Читать книгу The Saboteur - Paul Kix - Страница 7

His family kept asking him why. Why would a hero of the war align himself with one of its alleged traitors? Why would Robert de La Rochefoucauld, a man who had been knighted in France’s Legion of Honor, risk sullying his name to defend someone like Maurice Papon, who had been charged, these many decades after World War II, with helping the Germans during the Occupation?

The question trailed La Rochefoucauld all the way to the witness stand, on a February afternoon in 1998, four months into a criminal trial that would last six, and become the longest in French history.

When he entered the courtroom, La Rochefoucauld looked debonair. His silver hair had just begun to recede, and he still swept it straight back. At seventy-four, he carried the dignified air of middle age. He had brown eyes that took in the world with an ironic slant, the mark of his aristocratic forebears, and a Roman, ruling-class nose. His posture was tall and upright as he walked to the stand and gave his oath and, lowering himself to his seat at the center of international attention, he appeared remarkably relaxed—his complexion even had a bronze tint, despite the bleak French winter. He remained a handsome man, nearly as handsome as he’d been in those first postwar years, when he’d moved from one girl to the next, until he’d met Bernadette de Marcieu de Gontaut-Biron, his wife and mother of his four children.

On the stand, La Rochefoucauld wore a green tweed check jacket over a light blue shirt and a patterned brown tie. The outfit suited the country squire, who’d traveled to Bordeaux today from Pont Chevron, his thirty-room chateau overlooking sixty-six acres in the Loiret department of north-central France. He radiated a charisma that burned all the brighter when set against the gray sobriety of the courthouse. La Rochefoucauld looked better than anyone in the room.

A reputation for bravery preceded him, and almost out of curiosity for why someone like La Rochefoucauld would defend someone like Papon, the court allowed him an opening statement. La Rochefoucauld nodded at the defendant, who sat in a dark suit behind bulletproof glass. The makings of wry exasperation curled La Rochefoucauld’s lips as he recalled events from fifty years earlier.

“First, I would like to say that in 1940, although I was very young, I was against the Germans, against Pétain and against Vichy. I was in favor of the continuation of the war in the South of France and in North Africa.” He was sixteen then, and came from a family that despised the Germans. His father, Olivier, a decorated World War I officer who’d re-enlisted in 1939, was arrested by the Nazis five days after the Armistice in part because he’d tried to fight beyond the agreed-to peace. His mother, Consuelo, who ran a local chapter of the Red Cross, was known to German officers as the Terrible Countess. On the stand, La Rochefoucauld skipped over almost all of what happened after 1940, the acts of bravery that had earned him four war medals and a knighthood. He instead focused his testimony on one episode in the summer of 1944 and experiences that greatly compromised the allegations against Papon.

Maurice Papon had been an administrator within the German-collaborating Vichy government. He rose to a position of authority in the Gironde department of southwestern France, whose jurisdiction included Bordeaux. The charge against Papon was that from his post as general secretary of the Gironde prefecture, overseeing Jewish affairs, he signed deportation papers for eight of the ten convoys of Jewish civilians that left for internment camps in France, and ultimately the concentration camps of Eastern Europe. In total, Vichy officials in the Gironde shipped out 1,690 Jews, 223 of them children. Papon had been indicted for crimes against humanity.

The reality of Papon’s service was far messier than the picture the prosecutors depicted. Despite Papon’s lofty title, he was a local administrator within Vichy and so removed from authority that he later claimed he didn’t know the final destination of the cattle cars or the fate that awaited Jews there. Furthermore, Vichy’s national police chief, René Bousquet, was the person who had actually issued the deportations. Papon claimed that he had merely done as he was told, that he was a bureaucrat with the misfortune of literally signing off on orders. When the trial opened in the fall of 1997, the historian who first unearthed the papers that held Papon’s signatures, Michel Bergès, told the court he no longer believed the documents proved Papon’s guilt. Even two attorneys for the victims’ families felt “queasiness” about prosecuting the man.

Robert de La Rochefoucauld (pronounced Roash-foo-coe) knew something that would further undercut the state’s case against Papon. As he told the court, in the summer of 1944, he joined a band of Resistance fighters who called their group Charly. “There was a Jewish community there,” La Rochefoucauld testified, “and when I saw how many of them there were, I asked them what was the reason for them being part of this [group]. The commander’s answer was very simple: … ‘They had been warned by the prefecture that there would be a rounding up.’” In other words, these Jewish men were grateful they had been tipped off and happy to fight in the Resistance.

In the 1960s, La Rochefoucauld met and grew friendly with Papon, who was by then Paris’ prefect of police. “I learned he was at the [Gironde] prefecture during the war,” Robert testified. “It was then that I told him the story of the Jews of [Charly]. He smiled and said, ‘We were very well organized at the prefecture.’” Despite La Rochefoucauld’s own heroics, he said on the stand it took “monstrous reserves of personal courage” to work for the Resistance within Vichy. “I consider Mr. Papon one of those brave men.”

His testimony lasted fifteen minutes, and following it one of the judges read written statements from four other résistants, whose sentiments echoed La Rochefoucauld’s: If Papon had signed the deportation documents, he had also helped Jews elude imprisonment. Roger-Samuel Bloch, a Jewish résistant from Bordeaux, wrote that from November 1943 to June 1944, Papon hid and lodged him several times, at considerable risk to his career and life.

The court recessed until the next morning. La Rochefoucauld walked outside and took in a Bordeaux that was so very different from 1944, where no swastika flags swayed in the breeze, where no people wondered who would betray them, where no one listened for the hard tap of Gestapo boots coming up behind. How to relay in fifteen minutes the anxiety and fear that once clung to a man as surely as the wisps of cigarette smoke in a crowded café? How to explain the complexity of life under Occupation to generations of free people who would never experience the war’s exhausting calculations and would therefore view it in simple terms of good and evil? La Rochefoucauld was beyond the gated entryway of the courthouse when he saw Papon protesters move toward him. One of them got very close, and spit on him. La Rochefoucauld stared at the young man, furious, but kept walking.

What people younger than him could not understand—and this included his adult children and nieces and nephews—was that his motivation for testifying wasn’t really even about Papon, a man he hadn’t known during the war. La Rochefoucauld took the stand instead out of a fealty for the brotherhood, the tiny bands of résistants who had fought the mighty Nazi Occupation. They knew the personal deprivations, and they saw the extremes of barbarity. A silent understanding still passed between these rebels who had endured and prevailed as La Rochefoucauld had. A shared loyalty still bound them. And no allegation, not even one as grave as crimes against humanity, could sever that tie.

La Rochefoucauld hadn’t said any of this, of course, because he seldom said anything about his service. Even when other veterans had alluded to his exploits at commemorative parties over the years, he’d stayed quiet. He was humble, but it also pained him to dredge it all up again. So his four children and nieces and nephews gathered the snippets they’d overheard of La Rochefoucauld’s famous war, and they’d discussed them throughout their childhood and well into adulthood: Had he really met Hitler once, only to later slink across German lines dressed as a nun? Had he really escaped a firing squad or killed a man with his bare hands? Had he really trained with a secret force of British agents that changed the course of the war? For most of his adult life, La Rochefoucauld remained, even to family, a man unknown.

Now, La Rochefoucauld got in his Citroën and began the five-hour drive back to Pont Chevron. Maybe one day he would tell the whole story of why he had defended someone like Papon, which was really a story of what he’d seen during the war and why he’d fought when so few had.

Maybe one day, he told himself. But not today.