When Paris Went Dark (31 page)

She warns her sister not to return home until they return. She had given her journal to the family cook, who would keep it for years. Hélène Berr and her mother and father were deported three weeks later from Drancy to Auschwitz, only five months before the Liberation of Paris.

These three stories of courageous, naive, frightened, and resourceful Jewish girls have come down to us by way of chance and sorrowful memory. They reflect the psychological confusion that dominates when one’s surroundings are suddenly, relentlessly made sinister. Each of them imagined a freer, more protective Paris than they found themselves in. Each of the three, though not at the same time, discovered that her imagination, in the end, could not protect her from the pernicious efficiency of a focused hatred.

Low-cost housing: Drancy transit camp.
(© Roger-Viollet / The Image Works)

In May of 1942, the German authorities imposed the wearing of a yellow star (the Magen David—ironically, “the shield of David”) on all Jews over the age of six. As we have seen in Hélène Berr’s account, no emblem “narrowed” lives more than the gold star, the invidious symbol of German racial policy. This imposition was more vividly and poignantly remembered (by Gentiles as well as Jews) than any other regulation during the Occupation, and it continues to be among survivors. Neither Gentile Parisians nor Germans could ignore the garish pieces of cloth affixed to coats, sweaters, and dresses: “For the last eight days, the Jews have had to wear a yellow star, thereby calling public disdain onto their heads,” wrote Jean Guéhenno in 1942.
²²
Ernst Jünger, our “better” German, noted with asperity:

Worn proudly.
(Ghetto Fighter’s House Museum)

Of course, having to wear the yellow star gave rise to a devastating realization for the Jews: they were definitely the intended targets of an anti-Semitism that was to be much more vigorous from that point on.

The star was an awkward, if not clumsy, Nazi adaptation of a centuries-old European tradition that was intended to distinguish Christians from Jews in some visible manner. Using the same rationale, starting in Poland in 1939, and then in Germany itself in 1941, the Nazis hoped to use these obnoxious little badges not only to humiliate but also to encourage non-Jews to avoid the despised “other.” The bright yellow badge removed all attempts at anonymity—one of the advantages of living in a large city. Yet the bureaucratic apparatus needed to enforce this law often led to confusion and unintended consequences for both the Occupier and the citizen of Paris.
²⁴
Immediately there were exceptions demanded and approved. Would only immigrant Jews wear the star? Or French Jews as well? What about Jewish citizens from other Axis or neutral nations? What if one were only half Jewish, or married to a French Gentile? Why did French Jews have to wear the stars and Turkish and Bulgarian Jews (from countries allied with the Reich) not have to do so? And there were distribution problems. The short span between publication of the law (on May 29) and its implementation (on June 7) meant that a herculean effort had to be mounted in order to produce enough of the badges to be effective. “In France, this meant four hundred thousand yellow stars needing five thousand meters of cloth to be manufactured hastily under orders from the occupier.… For certain messier professions (butchers, those working with children…), stars were specially made in celluloid.”
²⁵
We know the names of the French companies that found and prepared the cloth, manufactured the stamps that printed
JUIF
in bold, quasi-Hebraic lettering, and that produced the stars. One wonders, as artisans employed by these companies worked overtime to prepare these odious markers, what went through their minds.

The order also insisted that: “The badge must be worn about the level of the heart, firmly sewn to the garment, and must always be visible. It is forbidden to hide [
cacher
] the star in any manner whatsoever. One must take care of the insignias. In sewing the star onto the garment, one must turn under the border that extends past the star.”
²⁶
(Stars were delivered in squares and had to be cut or sewn as described; one reason given by the police for the arrest of Hélène Berr’s father was that his star had not been firmly sewn onto his jacket.) The macabre precision of detail, the insistence that the “star of David” be dominant, the assumption that one would easily remove the star under certain circumstances, even the use of the word
heart
rather than “left side of the chest” and the unintended similarity between
cacher
(to hide) with
kascher
(kosher): all this language bespoke the oblivious obsessions that subtended Nazi racial policy.

The Parisian public’s reaction to the yellow star was varied and still fascinates. The injunction had a palpable effect on those who did not wear the star, who looked away when a Jew passed—in the apartment building, on the street, in the shop, in the Métro—thereby making an ethical decision that had been unnecessary up until then. Everything from eye contact to physical intimacies had to be recalibrated. The star created a mobile ghetto, one where Jews were identified publicly for the first time. Overheard were such snide remarks as “Imagine! Such a nice, polite man; when I saw his star I was truly shocked.” Jews (and blacks) had been relegated to the last car on the Métro since 1940, but then there was no way of telling who was and who was not Jewish. Now conductors and ticket takers were instructed to make sure those wearing stars rode in the rear. One Nazi, offended that a Jewish lady confidently wearing her starred sweater had entered the first-class coach of a Métro train, pulled the emergency cord and ordered her out. She was followed by all the Gentiles, leaving the red-faced thug alone in his newly “cleansed” coach.

