When Paris Went Dark (27 page)

The young student decides, impulsively, to take up his friend’s challenge and sets out to cross the river:

Once “over the river,” he finds a Jewish girl a few years younger than he and saves her from being caught up in the pitiless dragnet. Soon, to avoid capture, the two youths are forced, as they move surreptitiously through a sinister environment, to find new uses for previously innocuous doorways, cafés, stairways, Métro entrances, concierges’ loges, shops, and the narrow streets of the Marais.

On that sad day, most of the city’s buses (the familiar green-and-cream vehicles Jews had ridden every day to work and back) had been commandeered to take them to the Vélodrome d’Hiver, a massive indoor bicycle-racing track on the Left Bank, and thence to Drancy and other concentration camps near Paris—a very cynical trick. The city’s transportation systems are essentially closed to our two protagonists, for the Métro has become dangerous as well, their entrances guarded by the police and used as traps to capture unsuspecting Jewish travelers. So the youths have to walk from the Marais to the Louvre, and with care. They use public subway maps, posted outside stations, to find their way, but these maps are essentially useless for clandestine movement through the city. Ultimately they have to rely on their spontaneous and cunning use of the available spaces of the Parisian streets to make their way eventually to the
guichets
of the Louvre and from there to the Pont du Carrousel, bringing them to the Left Bank and some safety. Despite the fact that they have become emotionally close during their three-hour escapade, the girl decides to turn back, to find her family, and the boy, disappointed, gets on the train that takes him home to Bordeaux. This is a quite remarkable historical novel, one in which the very restrictions that the Germans used to keep people apart provide a nearly erotic atmosphere that inexorably pulls two of them close to each other. The absence of a happy ending only underlines the sorrow that pervaded the city of lovers during the Occupation.

Boussinot did not have an easy time getting his novel published in 1960, fifteen years after the war. In an afterword that he wrote to the 1999 edition, he places the blame for this initial censorship on the sensitivity of French memory. Few wanted to think about the Occupation and its embarrassing moral compromises. Another reason for the hesitancy to publish was the book’s ambiguous ending. The Jewish girl decides to return to the Right Bank, to seek succor from
the Union générale des Israélites de France (the UGIF), an organization approved by the Vichy government and the German Occupation bureaucracy. We now know that this organization partially served as camouflage for an insidious attempt at separating immigrant Jews from French Jews, and often, purposely or not, served the racial policies of the government. But perhaps more significant to the unofficial censors of Boussinot’s work was the response of the unwittingly courageous young Gentile after his offer to accompany the girl to the Left Bank is politely refused: “I said nothing. And yes, I admitted it: let her leave now, go wherever she wanted, and leave me alone. I was tired of the whole thing. Tired of her. Tired of having to decide, to walk, to argue, tired of being afraid. Tired of the heat, of the police, of still being in Paris, of not being comfortable in my own skin. Tired of the Jews.… Don’t forget how young we were!”
²⁶
This honest memory would have touched the nerves of French readers in the early 1960s. Being in the underground, even for a day, was not a game. Everyone who made that decision had to consider his career as a student or an employee; he or she had to think of the effect on his or her family. The Germans soon put up posters that warned that any arrested “terrorist” would be responsible for having all male members of his family arrested, deported, or sent to work for the Germans.

One man remembers what it was like to be an adolescent in such a troubling environment:

And another is even more succinct:

Such feelings of wanting to do something yet being afraid of painful consequences, meant living in constant anxiety; that is probably why, at the end of his novel, Boussinot’s adolescent protagonist, when asked at home in Bordeaux, “What’s going on in Paris?” responds: “Nothing.”
²⁹
Perhaps best just to lie low and, if one had to confront the authorities, try to forget it.

