After the Germans invaded the Riviera in the autumn of 1943, life for its inhabitants became a question of fear and survival. Families lived in terror: anything from a Jewish great-grandmother to an early membership of the Communist Party might trigger that dreaded knock at night. When Henriette Scortecci turned the mattress on the marital bed one day and found a number of Party leaflets (most résistants then were communists) that her husband distributed in the hospital where he worked, she lived from then on in a permanent state of terror that someone would betray him.
At the same time, cinemas, and even the opera, were packed. The black market was flourishing more than ever, although those who could not or would not afford it had seen no butter or fats of any kind, including olive oil; the monthly bread ration was constantly being halved; and the chicken or rabbit supposedly allowed every three months had not been seen for years (cats had disappeared, caught and sold as rabbit on the black market for high prices).
It was possible to tell those who used the black market by their silhouettes: they were the only people who were not skinny. Malnutrition had become so severe that teeth broke and finger-and toenails fell off. Two of Elizabeth Foster’s teeth snapped in half while she ate her morning slice of bread, and the nails on the femme de chambre’s left hand came off. ‘La maladie à la mode,’ said the doctor who inspected it. Adding to demand were the women who had had, or were pregnant with, babies by German soldiers.1
Vichy Radio’s only response was to castigate the black marketeers. An angry French Cabinet minister declared that it was commonly said: ‘Les Allemands prennent tout et les Français volent le reste,’2 adding that ‘When the camions of the Banque de France are used to transport tons of stolen food, and an organised band of schoolmasters of the secondary schools form an organisation to steal cigarettes from the prisoners’ parcels, dishonesty and corruption are going too far.’ An anecdote going the rounds, wrote Françoise Frenkel, was: ‘Jean has just died!’ ‘Was he ill, then?’ ‘Not exactly, but you know, the poor man was only living off his ration coupons!’
Theft – of anything that could be sold to provide money for food – was constant. Patients stole thirty bottles of wine and most of his sheets from Elizabeth Foster’s doctor; Elizabeth herself had various household articles stolen as well as kitchen pots and pans. Thieves would dress up as policemen and order the householder to open up, or disguise themselves as harmless-looking postmen saying they had something that had to be signed for, so could they see Madame? In both cases they would enter and ransack the apartment, tying up the owner if necessary.
With no petrol, any form of transport was at a premium. It was not safe to leave a bicycle anywhere as it would disappear almost instantly: doctors wheeled theirs into the apartments of their patients rather than, as formerly, leaving them in the halls of buildings. As the Germans requisitioned cars at random, some people ‘buried’ theirs, digging deep holes, putting the car on boards inside and covering the trench with a sheet of corrugated iron disguised with topsoil and growth.
The German invasion had taken many of the refugees, accustomed to the comparative safety of life under the Italians, by surprise. Some, however, were more prepared than others.
The Klarsfeld family, who had been living in Nice, had prepared a hiding place. They had placed a cupboard in front of the opening to a small room and inserted a panel that opened into the back of the cupboard, the whole thing hidden by clothes hanging in front of it. When the Germans pounded on their door at midnight, the two children, eight-year-old Serge and his sister Georgette, and their mother quickly made their beds and climbed behind the panel. This took only a few moments – the sort of time anyone would take when woken out of a deep sleep. When their father Arno opened the door to the Germans he told them that his family was in the country. Looking at the empty, made-up beds, the Germans believed him, taking only Arno with them. That October he was deported to Auschwitz, where he died, having saved his family.
The Sungolowsky family also decided to leave their apartment when the round-ups began; one deciding factor, said their son Joseph, was the increasing number of denunciations. It was the start of a series of moves, keeping them barely one step ahead of the Gestapo. Their first hiding place was with an elderly widow who put her tiny apartment at their disposal, but as she knew the Gestapo could search her block of flats at any moment, she could not keep them long. Through the Bishop of Nice, Monseigneur Paul Rémond, a man who worked bravely and indefatigably on behalf of Jewish children and adults, despite knowing that the eyes of the Gestapo were on him, Joseph and his younger brother were sent to a villa called Cottage Bellevue, which was in the Cimiez quarter of Nice, run by a Madame Lemas.
