Collette had joined the French navy in 1938, at age eighteen, because he sensed that war was imminent. During the Norwegian campaign of the spring of 1940, he found himself in the North Sea, fighting the German navy. At one point his ship was torpedoed and went down fast. Many of the well-trained sailors managed to cling to lifeboats and lifesavers as they waited for rescue by the British navy. Suddenly, German aircraft came roaring over the horizon and pitilessly shot at the survivors. Collette survived, but as he wrote shortly after the war, “it was at that moment that hatred for Germans entered my heart. . . . I decided that I would avenge my murdered buddies.”9
After the armistice, Collette was demobbed and suddenly found himself without a job, or a clear future. He tried to find a link to some resistance group, but without much success beyond volunteering to distribute leaflets, which he did, though with little enthusiasm. Yet his analysis of the situation was evolving—as it was with increasing numbers of the population—into a subtle awareness of who the real and most hateful enemy was: not the Germans now in his country, but the right-wing government that had enabled their rather smooth Occupation.
The traitors were not the Germans. They had vanquished the French, but as soldiers, face-to-face. . . . The real traitors are those despicable Frenchmen who, not content to see our nation founder, were now selling it, without scruples. Those traitors needed to be harmed; a Frenchman should make them realize that the whole nation hated them, wanted them thrown out. A few needed to be removed as an example so that others will continue what I began.10
Having seen the light, Paul decided to assassinate a Vichy bigwig as an unmistakable act of resistance by an independent Frenchman, under no one’s orders but his own.
In June 1941, after Hitler’s invasion of the Soviet Union, the more radical fringe of the Vichy contingent, with the concurrence of the SS, formed the Légion des volontaires français contre le Bolchévisme (LVF). These French volunteers wore German uniforms, marched under the swastika flag, and fought on the eastern front against the Russians. The official launching of the group was to be held at Versailles, with all of the major figures of the government present. Pierre Laval had been invited, though this was in August 1941, while he was still out of office; at the last moment, he decided to attend. Collette, who had falsely indicated that he might join the LVF, had been given a ticket to the event, and when he saw Laval suddenly appear with the other dignitaries, he could not believe his good fortune. Pulling from under his jacket a small-caliber pistol, he shot five times, wounding Laval seriously. “I had succeeded. An immense joy filled me within the space of a few seconds, and I realized what a perfect happiness comes from the satisfaction of a job well done.”11
Both the Vichy and German guards had scattered at the shots, but when they returned fire, Laval purportedly yelled, “Don’t harm him.” Laval was sent to the hospital, where he almost died; one bullet, lodged close to his heart, was left inside, too delicately positioned to remove. Collette was immediately interrogated by the police. At first they thought he had been a member of some established resistance group, or perhaps this was another part of the plot that had recently killed a young German cadet in Paris just a few days before.* But Collette was direct and honest in his rationale for having shot at Laval and others. It was patriotic to blow up ammunition dumps or a convoy, he argued, but it was unethical to aim at individual soldiers who were only doing their job and following orders. Besides, killing a German officer would bring the execution of fifty hostages in reprisal. But assassinating a traitor was another thing. Any German patriot would have done the same in his own country. “That’s why I shot Laval.”12
Collette was tried by the Vichy judiciary and sentenced to death. For reasons still unclear, that sentence was commuted to life in prison. Who approved this decision? Pétain? The government? The Germans? He never learned. Collette spent the rest of the war being moved among prisons in France and was finally sent to a camp in Germany, but he survived the war. He learned from other prisoners and from sympathetic guards that his act had resonated throughout Europe. Free French radio and other broadcasters “from Boston to Moscow” had “kept millions breathless by showing that the Vichy government was not the people of France. To the contrary, the latter, conscious of its duty, was in rebellion against those who pretended to impose a reign of national-socialism.”13
The story of this young man is gripping in and of itself, but it also serves to illustrate how independent and idiosyncratic many acts of resistance were. Nevertheless, “lone-wolf” actions—that is, individual, noncoordinated, but serious actions—were rare. For greater and sustained resistance, a team was necessary, and eager would-be resisters would generally first turn, as we saw in the case of Jacques Lusseyran, to their network of friends. These closed circles were plentiful and not always overlapping. Much official and academic history since the war has argued that the Resistance was a monolithic but well-organized, well-led organization. The variety of motives and actions befuddles even the most objective of those efforts—as it did the leader of the Free French.* As de Gaulle gained prestige and support, he began to worry more and more about the state of resistance activities within France, which he watched with a jaundiced eye. There was no unity, and very little communication, among the various groups, which included communists, immigrants, rightists, and Gaullists. They often acted independently, even competing with each other. Their clandestine publications carried a bewildering variety of messages and instruction that often confused those who were desperate for information and who might have wanted to participate, even peacefully, in some sort of resistance. Because the groups were poorly armed, they often put themselves in danger in order to rectify this lack of matériel. They all wanted some sort of recognition or support from London, which hesitated to deliver arms to any group without a coordinated leadership.
Early on, de Gaulle had established an intelligence office, known as the Bureau central de renseignements et d’action (BCRA), as a means to coordinate and control clandestine operations under the Free French flag. He sent his most accomplished masterful bureaucrat, Jean Moulin, to France several times to effect a difficult coordination of all major resistance groups, which would later be stereotyped as the Resistance. The first meeting of its leaders was held in Paris near Saint-Germain des Prés, in the sixth arrondissement, on May 27, 1943. There have been many debates about the effectiveness of this organization, especially since so many independent operators—for example, the volatile Maquis groups and immigrant groups—were minimally involved. But there is general agreement that this first attempt at coordinating strategy was quite helpful immediately before and after the D-Day invasion a year later. Still, as it became clearer that France would be free of the Germans and that L’État Français would sink into ignominy, resistance networks began to joust for postwar political position. From the Normandy invasion until the liberation of France and after, blood would be shed as competing cadres attempted to assert political dominance over one another.
