On 20 January 1942 senior Nazi officials gathered at a lakeside villa just outside Berlin. The aim of the meeting, known to history as the Wannsee Conference, was to agree the procedure for the implementation of the ‘final solution’ to the Jewish question whereby most of the Jews of German-occupied Europe would be murdered. This gave new impetus to the thousands of German officers in France who, in addition to ensuring that everything was being done to ensure military victory, now, at the same time and with the help of Vichy officials, devoted themselves to the relentless task of ridding the country of its Jewish population. Of course not every German in France was aware of the project for mass extermination and some, had they known, would not have supported such a plan. At the top was Carl-Heinrich von Stülpnagel, Commander in Chief in France from February 1942, increasingly an opponent of Hitler who eventually paid for his opposition with his life.* But in 1942, fresh from serving successfully on the eastern front where he had ordered many reprisals against partisans and where he was not known for his opposition to mass executions of Jews, he had little room for action. There were other non-Nazis in Paris, but most of them, aware of the risks, toed the line and waited.
In 1933, as soon as Hitler came to power, Ingeborg Helene Abshagen, known as Inga, born into a well-to-do Prussian family, was sent to London to further her education, her parents believing that she should escape the influence of German teachers, who were mostly Nazis. She studied briefly at the London School of Economics under the socialist Jewish professor Harold Laski. When she returned to Germany, fluent in English, strikingly attractive and with a different worldview from her peers, she easily found a high-powered job working for the Abwehr, German military intelligence, as secretary for its chief, Admiral Wilhelm Canaris. In 1940, immediately after the city fell, she moved with Canaris to Paris, where she lived at the Ritz but worked at the German-requisitioned Hôtel Lutetia during the day.
Inga was emphatic that Canaris was always critical of the Nazi regime from the moment he had witnessed, in Poland in September 1939, what he said were war crimes committed by the SS including the destruction of the synagogue in Będzin and the burning to death of the town’s Jewish residents. He warned then that ‘Germany will never be forgiven unless some action is taken against these criminals.’ Inga thus became close to a group of like-minded Wehrmacht officers in more or less permanent tension with the SS, one of the few German women in Paris working as a double agent supplying false passports to Jews and other persecuted minorities, sometimes delivering these in person. This treacherous work was endorsed by Canaris, who believed that the young and glamorous Inga, looking to all the world like a genuine Parisienne, would evade detection by French police. In 1942 she married a much older senior army officer, Werner Haag, and at the end of the year the pair left Paris for Hungary, no doubt fortunately for her as Paris was by now increasingly dangerous. ‘You lived in fear that you were going to be arrested. So I took my father’s advice to try to know as little as possible because what you didn’t know you couldn’t talk about and betray under torture.’
Gisèle Casadesus, then a young mother of two and a hard-working actress at the Comédie-Française, whose audience was always full of non-uniformed Germans, said, ‘You never knew who you could trust, so nobody ever spoke about anything that mattered just in case. Food was the constant topic of conversation. What can you eat, how to cook it and where can you get it?’
Although by 1942 Paris was full of German as well as French women, the former never acquired the chic of their local counterparts and in any case most had to wear uniform. Sometimes they were dubbed Blitzmädchen or Blitzweiben (because they had a stripe, or Blitz, on the shoulder), but the favourite French nickname for them was Grey Mice. These Grey Mice looked with cool dislike on their local rivals, who, they had been told in advance, were women of loose morals. The attitude was reciprocated. ‘The French were respectful to girls in uniform. We were treated politely by them. Not with kindness.’
The German women sent to Paris would mostly have been born in the late 1910s, and food was important for them too. They regarded the city as a ‘Paradise of Plenty’. Although German women had, unlike French, the right to vote, the Nazi ideology in all other ways treated them as second-class citizens whose role was to breed; they faced quotas in universities, and many other aspects of public life were closed to them. Yet, as they entered their teens in the early 1930s, having witnessed hyperinflation, mass unemployment and economic collapse, many of these middle-class girls were loyal supporters of the Führer. They may have been born malnourished, and they suffered spells of chronic hunger in 1923–4 and again in 1929–31, so food was inevitably a concern. But the women were not obsessed in quite the same way as the German men often were, meticulously documenting in letters home from France what they had had to eat that day and what they hoped to scrounge the next. Paris was regarded by all German soldiers as a prized posting, especially compared with the hardship and privations of being sent to the east. In Paris one could still get butter, coffee and luxuries such as pâté, confit (of various animals) and salted beef (if you knew where and could pay), as well as jewellery from Cartier, Boucheron and Van Cleef & Arpels, couture clothes from Jacques Fath or Maggy Rouff, and even silk stockings, though they might cost as much as 300 francs on the black market. But most French women could not afford such luxuries and, once they had damaged the final pair left in their cupboard, were deeply concerned about how they were to maintain their propriety since it was considered distinctly unladylike to be seen without stockings. The perfumer Elizabeth Arden came up with an answer: a miracle bottle of iodine dye costing about thirty francs and sold in three shades: flesh, gilded flesh and tanned flesh. It was advertised as ‘the silk on your legs without silk stockings’ and was very popular. Some women also became adept, in addition, at painting a straight black line up the calf to imitate the seam of a real stocking.
But you couldn’t eat iodine, and food was the overriding preoccupation for everyone. Food was an essential part of French national identity, especially for women responsible for domestic catering. Many Parisians were by now suffering deep hunger, and a generation of babies was in danger of growing up with rickets. Young French girls were sent off on their bicycles to visit distant cousins in the country in the hope that they might at least return with a cauliflower or a few eggs. If they had been sent by train, however, the jostling crowds on the way home frequently meant that an egg or two would be smashed – a disaster. Others, returning with suitcases full of meat, hoped they would not be noticed in the station mêlée. There were soup kitchens where poor people lived on ten francs a day, and special canteens run by the police, or similar bodies, for their own workers, like the one where the British nanny, Rosemary Say, worked until she was taken to the Vittel camp for enemy aliens in May 1941. But those with the money to use restaurants knew how to slip notes surreptitiously under a plate to ensure they would be given food not available to others. Food was an obsession not just because of gnawing hunger nor just because it was the only safe, non-political topic of conversation, but also because of these wild discrepancies. Racketeers were making serious money exploiting whatever they could get their hands on, and small café owners sometimes did a sideline in supplying false identity cards. Those who looked well fed were known as BOFs, Beurre Oeufs Fromages, and some of the profits they or their husbands made went back into the city’s economy as they were often spent at the couture houses. These ‘queens of the black market’, as they were known, were laughed at by some of the vendeuses, who described them as fat, well-fed women, who ‘arrive with pockets full of bundles of banknotes which they do not hesitate to place on the desk of the vendeuses. Their manners and language do not exactly match with the tone of couture.’
For ordinary Parisians the black market that was operating in earnest was mostly at Les Halles, although rumours that there was butter at an antiquarian bookseller’s, wine at the dentist’s or meat at a stationery shop regularly sent women scurrying off in unusual directions. At night women were sometimes seen at Les Halles searching the floor to see if any edible scrap had been dropped. On 31 May 1942 the anger over food supplies burst into the open as a group of largely communist women organized a demonstration to show the Germans ‘that we were not afraid’, as Lise London later explained. Born Elisabeth Ricol in France in 1916 to illiterate working-class Spanish parents who had been forced to emigrate, Lise had been a communist activist all her life and was now a leader of the Movement of Patriotic Women in Paris. Those who knew her described her as a force of nature, a brave and tireless agitator who put the cause above everything. She had learned her politics as a teenager in Moscow and while there fell in love with Artur London, a tall, handsome nineteen-year-old Czech-Jewish intellectual for whom she immediately left her first husband (the communist Auguste Delaune, who would be executed by the Nazis in 1943). But it was when fighting for the Republican cause in the Spanish Civil War that she learned she could face anything life threw at her. Still only twenty, she survived appalling deprivation and danger in Madrid, but while she was there miscarried a five-month-old baby.
She and Artur moved back to Paris, living under aliases with forged papers, and had another child together, a daughter, Françoise. Then in 1942 Lise helped to instigate a popular uprising against the Nazis in Paris. She had witnessed earlier, small-scale demonstrations in Paris where men had been shot but, as no women had yet been arrested, she was determined to ‘give confidence to women so they would want to engage with us … and to show that German repression would not end resistance’. Some of the women who joined in were part of organized communist committees but many others did so spontaneously out of desperation. The Rue Daguerre was chosen as it was a busy area with lots of food stores where many people came hoping to buy something to eat, however small; there were several warehouses nearby where products were stored before being sent to the front to feed German soldiers. In the weeks before the riot, Lise worked in secret with her colleagues producing leaflets about the intended action and organizing illegal broadcasts to be heard by other sympathetic groups. She said afterwards that the night before, she and Artur didn’t sleep. They made love until dawn. ‘We sensed that we weren’t going to see each other for a long time, maybe never again,’ she told an interviewer in 2011, aged ninety-five.
