When Paris Went Dark (26 page)

The Germans, knowing a good thing when they found it, had already appropriated the Salpêtrière as a major emergency and convalescent hospital for their military. Wehrmacht banners and the German swastika were everywhere evident when Bruller arrived; dozens of uniformed German officials were scurrying through the campus. What are we doing here? the author must have wondered. But just across the street was a small printing shop where invitations, announcements, and calling cards were produced. Its clackety-clack activity was barely heard over the constant comings and goings of German ambulances and sirens, and it was here where the most famous story to come out of Occupied Paris was printed. Bruller still had to find glue and cardboard for the book’s covers and men and women to sew together the printed fascicles. He did. The result was the first book published by a clandestine press in Paris, a press he named Éditions de Minuit (Midnight Publications), which would go on to publish about twenty-five works during the Occupation. After the war, it would publish the writings of luminaries such as Samuel Beckett, Marguerite Duras, Alain Robbe-Grillet, and others. (It continues to publish today.)

But some felt that more aggressive measures should be taken against the Occupier. On a hot August day in 1941, in the Barbès-Rochechouart Métro stop, not far from the Gare du Nord, a group of young partisans were trying to be inconspicuous while waiting—not for a train but for a German military officer, any German officer. Finally a naval ensign, dressed in the whites of the Kriegsmarine, arrived, and as a train pulled in and came to rest he started to step into the center, first-class car, reserved for him and his companions. As he placed his foot on the threshold of the car, a twenty-two-year-old Frenchman—who would be later known all over Paris as Fabien (the code name of Pierre Georges) and, subsequently, as Colonel Fabien, leader of the Resistance—pulled out a pistol and fired two shots into the back and head of the young officer, Alfons Moser.
^*
Both names would soon be known throughout Paris. Moser was the first German officer to be shot
publicly, in daylight, in France, and with his killing resistance against the Occupation had taken a decisive turn: the result would be a much more oppressive surveillance in the large cities of the Unoccupied Zone and more vigorous punishment, including executions of hostages, meted out by the Germans.

Such violence against the Germans became almost commonplace beginning in 1942. A
résistant
remembers a late spring night, probably that year, along the Quai d’Orsay, on the Left Bank. This was the upper-class area near the Ministry of Foreign Affairs where many German officers worked diligently at keeping the city calm. Undiscovered, two young men had been walking along the quay at the same time for a week, trying to discern a pattern of comings and goings as the Germans left their offices for their apartments or hotel rooms. On this evening, the two were sauntering along, glancing from time to time at the river, talking loudly, nonconspiratorially. Their mission: to obtain a firearm, the most precious and rarest possession of any resistance group. Soon, as they had expected, they heard the assertive sound of a booted officer coming up behind them. They kept walking beside the swift-moving river. The boots approached and then passed them. Pulling a blackjack and a hammer from their pockets, they leaped on the unsuspecting officer, beat him down, took his pistol and two ammo magazines, pocketed them, and ran down a side street, not stopping until they were blocks away. It would be, if they were lucky, hours before the German’s body—for he must have died from the double blows—would be found.

Such events had unpredictable and predictable consequences. One never knew how the German authorities would react. Would they shoot a dozen hostages? Would they change the curfew? Would they close down the neighborhood in which the attack had occurred and arrest all Jews and immigrants they could find in a roundup? For the sake of one pistol, an entire area and the many lives within it might be disrupted. On the other hand, the Germans would feel more vulnerable, less willing to go out alone when armed and in uniform. Not a few Parisians would be pleased that such efforts, though small in the scheme of major events, would remind the Occupiers that they were never
going to be comfortable in the City of Light. Weighing ethically and practically the consequences of violent action became common practice as the war dragged on.

Harrassment of the Germans began almost the day they arrived. For the most part, the perpetrators—pacifists, anti-fascists, pro-Communists, Catholics, Jews—were in their teens or early twenties. This makes sense in a way, since youth do not have jobs to protect or families to provide for. The German-Soviet Pact, signed in 1939, right before Hitler attacked Poland, had hamstrung the most organized anti-fascist political group, the French Communist Party.
^*
All members of the party had strict instructions not to attack the Germans, which gave the latter a year in which to set up an effective policing strategy with their Vichy allies and to concentrate on other challenges to their new order. By the late fall of 1940, de Gaulle’s message—about “continuing the struggle” and reminding the French that a battle may have been lost but the war continued—was getting through, especially to the most ungovernable of Parisian residents, high school and university students. The graffiti that promptly appeared on the walls, the whistling and hooting at German soldiers, the papers and tracts that were published and distributed—these activities were almost all the work of adolescent Parisians. Beginning in the winter of 1940–41, the first “battle” was initiated between the Occupier and Parisians: the Germans referred to it as the
V-aktion;
the French as “the war of the
V
s.” Scrawled in chalk over walls, café chairs and tables, official posters, Wehrmacht directional signs, and especially on Métro walls—indeed, on almost any flat surface—were
V
s for
victoire,
often appearing with de Gaulle’s
Cross of Lorraine. German propaganda offices immediately appropriated the angular letter as an abbreviation of
Victoria,
a sign of German success on all fronts. (The Germans appropriated the Latin term, since “victory” in their language,
Sieg,
begins with an
S
.)

