Read The Cost of Courage Online
Authors: Charles Kaiser
The Cost of Courage (22 page)
Well! Since the enemy which held Paris has capitulated into our hands, France returned to Paris. She has returned bleeding but resolute. She has returned, enlightened by this immense lesson, but more certain than ever of her responsibilities and her rights …
It would not even be enough, after what has happened, if with the help of our dear and admirable allies we chased him out of our country. We want to go to his country as we should, as conquerors.
This is why the French advance guard has entered Paris with guns blazing. This is why the great French army from Italy has landed in the south and is advancing rapidly up the Rhône valley. This is why our brave and dear Forces of the Interior are going to arm themselves with modern weapons. It is for this revenge, this vengeance and justice, that we will keep fighting until the last day, until the day of total and complete victory.
This duty of war, all the men who are here and all those who hear us in France know that it demands national unity. We, who have lived the greatest hours of our History, we have nothing else to wish than to show ourselves, up to the end, worthy of France.
Long live France!
Immediately after his speech, he reinforces his message of the one “real France” when he is asked to “proclaim the Republic before the people who have gathered here.” De Gaulle refuses to do so: “The Republic has never ceased. Free France, Fighting France, the French Committee of National Liberation have successively incorporated it. Vichy always was and still remains null and void. I myself am the President of the government of the Republic. Why should I proclaim it now?” (Two days earlier, he had said, “France is a country which continues, not a country which begins.”)
Shots were fired as de Gaulle approached Notre Dame, and continued as he strode down the aisle inside, but the general never flinched at the sounds of gunfire.(
photo credit 1.15
)
The next day, de Gaulle defies American commanders who want to use General Leclerc’s troops to guard the northeast approaches to the city. The French general concedes that militarily, the Americans are correct, but he insists, “We must have this parade,” and he needs Leclerc’s troops to provide security for the huge festivity. “Today we were to revive, by the spectacle of its joy and the evidence of its liberty, the self-awareness of a people who yesterday were crushed by defeat and scattered in servitude.”
At three o’clock in the afternoon, de Gaulle lays a huge wreath on the tomb of the unknown solider under the Arc de Triomphe
and relights the eternal flame, the first Frenchman to do so without German minders watching since the Occupation had begun four years earlier. De Gaulle thinks Parisians are watching him “as though I were the materialization of a dream.”
Shots ring out as de Gaulle leaves the Champs-Élysées to turn into the place de la Concorde, and thousands dive to the sidewalks, although de Gaulle thinks most of the fire is pointed up into the air. The same thing happens again when he arrives in front of Notre-Dame, and it even continues inside the cathedral. But no one has ever been more certain that he is a man of destiny than he is. He wrote about himself on this day, “Since each of all of those here had chosen Charles de Gaulle in his heart as the refuge against his agony and the symbol of his hopes, we must permit the man to be seen … so that the national unity should shine forth at this sight.”
And so de Gaulle walks straight down the nave of the cathedral, never flinching at the sounds of gunfire.
b
CHRISTIANE
is among the millions of Parisians who descend upon the Champs-Élysées to celebrate their liberator. But she never really experiences “the euphoria of the liberation.”
“Everyone seemed happy and relieved,” she remembered. “There were many who greeted de Gaulle with acclaim, after they had supported Pétain. I viewed all of this from a certain distance. It was true that the war was almost over, but my parents and my brothers had been deported, my sister had stayed with the Maquis in the countryside, and I was completely alone in Paris.”
At midnight on August 26, hours after de Gaulle’s triumphant march through the city, the Nazis return one more time to terrorize the French capital. Ignoring the surrender, which had been signed by General Choltitz, German planes bomb Paris, destroying five hundred houses, setting fire to the wine market, and killing or wounding a thousand citizens.
*
The Führer is not exaggerating. The day after this meeting with Choltitz, at least nine people are executed for their role in the assassination plot, including one field marshal, four generals, two captains, and Berthold von Stauffenberg, the brother of the ringleader. Four months later, Choltitz told his fellow generals, “This ‘Putsch’ of 20 July will be regarded as an event of historic significance. Those 1,500 men, hanged by these criminals, will all get a memorial dedicated to them, for they were the only patriotic, resolute and ‘ready to act’ men that we had.” (Neitzel,
Tapping Hitler’s Generals
) In fact, the widows of most of the anti-Hitler conspirators were initially denied pensions by the West German government, on the grounds that their husbands had been traitors. (
www.dw.de/germany-remembers-operation-valkyrie-the-plot-to-kill-hitler/a-1271174
)
†
In fact, Patton’s 3rd Army does run out of gasoline, one hundred miles from the Rhine, on August 30 — five days after Paris is liberated. (Collins and Lapierre,
Is Paris Burning?
p. 219)
‡
Although this is the last such prisoner train from Paris to reach Germany, there are several later ones from other parts of France. (
http://dora-ellrich.fr/les-hommes-du-convoi-du-15-aout-1944/
)
§
De Gaulle doesn’t know the exact numbers, but French casualties are mounting in Paris: 125 killed and 479 wounded on August 19, and another 106 killed and 357 wounded the following day.
ǁ
Paris Police Headquarters.
a
Choltitz was taken prisoner by the British, who sent him, along with many other captured German officers, to the Combined Services Detailed Interrogation Centre at Trent Park, near Enfield in Middlesex, where all of their conversations were secretly bugged. In October 1944, Choltitz declared, “We are also to blame. We have cooperated and have almost taken the Nazis seriously … We’ve let those stupid cattle talk and chatter to us … I feel thoroughly ashamed. Maybe we are far more to blame than those uneducated cattle who in any case never hear anything else at all. It wouldn’t be so bad if we Generals, or the generation before us, for that matter, hadn’t taken part. The trouble is that we participated without a murmur.” The general also said, “The worst job I ever carried out — which however I carried out with great consistency — was the liquidation of the Jews. I carried out this order down to the very last detail.” Choltitz was probably referring to actions he took in Crimea. (Neitzel,
Tapping Hitler’s Generals
) From Britain, Choltitz was sent to Camp Clinton, Mississippi. He was released by the Allies in 1947. In 1950, he published a memoir,
Brennt Paris?
