Читать книгу A Paler Shade of Red: Memoirs of a Radical - W. E. Gutman - Страница 22

UNDER THE OCCUPATION

Spurn Messalina’s advances and she’ll have your head. Sleep with her and Claudius will chop it off. Its conscience subverted, its soul disfigured, trapped in a paradox of its own making, Paris fell with a speed resembling haste. Capitulation led to compliance and collaboration. Accommodation invited opportunism. Parisians rushed headlong into the foe’s embrace, some with grudging resignation, many displaying unmasked, if heretofore dormant veneration for the conqueror. Energies and resources that might have been pooled to undermine the occupation and bedevil the occupiers, at least for a while, were eagerly expended to reap profit from catastrophe and secure comfort from the enemy. Cynics have suggested that if the French had truly believed in, or acted in conformance with, the image of daring and invincibility their history books so tenaciously promoted, they would have either repelled the Germans or drowned them in a sea of French blood. Defeat, instead, exposed the myth and bared a dispirited and faint-hearted France.

*

“If you want solidarity,” Aldous Huxley wrote in Ape and Essence, “you’ve got to have an external enemy or an oppressed minority.” The external enemy was now inside, aided and abetted by domestic turncoats and profiteers. Heretofore unmolested -- though often the casualty of subtle forms of intimidation -- the minority quickly became the focus of an evil fellowship dedicated to its extinction. Said Joachim von Ribbentrop at the Nuremberg Trials:

“You know, I was never an anti-Semite. I disagreed vehemently with Hitler and had a terrible argument with him on the subject. I told him that it was a mistake to pit world Jewry against us. It was as if we had a fourth world power to contend with: England, France, Russia and the Jews.”

It began with a series of assaults against synagogues and Jewish study centers. At first, the Germans blamed the Jews, accusing them of seeking publicity by burning and pillaging their own houses of worship. But German intelligence soon confirmed that the attacks had been the handiwork of French provocateurs, albeit with Berlin’s knowledge and blessings.

Two Jewish traitors brought from Berlin -- Israelovitch and Biberstein -- both working for a special German detail charged with “solving the Jewish problem” persuaded independent Jewish organizations in the occupied sector to consolidate and centralize their operations and resources, ostensibly to facilitate “discourse and interaction” with the German military administration. Simultaneously, Israelovitch and Biberstein helped the French police create a Jewish “membership roster” meticulously compiled alphabetically, by address, profession and nationality.

A French decree had also ordered a census of Jews living in the free southern zone but a happy coincidence of sabotage, confusion and bureaucratic ineptitude prevented the inventories from ever getting into German hands. The list turned up under a pile of scrap metal in a garage after the war.

Nevertheless, the Paris “roster” proved invaluable in three major operations. Ordered by the SS, the raids netted large numbers of Jews. Soon, a mandate signed by Adolf Eichmann, the man responsible for the liquidation of at least four million Jews, called for the deportation of Jews living in France. Logistics and a shortage of transports delayed the convoy’s departure.

The SS then demanded the arrest, at the hands of French police, of 28,000 Jews aged between 16 and 50. Spreading over two nights, the raids brought in only about 12,000 people -- 3,000 men, 5,800 women and 3,500 children. The German report, from which these numbers were gleaned, observes laconically,

“The persons apprehended constitute, for the most part, the dregs of Jewish society. Creditable sources reveal that a number of influential stateless Jews had gotten wind of the raids and managed to slip through the net. We suspect that members of the French police may have warned, in exchange for tribute, the very individuals they were supposed to arrest....”

Similar raids took place in the unoccupied sector. At first only stateless or foreign Jews, such as my parents, were targeted. But the Germans made it clear that these dragnets were aimed at eliminating all Jews, including French nationals -- which meant me as well. By 1942, the number of Jews deported reached 27,000. A year later the number exceeded 49,000.

*

Life in Paris under the occupation was hard and perilous. But it was not without play or diversion, both ventured at great risk and with reckless disregard for curfews, raids and other intrusions on personal freedom. Now “Verboten to Jews,” the Casino de Paris reopened weeks after the occupation. So did the city's temple of earthly delights, the Folies-Bergère, dozens of nightclubs and at least a hundred watering holes where high society, celebrities, performers, writers and philosophers toasted life and liberty with the enemy. A number of classy whorehouses, now the exclusive turf of high-ranking German officers, offered “membership” to a select French clientele less in need of sex than business connections and protection from their ever-obliging German hosts.