As Adolf Hitler looked down on Paris from his perch on Montmartre during his brief visit in June of 1940, he would have seen a large casernlike building to his right, visible in photographs of that moment. That structure would be one of the most vibrant centers of resistance during his army’s occupation of the city: it was the Lycée Rollin. With more than two thousand young male students, including those in middle school (
collégiens
) and high school (
lycéens
), it was one of the largest schools in Paris,
^*
located in a neighborhood filled with the “degenerates” that Nazi propaganda had been fulminating against for almost a decade:

Nevertheless, thousands of German soldiers visited the nearby Boulevard de Clichy, Place Pigalle, and Rue Lepic every weekend for four years, so the youngsters of the neighborhoods knew well and close up the
haricots verts
(green beans).

The political complexion of the Lycée Rollin ranged politically
from the right to the left, but it earnestly leaned more leftward. The politicization of the student body, and of many of the one hundred or so professors, had begun well before the defeat of 1940 and the Occupation itself. The 1930s in Paris had seen street riots between supporters of neo-fascism, and the right in general, and young Communists and Socialists, especially after the election, in 1936, of the first leftist government since the nineteenth century, the
Front populaire,
led by the Jewish politician Léon Blum. And then there had been the Spanish Civil War, between the elected Republicans and the right-wing rebel Nationalists under Francisco Franco, a war that divided French political opinion deeply. When asked when she had joined the French resistance, one young Frenchwoman answered:

The civil war in Spain, which had ended in mid-1939, had sent thousands of Republican refugees to France. Many of them were former fighters, and they provided a ready-made cadre for military resistance to authority. They had experience in the preparation and distribution of propaganda, in sabotage, in military excursions, and were adept at forming clandestine networks. Their children wound up in the lycées and universities of Paris. So it was to no one’s surprise that the attack on Poland, the defeat of the Allied armies in 1940, and the massive occupation of France’s capital would serve as motivation for these youngsters to let the Germans know that they were not welcome
in Paris. And they were often encouraged by the outspokenness and courage of their professors. Both the Germans and the Vichyists kept a close watch on these youngsters.

The Lycée Rollin was the only high school to change its name after the war; it is now known as the Lycée Jacques-Decour, the nom de guerre of a teacher of German, Daniel Decourdemanche. One day, as his students prepared for their professor’s arrival in the classroom, the door opened, and in walked the school’s principal. The students stood immediately. The room, filled with fourteen- and fifteen-year-old boys, was still; the principal almost never visited classrooms in session. One alumnus remembers what happened next:

Adolescence is a telling filter through which to analyze the Occupation. The unpredictability of adolescent judgment, actions, and responses must be the bane of any authority endeavoring to enforce order and predictability on a populace. A typical narcissism imposes itself on the adolescent, an almost compulsive need to separate oneself from a comfortable environment—an urge, if not a desire, to create a more personal and private world. The result can often devolve into secrecy vis-à-vis one’s parents; impatience with curfews and other limitations on time, space, and forms of amusement; and a commensurate disregard for even the most anodyne authority figures. There is a thirst for an attenuation of dependence yet an almost erotic need to form new affective relationships—often quasisecretive—as counterweights to the parental and familial ones weakening. In addition, there is an intellectual awakening, a moving away from the imposed teachings and beliefs of one’s parents and mentors, and often a simultaneous search for other, nonparental adults to fill in for those psychologically rejected. This makes adolescents especially susceptible to recruitment for “adult” enterprises. A new confidence in physical energy and ability emerges, too, accompanied by an urge to progress into new public and private spaces. It is no wonder, then, that an urban adolescent, finding himself under the thumb of a foreign occupier, is confused, resentful, and exhilarated all at once—or intermittently.

