When Paris Went Dark (22 page)

Auroy’s journal, which runs from June 10, 1940, to August 15, 1945, expresses her frustration, anger, and humiliation at being locked up in her own apartment, sequestered in her own neighborhood. She pulled no punches: “The Occupation has made us like wooden robots.”
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What made it worse, of course, was that she lived alone, and her neighborhood had become a tourist and nightlife mecca for the despised Germans: “Gray uniforms are everywhere. They come out of shops, their arms filled with packages.… Every day, around 5:00 p.m., many trucks filled with soldiers park in front of the Moulin de la Galette [a nightclub just a short walk from her apartment].”
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Out spilled Germans, drenching the neighborhood with their boisterous enthusiasm.

As with other memoirs and diaries, we should pause to ask ourselves why they were written, hidden, rewritten, trusted to others, and in some cases unpublished for years. In a world where there has been a short-circuiting of normal connections, blank pages can offer the freedom that one misses in an unpredictable occupied city. But the danger always remains that a person’s writing can be found and act as an instrument of betrayal. Finding a task that would bring habit to a disrupted environment led many Parisians of all ages to keep scrapbooks in which they pasted maps, drawings, and newspaper clippings and to write secret diaries, journals, and unsent letters depicting daily life. In the past decade or so, more and more of these texts have come out of closets, attics, and forgotten chests of drawers to be published for generations that have never known a bereft Paris.

Auroy was not a dispassionate chronicler: her journal is rich with detailed examples and analysis of the anxiety caused by trying to live some sort of “normal” life in German Paris. In 1943, for example, she returned from shopping to discover that neighbors from the floor above hers had been arrested. No one knew why. They were not Jewish and had expressed no stronger anti-Nazi sentiments than anyone else. A day or two after they had been taken away, Auroy watched as Germans, or
their acolytes, emptied the apartment of anything valuable. “Germans love to loot,” she observed, and she wondered what happened to the modern paintings, including one by Picasso, that had covered her neighbors’ walls. (It turned out that a cunning neighbor had saved them from the ignorant movers.) This arrest was very close to home—too close; happily, the Gestapo would never knock at her own door, but she was always on the alert for the sound of unfamiliar boots in the stairwell.

The curfew was one of the most successful—and pesky—means devised by the Occupation forces to control a population. To further discombobulate Parisians, curfew times were arbitrarily changed; Auroy and her friends often had to hurry home earlier than the announced hour in case a street might be blocked or a Métro station closed. Being caught on the street after curfew was no minor infraction. In an unpublished memoir of a British woman who had remained in Paris after the Occupation, the author relates how she had stayed past curfew at a friend’s home in the near suburbs; she decided nonetheless to walk back to Paris with a companion. Before too long, they were stopped on the near-empty streets by a French policeman and asked for their passes. They had none, but they showed their ID cards, and insisted that as British citizens they were in order, having gone each day to a police station to register. The policeman smiled, reminding them that he had the authority to have them spend the night in a police station. But taking pity, he decided to walk with them to the end of his route, pass them on to another group of cops, until they finally reached their destination. Later, our lady discovered a favorite technique of less generous policemen: they would pass innocent breakers of the curfew from one escort to another all night, making them walk miles and miles before the curfew lifted.
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Such tales must have led Berthe Auroy to reason that it was best just to stay at or close to home, in her neighborhood, within her narrow community. Wrote another observant Parisian about that period: “Occupied Paris is on its guard. Inviolate down to its core, the city has grown tense, surly and scornful. It has reinforced its interior borders, as
the bulkheads of an endangered ship are closed.… Left Bank and Right Bank are not two different worlds any more, but two different planets.”
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The city was like a submarine, with major sections closed off by watertight doors. A year after the Germans had arrived, Auroy would no more have thought of casually venturing south across the river to the Latin Quarter than she would have thought of boarding a train to Berlin; she might leave for the suburbs, but venture into another Parisian neighborhood if she did not have to? Not on her life.

This psychologically disturbing readjustment of one’s sense of space, of having to redefine where safety was assured and where it was not, is one of the most persistent themes gleaned from those who lived in Paris during the Occupation. One’s neighborhood, the Métro, one’s apartment house, one’s private rooms: all had to be reconsidered. What had been benign now seemed strangely dangerous. Long-repressed agoraphobia and claustrophobia began to reemerge; the spatial awareness of the citizen under Occupation became almost as acute as that of the soldier under fire.

Parisians, in secret, must have taken out thousands of maps and marked them with ink or pins to show the constellation of troops grinding across the continent and, at last, the inexorable retreat of the Reich’s forces. A new geography festooned apartment walls; children learned place names because of the nervous excitement with which their parents pronounced them. After the D-day invasion in 1944, Victoria Kent wrote:

Closed up in their apartments, so many Parisians, in hiding and not, used such charts and visual representations to expand their limited horizons.
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Albert Grunberg, a Jewish hairdresser, whose salon was right in the center of the Latin Quarter, on the Rue des Écoles, soon found himself a target of German interest. Fortuitously, Grunberg, who had married a Gentile after emigrating from Romania twenty years earlier, had anticipated his roundup. Seeing agents enter his shop, he escaped—barely—running next door to the adjacent apartment building and up to its seventh floor, where there was a small, semihidden room. On the same floor where he had been told earlier he could hole up were three other apartments. For the next two years, thanks to the assertive benevolence of the building’s concierge, Grunberg lived in a room of eight square meters (about eighty-five square feet).

