And the Show Went On: Cultural Life in Nazi-Occupied Paris (16 page)

By the summer of 1941, Fry’s own troubles were mounting, with pressure on him to abandon his operation now coming as much from the State Department and the Emergency Rescue Committee in New
York as it was from the French police. From his first days in Marseille, he had come to expect little help from the American consul general. On one visit in late 1940, Fullerton advised him to leave France before he was arrested and showed him a State Department cable criticizing his activities. In January 1941, the diplomat refused to renew Fry’s passport unless he agreed to return to the United States. The American embassy in Vichy was no more welcoming. When Fry went there to lobby for more visas, he recalled, the chargé d’affaires “was always too busy to see me.”
²²

Fry received no more help when Admiral William D. Leahy became ambassador, in January 1941. On one occasion, a third secretary informed him that the French police had a dossier on him. “I told him the police had a dossier on everybody,” Fry replied.
²³
Meanwhile, probably under pressure from the State Department, the Emergency Rescue Committee was sending Fry ambiguous signals. It regularly transferred money to him, but it grew impatient with his demands that it extract more emergency visas from the State Department. In late 1940, an American journalist named Jay Allen even arrived in Marseille and claimed that the committee had appointed him to be Fry’s replacement. Fry and his team simply ignored him.

More disturbingly, Fullerton was sharing his disapproval of Fry with the local French authorities, and this made it far easier for them to remove this high-minded irritant. On July 10, 1941, Fry was summoned by Marseille’s new hard-line police chief, Maurice de Rodellec du Porzic, who, as Fry later recounted, began by noting that “you have caused my good friend the Consul-General of the United States much annoyance.” He went on to say that both the United States government and the emergency committee had asked Fry to return home “without delay.” When Fry demurred, the police chief said that if he did not leave of his own free will, he would be arrested and forced to reside in a small town “where you can do no harm.” Finally, Fry agreed to leave on August 15, but he asked why de Rodellec du Porzic was so opposed to him. “Because you have gone too far in protecting Jews and anti-Nazis” was the reply.
²⁴
The following day, Fullerton gave Fry a new passport valid only for travel to the United States.

The August 15 deadline came and went, but two weeks later Fry was arrested and accompanied to the border town of Cerbère. His team went along, too, and gave him a farewell lunch in the station restaurant before he took the train into Spain. Daniel Bénédite, who had often proved his valor, took over the operation, and hundreds
more refugees were helped out of France before the Centre Américain de Secours was closed by the French police in June 1942. The number of people saved by Fry and his team is estimated at around two thousand, ten times more than the number he came to save in August 1940.

In the United States, Fry criticized American immigration policies and warned of the darkening fate of European Jews in a December 1942 article in the
New Republic
entitled “The Massacre of Jews in Europe.” The only immediate consequence was that the FBI opened a file on him. After that, he faded from public view, wrote his memoirs and became a high school teacher. Dina Vierny, for one, did not forget him: in 1967, just months before Fry’s death, Vierny persuaded André Malraux, by then culture minister, to name Fry as a
chevalier
of the Légion d’Honneur. More than thirty years later, she still remembered him fondly: “I knew this man. He didn’t have the physique for the job; as a St. George facing the dragon, he was modest. It never occurred to him for a second that he could be a hero, a true American hero. He stayed in France for only 389 days, but he tried through every means, often illegal, to save people without thinking of the danger he incurred. The man was charming, educated, curious, considerate, thinking only of his task. Later, he regretted not having been able to save more people.”
²⁵

With such artistic, literary and intellectual wealth leaving France (or being forced into hiding), it now looked as if the fields of arts and letters were being surrendered to Vichy supporters and Nazi sympathizers. Was this exodus justified? Jewish and anti-Nazi activists among the European refugees clearly had no alternative. But many French artists—the directors and actors who left for Hollywood and the Surrealists who were helped by Fry—made a more personal choice. “I don’t think they felt ashamed to leave,” Hessel said of the artists who ended up in New York. “They felt they had to save their art, their reputation and their contribution to art in the world.”
²⁶
But their flight did invite charges of cowardice and selfishness from those who remained and still greater abuse from right-wingers who disparaged them as
les mauvais français emigrés en Anglo-Saxonnie
, the bad French emigrants to the Anglo-Saxon world. Indeed, as the occupation moved toward its first anniversary, with Paris bustling with cultural life and most art forms flourishing, it could be argued that those who had gone had merely left room for new talent to replace them. And there were many ready to do so.