By then everyone had heard, or had read, of the laws that deprived Jews of property and rights; many Parisians had Jewish acquaintances who had been rounded up, or they had noticed empty and emptied apartments. Yet the overwhelmingly general response had been to half believe Nazi propaganda, which said that those arrested were Communists or foreign terrorists or black marketers. (One of my sources told me exactly this: as a fifteen-year-old boy, he was only interested in girls and bikes; the posters announcing the executions of “terrorists” barely interested him.) Before the star, Jews could “pass” as Aryans (though their official identity papers were stamped with a red
JUIF
or
JUIVE
). Now no such shelter remained. For the first few days, groups of young anti-Semitic rowdies would slap Jews in the street or force them inside if they were having coffee on an outdoor terrace. The French police, strangely enough, patrolled the streets to stop this harassment (probably to prevent retaliation), briefly protecting the very Jews who had been humiliated by having to wear the star in the first place. But as noted earlier, there are also many anecdotes about Gentiles saluting, winking at, or otherwise showing solidarity toward Jewish strangers having to wear the yellow badge. During one of her walks, Hélène Berr came across a couple at the Métro stop at the Place de l’Étoile: “There were a young man and woman in the line, and I saw the girl point me out to her companion.… Instinctively I raised my head—in full sunlight—and heard them say: ‘It’s disgusting.’ ”
²⁷
The ambiguity of the Gentile girl’s remark emphasizes how daily engagement among citizens had been altered by the appearance of the stars.

Waiting in line with a star.
(© Roger Schall / Musée Carnavalet / Roger-Viollet / The Image Works)

The Germans were understandably nervous about the public’s reaction to the gold stars, as memoranda circulated among them indicate; they commented on the complications of the recent introduction of stars in the Netherlands and in Belgium.
^*
Their responses to infractions were swift and draconian, too. The badges worn by some young Gentiles eager to show solidarity, emblazoned with words such as
SWING
or
GOI
or
INRI,
did not amuse the Occupation authorities—or, for that matter, their allies. One woman had put a paper star around the neck of her dog; when stopped by the police, she grabbed it and ate it, according to the police report, but she was arrested anyway. (The Vichy government had forbidden the law’s enactment in the Unoccupied Zone for exactly this reason: fear of public criticism.) Just a few days after the stars began appearing on the streets of Paris, a German police official wrote: “According to intelligence arriving hourly, Gaullist and Communist groups are making propaganda for trouble this coming Sunday [the first since the law’s imposition]. Directives have been given that Parisians sympathetically salute Jews wearing stars on the
grands boulevards.
”
²⁸
The bureaucrat had also heard that many Gentile Parisians were planning to wear their own yellow stars, either blank or with something else written on them, and suggested these individuals should immediately be arrested and put on trains to the east. Perhaps, he mused, Jews should even be forbidden to
walk along the Champs-Élysées, the Rue de Rivoli, and other large boulevards the following Sunday. And the chauffeur of a Gestapo official even reported that he had seen Jews appearing
proud
of their stars, pointing them out with humor and irony to their French compatriots. These latter were saluting them, shaking their hands, expressing regrets. One was overheard saying, “Just wait a bit more. Today they are forcing you to wear the star. But that will not last much longer, and the few Germans who will survive this war will be obliged to wear the swastika for all eternity.”
²⁹
Another German wrote indignantly: “Especially surprising was the effrontery with which Jews circulated in groups on the large avenues and paraded in the cafés and restaurants.”
³⁰
Some of the more courageous Jews actually sat at tables next to German officers, to the amusement of other patrons. But this would not last long, for on July 15 (just a day before the largest roundup of this period), the Germans published an ordinance that forbade Jews to frequent any public establishment or attend public events, e.g., “restaurants, cafés, cinemas, theaters, concerts, music halls, swimming pools, beaches, museums, libraries, expositions, châteaus, historic monuments, sporting events, racecourses, parks, campgrounds, and even phone booths, fairs, etc.”
³¹

A star in solidarity with Jews.
(Préfecture de la Police de Paris)

The star was especially burdensome for children. In fact, Parisians seemed most upset by seeing six-, seven-, and eight-year-olds wearing the huge badges (everyone over six years old had to wear one; there were no children’s sizes) pinned and sewn to their school clothes.
Annette Muller remembered how it was. Her mother sewed the stars on her four children’s garments and then marched them down the streets of the 20th arrondissement, ordering them to walk with heads high. “Her arrogant gaze seemed to defy those who looked at us silently,” Annette recalled. “She wanted to show to everyone that she was a young Jewish mother, proud of her Jewish children.”
^*
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