Voices from the Dark Years (47 page)

General Oberg took advantage of Darnand’s expanded powers to ‘request’ the deployment of the Milice in the northern zone, to economise on German manpower. Delighted to agree, Darnand arranged for a council of war each Thursday in Oberg’s offices, at which Jean Leguay and his other representatives in the capital took their orders directly from the SS general. In both zones the excesses of the Milice grew wilder after Darnand’s elevation to cabinet rank cloaked them in a pretension of legality. On 10 January a group of
miliciens
under Joseph Lécussan abducted the 84-four-year-old former president of the League for the Rights of Man from his home in Lyon at gunpoint. Victor Basch and his 79-year-old wife Ilona were driven around and humiliated until Lécussan grew tired of the sport and killed them, dumping their bodies to be found by passers-by. A chronic alcoholic, Lécussan was a tall, heavily built ex-naval officer whose hair-trigger temper matched his red hair. Rarely sober, as Director of Jewish Questions in Toulouse he had indulged his hatred of Jews and communists in brutality, killing at least one detainee and extorting funds from many others. After joining the Milice in 1943, this record was enough to see him swiftly appointed its regional head in Lyon and graduate from murder to massacre after the Normandy landings.
¹⁰

With Laval’s acquiescence, Darnand removed any remaining protection for French citizens and unleashed a spate of arrests of Jews and other ‘enemies of the regime’, to judge whom courts martial were established all over France on 20 January. One of these dangerous people was now seven months pregnant with her third child, the other two being looked after with all the other infants of the Moissac
colonie.
Warned that she risked losing her unborn child if she did not cut down on her heavy work schedule, Shatta Simon told her doctor, ‘What does one unborn child matter, against the lives of so many living ones?’

One of the ‘living ones’ was Suzanne Naudet, who was hiding in her aunt’s house in a remote part of Lozère. After her younger sister was arrested by gendarmes in the village on 15 January, a friendly dairyman drove Suzanne and her aunt to the one-man gendarmerie post of neighbouring Malzieu. Instead of locking them up, Gendarme Marcellin Cazals turned his single cell into their nightly refuge and found sewing work to occupy them during the day, for which he became one of eight gendarmes recognised as ‘just among the nations’ in the Holocaust archives of Yad Vashem.

Further south, in the Lot-et-Garonne village of Montpezat, Laure Schindler was now in hiding in a house without running water or electricity; among the daily chores she shared was the carrying of water from the communal well. Her foster-parents Hélène and André Gribenski were cultured people who taught in the small private school that Laure attended with her friends Sarah and Ruth from Moissac, whose false papers named them Simone and Régine. Only with them could she relax and literally ‘be herself’. She wrote of this time:

In the evenings André read us poetry by the light of candles or an oil lamp and Hélène played the piano to professional level (returning after the war to Strasbourg Conservatoire, where she was a professor). But I resisted all their approaches with frigid politeness and they respected my need to keep my barriers intact – until the day when I came home from school to hear Hélène playing a Schubert sonata. The piano had been played nearly every day during the three months I had spent in Montpezat, but I had blocked it out of my consciousness because it reminded me too much of my home in Germany and the grand piano in our nice middle-class sitting-room, on which I had endured the hated weekly piano lessons.

For whatever reason, on this day I came home and did not go into my bedroom, but sat down near the piano. Hélène noticed me come in, but continued to play. It was not very long since I had learned that my father had died and, as I listened, it was as though Hélène and Schubert between them were attacking the wall I had built around myself with blow after blow of a huge axe, until I was weeping – not the tears of a frightened child, but of a girl on the threshold of womanhood mourning all the grief in the world.

