And the Show Went On: Cultural Life in Nazi-Occupied Paris (14 page)

For Fry, however, it was also a no-man’s-land of Gestapo spies, corrupt French police and refugees galore—perhaps as many as 150,000 out of a population of 650,000. It was a place where exiles might be exchanging gossip in a port café one day and hiding in fear of arrest the next, where Chinese visas and fake Polish and Czech passports were for sale, where British soldiers who had missed the Dunkirk evacuation were trying to bribe their way onto ships heading to North Africa, where it was even possible to send and receive mail from abroad. France was defeated and Vichy officially governed the unoccupied zone, but Marseille remained something of a safe haven for German and Austrian artists and intellectuals who were Article 19 targets for arrest and deportation to the Reich.

Some independent lawyers helped Fry obtain visas and safe conducts through official channels. Fry also knew a few police officers who were willing to challenge or ignore the new rules. And when all else failed, he tapped the shadier sides of Marseille. He and his team were soon at home in this netherworld. At one point, Fry agreed to serve as a secret agent for London in order to facilitate the escape of British soldiers. On another occasion, his team turned for help to Corsican gangsters who, Fry noted, were also involved in “white slavery, black market dealings and smuggling dope.”
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Fry and Beamish quickly learned the ways of spies: they would send messages to New York hidden inside tubes of toothpaste carried by refugees who had permission to leave France legally. Every means was justified in order to save lives.

Fry’s memoir reveals his anxieties and disappointments, but to outsiders he invariably seemed reassuringly calm. “There was in him a delightful mixture of earnest resolve and of wit, of methodical, almost formal demeanour and playfulness,” Hirschman recalled long after Fry’s death in 1967. “His sartorial elegance (his hallmark was a striped dark suit with bow tie), together with his poker face, were tremendous assets to him in dealing with the authorities.”
⁴
Indeed, since Fry feigned working strictly within the law, he never hesitated in demanding that French officials rectify their assorted illegal acts. At the same time, he felt burdened by his inability to help everyone. He quickly decided to go beyond his initial two hundred names since
some on the list had already left France and a few, like Willi Münzenberg, were dead.

To manage the escalating demand for his services, in October Fry moved his operation to larger quarters at 60 rue Grignan and formalized it as the Centre Américain de Secours. By May 1941, he had received letters from 15,000 refugees and had taken on 1,800 cases, representing 4,000 people. Further, there were still refugees interned in the nearby Camp des Milles and other camps in the unoccupied zone. Just those gathered in Marseille represented extraordinary talent. “In our ranks are enough doctors, psychologists, engineers, educationalists, poets, painters, writers, musicians, economists and public men to vitalize a whole great country,” noted Victor Serge, the former Communist writer who was now on the run from both Moscow and Berlin. “Our wretchedness contains as much talent and expertise as Paris could summon in the days of her prime; and nothing of it is visible, only hunted, terribly tired men at the limit of their nervous resources.”
⁵

By the end of 1940, Fry and his team were channeling refugees out of France at an impressive rate. Some escapees were young and willing to take risks; others were old, weak and, occasionally, a tad self-important. Fry himself, for instance, traveled as far as Lisbon with Heinrich Mann, his wife and his nephew Golo, as well as the German novelist Franz Werfel and his wife, Alma Mahler-Werfel, who was carrying scores belonging to her late husband, Gustav Mahler. One frequent guide was Dina Vierny, the twenty-one-year-old muse and model of the sculptor Aristide Maillol, almost sixty years her senior. She would wait in a red dress near the Banyuls-sur-Mer railroad station, close to France’s border with Spain, and lead refugees—first those sent by Frank Bohn, then those dispatched by Fry—along secret mountain paths to safety. Vierny herself was a Russian-born Jew (as well as a Trotskyist sympathizer) and, as such, vulnerable to Vichy’s decree of October 4 ordering that all foreign-born Jews be interned or placed under house arrest. In 1941, she was detained by French police in Banyuls-sur-Mer, but Maillol obtained her release and sent her to pose for Bonnard and Matisse on the Riviera to distance her from the border. When she returned, she resumed her clandestine work. Every ten days or so, she would travel to Marseille to coordinate her activities with Fry and his team.

