The Cost of Courage (25 page)

FROM THE VERY BEGINNING
, all of the children were marked by their parents’ silence about the war. Most of them remember seeing books lying around the house with terrifying pictures of the inmates of the German camps, but if something about World War II suddenly came on television, their parents usually left the room.

Like their own father, who had never talked to them about World War I, André, Jacqueline, and Christiane almost never spoke to their own children about World War II. And just as Christiane had complained that her parents were so close that there was no room in between them for anyone else, the children of Christiane, Jacqueline, and André saw the three siblings as an equally tight unit, almost impenetrable to everyone else, including their own offspring.

“You’ve never seen two sisters who were so close,” said Eric Katlama, Jacqueline’s older son. “I’ve never seen it. They were sisters of incredible proximity and complicity.” They talked on the phone every single day. “I think André and Jacqueline built a wall around Christiane,” Eric continued. “My mother would not allow anyone to question what Christiane had done” during the war — or its effects on the rest of her family. “Jacqueline always defended Christiane — even when there wasn’t even an attack, but just a hint of anything. That was instantaneous. I can’t put myself in Christiane’s place, but if I were Christiane, I would have completely put it out of my mind, without ever looking back at it again.”

Eric remembered his uncle André as a “very very big personality. He was very impressive. There weren’t a huge number of people who came out of Auschwitz. André was like the statue of the commander in the opera
Don Giovanni.
The commander is the one who is killed at the beginning of the opera, and he comes back as the statue. So it’s true we had something of that picture.

“Of course we were proud that they had all been in the Resistance,” Eric continued. “But it was a pride that we kept to ourselves. We never externalized it. Never.”

When I asked André’s oldest son, Robert, if he agreed with his cousins that the war had been a taboo subject, he replied, “It’s true. We were always scared to ask any questions. And we were always scared that we wouldn’t ask them the right way, that was tragic — or else, not tragic enough.” We both laughed. “It was difficult.”

Beginning in 1958, the family did deal with the war directly, once a year, with a ceremony that struck the children like a grim exclamation point. The young ones “camouflaged their unhappiness with fake laughs that were a little nervous,” while the two sisters stood next to their brother and cried uncontrollably. Often André cried as well. Eric Katlama thought “it was clear that André was suffering even more than Christiane and Jacqueline. My mother made us understand that André had suffered even more than she had.”

The ceremony occurred every year on October 25, the date the Germans had inscribed in their meticulous records for the death of Hélène at Ravensbrück. It took place at the family plot at Père-Lachaise, Paris’s largest and most celebrated cemetery, built in 1804 by Napoleon on more than one hundred acres on a sloping hillside at the north end of the 20th arrondissement. In its first years, the cemetery was a bit of a flop, because the Catholic Church hadn’t blessed its land, and the fashionable people thought it was too far from the center of the city. In a brilliant marketing gimmick, the proprietors transferred the remains of Jean de La Fontaine and Molière to the new burial ground. After that it was a huge success. Balzac, Oscar Wilde, Sarah Bernhardt, Chopin, Bizet, Proust, Yves Montand, Simone Signoret, Maria Callas, and Jim Morrison eventually joined them there.

And the Boulloches. At their plot, the names of their dead parents and their dead brother had been etched on a huge polished granite sarcophagus, which was actually empty. Attendance at the annual ceremony was required for all sixteen family members — ten children and six parents.

“I remember there was a feeling of meditation that began in the car on the way to the cemetery,” said Eric Katlama. “They prepared us psychologically. They made us understand that it was something terribly painful for those who had lived through it — perhaps more for André than for the others, because he had been deported, so he had seen what it was like.”

The black granite sarcophagus on which the family engraved the names of their dead.(
photo credit 1.22
)

André always presided. And he spoke only two sentences: “We are reunited in memory of your grandparents and your uncle, who were killed by the Nazis.” (“He didn’t say ‘the Germans,’ ” his nephew, Michel Katlama, recalled. “He said ‘the Nazis.’ ”)

“Remember that they died for the liberty and the liberation of France.” Then the patriarch called every grandchild forward — Catherine, the oldest, was first — handing each of them one red rose to be placed on top of the granite box with a cross carved in the middle.

“This was the Boulloches,” said Christiane’s older son, Pierre Audibert. “There was an aspect of this ceremony which excluded: it was the pure solidarity of the Boulloche family. A pact with their dead.”

As one of Christiane’s children put it, “Just as there is original sin, the Boulloches had the opposite: original virtue. They had chosen the right side. They had done everything the way you were supposed to. This feeling of belonging to some kind of martyr’s elite is quite heavy. I realized later that I had made many Jewish friends in school who had lost a lot of people in their families during the war. I didn’t realize they were Jewish at the time. It was unconscious. The first value transmitted by my mother was, you must not accept — you must act.”

The family reunited one last time at Père Lachaise in 2004 at my request. Christiane is second from left in the front row. On her left is her niece Véronique Katlama; on her right, her daughter Noëlle. Behind Véronique is her brother-in-law Eric Katlama.(
photo credit 1.23
)

Christiane’s youngest, François, echoed his sibling: “It showed that you can do good things in life. But it’s also a little crushing: It sets the bar very high. Christiane was lucky to make the right choice. Lucky — with the time to pay for it.”

