A Train in Winter (6 page)

Towards the end of October, Morais, the founder and president of a student group called Corpo des Lettres, began to talk to his friends about starting a poster campaign. Number 5 Place Saint-Michel was home to a number of student organisations and here, after office hours, Morais and his friends turned out anti-Vichy and anti-German flyers, distributed next day to
lycées
and faculties throughout Paris by students. In a rising mood of hostility and mockery, they went around repeating their favourite jokes. ‘Collaborate with the Germans?’ went one. ‘Think of Voltaire… A true Aryan must be blond like Hitler, slender like Göring, tall like Goebbels, young like Pétain, and honest like Laval.’ Another started with the question: ‘Do you know what happened? At 9.20, a Jew killed a German soldier, opened his breast and ate his heart! Impossible! For three reasons. Germans have no hearts. Jews don’t eat pork. And at 9.20 everyone is listening to the BBC.’ When, in ones and twos, the student leaders were arrested, it only made their companions more resolute.

Then, on 30 October, a distinguished scientist in his late sixties called Paul Langevin was arrested in his office in the Faculty of Physics and Industrial Chemistry. In the 1930s Langevin had been the founder of an anti-Fascist movement and he was much admired by his students. Professors and students alike decided to see in his arrest a Nazi attack on French intellectual life. Posters immediately appeared on the walls with the words ‘Free Langevin’. And, since the professor held his classes on a Friday, a mass demonstration was called on Friday 8 November in front of the Collège de France where Langevin had his laboratory.

Despite the presence of German soldiers and French police, it passed off quietly. But the students now felt themselves to be at war. Meanwhile, in a message relayed over the BBC, the French in London had suggested that wreaths be laid at the Arc de Triomphe on the 11th, to mark Armistice Day. The Germans issued an order forbidding all such gatherings. The students decided to defy this. By 3 p.m. on the 11th, crowds of young people were collecting at the bottom of the Champs-Elysées and starting to walk towards the Étoile in small groups, singing the Marseillaise. One group of friends had produced a huge visiting card, over a metre long, with the words
Le Général de Gaulle
.

By mid-afternoon almost 10,000 people had gathered. The weather was fine and the mood was almost festive. But not for long. The Germans opened fire. A number of students were badly wounded, but none died since the soldiers had been ordered to shoot only at their legs. A hundred and fifty were arrested immediately; many more were picked up in the days that followed and sent, for brief periods, to prison. The university was closed. Paul Langevin remained in detention for thirty-seven days, during which time he went on with his research with the aid of some spent matches he found on the floor of his cell, before being sent to Troyes, under house arrest.

Professor Langevin had a 21-year-old daughter, a solemn, dark-haired young woman called Hélène. After her husband Jacques Solomon, a physicist working on quantum mechanics and cosmic rays, was demobilised from the medical services and returned home, Hélène suggested that they take a holiday cycling in the forests near Paris. As they cycled along, they discussed what they might do to oppose the German occupiers. Jacques said: ‘We mustn’t fool ourselves. Whatever we do will mean throwing ourselves in the lions’ den.’

On the tracks in the forest they encountered two friends, a Hungarian Marxist philosopher called Georges Politzer and Maï, his wife. Maï, who was 25, was the only daughter of a celebrated cook, who had been chef to the Spanish court. Educated in a convent in Biarritz, she had studied to become a midwife and had met Politzer on a train in the Basque country. Through him, she discovered Marxism. The Politzers had a seven-year-old son, Michel. Maï was blond and strikingly pretty. Cycling along together, the two young couples talked about starting a paper,
L’Université Libre
, aimed at pulling together the entire sweep of intellectual resistance, regardless of political beliefs. It was, they agreed, to be a ‘national front of all French writers’.

Maï Politzer, ‘Femme Vincennes’

Hélène happened to be at lunch with her mother when the two German soldiers had come looking for her father. She quickly spread the word of his arrest. The Politzers and Solomons decided to rush the first issue of
L’Université Libre
out, 1,000 copies of four roneoed pages, in time for the demonstration on the 11th. By now they had joined forces with Jacques Decourdemanche, known as Decour, a scholar and teacher of German, a tall, thin, sporty young man who had spent the years before the war writing for various left-wing publications. The message of
L’Université Libre
was clear: words are themselves actions, and actions motivate; we have to say no to the occupier. The relationship between its founders was somewhat complicated by the fact that Decour and Maï were lovers.

Soon sought by the Gestapo, Jacques Solomon went into hiding in the house of a professor at the Lycée Fénelon, where he continued to work on the new paper. ‘The French,’ he repeated, ‘must freely be able to read and think French in France.’ In the evenings, Hélène took over the distribution of
L’Universit
é
Libre
, using the Café Wepler in the Place Clichy as a meeting place, or dropping off bags containing copies in the lockers of stations, later to be collected by others to distribute. Maï, who had good contacts inside the PCF, liaised with party members, while another friend, Viva, the daughter of Pietro Nenni, head of the Italian Socialist Party, offered to help print some of the issues on the presses that she and her husband ran. Viva, who was 25, had come to Paris with her father when he was forced by the attentions of Mussolini’s secret police to seek refuge abroad, and she had finished her studies in France. She was also a striking looking young woman, with a mass of dark curly hair. Decour, who was teaching at the Lycée Rollin, cycled around Paris exclaiming: ‘In the country of Descartes, reason will triumph.’ It was still possible, in the winter of 1940, to be light-hearted about opposing the occupiers; the young resisters felt purposeful and elated.

