When Paris Went Dark (32 page)

Closed to Jewish children.
(Mémorial de la Shoah)

But what was worse than being paraded by offended parents was having to go to school. We all know that children, after a certain age, want to fit in, not to stand out, so it is not hard to imagine what happened when a child appeared in class (especially in a class with few Jewish children) wearing a huge yellow star. The Gentile parents of many children had not prepared them for seeing their Jewish friends so distinguished, and their first reactions were often humorous, teasing, and occasionally bullying. At school, Muller noticed that her non-Jewish friends stopped asking her for playdates; more significantly, she remembered a very
pretty, blond, blue-eyed girl from a very well-off family, a young icon for all the other kids, who showed up the same day with a bright star on her chest. Even Annette was surprised. This was not the only eyebrow-raising event: many folks were surprised to see so many stars on people who did not “look Jewish.” Noted Biélinky:

Even the children.
(Mémorial de la Shoah)

The caricatures that the Germans had been promulgating for more than two years, that Jews were all quasi-Semitic, with pendulous lips,
large hands, hooked noses, frizzy hair, and small, greedy eyes, were seen as just that: exaggerations.

Despite this upending of stereotypes, her mother’s courage, and her pride in being Jewish, Annette Muller concluded at that young age that “to be Jewish meant to be dirty, disgraceful, shameful. That shame—I felt it in the street when people turned away at the sight of the star, which marked us like a hateful and stinking stain. Was this what it meant to be Jewish? That’s what I was, and I was ashamed. I wanted so much to be like the others, good people, clean and proper.”
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The attention that the new edicts were increasingly directing toward children also made Jewish youngsters feel uncomfortably “special.” Parks were closed to them; fairs, festivals, puppet theaters, sailing ponds, athletic teams similarly denied them. They had to stay close to home, and be there after 6:00 p.m.

Another French Jew, seventy-year-old Edgar Sée, left us a much more oblique memoir—only recently published, a short notebook of the last year of his life in Paris—which helps us understand why so many star-wearing Jews did not leave the city and even managed to survive, though not he. Sée was an eminent attorney, teacher of law, and active member of his Jewish community. His family had deep roots in the Alsatian community and had been French for at least two centuries. In his diary, he describes a day just after the imposition of the star when he met an elderly Gentile couple on a walk along the Seine: “[They] questioned me about the star, assuring me of their respect and sympathy, just as had previously numerous ecclesiastics, individuals, [and] working-class people especially; [some] would get up to give me their seat in the Métro, or allow me to advance in line because of the restrictions put on our shopping times, etc.”
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He was arrested along with other Jews on his street, the elegant Avenue Victor-Hugo, in a roundup occasioned by the assassination of a German official in his neighborhood. The detained were promptly sent to Drancy. Sée had thought he might be safe from such scrutiny, for he had a friend in the German embassy with whom he had worked for more than ten years when he was younger, but even though that colleague wrote a letter the day after his arrest (“Although he is a Jew, and seventy years old, for years [he] has defended German
interests [and] merits the protection of Germany”
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), it was ignored by higher-ups, and Sée was deported two weeks later. He did not return.

Sée was caught up in the self-deception of many French Jews, especially wealthy and well-connected ones, such as Hélène Berr’s father, that somehow they could ride out the disaster that was surrounding them, encroaching daily on their lives. If they gave up their arms and radios, if they renewed their IDs, if they wore punctiliously the yellow star, if they rode the last car of the Métro train, they would be fine. “[These French Jews] could not bring themselves to believe that the same men would commit in France the same infamies [they were carrying out in the east]. The country of the rights of man had its traditions and would preserve them.”
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In his unpublished manuscript, the late Berkeley historian Gerard Caspary, a Jewish survivor, annotated an extensive correspondence between his mother, Sophie, and her mother, Martha, who had been living in Sweden since the early 1930s. The letters were written in the early 1940s, as the Germans focused their attention on the Jews of Paris, and he wrote in his introduction that there was a distinct disconnection between what was happening to Jews in the city and in France and the daily lives of the Casparys in Sèvres, just beyond the limits of the capital. On the one hand, mother and daughter, now separated from each other not only by distance but by war, were writing as if the separation were only temporary and could be resolved by either emigration or good luck. On the other hand, the letters speak of the daily problems of living in an occupied environment; but slowly the persecution of Jews, especially the limitations placed on their daily lives, seeps into the correspondence.
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Knowledge of what was going
on around them gives an aura of solemnity to even the most mundane observations. There is much discussion about cost of living, money transfers, clothing for a fast-growing teenager, cold, and foodstuffs. His mother is proud that Gerard can take the Métro to Paris to go to movies or to accompany his classmates on field trips. Little by little, though, coded terms begin to appear in the letters between mother and daughter that signal deportations, plans for escape, and war news. The yellow star legislation receives only an oblique mention, yet it is obvious that every trip far from their abode, especially into Paris, was fraught with danger. Parisian friends were disappearing, and roundup news was passing fast through the innumerable grapevines that connected Jewish households. Caspary wrote of a “mad sort of normality,” a description of Jews’ efforts to avoid trouble and act as if everything were fine. It remains impossible to know whether Sophie’s letters were written this way because of censors who were reading them, or because she was making a doomed effort to find normality in an upturned world.