It was not too long before various organizations began assertively appearing in opposition to the Occupier. Eventually they would be unified under the umbrella of
Forces unies de la jeunesse patriotique.
But before that attempt at unification, the teenagers of occupied France called themselves the
Jeunes chrétiens combattants,
the
Bataillons de la jeunesse,
the
Jeunes protestants patriotes,
the
Fédération des jeunesses communistes,
the
Front patriotique de la jeunesse,
and on and on. There was often tension between these groups and those organized by more mature
résistants,
as the latter felt that lack of coordination, enthusiasm, and independence were detrimental to an organized resistance. Yet the adolescents were everywhere, and they kept up the spirits of those against the Occupation, especially in its early years.

One of the most extraordinary of these youngsters was a boy named Jacques Lusseyran. A student in the prestigious Lycée Louis-le-Grand, situated on the Left Bank near the Collège de France and the Sorbonne, Jacques realized, at the age of sixteen, that unlike his placid parents and their friends he was not ready to acquiesce to this new “normality”: “I was no longer a child. My body told me so.… What attracted me and terrified me on the German radio was the fact that it was in the process of destroying my childhood.… To live in the fumes of poison gas on the roads in Abyssinia, at Guernica, on the Ebro front, in Vienna, at Nuremberg, in Munich, the Sudetenland and then Prague. What a prospect!”
¹⁹
Jacques’s “uneasiness was more intense than the uneasiness of people full grown,” so he and a small group of friends began meeting to figure out how they could “resist.” The group named themselves the
Volontaires de la Liberté
and selected Jacques as their leader. It was his job to decide who could be trusted to join their group. But Jacques Lusseyran
had been blind since the age of eight.
The confidence that his school chums had in him was based in part on the way that he had handled that handicap as a schoolboy; they were also confident that the Germans would never suspect that a blind boy would be a
chef de la Résistance.

For almost two years, until they were betrayed by another school chum, the group’s membership grew from a dozen to more than five hundred, and at one time Lusseyran could call on five thousand Parisian youngsters to distribute tracts, hide printing presses, compose copy, act as lookouts, and support other resistance groups. The tenacity of this group of youngsters, their clear-eyed belief in liberty, their hatred of the Germans and their acolytes the Vichy supporters, stood as a model for other resistance groups, though as Lusseyran estimates in his memoir: “Four-fifths of the resistance in France was the work of men less than thirty years old.”
²⁰
One of the main tasks of this group of youngsters was to encourage those other French citizens too hesitant to take a stand against the Occupation. Lusseyran insisted that his newspaper was not a political document but rather a “way of spreading passive resistance. Most of all we made it clear that there was an active Resistance at work, one that was growing from day to day. [Our membership]
was invisible to our readers… The only sign it could give at that stage was our two-page printed sheet.”
^*
21

A little-known novel by Roger Boussinot,
Les Guichets du Louvre
(The Louvre’s Portals), takes as its subject perhaps the most familiar and despairing event of the Occupation, the massive arrest of Jews on July 16–17, 1942, primarily by French police. Boussinot’s autobiographical fiction reminds us that Paris had acquired a new topography for
all
its citizens (not just those especially sensitive to German presence, e.g., Jews and political refugees). A Gentile French student, packing up to return to his home near Bordeaux for summer vacation, learns from a friend on the fringe of the resistance that there will be a roundup of Jews on the Right Bank that very day, the infamous July 16, 1942. His friend suggests that if the young man and others like him were immediately to go to the targeted neighborhoods, they might each save someone by leading him or her to and through the
guichets
(the small gates through which one enters the Louvre complex from the Rue de Rivoli) onto the Pont du Carrousel and then across the river to the Left Bank, which was felt to be safer, less “German,” and more open to refugees than the Right Bank. The implication is that the river has demarcated what had become in effect two Cities of Light. Says the narrator: “On July 16, at about 4:00 a.m. in a Paris still asleep, buses with their bluish headlights left barracks, military camps, and depots and, under the curfew, started toward the neighborhoods of Belleville, Saint-Paul, Popincourt, Poissonnière, and the Temple.”
²²
All these neighborhoods were filled with Jewish families and businesses. Young policemen had been brought into Paris from the provinces to do the dirty work of rounding up Jewish families, and Boussinot depicts them as innocent tourists, visiting Paris for the first time: “The glances of the gendarmes… seemed to see nothing and only lit up when they recognized a public monument: then the kepi-covered heads would almost all lean forward together, trying to catch a glimpse of the top of the
Eiffel Tower, or the Obelisk, or to follow the passing of the elevated Métro above the trees.”
²³
Yet as with Hitler’s tour that had preceded theirs by two years, their apparently innocent gaze hid a devastating project. Jews were in danger because the French, not the Germans, were on the hunt.