Village of Secrets Read online

  Simon was 12 when the Maginot line, France’s impregnable barrier of cement and steel, was outflanked by the Panzers in May 1940. Within days, the German army was advancing on Paris, driving before it a wave of terrified citizens and defeated military recruits, while in Paris the government gathered in force in Notre-Dame to offer prayers for divine intervention. Sara had just given birth to her third child, a boy they called Jacques. Escape was not an option for her, but she persuaded Aaron to join the exodus south, the eight million people who fled from their homes before the German advance, to see for himself what possibilities existed for the family away from Paris. He was soon back, recounting how he had got as far as Orléans and that he had escaped attention from the military by putting his belongings in an abandoned pram and pretending that it contained a baby. For a while, as the German occupiers in Paris appeared to be behaving so correctly towards the country they had overrun, the Liwerants continued to feel safe, though they marvelled at the sight of the German women who arrived with the troops as secretaries and office workers, dressed like American airline hostesses, with their ‘lumpy athletic figures’. They had changed the ‘w’ in their name to a ‘v’, which they thought made it sound more French.

  Like the rest of France, Sara and Aaron felt reassured by the declarations of France’s new leader, the elderly veteran of the Great War, 84-year-old Maréchal Pétain, the aloof and immaculate embodiment of the legacy of the great French victory at Verdun. Pétain had a neat little moustache, a soft belly, and pale blue eyes, and he held himself, as befitting an ancien combattant, very upright. They shared his desire for a new moral order, a National Revolution, in which fecund and stable families would redeem the Blum years of profligacy and too much liberty. It sounded comforting when he spoke of his ‘beloved France’ and his decision to bestow on its people ‘the gift of my own person’; like naughty children, they would have to redeem themselves through pain and collective mortification. ‘You have suffered . . .’ he told them, ‘you will suffer more . . . your life will be very hard.’ The Liwerants liked the idea of a country in which people returned to the land they had abandoned in favour of city life and had more children, even if it seemed peculiar that the ills that had apparently caused the ignominious French defeat included paid holidays, Pernod, the white slave trade, strikes, gambling, bathing suits, democracy and the ‘degrading promiscuity in workshops, offices, factories . . .’

  In the mea culpa that swept France in May and June of 1940, with its wild talk of ‘libertine, enfeebling self-indulgence’, it seemed to Sara and Aaron puzzling that no one seemed to question why, since the country was being punished by a vengeful God, He was at the same time choosing to reward Hitler and his Nazi ambitions. Collaboration had not yet acquired its overtones of treason, but was rather seen as a spur to changing the way the French were to be schooled, employed and governed, with discipline and a strengthening of national fibre. Tough new measures were to rescue the country from a ‘republic of women and homosexuals’. On the wall of Simon’s classroom hung a picture of the Maréchal, shouldering the burden of government when he should have been enjoying a well-earned retirement; his portrait was to be found on posters, postcards and coins. On stamps it had replaced that of the traditional Marianne. Not since the Second Empire had France had the effigy of a living ruler on its coins. In the cult of Pétain, to disobey was to betray. Jeanne d’Arc was also in evidence, another fine symbol of patriotism, piety and sacrifice. The ravings of men like Maurras and Céline, the Liwerants told themselves, hardly applied to them.

  On 22 June, Pétain signed an armistice in a railway siding in the forest of Compiègne, cutting France into an occupied zone, governed by Germany, and an unoccupied zone, run by the French from the spa town of Vichy, and agreeing to terms not unlike those forced on the Germans at the Treaty of Versailles. It was Hitler’s first visit to Paris, and he slapped his knee in delight at the country of which he was now master. Then, barely eight weeks later, the first signs of something new and ominous appeared: on 27 August, Pétain removed the penalties for anti-Semitic defamation. At this point, the Germans were not yet planning to make France in their own image of Judenfrei, free of Jews, but rather to turn the unoccupied part of France – the one third of the country that was to be ruled by the Vichy government, separated by a heavily guarded 1,200-kilometre demarcation line – into a reception centre for their unwanted Jews.

  Forbidding those Jews who had fled south from returning to their homes in the north, the Germans started taking over the Jewish businesses abandoned during the exodus and ordering banks to open Jewish deposit boxes, from which they confiscated gold, foreign currencies and jewellery. Soon, 4,660 firms in Paris carried the yellow sticker of confiscation. On 3 October, after a census of the Jews in the capital and its suburbs, which put the number at 113,462, of whom 57,110 were French citizens and 55,849 foreigners, came the first Statut des Juifs from the Vichy government which would rapidly turn into a wholesale process of marginalisation and destitution. It was perfectly clear, announced Vichy, that the Jews had ‘exercised an individualistic tendency which has resulted almost in anarchy’. They had to be curbed, punished. It was the speed with which all this happened that was so terrifying; and the spirit in which it was done, combining both a thirst for revenge and a sense of eager repentance. The Vatican, consulted, was acquiescent. For the Germans, it could not have gone better: they had found a country not merely resigned to defeat, but ready to blame itself for what had happened, and eager to accommodate and anticipate lest worse befall.