The disruption when it came involved hundreds of women, and although the Germans up until then had been trying not to shoot women, Lise herself was targeted and would have been hit had a comrade not spotted the danger and shot the German soldier first in the legs. The crowd then dispersed and, in the sniping that ensued, Lise escaped, only to be arrested eleven days later and condemned to death by a Vichy court – the only woman to receive this sentence. However, the fact that she was heavily pregnant with her second child, Michel, saved her from the guillotine. She gave birth in prison, but then had her baby taken away from her, and in April 1943 she was handed over to the Gestapo. Her parents, the elderly and frail Ricols, took care of their grandchildren, Françoise and Michel, throughout the war as Lise was later sent to Ravensbrück concentration camp and Artur to Mauthausen.
Since the German state was determined to ensure that its citizens would be the last in Europe to go hungry, it encouraged them to buy, or often simply take, everything in France that would keep. But when young German girls sent to Paris reported on how exciting it was to be there, the cause of their euphoria was mostly not the food. Ruth A. from Heidelberg wrote, ‘Yes, we had it good in Paris – soirées, dances, invitations, wonderful parties. We were simply lucky!’ The best part of Parisian life for the Grey Mice was the myriad opportunities for meeting eligible German officers, and Ruth A. met her own husband – a ‘charming Viennese’ medic – at a special meeting house in Paris run by the Wehrmacht. The couple were married on 10 July 1942, but not in Paris as they had hoped. The city was much too volatile, and in fact on that day a German officer was shot in front of the Madeleine church. But they were able to get travel permits for their families to travel to Lorraine, where her brother was stationed and where the marriage took place. However, Ruth’s story illustrates another problem: the auxiliaries quickly acquired a reputation as ‘Officers’ Mattresses’. In 1942, in order to encourage suitable young single women to sign up to work in Paris, the Germans started to publish propaganda texts which stressed the homely morality of German women compared with the urbane flirtatiousness of the French.
When French women board a train they are ‘painted and powdered. Suddenly we were overcome with such a feeling of unwashed stickiness,’ wrote Ina Seidel, a communications worker, adding self-righteously: ‘night-time entertainment seems to be the primary industry in the capital of France’. Seidel explained that the Parisian streets were empty at 6 a.m. but ‘we are eager to be at our post to relieve our comrades on the night shift and we enter the exchange with a fresh, happy greeting!’ What she did not say was that the night-time entertainment was in great demand from her male German colleagues.
Ursula Rüdt von Collenberg spoke without any conscious irony in a post-war interview about life in the French capital for a twenty-one-year-old German girl in 1942 ‘as the most wonderful and unforgettable time of my youth’. But then she did not have to wear uniform for her job in the French archives, working for the German historian Wolfgang Windelband and living in a huge room, with her own bath and telephone, at the Hôtel d’Orsay. ‘I never lived so well anywhere,’ she recalled. ‘We went to the opera or the theatre, we saw Jean-Louis Barrault and Sacha Guitry and the Grand Guignol; we visited exhibitions in the Orangerie and the Musée de l’Homme.’
Ursula’s uncle, Baron Kurt Rüdt von Collenberg, a Luftwaffe general, was living at Neuilly at the time in the requisitioned villa of a Mme Mandel (no relation), where ‘he gave fantastic dinner parties … with all the right French guests, Marquis so-and-so and Comte tra-la-la. We had good French friends like Daniel-Rops [the Catholic historian who wrote books of religious history] who translated Rilke … there was lovely material to be bought for clothes and I found a little White Russian dressmaker. Fantastic deals were being transacted all around on the sly, for wines, food, shoes what have you. We could buy what we wanted, much more than the French.’
As Ursula was well aware, the spring of 1942 offered plenty of opportunity for Germans in Paris to appreciate not just French food and couture but also culture. Jeanne Bucher ignored the prevailing caution and held a show in May for artists including Lurçat, Braque, Léger, Klee and Laurens, even though she could not actively promote the exhibition, which was attended mostly by French. But the major event that month was a massive retrospective show of the work of Arno Breker at the Orangerie, exhibiting giant figures of supermen representing a Nazi fantasy of Aryan power in Paris. Breker, trained in France but deeply sympathetic to the ideals of the Third Reich, was considered an ideal choice to promote Franco-German loyalty. The young Ambassador Otto Abetz, still only thirty-nine, arranged for Breker to stay in Helena Rubinstein’s magnificent and newly expropriated apartment on the Ile Saint-Louis.
Simone de Beauvoir commented in her memoirs that ‘almost the entire French intelligentsia’ had snubbed the exhibition, but this was far from being the case. The opening events were supported by artists such as Arletty, Sacha Guitry, Serge Lifar and of course Cocteau, who considered himself a personal friend of the great Breker and published a long article detailing why he admired the man so much, a step too far even for many of his artistic circle. As the Vichy Education Minister, Abel Bonnard, delivered some welcoming remarks followed by equally warm words from Pierre Laval, brought back as Prime Minister in April 1942,* no one seemed aware that the bronze for some of the enormous statues on show had been created from the melted-down monuments of Paris itself, or that they had been cast using the forced labour of French prisoners of war. To underline how significant this show was, concerts were arranged beneath the statuary. At the opening celebrations, Germaine Lubin, fresh from performing Schubert lieder as requested at a special farewell concert for her friend and admirer Hans Speidel, was once again the star. In August, the pianists Alfred Cortot and Wilhelm Kempff were chosen to give a magnificent four-handed recital to mark the closing of the exhibition.
Where cultural relations led, personal relationships between German men and French women followed. The actress Gisèle Casadesus was well aware of the Germans in her audience even though most wore civilian clothes and did not frequent the Comédie-Française as much as the opera. ‘In the theatre it was normal to be friendly to Germans because they were the audience,’ explained Jean-Claude Grumberg, ‘but if you wanted to perform you had to swear you were not Jewish.’*
Pretty young actresses were regularly asked out for a drink after a performance even if they were married. Casadesus decided that the best way to avoid having to say no was to make sure she always dashed off with the audience in order to catch the last Métro before the curfew. ‘If anyone asked for me, I told my dresser to tell them that I had to hurry home to my children,’ she explained; after all, missing the last Métro invariably meant being out after the curfew – a serious crime.
Micheline Bood wrote in 1941, with all the fiery injustice of a teenager, that she had reached the point where she found the French ‘no longer men. I am renouncing my country, I no longer want to be French! When you see how one and all have become collaborationist and are licking the boots of the Germans out of fear and cowardice even in my own country.’ She described with disgust how one of her friends, fifteen-year-old Monique, ‘let herself be kissed by this Boche, who is an enemy in a conquered country’.
But then, in May 1942, she changed her mind and she too started socializing with Germans. She described how on one occasion she and some friends went out with a young officer, not much older than them, who was wearing a white linen jacket ‘like Lohengrin’ with a shining eagle emblem, and although the other soldiers saluted him, ‘the women, the Blitzweiben or little Grey Mice, scowled at us’. It was exciting to be taken to smart restaurants and fancy bars and to experience Paris nightlife accompanied by handsome men. She now studied German in order to get a job with the authorities and scrunched up all the letters of denunciation she received before throwing them in the bin. These girls did not see themselves as collaborating any more than Colette did when she recommended turnip juice (which was all one could buy) as a remedy for wrinkles. In different ways, both were ensuring that the population remained quiescent and made the best of the situation.
But was sexual collaboration, if genuine attachment was involved, in a different category from that which endangered security by passing on secrets? The question was never adequately addressed in the post-war world and was to cause French women the greatest trouble in the immediate aftermath of the Liberation. By the middle of 1943 almost 80,000 women from the occupied zone were claiming support from the Germans for the children resulting from these liaisons. The French author Patrick Buisson argued that the Occupation encouraged the sexual liberation of women (often lonely wives or abandoned girlfriends) and that the presence of good-looking German soldiers encouraged the development of libido. German military superiority left the French humiliated and in a state of ‘erotic shock’, he wrote.
Johann and Lisette, the married German Wehrmacht officer and chic French secretary, had continued with their affair for two years in spite of periods when he was sent away on missions and, according to their letters, were more in love with each other than ever. But by 1942 the tense atmosphere of arrests, shootings, deprivation and reprisals had left Lisette full of doubts, which Johann tried to assuage. Her parents may have believed, as she approached thirty still unmarried, that she was bettering herself. But her working-class cousins deeply disapproved of the relationship with un boche and wanted nothing to do with her. ‘Collaboration?’ wrote Johann in one of his letters to her. ‘I think it is an illusion. You have to love deeply to understand. Love alone is stronger than patriotism, a love like this one. I love France in you, and you will cherish Germany through me.’