Caspary had been born in Frankfurt and came to France with his parents around the age of four. He kept his Jewish origins to himself and only told a French friend or two about his ethnic heritage. He was surprised one day when his teacher told him that he had come in first in a competition but was going to be awarded second prize because he was Jewish. It was the first time the outside world had made a point of his Jewishness. Then came the day when he had to wear the yellow star to class for the first time. His mother told him to be proud, to hold his head up; but he wanted to do that for her sake, not because he was proud: “I was absolutely terrified. Previously I had told only one boy in school that I was a Jew.… When I knew that the Jewish star was coming I told no one of my fears except Claude [his friend], who swore that though all the other kids would turn against me he would stick with me… no matter what.” To his surprise, the school principal had announced to all his students that anyone bullying or otherwise making fun of a Jewish boy would never receive a recommendation from him; in fact, he would be sure that others would not write recommendations for them, either. This did not really mollify poor Caspary.
Unbeknownst to him, his mother, “hating and fearing authority figures as much as she did, but knowing how scared I was, must, on her own and without telling me… have gone to the principal and asked him to do something.”
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Caspary described the arrest of his parents by French police succinctly, but quite effectively:

Caspary thinks that the police might have been giving his parents a warning, but he never found out, and they were taken like squirrels in a trap. The police offered to let the teenager go (he was only fourteen) if his parents could find a place for him. Sophie called a friend; Caspary embraced his parents and left the house in tears, on his way to a new, safer, and lonelier life. He never saw them again.

The French finally remember: Vichy police arrested Jewish children.

Just six weeks after Jews had been ordered to wear the yellow star came the Grande Rafle. Over two days and in dozens of Parisian neighborhoods, thirteen thousand foreign and French Jews were taken from their homes, from their hiding places, from hospitals, from schools, retirement homes, even asylums. As a result of this enormous dragnet, more Jews with French citizenship were caught than ever before. Finally, and most poignantly, more than four thousand children, ranging in age from about two to fourteen, were collected and deported. Many children were abducted from their classrooms, from their kindergartens, and from their nurseries before the eyes of their classmates and teachers. A casual walk through the Marais and other sections of Paris today will reveal plaques that commemorate those events and the numbers involved. Some children were not taken, but when they returned home they found their parents gone and the apartment doors sealed. Or they found the seals broken because neighbors and the concierge had broken in to take possession of objects or the
space itself. One police record reports a Gentile neighbor asking, on behalf of a Jewish girl, if she could go into her parents’ apartment to collect a change of clothes.
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Some mothers had left their babies in their cribs, unnoticed by the police because they were not on any list; some had hidden them in closets or in hideaways prepared months in advance. One father kept repeating to his friends: “My ten-month-old is all alone; I didn’t have time to give a key to the concierge, and I don’t know where my wife is!” Sympathetic Gentiles had, fortunately, carried off a few youngsters before the Grande Rafle; and many had been grabbed out of lines, ready to mount buses for Drancy and the Vélodrome d’Hiver. But many more were roaming around a dreadfully quiet neighborhood after the buses had taken away their parents. The neighbors they knew had been carried away, too; most of the children did not know the area around their quarter well at all, for their parents had forbidden them to leave the street or block. They had no money, though we do know that some prescient parents had sewn francs into the hems of their clothing just in case. Fortunately, they did have one organized group of saviors: the Éclaireurs israélites de France, the Jewish scouting organization, similar to the Boy Scouts in Great Britain and the United States. (There were female members, too, and later the name of the organization was changed to include “Éclaireuses.”) These teenagers, who themselves had escaped arrest because they had been living in other areas, were well organized, and their leaders sent them out immediately on July 17 to search the streets for wandering children. They found hundreds of them and took them first to temporary orphanages in Paris, then later, when they could, to the countryside. In this way, thousands of youngsters were saved and survived the war, generally in hiding. Occasionally, groups of children would be denounced by anti-Semitic French citizens and deported, but overall the French people can look with pride at their active participation in being among the “Justes” and in saving these young Jews.
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Nevertheless, the toll was horrific, as was the complicity. The pressure on the Vichy government from the Germans, who felt that the Parisian police and the Vichy masters were dragging their feet on arresting and deporting all Jews living in France, had been enormous. They knew, too, that the Italians were not as fanatic as they were, and that as a result many Jews were living in relative safety both in the Unoccupied Zone and in the zone controlled by the Italians in the far southeastern part of the country. This situation especially offended the Commissariat Général aux Questions Juives, that their allies were protecting so many Jews.

