Voices from the Dark Years (36 page)

Once across the line, Renée and her aunt were welcomed into a farmhouse belonging to friends of the
passeur
, but knew they were not safe until 7km inside the Free Zone. Next day, after a long bus journey to Pau, Renée tried to persuade a Protestant priest who was a friend of her husband to find room for Aunt Louise, but his house and outbuildings were already overflowing with Jewish refugees and the best he could offer was to lay another mattress on the floor of the dining room if Rénée could find nowhere else for her aunt.

Françoise and Manon were now at boarding school in Pau, making poor progress due to worrying about Rénée, but at least they were safe there. After a brief visit, she set off to see her sons at Chambon-sur-Lignon in the Auvergne. Accessible only by a single road and a railway winding its way through difficult mountain country, the village was fiercely Protestant. Like Roger Delthil in Moissac, its mayor Charles Guillon had asked all inhabitants in 1938 to open their hearts and homes to refugees from the Spanish civil war and those fleeing Nazi repression. Thirteen pastors in the parishes of this upland area – of which the tall, blond André Trocmé and Édouard Theis and Noël Poivre were the most active – organised shelter for 5,000 refugee children and adults, almost every house and farm opening its doors to them. Each month, several trains brought groups of children with false papers identifying them as city kids from poor families having a well-merited holiday in the country. Whenever the gendarmerie was to pay a visit, Trocmé received a warning, giving time for children living in the village to be sent to outlying farms. Renée’s sons were staying in the home of Monsieur Eyraud, who was – as she later found out – head of the Resistance in the area.

In the Dordogne, the Bardonnie family was under surveillance day and night. An SS unit stationed just across the line in Castillon searched the house. Denyse was absent at a clandestine meeting with her husband, so it was 14-year-old Guy who ‘welcomed’ the visitors armed with machine pistols. Sixty years later, he still remembers the rush of terror on being roughly lined up against a wall at gunpoint with his younger brothers and sisters, desperately hoping that ‘Uncle’ Armbruster’s faith in their blond hair and blue eyes would be justified – as it was that time.

N
OTES

  
1.
  Quoted by L. Chabrun et al.,
L’Express
, 6 October 2005.

  
2.
  Pechanski,
Collaboration and Resistence
, p. 180.

  
3.
  C. Pinaud,
La Simple Vérité
(Paris: Julliard, 1960) (abriged by the author).

  
4.
  Quoted by J.-P. Guilloteau in
L’Express
, 31 May 2004.

  
5.
  Ibid.

  
6.
  Ibid.

  
7.
  
Comme toujours impassible / et courageux inutilement
/ je servirai de cible / aux douze fusils allemands
.

  
8.
  Krivopissko (ed.),
La Vie à en mourir
, pp. 124–5.

  
9.
  Schindler-Levine,
L’Impossible Au Revoir
, pp. 119–21.

10.
  Extract from a letter preserved in the archives of CDJC in collection EIF.

11.
  Le Boterf,
La Vie Parisienne
, Vol. 1, p. 65.

12.
  Quoted on
www.spartacus.schoolnet.co.uk/2WWlaval.htm
.

13.
  Ibid.

14.
  Amouroux,
La Vie
, Vol. 1, pp. 158–61.

15.
  P. Claudel,
Journal
(Paris : Gallimard, 1969), Vol. II, pp. 400–1.

16.
  Amouroux,
La Vie
, Vol. 2, pp. 134–5.

15

‘W
E
H
AVE
L
EARNED
OF
THE
S
CENES
OF
H
ORROR
…’

With Hitler’s Minister for Armaments Albert Speer complaining that the manpower shortage in the Reich was critical as losses on the eastern front sucked almost every fit German male into uniform, on 21 March 1942 Fritz Sauckel was empowered to drain the occupied territories of workers. Later hanged at Nürnberg for the brutality of his slave labour programme, he was an insignificant man who had grown a Hitler moustache to give him what passed for an air of authority. Meeting Laval on 16 June, he demanded 2,060,000 workers from France in addition to the 1.6 million POWs used as cheap labour in Germany.

A week later Laval announced that he had finally done a deal: in return for every
three
volunteer workers heading east, one POW would be released to return home. Called La Relève, or ‘the relief shift’, the scheme was a failure, enabling him later to claim that it was due to him that only 341,500 actually left, earning the release of 110,000 POWs, including 10,000 disabled men. Sauckel’s hunger unsated, he forced Vichy to introduce conscription for labour service in the Reich. It was called Le Service du Travail Obligatoire (STO).

On 2 July Bousquet got the impression at a meeting with Oberg and senior SS aides that no one liked being pushed around by Adolf Eichmann, who was growing impatient at the slow progress of the Final Solution in France. Minutes of the meeting taken by Oberg’s interpreter, SS-Major Herbert Hagen, record Bousquet’s point that Pétain disliked using French police for arrests in the Free Zone, while not protesting about the arrests per se. On 6 July Danneker cabled Berlin the news that Laval would allow children in the Free Zone to be deported with their families, and had said that the fate of Jews in the Occupied Zone and other ‘enemies of the regime’ was of no interest to him at all.
¹
By saying this, he gave the green light for the most monstrous single outrage of the occupation, of which details were thrashed out in meetings on 8 and 10 July between the Gestapo and French police led by Bousquet’s deputy for the Occupied Zone, Jean Leguay.

