Americans in Paris: Life & Death Under Nazi Occupation (31 page)

IN PARIS, SOME OF THE WOMEN AND MEN Sylvia Beach loved most were risking their lives to protest or resist the occupation. ‘There were a few Nazi sympathizers in Paris, called “collabos”,’ she wrote, ‘but they were the exception. Everybody we knew was for resistance.’ One of them was the daughter of her friends Henri and Hélène Hoppenot. Henri Hoppenot was the French diplomat who had arranged, at Adrienne’s request, documents for Arthur Koestler to escape from Paris in 1940. He was also an author and librettist, while Hélène was an accomplished photographer. Their teenage daughter, Violaine, had been a subscriber at Shakespeare and Company’s lending library for years. Sylvia had written to her own father on 27 February 1940 about her ‘young friend Violaine who was named after [Paul] Claudel’s play “La Jeune Fille Violaine” and prefers politics to poetry’. Claudel, a favorite in Odéonia, was Violaine’s godfather. Encouraged by Sylvia, Violaine Hoppenot had been admitted to do postgraduate study in America. But her preference for politics over poetry took her into the Resistance, carrying messages on her bicycle past the German troops in Paris and distributing banned literature. Another friend, the writer Jean Prévost, had left Paris to become a Resistance fighter in the mountains of eastern France.

Sylvia and Adrienne’s friend and supporter, 69-year-old Paul Valéry, was publicly at odds with the Nazis. When the philosopher Henri Bergson died on 4 January 1941, Valéry bravely delivered the eulogy. He praised his Jewish friend and Nobel Laureate at the Académie Française on 9 January in full view of collaborators who would report his words to the Germans. He said of Bergson, ‘He was the pride of our company.’ Born in France in 1859, Bergson was the son of an Anglo-Irish mother and a father who was Polish, Jewish and a musician. When Vichy offered to make Bergson one of the ‘special’ Jews whose cultural and scientific accomplishments exempted them from discriminatory laws, he declined. Arthur Koestler admired him, and the Nazis hated him. Valéry said Bergson was a ‘very pure, truly superior figure of the thinking man, and perhaps one of the last men who had exclusively, profoundly and exceptionally thought, in an epoch when the world goes on thinking less and less’.

Sylvia, who had supported the Nazis’ enemies in Spain, neither cooperated with nor appeased the occupiers. She consorted with intellectual opponents of the Nazis like Valéry and
résistants
like Violaine Hoppenot and Jean Prévost. At Shakespeare and Company, she refused to dismiss her Jewish volunteer assistant, 27-year-old Françoise Bernheim. Bernheim was taking a degree in Sanskrit until the University of Paris acquiesced to German pressure to expel its Jewish students. A sympathetic professor allowed Françoise to continue her studies clandestinely.

Françoise and Sylvia politely served Germans who came to Shakespeare and Company in search of English books. Some of the browsers were from the Gestapo. ‘I wasn’t on good terms with these Germans,’ Sylvia said. ‘But they came to my shop before we closed and asked to look at my theatrical books. And I showed them all Gordon Craig’s books. Then I said, “You know, it’s a disgrace for you to have imprisoned Gordon Craig and his wife and little child.” And they said, “Oh, we’ll get him out.”’ The son of famed English actress Ellen Terry, Edward Gordon Craig was a respected actor and theatre critic. Shakespeare and Company had sold his theatrical magazine,
Mask
, until it ceased publication in 1929. The Germans had interned him, although he was nearly seventy, along with the other British subjects in France at the beginning of the occupation. The Gestapo men returned to the bookshop with another officer, who told Sylvia to prepare a report on the Craigs that verified they were not Jewish and bring it to Gestapo headquarters. Sylvia complied, and the Gestapo officer promised her the Craigs would be freed by Christmas.

