A Train in Winter (4 page)

In September 1940, the French were issued with ration books and told that in restaurants they could have no more than one hors d’oeuvre, one main dish, one vegetable and one piece of cheese. Coupons were needed for bread, soap, school supplies and meat, the quantities calculated according to the age and needs of the individual. Parisians were advised not to eat rats, which began emerging, starving, from the sewers, ‘armies of enormous, long-whiskered, dark-coated, red-eyed rats’, though cat fur, especially black, white and ginger, became popular to line winter clothes, since coal had disappeared and houses remained unheated. From November, a powerful black market in food, writing paper, electric wire, buttons and cigarettes operated in Les Halles.

The French were becoming resourceful. Everyone made do, mended, improvised. The word ‘ersatz’ entered the everyday vocabulary of Paris, housewives exchanging tips and recipes as they queued interminably for ever-dwindling supplies. They told each other how to make
gazogène
, fuel, out of wood and charcoal, how to crush grape pips for oil, and roll cigarettes from a mixture of scarce tobacco, Jerusalem artichokes, sunflowers and maize. As raw materials ceased to reach France from its colonies, and supplies of linen, cotton, wool, silk and jute dried up, women dyed their legs with iodine and wore ankle socks and carried handbags made of cloth. Soon, Paris clattered to the sound of clogs and horse-drawn carts. Vegetables were planted in the Tuileries and in window boxes. A first wind of resistance was beginning to blow. When the ashes of Napoleon’s son, l’Aiglon, were returned from exile in Vienna on 15 December 1940 in a huge fanfare of military splendour to be buried again in Les Invalides in Paris, posters were seen with the words: ‘Take back your little eagle, give us back our pigs’.

Nor was it easy to learn much about the outside world. On 25 June, a
Presse-Gruppe
had been set up to hold twice-weekly press briefings for those newspapers which, like
Le Matin
and
Paris Soir
, had been allowed to reappear. In theory, the Germans were to draw up the ‘themes’, while individual journalists decided on the actual content. In practice, editors had been issued with a long list of words and topics to avoid, from ‘Anglo-Americans’ to Alsace-Lorraine, while the words Austria, Poland, Yugoslavia and Czechoslovakia were never to be used at all, since as countries they no longer existed. Abetz had appointed a Dr Epding to ‘diffuse German culture’. Publishers, meanwhile, had been given an ‘Otto’ list of banned books, which included anything written by a Jew, a communist, an Anglo-Saxon writer or a Freemason, the better to create a ‘healthier attitude’. Malraux, Maurois and Aragon vanished from the bookshops, along with Heine, Freud, Einstein and H.G. Wells. In time, 2,242 tons of books would be pulped. By contrast,
Au Pilori
, a violently anti-Semitic paper based on Julius Streicher’s
Stürmer
, was to be found all over the city.

Occupation, for the French, was turning out to be a miserable affair.

CHAPTER TWO

The flame of French resistance

Not many people living in France heard the celebrated call to arms of a relatively unknown French general, Charles de Gaulle, transmitted by the BBC on 18 June—four days after the fall of Paris. Some eight million of them were still on the roads to the south, though by now the traffic was crawling the other way, back towards their homes in the north. But the BBC had agreed to give the Free French a slot each evening, five minutes of it in French, and after his first
appel
to the French, de Gaulle spoke to them again, on the 19th, 22nd, 24th, 26th and 28th. With each day that passed, his stern, measured voice gained authority. His message did not vary. It was a crime, he said, for French men and women in occupied France to submit to their occupiers; it was an honour to defy them. One sentence in particular struck a chord with his listeners. ‘Somewhere,’ said de Gaulle, ‘must shine and burn the flame of French resistance.’

Soon, the idea that it was actually possible not to give in to the Germans became an echo, picked up and repeated, written out and handed round, printed in Underground papers and flyers.

De Gaulle had said nothing about the reasons for the French defeat, simply that France was not beaten and would live to see another day. In the evenings, behind closed shutters, in darkness, defying German orders, those who owned radios gathered to listen as the first few chords of Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony—chosen when someone pointed out that V, in Morse code, was three short taps—announced words that were quickly becoming famous: ‘Içi Londres. Les Français parlent aux Français’. It had the effect of creating links between listeners. In the long food queues, housewives discussed what they had heard. Just at the time when the Germans seemed at their most invincible, it gave ordinary men and women the feeling that they, too, might participate in the ultimate defeat of their oppressors, even if that moment lay far in the future. And though they had little notion of what de Gaulle had in mind, beyond his call for volunteers to join him and the Free French in London, some of the French at least began to see in de Gaulle a future possible liberator and leader.

When the Prefect and future Resistance leader Jean Moulin visited Paris in November, come to see for himself whether there might be a possible
resistance Française
, he concluded that there was nothing much happening. But he was wrong.

The first acts of resistance were small, spontaneous and ill-co-ordinated, carried out by individuals acting out of personal feelings of rebellion and shame. The Free French’s Croix de Lorraine—the symbol taken from Joan of Arc—and Vs for victory were scribbled in crayon, lipstick or paint on to walls, on to blackout paper, on to German cars, in the métro and at bus stops, and after the Germans co-opted the Vs, saying that they stood for Victoria, an ancient German word, the French wrote Hs instead, for
honneur
. Rosa Floch was only one of dozens of young girls who wrote ‘Vive les Anglais’ on their
lycée
walls. A few stones were thrown at the windows of restaurants requisitioned by the Germans. There were catcalls and whistles during German newsreels, until the order went out that the lights had to be kept on, after which the audience took to reading their books and coughing. A young man called Etienne Achavanne cut a German telephone cable.

