Paris After the Liberation: 1944 - 1949 (23 page)

‘Why did you resign?’ he asked.

‘It’s for me to ask you why you didn’t resign,’ Camus replied. ‘And I’ll tell you why you didn’t: because you were afraid.’

‘You’re quite right,’ Mauriac admitted.

Mauriac was too honest to have any illusions. At a dinner with Pastor Boegner, he described the National Front – a Communist-dominated organization of which he was a member – as ‘the screen behind which Communism carries out its business. I know because I’m part of it.’

Jean Paulhan raged the most against the takeover of
Les Lettres françaises
. He openly scorned the more-resistant-than-thou fellow-travellers and the National Committee of Writers, which Aragon and Triolet wanted to turn into a writers’ union closely allied to the Communist Party.

Aragon’s plan, no doubt elaborated at party headquarters, was the classic Stalinist tactic of extending the purge to include critics of the Communist Party. On 25 November, in
Les Lettres françaises,
he launched an attack on André Gide, comparing him to Hérold-Paquis, the fascist propagandist from Radio-Paris. His real target was not the Gide who had, for a short period, written for Drieu’s
Nouvelle Revue française,
but the unrepentant author of
Retour de l’URSS,
the book most reviled by Stalinists at the time of the Spanish Civil War. Gide’s friend Roger Martin du Gard was disgusted with ‘the bad faith and the dishonest motives of Aragon’, and he warned Gide in Algiers to take care on his return to France. ‘Think carefully about reaching Paris: the ground is mined!’

The party also sought to destroy the reputation of Paul Nizan, a novelist and Sartre’s oldest friend, who had been killed on the retreat to Dunkirk in 1940. Nizan had been a loyal Communist until the Nazi– Soviet pact in August 1939. When his very short and simple letter of resignation was published, the enraged party circulated malicious allegations and Maurice Thorez described him as a ‘police spy’.

After the war Louis Aragon, as part of a renewed whispering campaign against Nizan, repeated the allegation to Sartre, a fellow member of the National Committee of Writers. Sartre prepared a statement of protest against the vilification and persuaded André Breton, Albert Camus, Jean Paulhan, Julien Benda and François Mauriac to sign as well. Sartre was powerful enough to stand up to the Communist anger directed against him, but the lies lingered on for years.

Politics were also complicated for those in the literary establishment who had something to hide. The veteran Catholic poet Paul Claudel presented a poemto the glory of General de Gaulle, which was read at a gala for the Resistance at the Comédie-Française some ten weeks after the Liberation. But the following morning, unkind tongues reminded people that Claudel had written a strikingly similar work in 1942, dedicated to the glory of Marshal Pétain.

Several publishers faced even more delicate problems. A week after the Liberation, the Resistance press demanded the blacklisting of publishers accused of collaboration, among them Gaston Gallimard, Bernard Grasset and Robert Denoël. Grasset was arrested and taken off to Fresnes prison, but Gallimard was left untouched. Gallimard had allowed Drieu la Rochelle to take over the
Nouvelle Revue française,
but since he had also helped Jean Paulhan launch its Resistance counterpart,
Les Lettres françaises,
he had covered himself brilliantly. ‘Not stupid, the old man!’ commented Galtier-Boissière in cynical admiration.

Gallimard had another strong suit. His publishing house, which dominated French literature, boasted many members of the National Committee of Writers. He had been scrupulous, even generous, in the dispatch of royalty cheques during the lean Occupation years, so it would have been a very churlish writer who was not grateful. Even Aragon was about to have his next novel,
Aurélien,
published by Gallimard, having forsaken Denoël.

It was no secret that Gaston Gallimard had cooperated with the Germans. He had respected the ‘Otto List’ (named after Otto Abetz) of works proscribed by the Germans; he had exercised self-censorship in the books he published during the Occupation; and he had attended receptions at the Deutsche Institut. Nevertheless, he found strong supporters prepared to speak up for him – among them Sartre, Camus and Malraux.