Hélène Berr was also a teenager when war broke out, but with fewer options to make the best of things, as she documented in the elegiac diary which she kept from 1942 onwards. Hélène was dreamy and non-political but the situation was ‘obliging’ her to take a stance. Her maturity and intelligence are in stark contrast to Micheline Bood’s childlike enjoyment of the moment, yet both were young French women from middle-class homes eager to sample life. Berr was born in Paris in March 1921, the fourth child of Raymond and Antoinette Berr, French Jews of enormous culture, sensitivity and intellect who lived in the affluent 7th arrondissement on the Avenue Elisée Reclus. The family’s Judaism was secular and low key, never denied but not the most central part of their lives. M. Berr was a scientist, a successful industrialist and a decorated soldier of the Guerre de Quatorze, Hélène herself an English student at the Sorbonne and a gifted violinist in love with music, literature and a young Frenchman of Polish Catholic origins, Jean Morawiecki. Brought up like most of the haute bourgeoisie by an English nanny, she was a fierce Anglophile and filled her diary with almost as much about English literature as about the Occupation. It’s the juxtaposition of her quartet, playing sublime music, with the horrors she increasingly witnesses around her which gives the diary a particular poignancy. How can a world of Schubert and his ‘Trout Quintet’ coexist with a world where women have to give birth in the gutter and Jews are forbidden to walk across the Champs-Elysées or to enter theatres and restaurants?
At the Berrs’ country home in Aubergenville on the Seine, summer 1942. From left: Hélène, her mother Antoinette, sister Denise, boyfriend Jean Morawiecki and brother-in-law’s sister, Jacqueline Job
In June 1942 she wrote: ‘When I review the week just passed I see a dark sky looming over it, it has been a week of tragedy, a chaotic jumble of a week. At the same time there is something uplifting in thinking of all the wonderful understanding I have encountered … there is beauty in the midst of the tragic. As if beauty were condensing in the heart of ugliness. It’s very strange.’
Initially she did not intend her diary to be published, but wrote it rather as a message for Jean, who eventually decided to leave, via the Pyrenees, for England to join the Free French Forces of de Gaulle. Her brother and sister also managed to cross into unoccupied France but she took the firm and conscious decision to stay, initially to support her parents but later as a moral decision on its own, not to abandon the Jewish children she was helping under the auspices of the various Jewish relief agencies. Her choice was to do the right thing, which she did not yet realize would mean certain death because many of the homes were run by the controversial Union Générale des Israélites de France, the organization intended to help Jews but which in the end facilitated their capture and death.
The leaden atmosphere in Paris during the early summer of 1942 provided ample warning of what the full force of the Gestapo could do when it felt threatened. Marie-Elisa Nordmann was a brilliant young chemist who came top of her year when she graduated from the Institut de Chimie de Paris in 1931 and then spent a year in Germany to improve her language skills. She had wanted to be a doctor, a career her protective Jewish mother had not deemed suitable for a young lady, so when fellow chemist Paul Rumpf proposed, she was tempted into marriage at the age of twenty-two, hoping this would give her the independent adult lifestyle she craved but which was hard for a single woman from her milieu to enjoy. But the marriage was unhappy almost from the start and, soon after the birth of their son Francis, the couple divorced. By 1939 Marie-Elisa was living in an apartment with her widowed mother Hélène and her baby, moving in anti-fascist circles, already convinced she had to persuade more of her countrymen about the need to fight the Occupation. She undertook to distribute flyers urging resistance, but she soon realized that something more active was required. So, in spite of the enormous danger and risk to her young son, she agreed to supply mercury from her laboratory for explosives. She was arrested in a round-up of seventy people, many of them women, on 16 May 1942 and taken to a variety of prisons including La Santé, then Romainville and finally, in January 1943, to Auschwitz. She was part of the notorious ‘Convoi des 31,000’, a series of cattle trucks that took 230 women from a variety of backgrounds and ages whose strength was to be their support for each other. Only forty-nine of them would survive. Insisting that she was a political prisoner, Marie-Elisa managed to hide the fact that she was Jewish, not always possible for men who were caught and it was discovered they had been circumcised. She had learned in August from a secret message hidden inside a packet of cigarettes, just a few weeks after her own arrest, that her mother, devotedly looking after her grandchild Francis, had been taken to Drancy as a civilian hostage and then sent to Auschwitz and gassed, once it was discovered she was Jewish. Francis survived the war, looked after by his uncle and aunt Philippe and Paule Nordmann, as did Marie-Elisa.
In June 1942 all Jews over the age of six in occupied France were ordered to wear a yellow star with the word Juif in black inside the star on their outer garments at all times. The procedure for collecting these three cloth badges – which used up one month’s worth of textile rations – involved queuing at local police stations and, after signing for receipt of the stars, giving various other pieces of information including an identity card number and home address. Wearing the star enabled all the other punitive laws against Jews to be more stringently enforced, such as not being allowed to go to the theatre, cinema or certain shops until late in the day by which time all the produce had been sold, or to use public phone booths and public parks. In addition, Jews were now restricted to the last carriage of the Métro, but this order was issued by the Préfet of the Paris region with the rider that ‘no announcement was to be posted and no information given to the public’. Hélène knew nothing about the rule when she ran for her train on Friday 10 July and was shouted at: ‘You there! In the other carriage …’ By the time she had moved, ‘tears were pouring from my eyes, tears of rage and of protest against this brutality’.
A handful of protesters took the decision to wear a yellow star out of sympathy even though they were not Jewish, and called themselves ‘Friends of Jews’; some wore a star with the word Zazou printed in the middle, the Zazou style being a kind of spontaneous teenage rebellion, more popular with boys than girls, deriving from jazz and anti-fascism. Although the Zazous were spread throughout France, they were concentrated in Paris and met in cafés or basement clubs, mocking the Nazis and their Vichy collaborators. After a government decree that hair should be collected from barber shops to be made into slippers, Zazous grew their hair longer. Cartier even had a customer who commissioned an expensive gold-star brooch to be made as a rather futile grand gesture, but a gesture nonetheless, while one young girl was imprisoned for tying the yellow star to the tail of her dog. Hundreds of Jews, if they thought they could avoid being identified, took the decision not to wear the star at all. Of course they risked being denounced by those who knew they were Jewish, so well-known Jews had little choice other than to write to Vichy, which had not yet imposed the star on its citizens, anxiously requesting that they might be granted special dispensation by Pétain himself.
Claire Chevrillon, hoping that the Parisian authorities had not discovered that her mother was Jewish, advised her to risk not wearing it. But her law-abiding mother decided she should and queued up to buy her three badges. ‘First my mother wore the star. Then she took it off. Then she put it on again. She oscillated this way for several months – certainly the worst thing to do – and finally stopped wearing it altogether. Later through the underground I got her a false identity card with the name of Mme Charpentier, which at least allowed her to avoid being caught in a street round-up.’
Some women saw in the regulations an opportunity for revenge or for a meagre payment from the authorities. One anonymous informer wrote about the daughter of M.A., ‘a former dancer who was not wearing the star. This person, not satisfied with being Jewish, debauches the husbands of genuine French women … Defend women against Jewesses … and you would be returning a French husband to his wife.’ It was typical of many such letters.
Hélène Berr agonized for herself too but then decided she must obey. ‘It is cowardly not to wear the star vis-à-vis people who will,’ she wrote. One day a stranger approached her and offered his hand saying loudly, ‘A French Catholic shakes your hand … and when it’s over we’ll let them have it.’ It was, she felt, the decent thing to do. Similarly she concluded that leaving the country would be an act of cowardice: ‘enforced cowardice, it would be cowardly towards the other internees and the wretched poor’.
But on 23 June – ‘a radiant morning’, as Hélène noted – her father was, without warning, arrested. Hélène was the first in the family to discover that he had been taken from his office for questioning at the Avenue Foch, and she rushed home to tell her mother. The Avenue Foch was a wide boulevard in the heart of fashionable Paris where three magnificent nineteenth-century villas at numbers 82, 84 and 86 had been taken over by the notorious SiPo-SD (Sicherheitsdienst), the counter-intelligence branch of the Nazi SS, as their French headquarters in Paris. Number 84, used for the imprisonment and interrogation of foreign agents captured in France, soon became a byword for cruelty, torture and terror. Later that day the Berr family learned from a surreal conversation with a French police officer, who telephoned to give them further details, that M. Berr had been detained because his yellow star was not correctly stitched on. Mme Berr then explained that she had put it on with hooks and press studs ‘so Papa could wear it on different suits. The officer insisted that the press studs were what had prompted Papa’s internment. “At the Drancy camp all the stars are stitched on.” So that made us realise that he was on his way to Drancy.’
In the boiling heat of the day, so hot that Hélène was ‘drenched in sweat’, she, her sister Denise and her mother rushed around gathering essentials such as a toothbrush, which they had been told they could deliver to the Préfecture de Police, where he was being held.
We tramped up endless staircases, along blank-walled corridors with small doors leading off to left and right; I wondered if they were cells and if Papa was in one of them. We were redirected from one floor to another … the baggage was heavy. Maman found it hard to get up the top flight of stairs. I told myself: ‘Come on now, it’ll soon be over.’ It was close to excruciating.
After several false starts they found the usually dapper industrialist, without tie, braces or shoelaces, already looking like a man in custody. As the dismal family group sat on a bench Mme Berr started sewing on his star again. ‘I was trying to get a solid grip on what was happening,’ Hélène wrote. As she took in the scene she reflected: ‘You might have wondered what we were all doing there … we were among French people.’ There was not a German in sight.
