And the Show Went On: Cultural Life in Nazi-Occupied Paris (55 page)

To this day, it remains unclear exactly when or how Duras, Antelme and Mascolo joined the resistance group headed by François Mitterrand, who until early 1943 had worked in a Vichy department charged with repatriating French prisoners of war. Years later, Duras recalled that on Mitterrand’s first visit to her apartment, she was shocked to see that he was smoking English cigarettes; that would place the meeting in early March 1944, after Mitterrand returned from a secret trip to London. What seems beyond doubt is that Duras, Antelme and Mascolo began working with Mitterrand’s network by, among other things, hiding
résistants
in Duras’s apartment, below that of Fernandez.
^*
Then, on June 1, Antelme was arrested and deported, first to Buchenwald, then to Dachau.

What followed is one of the murkiest episodes in Duras’s life. With Antelme initially held at Fresnes, she sought permission to send him food. In doing so, she met a Frenchman, Charles Delval, who was working with the Gestapo and claimed to have ordered Antelme’s arrest. Attracted by the young woman, Delval invited her to dinner, and they subsequently shared numerous meals in expensive restaurants. After the liberation, Duras claimed that she was collecting information for Mitterrand’s group; under interrogation, Delval said they discussed literature. In early 1945, Delval was executed, leaving unanswered the oft-asked question of whether he and Duras were
lovers. After V-E Day, Mitterrand miraculously found Antelme among thousands of starving inmates at Dachau; he urgently messaged Mascolo, who drove to Germany to bring the skeletal Antelme home. Antelme survived,
^*
but his marriage to Duras did not.

In the final months of the occupation, then, while some writers were still going about their lives with a degree of normality, others were giving their lives for their resistance or, in the case of the poet Max Jacob, who died in Drancy, for being Jewish. Joining them was Saint-Exupéry, who died when his plane crashed into the Mediterranean on July 31, 1944, during a reconnaissance flight from Corsica over southern France.

In Paris, with Éluard, Mauriac and others increasingly forced to hide, Paulhan had a narrow escape. In his memoir, Heller claimed that in June 1944 he warned Paulhan of a plan to arrest him. “When the undesirable visitors arrived at his place at 7:00 in the morning,” Heller recounted, “he escaped over the rooftops and first hid in the loft of a nun’s school close to his home. He changed his hideout various times until he went to a house in the suburbs.” In a thank-you letter to Heller, Paulhan noted calmly that “my morning visitors returned twice.”
³⁵
Paul Léautaud, still unaware of Paulhan’s resistance activities, was puzzled by his friend’s dramatic flight. “I wonder what imprudence he has committed?” he asked in his journal.
³⁶
Paulhan was, as always, understated, telling another friend, “A morning visit has made us change apartments, has sent us to the suburbs, beyond the reach of visitors. What tranquillity!”
³⁷
Heller said that, a few weeks later, he saw Paulhan standing at a bar and, to avoid any risk to him, gave an almost imperceptible nod of recognition and walked on. They would next meet after the war.

*
This was Malraux’s last novel, republished in France in 1948 as
Les Noyers de l’Altenburg
(The Walnut Trees of Altenburg).

*
The first Jewish children were deported after the
rafle du Vél’d’Hiv’
in July 1942.

*
Later in the war, the maquis of Vercors would become one of the strongest rural resistance forces.

*
By coincidence, this story echoes that of
Dolce
, the second volume of Irène Némirovsky’s unfinished
Suite française
, which also portrays a “good” German officer billeted in a private home in a provincial town.

*
The title refers to Alcuin of York, an eighth-century English poet and theologian, and to Aldous Huxley.

*
Aragon and Triolet were briefly detained while crossing the demarcation line in June 1941, but they were not properly identified and after ten days were allowed to travel on to Paris.

*
Curel was himself arrested in July 1943 and deported to Austria, but he survived the war.

*
In Greek mythology, Hypnos is the god of sleep. By taking this name, Char saw himself watching over the long night of the occupation.

*
Before reaching London via Spain and Portugal, Druon, who was living in the unoccupied zone, had his first play,
Mégarée
, performed at the Grand Théâtre de Monte Carlo.

