Paris After the Liberation: 1944 - 1949 (24 page)

The resistants survived best in the long run, while ‘
kapos
’ and collaborators – with what might be seen retrospectively as moral justice – had the lowest survival rate. Those who had tried to obliterate their own individuality in an attempt to make themselves invisible to
kapos
or SS guards may have survived better in the short term; but turning off a psychological switch to become an apathetic automaton – they were known as ‘musulmans’ in the camps – made it almost impossible to recover afterwards. Altogether 6,000 deportees died soon after their return, of whom ‘musulmans’ made up a significant proportion.

The difficulty of returning to their old lives was common to all. They were unable to sleep in a soft bed. They suffered from nightmares and a lack of confidence. Worst of all, in a way, was the disappointment in homecoming: their families found it very hard to cope with their depressions, caused largely by survivor guilt. ‘Joy did not come,’ wrote Daix, ‘because we had brought too many dead back with us.’

Their whole relationship with the normal world had been completely distorted by their recent submersion in the nightmare of the ‘
univers concentrationnaire
’. Charles Spitz, a
résistant-déporté
who had worked in the Dora tunnel, found that the habits of the prison camp died hard. Two months after his return to Paris, his wife suggested they go and have dinner in a restaurant. ‘She had bought me the whole panoply of civilized man, including a wallet and purse. But, without her knowledge, I still kept in my pocket a little wooden box which a comrade from Dora had made for me. It contained some bits of string, pins, and other treasures which were precious in the camp… When it came to pay the bill, to everybody’s stupefaction, I automatically opened my box and emptied its contents on the table.’

*

The prisoners of war were processed at the Rex and Gaumont cinemas. One prisoner, just arrived from Germany, when asked where his home was in France, replied that he was from Oradour. The person in charge of interviewing himfainted, unable to tell himthat the village and almost all its inhabitants had been destroyed by the SS Das Reich Division.

There were many tragedies awaiting them, both great and small. In a number of cases, a prisoner reached his apartment to be told by a neighbour that his wife had gone to live with another man. One arrived home to find a child of whose existence he had never been told. His wife was not there, having slipped out to the shops. The man’s jealousy exploded after five years of prison camp and he killed the child. He then went off to surrender to the police. But the child was not his wife’s by another man. She had just been acting as a child-minder, to earn a little money.

Special Operations Executive, whose captured agents had been sent to concentration camps, devoted great efforts to finding them in the crowds at the Gare d’Orsay. Teams of FANYs (the young women of the First Aid Nursing Yeomanry attached to SOE) worked in relays trying to spot survivors who had changed almost out of all recognition. The task was so distressing that one or two of them had nervous breakdowns.

SOE had already set up a base in Paris by taking over the Hotel Cecil in the rue Lauriston, and was doing all it could to help its agents, their families and those who had assisted in other ways, with food from US army bulk ration packs. This had to done discreetly, because it was strictly against regulations. They were all invited to eat at the Cecil, then encouraged to take away as much as they could afterwards.

Apart from its own refugees, France found itself responsible for over 100,000 displaced persons of forty-seven nationalities by July 1945. They included 30,000 Russians, of whom 11,800 were prisoners of war, 31,500 Poles and 24,000 Yugoslavs.

Since long before the First World War, Paris had been the haven for refugees from all over Europe, fleeing autocracy, pogroms and violent nationalism. Bolshevismand then fascismin all its forms vastly increased the flow. Since 1900 foreign communities had swelled in Paris, with Armenians escaping the Turkish massacres; White Russians escaping the Revolution and civil war; and Poles, mainly Jewish, fleeing Piłsudski’s regime. Political fugitives arrived from Mussolini’s Italy and the Balkan dictatorships; then Jews, left-wingers and liberals from Hitler’s Germany and other countries subsequently occupied by the Nazis. Finally, in 1939, came the largest wave of all when over half a million defeated Spanish Republicans crossed the Pyrenees, fleeing Franco’s execution squads.