Early in October, a music publisher called Raymond Deiss typed out two double sheets containing the daily bulletins of the BBC, printed them on linotype and called his news-sheet
Pantagruel
.
^*
Tracts, posters, flyers, typed up and printed by journalists and university students, reminding women that a group of Parisian fishwives had marched on Versailles in 1789 demanding bread from Louis XIV, called on them to protest against rationing. In the Musée de l’Homme, a group of ethnographers and anthropologists joined forces to run off an anti-Vichy and anti-Nazi news-sheet on the museum’s mimeograph machine.

Inspired by a mixture of patriotism and humanism, by a view of France as the champion of individual liberties and the Germans as brutal conquerors, these early pamphlets and papers came from every class and every political ideology. Some extolled Catholicism and morality; others Marxism; others Tom Paine and the Rights of Man. All shared a conviction that to do nothing was wrong.

Faced by this outpouring of protest, the Germans acted swiftly and decisively. The writers and printers they were able to catch they tried and sent to prison. The naïve first resisters were no match for the Nazis, long accustomed to a harsh war of repression at home. The Germans took to putting up posters of their own, warning of the consequences of resistance and offering rewards to informers. Following close behind them, young boys ripped them off while they were still wet, or wrote the words ‘Draw a line for de Gaulle’, so that soon the German posters were covered in dozens of little lines.

There was, however, one political group in France which already knew a good deal about survival and the clandestine life. The Parti Communist Français, the PCF, born in the wake of the First World War from a schism of the left at Tours in 1920, had zigzagged through the turbulent currents of French interwar years. Briefly in shared power as part of Léon Blum’s coalition of radicals, socialists and communists in 1936 and again in 1938 as the Front Populaire, with a platform of better conditions for the workers and a banner of
Pain, Paix et Liberté
, the PCF had seen its numbers rise sharply in the mining towns of the north, in areas of heavy industry and in ports.

The party had attracted a wide sweep of followers, from the Stalinists, who believed in a revolution of the workers and were veterans of the early struggles with the socialists, to a whole generation of youthful idealists inspired by the PCF’s vision of a more equal France. What united many of them was their support for the Spanish republicans after Franco launched his rebellion against the Frente Popular and invaded Spain in July 1936, and their disgust at France’s decision to sign the non-intervention pact. Many of these younger communists had gone to Spain to fight in the International Brigades, while their families back in France collected money to help Spanish republican women and children. And, when the refugees fleeing Franco’s soldiers began to cross the Pyrenees and into France, the French communists were the first to take in destitute Spanish families and to campaign on their behalf. To be young and active in France in the 1930s was to care passionately about politics.

One of these young idealists was Cécile Charua, a strong-minded, physically sturdy young woman who was born in Paris’s
ceinture rouge
, the ‘red’ suburbs. As she saw it, to grow up French was to grow up communist, and if you did not fight injustice and xenophobia, well, then there was no point to life at all. Cécile’s parents divorced when she was a small child, and her mother then married a painter, a man whose anarchist beliefs occupied more of his time than bringing in money for the family. Most of Cécile’s considerably older brothers and sisters had long since moved away. Her mother left home before dawn in the early summer months to pick cornflowers in the fields to sell in the Gare Saint-Lazare on her way to work. She was a furrier by trade, but earned very little money.

Cécile Charua, ‘le Cygne d’Enghien’

At the age of 13, Cécile was sent as apprentice to another furrier. She enjoyed working with fur, sewing it on to a lining, selecting the different pelts; she savoured their colours and the way the fur lay, making patterns. She particularly liked astrakhan, the fleece of central Asian lambs. Cécile saw herself as feisty and capable, and skilled at spotting the match between the different furs, but she was not much good at finer needlework. She could not afford a fur coat herself, and like all workers in the fur business, was laid off when the demand for fur dropped at the end of December. When she had money, she spent it on theatre tickets, going to the cheapest seats at the Comédie Française or to see Louis Jouvet perform at the Athenée; one day, her artist stepfather took her to meet Picasso.

Soon after her 16th birthday Cécile decided that she was sick of her mother’s strictness and her stepfather’s idle ways. Wanting, as she said later, a bit more to eat and a little freedom, she married a man who worked for the post office and was a keen trade union member. Nine years her senior, he took her along to political meetings, where she met anti-Fascists and learnt about what was happening to republican families in Spain. Soon she, too, began collecting money for milk for Spanish babies in Bilbao. Cécile had a daughter, and at weekends she put the baby into a sling on her back and went off camping in the forests around Paris with her friends.

In 1935, Cécile became a party member. What appealed to her about the PCF was that the communists wanted enough bread for everyone. Having had a hungry childhood, it made sense to her.

The Nazi–Soviet pact of non-aggression, signed by von Ribbentrop and Molotov on 24 August 1939, came as a shock, as it did to the entire French Communist Party. Overnight, communists were regarded by the new French centrist government, and its Prime Minister, Edouard Daladier, as being on the side of their old enemy, the Germans. After
L’Humanité
, the main PCF paper, published a long communiqué in praise of the pact, Daladier shut it down, along with its sister publication,
Le Soir
. On clandestine presses,
L’Humanité
fought back, attacking the French and British governments as imperialists, waging war against the workers. In what they called an ‘essential national purge’, police raided party offices, arrested known militants, suspended communist mayors. The thirty-five communist deputies sitting in parliament were arrested and eventually sentenced to five years in prison for acting on behalf of the Comintern. By the autumn of 1939, there were said to be several thousand communists behind bars.