Authors: Caroline Moorehead
Placing his men at strategic points around Paris, on bridges, by métros and train stations, and using old men, women and even children as extra spotters, Rottée’s officers, all through the autumn of 1941, began to assemble a picture of clandestine Paris. They watched, they followed—Rottée had arranged for them to have rubber rather than wooden soles to attract less attention—and they waited. Sometimes they disguised themselves as postmen, or electricity inspectors come to read the meter. When the people they were following appeared too anxious and too watchful, they backed away.
The moment would arrive when their card index would reveal the identity of entire networks of the Resistance; but not quite yet. And so, day by day, the inspectors returned to the Prefecture and filled in their report cards with minute descriptions. ‘1.80m, 30, moustache, slight limp, green overcoat’ and ‘1.55m, 20s, elegant, white socks, hat with a feather’, for among those they followed up and down the streets of Paris, along the banks of the Seine, through squares and over bridges, into parks and in and out of métro stations, were many women. The inspectors called Betty ‘Ongles Rouges’, because of her brightly painted red fingernails, and her stylish clothes.
Arthur Dallidet, attempting to instil in the resisters a proper sense of danger, kept telling them to vary their routes, wear different clothes, change the letter drops. Look elegant and coquettish, he told Danielle; Betty, with her stylish ways, did not need telling. In a booklet he issued to members of the Resistance, Dallidet counselled ceaseless vigilance and the need, always, to anticipate. Change your pseudonym from time to time. If someone misses a rendezvous, he urged, don’t go home. And, he added, never, ever be late for an appointment.
It was not, however, only the communists and the different bands of resisters who were in growing danger. There was another group of people whose lives were about to be destroyed.
In the summer of 1940, observing the rapid advance of the German army, Langeron, the Paris police Prefect, had decided to evacuate the files held by the Service des Étrangers, the bureau that looked after foreigners, along with cabinet papers and political documents. Barges were brought to the quai des Orfèvres and several tons of paper passed from hand to hand along a chain of men, working in shifts for forty-eight hours. The barge with the political documents got through to the south before the Germans reached Paris, but the one with the dossiers on foreigners was blocked in the Seine when a boat carrying munitions exploded. In spite of feverish attempts by Langeron’s civil servants to retrieve and hide them, most of the files were discovered by the Germans and carted back to the police Prefecture. And when, in October, a Bureau for Foreigners and Jewish Affairs was set up, the retrieved files, and particularly the ‘fichiers Juifs’, were very useful when the round-ups of ‘undesirables’ began.
The first anti-Semitic laws of the autumn of 1940 had excluded Jews from most forms of public office. Vichy, its definition of Jewishness rather more all-embracing than that of the Nazis, defined as Jewish anyone with three Jewish grandparents, or two Jewish grandparents and married to a Jew. Until that moment, some French Jewish families, who had for many generations been French citizens, and who remained secular, genuinely did not define themselves as Jewish. Both France Bloch and Marie-Elisa Nordmann, who had grown up without religion, saw themselves as essentially French rather than Jewish.
Even before any request was made by Vichy, the first anti-Jewish decrees had been floated. When required to do so, most of France’s Jews—and especially the foreign Jews, anxious to demonstrate their allegiance to France—registered with the authorities, both because they feared the consequences of disobedience and because few realised what lay ahead. In any case, many who had decided not to declare themselves were soon denounced. Lawyers, doctors, bankers, shopkeepers, all hastened to denounce
Juifs camouflés
, camouflaged Jews, Jews living in ‘luxury villas’, Jewish women of ‘loose morals’, and Jews grown ‘rich and greedy’ at the expense of good Catholic families. With rationing and food shortages, the idea of Jews ‘gorging’ incensed these informers.
Arrests of Jews in Paris had begun in May 1941, not long after the setting up of a General Commissariat for Jewish Questions, under a right-wing member of parliament called Xavier Vallat. Vallat had lost an eye and a leg in the First World War, and was best known for the savagery of his attacks on Léon Blum in 1936. And it was in the summer of 1941 that the
chasse aux Juifs
, the hunt for Jews, began in earnest, so zealously pursued by the French collaborators that it was said that even the Nazis were impressed. Foreign Jews were to be interned; Jewish firms to be ‘Aryanised’. ‘To make our houses really clean,’ read one poster for an exhibition, ‘we must sweep up the Jews.’
