Читать книгу A Paler Shade of Red: Memoirs of a Radical - W. E. Gutman - Страница 24

IN THE MAQUIS

We arrived in Lyon in the evening, worn out and destitute, save for a few clothes hastily bundled in two small cardboard suitcases, my father’s medical satchel, and trinkets my parents hoped to sell for much needed cash along the way.

Abandoning the apartment on Rue du Pont Neuf was especially hard on my mother. She’d grown fond of it, felt at home. She’d described it as “cheerful and charming, a nest with windows on the most beautiful city in the world.” I have only a dim recollection of the place.

My father, who had viewed the war as an unsustainable aberration, thought that “revulsion and sheer exhaustion” would soon wear the antagonists down, bring them to their senses and put an end to the madness.

“No sane man can possibly countenance war. No sane man wants to die,” he argued. “Surely, when a man finds himself in the thick of battle, when the trenches fill with blood and the air resonates with the screams of the wounded and the dying, it will become apparent that he was put there by other men who will never shed a drop of their own blood, never lose their lives for the causes they espouse.”

He reconciled the incongruity of his own involvement in the war by viewing his role in the Résistance as a means of hastening the enemy’s demise. What he’d wanted most was to resume his medical practice, to heal, to alleviate suffering. His friends’ assassination, the unraveling of his underground network, his own arrest, the vicious beating he’d endured, and his narrow escape from certain death in some camp in Germany, Poland or the Ukraine, tempered his optimism, shook his faith in happy endings and altered his concept of sanity.

*

We lost the apartment when we fled Paris. Under a law enacted in 1941, the pro-Nazi Vichy regime set as its objective the elimination of “all Jewish influence in the national economy.” The seizure of property belonging to French Jews followed. Of the 330,000 Jews living in France in 1941, about 75,000 were deported to Nazi death camps. Only 2,500 deportees returned. Lies and official trickery would long obscure the precise role France played in the deportation of Jews and the plundering of their assets during the war. We would never set foot in our apartment again. Half-hearted attempts to regain possession after the war failed. Despite sworn statements by several fellow-Maquisards, among them members of the Armagnac Bataillon, a snarled, hostile bureaucracy and a severe housing shortage dampened all hope of restitution.

*

Lyon was a crucial center of the Résistance during the occupation and my father lost no time contacting Jean-Pierre Lévy. Founder of Franc-Tireur (Sniper), a successful clandestine publication dedicated to Socialist and radical causes, Lévy found us a small room above a barbershop for the night. We left Lyon before dawn on the first leg of a circuitous journey that would take us west to Clermont-Ferrand, southeast to Le Puy, southwest to Rodez and Montauban, south to Toulouse and west again to Auch and Vic-Fézensac, in the heart of Gascony. Coded instructions signed by the people in Lyon and addressed to a Monsieur Lagorce, owner of a café in Vic-Fézensac, earned my father immediate conscription into the Maquis. He was given a new name -- Docteur Guillemin, a nom de guerre by which he would be widely known and remembered in the region well after the war.

*

It was at that time that I, too, assumed a new identity. My father’s miraculous escape from Fresnes Prison and our nighttime flight from Paris coincided with a scheme to erase in me any conscious sense of Jewish selfhood. This did not prove difficult; I’d never received any religious instruction. All I’d learned is that being Jewish can be detrimental to one’s health. The opportunity to playact, a pastime for which I seemed well suited at an early age (I was told I used to parody Hitler and Mussolini, and imitate Maurice Chevalier and Charlie Chaplin) added to the allure. Outlandish as it was inventive, the biography my parents concocted for me -- just in case they were intercepted and we became separated -- would have made Baron Munchausen blush with envy. We rehearsed, often and extemporaneously. My father would assume a heavy German accent, mimicking the overbearing manner of an SS interrogator.

“Vat is your name?”

“Wilhelm Guillaume.”

“Vere vere you born?”

“I was born in Surabaya, Java.”

“Vat vere you doink in Java?”

“My father was a career diplomat before the war.”

“Vat is your religion?”

“Lutheran.”