André Malraux, author of
La Condition humaine
and
L’Espoir,
was as gifted a mythomaniac as he was a novelist. He pretended a deep knowledge of the cultures and languages of the Far East, whereas in fact he was more interested in the trafficking of Oriental antiquities. He made hugely inflated claims for his participation in both the Spanish Civil War and the Resistance, and it is astonishing that so few people challenged them: he was awarded all the most distinguished decorations for service in the Resistance, and the British gave him the DSO, the second-highest award after the Victoria Cross. This compelling, mercurial man had been a Communist sympathizer in his youth; but from the mid-1940s, he became a committed Gaullist and formed part of the General’s closest circle.

Malraux’s establishment in the Gaullist camp naturally put him out of sympathy with those, like Sartre, who were moving ever more aggressively to the left. Four years later, the differences between the two writers would erupt. Malraux, to obtain revenge on Sartre, was to blackmail Gaston Gallimard by threatening to expose his wartime record. Yet when questions were raised about Malraux’s exaggerated exploits, he threatened to send back all his Resistance medals – a gesture so dramatic that it seemed to silence his critics.

The steady stream of exiles returning to Paris in 1944 and 1945 came from all classes and several nationalities. Many workers and their families, who had been close to starvation in the city, had sought shelter with peasant relatives. Hitching rides in different sorts of wood-burning vehicles, or on trains once the tracks were repaired, they returned with their few possessions in cardboard suitcases. Wherever possible, they brought a sack or two of flour back with them, either to sell or to keep them through the months ahead. Few took much notice of their arrival in the upheaval of the times. But the exiles whose return Parisians remembered for the rest of their lives were the
déportés
who arrived back from Germany in the spring of 1945.

The term
déporté
was loosely used to cover three different categories of prisoner: Jewish and other racial minorities sent to extermination camps, members of the Resistance sent to concentration camps, and conscripts sent on forced labour by the Vichy government from 1943. The prisoners of war from the defeat in 1940 were treated no differently from their British, Dutch and Belgian counterparts.

In April 1945, the advancing armies found themselves liberating one camp after another. The commanders, their attention focused on finishing the war, were unprepared to cope with the problemof feeding and caring for hundreds of thousands of civilians, many of whom were close to death. All too often, they were given ration packs and told to fend for themselves until the fighting was over.

Relatives waiting for news in Paris found the mixture of hope and fear very hard to bear. It often produced a feverish nausea. Sleep was impossible. The novelist Marguerite Duras sat by the telephone, convinced that her husband, Robert Antelme, had been among those executed at the last moment by the SS before the Allies arrived. Whenever it rang, the caller turned out to be a friend asking: ‘Any news?’

Even when transport was finally organized for repatriation, the process was still slow. The journey back to France could take five days. (As soon as the war ended in May, the Americans allocated the bulk of their transport aircraft to ferrying back prisoners and the whole procedure speeded up immeasurably.) Some passed through Switzerland via Geneva, where Pierre de Gaulle, the General’s brother, was consul. The depth of his sympathy was in no doubt. Pierre Daix, a young Communist who had survived Mauthausen, found himself spontaneously embraced.

On 14 April 1945 at the Gare de Lyon, an official reception committee, which included General de Gaulle, Henri Frenay, François Mitterrand and the two Communist leaders Jacques Duclos and André Marty, waited to welcome back the first group of 288 women. * Well-wishers carried lilac blossom to present to them and women brought lipsticks and face powder to distribute. They expected the returning prisoners to look thin and tired from their experiences, but not much more. France had been partially shielded from the appalling truth. The French ministry with responsibility for prisoners, deportees and refugees had been trying to suppress information about the camps, just when General Eisenhower was calling for every available journalist to be brought in to Germany to report on their horrors. Few had imagined the reality of virtual skeletons dressed like scarecrows. ‘Their faces were grey-green with reddish brown circles round their eyes, which seemed to see but not to take in,’ wrote Janet Flanner, the American journalist. Galtier-Boissière described deportees as having ‘a greenish, waxen complexion, shrunken faces, reminiscent of those little human heads modelled by primitive tribes’. Some were too weak to remain upright, but those who could stood to attention in front of the welcoming committee and began to sing the Marseillaise in cracked voices. Their audience was devastated.

Such scenes were repeated many times. Louise Alcan, aged thirty-four, a survivor of Birkenau and Ravensbrück, described her own arrival: ‘Gare de l’Est. Eight in the morning. A crowd behind the barriers. We sing the Marseillaise. The people look at us and burst into tears.’