Hélène stopped playing to embrace me, but did not try to halt the sobs that wracked my still thin body. After a while, she said, ‘Let it out, girl. Cry all you want. We were beginning to despair of you and wonder whether there was anybody left there behind all your polite silences.’ Then she resumed playing the sonata and I realised that if you build a wall to protect yourself from pain, there is also a wall between you and love, so that you too are dead.
¹¹

On the same day Eugène Deloncle got his comeuppance on returning from Spain, where he had been seeking a bolt-hole for the time when his life would be forfeit in France – and possibly depositing in a safe place some of the funds received during his years of right-wing militancy from Eugène Shueller, president of the L’Oréal perfume empire. Arrested by the SD, who suspected him of having contacted Gaullist or Allied agents in Spain, Deloncle was interrogated and released so that a
carlingue
gang working for the SD could eliminate him with plausible denial for all his followers of the MSR. Their
modus operandi
was simply to break down the door of his Paris apartment and shoot dead Deloncle and his son in the guise of a gangland settlement of accounts.

On 21 January the
Journal Officiel
published a decree disbanding the Compagnons de France, which came as no surprise to the leadership after
miliciens
had occupied their HQ at the château of Crépieux-la-Pape near Lyon, as well as some regional centres. That evening a message from Guillaume de Tournemire was read out in every Compagnon camp:

The government has decreed the dissolution of our movement, but the struggle of the Compagnons will continue. Continue your service to your commune, your trade and your families. The day will come when the call of the Compagnons rings out again in our country. Then, the flag that I lowered to half-mast on 26 July 1942 will be raised again to the mast-head. I am counting on all of you. Have courage! Work hard for France!
A moi, compagnons!

That month in Paris electricity was cut off for the night at 10.30 p.m. Gas of varying pressure was available for cooking only at meal times. People hesitated to take a train because rolling stock was a target of opportunity for patrolling RAF Mosquitoes. Others arrived in Paris exhausted after spending their whole journeys standing on the running board of a coach, so they could jump off and seek shelter quickly in the event of an air raid.

On 17 February twenty-two members of a PCF action group were executed by firing squad at the Parisian fortress of Mont Valérien after allegedly being betrayed by an attractive red-haired Jewess called Lucienne Goldfarb. Recruited into the Communist Youth aged 18, Lucienne turned informer after losing her parents in the
Rafle du Vel d’Hiv
. Whether or not she was working for Darnand on the Manouchian operation or for some PCF faction that wanted the independent Armenian activist out of the way, is unknown. What is certain is that she was luckier than fellow-conspirator Joseph Davidowicz, who was slowly strangled to death by party comrades whose friends had been betrayed. The crime for which Manouchian’s group were shot was the assassination on 28 September 1943 of SS-Standartenführer Julius Ritter, Sauckel’s deputy for the STO in France. They were tracked down not by the Gestapo, but by the Renseignements Généraux, who arrested Manouchian at a meeting on 16 November 1943 with his FTP boss Joseph Epstein.

Seeing everywhere in Paris the black and red posters announcing death sentences, Simone de Beauvoir wrote, ‘I looked for a long time at the young faces on the poster under the arches of the Metro, thinking with sadness that they would soon be forgotten.’
¹²

Headed ‘
Liberation? Are these liberators or an army of criminals?
’
¹³
the posters made much of the fact that Manouchian and his immigrant comrades boasted hardly a single French surname between them. The twenty-third member of the group, Olga Bancic was beheaded in Stuttgart prison on 10 May 1944.

From his cell a few hours before being led out to execution, Manouchian wrote to his wife:

We are going to be shot at 3 p.m. I don’t really believe it, but I know I shall never see you again. I should so like to have had a child by you, as you always wanted. So please get married after the war without any guilt and have a child in my memory. My last wish is that you marry someone who can make you happy. I have no hatred for the German people or anyone else – except for whoever betrayed us and those who sold us. Everyone will have his due reward or punishment.
¹⁴

Marcel Rayman, who died with Manouchian and for the same crime, wrote to his son: ‘Be happy and make Mummy happy as I should have wanted to do, had I lived.’
¹⁵