Sylvia and Adrienne closed their shops for the summer holidays. Adrienne joined her family in their thatched cottage near the village of Rocfoin north of Chartres, and Sylvia went to La Salle du Roc. On 14 August 1941, she wrote from Bourré to Carlotta Welles Briggs in California, ‘While Rome burns, and everything else, I think you can’t do better than play the fiddle. Meanwhile I am a war profiteer. That’s plain enough, what with all my holidays in your beautiful place.’ She was pleased that a neighbour named Baptiste was supplying her with fresh vegetables for which she did not have to queue for hours. ‘It is cool and windy and sometimes rainy here but the flowers in the border are as gay as can be and you know how the fountain and the green-lawn and the trees are swell at this time of year–and at all times.’ Alone in the country, Sylvia catalogued Carlotta’s books. Country life had minor inconveniences: ‘There’s a magpie in the village who is going to be for someone’s dinner if it doesn’t stop flying into rooms and stealing anything it can lay its hands on. Trinkets or a whole cheese, the coiffeuse says, disappear in the magpie’s secret cache.’ The corn was growing well, ‘but there are no lima beans this year’. Sylvia’s First World War expertise from working the land as a Volontaire Agricole served her well with the flowers and vegetables on Carlotta’s land. In the same letter, she sent sad news of the Armenian friend Carlotta had asked her to visit in November 1940: ‘Your friend Mme Barseghian died on May 19th. Her son is a prisoner. The neighbors told me all about them. An operation on her eyes was unsuccessful.’ She wrote that Marcel and Gertrude de Gallaix, who were also using the house, would return ‘soon after the 15th when I shall be going back to town’. The two German officers assigned to live in the house in 1940 must have left by the time of Sylvia’s stay, because her letters did not refer to them.

Eleven days later, Sylvia returned to Carlotta’s house near Bourré. On 25 August, she wrote to Adrienne Monnier,

Back in Paris, Sylvia saw more of her friend Sarah Watson. Born in South Carolina in 1885, Miss Watson had lived in France since 1918 and was directress of the students’ hostel for girls in Paris, the Foyer International des Etudiantes, in the boulevard Saint-Michel. She and Sylvia met occasionally for lunch in the hostel’s cafeteria. Their views on the Nazis were identical. Miss Watson wrote home, in words that might have come from almost any American in occupied Paris, ‘If only America can wake up before it is too late, if she can realize this is not just another war–it is a new religion that is conquering the world.’

The last letter that Sylvia’s sisters received from her was sent in June 1941. A parcel of clothing that they sent her never arrived, because the British were seizing packages sent from the United States to France. Holly posted a letter to Sylvia in September, but it ‘was returned to me unopened’. George Antheil, Ernest Hemingway, Archibald MacLeish and other friends from her Golden Age in the 1920s wrote to her as well, but their letters came back. Paris was increasingly closed off, and Sylvia was closed off with it.

 

In the summer of 1941, Charles Bedaux was working on his equivalism project at Roquefort in Les Landes. His
Ausweis
from Otto Abetz allowed him to return to the Occupied Zone for weekends with Fern at the Chateau de Candé. At one of Candé’s lavish dinner parties, a German guest mentioned that the Luftwaffe planned to bomb the British petroleum refinery at Abadan. This information troubled Bedaux, who had studied the refinery on the Iranian shore of the Persian Gulf for its owners, Britain’s Anglo-Iranian Oil Company, in 1937. In July 1939, he had advised Anglo-Iranian’s chairman, Lord Cadman, in London to protect the oil refinery from bombardment. Abadan, a prime asset in war and peace, was the world’s largest refinery with production of twelve million tons of fuel a year. Much of the oil came by pipeline from British-owned fields in Iraq. Petrol and lubricants from Abadan were vital to the British war machine in Iraq, Transjordan, Palestine and Egypt. Without it, Britain’s tanks and warplanes could neither deter the indigenous populations from seeking independence nor face the German threat.

To the German high command, denying petrol to Britain’s Middle East forces made military sense. A pro-German faction of the Iraqi officer corps under politician Rashid Ali al-Gailani had just seized power in Baghdad and sought German support against the British occupier. Syria and Lebanon were in the hands of French officers loyal to the Vichy regime, and Admiral Darlan granted the Germans access to Syrian airfields within range of Abadan. An air raid was as feasible as the recent Italian attack from Libya on Britain’s smaller refinery at Haifa in Palestine. Bedaux argued strongly against destroying Abadan and asked the Germans to take a long-term view of Abadan’s possibilities. His solution for Germany was not to destroy Abadan, but to capture it.

