And the Show Went On: Cultural Life in Nazi-Occupied Paris (24 page)

Among these were the novelist Irène Némirovsky and her husband, Michel Epstein. They had already left Paris and joined their two daughters in Issy-I’Évêque when German troops entered the small town in Burgundy on June 17, 1940. Since their first visit two summers earlier, Irène and Michel had always stayed in the Hôtel des Voyageurs and, while a dozen German officers had moved in, the couple had not been asked to leave. In fact, Epstein, who spoke German, sometimes played billards with the soldiers, who, in this quietly bucolic area of Saône-et-Loire, had little to do. The Epsteins’ two children, Denise, eleven at the time, and Élisabeth, three, attended the local school, while Irène, weather permitting, would walk to nearby woods—the Bois du Sapin or the Bois de la Maie—where she could write in peace. One favorite spot was L’Étang Perdu, a “lost pond” hidden among the trees. “She would go off into the countryside and write all day, all day, all day,” Denise reminisced. “Only later did I understand she was upset to have been abandoned by the literary world that had once feted her.”
¹⁴

The Epsteins stood out in the town, not because they were the only Jews but because they were educated Parisians. “Irène was chic, elegant, tall, thin,” recalled Gérard Morley, the son of a local
résistant
, who was ten at the time. “You could see that she was not from Issy, that she was from a different class. We knew she was a writer because she gave my mother a copy of her book
Deux.”
¹⁵
A photograph of Élisabeth’s class at school also underlined this difference: Élisabeth was the only child wearing shoes; all the others were in clogs. But the Epsteins were no longer well off. Michel had lost his job at a Paris bank and, as early as October 1940, Éditions Fayard had canceled a book contract with Irène. Surprisingly, though, Horace de Carbuccia, the right-wing editor of
Gringoire
, which was based in Marseille, agreed to publish her under a pseudonym, and he ran eight of her short stories between December 1940 and February 1942 before deciding he was taking too great a risk. Further, while unable to publish her, Robert Esménard at Éditions Albin Michel in Paris stood by her, paying her regular advances against future books.

In late June 1941, following the German invasion of the Soviet Union, the Wehrmacht detachment in Issy was reassigned to the new war front and, after holding a party at the local château, the occupiers left as abruptly as they had arrived. Irène, who was planning a five-part
epic called
Suite française
, inspired by
War and Peace
, had already completed the first volume,
Storm in June
, covering the exodus from Paris. She set the second volume,
Dolce
, in an occupied town like Issy, where she imagined an unconsummated love story between a refined German officer billeted in a private home and a young woman whose husband is a prisoner of war. Her story ends when the Germans are sent to the Eastern Front.
^*
Around that time, she also wrote
Chaleur du sang
(Fire in the Blood), a family drama set in a town in Burgundy, which was finally published in 2007. In early 1942, the Epsteins left the Hôtel des Voyageurs and rented half of a large unfurnished house overlooking the town’s war memorial. That spring, while Irène and her family were now required to wear yellow stars, she continued to fill her notebooks, using minuscule handwriting to conserve her paper. She and her husband were not in hiding, and they made no effort to enter the unoccupied zone just twenty miles to the south, yet the little news that reached them was beginning to alarm them. “My mother’s face was pale,” Denise said. “There was no longer a smile. My father, who used to sing, was very silent.”
¹⁶

Then, on July 13, two gendarmes knocked on their front door with an arrest warrant for Irène. “When they came for her, there were no tears,” Denise remembered. “It was a silent adieu. She asked me to look after Papa and she told Élisabeth she was going on a trip. I am sure she knew she was leaving forever.”
¹⁷
Desperate to obtain her release, Michel contacted friends in publishing and even wrote to Abetz stressing Irène’s “hatred for the Bolshevik regime.”
¹⁸
He was unaware that already on July 17 she was aboard a train carrying nine hundred other Jews from the camp at Pithiviers to Auschwitz. One month later, she died there, perhaps from typhus. She was thirty-nine. Epstein’s own luck ran out on October 9. He, too, was arrested by gendarmes and died in an Auschwitz gas chamber on November 6. The only good fortune was that Denise and Élisabeth survived, first hidden by a local teacher when gendarmes came to look for them, then taken by a governess to southwestern France, where they hid for eighteen months in a convent. In their suitcase, they carried the unfinished manuscript of
Suite française
, which would be published sixty-two years later.