The earlier arrests had been relatively restricted—of adult men who did not have French citizenship—but on 18 August, French policemen sealed off the 11th arrondissement of Paris. The initiative came from the Germans, while those carrying it out were, as usual, from Vichy. Checking papers at métro stations and in the streets, raiding flats, shops and offices, police took away every Jewish man aged between 18 and 50 that they identified. Raids continued until the 23rd, by which time there were 4,242 men in custody. They were taken to the newly opened camp of Drancy, on the outskirts of Paris, formerly used to intern British civilians. There were beds, but no mattresses; food, but no means of heating it. By now both Abetz, in the German embassy, and Dannecker, in the Jewish Affairs Department of the Gestapo offices in the rue de Saussaies, had already discussed interning Jews in various camps in the occupied zone until enough trains could be found to take them to the recently conquered lands in the east.
In mid-December, a moment of comparative tranquillity in the war on communists, another round-up of Jews took place and 743 were taken to a camp at Compiègne. Before long, together with three hundred Jews chosen from those at Drancy, they were on their way to the east. How many knew of Hitler’s plans for the Final Solution? Radio Moscow had put out broadcasts on the German intention to exterminate the Jews, and pamphlets had been written and circulated throughout Paris, but who had read them?
In the early summer of 1941, Louis Jouvet left Paris for Buenos Aires, taking with him the scripts of eight plays, a cast of actors and Charlotte Delbo as his assistant. Increasingly disturbed by German censorship and rules forbidding him from employing Jews in his company, angry at being prevented from producing plays by Jewish playwrights, Jouvet had decided that he was no longer prepared to be part of a theatrical world that had become collaborationist. The choice of Buenos Aires as a city in which to sit out the German occupation had fallen in part to Charlotte, who had been given the task of exploring possibilities for foreign tours. Argentina had come up with the necessary invitation.
Georges Dudach, Charlotte’s husband, had chosen to remain in Paris, where he was working closely with Georges and Maï Politzer, organising the Resistance in the various faculties of the Sorbonne, and recruiting students for the Francs-Tireurs et Partisans. In a flat that he rented in the rue de la Faisanderie, Dudach wrote and typed up tracts, calling on French patriots to become the new guardians of a ‘spirit of liberty in a France whose face has been partially obscured by Hitler’s lies’. There had to be a platform, Dudach insisted, for French writers who refused to be silenced.
In June 1941, soon after Charlotte’s departure for South America, Dudach crossed the demarcation line to collect Louis Aragon and Elsa Triolet for a meeting in Paris to discuss starting a paper that would reflect the entire spectrum of the literary resistance. As with the new unified Front National of the Resistance, the moment seemed to have come to move beyond sectarian limitations. Returning across the demarcation line near La Haye-Descartes in Indre-et-Loire, ‘in the grey and dangerous silence’ of dawn as Triolet would describe it, Dudach was stopped and arrested by a German patrol. Aragon and Triolet got through.
Dudach was held in custody for three weeks but then released, his true identity not having been discovered. He was back in Paris in time to help plan a new National Committee of Writers, of all backgrounds and political beliefs, and a new paper,
Les Lettres Françaises
, with the remit of preserving the ‘spiritual purity of man’, and of reminding writers, scholars and poets of France’s proud republican traditions. Just as the Enlightenment philosophers had once fought the supreme evil of obscurantism, so French intellectuals would again take up their pens to fight Hitler, who had extinguished the light of truth and freedom.
Les Lettres Françaises
, on which Politzer, Dudach and Decour started work, assisted by Maï Politzer and Hélène Solomon, was to publish book reviews, poems, work by writers banned in France and to provide lists of those executed as hostages.
In time would come a new version of an older paper,
La Pensée Libre
, as well as a clandestine publishing house, Les Editions de Minuit, committed to the idea of challenging the draconian German domination of French culture. The novelist and engraver Jean Bruller, under the pen name Vercors, was soon at work on what would be the first book.
Le Silence de la mer
is the story of a German officer billeted with an uncle and his niece in Chartres who refuse to speak to him, and who becomes so appalled by what the Germans are doing to France that he volunteers for the war in the east. Though criticised for making his German too likeable, Vercors would say that such a man ‘has to exist, for the sake of humanity’. Throughout France and abroad,
Le Silence de la mer
would soon become a metaphor for the silence of oppression and censorship, but also for the choice of saying no. And in the wake of these different publications came national committees for the other arts—music, film, theatre—extolling all that was French, and keeping in touch with artists exiled abroad or in the free zone.
There was indeed a great need to reassert French culture in German-occupied France. By late 1941, Paris was, as the Germans kept saying, ‘shining culturally’, but it shone for them alone. The theatres played to full houses, cabarets flourished, writers wrote, artists painted, musicians gave recitals, but all on condition that there was no Jew among them, that total censorship was accepted, that the list of banned books was observed. The list had recently been extended to include anything English or American written after 1870, which effectively meant that a writer such as George Meredith—one of the more surprising popular foreign writers in France—could be read only in part.
A clash between Goebbels and Ribbentrop over who should control German propaganda abroad had temporarily been won by Ribbentrop, and under Abetz’s velvet paw a cultural atmosphere favourable to Germany, in which France appeared to be culturally independent but was in fact controlled, scrutinised and subverted, had been put in place. While at the German embassy Abetz seduced writers and artists with his glamorous receptions, Goebbels’s men in the Propaganda-Abteilung quietly went on trying to destroy France’s intellectual world, in order to replace it with a German one. Threatened with forced labour, or even death, if they listened to foreign radio broadcasts, many Parisians preferred not to engage with the whole question of collaboration and complicity, but instead went to the cinema to watch escapist movies. Collaboration had been something totally new, unknown, imposed by exceptional circumstances, and now it simply had to be survived.
What Maï and Georges Politzer, Decours and Charlotte’s husband Dudach were determined to do was to counter, by all available means, this pervasive bad smell of complicity. For this they were reliant on printers and distributors. Maï, Cécile, Viva Nenni and Hélène Solomon had never worked harder, carrying proofs, lead, zinc and galleys from one end of Paris to the other for the new publications. Dallidet’s orders about prudence and vigilance were becoming increasingly hard to obey: there was just too much to be done. And it was getting riskier every day.
These young women, known to the French police as
les militants techniques
, the technicians of the movement, had helped put in place a highly organised system. Fernand David and his men knew it existed, but had as yet failed to penetrate the network. One of the women would collect a manuscript from Politzer or Decours and take it to a typographer. From there it would travel, in the hands of another courier, to a photoengraver. After this, a third young woman would collect the pages and transport them to a printer.
There were by now a large number of separate clandestine printing studios around the city, some concealing the work they did for the Resistance behind legitimate jobs—like Viva Nenni and her husband in the Place de Clichy, who worked as ordinary printers for the public during the day, and for the Resistance at night, behind locked doors. Viva’s husband, Henri Daubeuf, had been extremely reluctant to help the Resistance but Viva insisted, saying that her Italian socialist father would unhesitatingly have done so. What she did not know was that Daubeuf had insisted on being well paid for his pains.
There were then other agents, many of them also women, who delivered ink and paper, and those who collected the printed pages and took them to depots, from where still others handled the distribution. Never trust any stranger who approaches you, Dallidet told them, unless they give you the other half of a métro ticket I will give you.
One of the men in charge of the printing operation was a 29-year-old machine fitter called Arthur Tintelin, who had been a member of the Jeunesse Communiste before the war. Tintelin walked for miles around Paris every day, using the warren of little alleyways in the Marais and the 5th in which to cover his tracks, meeting up with Cécile, Lulu and Mado Doiret, Danielle’s young protégée. By now another young woman had joined them. Jacqueline Quatremaire was a typist in her early twenties, who had lost her job at the Labour Exchange when the unions were closed down, and who liked to wear fashionable and brightly coloured clothes. Jacqueline’s parents were both in internment camps. Mado and Jacqueline had become friends and, feeling increasingly lonely and isolated in their sparse lodgings, often going without food when their false ration cards arrived late, had taken to meeting and taking walks together. They were finding it hard to remember to destroy all incriminating names and addresses, having memorised them first, to find safe hiding places for false identity cards and ration coupons, to change their appearance and their routines every few days, and to make certain that, in the event of arrest, any codes in their keeping would not be decipherable.