German posters had long since attracted adolescent graffiti, despite the risks. For example,
BOLCHEVISME
was altered to
BOCHE
so that
SI TU VEUX QUE LA FRANCE VIVE, TU COMBATTRAS LE BOLCHEVISME
was changed from ‘If you want France to live, you will fight Bolshevism’, to ‘… you will fight the Germans’. The previous year a group of pupil-teachers at the Le Braz lycée in St-Brieuc had encouraged their students to tear down German posters, paint V-signs and distribute Resistance literature. After a German soldier was killed in the course of one of these teenage pranks, twenty of the pupils and pupil-teachers were arrested and interrogated by the Gestapo. Some were released, others deported, but three unlucky ones lost their lives at Mont Valérien, shot six minutes before Manouchian and his comrades.
¹⁶

Tortured at several interrogations before his condemnation on 20 January for ‘intelligence with the enemy’, Maurice Pomponeau was executed on 21 February at Montluc prison in Lyon for the unusual crime of encouraging desertion by offering false papers, civilian clothes and shelter to
malgré-nous
conscripts from Alsace and Lorraine. By profession an accounts officer in the French air force, his last letter to his family was a list of his insurance policies and included the advice that his salary should continue to be paid ‘until the end of the war, I think’.
¹⁷

Violent death was not reserved for captured
résistants.
In the late evening of 3 March 1944 RAF bombs aimed at the Renault factory in Boulogne-Billancourt killed 500 civilians living in this densely populated area and injured three times as many. The following day an impromptu cenotaph was erected in the Place de la Concorde, past which a queue of 300,000 people slowly filed. Another huge demonstration took place at the enormous mass grave in which the hundreds of simple coffins were tightly packed in rows side-by-side.

Murder also throve. On 11 March Paris firemen were called by neighbours to a chimney fire at the unoccupied apartment of Dr Marcel Petiot in the very respectable rue Lesueur near the Arc de Triomphe. After breaking in, they recognised the smell of burning flesh and found in the stove the remains of human bodies. After police telephoned Petiot at his surgery near the Opéra, he arrived on a bicycle, claiming to be ‘a brother of the occupier’ and that he was in the Resistance. The bodies, he said, were of executed traitors. Pretending there were secret files in the apartment, he told the police it was vital the whole affair be hushed up.
¹⁸
Only in Occupied Paris could anyone telling such a story be allowed to leave after promising to return – and then disappear!

A further step in the moral decline of France’s government came on 16 March, when fascist theoretician Marcel Déat joined the cabinet. After five weeks of stubborn resistance, the marshal had given in to German pressure, ceded all executive power to Laval and been obliged to accept Hitler’s spy Cecil von Renthe-Fink into his immediate entourage. The Hero of Verdun was effectively under house arrest by this time, going outside only for exercise in his garden, accompanied by Ménétrel.

By the end of the month, according to a cable from Abetz to Ribbentrop, the Paris police alone had carried out 4,745 arrests – many for sabotage in factories working for the Germans. This compared with approximately 40,000 French citizens arrested all over France in the whole of the previous year. Of the 670,000 workers drafted to work in the Reich, only 400,000 now remained there, the missing quarter-million having failed to return from home leave. Those enlisted in recognised Maquis units numbered at most 40,000,
¹⁹
so where were the others?

Some lived at home with false papers, operating in informal groups, distributing tracts or collecting intelligence to be passed on to London; others again lived rough in remote areas, but did not put their lives at risk because they had no weapons anyway. In Pellegrue, a small village in Gironde, Robert Hestin spent four months hiding in his bedroom after deserting from the STO, fearful that neighbours would denounce him if he went outdoors. Eventually unable to stand the inaction and because his political views were that way, he joined a communist Maquis unit passing through the area and travelled with them as far as la Souterraine, north of Limoges. There, he fell out with the self-appointed officers, who tried to win him over with a soft job as their mess servant in a requisitioned chateau. After giving them a lecture on the inequity of PCF members enjoying the services of a cook, pastrycook and baker in the chateau while their men slept in barns and lived on soup, Hestin left in disgust and walked the 200km home.
²⁰