Voices from the Dark Years (49 page)

With boots and rifle butts, the children were hustled onto the trucks. Toddlers unable to clamber aboard were forcibly thrown in and the tailboards slammed shut. One adult survived the war; two adolescents and Miron Zlatin were transported 3,000km by train and shot at Tallinn in Estonia; the children were gassed naked at Auschwitz on 15 April. One of the women sorting clothing outside the gas chamber was Fortunée Benguigui, who had kept herself alive in the camp hoping that her children were safe in France. That morning, she recognised on a pile of clothing outside the gas chamber a pullover belonging to her son Jacques.

Life goes on. That was also the day an unknown young singer named Charles Aznavour got the break he had been waiting for at the Casino-Montparnasse in Paris, while at the ABC the Compagnons de la Chanson were singing the repertoire for which they would be famous worldwide thirty years later. Another unknown called Yves Montand came to Paris that spring to seek his fortune despite being on the run from his STO obligations and suspected of being technically Jewish. On the night after his first engagement, he was only saved from arrest by the proprietor of his hotel distracting a Feldgendarmerie NCO from checking his guest’s obviously false ID. His first paychecks lost at the poker tables, Montand had a second stroke of luck when Édith Piaf sacked her current male singer. Montand detested Piaf as heartily as she sneered at what she called his ‘poor singing’, but she insisted that he dress like her on stage – all in black – and he decided to make this his trademark style for the rest of his career.

With 2,000 Waffen-SS troops posted straight from the Russian front to the Moissac area to regroup and refit, Madame Delmas, owner of a smart hotel and restaurant in the centre of town, whose husband was a POW in Germany, organised
dîners dansants
for the SS officers on Friday evenings. Food and alcohol could always be found on the black market; her problem was finding attractive girls to amuse them. Each Friday afternoon she came to have her hair done in Marie-Rose’s salon, so as to look her best that evening. Several times she invited her beautiful hairdresser to join the fun, promising that the food was excellent and the officers very correct: ‘You’ll have a good time. Nobody’s going to make you do anything you don’t want to, so where’s the harm?’ Marie-Rose had often heard women in the salon discussing girls who went with Germans; it was hinted darkly that they would ‘have to pay for it’ after the Liberation. It wasn’t this that held her back: she just did not want to get involved with this very manipulative client. One Friday evening in April 1944, Madame Delmas telephoned just before closing time to say that she had been unable to get away that afternoon for her hair appointment. The plea ended, ‘Couldn’t you, just this once, come to the hotel and comb my hair out? I’d be so grateful.’
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Reluctantly, Marie-Rose agreed to help a regular customer in a fix and packed a few essentials in a bag. After arriving at the hotel, she was kept waiting by Madame Delmas until it was almost time for the guests to arrive. To escape after doing her hair, Marie-Rose used the excuse of having to look after her son, but Madame Delmas said, ‘Let your parents take care of him. Stay just for a while and enjoy a good dinner. You deserve it.’

The food was ample and well cooked, the atmosphere very relaxed, all the officers in their immaculate SS uniforms very correct and attentive to the ladies. Several times Marie-Rose danced with a blond, blue-eyed Austrian, an engineer in civilian life, who told her his name was Willi. She was 23 years old, he three years older. One of the other girls present, interpreting for the officers who could not speak French, was a vivacious multilingual Jewish refugee called Masha from Latvia, whose ‘racial impurity’ bothered none of the SS men.

Good food, a glass or two of wine, the elegant atmosphere and the polite manners of the men chatting up the girls with champagne glasses in their hands in the moonlit garden behind the hotel, all put Marie-Rose off her guard. All she knew of Willi was that he was unmarried and came from Vienna. Yet when he asked whether they could meet again the following Friday, she blushed to hear herself say that she would like that.