And then there was further disorientation, as another three women came in including ‘a stout vulgar blonde’ with ‘a dark-skinned Italian Jew’, the foursome probably involved in black-marketeering. ‘The four of us were so distant from those poor folk that we could hardly conceive that Papa was a prisoner too.’ Raymond Berr was sent to Drancy, although he was eventually released after Établissements Kuhlmann, the giant French chemical company to which he had devoted his entire career since 1919, negotiated his release and paid a substantial ransom. The family knew it was but a reprieve. From now on he was obliged to work from home and could no longer travel, but even that was an extraordinary privilege for a Jew – Berr was the only one in France to whom it was granted.
Less than a month later, on 16 and 17 July, the Vichy government, aiming to satisfy German demands to reduce the Jewish population, arrested some 13,152 Jews, including more than 4,000 children, mostly from Paris, in an operation which they were calling ‘Spring Wind’. René Bousquet, Secretary General of the French National Police, knew that using French police in the round-ups would be ‘embarrassing’ but hoped that this would be mitigated if those arrested were only so-called foreign Jews.* However, as the historian Serge Klarsfeld has revealed (making use of telegrams René Bousquet sent to the prefects of departments in the occupied zone), the police were ordered to deport not only foreign Jewish adults but children, whose deportation had not even been requested, nor planned for, by the Nazis. Pierre Laval maintained that including children in the round-ups was a ‘humanitarian’ measure to keep families together, a clearly fallacious argument since many of the parents had already been deported. The reality was that this way he not only raised the total numbers but would, he calculated, avoid the awkward situation of leaving Jewish children without parents, who would then be the responsibility of the state. The youngest child sent to Auschwitz under Laval’s orders that month was eighteen months old. So terrified were the children that some of them invented the name ‘Pitchipoi’ for their imagined, unknown destination. The adults accepted it in a feeble attempt to convince them they were going somewhere exciting. Everyone was taken on French buses to the Vélodrome d’Hiver, a bicycle stadium in the shadow of the Eiffel Tower, where most of the victims were temporarily confined for five days in extremely crowded conditions, almost without water as there was only one available tap, with little food and with inadequate sanitary facilities. They were then moved to Drancy, Pithiviers and Beaune-la-Rolande, internment camps managed by Vichy in collaboration with the Germans, before being sent on by train to Auschwitz for extermination. The round-up has been a source of enormous grief in France. It was not until 1995 that French President Jacques Chirac admitted French complicity as French policemen and civil servants had been used for the raid. He urged that 16 July be commemorated annually as a national day of remembrance. It was a ground-breaking moment in French history.
Rachel Erlbaum still lives today in the same apartment in the Marais just across from the Rue des Rosiers where she grew up with her parents and younger brother, a street with many other Jewish families. Her mother took the precaution of hiding during the day, living in the coal cellar, and only going back up to the apartment most nights to see her children. She was there on the day of the round-up. ‘At dawn, as soon as they realised something was going on, my parents closed the shutters and told us to keep quiet. By some miracle the police did not enter our building.’ Rachel pauses before continuing. ‘I can still hear the screams and cries of the babies and other children thrown into the green and yellow buses by French police.’
‘La police française,’ she repeats, in case there is any doubt about the significance of what she has just said. And then she says it once again with more vigour, so hard is it to comprehend. ‘French buses on every street corner. The Germans may have been waiting behind the cordoned-off area but they did not show their faces.’ They did not need to. Her schoolfriend Sara Lefkovich was arrested that day. She had been in hiding with her father while her mother was in a different hiding place with her brother. When her father was taken, Sara ran to him and he shouted at her, ‘Run away, go, run away, Sara,’ but she, wooden, could not move, rooted to the spot in an embrace with her father. She did not want to leave without him. Neither came back. It’s a memory Rachel Erlbaum will never forget and which lives afresh whenever she talks about it.
The Reiman family lived not far away in the Rue du Temple when the police came for them – mother Malka, and daughters Madeleine, eleven, and Arlette, nine. Their father had already been arrested and taken to Pithiviers. ‘“Don’t worry,” he always told us, “don’t be afraid. This is the land of freedom, of Voltaire and Rousseau.”‘ And so it had been until 1940. Abraham Reiman, born in Poland, had built up a successful furrier business and married his childhood sweetheart, Malka, in France in 1929. For ten years the Reimans had enjoyed a bourgeois existence with car, housekeeper and total freedom for the young children to run around in the area meeting friends. When Abraham was arrested in 1941, the enterprising Malka managed to get herself and the girls to Pithiviers and, thanks to the efforts of a kind and sympathetic local French policeman, who arranged for them to stay at his home, they saw Abraham and gave him a parcel of food and clothes. Notwithstanding, in June 1942 he was deported to Auschwitz, where he was killed.
But this time, back in Paris, there was nothing Malka could do. ‘I remember my mother shouting and screaming at the police who came to our door and throwing furniture at them. They told us to prepare food and drink for three days. “How ridiculous,” my mother replied. “What can we take? As Jews we are barely allowed to buy any food.”‘ Arlette remembers every detail about that hot and humid day, especially how the concierge was watching as the four families in their apartment block left.
Once at the stadium, the situation deteriorated dramatically.
The stench was appalling, unimaginable. You could barely breathe. There was nothing to eat or drink, the few toilets that were in use were quickly blocked, some people were throwing themselves off the top of the wall to commit suicide and women who had their periods were walking around with blood pouring down their legs. I thought these women were dying and had been murdered. I clung to my mother, berating her, ‘Where is Zola now and where is Rousseau?’ I thought these were real friends of my father’s and that they would come and help us. But adults had lied to me. That is what stays in my mind.
There were other heart-wrenching testimonies of children saying a final goodbye to parents they would never see again, some who went mad and behaved violently. When condensation started dripping from the roof one mother was heard to tell her child this was God’s tears.
Irène Némirovsky was arrested on 13 July, likewise as part of the Spring Wind operation. French gendarmes came to the house the family had recently rented in the heart of Issy-l’Evêque. Everyone in the village knew that the Epsteins were Jewish long before they had seen them wearing a yellow star (only Elisabeth, the youngest daughter, was exempt), despite the fact that the Epsteins regularly attended Sunday mass and that their daughter Denise had had her first communion in the local church. The two gendarmes who came for Irène were polite, gave her enough time to pack a small suitcase with essential toiletries and offered her a chance to say another goodbye to her daughters. She declined, saying ‘one adieu is enough’, and left behind the manuscript of the great unfinished epic she was working on at the time, written in tiny, spidery handwriting on the paper that was becoming increasingly hard to come by. As she had prophetically told her publisher two days previously, ‘I have written a great deal lately. I suppose they will be posthumous works but it still makes the time go by.’ They were her last words as a writer.
The book, Suite Française, was intended as a symphony with four or five sections. The completed two, ‘Storm in June’ and ‘Dolce’, are brilliantly nuanced evocations of how the war was damaging the lives of ordinary people; they show a writer who had developed a deep understanding of humanity, not always visible in her earlier works. Irène by this time seems to have had no illusions about her own fate, the last two years having taken their toll on whatever optimism she may have had in 1940 when she wrote to Marshal Pétain ‘with respect and sometimes even with veneration’. She had asked him to grant her special status, having lived in France for more than twenty years, insisting, ‘I cannot believe, Sir, that no distinction is made between the undesirable and the honourable foreigners, those who have done everything possible to deserve the royal welcome France has given them.’
Her plea for cultural superiority to save her family strikes an awkward note today, but when she was arrested two years later Michel Epstein clearly thought that, thanks to their influential friends, his wife would be swiftly freed. They managed to exchange a few letters suggesting names of people they hoped would help. But after two days in the local prison Irène was taken to the Pithiviers camp, which by the time she arrived was swollen with arrivals from the Paris round-up. Theodor Dannecker, head of the Jewish section of the SiPo-SD, having promised to deliver a deportation of 40,000 Jews in three weeks, was tightening his grip: no more visits, parcels or releases on health grounds. On Friday 17 July Irène was taken on a dawn convoy to Auschwitz, where, as her biographers put it, ‘she was no longer a novelist, mother, wife, Russian or Frenchwoman: she was just a Jewess’. The journey took two days and on arrival she was marked with a tattoo but not gassed immediately because she was young enough to work. She survived until 19 August when an epidemic of deadly typhus swept through the camp and killed her. She was thirty-nine. Her daughters clung on to the manuscript, not realizing the value of what they had in their possession.
The then three-year-old Renée Wartski, by her own admission ‘an extremely difficult child’, has always known how lucky she was to have survived the round-up. ‘I can still remember the look on my mother’s face when she heard the Paris policeman knock on the door of the concierge and ask for the Jews on the second floor. Normally I would have screamed.’ Renée’s father, a naturalized Frenchman who worked in the leather trade, had emigrated from Poland during the First World War when France encouraged such movement, and was now a prisoner of war in Germany. Her mother Fanny was alone with Renée, her nine-year-old brother Louis and her parents, all squashed into a small apartment in a four-storey building down an alleyway off the Rue de Crimée, an old cobblestoned street with cafés on each corner in the 19th arrondissement. ‘The quick-thinking concierge told the policeman: “They’ve left, sorry, gone out of town.”
“But why are the shutters open then?”