* * *
There is, and always will be, debate among historians of the Resistance, as there was among its veterans in the 1950s, 1960s, and 1970s, about how influential the French communist youth were at the outset of the Occupation. Robert Gildea, the respected student of France during the Occupation, is quite blunt in his appraisal: “Communists were perhaps the most radically inclined to resistance, although the path from [French Communist] Party . . . was a complicated one and not all took the same route.”14 There is no gainsaying that the youth leagues of the French Communist Party during the 1930s were instrumental in educating their adherents—girls as well as boys—who signed up in their early teens. They met regularly, not only for indoctrination but also for social reasons. In some ways, these groups, led by older adults, were the counterpart to the scouts, who were doing the same thing but who were not as fundamentally ideological. The communist youth groups went camping, had parties, organized dances, and cycled in groups in the countryside. Several members as young as sixteen even joined the International Brigades to fight for the Spanish Republic during that nation’s brutal civil war (1936–1939). The police estimated in the late 1930s that there were thousands of members of the French Communist Party ready to take up the fight to preserve the French Republic against the quasi-fascist right. This was the eager cohort itching to continue the fight against fascism in Occupied France as early as June 1940.
Consequently, when the Soviet Union had directed these cadres not to fight the Germans between August 1940 and June 1941, the only way these youngsters could relieve their frustrations was to take on the Vichy government itself. There was little violence during this first year of the Occupation; most of the communist youngsters’ efforts lay in printing and distributing tracts, putting up posters, writing on walls, and keeping the embarrassment of the grande débâcle before the attention of the French.
* * *
A few years ago, Pamela Druckerman wrote an article in the New York Times about one of the most interesting personalities to come out of the knotted story of the French resistance. His name was Adolpho (he had been born in Argentina) Kaminsky (he was of eastern European Jewish stock).15 He was only thirteen when his parents, who had emigrated from Poland, had to leave Paris, not because they were Jewish, but because his father had been involved with a communist journal and the French government was increasingly suspicious of the French communists who had supported Russia during its ill-fated invasion of Finland (1939–1940). The events in Nazi Germany, especially Kristallnacht in 1938, had caused them to feel uncomfortable in a large metropolitan area, and the Kaminskys, more prescient than most Jews, fled the capital city for Vire, in Normandy’s Calvados region.* Their arrival in the small town (made possible by his father’s brother, who lived in Vire) doubled the Jewish population of the town. But they were well received, and the children soon finished their schooling. (Fourteen was the terminal age for public schooling in France.)
In his last year in high school, Adolpho and a friend began printing a school newspaper, an experience that provided him with an education in presses and inks and paper, knowledge that he would exploit later as the most important forger in the Resistance. Soon both Adolpho and his older brother, Paul, were working, first for their irascible uncle, who sold millinery in the town market, and then for a small factory that manufactured airplane instrument panels. There Adolpho came into contact with politically sensitive members of the working classes, and the fate of one especially, Jean Bayer, would mark a major step in his rapid advance toward adulthood.
“Then, one day, they arrived. It was June 1940.” Adolpho had been biking along a road when he was suddenly confronted with a column of German tanks:
Brand new, as if they had just rolled off the production line. And the soldiers all in gleaming boots and impeccable uniforms. Then I understood what my father meant when, on seeing the French draftees in their uniforms that didn’t match, some without helmets, he said “This time it’s certain. We’ve had it. We’re not going to win the war with an army like that.”16
Immediately life changed for the village and its Jewish citizens as the Germans billeted themselves in Vire, anticipating an invasion of England. The aircraft factory closed briefly, only to reopen under German management to produce matériel for the German air force. Immediately, all Jews were fired, and Adolpho and his brother were rudely marched past their friends to the exit; their coworkers showed their solidarity by hooting at the German police. Some had probably not known until then that the boys were Jewish. Now unemployed, they still had to earn some meager living to help their parents. As it would turn out, racist policies had just freed a young man to pursue another profession, one that would make him one of Germany’s most wanted men in Occupied France.
Adolpho answered an ad for an apprenticeship with a dyer (a teinturier), who specialized in cleaning clothing marked by difficult stains. Rather than remove them, he would often re-dye the garments. But his new apprentice soon discovered ways to remove the original stain—blood, wine, ink—and return the original item to its owner as if it had never been damaged. His study of the chemical reactions that could change colors, and the chemical principles in general, would inform his future resistance work against the Germans. “I’d found my vocation.”17
Soon the young man became a local celebrity, for he had also figured out how to make soap (then very rationed) and candles (increasingly necessary), and how to “clean” salt that had been discarded because of contamination from other metals. The latter process was especially useful, as the Germans had severely rationed salt, fearing that local farmers would use it to cure pork and then hide the meat from the Occupiers, who continued to send three-quarters of French livestock to Germany. Adolpho “cleaned” so much salt that he became a hero to the wily Norman farmers (and also provided his family with enough food to live somewhat more comfortably).
By 1942, now sixteen, Kaminsky had befriended the local pharmacist, who helped him continue his education in chemistry. In late 1940, when Adolpho heard that Jean Bayer had been executed for subversive activities, he learned the brutal truth: the Occupiers treated opposition seriously, and mercilessly. He itched to do something effective against these foreign soldiers and often expressed his wish to neighbors and friends he could trust. It turned out that the pharmacist for whom he worked was a Gaullist agent using his shop as a cover for clandestine acts. Sensing the youngster’s anti-German sentiments, he asked Adolpho if he was interested in making items more important than soap or candles. The hint was obvious, and the boy affirmed enthusiastically that he indeed was.