I also learned to cross myself and could recite by heart from Matthew, Mark, Luke and John. Owing an absence of any discernible stereotypical Semitic features, I managed to pass for the perfect little goy. This role would be further refined in a monastery where I was given refuge during a particularly perilous mission in which my mother took part. I tenaciously clung to this fiction until the end of the war.

The war, with all its dangers, uncertainties and twists and turns also taught me stealth, alacrity and patience. At an age when children are incapable of modulating their voices, when curiosity or exuberance yields an incessant flow of questions, when fun sparks laughter or a scraped knee elicits earsplitting shrieks, I learned to whisper, to hold my breath, to tiptoe, to make myself small, to sit still behind a bolted door as the cadence of German boots faded in the distance. I also learned how to wait, sick with worry at the edge of a forest clearing, for my father to emerge from the shadows in the middle of the night at the head of a dozen other men. I understood the uncompromising urgency to love him without uttering a single word and to see him vanish back in the woods with no guarantee that I’d ever see him again.

Patience is a form of self-respect.

*

It was in late 1942 that groups of insurgents joined forces and began to operate from mountain retreats, forest hideaways, swamps and caves. Efforts to finance the Maquis with public support bore little fruit. Everybody applauded it; few dared support it.

“Weapons were in short supply in the beginning,” my father told me. “Cells in the area took turns manning a lone submachine gun. Fortunately, the Germans had no idea how poorly equipped we were and they ventured into our turf with extreme circumspection.”

Several French Army officers eventually joined the Maquis. Pierre Dalloz, organizer of the Vercors, wrote:

“They had their idiosyncrasies, their apartments, their families in the big cities. They helped train us as best they could but when a risky operation was planned we had to act alone.”

Jean Galtier-Boissière, the editor of the satirical magazine Crapouillot and author of l’Histoire de la Guerre 1939-1945 (History of the War 1939-1945) wrote:

“Large sums were soon collected from raids on public funds. With the complicity of its director, one hundred million francs were withdrawn from a bank and parceled out to the families of the Maquisards -- 800 francs per wife, 500 francs per child.”

Despite their vigilance, the Germans did not take the Maquis seriously at first. German propaganda chief, Joseph Goebbels, called it a “revolution of the lazy to defend their tendency to do nothing.” This assessment was both premature and groundless. A few months later, the Abwehr and the S.D. (SS Intelligence Service) would denounce the “dastardly acts of the terrorists” against its troops and conduct punitive raids in which dozens of innocent civilians were lined up against a wall and shot.

The importance and exploits of the Maquis are still being contested. Many believe that its successes were rare and limited, and were offset by suffering and an unacceptably high loss of life. If the Maquis had not existed, some argue, France would have been retaken a month or two later, whereas German reprisals could have been avoided, as would have been the fratricidal bloodbath that followed the liberation of France.

Writing in the January 30, 1948 edition of the Liverpool Daily Post, Sir Basil Henry Liddell Hart (1895-1970), the British military scientist, agreed:

“The Résistance no doubt exerted considerable pressure on the Germans. The Maquis interfered with their ability to thwart the Allied advance. In analyzing these operations, however, it would appear that their efficacy was narrowly dependent on a sustained degree of coordination with regular military actions against the enemy. Thus, [the Maquis] rarely became more than an inconvenience. On the whole, its exploits proved less effective than passive resistance. Worse, they invited immediate and cruel retribution far out of proportion with the losses they might have inflicted on the Germans, and brought on enormous suffering on their compatriots.”

Liddell Hart was also skeptical of some of the Maquisards’ integrity:

“The Résistance attracted many undesirables and gave them the opportunity to indulge their evil instincts and to vent their hostilities under the cover of patriotism, thereby adding new meaning to Dr. [Samuel] Johnson’s historic remark that ‘patriotism is the last refuge of scoundrels.’”

Whereas German Generals Warlimont, Blaskowitz and von Wittersheim, of the 2nd Panzer Division, conceded that their troops had suffered “grave losses from the heroic actions of the Maquis.”

Americans, likewise, lavished praise on the “fifis” and acknowledged their invaluable role in assisting two Allied landings. Writing in Ultra Secret, war correspondent Robert Ingersoll acknowledges:

“We were amazed to discover that the Résistance was in fact so effective that six enemy divisions failed to paralyze it -- six divisions that we otherwise would have had to face alone. The most blasé among us quickly rallied when German officers confessed that they had lived in terror in France’s open country and had lost total control in many regions well before our arrival. It is likely that the Maquis achieved the work of twenty divisions.”

General Dwight D. Eisenhower concurred, though his assessment was more conservative:

“G.H.Q. estimated that, at times, the help lent by the Free French forces to our campaign represented the equivalent of fifteen divisions. Their support considerably enhanced the speed of our advance through France.”

*

I remember little from that period. The names of three small towns in southwestern France -- Barbotan, Cazaubon and Estang -- evoke images of frequent and hurried treks between them, by car, bicycle, on foot, in the middle of the night as a huge yellow moon cast a ghostly pallor upon my parents’ faces. What stands out in this hodgepodge of mangled memories is the name of an old chateau: Bégué. In his book, Chronicles of the War Years, 1939-1945, author and Résistance veteran, Pierre Cames, describes its role in the war years as epic:

“[Bégué] was, for the Jews, an island of humanity in an ocean of barbarism. Like hunted beasts, most of the men and women who took refuge in this precarious haven had clawed their way out of a pit of human bestiality. They had eluded frightening manhunts and the implacable cruelty of Nazi madness; they could now catch their breath.”

Turning the chateau into a shelter for fugitive Jews was the brainchild of Father Elie -- Alexandre Glasberg -- the Polish-born Jew who converted to Catholicism in the early 1930s and served the Résistance with uncommon valor. Father Elie had overstepped his authority and taken uncommon risks by defying the predominantly anti-Semitic and collaborationist Catholic hierarchy. He is remembered as a hero of the Résistance and was recognized by the State of Israel as Righteous among the Nations.

The little I remember of the Chateau de Bégué is faded, gossamer, and threadbare, like fragments of a dissolving dream: A large common dining room swarming with loud, restive throngs; a place throbbing with anticipation and anxiety, hope and foreboding; a shelter where broken spirits could mend and, if they were up to the task, train for the long fight the Résistance aimed to bring to the enemy. My parents and I spent some time there. Days? Weeks? I couldn’t say.

*

Recollected with near perfect clarity, two incidents would remain forever etched in my memory. I vouch for their authenticity; I can’t assign them a specific place or time. Nor can I reconstruct with any degree of accuracy, the events that preceded or followed. They loom from the depths of my memory, isolated and visible like the tip of an iceberg in an otherwise empty sea.

Food was scarce during the occupation but members of the Maquis and their families seldom wanted. Farmers gave generously and my father accepted potatoes, leeks, onions, eggs and an occasional wedge of cheese in lieu of honorarium whenever he delivered a baby or tended to sick or wounded comrades. Fresh meat was more difficult to obtain due in part to a shortage of livestock. Hunting was discouraged because shooting guns invariably drew the Germans’ attention.

Despite these restrictions, we could count on our weekly allotment, about five hundred grams of beef, horsemeat or lamb. My mother would remove the meat from the coarse brown paper wrappings, assess freshness by color and smell and cook it immediately. One day, the deliveryman brought a piece of meat that was unlike any other my mother had ever seen. Pinkish rather than red, the flesh had an unfamiliar consistency and appearance. Worse, it emitted an indescribable pungency and was adorned on one side with a patch of soft, short flaxen hair. Suspicious, my mother asked the man to wait while she summoned my father.

“Ari, look at this. What is it?”

My father exploded. “It’s not what but who!” He retched. My mother ran out of the house screaming.

The deliveryman turned white and nearly fainted. “What do you mean, who,” he asked, his eyes big with outrage and disbelief.

“This is part of a human thigh,” my father bellowed. “Where did you get it?”

The man mentioned a name.

“Find out where it came from. I demand an answer next time I see you, you understand? Take this monstrosity with you and bury it.”

The story, as I can best reconstruct it, is that a poacher had shot and killed a German soldier, cut up usable parts of his body, and distributed them through the underground food network. It is likely that some less enlightened -- or less finicky -- end-users dined on their gruesome ration that week.

My father later told me that he would have “beaten the poacher unconscious” had he run into him.

