Americans in Paris: Life & Death Under Nazi Occupation (45 page)

In March, the camp loudspeaker called Sylvia Beach’s name. She was told she could leave Vittel at once. Mabel Gardner helped her pack, and she went to the commandant’s office to obtain her release papers. When she told the officer in charge that she had no money to pay for the train to Paris, he threw her documents into the waste basket. Mary Dickson from the Paris students’ hostel lent her money for the ticket, and the officer retrieved Sylvia’s papers. A soldier was ordered to escort her out of the camp. Sylvia, who had been craving her freedom, nonetheless took no satisfaction from it: ‘And what if my dear dear friends left behind in the camp were not released? This thought spoiled all the pleasure of release for me.’

Occupied Paris in the spring of 1943 was a harder place to live than the camp at Vittel. Although Sylvia could walk or cycle anywhere in the city, she was afraid of being interned again at any moment. ‘I came back to Paris and hid for fear they’d think I was well enough to go back,’ she said. Rather than move into her flat, where the Germans could find her, she took the advice of friends to ‘disappear’. She wrote, ‘Miss Sarah Watson undertook to hide me in her Foyer des Etudiantes (Students’ Hostel) at 93 boulevard Saint-Michel. I lived happily in the little kitchen at the top of the house with Miss Watson and her assistant, Madame Marcelle Fournier.’ She enjoyed student life for the first time in twenty-five years, taking lunch with Sarah Watson and the girls in the cafeteria and using the hostel’s library. Best of all was that ‘nobody let on that I was there’.

Every day, Sylvia made secret visits to Adrienne in the rue de l’Odéon. In Adrienne’s shop, she read the first copies of the underground Editions de Minuit. Jean Bruller, Yvonne Paraf and Yvonne Desvignes had begun publishing the Midnight Editions’ books shortly after Pearl Harbor with 5,000 francs donated by a Paris doctor. The first was Bruller’s war classic,
Le Silence de la mer
, which he wrote using the nom de plume ‘Vercors’. Vercors was the region where, even then, their friend and Hemingway’s old sparring partner, Jean Prévost, was fighting in eastern France. Many of her and Adrienne’s other friends were writing for the series under pen names. ‘François la Colère’ was in reality Louis Aragon, the poet who had fallen in love with Cyprian Beach twenty years earlier. ‘Forez’ was François Mauriac. ‘Mortagne’ was Claude Morgan, editor of the underground newspaper,
Libération
; ‘Jean Noir’ was the poet Jean Cassou. Bruller also published John Steinbeck’s
The Moon is Down
in French. Sylvia’s friend, the poet Paul Eluard, was, she wrote, ‘active in bringing out and hawking about in the bookshops the Midnight Editions and other clandestine publications and dodging the Gestapo. He was obliged to sleep in a different place every night.’ Copies were sent through the post and passed from reader to reader. Every hand-bound copy was inscribed, ‘
Ce volume, publié aux dépens de quelques lettrés patriotes, a été achevé d’imprimer sous l’oppression à Paris
.’ (‘This book, published with the aid of certain literary patriots, has been printed under the oppression in Paris.’) One of the writers working on Midnight Editions, the poet Jean Paulhan, was arrested and spent months in solitary confinement. He later told Sylvia he kept his sanity by reciting to himself every poem he could remember. Adrienne took a risk merely reading the volumes, but she went further and hid copies in La Maison des Amis des Livres.

If the literary
résistants
were winning a battle to keep the culture of free France alive, other battles were being lost. Sylvia learned after her return from Vittel that her close friend and former assistant, Françoise Bernheim, had been arrested in one of the
rafles
, round-ups, of Jewish people in Paris. The Germans took her to Drancy and put her on the train for Oswiecim. By then, having heard from the Polish Jewish women at Vittel, Sylvia knew what happened to prisoners at Auschwitz. Another love of her life had been taken from her.

To complicate matters, she had to thank one of those responsible for turning women like Françoise Bernheim over to the Germans, Jacques Benoist-Méchin, for her own liberty. Adrienne confided in a letter to her assistant, Maurice Saillet, on 30 March, ‘Sylvia has been to see Benoist-Méchin (it seems that it’s really him who set her free, through an SS general). He was very kind, very affectionate and [he] promised to release her again if she is taken.’ Nowhere in Sylvia’s letters or memoirs did she refer to a courtesy call that she must have found distasteful.

When Drue Tartière asked Sylvia to visit some of the American flyers she was hiding at friends’ apartments in Paris, Sylvia seized the chance. She and sculptress Elsa Blanchard went with Drue to see ‘the boys’ and ‘to keep them from getting too bored’. The young Americans would have been delighted to hear her stories about Ernest Hemingway, John Dos Passos and the other ‘lost generation’ writers Sylvia had known in the 1920s. She gave them some of the clothes that Jim Briggs, Carlotta’s husband, had left in their Paris flat with instructions for her to use them as she thought best. Sylvia’s friend, Sarah Watson, brought the aviators meat from the refrigerator at her students’ hostel. These American women welcomed the chance to do something for the young men whose bravery was bringing their own liberation closer.

THE WALT WHITMAN SOCIETY of Long Island called on Congress in March 1943 to revoke René de Chambrun’s American citizenship. The
New York Times
reported on 7 March, ‘The society charged that Count de Chambrun was “the chief instrument of the pending movement to expel a percentage of the Jews in France and responsible for the establishment, now under way, of Nazi-ized ghettos”.’ Although the accusation was far-fetched, it related to another instance of de Chambrun attempting to use his influence at Vichy. A former Jesuit priest, Abbé Joseph de Catry, had asked René for an introduction to Maréchal Pétain. Chambrun arranged for de Catry to meet Pétain’s secretary, André Lavagne. The ex-priest was promoting what he called ‘Christian anti-Judaism’ to ‘restore the dignity of Judaism and to effect its concentration in a Jewish state’. For a time, Vichy considered this as a possible way around Catholic and American opposition to its collaboration with the Nazis in deporting Jews to Poland. Joseph de Catry had a Jewish ally, Kadmi Cohen, whom the Germans had released under suspicious circumstances in late 1941 from internment at the Compiègne camp. Cohen, a Revisionist or right-wing Zionist, made an appeal to the Germans similar to that made by mainstream Zionist leaders, like Chaim Weizmann, to the British: that Germany sponsor a Jewish State in Palestine, Transjordan and the Sinai peninsula that would defend German interests. De Catry’s ‘Masada’ programme required the Germans to expel the British from the Middle East, something Rommel’s Afrikakorps had failed to do at El Alamein in November 1942. André Lavagne thought the plan ‘could lift the very black cloud that hangs over [France] because of an excessively violent antisemitic policy’. When the Catholic hierarchy disowned de Catry, Pétain’s advisers lost faith in the scheme. So did the Germans, who eventually killed Kadmi Cohen at Auschwitz.

Suspicion of René de Chambrun grew in Allied circles. In July 1943, Britain’s Ministry of Economic Warfare, in a secret memo to the British Embassy in Buenos Aires, accused de Chambrun of ‘organizing a series of holding companies in order to conceal transactions carried out on behalf of the Germans, the object of which is to place looted property in security. Pierre Laval, himself, is the brains behind the scheme.’ No evidence emerged to prove the charge, but a careful watch was nonetheless kept on de Chambrun and his friend, fellow Franco-American lawyer François Monahan. Someone began supplying the American press with allegations about René de Chambrun designed to embarrass his family in Ohio, as well as his cousins, the Roosevelts.

 

Charles Bedaux was the subject of investigation and negotiation, not only in Washington, but in France. Although his arrest made headlines in the German-supported Paris press for only a day, both Vichy and the German occupiers had a residual interest in the millionaire. His name came up when François Monahan went to Lourdes in December 1942 to see the American diplomats interned at the Hôtel des Ambassadeurs. United Press correspondent Ralph Heinzen, who was interned with his wife at another hotel in Lourdes, believed that Monahan was representing Pierre Laval in an effort to reopen a Vichy–Washington channel after the break in relations. Monahan thought that Bedaux might act as an intermediary between Laval, who naively hoped to negotiate peace between Germany and the Allies, and Robert Murphy in Algiers.

André Enfière, a secret member of Charles de Gaulle’s Committee of National Resistance, chanced upon a German interest in Bedaux while he was in Paris seeking the release from Vichy custody of the president of the Chamber of Deputies, Edouard Herriot. Herriot’s defiant speech at Vichy in July 1940 had been praised by American Ambassador William Bullitt as ‘the single example of courage and dignity during the dreary afternoon’. Herriot had subsequently been arrested for condemning Maréchal Pétain’s award of the Legion of Honour in August 1942 to the pro-Nazi Legion of French Volunteers Against Bolshevism. Pétain, who had little regard for parliament or its members, confined Herriot in various locations, including Vittel and Nancy, far from his home in Breteil. Herriot was an old man, whose health suffered from the moves. Enfière’s concern for his well-being was combined with his respect for a man who represented the Third Republic. In his and de Gaulle’s view, the Republic’s abolition in July 1940 was illegitimate because it had been coerced by Nazi bayonets. To ameliorate Herriot’s condition and have him available to reconvene parliament when the Germans left, Enfière, to his distaste, negotiated with Vichy politicians Georges Bonnet and Pierre Laval.

It became clear that the Germans had the final word regarding Herriot, so Enfière appealed to Charles Bedaux’s friend in the Hôtel Majestic, Dr Franz Medicus. Medicus, whom Enfière believed was anti-Nazi, confessed he was powerless to do anything and advised him to approach the Gestapo in avenue Foch. Despite the fear with which all Frenchmen not in Nazi pay had of the Gestapo, Enfière went to them several times on Herriot’s behalf. But it was not until he contacted Dr Keller at the German Embassy that progress seemed possible.

Dr Keller worked in an undefined role at the embassy, described merely as ‘observer’, possibly reporting to Admiral Wilhelm Canaris’s military intelligence agency, the Abwehr. His alcohol-induced indiscretions were known even to the American Embassy in Vichy, which received a report on him from a Brazilian diplomat in 1942. Keller, in a drunken outburst at a party in Paris, revealed, ‘The Germans are going to eliminate General Weygand from Africa because he was conspiring with the United States against German interests. As soon as the military situation in Russia is stabilized, pressure will be applied to France for use of the Africa bases, with a guarantee of French sovereignty in the African colonies if permission to use the bases is conceded and a threat to take the colonies if the request is not granted.’ Keller’s gaffe gave weight to those in Washington who favoured invading French North Africa before the Germans did. Keller was nothing if not a loose cannon, but he somehow retained his job. Enfière disliked him from their first meeting. He wrote, ‘Dr Keller was a repulsive personality, while giving the appearance of an honest man, cunning, restless, ambitious, fanatic, without being a Nazi officially (so he pretended), a lecher who without shame used the most repugnant means to satisfy his lewd desires on women who wanted to save a husband or a son who had been arrested.’

Enfière used ‘flattery and alcohol’ on Keller, who arranged the transfer of Herriot and his wife from Nancy to the suburbs of Paris. But Herriot’s physician insisted that the only cure for his patient was rest at home in Breteil. Keller was willing to accede to the doctor’s wishes on one condition: ‘Dr Keller let me know that one could obtain the return of Herriot to Breteil in exchange for a person in the hands of the Allies, a person to whom the German police seemed to attach extraordinary importance and to me was totally unexpected. He proposed the engineer Charles Bedaux … Keller’s remark astonished me.’ Keller added, ‘This man is essential to us. Have him released, and we’ll give you Herriot back.’

Knowing the Americans would not release Bedaux, Enfière had no power to make a trade. But Keller’s unexpected request made him curious about the American millionaire:

Enfière at that time could do nothing more for Herriot, who was returned to Nancy. Nor could he help Charles Bedaux. In captivity, Bedaux was unaware that the German peace camp had interceded for him. Enfière resumed his activities as agent Lamballe, reporting to Allen Dulles of the OSS, who favoured talking to anti-Nazi Germans about overthrowing Hitler and making peace, and Charles de Gaulle, who did not. Roosevelt and Churchill had settled the policy at their Casablanca summit in January 1943: the Allies demanded nothing less than Germany’s ‘unconditional surrender’.