From that day on [late 1942], as well as bars of soap, candles, and salt, I made more harmful products that corroded the transmission lines, and made little railroad parts rust, and detonators as well. Being involved in the sabotage meant for the first time I didn’t feel entirely impotent following the death of my mother [most likely pushed from a train by Germans on her way to Paris] and my friend Jean. At least I had the feeling that I was avenging them. And I was proud; I was in the Resistance.18
Then terror: in the summer of 1943, Adolpho and his whole family were arrested and sent to Drancy. Through his brother Paul’s clever persistence, the Argentine consul was warned, and after three months in detention, the whole Kaminsky family was released, as Argentine citizens, even though they were Jewish.* Lost in Paris, without ration tickets or housing, they eventually found succor from others and began to take up their lives again, only to be rearrested soon afterward and returned to Drancy. Bureaucratic confusion again allowed their release and return to Paris. The destitution and fear that he witnessed in that transit concentration camp marked Adolpho for the rest of his life, and to have survived two imprisonments there most likely added to the lifelong guilt he carried as a survivor.
Back in Paris again, he soon joined a resistance network in the capital, and quite by happenstance his superiors found out that he was a specialist in inks and ink removal, paper preparation, photography, and other skills that made up the artisanal armory of a forger. Setting up two laboratories in separate locations in the Latin Quarter, Adolpho became the master forger of northern France, known not only for his exquisite precision in imitating official documents—ID cards, ration tickets, passports, birth certificates, baptism and wedding certificates—but for getting the job done immediately, always a requisite of such clandestine work. As the tide began turning against the Germans in 1943, they began vigorously rounding up Jews rather than concentrating on protecting the Reich from the increasingly aggressive and well-trained armies of the Soviet Union. By his almost continuous forgeries of official documents, Adolpho put sand in the gears of that nefarious bureaucracy. His work, and that of two or three close comrades, saved hundreds of lives—especially of Jewish children—during the rest of the war.
As the armed resistance became more active, easier travel within France by agents was essential; no one could move even just a few blocks or kilometers from home without having to show an ID card. London was parachuting agents into France, all of whom needed new identities. Adolpho became the key to a door that opened France to groups of bold agents, spies, and warriors smelling the defeat of Germany and wishing to advance it. In enabling the resistance activities to run smoothly, Adolpho never complained, nor did he ever consider quitting his work as a forger. As he said after a long pause when asked why he worked so hard, so courageously even after the Liberation, he remembered the liberated death camps he had visited and their dying inmates. And those who had died during the Occupation. How could he not offer his skill as a forger when so many had perished?
* * *
Obviously, Jews had a major reason for joining the Resistance: their lives, and those of their families, were at stake. In France, unlike in Russia, there were no squads of German soldiers—the infamous SS Einsatzgruppen (deployed task forces)—especially trained to line Jews up in front of their own graves, then shoot them. (It is estimated that more Jews, Roma, and communist partisans were killed by these forces than by gas in the concentration camps spread across eastern Europe.) But the diligence of the French police and their German minders did lead to Jews in larger numbers being taken in roundups, sent to transit camps, such as Drancy outside of Paris, and then put in cattle cars to end up in labor and death camps.
As a consequence, Jewish youth, banded together in secret groups at school or, while it lasted, their own aforementioned scouting organization, began resisting by printing and publishing two-page newspapers that tried to run down the rumors coming out of the east, forging papers, finding hiding places for the most vulnerable, and, especially, taking care of the hundreds of children who had lost their parents or whose parents wanted them sent to safety. They were proud of their work and diligent in organizing, but they carried an extra burden should they be caught: being Jewish, they would themselves be sent immediately to Drancy or another holding camp in France and eventually transported eastward. No trial would take place, unless it was for show; no special dispensations would be possible, not even for the well connected; and no bribes would be sufficient to challenge the authorities. Unlike many other résistants, Jewish resisters would have no escape.
Those Jews who resisted by hiding abandoned children had even more to worry about, for not only were they in danger of being discovered, but so were those they were hiding. Jean-Raphaël Hirsch, an eminent physician in Paris, has written a chilling biography of his father, Sigismond—and thus an autobiography as well. Hirsch’s book Réveille-toi papa, c’est fini! (Wake up papa, it’s over!) also introduces the youngest résistant in our book, Jean-Raphaël himself, who, at the age of ten, was suddenly a liaison for the groups taking care of the children hiding throughout the region.
Sigismond and Berthe Hirsch had taken every precaution, even as the local Vichy agents and their Gestapo colleagues began to close in on those who were hiding Jewish children. After arriving in France as immigrants from Romania, they had immediately volunteered in 1940 to run a network that was keeping track of over four hundred Jewish orphans sent to southwestern France for safety. They found an isolated house, with a gated entrance, and kept a low profile as just another refugee couple from Paris.
And then there was Dick, a watchful, protective dog who barked at every stranger who came near the house. But that morning Dick had trotted off to visit the village, after chewing through the cloth “chain” that had attached him to the gate. With the warning system gone astray, the Gestapo’s vehicle was able to unobtrusively slide past the gate and park next to the house. Quietly, agents moved toward the front door; rushing in, guns drawn, they asked the young housekeeper where the Hirsches were. Easily found, they were just rising from their bed, still in their nightclothes. Thinking quickly, Sigismond rushed toward a large window, jumped out, and ran toward the woods. This distraction allowed Berthe to take the lists of hidden children, kept in her baby’s bassinet, and throw them into the room’s stove. That act alone probably saved the lives of dozens of Jewish children. Soon, Sigismond was recaptured, and he and Berthe were taken to Toulouse, put in jail, and interrogated and tortured for weeks. Their ten-year-old son, Jean-Raphaël, known as Nano, was off on an overnight mission to deliver news to locally hidden children. When he headed home on his bike later that morning, a friend stopped him so that he would not return to the now-ransacked house. Reluctantly, he turned around to pedal to his aunt’s house, where he would hide. Nano would never see his mother again.*
Despite the dangers involved, Hirsch père had needed efficient and faithful help to keep track of the dozens of hiding places where Jewish children were lodged. So, as Nano recounts in his memoir, his father decided to recruit his own son to be a liaison between him and the various scout and Maquis groups for which he was responsible.