Something my old friend Max said thirty years later gave this incident fresh metaphorical poignancy. Max kept large land crabs in a cistern in the lush garden behind his house in Barbados. He used them for bait and fed them scraps of fish he’d caught earlier in the day.

“It gives the crabs a chance to get even -- in advance,” Max had remarked without a trace of sarcasm.

*

Attacks on German soldiers were swiftly countered with public executions. Staged to set an example and deter further aggression against the occupier, these grisly pageants also palliated the enemy’s frustration while satisfying their need for vengeance. One morning, I recall, ten men, eight of them veterans of the First World War, were dragged to the village square, lined up against the church wall and shot to avenge the murder of a German officer who’d been screwing the baker’s daughter. I saw them crumple, lifeless, on the cobbled sidewalk. Their duty done, ten pink-faced young men barely out of their teens placed their rifles on their shoulders, spun on their heels and marched away, single file, expressionless, robot-like in their mustard-brown uniforms. I remember staring at the pitiful assemblage of inert, scrunched bodies, blood oozing from their open mouths, their eyes staring in the void, like the eyes of a doll. I also remember telling myself over and over that I’d been treated to a grotesque but otherwise harmless spectacle, a dramatization of unimaginable realism, mere cinema. It began to rain and a steady downpour washed away the blood as onlookers scattered and dissolved in a gray sulfur-laden mist.

The baker’s daughter survived the war only to have her head shaved in a public orgy of bestiality and later beaten to death by exultant “freedom fighters,” many of whom had screwed France to the bone when nobody looked.

*

Responding to German bombardments, Allied air forces began attacking German cities. The first raid on Lübeck in March 1942 gave the enemy a foretaste of the infernos that would engulf Berlin, Dresden, Hamburg, Frankfurt and Munich during the next two years. Wave after wave, thousands of planes dropped their deadly cargo in “saturation bombing” runs that flattened most of Germany’s urban centers. American planes released nearly one million tons of bombs over Europe. The British dropped well over a quarter of a million tons of high explosives.

In France, the first major Allied raid killed 600 and wounded 1,500 civilians in and around the Renault factory. A second expedition in 1943 over Longchamps killed 400 and wounded 500. Allied planes then attacked seaports and industrial centers. The bombardment of Nantes, an important harbor on the Atlantic, killed 1,200 civilians when several bombs struck, “by mistake,” an entire neighborhood. In Toulon, on the Mediterranean, 450 civilians were killed. Preceding and accompanying the Allied landings, American raids on Lyon, Marseille and the Paris region claimed an additional 2,000 lives.

French reaction to the bombings was a function of political conviction and varied, depending on the damage the bombs inflicted. Reassurances and impassioned exhortations by armchair stoics did little to comfort the victims. For the parents and children of the thousands pulverized by direct hits or reduced to pulp under tons of stone and concrete, knowing that the bombs came from the “liberators” was of very little consolation.

Resentment against the raids was not limited to collaborators, Nazi sympathizers or communists. Expressing consternation and bitterness to his handlers in London, a key Résistance chieftain, characterized as “moronic and criminal” bombardments that “exterminated Frenchmen by the hundreds but failed to meet the Allies’ military objectives.” Years later, this characterization would come to mind, justifiably, when U.S. forces shelled Vietnam, Baghdad (twice in a decade), Belgrade, Afghanistan and Pakistan.

The depraved indifference, with which the Allies -- Americans in particular -- leveled off scores of French towns and killed their inhabitants, continued after the victory in Normandy. Le Havre, which bled during the German invasion and sustained four years of “strategic” bombardments, was subsequently razed.

But the bombardments also drove a wedge in the Axis alliance. I’d learned to manipulate the radio and could fine-tune the short-wave bands and lock on the BBC for the latest news of the war. (The first four notes of Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony always preceded the broadcasts. I owe a passion for classical music and a special reverence for Beethoven to these four portentous notes). The broadcasts offered up-to-the-minute reports on the latest campaigns. If the broadcasts from London were to be believed, things were looking up.

The winds of war also pushed open a window of opportunity my parents promptly exploited with a naiveté, recklessness and blind optimism that would characterize many of our undertakings.

Hard luck is more tenacious than good fortune -- and more dependable.

One trusts chance more than probability.

A fool is a brave man who won’t listen to reason.