Worldly Philosopher: The Odyssey of Albert O. Hirschman (27 page)

France went on alert. On April 12, an act decreed that foreign men between eighteen and forty who had resided in France for over two months were allowed to join French army, as opposed to just the Foreign Legion. The same promulgation subjected “stateless” foreign men from twenty to forty-eight to the same duties as Frenchmen—a two-year term of service. Alarmed at German bellicosity, Hirschmann enlisted in the French army now that foreigners were not restricted to the Legion. He was a soldier in training when German and Russian armies invaded Poland in September, and France and Britain declared war on the Reich on September 3.
²⁰

He readied for his second war.

This one would prove to be a different experience from the Aragonese front, up to a point. On September 18, he wrote his mother to say that “all is well with me from a physical and moral point of view. The training is moving forward to make us into verifiable soldiers.” Two days later, the French government ordered that all male German refugees be interned, with the exception of those serving in the army: it was either a detention camp or a training camp. Hirschmann found himself stationed east of Paris, dispatched to a platoon of German and Italian émigrés, where “I am making some new friends,” he wrote to Mutti. His commander was “very
nice and intelligent,” he added. They were allowed off the camp on Sundays. From London, Mutti sent new copies of
La Statesman
, which the soldiers shared. A photograph of Cadet Hirschmann has him posing with twenty others in his group. The German and Italian
copains
—mainly Jews and intellectuals who had fled fascism to find themselves trained to fight them—are wearing different uniforms, some none at all. They are relaxed and friendly, looking more like a young faculty meeting. OA closed his note to his mother telling her that they will be celebrating Yom Kippur. “I feel just as I used to in the good days of the Collège Français!”
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When France went to war, it did so under some strong precepts. Military planners had been above all obsessed with a surprise attack from Germany and had plowed resources into formidable systems of fortification. The result was the famous Maginot Line, named after the war minister in 1932, who had died of typhoid fever caught while eating oysters. After receiving its basic training, Hirschmann’s company, a Bataillon d’Ouvriers d’artillerie, was nothing more than a work gang sent off to maintain a rail line connecting to a munitions factory in the Loire Valley, “manual labor” that reminded him of his “profound conviction of his ineptitude with this kind of work.” Hirschmann remembered that his officers had no sense at all of Germany’s military preparedness or strategy; his training resembled the one he had received in Barcelona—their guns did not fire, their boots did not fit, and their overcoats did not match.
²²
There was, however, some solace: given the short days of winter, he had plenty of time in the evenings to read Stendhal’s
Le Rouge et le Noir
and to plan a “whole literary program ahead of me.” His favorite pastime was rereading Montaigne’s
Essais
. He told Ursula that “this is perhaps the bedside book—
livre de chevet
—par excellence, the one that would probably be my choice to take if I had to choose only one book.”
²³

Postcard of Otto Albert’s French company.

These were prophetic words.

The high command was unprepared for a new type of war, especially in the rapid deployment of large-scale forces and the use of aircraft. In the end, German forces avoided the Maginot Line altogether and perforated the supposedly impenetrable Ardennes forest. The distinguished historian, Marc Bloch, a captain in the army intelligence, was still thinking about his lectures at the Sorbonne when “the storm of 10 May burst over our heads;” eighty-five German infantry and ten armored divisions swarmed into Belgium and Holland, and by May 13, they were already crossing into France.
²⁴
Two weeks later, they were rolling swiftly onto Paris. The government began to make plans to evacuate the capital; four days later the Germans rolled down the Champs-Élysées. On June 10, smelling an opportunity for spoils, Mussolini declared war against France. The next day, Hirschmann—not knowing just how badly the war was going for his fellow French troops—wrote about the sadness of finding his family divided by enemy lines. “Knowing now that we are completely cut off,” he wrote to his mother the morning after Mussolini’s announcement, “knowing that these
êtres que j’aime que j’adore
are living in enemy country this leaves my heart broken in ways I cannot even tell you.” Completely ignorant of what was happening on the front, he concluded: “I am doing very well here, and I figure I will be staying here for a while longer.”
²⁵
A week later came another shock: on June 17, Marshal
Pétain, the new premier, issued a radio address telling France’s citizens that the fighting would stop. Then came an endless, apprehensive week of waiting to hear the terms. The armistice took effect June 25 with the Nazis holding 1.6 million French soldiers as prisoners of war. France would be severed into an occupied north and an “unoccupied” south, based in the city of Vichy.

