Americans in Paris: Life & Death Under Nazi Occupation (47 page)

Phillip and Verdier left early in the morning by train from the Montparnasse station with sandwiches, a container of wine mixed with water and a forged
Ausweis
. When they arrived in Nantes, they went to the house of agent Dorsal. Dorsal gave the boy a Kodak box camera, a simple device with a fixed lens, to hide in his lunch bag. Phillip then rode in the backseat of Dorsal’s old Citroën, while Verdier sat in front holding a machine pistol in case the Germans stopped them. It was, Phillip recalled, a dramatic, fast drive on a dangerous road. The two men dropped him at the train station in Pontchâteau, where Mme Le Bagousse met him and took him to their farm. Phillip gave M. and Mme Le Bagousse the presents his mother had wrapped for them: salami, a bottle of claret and some gabardine cloth. To their teenaged daughter, Erika, he presented a copy of La Fontaine’s
Fables
.

While Phillip was unpacking, M. Le Bagousse saw his camera and immediately seized it. Possession of a camera so close to Saint-Nazaire could get them all shot. He hid it somewhere in the house. Deprived of his camera, Phillip had no idea how to complete his mission. He could not tell the truth to his hosts, who might send him straight back to Paris. The family gave the boy lunch. Afterwards, Erika took him on the train to Saint-Nazaire with her father’s railway worker’s pass clearing them through the German security checks. For an afternoon, they were two kids wandering around the old port town and enjoying the remaining sights of Erika’s old neighbourhood. They went into the main church of Saint-Nazaire and climbed its belfry. Beside the mostly ruined town lay the docks, which had made Saint-Nazaire a shipbuilding centre in the nineteenth century, the submarine repair base and the anti-aircraft defences. In the harbour, tantalizingly for camera-less Phillip, was a U-boat. Dejected, he went with Erika on the train back to Pontchâteau.

Phillip went to bed feeling he had failed his first test as a
résistant
. He was about to sleep, when Erika slipped silently into his room and gave him the camera. The two youngsters spent the rest of the night together, but Phillip did not tell her why he needed the camera. The next day, she took him back to Saint-Nazaire. They revisited the church, again climbing the stairs to the top. He snapped one picture after another, until the roll ran out. If the Germans had seen him photographing their installations, they would have executed him on the spot. Phillip and Erika went back down and walked unobserved to the train station. At Erika’s house, Phillip removed the exposed film. Erika replaced the camera in her father’s hiding place. All Phillip had to do next was get the film to Paris.

The courier, Verdier, met him again in Pontchâteau and rode beside him on the Paris train. They cleared the German checkpoints and arrived safely at the Gare de Montparnasse. There, R met them and retrieved the film to send the priceless photographs to London. Phillip was now the third member of the Jackson family to be a fully fledged partisan in
la Résistance
.

KING JOHN WAS STILL PLAYING at the Odéon in late June, when a ‘new and peculiar sort of reader’ appeared at the American Library. These fake readers did not speak to Clara, but they asked about her and ‘looked darkly at any member of staff they chanced to encounter’. Clearly, German undercover agents were taking a renewed interest in the library. Had she or one of the staff been denounced? Hilda Frikart, the secretary whose sister, Florence, Clara had saved from execution almost three years earlier, told her one morning in late June 1943 that Dr Hermann Fuchs had telephoned. He apologized for not being able to call on her and asked whether the countess would come to his office near the Hôtel Majestic before business hours. Clara went the next morning with Hilda Frikart to see Dr Fuchs. Aldebert waited across the street, ‘in case we did, or did not, come out’.