It was [in 1943] that—we are never better served than by our family—my father had the notion to give me a bike, and to include me in his clandestine work. Ten years old, and doubtlessly one of the youngest résistants in France. I was expected to carry messages to all of the children for whom my father had responsibility, and to do so on almost impassable paths leading to isolated farms, difficult to reach.19
Nano was what was called an agent de liaison, a messenger between and among groups of resisters, and to those who were hiding children. On the one hand, it was not a very dangerous job—unless one was caught, of course. Children, for quite a long while, were generally ignored by the security police; if out after curfew, they were picked up and quickly returned to their parents after a frightening night in jail. On the other hand, the danger for the networks was that they had a good deal of information in their heads about hiding places, Maquis camps, and group leaders.
Nano was exceptional, but he was not the only child engaged in such work. Though rare, there were a few whole families engaged in clandestine activities. They were mostly Jewish, of course, but some non-Jewish families were quite sensitive to the plight of their fellows; it seemed to them that, from both a moral and functional perspective, it was inappropriate to exclude any son or daughter, or brother or sister, from having the opportunity to stand for something larger than the family itself. At first, before the Germans took over the Unoccupied Zone in November 1942, it had been relatively easy to house the children in what amounted to orphanages, run by either Protestants or Catholic sisters with the help often of young Jewish men and women. Boys and girls cohabitated, and the local communities, especially in southern and southwestern France, paid little attention to their presence. Hundreds of Jewish children were hidden and saved during this period through the good graces of French men and women who found hunting for children a repulsive trait in the Germans, but especially in their fellow citizens who were loyal to Vichy’s laws. We have seen how the best-organized and most reliable organization was the network of young members of the Éclaireurs israélites de la France, the Jewish boy (and girl) scouts. These youngsters had been scouts since before the war began, and their leaders had been scouts before them, so as of May 1940, this was the most cohesive and best-trained group of youngsters ready to confront the Germans. The EIF scouts would prove invaluable in moving the hidden children from one sanctuary to another.
With the German army’s occupation of southern France in November 1942 came the imposition of stricter laws regarding Jewish citizens and noncitizens. Suddenly, the orphanages, usually in large abandoned schoolhouses or chateaus, became too dangerous—a single raid could capture dozens of the children, who would then be sent off to camps in France and eventually put on trains to eastern Europe. The scouts’ efforts to disperse the children and place them, one by one, throughout the district was made even more difficult, and dangerous, by the fact that many of the children who had sought refuge in France spoke only German. When Roger Fichtenberg was asked at a 1994 conference whether these efforts could have succeeded without the training that the Jewish Scouts had received, he answered, “No, it would have been impossible.”
As the Occupation continued, local bureaucrats were increasingly pressured by the Reich to produce Jews for Germany’s intensifying efforts at racial cleansing. Word spread about which farms and which convents might be hiding these children. Simultaneously, the work of constantly transferring them from place to place, usually by foot or on bicycles, was taking its toll on the young scouts, many of them scarcely older than the children they were protecting. As the Maquis began to grow in 1943, especially after the imposition of the draft for forced labor in Germany, some of the children, as they approached or entered their teens, began to slide quietly into the forests, where they were reluctantly admitted into underground groups. Some could serve as messengers, and others could help maintain the camps, but the ever-vigilant guerrilla forces could not handle a large number of children.
Sigismond Hirsch had begun his work almost immediately after the armistice was signed, and his leadership and amazing success at hiding young Jews would last until his arrest in 1943. His son remembers:
So many years after the events, it remains difficult to imagine the extraordinary work [of these] benevolent young people between the ages of 20 and 30, having their own problems to deal with. They did the impossible: to hide in the wink of an eye children and teenagers, or to re-hide them. . . . Each case was different, for each hidden child demanded urgent and specific action. They had to be taken from schools to parsonages, from high schools to convents, from an isolated farm to another farm. Some were kept in place, others moved, and all kept dispersed [throughout the region]. To hide someone meant, more often than not, re-hiding them later, often several times. . . . Each time, a new host had to be convinced, a child had to be reassured that this new move was necessary.20
And more than a new host had to be found: new false papers had to be created, new names invented, and new liaisons established with local citizens, both in the Resistance and not.
Girls were quite successful in this sort of clandestine work. As we have seen elsewhere, they were even more ignored by the police than young boys, and if they were older, they were urged to pretend to flirt, to dispel the idea that they were on any but the most innocent of errands. Jean-Raphaël Hirsch has an especially poignant view of the young women and girls who were as committed as the boys to saving children: “One cannot but admire them, [for] these female children too had the sad feeling that they were skirting their youth.”21
This idea of a lost childhood, not only for those being hidden but for those who were instrumental in hiding them, is recurrent in Hirsch’s memoir. The psychological and moral effects on these youngsters were profound. Their childhood—and Hirsch’s—had been lost, never to be remembered as a time of security, freedom, and days of mostly trivial threats when “torture” was nothing more than the pain of an unrequited crush, not the relentless pounding of a Nazi cudgel, and high stress was taking a school exam, not watching in horror as friends were led away, never to return.
In 1942, while still living with his family in Paris, nine-year-old Hirsch had been forced to don a yellow star. His mother, while sewing it onto his school uniform, admonished him to wear it without shame, to be proud of his Jewish heritage. But that attitude lasted only until he was first taunted on the school playground:
That star soiled the world of Jews as well as that of the goyim; it soiled the entire world. And a child perceives this quite clearly. Indeed, having to wear the star meant that he was no longer a child. He had suddenly become an adult, prematurely an adult whose childhood, whose purity had been stolen. In effect, I was no longer a child; I was no longer pure; I was no longer kind; I was ill—I was smoldering with rage.22
Later, as he rode fearlessly through the hills of Languedoc, searching for places to hide more vulnerable Jewish children, this “rage” would serve to give him the confidence to do what children in wartime must often accomplish.