Officially, it was a nursery for young children whose parents were away, usually living in a French colony. They took in other Jewish families and furnished a cellar for those fearing a round-up. The trapdoor leading down to the cellar was covered with cement (rather than being left wooden), and the entire floor of the room above was covered with carpet, so that there was no sign of the occupants cowering below ground. But when the Gestapo entered, their boots would ring through the cement, warning everyone to keep quiet.
‘In the month of October 1943 we were woken in the middle of the night by Madame Lemas, who told us that Gestapo agents had come to this area to pick up families who were hiding, and said we must pretend to be fast asleep,’ remembered Joseph. ‘We were very frightened. A few moments later, the Gestapo strode in – I saw them from under my eyelids. Madame Lemas accompanied them, holding in her arms a little Gentile girl who was in floods at having been woken. She told the Gestapo that we too were her children and must not be touched. They shone their torches on us, opened the door of the pavilion that gave onto the road to assure themselves that no one was there and then left, without looking for any other verification – which would have been disastrous for us. We were saved! A miracle had taken place!’
The German grip was steadily tightening. Bicycles were now banned from the Promenade des Anglais, and in December cement barriers nearly four metres high were built. The round-up raids were regular affairs and more difficult to evade, with informers everywhere.
Sometimes, though, the safest place was under the enemy’s nose.
One Resistance leader, Colonel Gallizia, sent to Nice, left his men at Grenoble and installed himself in a villa in the rue François-Aune belonging to a sympathiser. As he ran a network he needed an office, and this was provided for him by Robert Streitz, Chanel’s architect, who for some time had been an active Resistance worker while carrying on his practice. The room he offered was tucked high up under the attics of the seven-storey Palais Marie-Christine.3 ‘Here I had an office that only Cambours [his superior] knew of,’ recorded Gallizia.
Just beside the Hôtel Celtic in Cannes, where Gestapo officers were quartered, stood the convent school of Ste-Marie. Here a brave nun called Mère Irène welcomed seven young Jewish girls, despite the fact that the Gestapo could see all the paths and alleyways in the garden and the various comings and goings from their windows. The primary-school inspector, who was aware of the situation, was frightened for Mère Irène’s life and was always telling her to take the utmost care; he would also warn her when a round-up was coming.
The children had been sent there by the Bishop of Nice, who had managed to obtain false papers for them, as well as false baptism certificates. When they arrived, Mère Irène immediately gave them new names – but she had another, more tragic duty to perform: she had to tell them that their families had been caught in a round-up. ‘I will never forget the scenes of despair when I had to tell them this terrible thing,’ she said. ‘I told them I would never abandon them.’ Nor did she. All of the children spent the school year 1943–4 there, until Cannes was liberated in 1944. Only when all eight little girls had found lodgings or a family did they leave.
Gaby Fisher, now eleven, entered a dangerous and lonely period. She had been staying with her elder sister, whose marriage to a Frenchman had given her a French name, and attending the village school. Now old enough to go to a lycée, it was a question of Gaby, too, changing identity and living as a non-Jew. She had of course to attend school, or suspicions would instantly have been aroused. It was an unhappy time. The meals at the lycée were appalling, and so scarce that everyone was always hungry. Parents and relations often sent the girls food, which they tried to keep safe in locked boxes, but it was frequently stolen. Gaby had to sleep in a dormitory of fifty, so freezing-cold at night that the girls often slept two in a bed. ‘This was strictly forbidden but we couldn’t understand why the supervisors had such fear of letting us sleep two by two in a bed.’ Gaby herself often slept with another Jewish girl called Miriam, sometimes both crying themselves to sleep as they confided how much they missed their parents. ‘Once I told a Gentile friend that I was Jewish, it was a secret too heavy to keep to myself.’