In the weeks to come,
L’Université Libre
would comment on every arrest, every turn and step in the war, every Nazi edict and prohibition. In its wake soon came plans for other papers and magazines, designed to keep de Gaulle’s flame of resistance alive by extolling all that was best and most important about French culture.

One by one, other young intellectuals were drawn into the fold. One of these was Charlotte Delbo, the 27-year-old daughter of a metalworker from the Seine-et-Oise who had risen to run his own shipyard. Charlotte was a tall, clever young woman with a long thin face and remarkable green-grey eyes. She was quick and funny and could be sharp. Both her parents—even her working-class Catholic Italian mother who had emigrated to France with her family before the First World War—were atheists, and it was from them that Charlotte, the eldest of four children, had picked up her strong anti-Fascist beliefs. There had been no money to send her to university, so Charlotte left school after taking her baccalaureate and trained as a secretary.

Charlotte Delbo, assistant to Louis Jouvet and a member of the Jeunesse Communiste

In 1932, just as the PCF was entering its new phase of expansion and recruitment, she joined its youth wing, Jeunesse Communiste. Here, she was able to study at night under the Marxist philosopher Henry Lefebvre. Maï and Georges Politzer were friends of Lefebvre. The following year, working as a secretary by day, Charlotte began to contribute articles to a paper put out by the young communists, Jeunes Filles de France. Fascinated by the theatre, she was sent one day to interview the director and actor Louis Jouvet, who had recently taken over the Athenée theatre. Jouvet was captivated by the intelligence of her questions and the speed with which she took down his words in her neat, rapid shorthand.

Two days later, he offered her a job as one of his two assistants, taking notes for the course he gave in theatre at the university. Charlotte, meanwhile, met and married Georges Dudach, the son of a metalworker in an aeronautics firm. At the age of 12, Georges had started as an apprentice in the business but when it became clear that he was intelligent and studious he had left to work for a union, and began to study law at night. In spite of his father’s opposition, Georges had joined the PCF in 1933 and when he and Charlotte married he was working for one of the party’s other papers,
L’Avant-Garde
.

In the summer of 1939, Charlotte and Jouvet went walking together in the countryside. When she got home, with a huge bunch of mimosa she had picked, Charlotte sat down and recorded in her diary what she remembered of their conversation, not knowing what she might later need it for. Jouvet’s attention to detail, and the way he analysed every aspect of a production appealed to her. She also had an excellent memory.

Because Charlotte spoke some German, along with English, Spanish and Italian, and because he could not bear to meet them himself, Jouvet asked her to handle most of the dealings between the Athenée theatre and the Germans. One day she was called to the rue de Saussaies and asked to report to the occupiers on individual members of the company, to say whether they were ‘pure’ or not. She felt outrage and contempt that she should be asked to spy. As the weeks passed, and the Germans moved steadily towards total control of the theatre in Paris, she observed with horror the growing exclusion of Jews from jobs and occupations. Charlotte herself was not Jewish, but her cast of mind was defiant, independent and humane. She had no time for the bullying and bureaucracy of the Nazis.

The winter of 1940 was exceptionally cold, the longest and coldest since meteorological records began. In Toulouse, temperatures dropped to minus 13 degrees. A metre of snow fell on Grenoble. In Paris, where it froze for sixty-six consecutive days, cold, hungry, angry women, unable to afford exorbitant black market ration cards, queued for hours for supplies that dwindled day by day. Though the integration of France into the Nazi war economy had dramatically cut unemployment, the French were beginning to understand that the shortages were the direct result of the enormous booty of clothing, food and raw materials leaving every day for the Reich. The Parisians were now obsessed with food and warmth, lining their clothes with newspapers, putting mustard in their socks and making muffs out of rabbit and cat skins. The extreme cold enabled the dissident young to dress in outrageous clothes—boys in vast enveloping overcoats, their hair slicked back with vegetable oil, girls in fur coats over very short skirts. They called themselves
zazous
and became a colourful sight on the streets of Paris; they reminded people of the exotic
merveilleuses
during the Directoire in 1795.

No longer the capital of France, without government or embassies—apart from a US representative—French Paris had turned into a silent, still, anxious city, patrolled by enemy troops in uniform. The free press had gone underground, unions had been abolished and all gatherings of over five people were forbidden. German Paris, by contrast, was flourishing, its restaurants and cabarets full, its dress collections admired, its art shows well attended. The couturière Madeleine de Rauch had brought out a witty collection of winter clothes based on the theme of the métro. Solférino was a tailored red coat, Austerlitz a yellow jacket.

Paris had become a city of collaborators, both open and hidden, anti-Semites, anti-Freemasons, repentant communists and right-wing Catholics, who had hated Blum’s Front Populaire and felt more than sneaking admiration for the German cult of youthful valour, orderliness and heroism. For the most part they were men, locked into an increasingly lucrative but dangerous relationship with the occupiers and effectively prisoners of their outwardly polite but inwardly ruthless German friends; but there were women among them too. Gabriel Petri, who worked on
L’Humanité
, called them
nazilous
and spoke of them as servants to the Germans. To the surprise of the occupiers, informers were coming forward in their hundreds, to denounce Jews, gypsies, black marketeers, and neighbours keeping pigs in their gardens. It would later be said that over half of the three million denunciations received during the years of occupation had been motivated because of the rewards offered, 40 per cent by politics and 10 per cent as acts of revenge.