The sudden collapse of the French defenses sparked a mass upheaval. Eight million people took to the road. First came the waves of Dutch, Belgian, and Luxembourg citizens fleeing the German onslaught. They brought with them rumors of German raping and pillaging. Then, as the Reich’s troops poured into France, civilians bundled their belongings and fled in advance. Hirschmann and his fellow soldiers stood at the side of the road and watched the waves of frightened families. “Columns of refugees pass us by and we do what we can to relieve them of their lot—but these are sad images.” To make matters worse for Hirschmann’s company, word arrived that the families of some of the fellow German soldiers were being herded into detention camps. This led to a desperate scramble to get them released.
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“In this mass of people,” remembered one witness, “nobody could find anybody else. Nobody knew where they were going. People just moved on, and that was it. Towards the south, far from the ‘others.’ They fled.”
²⁷
Pétain’s speech on the seventeenth sent riptides through the French army, still scrambling to organize itself or conduct an orderly retreat. The war was over, but there were no orders from the high command as to how to proceed. Demobilize? Recongregate? Go home? What home? When it became clear that France was to be partitioned, many soldiers joined the mass trek southward to the unoccupied zone.

Pétain set up his Revolution nationale government in Vichy and proceeded to salvage a bruised national pride, broadcasting pieties about “work,” “family,” and “national sovereignty.” But the realities of the National Revolution were all too clear—this was a puppet government. There was little safety to be had in the unoccupied zone, especially for Jews. Pétain picked up where his Third Republic predecessors left off—herding non-French refugees into detention camps originally erected as pens for Spanish Republicans in 1939. Radio Vichy spewed a bilious
campaign against Jews and “traitors” over the airwaves. By September 1940, there were thirty-one detention camps in the southern zone. Then came Article 19 of the armistice agreement—a mockery of Pétain’s rhetoric about French sovereignty—which required Vichy to “surrender on demand” all Germans named by the Reich to its officers. The Nazis sent the Kundt Commission to scour the detention camps hunting for their enemies.
²⁸

An even worse fate awaited the Germans and Italians fighting on the French side. Hirschmann and his comrades convinced their lieutenant to release them with fake military passes. Each got to choose their new avatar. Hirschmann chose Albert Hermant—it stripped away the aura from
Otto
and kept the
H-r
and
man
syllables. Later, this choice became embellished with the fancy that Hermant was a French Romantic poet—if so, he is so obscure that he was unknown. But it had a nice ring and under pressure was easier to sign with a natural flow of the pen. “
Sauve qui peut, il faut se débrouiller
,” the commander told his soldiers, and with that they disbanded, blending into the millions heading southward. Hirschmann procured a bicycle in Le Mans, ditched his uniform, and bought some clothes from a peasant. He followed the country lanes en route to Bordeaux. At Niort, he went into a backyard and buried his German papers in a tin can; now he was undocumented except for his bogus military pass—which was not going to get him far. The trick was to get into the Vichy zone, but to do so, he had to get past German checkpoints. A German officer stopped Hermant and ordered him to the nearest POW camp to rejoin his company. Hermant agreed, saluted his captor, and set off in the right direction, only to vanish into a crowd. Slipping out of their hands, he crossed into the Vichy zone, where he reached out to his only contact: Doctor Cabouat, who knew Hirschmann from his summers teaching German on the Normandy coast. Cabouat invited the runaway to take refuge with his family in Nîmes, a small town near the Mediterranean coast.
²⁹