The Vichy government and German censors controlled all the official press—daily, weekly, and monthly. Radio signals from London were successfully—but not completely—scrambled, and the strong signals from Radio Paris (the official station) sent continuous and biased information to a populace thirsty for news of any kind. Newsreels emphasized German advances and minimized the results of Russian, British, and American successes. The underground did not have access to these outlets, though the BBC did get on the air for a few minutes every night, and the Allies did drop millions of leaflets across France with messages of hope. Still, many independent and organized resistance groups risked imprisonment and worse to spread a counternarrative. One young Jewish boy would take his six-year-old sister with him all over Paris to distribute tracts that described how Jews were being treated; they passed right before the eyes of their wary enemies. And we have seen how paper, ink, and printing apparatuses were as sought
after as arms. The underground groups still were able to print one-page newspapers or tracts in almost a dozen languages in addition to French: Spanish, Polish, Russian, Czech, Armenian, German, Romanian, and Yiddish. Yet the Communist Party believed that louder, more consequential actions would not only enhance their own reputation but also keep up the spirits of an increasingly tired, hungry, and depressed Paris. “Loud” and “consequential” meant violent action, coordinated and effective.

With the Grande Rafle (the Big Roundup) in July of 1942, attitudes changed radically for all those concerned—Germans, Parisian police, Jews (foreign and immigrant), Parisians in general, and resistance groups. We will in the following chapter learn more details of this giant dragnet, but one thing can be said now: the raid not only confirmed that no Jew was safe in Paris, it also made evident to other Parisians that the Nazi racist ideology, and its cynical support by the French police, could no longer be ignored. Finally, it radically changed the more hesitant immigrant resistance groups, who concluded that only force could meet force. A new “generation of anger” among young Jews and their Gentile friends was born overnight. And, at the same time, the costs paid by more aggressive
résistants
could no longer be ignored.

For Parisian passersby reading a garish
affiche rouge
(red poster), pasted everywhere on public walls, some names were almost unpronounceable, and certainly not “French”: Fingercwajg, Manouchian, Grzywacz, Wajsbrot. Unlike other posters that listed only the names of those executed by the Germans, this one had photographs of the alleged perpetrators, a first for the German propagandists. Against a dull red background, the poster showed portraits—mug shots, really—of shadowy, solemn, hirsute, “foreign-looking” faces. Also listed were their national origins: Polish, Italian, Hungarian, Armenian, Spanish, Romanian, and French. The bottom third of the sheet was covered with photographs of derailed trains, a bullet-pierced torso, a dead soldier, and a collection of small arms. The poster, printed in red and black, appeared on walls all over France in February of 1944. The terms
Libérateurs?
and
Libérations?
were written in very large fonts, implying that these “jobless bandits,” “terrorists,” “foreigners,” and “criminals”
were unworthy of patriotic respect. The propaganda campaign was carefully organized; booklets were liberally distributed along with the posters. The accompanying single-page tract was even blunter than the
affiche:

The Red Poster.
(Mémorial de la Shoah)

Who were these “foreign bandits” who had seemed to unleash all the paranoid fury of an occupying army and bureacracy that, by late 1943 and early 1944, were realizing that Germany was losing the war? The so-called Manouchian Group was an armed, Communist-supported team of urban guerrillas, part of the FTP-MOI (Franc-tireurs et partisans–main d’oeuvre immigrée, or Irregulars and Partisans–Immigrant Labor Force), which had been formed from mostly young Jewish independent operators who had been attacking Germans in Paris since the fall of 1942.
^*
The Communist Party had decided that it would be more effective, and would bring more publicity to their own anti-German resistance, if these young men—and a few women—were organized in the manner of a military commando force, or a small, mobile combat unit.

Finally, a coup de théâtre: on September 23, a small team managed to assassinate, in the cozy, German-preferred 16th arrondissement, General Dr. Julius Ritter, the head in Paris of the hated STO, which identified and drafted young French men between the ages of eighteen and twenty-two for forced work in Germany.