*
Until November 1942, when the Allies landed in North Africa and Germany took over the unoccupied zone, postal services worked efficiently within the Vichy-run territories, but important mail crossing the demarcation was usually hand-carried.

*
Antelme had in turn taken Anne-Marie Henrat, a colleague at the Interior Ministry, as his mistress.

*
Fernandez died on August 2, 1944, thus escaping an inevitable trial for collaboration.

*
Duras gave a poignant account of his return in
La Douleur
, published in English as
The War: A Memoir
.

_·
CHAPTER 15
_·
The Pendulum Swings

WHETHER COLLABORATORS
,
attentistes
or resisters, the French were at least agreed on one thing: that no matter what they did inside France, the country’s fate would be decided by others beyond its frontiers. They also understood that the first step would be an Allied counterattack across the Channel. Indeed, throughout the summer of 1943, there were rumors of an imminent Anglo-American invasion. The Germans, too, were expecting one. After British commandos carried out a successful raid against dry-dock facilities at Saint-Nazaire, on the west coast of Brittany, on March 28, 1942, Hitler ordered the construction of the Atlantikwall, a system of coastal fortifications stretching from northern Norway to France’s border with Spain. In August 1943, when British and Canadian troops tried to seize the Channel port of Dieppe, the German defenses stood up well; the attack proved a setback for the Allies and further delayed their long-planned invasion of France.

Clearly, the Allies were not yet ready. Further, Washington and London had made it clear that their principal objective was not the
liberation of France but the defeat of the Reich. France could well be the first occupied country to be liberated, but that was because it lay on the path to Berlin. Certainly, Roosevelt and Churchill felt they owed no special favor to France and, least of all, to de Gaulle, whose stubborn defense of French honor was driving them to distraction.

Nonetheless, the tide was turning, albeit slowly. After the Allied occupation of Vichy-ruled Algeria and Morocco in November 1942, Hitler moved his army into southern France in anticipation of an Allied attack across the Mediterranean. He also allowed Italy to occupy Corsica and Savoy, as well as the Côte d’Azur as far west as Toulon. But the Allies needed time to consolidate their control of North Africa. Early in 1943, following the Battle of El Alamein, the British drove Field Marshal Rommel’s Afrika Korps out of Egypt and Libya and into Tunisia. Hitler then hurried army and air force reinforcements to Tunisia, and it was there that the Germans and Italians made a stand. Finally, in May 1943, the Allies took Tunisia, capturing some 275,000 Axis soldiers. But, rather than invading southern France, Washington and London opted for what seemed to be an easier route—the “soft belly,” in Churchill’s optimistic words—into the heart of Europe: in July 1943, Allied troops seized Sicily, prompting the ouster and arrest of Mussolini.

Two months later, after the Allies invaded the “toe” of southern Italy, a successor Italian government under Marshal Pietro Badoglio turned its back on Berlin and signed an armistice with the Allies. The Germans were unimpressed, immediately taking over the southeastern area of France under Italian occupation. They also assumed control of the war in Italy, arming Fascist militias, rescuing Mussolini and setting him up as head of a puppet regime. Meanwhile, the Allied campaign in Italy bogged down. Even with the support of Italian partisans, it was not until June 4, 1944, two days before D-Day, that American troops finally entered Rome, which had been declared an “open city.”

On the Eastern Front, hope was reborn with the stunning Soviet victory over the Wehrmacht in the Battle of Stalingrad in early February 1943. But here, too, the war was far from over. Germany still occupied a broad swath of western Russia, as well as Belarus and the Ukraine. And while its advance into southern Russia had been halted, the siege of Leningrad (today’s Saint Petersburg) lasted until January 1944. The Nazi killing machine was also intact. Having taken the lives of millions of Soviet citizens, including many Jews,
following its invasion in June 1941, the German military, notably its feared Waffen-SS units, continued to commit atrocities as it was gradually driven out of the Soviet Union and eastern Europe. In the Soviet Union alone, by the time Hitler was defeated, combat, massacres and starvation had killed an estimated twenty-three million people, roughly half of them civilians, including one million Jews. At the same time, in 1943 and 1944, as word of large-scale killing of Jews began to reach the west, Hitler continued to execute his “final solution” of European Jews, with railroad cattle cars full of deportees arriving in Poland’s death camps almost daily.

