When Paris Went Dark (33 page)

Hundreds of rapidly scribbled and notes and letters from detainees were sneaked out of the Vélodrome, but only about two dozen of them have made their way to the archives of the Mémorial de la Shoah in Paris.
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They ask friends, relatives, concierges to send them packages; they have no idea how long they will be in the arena or where they will be taken afterward. One Polish woman even thinks she will be released because her two daughters had been born in France, and she asks her concierge if they can stay with her when they return. The letters provide confirmation of what archival research has shown since: there were no uniformed German soldiers at the Vél d’Hiv, only French police; there were thousands of babies and very young children; most of the detained thought they would be sent to French concentration camps permanently; others thought they might be released because they were mothers of small children; some few—e.g., furriers and leather workers—were released because the Germans needed their services (for Eastern Front uniforms).

Among the thousands waiting in the Vél d’Hiv to find out their fate, some committed suicide—these were Jews who knew that the roundup was not just for the purpose of taking names. Perhaps the most moving testimony of this awful week in this awful place comes from a fireman, part of a cohort brought in to check—unbelievably—for fire hazards caused by overcrowding. In 2007, one of those Parisian firemen,
F. Baudvin, recounted his story for the archives of the Mémorial de la Shoah in Paris. One can still feel his distress sixty-five years later. On entering the forecourt of the arena, he noticed that there were no Germans, only gendarmes and municipal police, but on one side, he glimpsed a few men in civilian clothes—“gabardine,” he wrote. Were they the Gestapo? He did not know or have the leisure to further consider the possibility. As soon as he and his fellow firemen went inside, detainees ran up to them, begging for help, stuffing their potential saviors’ pockets with notes and letters for the outside while pleading for something to drink. Against orders from the police, the firemen turned on the hoses, mercifully spraying the arena and the crowd. They tried to separate themselves from the anxious detainees, afraid that they would be searched, or worse, by the police or the “gabardines” when they left. When they finally returned to their caserne, their chief gathered the five young men:

Some were so young.
(Names inscribed at the Shoah Memorial.)

Baudvin tells us that he had collected 144 notes and letters. He spent the morning finding envelopes and stamps and trying to decipher addresses before he and his colleagues spread out across Paris to mail what was, for many, the last word received from their imprisoned relatives or friends.
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Next to the assignment of the yellow star, the decision to arrest children between the ages of two and sixteen, then separate them from their parents, was probably the most significant public relations mistake of the Vichy government and their German partners. It is impossible in such a compact city to arrest and move around more than thirteen thousand people, especially when most are women and children, without that information becoming known. The sight of youngsters in buses, roaming the streets alone, or holding their mothers’ hands as they mounted police vehicles made an impression on Gentile Parisians. Police reports following the roundup were especially sensitive to public opinion. Excerpts from two such reports reveal this concern:

The French, much more than the Germans, realized that support for the État français depended on the continuing credibility of the Vichy leaders, especially Maréchal Pétain. Already, food shortages, the snail-slow release of French prisoners of war, and declining living conditions had made criticism of Pétain’s “contract with the devil” come under much more incisive criticism from the public. Indeed, the plight of French prisoners was one of the recurring obsessions of Pétain’s government, and the Germans played bait-and-switch games with them for four years. The Vichy administration put a huge emphasis on
Famille, Travail, Patrie,
but you cannot have a
famille
without a
père,
at least according to the government’s own (conservative Catholic) dogma. Thousands of letters written to prison camps from desperate wives must have lowered the already basement-level morale of the French men in the stalags in eastern France and in Germany. And the Vichy government found itself awkwardly caught between the demands of a “new order” based on traditional ideas of family and a recalcitrant German authority that was using the prisoners as a token for blackmail. Once the Unoccupied Zone had been invaded and militarily occupied by the Germans in November of 1942 (the invasion of North Africa by the Allies had convinced them they should protect more closely their Mediterranean flank), Parisians and other French citizens came to see the embarrassing ineffectiveness and political impotence of the État français. Beginning in early 1943, many supporters of Pétain and Vichy would begin to hedge their bets, quietly
joining or supporting the Resistance, which was finally coalescing around de Gaulle by this time.
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If we define a city in part by its institutions and its history, Paris will never be able to erase its responsibility for the roundups, especially the “big” one. These events revealed clearly the truth behind the German and Vichy French policy toward the Jews, and they did more to undermine the Occupation’s goals—those of the Wehrmacht, the SS, the Gestapo, the foreign service, and the propaganda machine—than any others. That is one reason why the German reaction to the breakup of the Manouchian Group in late 1943 was so furious: the Germans wanted to prove that France was in more danger from all these foreigners than from them.

