Andrée's War (17 page)

‘When I came home this afternoon and was putting my bike away, the soldiers followed me into the courtyard and asked if I lived here. Claude was terrified and did not utter a word. I just said yes. They asked who else lived in our flat.'

‘And what did you say?' asked Yvonne, in concern.

‘I said there were just five of us: Papa, Maman, me and my sisters.'

‘You did not mention Mademoiselle Weller?' asked Edmond.

‘No, of course not,' said Yvette.

‘This is worrying,' said Edmond. ‘They must suspect something – what reason could there be for them to come here asking questions about us?'

‘Leave it to me,' said Yvonne. ‘If they return I will deal with them.'

For the next few days Yvonne carefully watched the street below to see whether any Wehrmacht soldiers approached her apartment block. Late one afternoon, several days later, she saw two young Nazi soldiers talking to the concierge. She swept downstairs and, in her most authoritarian manner, spoke directly to the soldiers. ‘I understand you have been apprehending my daughters; how dare you go anywhere near them, let alone talk to them. If you ever come anywhere near them again, I will immediately report you to your commanding officer.'
*

Utterly cowed by Madame Griotteray's anger and icy poise, the two
soldiers – neither of whom could have been much over eighteen years of age – stammered out a few words to say that they hadn't done anything wrong. Yvonne interrupted them fiercely: ‘I repeat, if I ever see either of you anywhere near this building again, your commanding officer will be informed immediately. I suggest you leave at once.'

The soldiers, unused to such authority from a French civilian, hurried out of the courtyard on to the road and headed swiftly down the street towards la Madeleine. Yvonne could only hope they had not been ordered by their superior to check on her apartment block and were instead acting on their own initiative. She had no idea who or what had led them to her family, but she was only too aware that if caught the whole family could be arrested. It was puzzling; they had all been very careful since Mademoiselle Weller had arrived, so there should have been no cause for suspicion.

As spring 1942 arrived, the Wehrmacht's rounding up of Jews from the streets of Paris intensified, but the Griotterays continued to maintain their cautiousness and Jacqueline Weller's presence in the rue Godot de Mauroy went unchallenged. They assumed their guest understood fully the risk they were taking in helping her and that she also was taking all necessary precautions to avoid drawing any attention to herself or them. What happened next provoked such anger in Andrée that it would remain with her for the rest of her life.

Mémé, the Griotterays' housekeeper, had returned from Rochefort the previous day with some food, from which she and Yvonne had been able to make up a coq au vin. Everyone had been told dinner would be served at eight o'clock and so rarely were they able to find fresh food that the family was eagerly looking forward to the meal. As they gathered for dinner, they realised their guest was missing. Edmond questioned his wife as to her whereabouts, but Yvonne didn't know where she was.

‘It is well past eight o'clock,' said Edmond impatiently. ‘Where is she? Why is she not here? What is she doing out on the streets so late?'

‘Be patient, Edmond. She will be back shortly.'

Yvonne opened the windows and leant over the balcony to see the street below. As she watched, she saw a
velo taxi
make its way towards their flat and stop right outside the door. A dark-haired, heavily made-up, beautifully
dressed young woman stepped out. ‘I simply do not believe it,' Yvonne muttered in astonishment, ‘what does she think she is doing?'

Andrée joined her mother at the window to see what was going on. They both watched, speechless, as Mademoiselle Weller paid the carriage driver and made her way past the concierge's window into the building's staircase.

‘That's it, she is not staying!' exclaimed Andrée. ‘We are not running any more risks for that stupid woman. How could she possibly draw attention to herself in such a way when she knows that Jews are being arrested on the streets of Paris for no reason whatsoever? No wonder those soldiers were downstairs – someone must have noticed her and tipped them off. She has to leave.'

Andrée had stolen an unused ID card that afternoon; it was in her handbag, to be put into Jean Barbier's postbox the following evening. If the flat was searched because someone in the street had noticed Mademoiselle Weller and reported her to the authorities, Andrée might very well find herself before a firing squad, and so might her parents.

