Theater of Cruelty (18 page)

If this attitude was not shared by all French artists, it surely was by Cocteau. Yet no matter how much he attempted to lead a normal artistic life in abnormal times, some aspects of wartime bohemia must have been pretty strange even by his standards. One of his favorite haunts during the war was a brothel named L’Étoile de Kléber on the rue Villejust. The madame was a colorful figure named Madame Billy. Edith Piaf lived under her roof for some time. Michel Simon, the movie actor, was a frequent guest, as were Maurice Chevalier and Mistinguett, with her entourage of gigolos. The food, acquired on the black market, was superb, and the conversation brilliant. Piaf could be relied upon to sing for her supper. For Cocteau it was a refuge in hard times.

But not just for him and his friends from the beau monde. German officers, always in impeccable civilian clothes, were loyal clients of the brothel, as were agents of the Gestapo, whose torture chambers on the rue Lauriston were conveniently nearby. If this mélange was not strange enough, Mme Billy’s establishment was frequented by members of the French resistance too. Only once in a while did unpleasantness intrude, such as when the German police decided that Jews might be among the company, and all the French guests were required to pull down their trousers. According to the writer Roger Peyrefitte, all the men protested vehemently except for Cocteau, who rather took pleasure in the exercise.

Far from the mainstream, these scenes at L’Étoile de Kléber, but like Zucca’s photos they were revealing of a certain aspect of wartime Paris that would be difficult to imagine in any other Nazi-occupied European city. One might argue that simply by publishing their books, putting on their plays, and making their movies, artists like
Sartre and Cocteau were not really defying anyone but collaborating in a way: they helped the Germans hold up the façade of normality. But there were many gray areas, described by Paxton and others, where personal loyalties trumped political principles, and compromises were mixed with acts of resistance. Camus, for example, was published by Gallimard, which was run by collaborators, but he also edited
Combat
, the clandestine journal of resistance.

For Hélène Berr, there could be no gray areas. She may not have felt apart, as a Jew, from other people, but that made no difference to her enemies. For her too, until it became utterly impossible, striving to lead a normal life was a matter of pride. Barred by Vichy laws in 1942 from studying for her
agrégation
, the civil service degree, she kept working on her doctoral thesis on Keats’s Hellenism. And most fatefully, she refused to leave her beloved native city of Paris. When an offer was made to release her father from Drancy if the family agreed to emigrate, she noted in her diary on July 2, 1942, that leaving would mean “giving up a sense of dignity.” Escaping was a form of defeat. She also despised “Zionist movements” for that reason, as they “unwittingly play into the Germans’ hands.” Resistance was the only honorable course. Running away would mean “giving up the feeling of equality in resistance, if I agree to stand apart from the struggle of other Frenchmen.”

Well-meaning people urged the Berr family to flee, but in Hélène’s view they “fail to grasp that for us it is just as much of an uprooting as it would be for them, because they do not put themselves in our shoes and consider us as naturally destined for exile.” Of all humiliations, this was perhaps the one she most keenly felt, that even French compatriots who wished her no harm still talked as if her ancestry set
her apart. Being compelled to suffer for being a Jew created a barrier that she regarded as not only cruel but absurd. Giving in to this absurdity, for her, would be an act of cowardice.

At the same time, enforced suffering created a different kind of solidarity too. The order to wear the yellow star in 1942 struck her as barbaric, and her first instinct was to refuse. Then, on June 4, 1942, she had another thought: “I now think it is cowardly not to wear it, vis-à-vis people who will.” She continued: “Only, if I do wear it, I want to stay very elegant and dignified so that people can see what that means. I want to do whatever is most courageous. This evening I believe that means wearing the star.”

Hélène was in fact among the few brave people who resisted very early on. In 1941, she joined a clandestine network to save Jewish children from deportation. Apart from the increasing hardships faced by her own family, she quickly became aware of the depths of human cruelty: a woman hauled off to a concentration camp because her six-year-old child wasn’t wearing a yellow star; 15,000 Jews trapped in the Paris velodrome for five days in July 1942, without water, electricity, lavatories, or food, before being sent to the death camps.
¹⁰
This notorious event goes unrecorded (or at least unpublished) in Jullian’s journal.