(Is Paris Burning?). He wrote that he had refused to blow up Paris because he thought Hitler was crazy and the destruction of the French capital would make any future friendship between France and Germany impossible. His memoir was a principal source for
Is Paris Burning?
by Larry Collins and Dominique Lapierre. He received a German general’s pension of $675 a month. He died in Baden-Baden in 1966 at the age of seventy-one.
b
None of the snipers was ever caught alive, or identified. De Gaulle believed they were agents provocateurs, who had fired “a few bullets into the air” to “create the impression that certain threats were still lurking in the shadows” and “that the resistance organizations must remain armed and vigilant.” (de Gaulle,
Complete War Memoirs,
p. 658)
We must not forget that we owe a great debt to the blunders — the extraordinary blunders — of the Germans.
— Winston Churchill, addressing Parliament, September 1944
T
WO DAYS AFTER
the Liberation, Christiane goes to a police station to request a gendarme to accompany her to her parents’ apartment. When she walks through the front door, she discovers a hovel: the Germans have looted everything, from her mother’s jewelry to her father’s rare books.
*
When she is alone in the ravaged apartment, a neighbor appears, the father of a young girl who is Christiane’s age. He says he is there to comfort her, but when she lets him in, he tries to rape her. “I was shocked and quite undone. After everything else I had been through, this was really too much.”
To escape her brutal neighbor, her loneliness, and her parents’ decimated home, Christiane leaves Paris at the end of August by car to rejoin the Maquis and Jacqueline in the Morvan: “She was
all I had left.” At the end of September, the region is liberated. On October 21, Jean Longhi (Grandjean) presents Christiane with the Croix de Guerre. The self-effacing
Résistante
is annoyed by this recognition of her bravery: “I considered all of my clandestine activity to be a matter of course, and now a decoration! After so many dramas and so many deaths, it seemed like a ridiculous gesture.”
Christiane and Jacqueline return to Paris and their parents’ apartment. Their lives are brightened by their new tenant, Lieutenant Henry Kaiser, the charismatic Brooklynite who is a labor lawyer and the labor adviser to the occupying American Army.
Then Christiane suffers one more serious scare. Jacqueline becomes ill, and the doctor telephones Christiane and asks to see her alone. He tells her Jacqueline has only a few months to live. After all the other catastrophes she has already endured, Christiane feels completely overwhelmed — until she takes the X-rays to her friend Dr. Cler for a second opinion.
After examining them, Cler explains that they actually show only a few benign traces of an old case of pleurisy. He promises Christiane her sister will recover before long — and she does.
THE SISTERS
’
GREATEST PREOCCUPATION
is the fate of their parents and their brothers, about whom they have heard nothing since André’s letter from Flossenbürg the previous summer. At first they don’t even know that their father has been sent to Buchenwald, their mother to Ravensbrück, a women’s concentration camp about ninety miles north of Berlin, and Robert to Ellrich, a subcamp of Dora-Mittelbau, about twelve miles away.
By November, they have learned their father’s whereabouts. A family friend, Pierre Lefaucheux, miraculously returns from Buchenwald, and Christiane immediately goes to see him. When she arrives at his house, he is at the dinner table with friends. She hears
laughter from the dining room while she waits for them to finish. When dinner ends, he finally tells Christiane that despite the dire conditions at Buchenwald, her father is fine. But the friend is obviously uncomfortable, and she wonders if he is telling the truth or just doesn’t want to alarm her.
The daughters know nothing about their mother’s fate. But her husband, Jacques, actually hears from Hélène shortly after he arrives at Buchenwald. She is permitted to write one letter a month, and he receives her first one toward the end of September. Jacques’s college classmate Etienne Audibert, who was with him in the camp, recorded what happened next.
Although letter writing from one camp to another continued to be authorized, after that [Jacques] never received another letter [from his wife]. He could not fail to understand what that meant. This was the greatest blow that could have struck him, and it crushed his indomitable energy. Once his moral resolve had been broken, there was nothing left for him but death; that is the law of the camp. He succumbed on February 18, 1945.
Jacques’s deduction had been correct: Hélène had died at Ravensbrück on October 25, 1944, just two months after she had been waterboarded by the Nazis.
Etienne Audibert’s remembrance continued:
It is something entirely different to die in a concentration camp. Death from action or during combat, consensual death accepted with one’s full strength, has nothing in common with gradual physical and moral erosion, a progressive degradation, when the victim sees his faculties slowly disappear, his personality silently breaking up. Those who knew Jacques Boulloche, his wife, and their children could not fail to appreciate the extreme refinement of their milieu. Everything breathed elegance; everything carried the luster of high culture and good taste. Could they recognize
these tattered people when they were dressed in rags, deprived of everything, famished, shivering from the cold, treated worse than any beast has ever been, struck by blows for no reason, weakened daily by humiliations that could only be conceived by the deranged imaginations of monstrous perverts? Can others imagine their agony, alone, far from the sky of France and everyone they loved, these spectral beings with a feverish glow, their eyes like concave sockets, with protruding ears and parched skin ready to crack, living their final weeks in a ghastly atmosphere polluted by the foul smell of the smoke of the crematorium? And added to their own pain, the desperate anxiety each of them felt about the other three? When they are finally dead, no friendly hand comes to close their eyes. And then the cinders of their flesh are dispersed to the wind.