“Oh,” she shrugged convincingly, “you know Jews – strange people – when they leave in a hurry, like that, they don’t think.” But Renée, aware that she owes her life to the loyal concierge, insists on telling me ‘a parallel story, about her mother’s sister Sara, a dressmaker who lived in the north of the city and who was denounced by her concierge and deported ‘even though she had often made clothes for this concierge’s child. Why? I always believed it was just a matter of luck that I was saved and they were not. After my aunt and cousins were taken away the concierge helped herself to all the silver in the flat.’*
In fact, Fanny Wartski had been warned about the upcoming rafle, or round-up, as her younger brother, a violinist, had heard rumours thanks to his best friend in the orchestra, a Catholic. But the family had not acted in time. Now she wasted not a moment and the next day courageously paid a passeur to whom she had been recommended to take her two young children out of Paris as quickly as possible. They were going to live on a farm in the Alps in the free zone. She would follow when she could. Some weeks later Fanny arranged to hide herself in the back of a goods train transporting coal. She heard dogs sniffing for would-be escapers but she survived and, when the family was finally reunited in Grenoble, her face was covered in so much coal dust that relatives teased her: how could she think to put on mascara at a time like this?
It was brave of my mother to trust the passeur as such people sometimes took the money and did not deliver, selling the children on to the Nazis. We could never discuss this at first. Then, when she did manage to talk about it, she would always laugh when she told the story of how we got out. She tried to make light of it by joking about the coal-dust mascara. It was her way of coping.
After the Vél’ d’Hiv round-up, few French people – whether Jews or non-Jews – were left with any illusions about the future. Even Gerhard Heller, after seeing hordes of Jewish children being herded towards cattle trucks at the Gare d’Austerlitz, declared: ‘That day my eyes were definitely opened by the horrors.’ A handful of young French girls training to be nurses were taken to the stadium and witnessed a corner of the human drama but could not begin to comprehend the epic scale of the tragedy. What could they do beyond ladling out soup? Denise Tavernier, a twenty-three-year-old probationer social worker who had just gained her first degree, was so horrified by what she saw that she protested to the chief of police, telling him he should be ashamed to be French. ‘I was threatened with being arrested myself and since no one at the time wanted to hear I kept quiet. But, encouraged by my priest, who told me future generations must know about this, I did write down details of what I saw.’ Eventually, when police archives were opened in the 1980s, Serge Klarsfeld read her comments and, in 2013, Denise Tavernier, aged ninety-four and in poor health, was awarded the Légion d’honneur. Another student nurse, present that day, still cannot talk about it.
In the wake of the summer events, arrests were carried out on the flimsiest of pretexts, so that Paris was like a trap which could be sprung at any moment for so many who had something to hide. Train stations were now crammed full of people desperate to get out of the city; men and women were occasionally spotted with baggy overcoats over pyjamas, suggesting that they had had to leave through a back window in a hurry. The Métro and theatre exits were places of infinite danger where the Gestapo, usually in plain clothes, would often be hovering ready to ambush Jews, saboteurs, spies or even random hostages, especially alert for anyone turning round or going backwards at the sight of barriers.
Only very few of those arrested effected extraordinary escapes from the sports stadium; toilets which had windows had been blocked off for use so exits were few. And those who managed to slip out had to find other hiding places swiftly. Cécile Widerman Kaufer was just eleven years old when ‘soldiers banged on our door loudly, pointed guns at our heads and forced us to leave our apartment’. She never forgot being driven to the sports stadium, spending several days without food and water and then her father somehow convincing a French guard to let her and her younger sister, Betty, leave the stadium and go with their mother to the nearby Rothschild Hospital. It was the last time they saw their father and elder sister.
While at the hospital, I convinced a woman to pass a note on to my grandparents letting them know where we were. Next, we persuaded a French guard to let us free from the hospital, while my grandparents arranged for my sister and me to be taken into hiding by a Catholic French woman from Normandy who was already hiding five Jewish children. We called her Mémère, which means grandmother in French …
Like the thousands of other hidden children, we went for days without food. I was scared all the time and worried constantly about caring for my little sister. But I promised my mother I’d take care of her. And I still take care of her.
As Cécile told an interviewer in 2012, ‘Every July, my stomach churns from the memory.’
Most were taken from the Vélodrome by cattle train to Beaunela-Rolande. There Malka Reiman, a German-speaker, found a job as a translator in the camp. Working in an office she saw documents which made her realize they would soon be taken from there to somewhere worse, so she came up with a flimsy ruse, telling the authorities that before the round-up she had hidden vital material, furs as well as sewing machines, that would be useful to the Germans. If she was allowed back to Paris with her children she would show them where. Amazingly, they allowed her and the two girls to travel unaccompanied on a military train back to Paris where they were due to be met. Her daughter Arlette recalled:
My mother, realizing that the train was very slow, regularly stopping, saw a chance. She told us, when she gave the nod, we would have to jump out and lie low between the wooden sleepers and that we would be fine. We had to trust her. She would come back to collect us. It was terrifying but we did it. The whole thing is still today like a dream to me, but she saved our lives. We then walked into Paris and stayed with a friend until my mother found a family outside Paris to take us in.
Paris was terrifying for many but, at the same time, social life flourished as usual for the upper crust, le gratin, a shrinking number of privileged individuals.* On the evening of 17 July, the day after the round-up, Josée de Chambrun was partying with her friend Arletty and her Luftwaffe officer Soehring, and the next day Bunny, her husband, won at the races at Maisons-Laffitte, while in the evening the French film actor Raimu was entertained for dinner by the Lavals. It took more than events at the Vél’ d’Hiv to keep Josée away from her favourite activities for long, whether this was socializing with the stars or buying hats from Balenciaga or dresses from Schiaparelli. The one required the other. But she was not alone. Records from Van Cleef & Arpels show that the Paris showroom continued selling its dazzling creations in 1942, and not just to Germans. The firm’s file cards of jewellery sales indicate that the purchaser was sometimes a named German officer, sometimes simply ‘Allemand Civil’ or ‘Officier Allemand’, but there were still many sales to French clients such as the Faucigny-Lucinge family, whose name appears regularly. Similarly, when a special couture ration card was negotiated with the Vichy government, enabling thirty couture houses to continue their creative work with certain complicated restrictions, it was French women as well as German who continued to buy. No fashion house was allowed to produce more than seventy-five outfits and each outfit had controls on the amount of fabric permitted. Yet Balenciaga saw sales rise by 400 per cent in 1941 and 1942 – although the house was briefly closed by the Germans in 1944 because it had exceeded its quota. To attend any fashion show during the Occupation one needed a special pass, but – of 20,000 such passes issued – only 200 were given to wives of German officers, many of whom were on the invitation lists of Otto and Suzanne Abetz. The rest went to French women.
But Parisiennes were creative, and many of them had their own dressmaker who would copy high fashion. The twenty-one-year-old Elisabeth Meynard was typical: even though it was summer, she enjoyed wearing a ‘smart suit of smooth brown velvet, which my favourite Jewish Polish dressmaker, moonlighting to bring in some extra cash, had made for me with material bought as upholstery fabric’. Jacques Fath, who started trading as a couturier only in 1939, was able to increase the number of his skilled staff from 176 in 1942 (many of them drawn from other houses that had been forced to close) to 193 in 1943 and 244 in 1944. His pretty wife, Geneviève, was a key asset as she was not only photographed in his creations on magazine covers, such as Pour Elle in March 1942, but, according to the influential historian of fashion Dominique Veillon, it was she who maintained the crucial business connections with the German purchasing office in Paris’s Rue Vernet, ensuring that Fath’s creations were reproduced and discussed in the French and German press. There were others in the fashion industry who maintained an equally opportunist, if not actively collaborationist, attitude by joining the Cercle Européen, an ideological centre for those who believed in Nazi ideas, among whom Marcel Rochas is the best-known. Rochas had been suspect ever since he and Maggy Rouff agreed to present a private show to German dignitaries in November 1940. But in 1942, as the elegant Odette Fabius noted, once Jews had been forced to wear the yellow star, ‘he no longer greeted even good customers and friends because they were Jewish[,] and crossed the road to avoid catching their eye when he chanced to meet them in the Avenue Montaigne’. Since her own apartment was on the Avenue Montaigne she was especially well placed to observe this.
Other couturiers with a different agenda were equally busy. Comtesse Lily Pastré, two years into the war, was now enjoying her new-found independence. This least political of women, an eccentric who liked to play the saw (much to the consternation of listeners), now relished the opportunity to act as a true and hugely generous patron of the arts. Since 1940 she had poured her money into an organization she had created called Pour Que l’Esprit Vive (May the Spirit Live) to support the artists she had so loved watching and listening to in Paris who were now in difficulty. Among those who benefited from her hospitality were the harpist Lily Laskine, the composers Darius Milhaud and Georges Auric, the pianists Youra Guller and Rudolf Firkušný and the painters André Masson, Victor Brauner and Rudolf Kundera. Pastré went out of her way to seek out Kundera, living in poverty in Cassis, and persuaded him to come to her chateau at Montredon, telling him that where he was living was unworthy of his art. And she agreed to shelter the Jewish lover of Edith Piaf, Norbert Glanzberg. She started arranging nightly concerts at the chateau, which had also become a refuge for fleeing artists, several of whom were waiting for a boat and a visa for America. Most of the latter were being helped by the Emergency Rescue Committee officer Varian Fry, the American journalist who had been sent by this private relief organization specifically to bring artists and intellectuals out of France. It is estimated that his efforts saved about 2,000 people. Artists looked after by Lily Pastré found not only comfort and stimulation – there was always plenty of food at her table.