*
First published in 1946, this autobiography was also later issued as
Assignment Rescue
.

*
Although a homosexual who apparently never consummated his 1894 marriage to his cousin Madeleine, in 1923 Gide fathered a child, Catherine, with Élisabeth van Rysselberghe, the daughter of his confidante, Maria van Rysselberghe, widely known as La Petite Dame.

*
It was in the Weil family apartment beside the Luxembourg Gardens on December 30, 1933, that Trotsky presided over the founding meeting—a preconference, he called it—of the Fourth International, which was formally created in June 1936. As Adolf Holl recounts in
The Left Hand of God
, in July 1936, in a letter to Victor Serge, Trotsky said he had known Simone well: “For a period of time she was more or less in sympathy with our cause, but then she lost faith in the proletariat and in Marxism. It is possible that she will turn toward the left again.”

_·
CHAPTER 5
_·
Paris by Night

BY THE SPRING OF
1941, Parisians had adjusted surprisingly well to the occupation, fortunately perhaps, since it was also evident that no one was hurrying to their rescue. The United States was reluctant to enter the war. The Soviet Union had a nonaggression pact with Germany. And while Britain had held off a German invasion in the summer of 1940 to the surprise of most of the French, “plucky little England” still posed no threat to the Reich. Indeed, German and Vichy propaganda had been skillfully reminding the French that Britain was their historic enemy. And, it was noted, there were fresh reasons to distrust
la perfide Albion:
the perception that Britain had sacrificed France to save its own forces at Dunkirk; Churchill’s decision to bomb French navy vessels moored at Mers el-Kébir in Algeria; and Britain’s support for a failed Gaullist attempt to take over Vichy-run Senegal in September 1940.

The beneficiary, by default, was Pétain, who at this stage appeared to most French people to be the only alternative to supporting either the Germans or the British. The problem was that the marshal himself
could do nothing to change the lives of Parisians. In fact, he never set foot in Paris between June 1940 and April 1944, four months before the city’s liberation. The reality was that the Germans were in charge, and most Parisians chose to make the best of things. And this meant seeking distraction wherever they could.

The 1930s had generated an extraordinary array of music halls, cabarets, nightclubs and bordellos, and almost all had reopened by Christmas 1940. In many of them, notably music halls, it was also possible for Parisians to enjoy themselves without having German uniforms beside them. The reason was simple: stand-up comics and
chansonniers
performed their numbers in French, often peppered with argot, which few German soldiers could understand. Naturally, given the risk of being denounced, direct criticism of the occupation forces was unwise, but that made the double entendre all the funnier. One song, for instance, punned on the word
occupation
, which also means “job” in French:

With us our biggest problem
Was the absence of occupation
And we complained we had none
Well, now I believe we have one.
¹

Another instructed listeners to read between the lines:

So in what we say, it’s up to you
To look for what we mean
And think: “If he has not said it
I understand … what he meant to say.”