Huguenots like the Dupuys, with whom they vacationed in Aubi-sur-mer, the Cabouats knew something of persecution. It was, after all, the Huguenots who had founded Hirschmann’s Collège in Berlin as a
haven for religious refugees. In France, they enjoyed a discreet reputation for tolerance and an ethical commitment to provide shelter for others. The Cabouats did what they could to shelter Hirschmann, sealing his lifelong admiration for the Huguenot spirit. They landed him a job at the local natural history museum, run by a friend of the Cabouats, during which time he plunged into a textbook on paleontology he found on the museum’s shelves. Finding this boring and knowing that he could not hide in Nîmes without endangering himself and others, the issue became how to get out. There was also some lingering “feeling that I should comply with some rules.” He wanted discharge papers lest he be accused of desertion by Vichy authorities. So, he ventured to the nearest military camp and managed to get his formal discharge. He still did not have a civilian identification that would stand up to any scrutiny. The Cabouats arranged for Hirschmann to get a
carte d’identité
, a much-prized artifact for any refugee wanting to escape the Nazi dragnet. Madame Cabouat testified and signed the carnet issued by the Nîmes Commissaire on July 6, 1940. Hereafter, Otto Albert Hirschmann was officially Albert Hermant, an interpreter by profession, a Frenchman born in Philadelphia; this last twist was devised just in case an overzealous inspector wanted to check a French birth register.
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The pause in Nîmes allowed Hirschmann—hereafter known as Albert, the name he adopted permanently, relegating Otto to the initial
O
—to take stock and prepare his next steps. Somehow, he received word from another German fugitive from Paris, his old mentor from their militancy days in Berlin, Heinrich Ehrmann, who told Hirschmann that he was on his way to Marseilles to escape France. So, Albert thanked the Cabouats for their risk-taking generosity and made for the port. When he arrived, the city was teeming with refugees, not just French, but German, Austrian, Italian, Dutch, and not a few stragglers from the ill-fated British Expeditionary Force. Ever since mid-June, the number of refugees had been backing up at the Spanish border. Some wound up ensnared in the French detention camps; many found their way back to Marseilles to find another way out. The cafes and bars teemed with them. Albert walked past the clusters of frantic refugees and checked into the Hotel
Luxe on the Gran Via Canebière, facing the Old Port. Then he went to locate Ehrmann, who was about to leave for the United States, having just secured a visa. He also caught up with the grieving Rein family, sans Mark, who were also about to leave. The reunion was at once profoundly sad and relieving; having lost his son, Rafael did not want to lose one of his closest friends.

Between Ehrmann and the Reins, and their contact with American socialists of the Jewish Labor Committee and the Neu Beginnen activist, Karl Frank, who had relocated to New York, Hermant learned that an American was due to arrive from Spain at the Gare St. Charles on August 14. His name was Varian Fry. Fry was supposed to arrive with visas. When he stepped onto the platform of the Marseilles train station, Fry was greeted by a smiling young, French translator who volunteered to escort him to the Hotel Splendide. They settled into Fry’s room and swapped their stories. Fry liked Albert Hermant instantly. Multilingual and impressed by the story of the false papers, Fry noted his knowledge of the German Social Democrats. He found himself taken by Hermant’s irrepressible smile and charm—and soon nicknamed him Beamish, after the impish grin. Beamish could be useful. For the next five months, Fry and Beamish worked hand in glove in a remarkable effort to get stateless refugees out of France.
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Fry, a thirty-one-year-old Harvard-educated classicist, had been working as an editor in New York when the war broke out. Having been to Germany some years earlier as a foreign correspondent, he had seen the persecution of Jews firsthand. It left him horrified. When stories about the bottlenecks of eminent writers and artists unable to escape France began to circulate, Fry enjoined a coalition of socialists, Jews, Quaker charities, and New York dignitaries, as well as some trade unions, to donate $3,000 to fund the exodus of a short list of worthies facing arrest in southern France, especially the better-known intellectuals and artists who were known to be in danger. The organization was called the Emergency Rescue Committee. When he got to Marseilles, Fry encountered a vastly more complex challenge. There was far more than a handful of refugees. The recent news of the German philosopher Walter Benjamin’s
death while escaping from France had cast a pall over the city. The Portuguese and Spanish governments were demanding visas for anyone trying to cross the Pyrenees. Marseilles was choking up. What Fry did not lack was nerve; neither did Hermant. Fry also had the cover of being American, still a neutral power, and Hermant was French, but he also spoke impeccable German, and fluent Italian and English to boot. They could both prove Hamlet wrong.