My father’s medical practice, which had flourished until the war, waned to a trickle then dissolved. Money nearly ran out. He borrowed from friends and repaid them by selling clothes, furniture, jewelry, bric-a-brac. It was around that time that the Résistance recruited him as a medic. At first, he was also entrusted with delivering coded messages. Much of this commerce took place in public, mostly in city parks. I remember tagging along on two or three occasions. There was plenty for me to do as I waited for my father to complete these risky missions. I would keep him in sight from the corner of my eye while I took in puppet shows or launched paper boats in the Tuileries garden basins. Or I'd romp in the sandboxes of the Jardin du Luxembourg, feed the ducks in the Parc de Vincennes lake, or tarry by the monkey cages at the zoo.

*

In three-quarter time, like the waltz, memory picks and chooses, records and erases.

My memory of these troubled times is opaque, fragmented at best. Episodes I manage to recall with some clarity, like vivid snippets from an otherwise impenetrable dream, are frayed, out of context, out of sequence. All that’s left is a peripheral vision of early childhood, mangled, colorless, two-dimensional insights, mere moments that stand out, disjointed and surreal against the blackness of oblivion. Permeating each recollection, when summoned, is deep sadness.

*

I remember going to the cinema, at night, and scrambling out of our seats during an air raid. It’s raining. I see crowds milling outside the theater, gazing skyward in anxious anticipation. At first, I hear whispers then shouts. French and German blend in a tempest of monosyllabic commands, impassioned pleas and protestations. But I can’t make out the words. I see fear in my parent’s faces. I smell it on their breaths. I recognize the scent of cold sweat. I hold my breath against the sulfurous emanations of matches being struck and swirls of black tobacco smoke rising toward the darkened sky. The air raid is a ruse concocted by the Gestapo to create panic and lure known insurgents into its web. My father takes me in his arms. He and my mother run in the dark. Panting, they take shelter in a doorway. In the distance, the dreaded shriek of a police whistle pierces the night. I can feel my father’s heart pounding against my chest. The sound of cleated shoes grows faint then subsides. We step out of the shadows onto the sidewalk. Our own footsteps, now measured and steady, echo with an eerie resonance in the deserted street. Our shadows stretch then contract as we pass under the pallid light of a gas lamp.

*

I’m sitting wearing short pants on hard wood benches in cold, narrow parlors, waiting for my parents to emerge from offices -- or were they living rooms? I see anguish and exhaustion on their faces as we run down the stairs and race along gray, gloomy streets, our heads down, our coat collars upturned under hats that raise suspicion instead of conferring anonymity.

*

I also remember being taken on endless Métro rides, often on the spur of the moment, but I can’t say where to or why. I only recall counting the stops on the overhead chart and calling out and repeating the names of the stations on the vaulted tiled walls with a hypnotic cadence born of ennui.

Châtelet

Réaumur-Sébastopol

Strasbourg St.-Denis

Gare de l’Est

Gare du Nord

Barbès Rochechouart

Marcadet-Poissoniers

Porte de Clignancourt

The names evoke images and sensations even now as I write them and utter them out loud, one by one, but I can’t decipher the meager clues they offer. In one of the stations, a large poster attracts my attention: Marianne, France’s voluptuous effigy, is being devoured by a large black bird, a vulture with bulging eyes, a hooked beak, a skullcap atop its head, corkscrew tresses dangling from its ears. I behold the silent manifesto, uncomprehending.

“Look, papa, look at the funny bird. Why is he eating the lady?”

“He’s not eating her,” my father retorts with studied impertinence.

“She’s forcing herself down his throat and he’s gagging, so he’s spitting her out. She tastes foul, like liver or tongue.” He makes a face. He knows that the mere mention of liver can make me retch. Experience would at once arouse and sustain a loathing for other organ meats and, eventually, for all meat.

“Is the lady made of liver [foie, in French]?”