WHEN THE WAR ENDED
, de Gaulle and the Boulloches felt much the same way: The only chance they had to survive was to avoid dwelling on the past. De Gaulle’s task was more complicated, because he had to paper over the mixed record of his countrymen. Stanley Hoffmann, the great historian of modern France, explained de Gaulle’s postwar attitude this way: “If one wants people to win victories over their very worst flaws, one must appeal to what is noble in them. If one wants to bring out the best in them, it is the best that one must celebrate.” The general adopted a kind of therapeutic optimism, which he considered essential to France’s recovery. De Gaulle told the novelist André Malraux, who became his minister of culture, that “man was not made to be guilty, sin is not interesting, the only ethics are those which lead man toward the greater things he carries in himself.”

BUT DE GAULLE
never literally said that “all the French were
Résistants,
” explained Claire Andrieu, an associate professor of history at the Sorbonne, who is the author of a shelf of books about the war and an expert on the Occupation and the Liberation. She also happens to be André Postel-Vinay’s daughter.

“Contrary to what some people say, no one has ever written that all of the French were in the Resistance,” the professor continued. “On August 25, [1944], in liberated Paris, de Gaulle spoke of the ‘only France [a clever adjective], the France who is fighting, the eternal France.’ De Gaulle never said that all the French were
Résistants.
In fact, he often said the opposite, but not in public. For example, when he received the National Council of the Resistance on September 6, 1944, he said, ‘You are the Resistance, but the Resistance is not the nation.’ He knew well. He wasn’t crazy.”

“But obviously,” I interjected, “most people were neither collaborators nor resisters.”

“I don’t think it’s that either,” she said. “The problem is that we had a quasi-totalitarian dictatorship. Because you had Vichy plus the Nazis — that was a lot. And a radical system of economic exploitation. So objectively, whatever the wishes of the French were, they collaborated. That is to say, we let freight cars full of cows and metal leave for Germany. We let six hundred thousand young Frenchmen leave to work in Germany. This is a collaboration. We allowed more than fifty thousand members of the Resistance to be deported to Germany. So objectively, it was a collaboration — without even speaking of seventy-six thousand Jews who were deported.

“The country functioned in the midst of the Vichy-Nazi system. Everyone, including the baker, was forced to do so. But elsewhere — outside of working hours — they listened to the BBC. And if a British or American aviator knocked at the door of a house, 99 percent of them were hidden. That is the figure the American Military Intelligence Service gave in 1943. Therefore, there are certain counterweights to this objective collaboration. It’s why I look at things from this perspective.

“It’s complicated, because it can be the same people who organized the convoys of looted goods — people who worked for the SNCF [the French national railroad] — and who also hid an Allied pilot at home. It can be the same person. So that’s why I am personally not very satisfied with the existing theses on the behavior of the population. I think people forget everything that could be done outside of institutions.”

While de Gaulle felt he had to disguise the history of France in public, the Boulloches merely remained mute about their own. At the beginning, this had seemed odd to me, since all three of them had been decorated for their bravery, and André was part of an elite of just a few hundred
compagnons de la Libération,
the most revered Resistance fighters of all. But that was the cost of their courage: Because half of their family had been killed by the Nazis, they needed their own silence as much as France needed its myths.

FRANCE
’
S SEARCH
for its own truth was reignited by the strikes and riots led by students and workers against de Gaulle’s government in May 1968. Among the many issues pushed by the students who barricaded the streets of Paris was a demand that their parents reconsider the official version of how most Frenchmen had behaved during the German Occupation.

André’s only daughter, Agnès, was arrested after getting into a fight with a policeman during one of the demonstrations. André told her that if she “wanted to fight, there were a couple of things you should pay attention to. If you’re getting hit on the head, never put your hands there, because your fingers are much more fragile than your skull, and you’ll just get your fingers broken. If you carry a weapon, it is always to kill. Do not think it is to defend yourself. If you draw your weapon, never get closer than three meters to the person you want to kill, because otherwise he can take your weapon from you. All of us also learned how to strangle someone, even if you weren’t strong, by taking him from behind. So we did talk about stuff, and sometimes we played with him, pretending that we were trying to strangle him.”

THE UPRISINGS
also had a direct effect on three journalists working for the Office de Radiodiffusion-Télévision Française, the state-owned television network. These three men would make the movie that did more to change France’s self-image than any other event in the postwar period.

Marcel Ophuls, André Harris, and Alain de Sedouy all worked together for the French TV network, and when de Gaulle called for a media blackout of the barricades in the streets, the three of them joined the strike. Ophuls had written part of the strike manifesto for the TV journalists. By the late ’60s de Gaulle had moved sharply to the right, and Ophuls told me that he thought de Gaulle’s
conception of what television should be was “very much like Franco’s.” When the strike failed, he and his two colleagues were dismissed, which meant they had to figure out how to go on making a living. So at the moment when dozens of national institutions were under attack, the three of them decided to make a film about France during the Occupation.