Even after the major
rafles
of 1942, French police and officials continued to implement this Nazi policy, with Bousquet himself again playing a role in what became known as the Battle of Marseille in January 1943, when French police destroyed part of the old city and arrested some 2,000 people for deportation. Of the 76,000 Jews eventually sent from France to death camps, barely 2,000 survived. After the war, Vichy officials claimed they believed the Jews were being sent to work in Germany, but by 1943 they could not ignore strong rumors, if not actual confirmed reports, that Jews were being murdered en masse in Poland. In November 1943,
Les Étoiles
, an underground newspaper published by writers in southern France, reported on the horrors of Auschwitz and noted, “Periodically, as a reprisal, groups of 200 and 300 at a time are asphyxiated in ‘gas chambers.’ ”
¹⁹

Further, Vichy did nothing to alleviate the hardship and hunger that resulted in the deaths of at least 3,000 Jews in French internment camps. The record of the French as a whole was more heartening. Three-quarters of the Jews trapped in France in 1940 escaped deportation and, while many lived through the occupation in depradation and fear, most survived because they were in some way protected—or at least not denounced—by their French neighbors. In the Massif Central, for instance, Protestant pastors and families in Le Chambon-sur-Lignon and other mountain communities assumed huge risks in shielding thousands of Jews from arrest. Many Jews also found safety in the southeastern region of France that was under Italian occupation between November 1942 and September 1943. But if afar greater proportion of Jews made it through the war in France than in, say, the Netherlands, there was also a geographic explanation: as a relatively large country with tens of thousands of remote villages and hamlets and a mountain range running through its heart, France offered many places to hide. Some communities in rural France never saw a German soldier during the entire occupation.

While many French citizens were either opposed or indifferent to the persecution of Jews, Pétain himself felt that his popularity depended more on his handling of the prisoner-of-war problem. As a result, in May 1942, when Berlin demanded that 350,000 Frenchmen be sent to work in Germany to replace German workers sent to fight on the Russian Front, Vichy proposed a one-for-one worker-POW swap. Instead, although Laval managed to reduce the initial demand to 250,000 French workers, Berlin imposed a far tougher deal: three
skilled workers for every freed prisoner of war. Vichy was forced to accept. The return of the first POWs in August, under what was known as
la relève
, or “the relief,” was celebrated as a Vichy triumph, but the number of volunteers fell far below the required target. This was resolved the following month with a new law obliging all men between the ages of eighteen and fifty and all women between twenty-one and thirty-five to carry out any duties defined by Vichy. Companies were ordered to identify all staff members who were not indispensable, and the shipment of workers to Germany stepped up. By the end of 1942, the quota of 250,000 had been met and 90,000 prisoners of war had been freed. One consequence was a further slowdown of economic activity in France at a time of dire shortages of such necessities as food, clothes and coal. The only consolation for Vichy was that, at least in the occupied zone, Hitler, not Pétain, was blamed for the mounting misery of most of the French nation.

Soon, however, Pétain’s standing was further eroded by events beyond his control. On November 8, 1942, United States troops landed in Vichy-ruled Morocco and Algeria. Washington had hoped to drive a wedge between Vichy and Berlin by placing French troops stationed in North Africa under General Henri Giraud, who had escaped a German POW camp and had pledged loyalty to Pétain. By chance Admiral Darlan, the former deputy prime minister, was in Algeria at the time and, assuming command, he quickly signed a cease-fire with the Americans. Meanwhile, Laval rushed to Munich in the hope of persuading Hitler that Vichy’s forces in North Africa were resisting the Allied invasion. Unimpressed, Hitler ordered the Wehrmacht into the unoccupied zone and, soon after dawn on November 11, the twenty-fourth anniversary of the armistice sealing Germany’s defeat in World War I, German troops were driving past Pétain’s hotel in Vichy. Almost simultaneously, Italian troops occupied the Savoie and half the Riviera as well as Corsica.