The largest Jewish ghetto had been in the 20th
arrondissement,
‘
le village yiddish de Belleville
’ just north-west of Père Lachaise. The oldest was in the Marais; but the Jewish professional classes were spread all over the middle-class districts of Paris. People who had undergone the most appalling tortures and humiliations had to relearn how to be doctors, teachers, lawyers and businessmen. The only way they could do this was to lock away the past at the back of their minds and never to refer to it. Richard Artz, who grew up in a French Jewish family in the late 1940s, said that in his house the Holocaust and the sufferings of the Jews were simply never mentioned. When a female cousin became engaged to a German many years later, Arzt was astonished at the depths of rancour and pain that the announcement aroused.

Other returning foreign exiles seemed to inhabit a completely different world, whether on the Left Bank or in the
beaux quartiers
. Gertrude Stein and Alice B. Toklas, apparently protected by their innocence or a guardian angel, had managed to live out the war in the Alpine foothills of Savoie. They had never imagined that they were in danger as Jews. German soldiers had been billeted on them but had not realized that Stein and Toklas were not French, and they had gazed blankly at the Picassos on the wall. Fortunately, the friendly mayor had kept their name off the register.

Their return to the rue Christine was an emotional moment. ‘All the pictures were there, the apartment was all there, and it was all clean and beautiful. We just looked, and then everybody came running in, the concierge, the husband of the laundress downstairs, the secretary of our landlord, the bookbinder, they all came rushing in to say how do you do and to tell us about the visit of the Gestapo; their stamp was still on the door.’

While Gertrude Stein found that her apartment had been protected, Nancy Cunard returned to a scene of devastation. She had known Paris from the days of the Surrealists in the Café Cyrano on the Place Blanche, when Louis Aragon had been her lover. Her greatest achievement was the Hours Press, which published original works, mainly poetry, by Ezra Pound, Richard Aldington, Robert Graves, Harold Acton and Samuel Beckett.

Nancy Cunard reached Paris at the end of February 1945 and embraced a rather bewildered porter in blue overalls, the most accessible representative of the city’s working class. Over the next few days, she walked back and forth across the city, looking and remembering, and saw friends from the past, such as Janet Flanner and Diana Cooper, whom she had known before the First World War. But when she returned to her house at Réanville in Normandy she found that it had been looted and defiled, not by the Germans but by neighbours she had considered friends. The Hours Press was badly damaged, along with all her primitive statues. She was left in no doubt as to how much the locals had secretly disapproved of her left-wing causes and her lovers, especially her black lover, Henry Crowder.

Samuel Beckett returned from his hiding place in Provence, where he had often listened to music composed by Henry Crowder, played on an upright piano. Nancy Cunard thought he looked like ‘an Aztec eagle’ and that he had a ‘feeling of the spareness of the desert about him’. Peggy Guggenheim, with whom he had a brief affair shortly before the war, described him more prosaically, but no less accurately, as ‘a tall lanky Irishman of about thirty with enormous green eyes that never looked at you’. He was so modest that after the war very few people knew that he had been awarded the Croix de Guerre and the Médaille de la Résistance.

Others took longer to return home. Julien Green booked his passage back across the Atlantic on the
Erickson,
a former troopship which had lost little of its discomfort, but the poems of John Donne took his mind off it. Even if the danger of submarines was over, mines still floated in the English Channel. But what struck him most was the advice he received on reaching Paris when he asked after friends: ‘It’s better not to ask after this person or that.’

André Gide, whom he went to see, was scarcely more encouraging from another point of view. He told Green that he would die of cold and hunger in Paris. To escape such misery, he himself was off to Egypt.

Foreigners returning received a slightly different impression; not one of external dilapidation, but of an internal decay while the exterior remained untouched. Isaiah Berlin wrote to a friend: ‘Paris seemed terrifying to me – so cold and abnormally clean and empty and more beautiful than I have ever seen a city to be – more so than Leningrad, and I cannot say how much that means – but empty and hollow and dead, like an exquisite corpse; the metaphor is vile and commonplace, but I can think of nothing else.’ And Susan Mary Patten, the wife of an American diplomat, wrote that ‘it was like looking at a Canova death mask’. But the city’s empty elegance soon began to be filled with those who regarded it as the most civilized setting for their entertainment.