In a provocative passage of his memoir, Hirsch offers an explanation as to why so many young people were able to fight confidently a well-armed enemy and manage to, if not win all the time, at least apply persistent pressure that kept the Occupier continuously on alert. First, Jewish Scouts in the south (they were banned in the northern Occupied Zone) had successfully hidden caches of arms and other matériel discarded by retreating French troops. The content of these caches would prove indispensable later, from 1943 on, for the Allies were reluctant to drop arms into a heavily occupied section of the country. (They were also hesitant to arm the communist groups who made up a significant portion of the résistants.)
Moreover, Hirsch suggests, the arms used in this war were not nearly as heavy as those used in the last one, and they were less complicated to operate.
Because of the evolution of modern arms, of their “miniaturization” and their formidable and murderous capacity to kill, a child was able to shoot a small Sten machine gun, or another make, could carry a revolver, or a small package of plastic explosive. None of this required the muscular capacity of an adult, for a child’s finger was more than able to pull a trigger.23
And many of the other “weaknesses” of the résistants were in fact strengths. Qualities that would not have been assets in other contexts were quite useful to the clandestine groups’ needs. Younger resisters were “immature, without reflection, without experience of life or death.” They did not have an overweening empathy for those whom they did not know. Given an order, these young soldiers would execute it as faithfully as possible, often without pity, for like all child soldiers, they were guileless. On the other hand, it is difficult for most adults to see a child being so independent and so potentially dangerous. This worked to the advantage of the child résistants, of course, and their short pants, their freewheeling bike games, and their cheerfulness often protected them as much as a camouflage uniform. They were intuitive, canny, very fast in making decisions—and always fearless.
The adventurous life secretly dreamed of by most boys, a father who trusted him completely, his own natural resilience, a pride in his Jewish heritage—all of these characteristics gave Nano the courage that he was suddenly called on to assume when threatened with the specter of two pitiless and racist regimes, one foreign and one homegrown.
* * *
Claude Weill’s father, who had served in the French army during World War I, owned and ran a successful printing business in Paris. After the Germans set up their bureaucracy, they began to appropriate Jewish businesses by assigning “Aryan” Frenchmen as their managers. They did not have to look far for avaricious Parisians who would, in effect, take over all aspects of the business, including, of course, its profits. For a while the Weills felt safe, but with the imposition of the yellow star (Claude himself wore one for about a month, he recalls), their luck ran out. When the authorities arrived at Mr. Weill’s office in the summer of 1942, they told him that he had to leave immediately, refusing even his request for permission to say good-bye to his employees, most of whom had worked with him for years.
Weill described his father to me as morally conservative, obsessed with assimilation, and proud of his French heritage. He often told young Claude that he preferred that he bring home gentile rather than Jewish boys. When German Jewish refugees would knock on his door, asking for help, he referred to them as “Boches” and rarely gave them alms, a memory that still haunts Claude. Weill père could not believe that Pétain would forget his soldiers, no matter their religion. After the theft of his little factory, his father died later that year, of cancer, though Claude still believes that his father died of a broken heart.
Thanks to forged documents obtained from Catholic friends, the Weill family had been able to flee into the Unoccupied Zone and eventually settled in Terrasson, a small town with three thousand to four thousand residents in the Dordogne region. Claude was about fourteen years old at the time. The Weills found safety there, and fortunately Mr. Weill’s gentile secretary, still working in the newly managed printing firm, regularly sent them funds that she skimmed, under the eyes of the Aryan manager, from the business’s profits.
Claude remembers that there must have been other Jewish families in or around Terrasson. (The area was known for its sympathy toward refugees, given its long tradition of protest against Catholic hegemony, dating to the Reformation; exiled Alsatians and Mossellans had been resettled in the area as well.) The local Catholic priest agreed to provide the family with false birth certificates, but on the condition that the children take lessons in the catechism and be baptized as Catholics. They did, reluctantly; Claude found it amusing that he had already had his bar mitzvah in Paris, and here he was passing another adolescent rite. He knew to be careful, not to speak of Paris or of Jews he might have known, and to hide the fact that he was circumcised. Still, his mother must have been concerned about her son, for when she was approached about his joining the local Maquis, she quickly encouraged him to do so, to leave home from time to time and live in the wild with a resistance group. He thinks that she was proud of him for wanting to fight the Nazis, and the head of the region’s underground group was a respected village doctor, so she believed that Claude would be watched over carefully. He would return home weekly, but for over two years he was a courier, like Nano Hirsch, between different guerrilla groups operating on either side of Terrasson. He told me that, though it was dangerous at times, it was also exhilarating. “It was like the scouts, though more dangerous.” *
Weill’s group was constantly in search of food and supplies and found most farmers in the area to be helpful. They had use of the doctor’s car and would arrive at a farm, weapons at hand, with strong appetites. I asked if they ever stole food, and Claude smiled. “Well, we were in the doctor’s automobile; yes, perhaps one could say we ‘stole’ sometimes.” I failed to ask him why the farmers they “stole” from never reported their actions to the local authorities. But research has shown that frustration with the activities of a guerrilla group, even anger, often did not overwhelm the animosity that the locals felt toward the French government and the Germans. Also, such groups were armed and known to exercise their own penalties.
Occasionally, there would be brief skirmishes with the Germans on patrol, but Weill never fired a shot, nor was he ever in danger from a firefight. He always carried a pistol when they were laying out flares for parachute drops or standing guard, but never when he was performing his main work as a courier, one of the most common jobs given to youngsters in the Maquis and in cities. Youthfulness was often a useful camouflage for clandestine activities, as was being female. Adults also traveled on bicycles, but a youngster on one usually received only passing glances. Not that they were always safe: passing messages sometimes required carrying maps and other revealing documents, and especially as the war continued checkpoints would be set up suddenly and all riders searched thoroughly. Still, a kid on a bike was so commonplace as to be just part of the scenery.
