And the Show Went On: Cultural Life in Nazi-Occupied Paris (13 page)

Further, both Abetz and the Propaganda Abteilung subsidized smaller dailies and weeklies that made a point of denouncing known
or suspected Jews, among them
Gringoire, L’Appel
and the particularly vile
Au Pilori. Aujourd’hui
demonstrated that no other path was available: initially it was edited by Henri Jeanson, a respected journalist who thought that an independent newspaper was possible; in December 1940, he was replaced by Georges Suarez, such an avowed collaborator that he was shot soon after the liberation. Others, like
L’Oeuvre, Le Cri du Peuple
and
Le Réveil du Peuple
, were organs of French Fascist parties and took delight in demanding that Vichy support Germany more enthusiastically.

The flag carrier of the collaborationist press, though, was the much-feared weekly
Je suis partout
, which had been founded in 1930 and became openly Fascist and anti-Semitic starting in the mid-1930s. Robert Brasillach, its editor in chief since 1937, was released from a prisoner-of-war camp in April 1941 to return to his post. Initially pro-Vichy,
Je suis partout
joined in verbally lynching the former prime ministers Blum, Daladier and Reynaud as responsible for France’s humiliation. As the occupation advanced, however,
Je suis partout
embraced all the Nazi causes and, most infamously, used its pages to denounce individual Communists and to identify prominent Jews who were hiding in the unoccupied zone. At the same time, the weekly provided extensive coverage of the arts, although its theater critic Alain Laubreaux and its music critic Lucien Rebatet often preferred the roles of inquisitors, quick to identify their every enemy as tools of international Judaism. In this, they enjoyed considerable independence, even excoriating celebrities like Guitry and Cocteau who were on good terms with Abetz and the German Institute.

In the early months of the occupation, of course, Fascist writers and journalists faced no intellectual opposition. With the Communist Party neutralized by the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact of August 1939, only a few intellectuals dared imagine resistance. This in turn underlined the importance of the first open expression of revolt. On November 11, 1940, high school and university students marked the anniversary of France’s victory in World War I by trying to march to the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier at the Arc de Triomphe. Jorge Semprun, a Spanish-born writer who later joined the resistance and ended up in Buchenwald, was just sixteen at the time. “We got to the place de la Concorde without much trouble,” he recalled. “Around the Rond-Point of the Champs-Élysées, there were several hundred of us, there were some posters and shouts. Then the French police blocked the avenue. Along the avenue George V, armed German
troops appeared and the demonstration broke up quickly. I managed to escape into the George V
métro
station.”
³²
Françoise Gilot, who later became Picasso’s mistress, was less lucky. A nineteen-year-old law student at the time, she cycled from her home in Neuilly to join the demonstration, but was caught by the French police. “They took our names,” she recalled. “Some of the students were jailed for a few days. I was sent home. But after that, until my father managed to get my name off the list, I had to go daily to the Kommandantur in Neuilly to sign my name. I became a kind of hostage.”
³³
The German military command closed the Sorbonne until December 20.

These courageous youngsters were exceptions. Most Parisians had accepted the reality of the occupation and were following Pétain’s counsel that collaboration with Germany was best for France. In late October, Hitler traveled to Hendaye, on France’s border with Spain, for talks with Generalísimo Franco. On his way south, he stopped at Montoire, in the Loire Valley, for a meeting with Laval, who was also Vichy’s foreign minister. On October 24, returning home, Hitler stopped again at Montoire for his only meeting with Pétain. Six days later, in a radio broadcast, Pétain told the French: “It is with honor and to maintain French unity—a unity dating back ten centuries—in the context of the active construction of the new European order that I enter today on the path of collaboration.” He said this offered the hope of alleviating the suffering of the French, improving the conditions of French prisoners of war, reducing the cost of the occupation and facilitating movement across the demarcation line. He concluded by stressing that he had taken this decision entirely by himself. “It is I alone whom history will judge. Until now, I have spoken to you as a father. I speak to you today as your leader. Follow me. Remain confident in eternal France.” With “collaboration” still not a dirty word, it became an acceptable response to the occupation, although not to Galtier-Boissière. “Collaboration is: give me your watch and I’ll tell you the time,” he quipped.
³⁴
But for the most part, as the historian Henri Amouroux later put it, the French had become “forty million
pétainistes.”