The Duke and Duchess of Windsor reached Le Havre on the liner
Argentina
on the morning of Saturday, 22 September 1945. Their first concern was to smuggle ashore their little Cairn terrier, Pookey, who had been brought on to the ship with the help of an American general. Now they needed to get himpast the French authorities. ‘H.R.H. asked me to smuggle Pookey ashore,’ wrote Brigadier Daly in his diary that night, ‘as I was the most unlikely person to be caught. I hope nothing is ever heard of it.’

The Duke spoke to the large group of waiting newspapermen of the terrible damage around them, and the Duchess said that she hoped to join a relief organization for helping war victims. Finally, after the 134 pieces of luggage and packages had been dealt with, the Windsors climbed into the British Embassy Daimler with Daly. Their staff – the Duchess’s secretary, a maid and their black butler Sydney – were put in the car behind. Meanwhile, the drivers of an American military escort in five jeeps revved their engines impatiently. The British military attaché was still far from relaxed at breaking the law. ‘There was a terrible moment when Pookey was in the car safely ashore and the journalists crowded round for a final cinematograph show and photographs. The little beast kept quite quiet in his covered box shaped like a suitcase – he must have known he was a stowaway.’

Within a couple of days of the Windsors’ return to their rented house at 24 Boulevard Suchet, Adrian Holman, the minister at the embassy, had a talk with the Duke of Windsor – still referred to as ‘Edward P’, from his signature when Prince of Wales. Holman warned him that things had changed since his departure from the Côte d’Azur in 1940. French politics had moved sharply to the left, and he and his wife must recognize the new state of affairs. They should also be careful to avoid French people who were not
bien vus
– the safest course would be to stick to British and American friends for the time being – and they should not patronize the black market. But it was clear that the Duke and his wife, whatever her pronounced intentions to work for war victims, had not emerged from their egotistical cocoon. The Duchess remarked that Paris now offered ‘the most expensive discomfort she had ever known’.

There was no shortage of people ready to provide their luxuries. Count O’Kelly, a member of an Irish expatriate family who had a well-established wine business in the Place Vendôme, was able to provide much more than just wine. Nor was there a shortage of guests. ‘The house was looking extremely well, with masses of flowers,’ wrote Daly in his journal after a party there. ‘One of the best dinners we have ever had in Paris in a private house.’ Others were curious to see at close quarters this famous couple, rather less than fairy tale, but still unreal. ‘At fifty,’ recorded Jacques Dumaine, ‘the Duke remains the royal Peter Pan… his wizened jockey’s face, his fair hair and his debonair appearance contribute towards his persistent youthfulness and make one understand the note of novelettish sentimentality in his abdication.’ Janet Flanner observed that the lines on his face were the result of too much sun and not too much thought.

Duff Cooper’s greatest problemwas that the Duke was ‘so anxious to do right’. The ex-king was still angling for an official position, preferably in the United States. The Duke asked himwhether he should pay calls on General de Gaulle and Bidault. Duff Cooper found it sad that he still hankered after public life.

The Duke’s next preoccupation, however, was the Communist menace in France. It does not seem to have occurred to him that events like his meeting with Hitler offered perfect material to promote Communist Party propaganda. But the Communists evidently felt they had better targets. They pointed ceaselessly to the extermination camps, with the argument that only an international Communist order could prevent such horrors happening again.

Early in 1945, with Nazi Germany disintegrating, France knew that it could not face the post-war world until accounts had been settled with Marshal Pétain and Pierre Laval; but both men were still in Germany.

In the meantime, the trial of traitors who had betrayed the Resistance provided a false assurance that the basic issues were clear. Most of the public eagerly followed court proceedings in the press. The trial that preoccupied everyone for the first eleven days of December 1944 was that of the notorious Bonny–Lafont gang, otherwise known as the ‘Gestapo Française’.

Lafont was one of several criminals serving prison sentences who were released by the Germans, who had a use for their talents. In return for cars, petrol, guns and false identity papers, they kept the Gestapo and the Abwehr well informed and did much of their dirty work. Lafont became a member of the Gestapo and took German nationality in 1941. His right-hand man was an ex-policeman called Bonny, who had been involved in several pre-war scandals. With their henchmen, they formed one of the most hated gangs in Paris. Protected by the Gestapo, they rounded up and denounced hundreds of people and grew rich on blackmail, robbery, racketeering and terror. In their headquarters in the rue Lauriston, they tortured and sometimes killed their victims.