In France, despite growing confidence that Germany now faced defeat, the mood remained grim. With the demarcation line eliminated in March 1943
^*
and the German army and the Gestapo now present across all of France, the notion that Pétain was the father-protector of the nation was no longer credible.

Vichy remained responsible for the economy, internal security, education and culture. But it was now Prime Minister Laval, not Pétain, who was in charge—not that the Germans paid him much heed. He was brushed aside by Hitler when he tried to forestall a German takeover of southern France in November 1942. Laval also lost an important ally and interlocutor when Ambassador Abetz was withdrawn and replaced by his deputy, Rudolf Schleier, from December 1942 to December 1943, supposedly for being too Francophile. But Laval still did his utmost to please Berlin. As early as June 22, 1942, he had declared in a speech, “I hope for a German victory because, without it, Bolshevism would take over everywhere tomorrow.” Now he was more persuaded than ever that a German defeat would bring Communism to France.

To forestall this, French industry, which included aircraft manufacturing, was placed ever more at the service of Germany. Laval also offered additional French labor. In 1942, 250,000 Frenchmen had gone to work in Germany in exchange for the release of some 90,000 prisoners of war; on February 16, 1943, a compulsory program, the Service du Travail Obligatoire, or STO, was imposed. This, too, helped the Nazi war effort since it provided replacements for those many German men of all ages who were being drafted into the army and Waffen-SS. By the end of 1943, close to 650,000 Frenchmen and
Frenchwomen were at work in German industries, while many of the 1.4 million POWs were also laboring in factories and farms.

For Pétain, the only consolation was that Laval was now the most hated Frenchman in the country. The old marshal even tried to dismiss Laval in late 1943, perhaps believing that he could again appear to be France’s savior, but he was blocked by the Germans.

An occupation that began for many as an accommodation was becoming ever more of a confrontation. The resistance, which had grown only slowly in 1942 despite Communist backing, was now particularly strong in the former unoccupied zone. Its rural maquis, which began as isolated and poorly armed units based in mountainous and wooded areas of southeastern France, was also given an enormous boost by the STO. In fact, Laval’s compulsory work program became the resistance’s best recruitment tool. If in 1942 Vichy had tried to fill its quota by persuasion and negotiation, giving priority to skilled workers, now French police and German soldiers simply grabbed young men coming out of
métro
stations or movie theaters. The performing arts were inevitably affected. While the Conservatoire de Paris shielded some of its students by forming a youth orchestra, other orchestras, theaters and movie productions lost instrumentalists, actors and technicians to the STO. Two among the many artists caught up in these sweeps were the writer Alain Robbe-Grillet and the singer Georges Brassens, both in their early twenties.

But there was also a strong backlash against the STO. Tens of thousands of young men became what were known as
réfractaires—
those who had fled their jobs or universities and joined the maquis, most often in the Massif Central. Overnight, they escaped forced labor in Germany and wrapped themselves in patriotism. But they also posed huge problems for the resistance. Suddenly, it had to find false papers, food, warm clothes and weapons for large numbers of young men who, for the most part, were ill-prepared for combat.

In his journal, Jean Guéhenno noted with pride that some of his former lycée students were now in the maquis. One came to see him during a visit to Paris. Guéhenno wrote, “He told me about their lives, their admirable fraternity, companions so different from himself, their deprivation; the fight against snow and cold, the war against the Italians, then the Gestapo, the informers. He had become head of a unit, then of a camp. Fourteen of his comrades had been shot.”
¹
The
maquisards
were not always popular. The main complaint was that maquis attacks on German patrols brought reprisals
against unarmed villagers. In some areas, where
maquisards
robbed banks and post offices or forced farmers to hand over food in exchange for worthless bonds, they were also viewed as bandits. But with many middle-aged and older French opting for
attentisme
, the foot soldiers of the maquis also became a symbol of a younger generation’s willingness to stand and fight. And many died doing so: in June 1944, some six hundred
maquisards
were killed when German parachutists and gliders carrying troops launched a major attack on the maquis of the isolated Vercors plateau in southeastern France.