It seemed a very long week. Two weeks after their second meeting they became lovers. Sometimes they met, not entirely by chance, on the street by the salon or on the beach where local families and the German soldiers went to swim in the River Tarn with an unmarked demarcation line separating the two groups of swimmers. Then they could only share a few glances, for romantic attachments were forbidden to an SS officer, even had Marie-Rose been prepared to ‘come out’ and let the neighbours know. Only in Madame Delmas’ hotel could she and Willi openly be together.

On 20 April Pétain paid his first visit to Paris since the defeat on the occasion of a Requiem Mass in memory of the thousands of victims of the Allied bombing campaign. Received inside Notre Dame Cathedral by Cardinal Suhard and senior German officers, he emerged to the acclaim of an enthusiastic crowd estimated at a million people. Commentator Jean Galtier-Boissière reckoned that immediately after the Armistice 95 per cent of French people were for Pétain; 50 per cent remained so until the occupation of the southern zone; and 30 per cent remained loyal right up to the Normandy landings.

One reason for this came the following day, when the RAF raided the suburb of St-Denis and the important freight-handling yards of the Gare de la Chapelle, destroying 304 buildings, damaging Le Sacré Coeur cathedral and leaving another 635 French civilians dead.
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On 28 April Pétain was allowed to broadcast an appeal for calm and respect for German personnel, his essential impotence being evident on a visit to the Château de Voisins, south-west of Paris, when twelve of the nineteen cars in his cortège were full of German security men.
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Nevertheless, even on D-Day+1 at St-Étienne, his rapturous reception by the crowds was both a tribute to him as a man and a gesture of appreciation for the persistence with which he had tried to find a spoon long enough to sup with Hitler. Having no intention of allowing him to be kidnapped by
résistants
after his return to Vichy, as had happened to Mussolini the previous summer, his German captors obliged the marshal to spend each night in the Château de Lonzat, surrounded by German troops, with an inner cordon of his personal bodyguard and the chateau itself patrolled by French police.

On 2 May Brunner despatched to Drancy a victim more precious than he realised. Odette Rodenstock had been betrayed and arrested at her apartment by three
miliciens.
Interrogated under torture, she pretended to have lied to get her cover job as a social worker employed by the diocese – this to protect Major Rémond. Realising their mistake, the Gestapo in Nice cabled Drancy to ‘continue her interrogations’. Abbadi took a train to Paris, hoping to rescue her somehow, but had to content himself with sending a food parcel. Rescue being out of the question, she was deported in Convoy 74 on 20 May to Auschwitz-Birkenau, later to survive long starvation in Bergen-Belsen.

With all the burden of looking after 527 hidden children now falling on his shoulders, Abbadi returned to Nice, to find that it was too risky to stay in his hotel room after dawn – the time Odette had been arrested – but also too dangerous to walk the empty streets before the bars were open. He returned to the diocesan offices to ask for a list of churches with early Mass and later recalled, with a humour that conceals the horror of his situation at the time, ‘Every morning at 6.30 a.m. I was in some church or chapel. No devout Catholic ever went more regularly to Mass.’
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On the night of 21 May the RAF bombed Orléans, killing 150 civilians. In the absence of any organised rescue services, it was the survivors who had to clear away the ruins in a town without water or gas. British planes returned on 8 June to destroy the Vierzon rail bridge and the two main-road bridges were wired for demolition by the Germans. As the real D-Day approached, the pace of RAF arms drops to the Resistance accelerated, until the Maquis in south Dordogne boasted 2,800 Sten guns, 450 rifles, 500 revolvers, 8 anti-tank grenade launchers, 100 automatic rifles and several tons of plastic explosives. With all this weaponry, some of it in the hands of civilians with a grudge to settle, it is not surprising that from D-Day to the end of July there were an estimated 6,000 murders in France. In some cases, whole families were wiped out for reasons that had nothing to do with the war.