Schools were a favourite target for the Gestapo. They would notice if a child did not immediately answer to its name – a sign that it might have been given a new, non-Jewish one to disguise its origins. At boys’ schools they simply looked to see who was circumcised. To avoid detection some Jewish children pretended to be Catholic. Those who refused because they did not want to go to Mass were told to say they were Protestant, which excused them, but still allowed them to pass as Christians. Sometimes a child would be held back from the all-important baccalauréat exam because militiamen would invade the exam room checking the identities of pupils – they knew the importance of the exam, and that hidden Jewish children were therefore likely to sit it.
Occasionally a child cast as Catholic to save its life would remain in that faith. Miriam Selz and her brother were both baptised Catholic in the first year of the war in order to escape persecution. When Paris fell, her father brought a lorryload of children under the Red Cross to Cannes. He and her brothers left to hide in the Dordogne and Miriam was put into a religious school. Here she made her first Communion and was confirmed by the Bishop of Nice, Monseigneur Rémond.
When the Germans arrived in 1943 her mother left at once for Monte Carlo. One day the headmistress called her in, aged twelve, and said: ‘I’m terribly sorry but I can no longer keep you here because the Germans came yesterday to the boys’ school to see if any of them were circumcised. Here at Ste-Marie we are hiding a dozen young Polish-Jewish girls and it’s too dangerous for us to keep you.’ She left the same day for Monte Carlo, where she found her mother and her aunt. Fixed up with false papers giving her name as Marie Sellier, she was sent to a convent deep in the country. Here she stayed, lonely and miserable (‘from time to time I had fits of uncontrollable weeping’), missing her family and wondering how they were and if they had survived, an almost unbearable burden for a young child. With a changed name and a new faith, keeping a sense of her own identity was extraordinarily difficult.
Not everyone succeeded in escaping the invaders. Raymond-Raoul Lambert and his family were arrested in Marseilles and deported via Drancy to Auschwitz on 7 December, where they were gassed.
For her proposed trip (which became known as Operation Modelhut)4 Chanel again wanted a companion, so much so that she refused to travel without one – she had never travelled alone in her life, she told Momm – and the one she wanted was Vera Lombardi, her old friend from the Duke of Westminster days, whom she had last seen four years previously. Although Vera had left Chanel’s employment in 1930 to work for the designer Edward Molyneux, the two had remained friends.
This was an added complication: Vera’s Italian Army husband Alberto had fled into the hills to escape when the Germans invaded Italy after the 8 September armistice. When a German officer called on Vera with roses and a letter from Chanel (‘I’m going back to work and I want you to come and help me. Do exactly as the bearer of this letter says … all my love’) Vera refused at once. The last thing she wanted was to be away from the possibility of seeing her husband.
A few days later, on 11 November 1943, Vera was arrested and put in the Roman women’s prison, among thieves and prostitutes. It was somehow understood by the Nazis that she was a British spy, but when they learnt of her social connections they believed she could be useful to them and she was released and told she must go to Paris to join Chanel. With the Allies advancing up Italy, her brother with the British Army and her husband hidden nearby, she was reluctant, but realised she had little choice. To Paris she was taken, much against her will, and in the Ritz she met Chanel, who told her that she was going to open up the House of Chanel in Madrid.
Each kept a secret from the other. Chanel did not tell Vera that the moment they reached Madrid she was going to call on the English Ambassador to arrange the meeting with Churchill, and Vera did not tell Chanel that she herself planned to visit that same English Ambassador, to see if he could arrange for her to travel to the part of Italy where the Allies were now securely entrenched. Once there, she was certain, she could contact her husband (now in hiding with a family she knew) and he would be able to join her. All they talked about, though, was fashion.
They arrived in Madrid in late December 1943 or early January 1944. Once there, the inevitable happened. The two women, who both headed for the British Embassy when they found themselves on their own, came face to face in its doorway as they were leaving. According to Edmonde Charles-Roux, it was Chanel who first recovered from the shock. ‘Well, this is a fine thing!’ she is supposed to have said. ‘Are we going to stand here for ever staring at each other like a couple of cats?’