One of her most extraordinary actions was in April 1942 when she became aware that the Romanian-born pianist Clara Haskil, often in fragile health, was seriously ill. Clara, approaching fifty, had already survived an emotionally draining escape from Paris, along with other members of the Orchestre National de France. They had taken trains and been forced to walk in the cold and dark until they met a guide, who was paid to lead them through fields and woods to the free zone. But the guide was so frightened himself that he kept warning his musical charges that the prisons in the neighbourhood were full of people like them who had been caught. Once she had arrived at the Château de Montredon, Clara started suffering from double vision accompanied by severe headaches. Lily realized that this was more than emotional fragility and quickly summoned a talented resistance doctor, Jean Hamburger, who was in hiding in Marseilles. He diagnosed a pituitary tumour pressing on the optic nerve which would soon lead to blindness unless she underwent immediate surgery. Lily therefore organized and paid for a renowned Parisian brain surgeon, Marcel David, who operated on Clara’s tumour using only local anaesthesia and cocaine in a room at the old Hôtel-Dieu hospital. During the operation Haskil mentally played Mozart’s Piano Concerto in E-flat major as a way of ensuring that the surgery was not damaging her memory or mental abilities. Just three months after that operation, a heavily bandaged woman, looking pale and hunched, emerged in the chateau park and gave a magnificent and emotional rendering of Mozart’s Piano Concerto in D minor, thereby earning a reputation as a great Mozart interpreter as well as making medical history by her method of neurological rehabilitation. Everyone who listened that night was moved beyond words by her courage and determination. A few weeks later Lily organized a visa for Haskil to go to Switzerland; there she recuperated with Lily’s friend Charlie Chaplin. But on 27 July Lily Pastré set her sights on producing a defiant musical extravaganza that would combine brilliant originality and Parisian elegance – an open-air production of A Midsummer Night’s Dream for one night only. She saw it as her way of fighting against the current darkness, against ‘the constants of grief, failure and the disease of the time’, according to her friend Edmonde Charles-Roux.
Christian Bérard and Christian Dior were involved in the set design and costumes for the actors, draping over them whatever was to hand while they were on stage. When stocks of the materials had run out, Lily had the curtains and valuable old wall fabrics taken down inside the chateau. The orchestra comprised twenty exiled Jewish musicians conducted by Manuel Rosenthal, and at the end of the evening all costumes and scenery were burned; this was meant to represent unreality. Only one or two photographs survive to prove it was not just a dream. Lily’s son Pierre commented later that his mother, determined to be beholden to no one, derived the greatest sense of freedom imaginable by keeping a flame of Parisian culture alive in Marseilles. A few months later the Germans occupied the city and destroyed much of the old port area where Jews and resisters were hiding in the narrow windy streets.
*
The ramifications of the rafle rumbled on throughout the summer. Only a few people made public protests, among them Pastor André Trocmé, the pacifist Protestant minister who often preached against anti-Semitism at Chambon-sur-Lignon, the mountainous village in the Haute-Loire, south-central France, where many risked their lives to save hundreds of Jewish children. Trocmé protested against the Vél’ d’Hiv round-up in a public sermon on 16 August, declaring that ‘the Christian Church must kneel down and ask God to forgive its present failings and cowardice’.
Hélène Berr wrote that as soon as she had heard the details of the rafle she felt guilty ‘that there was something I hadn’t been seeing and that this was reality’. She noted some facts: ‘How some children had to be dragged along the floor, how one whole family (mother, father and five children) gassed themselves to escape the round-up, how one woman threw herself out of a window … several policemen have been shot for warning people so they could escape … It appears that the SS have taken command in France and that Terror must follow.’ But for Berr the real agony was how to respond personally: should she try to leave and abandon struggle and heroism in exchange for dullness and despondency or do something proactive, like many factory girls who lived with Jews? ‘They are all coming forward to request permission to marry, to save their men from deportation.’ Then, with the painful honesty which makes her diary such a powerful document, she admitted that part of the reason she did not want to leave Paris was her love for Jean.
The round-up was only a partial success for the Germans in terms of numbers of people seized, as only half the Jews intended to be arrested were actually caught. The news had leaked and many Jews went into hiding. But in August 1942 René Bousquet, Vichy police chief, rewarded by the Germans with extra resources, organized several further deportations of Jews from French-administered camps such as Gurs and Rivesaltes in the so-called free zone. These Jews had been turned over to the Nazis by the Vichy authorities in accordance with a deal Bousquet had just struck with SS General Carl Oberg, the man in charge of German police in France. The Bousquet–Oberg accords of 2 July were presented to local officials as giving French police greater autonomy, but this was far from the truth and in reality French police were compelled to comply with German demands. Since the Germans did not have enough manpower in France in 1942 to undertake all these arrests themselves, the question remains: if Vichy had refused to comply at this time would more Jews have been saved? The first of the convoys consisting of Jews from the Free Zone delivered by Vichy to the Nazis according to the Bousquet–Oberg deal, Convoy no. 17, left Drancy for Auschwitz on 10 August 1942 carrying approximately 1,000 Jews, almost all German citizens, over half of whom were women. Three-quarters were gassed as soon as they arrived in Auschwitz. Throughout the month of August, convoy after convoy left the non-occupied zone, heading first to Drancy. New convoys were then formed, not always with the same Jews, which went from Drancy to Auschwitz.
Now it was clear nobody was safe. Those Jews who had convinced themselves that they had lived in France for so long or had contributed so much to the country that they were immune from the threat, that they were somehow protected, were plunged into terror. Many applied for special dispensation to Vichy, making their case for why they should not have to wear the yellow star. On 25 August, Heinz Röthke, the highest-ranking German official in charge of the camp at Drancy, listed twenty-six individuals who had been granted an exemption certificate.
Among those hand-picked to receive protection from Pétain, which meant, among other ‘privileges’, that they did not have to wear the yellow star, were wives of leading figures such as Lisette de Brinon, née Franck, whose husband, Fernand de Brinon, was the Vichy representative to the German authorities in Paris, and Marie-Louise, Marquise de Chasseloup-Laubat, daughter of the banker Edgar Stern, as well as her sister Lucie, Mme de Langlade. Both had converted to Catholicism years before. But several requests were rejected, including one made by Colette on behalf of her husband, Maurice Goudeket. He escaped on forged papers to the free zone for a while, but then returned and hid in the maid’s room above their apartment, believing that Colette could not survive without him. It was a brave gesture.
The request from Béatrice de Camondo Reinach, daughter of the wealthy Jewish banker Moïse de Camondo, was also rejected. That summer Béatrice had been receiving instruction from a Catholic priest who, on 1 July, baptized her and four days later confirmed her into the faith. She continued riding in the Bois de Boulogne with the German officers from Neuilly she counted as her friends, and hunting in the forests near Senlis along with her close friends such as Marie-Louise de Chasseloup-Laubat, a high-profile hunt member who, unlike poor Béatrice, had been granted a valuable exemption certificate. Throughout the summer of 1942 Béatrice remained convinced that her brother’s death in action, her divorce, her conversion to Catholicism, her family’s gifts to the state and, above all, her friends in high places would surely protect her. While she herself was not a collector, she had grown up in an ambience where collecting French eighteenth-century art, preserving the ancient French patrimony, was more important than anything else, certainly religion. She had happily overseen the gift of her family’s home and collections to the state of which she was part and to which she belonged. She continued to feel secure within its boundaries. After all, her own mother, now Irène Sampieri, permanently immortalized by Renoir, seemed safe enough, albeit out of Paris. The child with the shimmering hair was to survive. But the horse-loving daughter was ultimately abandoned by friends as well as her mother, defined by her religion.
Béatrice was not alone in discovering that friends were not always robust. Renée Puissant was born Rachel Van Cleef on 22 October 1896. Her Jewish parents Alfred Van Cleef and Esther Arpels were double cousins who had married in 1895 in Paris when she was eighteen, he twenty-two. A generation earlier, Alfred’s father Salomon had left Ghent in Belgium after his first wife died and come to Paris, where he married Melanie Mayer, a linen merchant’s daughter. (Melanie’s sister, Theresa, married Salomon Arpels, and Esther was their daughter.) Salomon Van Cleef joined his father-in-law’s linen business, but when he died in 1883 his son Alfred was only eleven years old and it was decided that he should be apprenticed to a stonecutter. By 1906 Alfred and Esther were ready to open a fine jeweller’s in the Place Vendôme, following the example of Frédéric Boucheron, who had been the first to establish himself, in 1893, in the area near the new opera house. From the start they were in competition with Cartier, Chaumet, René Boivin and several others who had shops there. In 1908 they opened a branch in Dinard, followed by branches in other resorts such as Nice, Deauville and, in 1913, the important spa town and centre of much socialite activity, Vichy. There followed a period of rapid social advancement for the family. Esther, who now called herself by the less Jewish and more French name Estelle, served as a nurse during the First World War and was decorated four times for her work, culminating in 1921 when she received the Légion d’honneur.