Always fearing for the lives of her own family and friends, as well as the children under her clandestine care, Hélène longed from moments of normality, however fleeting. September 7, 1942, a visit to the university library:

Such echoes of her old life became increasingly rare. By 1943, the gulf between the persecuted and those who remained unmarked, as it were, had become unbridgeable. But it was not the difference between collaborators and resisters that preyed on her mind. What disturbed Hélène more than anything was the indifference, obliviousness, and condescending pity of the decent folks around her. What shocked her most was the human capacity for looking the other way. Which is why she decided to keep a diary. October 10, 1943:

A week later, Hélène walks to the Métro with an old student friend, a Gentile, who “lives in a different world from ours!” The friend, named Breynaert, is just back from a holiday on Lake Annecy. Hélène refuses to be envious of such friends or make them aware of their insensitivity, because she doesn’t want their pity. But, she writes, “it is painful to see how distant from us they are. On pont Mirabeau, he said: ‘So, don’t you miss being able to go out in the evening?’ Good God! He thinks that’s all we’re up against!”

Reading this diary is not just upsetting because we know what happened to the writer but because she knew what was likely to happen to her even as she was writing it. On October 27, 1943, Hélène quotes (in English) the famous poem by Keats:

She does not want her hand to go cold. No one can really imagine her own death. Hélène still hoped that she would survive to see again her beloved fiancé, a philosophy student named Jean Morawiecki, who had fled to Spain to join the Free French forces in North Africa. He was the designated custodian of her diaries in case of her deportation. Morawiecki received them after the war from the Berrs’ cook, Andrée Bardiau.

On March 8, 1944, at 7 AM, Hélène and her parents were finally arrested. On the 27th, Hélène’s twenty-third birthday, they were loaded into cattle cars to Auschwitz. Her mother was gassed in April. Her father was killed in September. People remembered Hélène for trying to keep up the morale of fellow inmates by singing bits from the Brandenburg Concertos and César Franck’s Violin and Piano Sonata.

On March 22, Jullian wrote in his diary:

Paris is liberated on August 25, 1944. Jullian is happy that the German occupation is over. But on October 2, he writes:

Paris may be freer, but uncomfortable too. On the rue de Wagram there are more maids in their Sunday best attached to the Americans than there were in the arms of the Germans. Vulgarity, sad lubricity in the Métro of Étoile; stupid meetings, lost times and lives.

Hélène was still in Auschwitz then. In November, she was transported to Bergen-Belsen. On April 10, 1945, five days before British and Canadian troops liberated the camp, Hélène, ravaged by typhus, no longer had enough strength to rise from her bunk. She was then beaten to death by one of the guards.

Millions and millions of lives were lost in the war, many of them under terrible circumstances. And millions have been lost since then. But it is the destruction of one precious life, of an extraordinary young woman whom we have come to know through her most intimate thoughts, that brings out the full horror of this ghastly waste. Of all the entries in her journal, one sticks in my mind more than any other. It was written on October 25, 1943. Hélène is gripped by anxiety at the thought that she might not be there when her fiancé returns:

ALL GOVERNMENTS MAKE
propaganda. The difference between totalitarian government propaganda and the democratic kind is that the former has a monopoly on truth; its version of reality cannot be challenged. Past, present, and future are what the rulers say they are. Which is why, from the official point of view, there is no stigma attached to the word “propaganda” in totalitarian societies. Nazi Germany had a Ministry of Volk Enlightenment and Propaganda, and the Soviet Union a Department for Agitation and Propaganda.

The idea that rulers should impose their own realities exists, at least as an aspiration, in democracies too. It was nicely summed up by a US government official (probably Karl Rove) who stated that
“we [the Bush administration] create our own reality.”
¹
But democratic governments and parties are not supposed to dictate the truth. We expect partisanship from our politicians; they can try to make their case. But the word “propaganda” has a negative connotation. It smacks of coercion or official lying. And so propaganda cannot be called that, but must be disguised as “news,” or “information,” or “entertainment” (
Casablanca, Mrs. Miniver
). The propaganda department of the US government during World War II was called the Office of War Information, and on several occasions during the last Iraq war heroic myths were presented as news stories.