Nevertheless, Claude’s most frightening experiences occurred when he was stopped on his bike by a German or Vichy patrol. Once he almost got caught; he was carrying incriminating papers in his pocket when a member of the Vichy government’s Milice peremptorily asked him to get off his bike and started to question him. As he was about to be searched, a German officer interrupted to ask the militiaman a question, and Claude was able to pedal off untouched. Had he been caught with the papers, it would not have been too long before they discovered that he was Jewish, and though he did not realize it at the time, he would have almost certainly ended up being sent to Drancy, then to Auschwitz or another extermination camp.
* * *
One of France’s best-known child and adolescent movie stars in the 1930s and early 1940s was a handsome young heartthrob named Robert Lynen. Lynen had become famous by playing a forlorn little boy in a hugely successful 1932 film called Poil de carotte (Carrot top), directed by Julien Duvivier. From that triumph, he continued to act in films until 1942, when he was twenty-two, even though, with no crisis of conscience whatsoever, he had earlier joined a resistance group. When we take a closer look at this remarkable young man, we realize that for someone who was so well known, who still sent out hundreds of his publicity photographs, joining a clandestine organization took the counterintuitive tactic of “hiding in plain sight” to the next level. He regaled his fellow résistants with tales of how he would be recognized in restaurants or on the streets and begged for his autograph, even by German soldiers. Arrogantly bolder than his fellows, he often frightened them with his braggadocio in the company of Germans and the French police. Of course, this too was part of his “disguise,” for he had realized that his stardom allowed him to tease the police, often in bars, about having machine guns for sale, and hand grenades for only a few francs each. The brazenness of his boasts, plus his celebrity status, protected him for a while, though it made nervous wrecks of those who were working with him. Lynen had a marvelous sense of humor and was always ready with a quip or clownish face to amuse and relax his friends, who were not protected by his veneer of notoriety. This chameleon ability to be both brazen and clandestine at the same time amused Lynen to no end, and it most likely protected him for three years.
Indeed, Lynen was so well known that the Germans themselves tried to recruit him for films made by their French film company, Continental. But he was a patriot; legend has it that when he was offered the unimaginable figure of a million francs to sign a contract with Continental, he took the pen proffered him by the German agent and, using it as a dagger, crushed it in a fancy ashtray, saying to the agent: “If you have this much money, buy the town a drink, and make a toast to Hitler, but don’t count on me.”24
His fame combined with his physical beauty, reinforced by his above-normal height, to make him the most visible of persons in an invisible world. His brother-in-law Pierre Henneguier, himself a major Resistance leader who would survive the war, described him in this way: “He is as handsome as the young prince of a fantastic Nordic tale, with his blond hair, blue eyes, his thin figure, and svelte silhouette. His attitude is empathetic, and he cannot count his friends. Everyone loves his gay, lively, courageous, and, yes, sometimes outrageous, character.”25
From the beginning, he and Henneguier, as well as a close Irish friend, Robert Vernon, were not only pasting anti-German notices on walls and standing up in cinemas to insult the German newsreels but had managed to become owners of a trucking business, one that allowed them, from 1940, to hide and transport arms throughout southern France. Azur-Transports (as it was named) was also a means of income, for despite his success as an actor, Lynen had little ready cash and had to take care of his mother and, later, his sister May.
Robert learned to drive the large trucks and was happiest when they were filled with hidden rifles, ammunition, and other matériel. Incredibly, these trucks were never stopped or searched. Lynen’s role as an agent evolved, and soon he was gathering and passing information rather than arms. He traveled all over France under the code name Aiglon (Eaglet),* but rarely incognito. He also learned to use a shortwave radio, met parachuted agents in the fields of France, and passed back and forth (often with a false ID) over the demarcation line that separated the two major zones of France. One of his friends remarked that he seemed almost to enjoy the danger, for he had confidence in his will to thwart the Occupiers and was amused that he could do so even though, with his famous face known everywhere, he was the antithesis of a clandestine operator.
Lynen had starred in thirteen films, his last being Cap au large (Toward the Open Sea) in 1942, filmed while he was still serving as a courier and planner of a resistance group that worked at first in the Unoccupied Zone and then in the whole of Occupied France for the British Intelligence Service. But as often happened, the success of the network was no guarantee that just one traitor would not reveal its complex organization. Lynen and his companion, Assia, were returning from Paris to his friend Vernon’s Cassis home in the south of France. Lynen was due to arrive the very day that the Gestapo raided Vernon’s home and arrested him. Lynen had sent a telegram to Vernon announcing his arrival, and the Germans got there just as his friend was reading it. In fact, the telegraph office, knowing of the Resistance network, had read the message first and quickly sent someone to the train station to warn Lynen. As luck would have it, however, Robert had illicitly boarded and could not be found. (He often jumped onto trains without a ticket, leaping off on the other side as the train pulled into a station. Why? As a game, a joke, a way to show his indomitability.) Departing the station by another exit, Lynen missed the man sent to warn him. When he arrived at Vernon’s home, he was arrested along with his girlfriend. This was in February 1943, and Robert Lynen would never be free again.
Most likely, the Wehrmacht, to which he was first turned over, would have offered him a deal; if he were to give them a few names, perhaps they would allow him to go to Germany and make films. But he doubtless would have refused—Lynen had already invested himself in the fight against tyranny and could not compromise, given his notoriety and his age (twenty-three). He was then given over to the Gestapo, who were less solicitous of the young movie star. We do not know exactly what happened to him, but one suspects that he was tortured before finally being transported to Germany with other young résistants. One cold morning he was led out, holding the hand of another young man, stood before a post, and shot. His body fell into a ditch filled with other victims, well over half of whom were twenty-four years old or younger.