After the last 3,500 STO conscripts left in July, bringing the total of French workers inside the labour-starved Reich to some 200,000 – of whom 10 per cent were female volunteers – the Germans ordered a census of unmarried women who could be conscripted. The archbishop of Toulouse spoke up, his family-centred Catholic morality outraged at the idea of single women being removed from the safety of their communities and sent to a foreign land. In occupied Moissac, the only ‘incident’ was on 3 June when a German soldier attempted to rape a local woman. The task of the town council had become almost impossible, torn as they were between the flow of laws and instructions from Vichy and the impositions of the Germans. However, when Dr Moles tendered his resignation as mayor he was ordered to withdraw it, so he went to a colleague and had himself given ‘sick leave’.

As part of the deception campaign to convince the Germans that the invasion was going to take place in the Pas-de-Calais, 8,000 tons of bombs were dropped on 4 June in what was only a diversionary raid on Boulogne, increasing the misery of the survivors in the town. By then, even the cloud-cuckoo world of Parisian
haute couture
was aware that the situation was far too serious for frivolity: for once no autumn collections were shown. Material for clothes had in any case become almost unobtainable, and the latest regulations for footwear restricting the permissible materials to wood, raffia – and rattan.
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The story of the Normandy landings on 6 June is too well known to need commentary here. Since there was a news blackout on French radio, many people heard of the invasion in a roundabout way. At the beginning of June, Willi had been due for fifteen days’ leave and tried to persuade Marie-Rose to travel to Vienna in order to meet his parents who, he was sure, would raise no objections to their marriage after the war. Whether it would actually have been possible for her to go there, Marie-Rose never found out because she told Willi that she could not leave her son. He therefore took his leave in Moissac, meeting her discreetly in sports shirt and shorts after the salon closed in the balmy early summer evenings.

Masha earned her living by giving German lessons in Montauban and Toulouse. It had been a boom market, with numbers of Berlitz language schools’ students rising from a pre-war 939 adults to 7,920 in 1941.
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On 6 June she and Marie-Rose were driven by an Italian SS auxiliary to Montauban, where Masha was to give some lessons and Marie-Rose had to buy supplies for the salon. They arrived before midday, took an early lunch in the Sans Souci restaurant and then split up, having agreed to rendezvous there at four o’clock. Returning to the restaurant, Marie-Rose found Masha agog with bush-telegraph reports of the landings in Normandy. The Italian driver was nowhere to be found and all the German troops in Montauban were hastily departing, so the two women took a train back to Moissac. The streets of the town were deserted, except for the last SS men loading equipment onto trucks to head north. Willi was gone. Marie-Rose had no idea where until she received a letter from him explaining that he had been wounded fighting with his unit on the Normandy front and invalided back to the Reich. Thus began a correspondence that lasted two years.

Maquis and Resistance groups all over France had received coded orders in the BBC personal messages on the night of 5 June to blow up rail tracks, telephone lines and bridges. For obvious reasons, first among them the restoration of national prestige, one would think that Free French troops played an important role in the first landings. On the contrary, although de Gaulle commanded 400,000 men in Allied uniforms, their presence on the beaches on 6 June was limited to a handful of liaison officers with the early waves, 180 French commandos who went ashore with the British at Ouistreham and a small paratroop detachment dropped in Brittany.
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General de Gaulle was understandably angry at being excluded from the invasion and not even being informed of its date until hours beforehand because President Roosevelt intended to occupy France, not liberate it, and lacked any concept of the civil unrest that might be triggered by treating all the factions in the Resistance as equal allies. He preferred to deal with Pétain or Darlan or General Giraud in preference to de Gaulle, who patently would not become a passive puppet after the Liberation. Winston Churchill was obliged to follow suit, since the game was being played with an American ball. Anglo-American interest in France at that point in the war was to make it the most advantageous battlefield over which to fight Germany into unconditional surrender. For de Gaulle, the liberation of his country was the first priority.
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N
OTES

  
1.
  The events of 21 March are digested from interviews with Françoise de Monbrison and the manuscript accounts of Renée and Christian de Monbrison.