On a lighter note, Ernst Jünger noted in his diary how the feet of the nude dancers at the Tabarin were rubbed raw by the wooden-soled shoes they had to wear in daytime. After a copious dinner at the famous La Tour d’Argent, he also reflected that the simple fact of eating well in a luxury restaurant conferred an immense feeling of power when one knew that most people on the street outside were hungry, day after day. For Jean Cocteau’s friends at Louis Vaudable’s establishment in the rue Royale, a good dinner always ended with ‘jam’. The opium so designated arrived by a route protected by Danneker, who found its distribution useful for blackmail.
²
For most people in the looking-glass world of Vichy, the rule was definitely, ‘jam tomorrow and jam yesterday, but never jam today’. Shortages and rationing were hurting so much that on 14 July housewives in Marseille followed their Parisian sisters who had protested on 31 May against all the problems of trying to feed a family. They chose the wrong place to demonstrate; from inside their headquarters, PPF hard-liners opened fire, killing two women.

In Paris, Simone de Beauvoir’s intellectual Jewish friends ignored the prohibition on entering public buildings and still spent hours debating in the Café Flore. Nor did they bother to wear the star in Montparnasse or St-Germain des Prés.
³
Those in less privileged
quartiers
were hearing rumours of a massive round-up pending. On 15 July the Paris public transport service was ordered by the police to reserve hundreds of buses for special duties next day. UGIF officials having been ordered to stockpile blankets and what provisions they could get their hands on, roughly printed tracts in Yiddish and French were passing hand to hand hours before the first knock on a door, which gave time for 100 of the victims targeted by Bousquet and Leguay to commit suicide. More would have done so, or tried to escape, except for their belief that the Germans would only take men for labour in the east. But this time, whole families were to be arrested.

Official records say less than 5,000 Paris police were involved; eyewitnesses put the number twice as high. As Prime Minister Lionel Jospin admitted on the fifty-fifth anniversary of the most infamous
rafle
, no German personnel were directly involved in the arrests.
⁴
Jean Leguay was later reinstated in the Corps of Prefects after denying any personal involvement or participation by police or gendarmerie, yet all arrests were carried out by his officers, paired with colleagues they did not know, and therefore could not trust. Typically, the knock on the door came at dawn, when two police officers arrived at the apartment of Madame Rajsfus – her former neighbour,
agent
Marcel Mulot, and a plainclothes inspector. They ordered her to pack and come along. More loquacious arresting officers told victims that they were being sent to work camps in German-occupied Poland. That afternoon, the Rajsfus family were held in a nearby garage with 100 others to await transport to the Vélodrome d’Hiver, the largest covered space in Paris. Madame Rajsfus told her children to slip out and go home. There, 14-year-old Maurice and his sister found the concierge already looting the apartment
⁵
, and the evening papers devoting as much space to the
rafle
as to the gala opening of the cabaret
Le Florence.

Their mother and thousands of other men, women, children and infants were eventually bussed in full view of passers-by to the stadium, which swiftly became a scene from hell as adults and children clamoured for news, for the sight of a friendly face, for a lost parent or child, for a piece of bread or a drink of clean water. The few toilets were swiftly blocked and too soiled for use. Only two doctors were allowed into the stadium to treat the sick and those driven insane. The first of eleven suicides was a woman who threw herself from the upper stands onto the concrete below, and the twenty-four other deaths during the eight days before everyone was shipped out included two women who died in childbirth.

A handful of those rounded up were rescued by the very men ordered to arrest them. In Soissons, north of Paris, Monsieur and Madame Glas were warned in advance about the
rafle
by
agent
Charles Letoffe, who sheltered them in his home between 18 to 26 July. Louis Petitjean was an inspector in the Paris branch of Renseignements Généraux – the equivalent of British Special Branch. Ordered to report for duty at 4 a.m. that day, he was given the name and address of a woman to arrest. Petitjean and his watchdog duly arrested a Madame Fuhrmann and her 7-year-old son in their apartment at 6 a.m. The boy clung to his mother screaming, ‘They’re going to deport us!’ While the other officer was conscientiously checking that gas and electricity were turned off, Petitjean whispered to the woman to trust him and he would save her.

With mother and child left at the local assembly point to await transport to the stadium, Petitjean went home and returned that afternoon, using his RG card to convince a sergeant-major in the elite Garde Républicaine, in charge of the PA at the stadium, that Madame Furhrmann and her son were required in connection with an ongoing criminal investigation. After several announcements almost inaudible in the general chaos, they eventually appeared. So difficult was it to clear a passage through the press of desperate people, climbing over benches and the sick lying on the ground, that Petitjean told her to leave behind her suitcase; she refused, because it held all her remaining possessions. Once outside, he led his two charges to the Bastille Metro station, bought them tickets and said goodbye, discovering many years later that they had survived the war and emigrated to Israel.