When Clara and Hilda walked into the office, Dr Fuchs pointedly remained seated at his desk. He warned Clara to speak only the truth. Before he could ask anything, she defended her management of the library. Her duty, she stated, was ‘to safeguard the institution and avoid trouble by any so-called “resistance”’. Dr Fuchs said someone had accused her of circulating anti-Hitler propaganda. As Clara knew from her involvement with Hilda’s sister in 1940, the Nazis could impose the death penalty for that offence. Dr Fuchs said that magazines from the library with certain caricatures outlined in red ink were in circulation. ‘Certain caricatures’ were comic illustrations of Adolf Hitler in a pre-war issue of Henry Luce’s
Fortune
magazine. Clara said that periodicals were not permitted outside the reading room. ‘If they have been circulated, it must be by Germans who carry them off. They have been particularly attached to the magazine room of late. I assure you, Dr. Fuchs, I am neither knave enough nor fool enough to betray the institution I have promised to safeguard.’ Fuchs, uncomfortable during the encounter, warned her not to show any periodicals to Germans without a card issued by himself. The next matter, he said, was more serious. Someone had denounced Countess de Chambrun for conspiring with Dr Karl Epting, director of the German Institute in Paris, to keep the library open by fraud. It appeared Dr Epting, who socialized with her son and his wife and had attended two performances of
King John
at the Odéon, was under suspicion.

Clara was confident she had nothing to fear. Dr Epting had merely sent students to the library two years before. The library, she said, remained open under the agreement Dr Fuchs himself had reached with Dorothy Reeder in 1940. The German ambassador, Otto Abetz, had given his approval to that arrangement and to the subsequent affiliation with the French Information Centre before Dr Epting had seen the library. Dr Fuchs drew a long breath and said, ‘Madame, I am very happy for you. It would have been for me a most disagreeable duty to make an unsatisfactory report. I will not conceal that I am also
very happy for myself
.’ Clara realized that his fate was somehow linked to hers. If the library violated occupation regulations, he would be responsible.

To avoid further German attention in the short-term, Clara closed the library for the summer holidays on Bastille Day, 14 July, rather than wait until August. That night, the Gestapo called at the home of the senior librarian, Boris Netchaeff. He and his wife, a Russian princess, were playing bridge with friends when the Germans broke into their flat and ordered them to raise their hands. As Netchaeff was about to comply, they shot him. One bullet pierced his lung. Eventually, he was taken to the German-commandeered Hôpital de la Pitié. General de Chambrun rushed to the Pitié to request Boris’s transfer to Neuilly for treatment by an American doctor, but the police were adamant that Boris would remain under arrest. Worse, the Gestapo planned to deport him to Germany. As a Russian under Gestapo suspicion, he would probably not return. Clara went to Dr Fuchs to hold him to his promise of responsibility for the library and its employees. If the evidence against the Russian proved false, Fuchs said, he would make sure that the Gestapo released him to the American Hospital. All he needed from Clara was a written report on Boris Netchaeff.

After three years under German rule, Clara had anticipated his request for a report. She had one ready, leaving him no excuse for delay. Dr Fuchs read it and pledged to effect Boris’s release within the week. The countess and the
Bibliotheksschütz
then had one of the more curious exchanges of the occupation. He reminded her that, at their previous meeting, he had asked her to tell the truth. Now, he was asking her not to respond if it would embarrass her. He asked, ‘Did you ever hear of a man called Aldebert de Chambrun?’ Clara, suppressing a laugh, confessed that she did not know
everything
about the Comte de Chambrun. After all, they had been married for only forty-two years. Dr Fuchs explained that the Bibliothèque Nationale had in its catalogue a two-volume life of Aldebert de Chambrun by Richard Wagner. Did the countess know why the great composer would have written a book about her husband? Again, she managed not to laugh. It seemed that Uncle Aldebert de Chambrun, for whom her husband had been named, had had a passion for Wagner’s music and had often visited Bayreuth. The senior Aldebert wrote a book about Wagner, not the other way round. Perhaps, she suggested, the cataloguers had accidentally reversed the names of subject and author. ‘I was beginning to think something of that kind must have occurred, but my searchers would not admit having been mistaken,’ Dr Fuchs said. Four days later, Boris Netchaeff was safe in a bed at the American Hospital.