Yet as Pétain defined collaboration, it was of little interest to the Nazis. Hitler’s one gesture of reconciliation was to order the transfer of the remains of Napoleon’s son, the duke of Reichstadt, known as L’Aiglon, from Vienna to Les Invalides in December 1940. “A big brouhaha over the return of the ashes of Napoleon II,” Galtier-Boissière wrote in his journal on December 15, 1940. “ ‘A chivalrous
act by the Führer.’ But disrespectful Parisians say they would prefer coal to ashes.”
³⁵
In reality, it was amply clear that Hitler had no intention of “rewarding” Pétain with a peace treaty, if for no other reason than that the very idea of punishing France—for the reparations it had extracted after World War I, for its defeat in 1940, for its arrogance—was popular in Germany. Instead, simply by keeping alive the idea of a peace treaty, Berlin obtained all the collaboration it needed: Vichy’s cooperation in sending French raw materials, industrial products and workers to Germany and, before long, in rounding up Jews for deportation.

Pétain’s last chance of negotiating a less arduous collaboration was in the June 22 armistice. But with most French desperate for a cease-fire, Pétain’s hand was too weak. Among the German demands accepted by Vichy, one in particular terrified the large community of German and Austrian exiles in France, many of them writers and university professors, most of them Jews: Article 19 committed France to hand over any subject of the Reich requested by Germany. Those
étrangers nondésirables
who had just escaped from internment camps knew they had to leave France as soon as possible. Their options were limited: to seek asylum in Switzerland (although it was unclear if Germany would respect Swiss neutrality); to cross the Pyrenees into Franco’s Spain and then continue on to neutral Portugal and beyond; to scramble aboard a boat heading for North Africa; or to find a country willing to accept them and obtain a Vichy exit permit. Hiding out in third-rate hotels along a stretch of the Mediterranean between Marseille and Nice, these fugitives from injustice felt their despair mount. Then, quite unexpectedly, a glimmer of hope appeared. On June 25, the very day the armistice went into effect, an Emergency Rescue Committee was formed in New York with the mission of bringing leading writers and artists to the United States. The man charged with organizing this was a dapper Harvard graduate and literary journalist by the name of Varian Fry. For many, he would be their unlikely savior.

*
Using the tune of “La Cucaracha,” Radio-Londres quickly invented a ditty that was soon on everyone’s lips:
“Radio-Paris ment, Radio-Paris ment, Radio-Paris est allemand,”
literally “Radio-Paris lies, Radio-Paris lies, Radio-Paris is German.”

*
On more than one occasion, small bombs placed by
résistants
blew out the bookshop’s windows.

*
Although German censors had this scene removed when the movie was shown in the occupied zone, its inclusion was later viewed as a collaborationist act.

*
On July 23 Vichy revoked the nationality of any French citizen who had fled France.

*
In June 1940, the exchange rate went from 12 francs to 20 francs for every deutschmark, a 67 percent revaluation of the German currency.

*
The Grande Chartreuse is an isolated monastery in southeastern France that was closed by the government in 1903 and returned to the Carthusian order by Pétain.

_·
CHAPTER 4
_·
L’Américain

FRY WAS
just thirty-two when he arrived in Marseille on August 14, 1940, with the names of some two hundred prominent cultural figures and $3,000 strapped to his legs. His motivation was touchingly straightforward, as he wrote after the war in his memoir
Surrender on Demand:
^*
“I knew that among those trapped in France were many writers, artists and musicians whose work had given me much pleasure. I didn’t know them personally, but I felt a deep love for these people and gratitude for the many hours of happiness their books and pictures and music had given me. Now they were in danger. It was my duty to help them, just as they—without knowing it—had often helped me in the past.” Having visited Berlin in 1935 and having personally witnessed the beating of two elderly Jews, he knew that the threat to these artists was real. He volunteered to use
his vacation time to evacuate them. He thought the job could be done in one month.