Vera had been to the embassy not only to try and reach her husband but to denounce Chanel as a German agent. Chanel cannot have known this at the time, as she wrote to Churchill (who had become seriously ill in Tunisia and cancelled his visit to Madrid) on behalf of Vera. Her six-page handwritten letter, handed to a senior British diplomat at the embassy, asked Churchill if he would put in a word that would smooth out all Vera’s difficulties and allow her to go back to Rome and her husband without fear of prison (as Vaughan records, there is a copy of this letter in the Churchill archives at Chartwell, along with a note saying that it was seen by Clementine Churchill while her husband was away). It ended: ‘Always affectionately, Coco Chanel.’
After writing it, Chanel returned to Paris, leaving Vera in Madrid. She also wrote Vera a letter showing that she had now become aware of Vera’s denunciation. ‘In spite of the frontiers, everything travels quickly! I know of your betrayals! You will gain nothing from them except having hurt me deeply,’ although one of her concluding sentences was less accusatory: ‘I hope with my whole heart that you find your happiness again.’ In Madrid Vera stayed with various people she knew and earned her living by painting equestrian scenes until she was finally able to escape.
Then came Chanel’s most extraordinary move: a visit to Berlin to report to Schellenberg the failure of her peace mission. When Schellenberg was interrogated by the British after the German defeat, he indicated that he had hoped Chanel might at least give Churchill a message that senior German commanders were at odds with Hitler, and were seeking an end to the war.
They met in his office, fortified against every possible contingency. ‘There were microphones everywhere, in the walls, under my desk, in every lamp,’ wrote Schellenberg in his memoir The Labyrinth (1956). ‘My desk was like a miniature blockhaus. Two automatic weapons were built into it, which could fill the entire room with repeating fire at a moment’s notice … another button set off the alarm signal ordering the guards to surround the building immediately and block every exit.’
There is no record of the conversation between the pair, so why Chanel went to see him has never been fully explained. Perhaps it was simply to draw a line under that particular episode.
How much or how far Chanel collaborated is still a matter for conjecture. There are certain incontrovertible facts: she was on the files of the British, the French and the Germans. The Germans clearly thought she could be of use to them; to the British and French she was a person, as were many others, to be watched.
What is certain is that while she was both pro-British and pro-French, she was above all pro-Chanel. Having hauled herself up from a background of which she appears to have been ashamed – why else would she so obfuscate her early years? – to achieve the life that she had designed for herself, she was not prepared to see it obliterated if she could help it. In addition, her view of the world was profoundly solipsistic. She did not feel part of the war; all she wanted was to go on living as she wished, seeing her lover and her friends – if this meant meeting German officers in the drawing rooms of the Serts or Serge Lifar, so be it; and she attended events and dinners given by friends who themselves worked with or for the Germans. Otherwise, she ignored the enemy.
Certainly, she was an enthusiastic ‘horizontal collaborator’, with a German lover (whom she never tired of saying was half-English). Yet although since long before the war Hans Günther von Dincklage had been known as a spy, in Sanary, where his wife lived and where he frequently stayed, it is difficult to believe that Chanel’s pillow talk contained anything of real value to Germany. Without access to either the British or the Resistance, she could not have known much that was useful militarily, although perhaps she hinted that she knew more than she did in her efforts to secure the release of her nephew.
Could the visit to Madrid be described as working for the enemy? In one sense yes, as it was what some in Germany – who knows how many? – wished. Yet Chanel’s belief in her own powers, and wish to see peace again, coupled with Schellenberg’s anxiety to make tentative approaches to the Allies to negotiate an end to the war, is not exactly treachery as most people would count it. The record of her conversations with diplomats discloses nothing more than the French attitude to their German overlords.
As to her affair with von Dincklage, he was a man of great physical attraction and Chanel was used to having a man both by her side and in her bed. She was sixty and could no longer count on having a pool of suitors at her beck and call. As always, she was determined to lead her life as suited her and she would not have wanted to pass up this fine specimen because he happened to be the wrong nationality. Although for both it made life easier, there seems little doubt that they loved each other.