In his most famous speech, on the fiftieth anniversary of the Grande Rafle, President Jacques Chirac was the first French head of state to assume responsibility on behalf of all the French and of the republic itself for what had happened; “Oui, la folie criminelle de l’occupant a été secondée par des Français, par l’État français” (Yes, criminal madness was assisted by the French people and by the French state”). It had taken fifty years for such a direct acknowledgment of guilt to have been formally offered, but this, of course, did not put to rest the major questions that continue to harass the French consciousness. How much had a deeply anti-Semitic vein, dating back to the Middle Ages, enabled the Vichy government in their efforts, not to mention the efforts of the Germans? Many French Gentiles put their livelihoods, families, and lives in danger to help their Jewish compatriots and Jewish immigrants, but how widespread was this phenomenon? Why did not more complain to their religious leaders or the government about what they could no longer avoid seeing as the deportations begun in early 1942 and after children were separated from their parents? What could they have done? Why were more than a million letters written to authorities in the five years of the Occupation denouncing
neighbors, especially Jewish neighbors? What options did the French police have to resist German authority? When the French saw the first edicts targeting Jews, why was there not more of an uproar? Was it because the French Gentiles, too, had been traumatized by the defeat and the sudden appearance of German soldiers at their thresholds? Did they have their own concerns that prevented an active countervoice? Their new living conditions, and the pressures they were under, forced the occupied to be selfishly preoccupied. Eyes were cast downward, and not toward others too far from their circle. “Why not leave it to the Communists and others to handle this? I have enough on my plate.” “The Allies will probably win.” “You can’t trust everything you hear.”
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These questions can never find complete answers, but in a way that is not something to regret. Pierre Laborie, in his little essays on what certain terms and concepts meant in 1939–40, warns us against being anachronistic, that is, in thinking that we, today, can understand what it was like to live in an occupied city in the 1940s. He warns, too, against thinking that just because it was “only” seventy years ago when all this happened, temporal proximity allows us to assume knowledge of such a different time, culture, and spirit.
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Yet asking these questions is what any society must do once it slips from the path it has set as its purest way. Many French—politicians, bureaucrats, historians—tried for a quarter of a century after the war to erase the memory of Vichy collusion in the Occupation; they failed, and in the almost half century since then they have addressed, straight on, their failures and their successes, trenchantly, effectively, and apologetically. A sense of historical, collective guilt can be seen as the sign of a healthy society, one that does not turn from self-criticism.

The story of the 1,500 nights of the Occupation lends itself to the most clichéd metaphors of nooses tightening, walls closing in, traps being laid, lights dimming, and so forth. Yet the strategy of the Germans
and their French police cohort was stealthy, predictable, and almost successful. Until mid-1942, when anti-Jewish operations became more violent and the rumors of a Nazi “final solution” had finally reached Paris, most well-meaning and generous Parisians were aware, in general, of the laws restricting the lives of their Jewish cohabitants but had convinced themselves that the government was only trying to control immigration and “terrorism.” They certainly did not know of the plans to deport them to their deaths, but to their deaths they went: the last, sad convoy to carry children, three hundred of them, left Drancy for Auschwitz on July 31, 1944, at the orders of Alois Brunner. The final transport of adult deportees left on August 17, a week before Paris would be liberated.
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