His theory was simple. If German troops invaded Iraq from Vichy Syria to support the anti-British coup, they could move on Iran and take Abadan for themselves. Bedaux’s rationale for saving Abadan, he said, had less to do with the war than the peace: ‘I advanced the philosophy of first thinking that to prevent it was continental logic. My idea was that Continental Europe would rebuild after the war only as fast as continental oil could be supplied, and that with its twelve million tons a year, Abadan was the heart of continental oil, continental gasoline.’ He revived the scheme he had presented to Lord Cadman in 1939 to protect the refinery and its Iraqi pipeline by filling them with liquid sand. The Germans, whose experience of Bedauxizing some of their factories had been positive, listened. They discussed it with him in the summer and invited him in November 1941 for planning sessions in Berlin with Albert Speer, the minister of armaments and munitions. With technical experts, Bedaux and Speer went over plans to save Abadan for Germany. Bedaux had already worked it out. Grains manufactured from sandstone, rather than harder natural desert sand, could be liquidized and fed into the pipes to absorb the shock of bombardment. He convinced Speer the operation could be accomplished in three days. When the refinery was finally safe from bombing, workers would need only three weeks to remove the sand. Bedaux later justified his collaboration with the Germans over Abadan: ‘My idea was that in introducing in their minds the idea of preserving, I would remove from their minds the idea of destroying.’ The delay made an Abadan attack less likely, because in the meantime Britain had removed the military junta in Iraq and forced the Vichy French out of Syria and Lebanon.

There were reports that Bedaux offered to sabotage Abadan
for
the Germans by filling the refinery with sand to render it unworkable. Such an operation would have denied Britain the petrol it needed to confront General Erwin Rommel’s
Afrikakorps
in Italian Libya. No sabotage took place. Bedaux claimed that no one in Berlin would see him about the Abadan project. His invitation had come through German lawyer Alois Westrick, whom Bedaux had known from pre-war soirées at the American Embassy in Berlin. On arrival, Bedaux checked into Berlin’s Hotel Adlon at his own expense. While Westrick kept him waiting, Bedaux saw an engineer from his old German company. The man told him that productivity in the German firms he advised had dropped by a third since the war began, which he attributed to low morale among the workers. Dr Emil Georg von Stauss, the banker in charge of nationalized companies whom Bedaux had met in 1937, invited him to his country house for a weekend. Back in Berlin, the German Production Ministry asked for his recommendations for the Bor copper mines in Yugoslavia. Bedaux said that the German Bedaux company, which the Germans owned, could deal with it. ‘What about French Bedaux?’ an official asked him. Bedaux became evasive, but promised to look into it. Janet Flanner wrote that Bedaux had ‘pepped up’ copper production at Bor for the Nazis, an accusation he denied.

In Berlin, Bedaux took up the cause of his old friend, Count Joseph von Ledebur. After Germany’s invasion of the Soviet Union on 22 June 1941, von Ledebur had been sent to the Russian front. Bedaux used what leverage he had with German officialdom to persuade them that Ledebur was more important to the successful running of the French occupation than as one of thousands of captains in the Russian theatre of operations. Bargaining his expertise for Ledebur’s freedom, he appeared to wield some influence. But, as with his other requests to the Nazis, he was advised to wait.

On 21 November, Bedaux entertained the wife and daughter of Dr Franz Medicus to tea at the Adlon. Mrs Medicus, unlike her husband in Paris, was indiscreet enough to criticize the Nazis. She insisted to Bedaux that Germany must not be allowed to win the war. He left Berlin four days later. Back in France, he told Pierre Laval, ‘Many people in Germany who were in the know, now after the first retreat on the Russian front, not only didn’t think Germany would win the war but opposed it because victory meant perpetuation of Nazi rule.’ Laval disagreed, and Bedaux claimed to have answered, ‘You will be sorry.’

Although Bedaux insisted Abadan had not been on the agenda during his three weeks in the German capital, the US government opened a file on its expatriate citizen-entrepreneur. His activities came under the scrutiny of several American government agencies, including the Treasury, State Department and the Office of Naval Intelligence. Federal Bureau of Investigation Director J. Edgar Hoover took a personal interest in Bedaux’s activities.

 

Florence Jay Gould arrived late for her weekly salon of German and French writers in her suite at the Hôtel Bristol, where many Americans were still living under the nominal protection of the US Embassy. When one of her guests asked what had delayed her, the society beauty declared, ‘The Paris stock market has just crashed. I think it’s a bad sign: America is going to enter the war.’ Outside her circle of German and collaborationist
littérateurs
, the prospect of American entering the war to defeat the Nazis was not at all unwelcome.