Fry at least had reason to believe he enjoyed strong backing at home. The list of names in his pocket had been drawn up by the Emergency Rescue Committee with the help of the exiled writers Thomas Mann and Jules Romains, the theologian Jacques Maritain and Alfred H. Barr Jr., the director of the Museum of Modern Art in New York. Further, Eleanor Roosevelt, the American First Lady who was never slow to defend human rights, had pressed the State Department to grant “emergency visas” to these gifted refugees. But once Fry had crossed Portugal and Spain and had finally reached Marseille, things looked a good deal bleaker. Although fluent in French and German, he had no connections. His instructions were to “save” two hundred people. “But how was I to do it?” he wondered. “How was I to get in touch with them? What could I do for them once I had found them? Now that I was in Marseille, I suddenly realized that I had no idea how to begin—or where.”
¹

Remarkably, things fell into place quite quickly. Fry’s first contact was Frank Bohn, who had been sent to Marseille by the American Federation of Labor to rescue fugitive European labor leaders. And Bohn already knew how to get people out of France. If they had an overseas visa, they could usually obtain a transit visa through Spain to neutral Portugal and perhaps even a French exit visa, which would allow them to leave France legally. In the early weeks after France’s defeat, some people were also given permission to leave by ship for North Africa. This was the ideal arrangement. Others traveled clandestinely to the Spanish border and managed to cross Spain into Portugal without proper documents. There was also the option of using fake passports and visas available at a price in Marseille. In the case of renowned refugees, however, the use of falsified papers increased the risk of their being arrested and ending up in the hands of the Gestapo. Still, Fry now knew what was involved. Through Bohn, he found a room in the Hôtel Splendide on the boulevard d’Athènes and began sending letters to those refugees with known addresses.

Within a week, word spread along the Côte d’Azur that an American with cash in his pockets and visas at the ready had arrived in Marseille, “like an angel from heaven,” as Fry put it.
²
His presence was even mentioned in two local newspapers,
Le Petit Provençal
and
Le Petit Marseillais
, bringing streams of refugees to the Hôtel Splendide and prompting the local police to summon him for questioning.
Fry’s cover was a letter from the International YMCA saying he had come to help refugees obtain overseas visas and to give them some money to live on. But he now knew he was being watched, and he worried about leaving incriminating documents in his room, lest they be seized in a police raid. His one shield was that he was an American; the United States had recognized the Vichy regime and was not yet at war with Germany. What Fry—and the French authorities—soon learned, however, was that the American consul general in Marseille, Hugh S. Fullerton, strongly disapproved of his activities.

Help came from a motley group of American do-gooders, European refugees and French volunteers, among them Miriam Davenport, an art student in Paris who had befriended the fugitive German poet Walter Mehring on her flight south; Mary Jayne Gold, a wealthy playgirl who was both generous and flighty; Charles Fawcett, an artist-cum-adventurer; Albert O. Hirschman, a fearless German Jewish anti-Fascist and, later, a distinguished American economist, whom Fry nicknamed “Beamish”; an elegant Austrian, Franz von Hildebrand, who spoke English with an Oxford accent; Lena Fishman, a Polish Jew who became Fry’s secretary; Daniel Bénédite, a leftist French Protestant, who would take over the operation after Fry’s expulsion from France in September 1941; and several others who were themselves refugees. A young American vice consul, Hiram Bingham IV, also surreptitiously provided Fry with visas and travel documents for fugitives, until his disapproving boss moved him out of the visa section in the spring of 1941.

The Marseille of Fry’s early months was bustling with cultural life. The government radio network, Radiodiffusion Nationale, had moved there, along with its orchestra and a small army of actors to perform its radio plays. Artists as varied as the composers Reynaldo Hahn and Paul Paray, Josephine Baker and the movie director Pagnol were working there. The Spanish cellist Pablo Casals, who had decided not to leave France, began giving concerts in Marseille and continued to do across the south until late 1942, when the Germans took over the unoccupied zone. The literary journal
Les Cahiers du Sud
resumed publication and, even though it was subject to Vichy censorship, it published many anti-Fascist writers. For a while, it even served as an informal hostel for refugee writers, with its offices, on many evenings, turned into dormitories. Theater activity resumed, the opera house reopened and an unknown singer called Yves Montand
had his stage debut. So many middle-class and wealthy Parisian Jews had gone there during the exodus—and stayed—that the anti-Semitic writer Lucien Rebatet renamed the city Marseille la Juive—Marseille the Jewess.