Hans and Lisa Fittko were not members of Fry’s committee but proved immensely brave and useful allies. Fugitives from Nazi Germany,
both had been interned during the phony war, Hans at Vernuche, where Walter Benjamin was also held, and Lisa at Gurs, where Benjamin’s sister, Dora, had been sent. In June 1940, the Fittkos managed to escape and, after meeting up again in Marseille, Lisa traveled to Banyuls-sur-Mer to explore ways of leaving France overland. By good fortune, the town’s mayor, Vincent Azéma, an anti-Fascist, showed her the best route over the Pyrenees. For the next eight months, until they were themselves forced to flee in April 1941, the Fittkos led over one hundred refugees into Spain without anyone being caught.

However, one early flight ended tragically, albeit through no fault of their own. Hans asked Lisa to lead Benjamin into Spain and, on the morning of September 25, 1940, accompanied by two other refugees, Henny Gurland and her teenage son Joseph, the group set off to check their intended route. Although only forty-eight, Benjamin was soon exhausted and, when the time came to return to Banyuls-sur-Mer for the night, the philosopher insisted on sleeping on the ground where they had stopped. The following morning, Lisa and the others rejoined Benjamin and, taking turns in carrying his heavy black briefcase, they eventually crossed into Spain. With the Spanish fishing village of Portbou now within sight, Lisa began her long walk back to Banyuls-sur-Mer. When Benjamin and the others reached Portbou, however, they were refused official entry into Spain, although they were allowed to spend the night in a local hotel. Depressed and despairing of ever escaping, Benjamin apparently took an overdose of morphine and died the following morning. Before losing consciousness, he gave a note to Henny Gurland, which she memorized before destroying. As she later recounted, it said: “In a situation presenting no way out, I have no other choice but to make an end of it. It is in a small village in the Pyrenees, where no one knows me, where my life will come to an end.”
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Not everyone on Fry’s list was eager to leave. Fry went to see Gide and his daughter Catherine
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at Cabris, near Cannes, and his offer of assistance was turned down. Fry learned that the writer was being wooed by the Nazis but was refusing to collaborate. “He knew the
possible consequences of his decision,” Fry later wrote. “He nevertheless refused to leave France. It was his home, and he was determined to stay.”
⁷
(Gide did, in fact, move to Tunisia in May 1942.) Fry traveled to see Matisse at his studio at Cimiez, overlooking Nice, and also failed to persuade him to leave France. A similar answer came from Malraux, who was living with his mistress, Josette Clotis, and their baby at Villa La Souco in Roquebrune-Cap-Martin, overlooking the Mediterranean near the Italian border. Malraux reiterated his anti-Nazi and anti-Vichy views but chose to stay in France; Fry did, however, give him some money and later managed to send him American royalties for
Man’s Fate
, the English translation of
La Condition humaine
.

Gide, Matisse and Malraux were, of course, French and were not Jewish. Writers and artists who were German and/or Jewish had strong reasons to leave France. One who refused to do so, however, was Gertrude Stein, that stern matriarch of American expatriate writers. She and her companion, Alice B. Toklas, both Jews, had spent the summer of 1939 in their house in Bilignin, a village in a region east of Lyon called Bugey, which had been their favorite retreat for the previous fifteen years. When war was declared, they made a quick trip to Paris to collect warm clothes as well as Cézanne’s portrait of his wife and Picasso’s portrait of Stein, but they did not return to the capital until after its liberation. They survived the occupation relatively untroubled. Before the United States entered the war, in December 1941, the Germans did not consider them “enemy aliens,” while their village was in the unoccupied zone until a year later. Further, Stein was a strong anti-Communist who never hid her admiration for Pétain. And she had at least one friend in a high place: her French translator, Bernard Faÿ, a specialist in American studies, was named by Vichy as director of the Bibliothèque Nationale in place of a respected Jew, Julien Cain.

In 1941, Faÿ and Stein agreed to publish a selection of Pétain’s speeches in English in the United States, for which Stein wrote a preface, comparing Pétain with George Washington as “first in war, first in peace and first in the hearts of his countrymen.” No doubt to her later relief, the project sank when the United States joined the Allies. After the war, during his trial for collaboration, Faÿ claimed that he protected Stein and Toklas from arrest and prevented the Germans from seizing the art remaining in their apartment at new 5 rue de Christine in Paris. Still, the occupation was not without hardship
for the two women, who had to walk to distant villages to buy food on the black market. At one point, they also received a message telling them to flee to Switzerland. “No, I said,” Stein recalled in
Wars I Have Seen
, “they are always trying to get us to leave France, but here we are and here we stay.”
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Samuel Beckett also chose to remain in France; or, rather, he returned to Paris in late 1939, reportedly saying he preferred “France at war to Ireland at peace.” As a citizen of neutral Ireland, he enjoyed some degree of protection, but he detested the Nazis and decided to join the exodus of Parisians heading south. Having briefly considered leaving for Ireland, he was also part of the mass return to Paris. Soon, he and his companion, Suzanne Dechevaux-Dumesnil, were involved with the resistance, Beckett translating intelligence reports into English for dispatch to London, Suzanne as a messenger. By the summer of 1942, fearing arrest, they had gone into hiding; after obtaining false papers, they left Paris by train for Lyon. From there, they walked to Roussillon, north of Aix-en-Provence, where Beckett worked on a farm and eventually participated in resistance actions with the local maquis.