After the war, Robert Lynen’s family moved heaven and earth, as did two of France’s best-known movie actors, Claude Dauphin and Jean-Pierre Aumont, to recover his remains (which were ultimately found, still recognizable, in that German ditch). They repatriated Robert’s remains, first to Strasbourg, and then, in 1947, to Paris for a public ceremony at the Invalides, where the earlier Aiglon had been laid to rest in 1940. Claude Dauphin wrote a widely published article that not only praised his fellow performer but spoke eloquently to the prominence and moral significance of all those adolescents who had fought against the German Occupation, often to their deaths.
The destiny of our little Robert Lynen, which ends this morning in the nave of the Invalides, is one that touches you deeply. First, because he was in our craft, one of the happiest of friends, despite his melancholy, and among the most enthusiastic, despite his reticence. And then because he belongs to that very large and sad cohort of boys who died at the age of twenty, for something. It tears at one’s soul to die at twenty, but it’s honorable to have joined up. And little Robert Lynen, running through the shadowy trails of the Resistance, knew well that such activity was not an act of a play that ended at midnight, but, at every minute, a deadly game.
This morning in the Invalides [where heroes are eulogized], we must remember that [story], in front of this coffin, whose contents are more noble and more moving even than that of the [other] Aiglon [the young Napoleon II, Prince de Rome]. We must not forget the moment when twelve black rifles were raised against these children, and when those children did not waver with terror, or from regret, that they had consented to lose all their future Springs, all their pleasures, all their birthdays, and that they died singing the most beautiful song of their country, at the age of twenty. We must remember this—we who have reached double their ages—all those lessons that these school kids have left us, not only of pride, of courage, of greatness, but also of prudent wisdom, and of humility.26
The poignancy of Dauphin’s moving eulogy speaks not only to Lynen’s courage and that of his friends, but also to the deep guilt of those who had survived the conflict or who had acquiesced, even casually, to the actions of the Occupier and his subservient French supporters. Doubtless many who were “in mourning” had themselves been part of the crowd advocating “just wait,” or “better Hitler than Blum,” or “never trust a communist”—those who had given Pétain and Laval their support, quietly or loudly, during the dark years. We hope that they were embarrassed by Dauphin’s words, that they sought redemption, that they never served in any official position again. But we should remember that hopes are like snowflakes: they melt wherever there is heat.
* * *
The estimates of the number of hostages and resisters executed by German firing squads in France from 1940 to 1945 range between four thousand and five thousand.27 In the early days, most of these were communists, Freemasons, or Jews, executed as hostages when a German soldier was assassinated. These are some of the cruelest stories; those killed were men and boys, like Guy Môquet, who had been arrested for relatively minor infractions and put in jail for several months or a year. Suddenly, they were told only a few hours before it was to happen that they would be executed in reprisal for some violence against Germans. Soldiers as young as they themselves would deliver the announcement to the hostages in their cells, where they had been waiting, sometimes for weeks, sometimes longer. An adjutant would offer them the services of a priest and a chance to write no more than three letters of good-bye. Some German guards even agreed to mail the letters themselves or to pass them on to their addressees. Why were prison guards and officials so “generous”? There is a large gap between an anonymous court’s decision to put someone to death, especially a younger person, and a prison’s responsibility for ensuring that the prisoners remain calm as they go to their deaths. Assurances were often given that possessions, even clothing, would be passed on to family and friends, or even that their corpses would be given appropriate burial. (The condemned would name where they wanted to be buried, but often they were interred in a common grave, with bodies thrown in pell-mell.) One young man even described in detail in his last letter what he was wearing, so that his parents could recover his body if it was not sent to them. Their relatives would only learn of their deaths when these letters were delivered.
As a more violent resistance began to grow, suspected and actual malefactors were brought to swifter “justice.” After the letters had been written and addressed, and after the execution, the authorities would first censor them (with heavy ink, or by cutting sentences and paragraphs from the letters themselves), and then a prison official, priest, or army officer would present them personally to the survivors. The recipients would be admonished not to share the letters with anyone outside the family and not to speak about their contents, under threat of punishment. However, the missives were often read aloud, not only to family members but to close friends; some were copied and passed around; a few were even printed in clandestine newspapers. The anguish and courage and patriotism, especially of the fallen young, became thus boldly manifest and raised the question for all: What am I to do about this Occupation, if this person gave his life at twenty?
These doomed youngsters expressed fear and anxiety not so much for themselves, but for what their death would mean for their survivors—their lovers and wives, their mothers and fathers, and often, their little brothers and sisters. Last thoughts were given as well for the fate of France. Often some reference was made to the afterlife, but almost always as a consolation for the recipients. Some apologies were offered for having gotten into trouble, or not having been an ideal child, but no one expressed regrets for having stood against tyranny. The tone of many of the letters that have come down to us from the condemned is one of self-examination, of wonder at how they wound up where they were at that moment, and hope that they had done well by their beliefs.
* * *
It was November 1941; the “easy” Occupation had been over at least since June, when the Germans stormed across western Russia. Tensions were palpable. A young member of the communist Bataillons de la jeunesse had been captured with some comrades after they derailed a train near Lille in northern France.* As the hours of his life dwindled away, Félicien Joly, twenty-two, felt that he had two duties when his jailers in a Lille prison gave him writing materials. Of course he wanted to explain to his family how things had wound up like this, but he also wanted to warn his friends that there was a traitor in their midst. Strangely, both missives arrived at his parents’ home. There was no doubt as to the urgency:
My dear comrades in the struggle . . .
I hope that this letter will get to you without being seen by others. We are five who have been condemned to death, but I am hoping to be pardoned because I’ve written to the supreme commander of the German Army. Maurice has betrayed the cause for which we had sworn to give up our lives if it became necessary. He gave the addresses of a bunch of our friends. For instance, he said “Don’t arrest Gary now.” Not a few buddies will be found out by this action. If they aren’t arrested, they should get away immediately. (All network commanders should take every precaution.) All drop-off points have to be changed.
You should make sure you aren’t being followed.
Do your best so that the struggle continues, and soon we will be victorious.