Cramped in his hideaway, Albert Grunberg was continuously alert; his journal offers us a very good account of how life for every unhappy Parisian—in hiding or not—must have changed. Compelled to live clandestinely—always aware of his surroundings, counting the minutes, the hours, the days, and the weeks until something or someone would bring a new order—he exhibited a daunting patience. Fortunately, his friends had also drilled a hole in the wall joining Grunberg’s room to the kitchen so that he could have electricity. He had to be very careful that his radio was not heard, that lights from his bedroom were kept to a minimum, that the snoring of his brother, Sami, who after several months would join him in hiding there, not disturb his neighbors as much as it disturbed him, and that he walk only on the piles of carpets that the concierge had laid in the tiny room and in the kitchen of the neighboring apartment, which he could get to unseen. (He could not cook in the kitchen unless the neighbor was there for fear of sending tattletale odors out to the building’s other tenants.)

Parisian apartment buildings are built around an inner courtyard and maybe a rear courtyard; they form a natural echo chamber, and sound carries with startling efficiency throughout the building, especially when windows are open. There was no air-conditioning in those days, so windows were often left open, especially during the hot summer months. Grunberg could only use his one small window—which opened onto the inner courtyard and through which he could see only the apartments opposite and a small panel of the Parisian sky—to listen and watch for any disruption that might presage a raid. The Gestapo and the French Vichy police were relentless in their patrols and roundups; they received dozens of letters a day suggesting that some Jew or communist was in hiding. The Nazis would cordon off whole quarters or apartment houses or set up barricades at Métro entrances and exits, for they were under persistent orders to provide a quota of foreigners and Jews for the detention and transit camp in Drancy, north of Paris, or for work (or death) in Poland and Germany.

Even concealed, the hairdresser was still in his neighborhood, though no longer a visible part of it. He was able to see his wife almost weekly, and from his small chamber he had contact with his concierge, her family, and a neighbor or two. Awaiting safe release, Grunberg began a journal to “kill time,” writing, as many others did, to lighten the sense that he was not free. He was fortunate enough to have a radio, and half his journal is taken up by descriptions he heard on news broadcasts of the victories of the Western allies and Russia against Germany’s war machine.

Grunberg and other victims of the Occupation of Paris did not examine philosophically the effects of physical isolation, but through their writings, we can begin to fathom what was the most intangible, though most prevalent, inconvenience of living in an occupied city: that of not being able to control and order one’s time or space. This unease undermined the “spacefulness” of a richly built and lived urban experience. For these chroniclers and their fellows the pleasure of living in Paris had gradually narrowed, or diminished, and, in some cases, it had been erased.

There was a persistent dearth of food and heat sources for most
Parisians between 1940 and 1945. No one starved, but the majority experienced hunger or at least an absence of satiety. Every winter seemed to last longer and be more frigid than the one before.
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As a result of the scarcity of nourishment, apartment rooms and—when the temperature allowed—balconies were turned into gardens; space was given over to growing food or raising rabbits and chickens. Public parks, too, were tilled and planted. The city took on the allure of a huge greenhouse as public spaces took on practical functions.

Of the four winters during which Paris was occupied, three were exceptionally cold, colder than any winter in memory. One writer describes vividly what it must have been like to have been unable to get enough coal or charcoal, even in the finest apartments. Having received a bouquet of pink carnations, a lady placed them in a glass vase and set them on a living room table. The apartment became so cold that the glass burst, but the flowers remained fresh and bright in a block of unmelting ice. Furniture makers soon began running advertisements about a new contraption:

Berthe Auroy’s memoir contains a remarkable series of entries about how her apartment shrank as she began to live in fewer rooms and finally consolidated her life in the kitchen, a place she describes with the detailed intimacy of a Balzac.

It makes little difference whether the “enemy” she feels closing in on her is the cold or the Germans; her world has become much smaller because of the Occupation and its deficiencies.

The Germans and their Vichy partners requisitioned hundreds of apartments; entire apartment buildings were even put under seal, both for housing and for looting. A protocol of “minding one’s own business” prevailed, but uncomfortable, even dangerous encounters were unavoidable. On the top floor of an elegant apartment building in the block-long Rue de Buenos-Ayres, right under the Eiffel Tower in the fashionable 7th arrondissement, a Jewish family hid in plain view. Having emigrated from eastern Europe with papers, forged by an Eastern Orthodox priest, that made them “Christians,” they had not registered when Jews were required to do so in 1940. To their despair, Germans requisitioned apartments on the lower floors of their building. For years, they would pass each other in the elevator or on the stairway, but the occupiers took no undue notice. Then, one evening, a heavy knock at their front door sounded. Gently, the lady of the home opened it to find three slightly drunk, smiling German officers on her landing. They were surprised at the sight of the woman, and she was terrified. They were just returning from a night out and, laughing out loud, excused themselves—“We are on the wrong floor. Please excuse our
rudeness, madame”—as they stumbled back down the stairs. The refugee family never completely forgot this incident and how intimately they were living with those who could arrest and deport them at a whim.