That other famous Irishman, James Joyce, was already ailing in 1940 and, while he fled Paris ahead of the Germans, he was then stuck for months in eastern France before being allowed to enter Switzerland; he finally reached Zurich, but he died there in January 1941. Two British writers had different responses to the German invasion. Somerset Maugham, long a resident of the Riviera, left France almost immediately for the United States. But P. G. Wodehouse and his wife, Ethel, who were living in Le Touquet on the Channel coast, were interned as enemy aliens. In June 1941, the writer was released from a camp in Germany and taken to Berlin, where he made five broadcasts, which, while jovial and anecdotal, prompted outrage in Britain. In 1943, the Wodehouses were allowed to return to Paris, and they remained there until the liberation. In a subsequent investigation, Wodehouse was found to have acted more foolishly than treacherously, but he was non grata in Britain and spent the rest of his life in New York.

Simone Weil was among the more unusual refugees, even by the eccentric standards set by many fugitives. Born into an agnostic Jewish family, with a brilliant mathematician for a brother, Simone proclaimed herself a Bolshevik at the age of ten. Like many of France’s brightest students, she attended the École Normale Supérieure in
Paris in her late teens. And she remained true to her radical beliefs. After graduating, she combined teaching philosophy with doing manual labor, as a way of sharing the lives of workers. By the mid-1930s, she had begun to lose faith in Communism and turned toward Anarchism and Syndicalism.
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She even traveled to Spain to offer her services to the Republican cause, but was too nearsighted to be useful. Then, in 1937, she had a mystical experience in the chapel of Saint Francis of Assisi in Assisi and, soon afterward, embraced Christianity, although she was not baptized. When Paris fell, she and her family fled south, where she continued writing, now increasingly on questions of faith. She acquired false papers under the name of Simone Werlin, but apparently made no effort to contact Fry. Eventually, she and her family left by ship from Marseille and reached New York in June 1942. Almost immediately, however, Weil began planning to go to Britain to be closer to France. At the end of that year, she reached London and found work with de Gaulle’s Free French Forces. Suffering from tuberculosis and refusing food or medical treatment, she was thirty-four when she died in Ashford, on August 24, 1943. Almost all the philosophic writings that later brought her renown were published posthumously.

Most prominent refugees had nowhere to turn for help except Fry. Among German Jews led to safety through Spain were the Nobel laureate in medicine Otto Meyerhof, the psychiatrist Bruno Strauss and the writers Lion Feuchtwanger, Hannah Arendt and Konrad Heiden, who was Hitler’s biographer. And among Jewish musicians who escaped thanks to Fry’s organization, the harpsichordist Wanda Landowska and the pianist Heinz Jolles were the best known.

Mehring, Miriam Davenport’s poet protégé and a vocal anti-Nazi, had several frights before he left France. He had a permit to cross Spain but worried that he might be recognized and turned over to the Gestapo. Fry’s answer was to give him a false Czech passport, persuaded that Mehring looked far too scruffy to be taken for a distinguished
poet. “In fact, he was so small that we called him
Baby,”
Fry recalled. “He had only one soiled, unpressed suit, the same one he was wearing when he arrived in Marseille. He looked more like a tramp than a poet—or a baby.”
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Mehring never reached Spain. At the French border, he was arrested and sent to the nearby Camp Saint-Cyprien. Somehow Fry obtained his release, but the terrified Mehring then refused to leave Fry’s room in the Hôtel Splendide, claiming illness. Finally, Fry found him a place on a ship leaving Marseille. As he was embarking, Mehring went before a French police official who drew out a folder that listed his name beside a prohibition for him to leave France. The official withdrew to consult, then returned and announced laconically that there must be two Walter Mehrings—and approved the poet’s departure.