With Vichy rapidly losing control of North Africa and the rest of its African empire, some in Pétain’s circle urged him to fly to Algiers to preserve the tattered fiction of an independent French government, but he refused. Instead, under German pressure, he reluctantly broke diplomatic relations with the United States. In a radio broadcast, he said that until then he had thought his darkest days had been in June 1940. Guéhenno was not impressed. “Here he is in despair at the very moment that all the French begin to have hope,” he noted in
his journal. “Never has a head of state been more ignorant, more deaf, than his people.”
²⁰

Still, one act of rebellion rescued a modicum of French pride. On November 27, as German and Italian troops entered the naval base in Toulon, orders were given to scuttle the French fleet to prevent it from falling into German hands: seventy-seven vessels were sunk or destroyed, including three battleships, seven cruisers and fifteen destroyers. The situation of the French in North Africa, though, remained confused. On December 24, Darlan was assassinated in Algiers by a monarchist involved in a bizarre plot to bring Henri, Comte de Paris, the Orléanist pretender to the French throne, to power; instead, the murder enabled the Americans to appoint Giraud as his successor. A protracted power struggle between Giraud and de Gaulle followed. Forced to share the presidency of the Free French Forces and of the French National Liberation Committee with Giraud, de Gaulle would need several months before he could assume undisputed French leadership of the battle to liberate France.
^*

In Vichy, while Pétain retained the title of head of state, Laval now ran the government, paying little heed to the aged marshal. Berlin allowed Vichy to maintain some of the trappings of government, albeit at a price: more than ever, it required the French police, its rural gendarmerie and its newly created paramilitary
milice
, or militia, to carry out repression on its behalf. However, events far from France had a greater impact on the occupation. As the Allies consolidated their hold on North Africa, the six-month-long Battle of Stalingrad, in southern Russia, ended on February 2, 1943, with the surrender of the German army. In his journal, Galtier-Boissière recorded the latest joke making the rounds: “Churchill and Stalin are up to their necks in excrement; Hitler is only up to his knees. ‘So how do you do it?’ the two asked Hitler. ‘I’m on Mussolini’s shoulders.’ ”
²¹
Yet if Stalingrad would prove to be a key turning point in the war, Parisians still found it difficult to imagine the occupation coming to an early end. Their one consolation remained an intense cultural scene that, since the fall of 1940, had done much to lift the city’s spirits.

*
The story is told that in 1863 Empress Eugénie accompanied her husband to Vichy, where Bellanger was staying in a nearby chalet. During a promenade, Bellanger’s dog ran up to the emperor, clearly recognizing him. Eugénie saw this as proof of her husband’s affair with the actress and never returned to the resort.

*
Friends of Le Corbusier’s would later insist that he was not anti-Semitic, but that he had a strong dislike of Freemasons.

*
Galtier-Boissière noted with delight that he bought a portrait of Pétain—to hang in his toilet.

*
Adjusted to contemporary purchasing power, this is equivalent to paying Germany $43.8 billion per year.

*
On July 30, 1943, Marie-Louise Giraud, a laundress from near Cherbourg who was found guilty of performing twenty-seven abortions, became one of the last women to be guillotined in France.

*
The word
maquis
means scrub, bush or overgrown heath, while
prendre le maquis
means to take to the bush or to go into hiding.

*
Outside
pétainiste
and right-wing circles, Daladier’s view was widely shared. As early as June 28, 1941, having read
Les Causes militaires de notre défaite
by a Colonel Michel Alerme, Galtier-Boissière scoffed at the author’s attempt to blame the Third Republic. “In truth, it is the result of the incapacity of the Superior War Council that French troops found themselves in the situation of savages carrying bows and arrows in the face of cannons and machine-guns,” he wrote in
Mon journal pendant l’occupation
(p. 55).