But Renée, the only child of Alfred and Esther, never enjoyed a good relationship with her mother, who always felt more of an Arpels than a Van Cleef and was possibly jealous that her husband had left Renée rather than herself in control when he died in 1938. Renée was a deeply creative woman with a good business brain and an instinctive understanding of style, but she could not draw, so it was largely thanks to the appointment in 1922 of the designer René Sim Lacaze, who could interpret some of Renée’s ideas, that the company had developed its reputation for its innovative designs and daring originality.
At the outbreak of war, when some of the Arpels family were in the United States and others in the south of France, Esther decamped to Cannes. Renée, left in charge of the Paris store, courageously oversaw an aryanization of the business whereby in March 1941 the majority shareholder became Comte Paul de Léséleuc, in a deal which enabled Van Cleef & Arpels to continue trading. Renée, however, had already removed much of the stock in an extremely heavy suitcase to Vichy, where she took an apartment at the Hôtel Parc et Majestic, the principal hotel, which housed Laval on the second floor and Pétain and his entourage on the third. She was alone but felt safe there, convinced she would be protected by her friendship with Josée de Chambrun and with René Bousquet’s cousin, Colonel Marty, the trusted administrator of her father, Alfred Van Cleef, who knew both her parents well. So she continued running the shop as a boutique, housed directly below the hotel.*
Odette Fabius was revolted by what she saw happening in Paris, not just M. Rochas crossing the street to avoid his former Jewish clients but shop windows along the Champs-Elysées displaying grotesque, giant-nosed caricatures of Léon Blum and Georges Mandel. She was torn between looking after her elderly widowed father, who refused to move from his Parisian apartment, and looking after the property in Biarritz which had been in the family for generations. In addition there was her daughter Marie-Claude’s schooling and safety to consider. In spite of the movement prohibitions against Jews, Odette repeatedly crossed the country from 1940 until the spring of 1942, buying a fake Ausweis whenever she could at a cost of 500 francs each. On one occasion she negotiated an extra four for her Sections Sanitaires Automobiles Féminines (SSA) friends Daisy de Broglie, Marie-Louise de Tocqueville, Claude de Peyerimhoff and Colette Schwob de Lure, a policy which landed her in prison for a week in 1941 when she was denounced. She was released, as she learned later, ‘because Sylvia de Talleyrand heard I was arrested and went to the Ritz Hotel to see her friend, the German tennis champion Gottfried von Cramm, who in turn told Otto Abetz … and I was freed.’ It was only thanks to the intervention of courageous friends with good networks that Fabius was released. But she never knew the name of the person who had denounced her.
Nonetheless, Odette’s experiences meant that she discovered an exaggerated form of patriotism which had little to do with the fact that she was Jewish. ‘I just felt extremely French with a strong line behind me … I had been brought up to be proud of my descent from the Furtado family who came to France in 1680.’ She never wore a yellow star because she refused to accept that she was different. She was French and that was her prime motivation in taking on an increasingly dangerous amount of resistance work. After her first spell in prison she went back to the south of France and tried, vainly, to persuade her father to join the family in Cannes. On one of her train journeys she met up with a childhood friend involved in the Alliance resistance network. At first all he asked her to do was deliver a letter. ‘I was both seduced by wanting to do it and anxious.’ Odette’s brother had by now left for London, where he joined de Gaulle’s Free French. But that was not an option for her, thanks to her duties as mother and daughter, but she urgently wanted to do something. Although she and Robert were barely living together, he was the father of her child so she had to ask his advice. He was not keen: ‘There are fifty million other French people who can do it, why you?’
‘Why not me?’ she replied.
Robert’s view, according to Odette, was that because they were Jewish they had to stay in a corner quietly if they wanted to survive. ‘If we didn’t have the right to travel then we needed to find another way of surviving.’ So she embarked on her resistance career regardless of what Robert thought and soon undertook her first mission in Paris, collecting an urgent letter and delivering it to the south (there was no post between the free and the occupied zones), and combining her visits to Paris with seeing her father. Thus began what she later called the richest period of her life. She worried about her ten-year-old daughter, all too aware that she was not seeing enough of her, so she placed her as a pupil in a Catholic boarding school just outside Vichy, rationalizing that this was the safest place as no one would bomb the provisional capital. Some 60 per cent of the pupils were Jewish, but religion was never mentioned.
Working for Alliance, she was given the codename Biche and reported to Marie-Madeleine Fourcade, known as Hedgehog, a woman no less strong than her and the only woman to head a major network. Odette was engaged in transporting letters, plans and even people across the line. Once she shared a compartment on the train with a German officer who was drinking champagne and toasted the Third Reich. Occasionally Marie-Claude travelled with her, and she risked more than once putting documents and false papers in her daughter’s case.
Seventy years later, asked whether she thought it right for a mother to jeopardize her daughter in that way, it seems clear this is a question Marie-Claude has often asked herself. She replied evenly that her mother ‘could never have been different. That was who she was.’ But she admitted that Odette herself later questioned whether it had been right, as a mother, to undertake resistance work. ‘Would it have been better if we’d had a peaceful family life in Le Lavandou, all three of us, or would living in a fixed abode in a group have hastened our departure to Auschwitz? Those were the decisions we faced.’
Odette was not good at taking orders and clashed with the formidable chief, Marie-Madeleine. Odette complained she was being given the boring jobs, however crucial, such as noting the arrival and departures of Lysander aircraft flying from England,* rather than operating from the Grand Hôtel at Marseilles, which was where everything happened, not least foreigners searching for a boat or for a visa from any of the consulates. ‘She criticized me and didn’t like me,’ Odette maintained. So she left Alliance and joined a different resistance network, OCM, the Organisation Civile et Militaire. Almost immediately, she was sent to meet the charismatic leader of the Sailors’ Union in Marseilles, Pierre Ferri-Pisani, a forty-one-year-old Corsican well known as the boss of the entire port, to enlist his help in getting regular information about everything going on there. Ferri-Pisani was a self-taught anti-fascist agitator who had fought in Spain for the republican cause and, in 1940, was briefly put under house arrest by Vichy. He knew he was under surveillance and was well protected by his associates. But eventually Fabius was taken to meet him at a rendezvous in the Café des Marins. She had prepared carefully for the meeting, choosing an elegant Lanvin suit but no hat or gloves, contrary to the rules for women of good society. Her one accessory was a copy of Das Kapital by Karl Marx, which made Ferri-Pisani laugh. She was immediately struck by the man’s imposing presence, charisma and directness. Where was the money to come from to pay for information, he asked? He went away and minutes later returned with a diamond. Odette never knew the provenance but guessed it might have belonged to his wife. He asked, could she sell it anywhere for a good price? So, in early December, Odette made her way to Vichy to visit her friend and former bridesmaid Rachel Van Cleef, now known as Renée Puissant, running the Van Cleef & Arpels boutique. When Odette explained the problem, her friend gave her much more than she had expected or indeed than it was worth. Ferri-Pisani was extremely impressed with his new recruit. Before the year was out, the two had become lovers.
Eight days after this transaction, on 12 December, the body of Renée Puissant was found in the street, officially described as suicide but her death a mystery, probably caused by her increasing realization that no one in Vichy was looking out for her. For more than two years she had managed to maintain a semblance of normality in Vichy, walking along the lakeside and around the park where Pétain went for his daily constitutional with his doctor, Bernard Ménétrel. As the Vichy population swelled to 120,000 (of whom 45,000 were bureaucrats, many of them married), it must have seemed that life was safer than in Paris. Although there were still long queues for food, the prospects for selling jewellery were at least as good as they were in Paris, if not better. In Vichy people took pleasure from playing golf, bicycling and watching horseracing.
But all that changed after 11 November 1942 when German troops occupied the former free zone in response to the successful Allied landings in North Africa. Four days previously US and British forces, commanded by General Dwight D. Eisenhower, began Operation Torch, the amphibious invasion of North Africa. This was intended to ensure Allied control of the Mediterranean, a preliminary to the opening of a second front in Europe which would relieve the pressure on Russia from Axis forces. Although Vichy French forces initially resisted, they were quickly neutralized and had ceased armed resistance by 11 November. Admiral Darlan, formerly Vichy’s deputy leader and one of Pétain’s closest advisers, defected to the Allies and, as he was in North Africa at the time, ordered French forces there to join the Allies. To prevent the seizure of their Mediterranean fleet by the Germans, the French wrecked their own ships, mostly by capsizing them in the harbours of Toulon, on 27 November.
This only served to emphasize that the armistice agreement of 1940 offered nothing that could justify the Vichy regime. As the Germans could no longer rely on Vichy to remain a neutral state in opposition to the Allies, they promptly occupied the whole of France, north and south. The Vichy administration was not officially disbanded but from now on it was increasingly a tool of German policy, and German repression was more draconian than ever. Any fiction that the unoccupied zone was free was now totally dispelled, and it was hard to see precisely what authority remained with the government in Vichy. In an odd reversal of the regime’s moral philosophy, married women, forbidden in 1940 from working in the public sector when husbands were in a position to provide for them, were now allowed to work without the permission of their husbands, so many of whom were either dead or prisoners of war. The country needed the workforce, the wives needed the money, so the laws were repealed.