Wishing to palliate the German Reich, with which he was still hoping to establish some sort of alliance, the ever canny Pierre Laval, who had returned to head the Vichy government in April of that year, knew that he had to win over (and outmaneuver) a hesitant Pétain, assuring the old Maréchal that only foreign Jews would be rounded up in this massive action. Pétain, it appears, was concerned that his own integrity would be besmirched should word spread (which it did) that the French government was in effect doing the Nazis’ bidding regarding deportation. It is unclear who decided that “families should not be separated,” a decision that would permit the roundup of children with their parents. The blame most often goes to Laval; Pétain always denied knowledge of this decision. We do know that it was not originally a German priority; why would they want to be responsible for the imprisonment and transport of thousands of children? They had even suggested that churches and Jewish orphanages take care of the young ones. But an offhand suggestion by Laval was finally sent to Berlin, and the word came back to the Commissariat Général aux Questions Juives that children “could” join their arrested parents. The children were sent to Auschwitz a few months after their parents, a story that spread like wildfire throughout France, and was the death knell that rang out for a corrupt regime.

The French police were deadly efficient. There had been warnings that a massive roundup was about to take place. The Jewish Communists were especially attuned to the plan to make a major sweep across Paris; most likely this information was garnered from their own spies among the Parisian police. A few days before the roundup, a tract appeared in Jewish neighborhoods:

And yet.

The collection of files (
fichiers
) gathered over the previous two years by the Occupiers and their Vichy functionaries provided names, addresses, occupations, ages, and numbers of family members, from which smaller lists were made and handed to each arresting group so that not one registered Jew would be missed. Though the French police have spent years trying to dodge their reputation as enablers, there is no doubt, now that the archives are almost all freely open, that the French forces of order were active, not reluctant, collaborators with the Germans. Indeed, there is no way the Germans could have succeeded as well as they did in rounding up these “illegals” if it had not been for the help of the local police forces. The Germans quite simply did not have enough personnel to track and keep files on Jews or plan and carry out raids, arrests, and incarcerations. Nor did they know as intimately the labyrinth that was the city of Paris.

The effect of this massive roundup was devastating. It ended for once and all the myth that some Jews were protected from the arm of the law. It established without any doubt that the French police were a major, unsympathetic force. There exists no record of even a single French policeman having refused to participate in his assignment.
However, quiet subterfuges did occur, and many Jews did escape under the turned gaze of a sympathetic officer, but much of that information is primarily anecdotal, just as is the information concerning the courage of some concierges and the jealous hatefulness of others.
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Filed lives.

About 4,500 French policemen organized and participated in the operation. The Germans were nowhere to be seen—this of course particularly infuriated both the Jews and their Gentile neighbors. Despite the initial successes of the roundup, which began at 3:00 a.m., the German authorities, surreptitiously evaluating the results, were apoplectic. Hoping to round up 27,500 Jews, the great majority of them during the early hours of July 16, the police had only, by midmorning,
been able to find about 13,000, and the action was threatening to take a day or more. What was the problem? A note from a French police bureaucrat, written at 8:00 a.m. on July 16, cites excuses for the roundup’s slowness:

This roundup collected primarily women and children. The police had reserved about fifty public buses for transport. In retrospect, it was clear that seeing police officers in recognizable uniforms, as well as the familiar green-and-cream buses, helped to calm the hunted. Men composed only about 30 percent of the detainees, for they had by now learned to sleep away from home at night or to hide out; no one thought that women and children were in danger. Most of those rounded up were taken either to the Vélodrome d’Hiver, in the 15th arrondissement, or to the railhead at Drancy. The Vélodrome d’Hiver (Winter Bicycle Track) was a huge covered meeting hall and racing venue. Over 17,000 spectators could watch a variety of events: rallies, boxing, even a bullfight, and the track could be used for roller-skating, even ice-skating. Everyone knew where the Vél d’Hiv was—right near the Eiffel Tower, on the Left Bank. It was a place for screaming throngs of fans, entertainment, and healthy competition. But it would become synonymous with the cruelty of Paris’s acquiescence to the German desire to rid the city of all Jews. Finally torn down in 1959 (after having been used as a holding center for anitcolonialist Algerians in 1958), there is now a Place des Martyrs Juifs du Vélodrome d’Hiver in memory of those incarcerated there for a week during the hot month of July in 1942.

Buses that brought Jews to the Vél d’Hiv.
(© BHVP / Roger-Viollet / The Image Works)

Vélodrome d’Hiver at a happier time.
(© Roger-Viollet / The Image Works)

The descriptions of conditions in this huge bicycling-rink-cum-concentration-camp were later recounted on film, in memoirs, and in firsthand accounts (several dozen victims were able to escape during the commotion of trying to direct eight thousand people into the building). One example from an eyewitness: