Americans in Paris: Life & Death Under Nazi Occupation (33 page)

Shakespeare and Company had been Sylvia’s life for twenty-two years. The occupation had now taken it away, as it had contact with her family and her friends outside France. ‘After escaping from what I feared more than emprisonment [sic]: the confiscation of the Shakespeare and Company library … I settled down in the little rooms above my former bookshop to wait for whatever might happen.’

 

In 1941, the American Library and the American Hospital celebrated their first Christmas without the protection granted to neutrals in German-ruled Grossparis. The library’s staff together with wives, children, aunts and cousins exchanged presents in the rue de Téhèran beside a modest Christmas tree. Boris Netchaeff, the flamboyant White Russian who had worked at the library for almost twenty years, boiled up hot rum punch and mulled wine. The fireplace smouldered with the aroma of roasted chestnuts. A basket of oranges appeared, somehow smuggled up from the Vichy zone. General de Chambrun and some of the hospital’s personnel came along to help the library’s smaller staff enjoy the occasion. Netchaeff obliged Aldebert by telling him fabulous tales of the Russian czars and their courts. Clara thought the party ‘succeeded in stirring up enough gaiety to forget our pains, troubles and anxieties for a brief while’.

One of their anxieties was whether the library, which had grown out of the collection of books donated to the doughboys of the American Expeditionary Force in France in 1917 and 1918, would survive at all. The American Library of Paris held the largest collection of English books on the European continent, and it promoted democracy through American literature. As soon as the United States and Germany were at war, the Rockefeller Foundation in New York withdrew its funding to the library ‘under prevailing conditions’. When Edward A. Sumner read the Rockefeller decision, he wrote to its board that ‘the Library is being operated by its First Vice President of American birth and, we are confident, without interference from either the German or French authorities … I personally would rather recognize and confirm this action than have the Library closed or its book collection expropriated or seized.’ He asked the foundation to ‘keep an open mind on the efforts we are making to keep the Library operating as an independent American institution’. The Carnegie Endowment cancelled its subsidy as well, fearing the library ‘might become a tool of the German Occupation Forces or of the collaboration’. Communication with Clara in Paris had become almost impossible since the United States declared war on Germany, but Sumner and the board trusted her to keep it open and to protect its valuable collection. Clara was assisted in her task by the French Information Centre’s grant of 600,000 French francs to tide the library over the following three years.

The Christmas celebrations at the American Hospital in Neuilly were far more elaborate than those at the library. Clara recorded a repast unknown to most Parisians, who were losing weight on the starvation diet caused by rationing:

Clara recalled that ‘we encouraged one another by saying “this time it really is the last; next Christmas we shall be free”’. The hospital auctioned the chef’s hand-written Christmas menus to benefit wounded British and French soldiers, whom the hospital cared for under agreements with their two governments. Vichy paid the hospital directly for French servicemen, and the British Embassy in Spain reimbursed the hospital via American banks. The Germans approved the arrangement, one instance in which enemies cooperated while their armies savaged each other on the battlefield. The hospital usually cared for about one hundred French and thirty to forty British casualties at a time. When the soldiers’ wounds healed, most of them could look forward only to German prison camps, Oflags for the officers and Stalags for the men. A fortunate minority disappeared via the underground railway to Britain, sent secretly in civilian clothes by Dr Jackson. He accomplished this ‘under the Germans’ very noses’, as well as the nose of General de Chambrun.

IN MID-JANUARY, THE GERMANS relaxed the requirement for the Americans in Occupied France to report weekly to the German military. Instead, they could go to the local French police. The American Legation in Switzerland notified the State Department in February that, while a few hundred American men were being held in camps, ‘no women yet interned, men over sixty and needing medical care liberated and Americans form separate group from other foreigners’. The Swiss Consulate, representing American interests in Paris, relayed a message from the German authorities to the American Legation in Berne that the internments ‘should be considered exclusively as a provisional measure and that each case will be examined separately’.

‘The German authorities eased restrictions on 340 American hostages held at Compiègne,’ United Press reported from Vichy on 29 January 1942, ‘and indicated some physicians needed in American hospitals in Paris may be released if the hostage quota is maintained by internment of other Americans in their places, it was learned today.’ The dispatch added that the Germans, who allowed the men to keep radios and receive family visits, had improved conditions ‘to insure good treatment of German nationals in the United States’.

Mme Edmond Gillet, director of social services for the French Red Cross, was the first official to send a full report on Frontstalag 122 to the American Embassy in Vichy. On 27 January, she wrote to diplomat S. Pinckney Tuck, requesting that he ‘consider this information confidential, in other words to use it only in so far as concerns the assistance to be given to the Americans’. Frontstalag 122 was not one camp, but several. Mme Gillet listed Sector A for 1,200 French communists and other political internees, 300 Russians and sixty Yugoslavs. The Americans were in Sector B with other civilians whose countries were at war with Germany. Sector C was for 1,200 Jews, who had been ‘arrested in Paris [and] were interned in the camp as a measure of retaliation. They are subject to particularly harsh treatment.’ She added, ‘They are not allowed to receive packages, letters or visits. But, among the interned Americans are a few Jews who are allowed to benefit from the treatment granted to Americans. This creates a very delicate situation.’

The Germans, who directed the camp from the
Militärbefehlshaber in Frankreich
(Military Governor in France) Headquarters at the Hôtel Majestic in Paris, informed Mme Gillet that the Americans were given ‘preferential treatment’. They, unlike the other prisoners, were allowed to receive two family visits, two letters and three postcards each month and parcels of food from the Red Cross. ‘At the same time,’ she wrote, ‘the French Red Cross, in cooperation with the American Hospital and the American Library, made a shipment of books, armchairs, tables, chairs and various other articles for the creation of a Camp Recreation Center.’ Clara Longworth de Chambrun opened a branch of the American Library in the camp, and one of the prisoners was made camp librarian. The French Red Cross was assiduous in providing care to the Americans, shipping them ‘three tons of sanitary products and foodstuffs’ in the first week.

Vichy was not at war with the United States, and the two governments retained diplomatic relations. No Americans were interned in the Unoccupied Zone. French police in Paris did not assist the Germans, as they had with the Jews, in incarcerating American citizens. The Vichy authorities extended the licences of the three American banks still doing business in France, Chase Bank, J. P. Morgan and Guaranty Trust. The Germans allowed them to keep branches staffed by French employees in Paris. Chase had already appointed Carlos Niedermann, who was Swiss, to replace its American manager in Paris in February 1941. In 1942, its Parisian deposits, including those of German nationals, increased despite the war between Germany and the United States. Meanwhile, the American Club, American Express and the American private schools in Paris closed. ‘Institutions such as the American Hospital and the American Library,’ the
New York Times
reported from Vichy on 29 January, ‘operated by foundations and open to the French as well as Americans, have not been confiscated, although the Germans hesitated a long time before abandoning claims to the hospital, which is one of the most modern and best equipped in Europe.’ The American Chamber of Commerce stayed open to protect American businesses under the direction of acting secretary George Verité.

Mme Gillet of the French Red Cross contacted General de Chambrun at the American Hospital, and he donated medical supplies to Frontstalag 122. The hospital had no linen or blankets to spare, but it sent medical teams to the camp. Some internees were brought to Neuilly for treatment. Otto Gresser recalled, ‘These patients were not at all eager to get well very fast. As soon as they were cured, we had to promise the Germans that they had to return to the civilian camps until the war was over.’ Jackson and Gresser put some of the internees on a prolonged ‘unwell’ list in a ward for the elderly. This kept beds full and internees out of the detention camps. Many of the 340 men interned in January were released within a few weeks. Dr Morris Sanders was not released until the end of April, when he was allowed to resume work at the American Hospital.

Apart from auditing the American Hospital’s annual accounts, there was ‘no other interference by the German authorities’. This left Otto Gresser free to scavenge necessary but contraband supplies and allowed Sumner Jackson to hide the British, and later American, flyers whose planes had been downed in France. The escape network was becoming more sophisticated, as the Resistance developed skills in forging papers, keeping safe houses, crossing the Line of Demarcation and deceiving the Germans. Routes that took Allied soldiers to safety also served to deliver photographs of German military installations and other intelligence to London. The Germans penetrated some of the networks and arrested their members. By the spring of 1942, they had not captured any Allied soldiers, whether escaped prisoners or downed airmen, on routes that began in the American Hospital of Paris. When the men reached England, they told their commanders about a patriot named Sumner Waldron Jackson.