As their guest walked confidently through the front door, tensions were high. Edmond greeted Mademoiselle Weller calmly, ‘Bonsoir, Mademoiselle, and where have you been today?'

Oblivious to the emotion she had aroused, Mademoiselle Weller replied that it had been such a lovely afternoon that she had decided to go out for a walk down the rue Royale towards the Louvre. She was tired of not being able to dress attractively and enjoy living in the centre of Paris.

Andrée was struggling to control herself. She said, sarcastically, ‘Did you think of walking into the Hôtel Meurice?'

‘Andrée!' her father interjected sharply.

Mademoiselle Weller was startled, but replied, ‘Why, yes, I did; I walked right past it.'

‘But the Hôtel Meurice is where the Wehrmacht Commandant of Paris is based,' Claude piped up.

‘My eleven-year-old sister understands the dangers, but a grown woman appears not to,' Andrée muttered to herself.

Edmond spoke calmly. ‘Do you appreciate the dangers we all face? You
do realise what is happening to the Jewish people in Paris?' They were all struggling to understand how this intelligent, educated woman who had been given a safe house could be so carelessly indiscreet.

As it dawned on Mademoiselle Weller how upset her hosts were, she apologised quickly and promised not to do it again.

‘You are right, Mademoiselle, it will not happen again. I am not prepared to risk my family's safety to help you when you behave in such an irresponsible way. It is too dangerous for all of us.'

The following day Yvonne made discreet enquiries among her friends and found her guest a new place to stay.

From 29 May 1942, every Jew living in France over the age of six was required to sew onto their clothes a yellow Star of David to indicate their ethnicity. The staff at Police Headquarters were instructed to distribute these across the city as well as to mark ID cards for Jewish citizens with a red stamp (JUDEN) to identify them. Of some 330,000 Jews living in France before the war, almost 25 per cent lost their lives between 1940 and 1945, according to the Jewish Museum of Paris. It might, however, have been even worse, were it not for France's vast rural countryside and escape routes via the Pyrenees and Alps.

Andrée was working at Police Headquarters during the spring of 1942 when plans were in train to round up thousands of Jews living in Paris and take them to the Vélodrome d'Hiver (always known as the Vel' d'Hiv, a bicycle stadium in the 15th arrondissement) on 16/17 July 1942, from where they were ultimately taken to Auschwitz and murdered. It is unlikely that anyone there would not have known of the plans, but Andrée was working in the ID and Passport Department, entirely separate from the department policing Paris; the German and the French police were also intent on keeping the round-up secret until the eleventh hour so that its implementation would be easier.

Theodor Dannecker, the SS captain who commanded the German police in France, had together with Adolf Eichmann decided to use the French police's records to round up the ‘foreign Jews' living in Paris and its suburbs.
To enable the operation to succeed, they needed the cooperation of the Parisian police force, as they (not the German police) would be responsible for carrying out the raids; at a meeting with René Bousquet, then Secretary-General to the Vichy police force, and several of his colleagues, they agreed to put their plan into action early on 16 July.

It is recorded that Bousquet raised no objections to having to organise the arrests, but found it embarrassing that the French police would have to carry them out. After much argument it was agreed that the French police force would only round up foreign Jews and not French Jews. One of the reasons Bousquet gave for his complicity was that the Vichy government was intent on upholding its freedom as the government of France in the Free Zone and Bousquet had received his instructions directly from Pierre Laval, the Vichy government's Prime Minister. By helping the Germans, Vichy would be allowed to remain a sovereign state.

As the 16th approached, rumours began to spread around Paris. Many policemen did their best to warn Jewish residents, many of whom lived in the ghettos of the capital, of the impending arrests. Word spread fast, but the plans had been kept so quiet that there was little time for people to leave their homes before the police arrived at their doors.

The charge of overzealousness in the carrying out of their duties has been levelled at the Parisian police force. Many Jews did manage to escape, warned by members of the Resistance, while others were hidden by neighbours. But while some police officers disobeyed their orders and helped their fellow Jewish citizens, the conditions in which the detainees were held at the Vel' d'Hiv were inhuman, with very little food and few toilets available and in unbearable heat.