 

Paris had nothing to celebrate on 14 July 1943, the 154th anniversary of the storming of the Bastille with its now-hollow promises of liberty, fraternity and equality. But, in New York, expatriate French men and women danced in the street on the evening before France’s national day. They roped off 44th Street between Second and Third Avenues and declared it ‘a little bit of Paris in Old New York’. Lampposts were festooned with American and French flags, and refreshments were served from a large tent in the middle of 44th Street. A sign labelled ‘French territory’ advised, ‘New Yorkers–Don’t believe all you hear –There was a France–There is a France–There will always be a France–ALWAYS.’ The actors Marlene Dietrich and Jean Gabin took part. New Yorkers and overseas Parisians danced congas, rhumbas, waltzes and the ‘Beer Barrel Polka’ on the cobbled ground. At a minute before midnight, a French sailor took the microphone and asked for silence. A young woman wearing red shoes and blue slacks played the accordion, and the Frenchman called on the crowd to join in singing
La Marseillaise
. Even hard-bitten American New Yorkers sang along. At the last refrain, the French sailor said, ‘Ladies and gentlemen, we owe this celebration to the generosity and hospitality of our American allies and our American hosts.
Vive l’Amérique!
’

 

That holiday morning in Paris, Phillip Jackson cycled through deserted streets past German sentries in the avenue Foch and around the Arc de Triomphe to the American Hospital in Neuilly. Phillip was carrying eggs from the family’s maid, Louise, for his father. At the hospital where he had been born fifteen years earlier, a British woman patient had posted a poem on the hospital bulletin board to honour a physician on whom she clearly had a crush:

Sumner was operating on a patient, so the boy went up to the roof to wait. The summer morning was tranquil, until German anti-aircraft batteries suddenly erupted with fire. American Flying Fortresses roared towards the air base at Le Bourget and dropped their payloads. Like his father from the same roof on 4 April, Phillip watched the Luftwaffe and the American Eighth Air Force duelling in the sky. Bombs fell, air gunners fired at one another, planes screamed in flames to the ground and parachutes snapped open. To the 15-year-old, the sight was unforgettable, almost hypnotic. Then his father appeared on the roof. Wearing a white, blood-spattered surgeon’s gown, Sumner Jackson shouted, ‘Damn, Pete! Get the hell out of here. Shrapnel’s flying all around.’ In the distance, American airmen were burying their parachutes and running for cover.

Before Sumner left the hospital that afternoon, he modestly removed the British woman’s poem from the board. He and Phillip then bicycled with Toquette to their house on the lake at Enghien to spend the rest of the holiday with Toquette’s sister, Tat. When Phillip recounted the story of the air battle he had seen, his mother ordered him to stay off the hospital’s roof. This seemed strange to a boy whose parents let him risk his life to photograph German naval installations at Saint-Nazaire. That was war. To be injured by falling ack-ack was unnecessary voyeurism.

The Jacksons’ lives were increasingly threatened. Toquette told Sumner that General Karl Oberg was paying 50,000 francs to anyone who led his agents to an Allied flyer in hiding. Those assisting the airmen would be shot. Someone had already taken the money, and one British airman disappeared. The informer responsible was himself murdered by the Resistance. One Resistance cell, she said, had been penetrated by Oberg’s men. Theirs could be next.

When the family weekend was over, Dr Jackson cycled back to work at the hospital. More airmen needed help to reach England, and more patients were brought from the internment camps. It was business as usual. On the bulletin board, to Sumner’s irritation, someone had pinned back the English patient’s poem praising her ‘perfect dear’, Dr Jack.

 

A month after Phillip Jackson watched the 331st Squadron of the American Eighth Air Force from the hospital’s roof, a crewman from one of the downed Flying Fortresses suddenly appeared at the American Hospital. Gladys Marchal, a British woman working for the Resistance, delivered the 19-year-old tail-gunner to Dr Sumner Jackson. The airman’s civilian clothes did not fit, and he did not look or speak French. Joe Manos was a half-Greek, half-Polish American from New York City, who, like Jackson, stood just over six feet tall. Joe had been on the run for a month, since that 14 July morning when Phillip Jackson saw his plane shot down. Two of Joe’s crewmates had been killed inside the B-17. Joe had parachuted from 16,000 feet with seven others onto a field of sugar beet near Le Bourget. Cut off from the other seven, he wandered along a country road. Two Frenchmen spotted him and warned that a German soldier was cycling past. Joe hid in the brush, until the two men returned with a car, covered him in firewood and took him to a safe house. By the time Gladys Marchal brought Joe to the hospital, he had been in three safe houses waiting for the Resistance to bring him false travel documents. Somehow, though, the
résistants
could not obtain the papers he needed.