All stage texts and lyrics had to be approved by the Propaganda Staffel, but German officials were surprisingly flexible where Germany was not involved. They allowed the comedian Jacques Grello to mock the mudslinging of collaborationist newspapers when he observed that surely one of them must be telling the truth, but which? And Jean Rigaux was authorized to make fun of the Italians, who were occupying part of southeastern France. The story is also told of two comedians, Raymond Souplex and Jean Rieux, who were summoned by the Propaganda Staffel and asked for the text of a prewar sketch ridiculing Hitler. They claimed they had no text and were therefore ordered to act it out. When they did so without cuts, the
German officer congratulated them on being honest.
²
Less fortunate was Rieux’s colleague Georges Merry, with whom in November 1940 he wrote a revue for the Théâtre des Nouveautés called
Occupons-Nous
(another pun on the occupation, this time meaning “Let’s keep busy”). Later in the war, Merry was arrested for using a radio variety show to send coded messages to a resistance group; deported first to Buchenwald, he died at the Mittelbau-Dora concentration camp, in Germany.

In practice, much of the comic material written for the stage simply satirized the daily lives of Parisians as they went about juggling ration cards and the black market, riding bicycles after years behind the wheel or trying to make old clothes look presentable. Little wonder that middle-class Parisians felt at home in music halls. They knew many of the songs, they knew some of the jokes, they could have a night out—even a
warm
night out in the winter—and forget their troubles. Michel Francini, a music-hall actor who was back in Paris by mid-July, recalled performing mainly for French audiences, starting with his first job after the occupation, the revue
1900
, which opened at the Théâtre de l’Étoile on September 10, 1940. “Crowds of people came,” he said. “Why? To go out. There hadn’t been deaths in Paris. It was a French revue. And the public was almost entirely French. It lasted five or six months. Then I did a cabaret show in Reims for two weeks, where there were three French and two hundred Germans. They didn’t find me funny, but they liked the girls.”
³

Certainly, for many German soldiers, to see half-naked dancing girls was the best reason for going out at night. And to do so in Paris was one of the unspoken rewards for soldiers who were allowed to spend a few days of R & R in the jewel of the occupied cities. For tips on where to go, soldiers could turn to the German-language newspaper
Pariser Zeitung
, which noted that Tabarin offered the most erotic show. And if by the end of an evening they wound up in a brothel, this, too, fitted into the Paris of their dreams. The city’s best-known brothels, Le One Two Two, at 122 rue de Provence, on the Right Bank, and Sphinx, on the Left Bank, were probably out of their price range. There German officers, French collaborators, clandestine resistance agents, black market operators and artists of all kinds, including women, met for drinks, gossip, spying and entertainment (with no requirement that visitors use the sexual services on offer). Ordinary German soldiers, on the other hand, could choose among a
score of less upmarket brothels where Wehrmacht doctors monitored the health of the prostitutes.

It was also possible to meet women more casually, as the celebrated German novelist Ernst Jünger noted in his journal. On May 1, 1941, just three weeks after being assigned to Paris by the Wehrmacht, he recorded meeting Renée, a shopgirl in a department store: “Paris offers meetings like that without barely having to seek them; one realizes that the city was founded on an altar of Venus.” Jünger took her to dinner and then to the movies. “There I touched her breast,” he wrote. “A burning glacier, a hillside in spring which hides in their thousands the seeds of life, perhaps also white anemones.” Then, in front of the Paris Opera, they went their separate ways, “no doubt never to see each other again.”
⁴
But, with that, Jünger, the immensely serious author of the World War I novel
Storm of Steel
, had discovered another of the delights of Paris.

German officers with money in their pockets usually preferred cabaret; there they could enjoy dancing girls in audaciously revealing feathered costumes, along with a well-known singer or two and, if lucky, a champagne dinner with a beautiful Frenchwoman. Germans with regular French girlfriends were not that numerous: photographs from the era often show uniformed soldiers watching a show with no women at their table. When the ABC reopened, it initially played exclusively to German soldiers. At Les Folies Bergère, where Germans often made up 80 percent of the audience, Paul Derval was quick to offer programs in German as well as French. Some performers would include a popular German song, such as “Lili Marlène” or “Bei mir bist du schön,” and invite the occupiers to sing along. The Germans were not unlike today’s tourists, almost filling nightspots themselves yet still imagining they were having a very French experience.