In 2008, sixty-six years after the event, an eighty-five-year-old friend of mine who had lived in Paris during the round-up broke down in tears as she described the events of July 1942. It took fifty-five years before the French government of Jacques Chirac finally apologised for the then police force's actions and the Vichy government's complicity. Previously it had always been argued that Pétain's regime was not the legitimate government of France, and that therefore the French government was not responsible for the actions of the French police force at that time.

On 16 July 1995, President Chirac made a speech to the nation, acknowledging the role that the state had played in the persecution of Jews and other victims of the German occupation:

These black hours will forever stain our history and are detrimental to our past and the traditions we cherish. Fifty-three years ago on the 16th of July 1942, 4,500 French policemen, under the command of their leaders, obeyed Nazi orders when over 13,000 Jewish men, women and children were rounded up in Paris and throughout its suburbs and arrested in their homes in the early hours of the morning. This happened in France, a country who bears in its constitution the declaration of the rights of man, a country which has always welcomed foreigners and asylum seekers, and yet on that night France broke man's civil rights and delivered those it should have protected to its executioners.

 

*
My then eighty-seven-year-old neighbour in France described a similar meal of cauliflower that same year; she still remembered how one day she had earned some beans by working for eight hours picking the crops on a farm outside Paris.

*
The family never recorded the real name of their guest, so this is an invented one.

*
Andrée told me that Yvonne's behaviour mirrored that of her mother's towards Wehrmacht soldiers stationed in Brussels during the First World War.

H
enri d'Astier de la Vigerie was convinced that France could and would defeat Germany, but he also knew that it would not be done alone. France's North African territories were essential, as was the help of the United States and Britain.

In 1941 the principal French North African territories were Algeria (which at the time was part of France), Morocco and Tunisia; the latter two were both French protectorates. Under the terms of the armistice drawn up between France and Germany, these territories fell into the Free Zone and were therefore unoccupied by German troops. The indigenous populations and the French forces based there remained loyal to Maréchal Pétain and the Vichy government.

In January 1941, aware that the Gestapo knew of his Resistance activities in northern France in the Pas de Calais, d'Astier decided it was time to head to North Africa. He reached Algiers on 25 January. Not long after arriving, he started work in the city of Oran, where he began to link up with his fellow Resistance fighters. As he settled into that stiflingly hot, dry city, d'Astier was well aware that there was little appetite in France's North African territories for war and that most Arabs and French Algerians supported the Vichy government. The prospect of fighting alongside the British forces was not appealing to many, following the bombing of part of the French fleet at Mers-el-Kébir, in which 1,290 French officers and men had been killed. The attack had taken place because Admiral Darlan, head of the French navy, had refused to allow several French ships to join the Royal Navy – a plan concocted by Churchill to avoid French ships falling into the hands of the German navy.

The political atmosphere in Algeria was stifling: anyone with any degree
of authority had been appointed by the state; there were no free elections and anyone opposing Pétain was considered a traitor. Most foreigners were treated with contempt, with the exception of the Americans; in 1941 the US government formally recognised the Vichy government and were thus permitted to continue running several consulates in France's North African territories.

There had been sporadic attempts at setting up several informal Resistance groups in North Africa, but d'Astier's intention was to establish a more structured Resistance movement into which he could bring together all the anti-Vichy inhabitants of North Africa, some of whom had already started to supply the French and British intelligence services with material.

As d'Astier settled into his new life, he began to gather around him a group of friends, acquaintances and contacts from across the region who he knew and trusted. He wanted to show the American consuls in North Africa (who would report back to Washington and London) that his Resistance network comprised well-placed, useful, reliable people who would help the US if and when they entered the war. His contacts included a group of Algerians referred to as les Pieds Noirs (Black Feet), whose families had always lived in Algeria; Frenchmen based in Algeria for business reasons; and members of the French armed forces. He befriended members of the civil service, Jewish Algerians and members of the French intelligence services.