The few French Jews who returned from the death camps aligned themselves with their compatriots. Vichy had stripped them of their nationality and handed themover to the Germans, but they were no less French for that; they too sang the Marseillaise and the ‘
Chant du départ
’, that battle anthemof the French Revolution. Only a tiny percentage of almost 80,000 ‘racial deportees’ returned; over a quarter of the entire population of French Jews had perished. Vichy had also handed over another 40,000 foreign Jews who had sought refuge in France. In addition there were around 100,000 political prisoners and the 600,000 conscripts on forced labour, many of whom had worked and died while constructing factories underground to escape Allied bombing. Out of a total of 820,000 French deportees, some 222,000 are estimated to have died.

The first processing point was at the Gare d’Orsay. General Dixie Redman took his military assistant Mary Vaudoyer there, having told her: ‘You must see this, and you must never forget it.’ They stood looking out of a window into a huge space where hundreds of men were walking, completely naked, covered in delousing powder and DDT, such was the fear of typhus.* Their faces were cavernous, their heads bald, either shaved or with alopecia frommalnutrition, their eyes downcast. None spoke. Both Redman and his assistant were appalled that they should be obliged to undergo yet one more humiliation. When they were deemed to have been disinfected, they were dressed in surplus British battledress, coarse, hot and often several sizes too big for them, and heavy ammunition boots.

From the Gare d’Orsay, the deportees were taken to the Hotel Lutetia, which had been the Abwehr headquarters during the Occupation. The whole block was surrounded by relatives desperate for news. Newspapers were full of little advertisements seeking information on missing relatives, or announcements of deaths at last confirmed. Such was the confusion and the scale of the task that some families had to wait several more months.

Marguerite Duras’s husband was saved by a miracle and by determination. François Mitterrand, the leader of Antelme’s Resistance group, was part of a semi-official French mission sent to Germany. He managed to get into Dachau, which had been sealed off by the US army to prevent the spread of typhus. A voice called out, ‘François!’ He did not recognize the living corpse. It was his companion who recognized Robert Antelme, and then only by his teeth.

Mitterrand rang Duras in Paris. He told her to send two members of the group to his office, where he had organized passes and three uniforms. Using a car and petrol obtained by Mitterrand, the two friends drove through the night, reaching Dachau the next morning. They dressed this virtual skeleton in the spare uniformwhich they had smuggled into the camp and carried him out, held upright between them, past the guard post. Fortunately, the American sentries were so afraid of infection that they all wore gas masks and could not see very clearly. Antelme was laid on the back seat of their car and driven back to Paris. The return journey took three times as long. None of themexpected him to survive it. But when they finally reached the rue Saint-Benoît, he was still alive. Despite all the warnings of how he had changed, Duras herself nearly suffered a nervous breakdown and had to be revived with rum by a neighbour. The concierge who had decorated the entrance to welcome himhome shut herself in her
loge
to cry in anger.

Everything possible was done for the deportees at the Lutetia. By right of suffering, they were known as ‘the best of the French’. Nothing was too good for them: veal, cheese and real coffee, obtainable only on the black market, were produced. But often the best intentions did not effect the right treatment. Deportees needed the simplest food in tiny quantities. Their stomachs were so unprepared for the change that they were violently ill. They also needed peace and quiet, not the pandemonium around the Lutetia. ‘We really felt like Martians,’ wrote Pierre Daix.

Some had survived their ordeals in the most astonishing way. Among those flown in from Germany was the Comtesse de Mauduit, an American who had hidden Allied airmen in her château in Brittany until a maid denounced her. Bessie de Mauduit arrived from Ravensbrück ‘still dressed in the striped uniform of prisoners, yet still very elegant’. She told her story to Jean and Charlotte Galtier-Boissière: ‘I never cried once in two years of captivity,’ she concluded, with a proud smile, ‘but I cried on seeing Paris again.’ A few days later Galtier-Boissière learned that Bessie de Mauduit had managed to look so elegant in her camp uniformbecause a forewoman from Schiaparelli, a fellow prisoner, had refashioned it for her.