March 21, 2003

"NO MATTER HOW THEY CHANGE HER..."

by Rita Kramer

        Nothing can be more disillusioning than finding out that the love of one’s youth was a whore.
        Remember what we grew up knowing about France? Glorious France, cradle of Liberty Equality, Fraternity, of the Enlightenment and the Rights of Man… Beautiful France, home of the arts of living, of exquisite food and glamorous couture, to say nothing of its great painters and poets…
        Which of us did not wistfully hum “The last time I saw Paris,” want to eat like the French, vacation on the Riviera, use expressions like voila and je ne sais quoi whenever possible, thrill to Edith Piaf sobbing Non, non, je ne regrette rien…
        And who could blame us? Wasn’t gallant France the tragic symbol of World War II? Conquered by a brutal enemy, resisting heroically, and finally liberating herself…or so the story went. Well, ladies and gentlemen, it was a story all right. Probably the most effective work of fiction to come out of the war, it should have won its author a literary prize instead of just the presidency of postwar France.
        Charles de Gaulle spent the war years in London, exhorting his fellow Frenchmen to keep the flame of liberty alive, and returned to his native soil as soon as the Normandy beaches had been cleared of the corpses of the American, British and Commonwealth troops that had scaled the Atlantic Wall to free Europe. Once there he congratulated his compatriots on their courage and threw out the only real resisters who had fought the Nazis. Some were Communists, others were the British agents who had been dropped into the darkness of occupied France with Churchill’s order to “Set Europe ablaze” and had proceeded to carry out sabotage and subversion. To them de Gaulle said, “Your place is not here” and he gave them a few hours to get out of the country. His reasoning was that they had not been working for France but for a foreign power. He meant England.
        Contrary to what the world was led to believe, France was not conquered, it fought for a few days and then surrendered. When they saw the Germans coming the army officers gave up and left their men, and the government leaders went south. Literally. And were only too eager to come to terms with the invaders, arranging an armistice that would leave them in charge of about a third of their country. To what ends, we will come to later.
        Nor did the French resist. Yes, there were pockets of resistance—clandestine newspapers mainly. But most people, understandably exhausted by a war only twenty years behind them that had left many families missing a husband or a son, were only too happy to avoid conflict—and the Germans arrived on their best behavior, delighted to be in Paree instead of on the Russian front. Paris, in particular, took them to its heart, so warm and gay. That first summer women in their flowered dresses and those silly little hats tripped along arm in arm with the handsome men of the Wehrmacht in their splendid uniforms as they ate in the same restaurants and shopped in the same boutiques and walked on the same boulevards that had become synonymous with the good life. It was only later, when things began looking less rosy for the Germans and the outcome of it all became less clear, that the occupiers became less desirable companions. They began requisitioning food, which led to shortages in French cities, and then shipping men off to work for the war effort in Germany—in exchange for French prisoners of war, of whom they had quite a glut. It was only when they instituted compulsory labor for young men (Service du Travail Obligatoire) that a revolt took place. The young men took to the hills, called themselves Maquis (for the rough shrubbery where they hid) and were organized, armed and trained in large part by those Brits who had come to do that job and who were among the leaders of the groups of saboteurs and snipers who kept German tanks from reaching the Normandy beaches in time to repulse the invasion.
        Meanwhile, what of the third of the country that was ruled by the French themselves from Vichy? The venerable Marshal Petain and his deputy Pierre Laval lost no time in doing everything they could to avoid annoying their Nazi colleagues. While the old man told his people to look upon him as their father and assured them that he would rid their country of the Bolsheviks and Jews who had betrayed them, French functionaries exhibited their bureaucratic genius by rounding up all the Jews who had sought asylum in the country that had given the civilized world the concept of human rights, and eventually began adding Jews who were French citizens. It began gradually, as those things do, first expelling the Jews from schools, then from the professions, then from businesses, then prohibiting them from sitting in public parks or using telephones. Neighbors were glad to identify Jews who might have gone unnoticed and informing became a lucrative business. After all, one said with a gallic shrug, c’est la guerre. And with the wartime housing shortage it was a good way to come by an apartment.
        Once the Jews were required to wear a yellow star on their clothing most of the French had the decency to look away. Probably not too many noticed the elderly gentleman with his carefully trimmed moustache and old-fashioned cane who wore his Legion d’Honneur and other medals just above his star of David. Those were hard times for everyone, after all, and if you lived in the apartment buildings with a clear view of the concentration camp of Drancy, just outside Paris, one of the many such collection points for Jews, you could pull the shades down. Then you might not notice that there were very few Germans around. It was French cops who knocked on the doors of the Jewish families and pulled young and old out and loaded them onto the buses, driven by regular French bus drivers, and delivered them to the camps, administered by French men and women who relieved them of whatever valuables they had brought with them and eventually put them on the buses again and got them to the train station where they were loaded—by Frenchmen—onto the cars that would take them, well, wherever they were going. It was no business of the decent Frenchmen whose job it was to get them onto the trains, or those railroad employees who ran them, to wonder where they would end up.
        Not a pretty story, and certainly not the one we all believed at war’s end. As a matter of fact it took years, about thirty to be more or less exact, before the truth of the French role in World War II began to come out. An American historian, Robert Paxton, was the first to write about Vichy France and its role in the extermination of European Jewry. Then other historians began to look into the matter, both in the U.S. and in France, where anger and resistance (real this time) met the early attempts to shed light on the sordid facts. Eventually, as the memoirs of living witnesses and the available documents began to pile up, France’s shameful record was exposed. But only piece by piece.
        Just this morning, in the New York Times (March 20) we read that the French National Railroad is being sued (not for money, for an apology) for its role in the deportation of some 76,000 Jews from France between 1942 and 1944. Of course we are shocked, shocked.
        The French are known for their sensitivity, their subtlety. Here are two small facts to add a soupcon of nuance to the story of wartime France. Pierre Laval insisted on putting the Jewish children, as young as two or three, who had been torn from their screaming mothers, on special convoys transporting them eastward. The Germans were surprised; they hadn’t asked for the children. Laval reasoned that those children might grow up to make trouble for France. He underestimated the power of the myth, the indifference of the world. One of those children who survived would tell anyone who was interested the curious fact that when the neighborhood gendarme loaded her family on the buses he went back to make sure their little dog would be left with the concierge so nothing would happen to it. She was only seven at the time but she was left with the distinct impression that the policeman, a family man of the neighborhood, cared more about the dog’s fate than about hers.
        Yes, there were those among the French who resisted and those who protected and saved Jews. Whether there were as many as there should have been is a moot point. What should be clear though is that the French have not suddenly descended into villainy from nobility as they maintain a foreign policy that protects and encourages brutal dictatorships. They’re only looking out for themselves. After all, c’est la vie.

Rita Kramer has written for Commentary, The Public Interest, The Wall Street Journal, Newsday, The International Herald Tribune and other newspapers and magazines in the U.S. and abroad. Her most recent book is Flames in the Field: The Story of Four SOE Agents in Occupied France (Penguin)

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