Bonjour to you all. Have courage. If I am pardoned, I hope to see you soon.28
We can only guess how this letter got past the prison censors. It was accompanied by another written directly to his parents. One of the lengthiest I have found, it speaks eloquently to the pride that condemned youth took in their confrontations with a dark fascism. A few excerpts:
This letter is the last that I write you. You will get it after my death, and it will waken sad memories for you. It hurts to write it.
. . . I stayed with my friends until the end. . . . I could have saved my life by turning in my comrades. . . . I did not do it. I am not a coward. . . .
. . . Ask for my two notebooks. . . . On the cover of one is a phrase from Nietzsche: “I want always to climb higher.” I leave [that message] to all idealistic youth.
To everyone, remember me as a hardy boy; my name will ring after my death, not as a funeral bell, but as a sound of soaring hope.29
Henri Gautherot, twenty-one, wrote in August 1941 to his father that “I will know how to die as a Frenchman. . . . I have not had, neither during the judgment, nor afterward, nor at the moment itself, a single weakness.”30 Other letters sneaked in information crucial to those families still connected in some way to the Resistance. Twenty-one-year-old André Sigonney wrote in August 1941 that “I have been condemned to death by the German authorities as well . . . as others, because the French police turned us over to them.”31 Again, we wonder why this sentence was not censored; perhaps the Germans wanted such information to be spread about the active role of French authorities in rounding up youth.
In March 1942, nineteen-year-old Fernand Zalkinow wrote a final letter to his sister from La Santé prison in Paris. It is another long one, as if he thought he could postpone the inevitable by keeping his pen from stopping:
Since I’ve been here, I have looked deeply into myself. I have come to realize that, despite all of my faults—and I have more than a few—I wasn’t so bad as all that, and that I could’ve been a pretty good guy. . . . I’m a bit of a blowhard, I know. But to tell you the truth, I still can’t explain why I am so calm. Before my sentence, I often cried, but since, I haven’t shed one tear. I have the sense of a deep interior tranquility, a deep quietness. It seems I have only one more test to pass, the last, and then everything will be over, nothing more.* 32
A would-be Spanish teacher had he not died, Pierre Grelot wrote to his mother a trenchant narrative of his trial, emphasizing, as others did, that while she might grieve him, she should also know no shame because of his actions:
I was tried with my friends on October 15. The trial was a comedy. We knew in advance what the verdict would be, since they gave death for the slightest thing. My crime was “antifascist propaganda against the occupying army, carrying and hiding arms and munitions, etc.” . . . Our attitude before the tribunal was dignified and noble. We knew how to garner the respect of those in attendance. The soldiers were moved; I saw one who was crying. Think of it: we were between 17 and 20 years old. When, after the judgment, the judge asked if we had anything to add, . . . I answered: “I am proud to deserve this sentence.” If any doubts [of our loyalty] remained, those words removed them.33
Bravado in face of the inevitable? Yes. Desire to make his mom proud? Yes. But it was also a message to a wider audience—and to himself—that he had acted as an adult, that he had performed according to the tenets of his group, of his friends, and that he had not faltered. The most poignant letters are written as if the young writer had been in shock: what did I do to wind up here? Most likely they were among those prisoners who had been chosen willy-nilly whenever the Germans had to make a statement about the assassination of a German soldier or officer. We cannot know.
Letters such as Grelot’s are so moving because they often have both obvious and not so obvious motives, and they are directed to specific as well as unknown audiences. As these young writers knew, their last written words would be delivered or not at the whim of the authorities; giving them materials to spend their last hours writing letters might have been another cruel trick played on them by their capricious captors. Common sense suggests that such self-aware, often well-educated youngsters had to suspect that these last letters might well wind up in the garbage heaps in the back courtyards of their prison. So again, the main audience, at least subconsciously, was themselves. And then we must think of those letters we shall never see: those half-written, those discarded, or those destroyed by families because they showed anguish, despair, and confusion. These last missives spoke almost certainly too of humanity, and the courage to have faced an enemy of their homeland.
Adolescence is the liminal stage between childhood and adulthood; it is difficult to identify when childhood ends and adulthood begins, especially during times of convulsive social and material change. Yet these letters, besides being palliatives to parents, send a clear message about identity formation that is as much aspirational as confessional: This is who I want to be. This is who I hoped to be. This is how I want to be remembered. This is how I tried to be. I didn’t have time to complete my transition to adulthood; remember me as someone who was on the right track, who had absorbed the love and teachings of his parents and mentors, who would have been a person to admire if he could have lived. This is the most poignant aspect of these lettres de fusillés (letters from the executed).
Personal memories, published memoirs, unpublished diaries and journals, and letters—not to mention scratched graffiti on the walls of their cells—are full of such tales of modest courage after a confrontation with the enemy. They bring back the question of what constitutes “resistance” in a police state. It is not always firing a pistol at an occupying soldier or policeman; it can be as modest as passing notes, whispering information heard on the radio, or throwing nails under the tires of the Occupier’s cars. It can be as fleeting as a teenager jumping up in a crowded movie house and yelling “Vive de Gaulle!” It can be as dangerous as hiding a downed Allied pilot or spiriting someone over the Spanish or Swiss border. Or it can be as quiet as a professor gently reminding his class of the values of the French Revolution, of the motto “Liberté, Egalité, Fraternité.”
It takes several generations for a totalitarian regime to inculcate permanent and paralyzing fear in a population, especially when there is almost no outlet for vocal or visible resistance. But even then, someone or some few will find a way to raise a fist or create an artwork or lift a voice that signals, “This will not last.” Such was the force of all those who resisted, no matter how meekly, during this deeply complicated period. The brutal tactics used after an arrest—beatings, blackmail, torture—were much less subtle than the means the Occupier devised to recruit spies, track lines of communication, analyze demographic records, patiently surveil families and employers, and seduce when they could not intimidate citizens. These methods are still being used in contemporary totalitarian or police states. And still, streets fill with the young asking why.