“Non, elle n’est pas de foi.” No, she is not of [good] faith. The wordplay is lost on me.

“Does it hurt the lady to be spit out?”

“She doesn’t feel a thing. Even her pride is unscathed.” A sardonic grin illuminates my father's face. Recklessly, he looks around, seeking approbation (or a hint of rancor) from the other riders. Stone-faced, they stare at a protective void of their own creation. Revolted, my father lets out a string of expletives that draw sidelong glances of discomfiture, fear and moralistic anger.

To seize an opportunity is more difficult than to avert bad luck.

*

One day, at an intersection, I kick a German soldier in the shin and call him a “sale Boche!” -- dirty Kraut. The look of horror on my mother’s face is indelibly etched on my conscience. I often replay her words in my mind.

“Please forgive him, Monsieur, he’s only a child. He didn’t mean it. He’s only four. Please sir, please don't....”

And I relive the unimaginable, the sheer incongruity, as the soldier picks me up in his arms and says, “You know, I have a little boy just like you at home and I love him very much. I hope to see him soon again. You mustn’t say what you said. It will make somebody very angry.” My mother’s expression changes from terror to awe, to incredulity, to gratitude as the soldier sets me gently back down on my feet.

*

In time of war, acts of kindness by the enemy are rare and difficult to measure against a background of wholesale barbarism. When peace returns, pain, bitterness and the urge to settle old scores all conspire to enshrine the evil that men do. Memory and hatred feed upon each other in a self-perpetuating symbiosis of spite and retribution.

“Yes, but this was an anomaly, an oddity, a random act, an eccentricity, as inexplicable as it was fortuitous,” someone quibbles.

“The very circumstances under which this random act of compassion took place render it all the more commendable,” I fire back.

“You’re eulogizing an exception, a chance event, because you lived to recount it.”

“It would still have ranked as an extraordinary show of mercy even if I’d later died at the hands of another.”

Die and you’ll be mourned; survive and you’ll be resented.

The debate goes on. I won’t prevail.

Breast-beating does the clenched fist more good than it does the heart.

Summoned every time a hint of prejudice threatens to spawn glib and bigoted generalizations, this incident has taught me to challenge slogans and clichés, to reject stubborn beliefs and beware of unyielding convictions. Convictions, Nietzsche warns, are more dangerous enemies of truth than lies. In the worst of all possible worlds, let tolerance be your guide.

When in doubt, celebrate the exception, not the rule.

Such high-mindedness would be put to the test several years later when, traveling on assignment in Germany, I discovered that many Germans still regret having lost the war.

*

Altruism, in any form, is in short supply between 1941 and 1945. At the urging of the Gestapo, over 11,000 Jewish children are picked up by the all-too-cooperative French police. They are roused from their sleep, yanked out of their beds in the middle of the night, seized in the streets, snatched from their parents’ arms and taken to Drancy, outside Paris, a detention center staffed by French police. Following triage, the children are carted away in cattle wagons. Their three-day journey ends in death camps in the East where, like so much waste, they are exterminated and reduced to ashes.

Only 300 children survive: the oldest, the strongest, the luckiest.

*

“Inexperience and lack of focus made for a very shaky start. We had little more than purpose and will,” my father said about the Résistance. “None of us had the slightest notion how a secret service works, and insights drawn from pulp fiction and films noirs proved faulty and dangerous. Much time was spent on organizational details. A number of operations had to be postponed or scrubbed as a result of miscommunication and confusion. In defiance of a cardinal rule of espionage which called for agents to be identified by their initials, we were each given the name of a Paris Métro station. I was known as St. Paul -- a neat trick for a Jew -- because I met my handlers a block away, on Rue des Rosiers (then and now a predominantly Jewish neighborhood). Early successes, more a function of hazard than aim, confounded the enemy. For a while, the amateurs’ gamble paid off.”

At first, the Résistance took on a political rather than military character. Great pains were taken to gather information and spread rumors crafted to keep the Germans in a perpetual state of alert and distraction. Teachers, lawyers, writers joined in the creation and dissemination of clandestine publications. One of them, Résistance, launched its first edition on December 15, 1940. A month later, acting on a tip, the German police raided a small warehouse, destroyed the presses and executed seven men. Three female employees were later deported and never seen again. Other tracts fared better, some miraculously evading the ever-narrowing German police nets for the duration of the war. One of them, the socialist Libération Nord, edited in the basement of a print shop specializing in religious pamphlets, circulated 50,000 copies a week through August 1944.