The Germans were caught off guard by this surge of violent attacks, and their troops were more and more demoralized as they watched “safe” Paris become a site for both discriminate and indiscriminate attacks against the Occupier. Enormous pressure was put on the French police, who created their infamous Brigades spéciales—about two hundred especially xenophobic and anti-Communist officers who volunteered to track down “terrorists” in the streets and neighborhoods of Paris. This office developed quite sophisticated means of following and setting up surveillance on suspected members of the underground. They were patient, even to the point of not stopping some attacks if they knew that bigger fish were still to be caught. They were experts in following their suspects, always working in twos and sometimes putting as many as four such teams on the heels of only one
résistant.
They disguised themselves as postal workers, bus drivers, even priests; one person caught in their snare reported that the team following him had even worn yellow stars! Once they arrested their suspects, they used the most brutal methods of interrogation, often to the embarrassment of their colleagues in other departments. After the war, many members of the Brigade spéciale were arrested, tried, found guilty, and put away for years, if not executed. In just a year, they managed to capture more than 1,500 young members of the Resistance, severely weakening the MOI.

When the MOI group was finally captured in November of 1943, after having been betrayed from within their ranks, they numbered twenty-three men and one woman. Interrogated and tortured for more than three months, they faced a hurried military trial, were found guilty, and were shot at the Mont-Valérien prison, outside Paris, in February of 1944. The one woman, Golda Bancic, a Romanian, was not allowed to die with her companions but was shipped to Germany, where she was decapitated in May of 1944.

Tommy Elek.
(Mémorial de la Shoah)

Besides its Armenian leader, Missak Manouchian, perhaps the best known of the
armée du crime
was the Jewish teenager, Tommy Elek. In photos, his boldly blond hair and direct gaze grasp one’s attention if only because of the effort made by the photographers to present the group as a bunch of unshaven, darkly hirsute, menacing foreigners.
His mother, Hélène, kept a restaurant on the Rue de la Montagne-Sainte-Geneviève, in the 5th arrondissement, right behind the Panthéon and in the middle of the Latin Quarter. The restaurant, Fer à Cheval (The Horseshoe), was a favorite haunt for Tommy’s leftist friends and for students in general—and for the Germans. (The restaurant had three entrances and thus three exits—the Jews, as well as their antagonists the Germans—sought with care residences and places of work with more than one exit, so it was a perfect place for the transfer of weapons, tracts, and so forth.) Hélène knew German (she had been born and raised in Budapest, where German had been a second language for many), so the Germans felt welcome in a restaurant whose proprietor spoke their tongue with such skill. They marveled at how handsome her seventeen-year-old son was, how much he was the perfect example of an Aryan, with his blond hair and blue eyes. Of course they did not know that Tommy had been active in the Communist resistance for about a year. Imagine their surprise when he was arrested along with the rest of the Manouchian Group in November of 1943.

In fact, one of the best-known resistance acts in Paris had been devised and carried out by Tommy before the Manouchian Group brought him under their quasicontrol. He had taken a large book—his father’s copy of Marx’s
Das Kapital
—carved out its pages, and settled a dynamite bomb into it. He fearlessly took it to the prominent German bookstore Librairie Rive Gauche, on the Place de la Sorbonne. Placing the book on a table, he left and waited to watch it explode through the store’s plate-glass window, behind which were displayed works by German and collaborationist authors; an exultant smile creased his young face as customers left, coughing, trying to escape the fire that was raging. The attack was bold and very public; on the other hand, it was an example of what the Communist underground feared most: acts carried out by independent operators that would force the Germans and the French police to be more alert while having little effect on the war machine itself. Still, Tommy’s bomb drew much attention to the vulnerability of the Occupation forces in his city.

Hélène’s restaurant stayed open until 1943, when she finally had to
put up a
JEWISH ENTERPRISE
sign. In her memoir, Tommy’s mother recounts how she came to learn of her son’s arrest. Tommy’s young brother, Bela, burst breathlessly into their apartment. Tears streaming down his face, all he could say was

Hélène Elek knew that Tommy’s fate was sealed, that he was dead or soon would be. She ran down her building’s stairs and outside to see the fateful poster for herself.

Tommy Elek’s last notes to his family, sent via the concierges of the buildings in which he had been hiding, were written a few hours before he was shot at Mont-Valérien in February of 1944. The poignant brevity of the notes, written by a barely nineteen-year-old youth, speaks not only to his courage but also to his confidence that he will have died for something larger than himself: