Americans in Paris: Life & Death Under Nazi Occupation (57 page)

THE NAZIS HAD SENT TOQUETTE JACKSON from Moulins to Romainville, near Paris, on 2 August. At Romainville, the Germans were holding 550 female political prisoners. Toquette was one of three American citizens in the camp. The others were Lucienne Dixon, originally French and married to an American engineer, and Virginia d’Albert-Lake. Born Virginia Roush in Dayton, Ohio, in 1909, she spent her childhood in St Petersburg, Florida. She married a Frenchman and moved to Paris in 1937. In 1943, she and her husband joined the Comet Resistance network, which had the twin distinctions of facilitating more Allied escapes and surviving longer than any other network. She had been arrested by the Feldgendarmerie in June, just after D-Day, while escorting South African airmen through the countryside. The Germans interrogated her at Fresnes prison in Paris and moved her to Romainville with most of the other women political prisoners. The Swedish Consul General Raoul Nordling was frantically attempting to obtain the release of all the women, as well as that of Jewish prisoners at Drancy, from General Dietrich von Choltitz. Von Choltitz and the regular army exerted little influence with the SS and Gestapo, especially after the failed 20 July plot.

Romainville was one of the camps that the Red Cross was permitted to visit, and conditions were better than Toquette had experienced in Vichy and Moulins. Toquette’s sister, Tat, was allowed to enter the camp on 10 August to spend half an hour with her. Toquette was unable to tell her what had become of Sumner and Phillip after their confinement at Moulins, where she last saw them. With each passing day, the women prisoners listened for news of the Allied advance that would set them free. One French
résistante
, Yvonne Baratte, wrote on 14 August, the eve of the Feast of the Assumption, ‘I am full of hope. They will not have time to take us from here.’ The Abbot of Lilas was scheduled to say Mass for the women in the morning. But a German guard, who reminded prisoner Maisie Renault of an orangutan with ‘his gigantic size, his immense arms and his powerful hands that seemed always to want to crush someone’, woke the women early. He shouted, ‘
Nicht Messe … Morgen, Alles transport Deutschland, tous mourir … tous mourir.
’ This mixture of German and French meant, ‘No Mass … Morning, all [to be] transported to Germany, all to die … all to die.’ The women were herded onto buses. Virginia d’Albert-Lake slipped some letters to the French driver, who told her,

As Toquette Jackson, Virginia d’Albert-Lake and hundreds of other women who had fought hard to liberate France rode in buses through Paris, they knew that the city would soon be free. From the pavements, people who had not resisted looked up, in shame, at the captives. Virginia wrote, ‘They pitied us. As I looked at them, the same thought went round and round in my consciousness: “These people will soon see the liberation of Paris. I’m going to miss the day of which I have dreamed for nearly five years and which was to be the greatest in my life.”’ The Germans took the women to the station at Pantin, where Sylvia Beach and the other American women internees had boarded the train to Vittel in September 1942. This train was not bound for a relatively comfortable mountain resort. Its destination was Germany.

The trains taking the prisoners to Germany were late, so the Germans ordered the women to stand in the hot sun. One of the women, knowing what lay in store for her in Germany, called out to some passers-by, ‘Hello, down there … Listen to me.’ They stopped, and she went on, ‘All the prisoners and the prisoners from Romainville are leaving … Warn the Resistance … Stop the train … You hear me? Stop the train.’ A woman passer-by waved a white handkerchief to signal that she understood. When the trains arrived, the Germans rushed the prisoners, more than 2,000 women and men, into crowded, airless carriages. Amid the wartime confusion, the train moved slowly east towards Nancy. It stopped in a tunnel near Nanteuil-sur-Marne for two hours, while the prisoners in the sealed carriages were nearly asphyxiated. The train could go no further, because the RAF had bombed a bridge a week earlier and the line was impassable. The SS guards marched the deportees out of the train into a field, where they were assembled in military columns. One woman tried to run away, but guards tracked her down and beat her severely.

They walked about five miles through fields to the town of Nanteuil-Saâcy, whose inhabitants called out to the prisoners, ‘
Bon courage!
’ and ‘
Vive la France!
’ Strangely, a contingent of Red Cross personnel was waiting at the train station with boiled potatoes and milk for the prisoners. A few hours later, they boarded a goods train. The train trundled slowly east for four days, until it reached the outskirts of Weimar. There, the SS separated the male from female prisoners. The women were taken off the train at Ravensbrück Konzentrationslager, built in 1939 to house slave labour for the Texled textile and leather factory and the Siemens armaments plant. The date was 21 August.

As soon as they entered the camp, the prisoners were forced to strip completely. The guards wrapped their clothes in brown paper, as if they would be returned one day. Each woman was forced to undergo a gynaecological examination for contraband, with no gesture towards hygiene. Most of the women, including Toquette Jackson, had their heads shaved. Virginia d’Albert-Lake was one of the lucky few whose hair was left. They were then issued camp uniforms–baggy trousers without belt, a pyjama shirt and a loose robe. Veteran prisoners warned the new arrivals not to drink the water, which was infected with typhoid. It would be better, they said, to drink the foul-tasting but boiled ersatz coffee. Their daily ration, apart from a quarter litre of pseudo-coffee, consisted of a half litre of soup made from swede and beetroot, 30 grams of margarine and a slice of bread. It was insufficient even for women who were not doing manual labour; the diet could not sustain women doing manual labour through twelve-hour days in factories. Ravensbrück was not a death camp, where prisoners were gassed or shot en masse. It was a place where the Third Reich’s enemies were made to die by starvation, overwork and disease. The prisoners from Romainville were sent into quarantine for two weeks, while they pleaded for any news at all from France. Maisie Renault remembered, ‘With a sort of devotion, they repeated, “Soon, France [will be] liberated”.’ Paris was nearly free, thanks in part to women like Toquette Jackson, Virginia d’Albert-Lake and Maisie Renault. They, who had done the most to set Paris free, faced, not liberation, but slavery.

 

South of Paris at Rambouillet, Charles de Gaulle pondered how ferociously the Germans would crush the uprising and defend Paris from the Allies. His French Second Armoured Division commander, General Jacques Leclerc, was ready that morning of 24 August to invade Paris and save the insurgents. Leclerc’s real name was Philippe François Marie Leclerc, Vicomte de Hautecloque. He had adopted the
nom de guerre
‘Leclerc’, when he joined de Gaulle in England in 1940, to protect his wife and six children in France. It did not work for long. The Vichy authorities discovered his identity, seized his chateau and evicted his family. Leclerc had fought in West and North Africa, leading his division of French and African soldiers across the Sahara to connect with the British Eighth Army for the Tunisia campaign, and also in Italy.

As commander of the French Second Armoured Division, whose tanks had just liberated Alençon and Argentan in Normandy with General George Patton’s Third Army, Leclerc had been assigned to lead the first Allied force into the city. It was a tarnished honour. The United States had made certain that Leclerc’s division expelled all its African colonial troops before it left Algeria via England for France. General Walter Bedell-Smith, Eisenhower’s Chief of Staff, had advised, ‘It is highly desirable that the [French] division should be composed of white personnel, which points to the second armored division, which has only one quarter native troops and is the only French division which could be made 100 per cent white.’ Most French units had large numbers of African troops, but the American racism that had prevented Eugene Bullard from transferring from the French to the American army in the First World War had not vanished in the Second. The American armed forces segregated their units by race, and they expected the same of the French. De Gaulle was proud of the African soldiers, who had fought honourably for France and suffered bestial treatment as prisoners of the Nazis. Although he saw no reason to exclude them from the liberation of Paris, he acceded to pressure from his stronger ally. Only white soldiers, French and Republican Spaniards, came with Leclerc to liberate Paris.

Clara de Chambrun rose at six o’clock on 24 August. The French police who usually guarded the Palais du Luxembourg were gone, and her sedate quarter had given way to insurrection: ‘This guerrilla warfare was directed against small enemy detachments, isolated trucks and motor cars.’ The skirmishes irritated Clara as much as they did the Germans. At nine o’clock, a friend called to urge her to leave at once. The caller ‘was credibly informed that in an hour the Senate buildings would be blown up and that our whole house was sure to go with it. The same warning came again from another source, but left me unmoved.’ The warnings were genuine.

By the time Clara looked out of her window again, German troops were barricading themselves into the Senate and digging tank trenches in the gardens for Panzers of the Fifth Sicherregiment. The tanks were well positioned to fire on any armed Frenchmen coming their way. General Dietrich von Choltitz was delaying execution of Hitler’s order to destroy Paris. He needed a ceasefire to calm the popular uprising, negotiate with the striking policemen and free his troops to fight the Allies. While he parleyed with the Resistance through Sweden’s courageous consul general, Raoul Nordling, the SS unit at the Palais du Luxembourg argued for the immediate destruction of the palace and a fight to the death against the partisans. On the lawns nearby, German firing squads ordered French prisoners to dig their own graves before executing them. Cornered and fearful, the German army, despite von Choltitz’s caution, became more menacing than at any other time during the four-year occupation.

Clara did not know that, in a school a few streets away, veteran and newly recruited
résistants
with captured German weapons were planning to attack the Palais du Luxembourg. Their leader, 25-year-old Pierre Fabien, was one of those whose actions, in his case assassinating a German naval cadet at the Barbès Metro station in 1941, had been strongly condemned by Clara. Their assault would give the SS a pretext to blast the explosives under the building. With the clash looming, most of the rue de Vaugirard’s residents evacuated. Clara would not budge. From her balcony vantage, she kept a detached lookout on
résistants
and German soldiers below. The whole neighbourhood might be destroyed at any moment. But Clara’s only fear was for Aldebert, who rang to tell her that a battle was raging in Neuilly at the gates of the American Hospital.

 

While Clara was apprehensive about the stand-off below her window, Sylvia Beach was thrilled to learn that
résistants
were liberating one Parisian quarter after another. She received an unexpected visit from the painter Paul-Emile Becat, husband of Adrienne’s sister Rinette: ‘He came on his bicycle, which was ornamented with a little French flag.’ Becat arrived in time to see the Germans destroy the old Hôtel Corneille near Sylvia’s flat. ‘The Germans had used it as offices,’ Sylvia wrote, ‘and, when they left, they destroyed it, with all their papers.’ Sylvia had been fond of the Corneille, because James Joyce had lived there, ‘and, before Joyce, Yeats and Synge’. Becat said he had come to offer congratulations on the liberation of Paris. Seeing the hotel on fire and the skirmishing near the Luxembourg Gardens, he realized his congratulations would have to wait. He left, carrying his bicycle, through a maze of cellars under the houses.

 

When General Aldebert de Chambrun called Clara at two o’clock, he was in his office at the American Hospital. The Resistance, which had lost its first battle at Neuilly Town Hall on 19 August, had returned to destroy or capture the German Kommandatur a few hundred yards from the hospital. Aldebert described the scene to Clara, ‘Cannon is roaring. Leclerc or the Americans can’t be very far away, but the trouble is the Germans have organized a veritable fortified camp and have posted big guns in all the avenues leading towards us. They seem to possess quantities of machine guns and wherever you look you can see boche soldiers. It would be pretty sad if they eliminated the hospital.’ Aldebert explained later, ‘The hospital found itself in the middle of the skirmish line and was equally endangered on both sides. After repeated colloquy with the German commander he became convinced that further resistance would only entail much bloodshed and the destruction of the hospital.’ Colonel Bernhuber needed the hospital for German wounded, and fighting while the Germans were about to surrender Paris had become senseless to him. At nine o’clock in the morning, he went into the Memorial Building of the hospital and found General de Chambrun. Without preamble, he announced, ‘I am, General, an officer of the German Army, but I am neither a Nazi nor even a German. I am an Austrian, and, since this war is nearly lost, I am ready to capitulate. But the soldier that you are will understand, I am sure, that I refuse to deliver my men and myself to a gang of snipers. I ask to meet a French officer or an American officer to offer my surrender. ’ (Clara recalled her husband telling her, ‘I asked why he did not surrender. “What? To this mob … I still have strong enough means of defense not to capitulate to such a rabble.”’) General de Chambrun promised to contact the American or French command, but he had no direct means of communication with either. He would have to go out and find them somewhere beyond the city limits of Paris. Colonel Bernhuber provided him with a laissez-passer to help him through the German checkpoints.