Quite possibly, when police came to arrest her, Renée panicked, the events of November all too clearly consuming her thoughts, and threw herself out of the window from her third-floor bedroom. According to Arlette Scali, who had grown up with the Arpels family and whose second husband, Elie Scali, had once been one of Renée’s lovers, Renée was completely alone in her hotel, depressed and close to a breakdown. ‘She could not cope with all the goings-on, all the laws, and had been counting on Colonel Marty – the trusted administrator of her father, Alfred Van Cleef’ – to protect her. ‘She was not only frightened, she was sick with fright.’ She had been humiliatingly forced to move from the Hôtel Parc et Majestic, where all the important Vichy leaders were living, to a third-floor room at the less prestigious Queen’s Hôtel, not far away but a move which led her to believe that any protection she might have been entitled to had now evaporated. Unknown to her, however, on 6 November a letter from one Vichy police administrator to another stated in a handwritten postscript with double underlining, ‘Ne pas inquiéter sur Madame Renée Puissant Van Cleef’. What seems clear is that for her, as for Némirovsky, the final humiliation had been the law which came into force the previous day, requiring all Jews throughout France to wear a yellow star.
It is worth lingering on the connection with Colonel and Mme Marty. In the mid-1930s, when Elie Scali and Renée Puissant were lovers, René Marty had been a good friend of both. He had been l’homme de confiance of Renée’s father. Now, as a cousin of René Bousquet, the hugely powerful Vichy police chief, he could be extremely useful and indeed was for Elie Scali, providing him with many permits to travel from the free zone to Paris and back to enable him to continue overseeing his apparently aryanized leather business, which was clearly a vente fictive, the term used for a false sale. When the Scalis moved to Graullet, a village in the mid-Pyrenees, after their Paris apartment had been expropriated by the Germans, it was the Martys who ensured that they were protected by introducing them to the police in the Tarn department. In return, Arlette Scali sent to Mme Marty frequent food parcels of eggs, turkeys and whatever else they had access to on their land. They well knew they owed their lives to Colonel Marty and they did not desert him at the Liberation, pleading on his behalf when he was, for a short time only, interned in Drancy.
But it wasn’t only Jews who were being picked up in the febrile atmosphere of 1942. One hot morning in September two men came to arrest Drue Tartière while she was gardening. She described them later simply as a huge German soldier and a smaller Frenchman, but Nadine, her housekeeper, told her they were from the local Gestapo. Drue was in dirty overalls, earth between her toes and under her fingernails, but they refused to give her time to wash and change, insisting she had to come immediately. She managed, by offering them a cognac, to delay them just long enough so that Nadine could warn Jean Fraysse, her former boss at Paris Mondial with whom she was by now heavily involved in resistance work. Then, promised that her interrogation would last only an hour, she went off to the local prison. After twenty-four hours without food or drink she burst into the office of the Kommandant and brazenly pulled up her overalls to show him blood trickling down the insides of her legs. Her period had just begun and she made use of it by shouting at him: ‘If I am going to spend my life in this filthy hole, at least send to my house and get me some clean clothes and, above all, some sanitary napkins.’ The embarrassed Kommandant was shocked into complying with her demands, which gave Drue the chance to contact Nadine and ask her to send urgently not only sanitary napkins and other essentials but a medical certificate which she had cleverly acquired about ten months before stating she had cancer of the womb. From now on she was going to have to fake this condition and starve herself to within an inch of her life.
Drue, together with several other women, had been rounded up because she was American, an enemy alien, and not because, as she had at first feared, they had discovered she was Drue Leyton, the American actress with a price on her head; or indeed because she and Jean were planning to receive arms, ammunition and other material on her property. She was soon being held at the makeshift camp in the Grand Hôtel at Vittel in north-eastern France, along with other American women she had known in Paris such as Sylvia Beach, whose well-known book shop, Shakespeare and Company, had been forced to close soon after the Occupation with most of the stock hidden upstairs. Drue persuaded the Jewish camp doctor, Dr Jean Lévy, who was also being held hostage, that in order to continue with her resistance work she had to get out. He agreed to play along with her ruse that she had cancer of the womb and, although he had to prescribe medicine to stop her haemorrhaging, told her to throw that down the toilet and instead take the haemorrhage-inducing medicine which she had brought with her as part of a preconceived plan. This made her very weak, and as an experienced actress she had little difficulty in staging fainting fits when the Nazi doctor came by. Dr Lévy quickly became worried that if she went on losing blood at such an alarming rate her health really would be compromised. But in early December the Germans agreed that she could go to a hospital in Paris for the X-ray treatment she kept demanding. Severely anaemic by now, she registered at the Clinique de l’Alma and was told she would require blood transfusions for at least the next year. But, after visiting Dr Lévy’s mother to reassure her that her son was alive and well and doing brave things for so many women, she went back to her house outside Paris where she lay low for a while to avoid reinternment.
In September 1942 Béatrice de Camondo wrote a heartfelt letter to a childhood friend she addressed as ‘Ma Bonne Moumouche’ (Mme de Leusse) in which she gave veiled descriptions of the present fearful situation in Paris and explained that she was preventing her daughter Fanny, who was referred to simply as ‘there’ (presumably in the unoccupied zone), from coming back to Paris as journeys were too dangerous. Béatrice said that she was still enjoying being able to ride every morning, smelling ferns and leaves, but that she now had to take the train every morning to a new place, closer to Paris, as she had stabled her horse with some new friends. Her divorce was proceeding but she wondered if it was worth the struggle, especially because ‘I am certain that I am miraculously protected, that I have been for years but it is only this year that I have understood from where all my blessings come. But will I have enough years to thank God and the Virgin adequately for their protection? I am such a small thing, and such a novice, so unworthy …’
Exactly three months later, on 5 December 1942, Béatrice and the twenty-four-year-old Fanny were arrested and taken to Drancy, now overflowing with 2,420 internees. According to some stories the Camondo women were arrested while having tea with a friend, but the official Nazi explanation for their arrest claimed that they had not been wearing their yellow stars, or that they were not in full view. This could be true only if they were outdoors. One week later the two women were joined there by Léon, Béatrice’s husband, and Bertrand, her son.
Among the desperate mass of humanity in Drancy was Bernard Herz, the pearl-dealer arrested on 2 November for a second time following a denunciation insisting that he, a Jew, was still running the business. Suzanne Belperron had been arrested the same day, she at her office and private showroom at the Rue de Châteaudun and he at his home at 38 Avenue du Président Wilson. Both were questioned at Gestapo headquarters, and in the car on the way there the policeman showed Belperron the letter of denunciation which alleged that she was running a Jewish business where one could not buy rings for less than 75,000 francs and cited the jewels of Lord Carnarvon. It was the mention of this name that made Belperron realize that she had been set up. A woman had visited her showroom a few weeks earlier asking for a particular type of ring similar to those she had made for Lord Carnarvon, the Egyptologist, before the war but offering to pay no more than 40,000 francs. Belperron told her that such a ring would cost at least 75,000 francs and, according to current regulations, she would need to supply more of her own gold. As the story reveals, Paris had become a city where nobody could be trusted, denunciations were rampant and bellies were filled with foreboding and fear.
* A member of the failed July 1944 plot to assassinate Hitler, he was found guilty of treason and hanged in August that year.
* Laval’s ill-judged remarks in June that he welcomed a German victory, even though he added the rider which everyone forgot, ‘as a means of countering Bolshevism’, effectively signed his death-warrant.
* Following the law of 2 June 1941 it was necessary to carry a certificate issued by the Commissariat Général aux Questions Juives, proclaiming that the holder did not belong to the Jewish race.
* Vichy France depended on the loyalty of its police and judiciary, which most of the time was not in question. However, the conundrum for the Vichy regime was that as long as it collaborated with the Germans it could preserve the fig leaf of French sovereignty, but if it resisted it risked provoking German intervention in all areas. For the first two years Vichy nominally administered France while accepting an occupied zone in the north. But it was not that simple as there was a double ruling in the north – one French, one German – but the Germans had the upper hand. Officially the Germans ran only the north, at least until 1942, and France and the occupiers were separate – a fiction which Vichy was determined to uphold.
* Similarly Denise Epstein, daughter of Irène Némirovsky, affirmed in a May 1996 interview that she had seen candlesticks belonging to her mother in the possession of the concierge of their apartment building after the war (Jonathan Weiss, Irène Némirovsky: Her Life and Works, p. 196).
* Janet Flanner estimated that the perfect taste and style of pre-war Paris espoused by le gratin were maintained by only approximately a hundred people out of a total population of two million (Flanner, Paris Journal, 1944–55, p. 62).
* When Esther received the Légion d’honneur in 1921 and Alfred the same award in 1922, both certificates were signed by Marty.
* The exceptional ability of Lysanders to land on small, unprepared airstrips behind enemy lines made them invaluable for clandestine missions to place or recover agents in occupied France.