In 1941, the Résistance, its ranks augmented by unemployed military officers, soldiers of fortune and leading intellectuals -- among them communist and Christian men of letters -- at last turned to guerrilla warfare.

That year, Stalin had proclaimed:

“In all regions occupied by the enemy must be created detachments of irregulars, on foot or horseback, charged with blowing up bridges, rendering roads unusable, downing power lines, crippling telephone communications, burning railroads, attacking convoys. It is the struggle for our nation’s liberty that will fuse with that of Europe and America to bring independence and democratic freedoms.”

Delivered for Russian consumption, and heard by communists everywhere, the challenge was not lost on the Résistance.

“We were in urgent need of weapons,” my father recounted. “Our arsenal was derisory: clubs, truncheons, meat cleavers, pocketknives, axes, picks, rusty revolvers, ante-bellum shotguns. In extremis, and not without perceptible enjoyment, some of our men used their bare hands. We gained considerably more fire power with the addition of explosives, incendiary devices, and a number of small-caliber machine guns, some pilfered from the men we killed, others procured in England and parachuted behind enemy lines.

“Our orders were to engage the enemy in desperate and unavoidable situations only, and to ‘disperse like mercury’ which, when clasped, scatters into tiny droplets that are impossible to seize.”

Orders were often ignored and lone wolves or splinter groups carried out several daring attacks. The assassination of two of Hitler’s point men in France, General Schaumburg and Dr. Ritter, was the handiwork of a Jewish phalanx led by 19-year-old Marcel Rayman. Rayman was executed in 1944 by the French collaborationist Brigades Spéciales. Meanwhile, weapons remained in short supply and minor successes were often offset by disastrous failures. Alarmed that elements of the Résistance were joining forces and creating a “red army” on French soil, London held back additional arms shipments, thus preventing modest, isolated strikes from achieving greater tactical success. Although a document circulated by the Communist Party’s Central Committee in 1944 added some weight to London’s suspicions, such concern had no legitimacy. The presence of British and American troops in France was to have a decidedly inhibiting effect and the communists succeeded only in securing a voice, often strident and disruptive but never dominant, in France’s otherwise habitually chaotic political life.

*

Much has been written about the Résistance. Opinions and facts heretofore withheld or yet to be exhumed will provide grist for future mills. The final verdict will depend on how one beholds history -- with selective amnesia or preclusive memory. Judgment will also be influenced by the role an ever-shrinking number of WWII veterans may have played in the Résistance. Whether it engages in homage or apologia, exaltation or calumny, a final chapter must justly conclude that France’s liberation apparatus was neither monolithic nor homogeneous. In fact, it lacked congruence; it was crippled by discord, given to dissimulation and often compromised by paranoia. Some of its members demonstrated extraordinary daring and sublime selflessness. Others, succumbing to cowardice or greed, betrayed their comrades-in-arms and delivered their compatriots into the enemy’s jaws.

“These were humans, not angels,” my father would remark; “men at war.” Indeed, many served the Résistance with honor and distinction. Others used it, fed on it. Here was a microcosm of society: misfits, intellectuals, desperadoes, liberal clergymen, Socialists and Marxists, idealists and opportunists, patriots and survivalists, deserters, decorated line officers and madmen in search of a cause. Circumstance and moral fiber -- not rank or class -- set them apart. Common men died like heroes; blue bloods broke rank, defected. Stranger gave his life to save another’s; friend betrayed friend to save his own. In the death camps – Auschwitz-Birkenau, Buchenwald, Dachau, to name a few -- starving prisoners offered their last piece of bread to feed a dying child. Others smothered their bunkmates to steal their rations. Some slept with German officers for an extra bowl of soup. A few became ruthless trustees who could be counted on to beat, torture and kill other Jews.

“C’est comme ça,” my father would conclude. That’s how it is “Don’t try to figure this out. There’s no explanation.”

To explain evil is to trivialize it.