 

With fewer Americans in Paris and most French prisoners of war in Germany, Aldebert de Chambrun sought new ways to fill the hospital with non-German patients. A proposal came in January 1942 from Dr Alexis Carrel, a Nobel Prize-winning French physician who had conducted research in America in 1906 at the then-new Rockefeller Institute. Carrel was a friend and mentor of Charles Lindbergh, who had moved to Paris for a time after the kidnapping and murder of his baby son in New Jersey in 1932. The two men had designed a blood profusion pump that allowed human organs to survive outside the body, an early aid to organ transplants.
Time
magazine had pictured the two with their pump on its cover of 13 June 1938. Carrel’s medical talent was undisputed, but his views on race and eugenics mirrored the Nazis’. His
L’Homme, cet inconnu
(
Man, This Unknown
) in 1935 recommended that the criminally insane and other undesirables ‘should be humanely and economically disposed of in small euthanistic institutions supplied with gases’. Carrel had no objections to Nazi euthanasia of ‘defectives’, but attacking France was another matter. From the beginning of the war in 1939 to the fall of France, Dr Carrel took an active part in the struggle against Germany, directing the French army’s Commission for Oxygen Therapy. He warned Lindbergh, who fronted the largest anti-war movement in the United States, American First, ‘It’s the Nazis who are destroying western civilization. It’s the Nazis!’

Dr Carrel requested the use of a laboratory in the American Hospital for his French Institute for the Study of Human Problems to research workplace injuries and establish standard first aid treatments. Its goal of sending injured men back to work quickly and efficiently would have appealed to Charles Bedaux. De Chambrun accepted Carrel’s proposal and approached the French state railway company, Société Nationale des Chemins de Fer, to send its workers to the American Hospital. In March, the hospital designated forty beds for SNCF labourers suffering industrial accidents or wounded in trains bombed by the Allies or sabotaged by the Resistance. ‘From this time on our 250 beds were nearly always occupied,’ de Chambrun wrote. Occupied beds meant no space for German troops and independence for the hospital. Dr Jackson cared for many of the
cheminots
, railway-men, who were among the first groups of workers to organize resistance to the occupation.

 

Along with the other Americans in Paris, Sylvia Beach reported each week to her local police station. ‘There were so few Americans [in the 6th Arrondissement] that our names were in a sort of scrapbook that was always getting mislaid,’ she wrote. ‘I used to find it for the Commissaire. Opposite my name and antecedents was the notation: “has no horse”. I could never find out why.’ From then on, ‘the Gestapo kept track of me, and they’d come to see me all the time’.

In January 1942, freezing weather proved more of a problem than the time-consuming search for food. Adrienne wrote, ‘Hardest to put up with, we are all of the same opinion, is the cold. In the bookshop, where I have had a wood stove installed, it is livable, but my apartment, like those of most people, is glacial; I can neither read nor write.’ Sylvia, in her solitary flat above the now-empty bookshop, was finding winter equally bleak: ‘I shared the strange occupied life of my French friends, without heat and food dwindling. Electricity was limited, we gave up any ration of coal for a little gas an hour at noon, finally none at all as we combined rations with whoever cooked a meal at noon. I took my lunch at Adrienne’s. I had a quarter of a litre of milk a day as I didn’t eat meat, and extra macaroni.’ Women were not given rations for tobacco, as men were, and there was no longer any chocolate, sugar or coffee for anyone–except on the black market. Contraband coffee cost $8 a pound, eggs $2 a dozen, chickens $5 each and cigarettes about $2 a pack–almost ten times their pre-war prices. ‘An average bottle of wine, which before the war cost 8 or 10 cents, now costs 60 cents,’ reported the
New York Times
in April 1942. When Adrienne realized one day that she had no cooking fat left, Sylvia watched her burst into tears.