  Jews, declared the Vichy government – in this as in much else going ahead of and beyond the German demands – would henceforth be banned from certain jobs and put on to quotas for others. A Jew, they decreed, was a Jew if he had three Jewish grandparents, or two if his wife was also Jewish. Civil servants, among them judges, clerks and teachers, began losing their jobs, along with lawyers, photographers, antiquarians, scientists, costume- and filmmakers, nurses and bookkeepers. Permission was given to regional prefects to intern ‘foreigners of the Jewish race’.

  To help the French better comprehend the virulent nature of the Jewish plague, a venomous anti-Semitic film, Jew Süss, was made, attracting many thousands of viewers, as did a supposed documentary about the Rothschild family, in which, at regular intervals, rats filled the screen, then seemed to overflow into the cinema. The Jew, as portrayed in the pages of the German scandal sheet Der Stürmer, introduced into France, was a small, fat, ugly, unshaven, drooling, bent-nosed man with pig-like eyes. In his school playground, Simon, one of a small group of Jewish children, was now fighting daily battles against bullying fellow pupils. Though he was small, and so short-sighted that he felt himself to be as blind as a mole, he was robust and did not lose many of his fights.

  Not all the repressive measures were aimed at the Jews. One of the first edicts, on 13 August, had targeted Freemasons, and they too were now banned from much of French professional life. Sixty thousand Masons were investigated, and 15,000 Masonic dignitaries were sacked. After Ribbentrop and Molotov signed their Soviet–Nazi non-aggression pact in August 1939, many members of France’s Communist party and former partners in the Front Populaire had been sent off to internment camps by Daladier’s government. After the German invasion they had not been released but were kept there as troublemakers. Jews, Freemasons and godless communists, followers of Marx or Trotsky or Rosa Luxemburg and seen as part of a Judeo-Bolshevik conspiracy, dark forces of the ‘anti-France’, were all soon to be engulfed in a turbulence of fear and persecution. It was enough, now, to be foreign, to have a foreign accent, to be a suspect. The French, wrote the novelist Henri de Montherlant, were displaying their true colours: a mixture of inertia and moral cowardice.

  And then, at the end of March 1941, the Vichy government, at the instigation of the Germans, who had decided that there was still no proper comprehension in France of the ‘necessity for a full-scale purification of Jews’, agreed to ‘address the Jewish prob
lem’. Pétain appointed a bullet-headed wounded veteran of the Great War called Xavier Vallat, a friend of Maurras, as director of the Commissariat Général aux Questions Juives – the CGQJ – with its headquarters in the seedy Hôtel Algeria in Vichy. Vallat had receding hair and heavy black eyebrows, and he wore a black eyepatch. He was a lawyer, a devout Catholic and an unashamed anti-Semite; he spoke of his anti-Semitism as ‘de l’Etat Français’, state anti-Semitism inspired by Catholic doctrine. ‘I have been anti-Semitic far longer than you,’ he told Theo Dannecker after the 27-year-old German officer arrived in Paris to represent Eichmann, head of Jewish affairs for the Gestapo. Dannecker, it would be said, was not only vicious but insane. Jews, declared Vallat, were ‘invariably dangerous’ except in very small doses; and they were culturally unassimilable.

  What had to be done was to confiscate – steal – their property and eliminate them from the economic, social and cultural life of France, while craftily funnelling their wealth into French rather than German hands. Vallat regarded himself, he declared, not as ‘a butcher and certainly not as a torturer’ but as a surgeon, brought in to cure a country ‘stricken by Jewish brain fever’, from which it had almost died. The anti-Semitic regime he envisaged would soon be the harshest in Europe, policed by a special force, the Police aux Questions Juives. Both Vichy and the Germans believed France’s Jews to be fabulously rich.

  Since his return to Paris, Aaron had continued to work with his old firm, bringing clasps and handles back to Sara in the evenings. Coming home one day in mid-May 1941, he heard that orders had gone out to ‘invite’ Jews to register with their local police stations. He thought it applied to everyone, French and foreigners alike, and went cheerfully, despite Sara’s misgivings, taking his bicycle and saying that he would go straight from there to work. That evening, there was no sign of him. Instead, a policeman banged on the door and told Sara to pack a case for her husband and take it to the barracks at the Porte de Lilas. Thirteen-year-old Simon went in her place and learnt that his father was being sent, along with some 4,000 others, to an internment camp not far from Orléans, built to accommodate all the German prisoners the French army had confidently expected to capture. A few weeks later, Sara was allowed to take the three children to spend a Sunday with him.

  It was not long before Aaron escaped. He arrived home late one night and was hidden by a French friend. He and Sara agreed that he would find a passeur, someone who, in return for money, would help him cross the demarcation line into the unoccupied zone, where, for the time being, Jews appeared to be relatively safe; from there he planned to make his way to Lyons, where the family had relatives. Once again, it was Sara who forced him to go, saying that men were far more at risk than women and children. In Belleville there was a lorry driver who used his truck to transport meat between the two zones. He was willing to hide Aaron in one of the two narrow boxes that ran along the chassis and in which blood from the carcasses normally collected. The crossing of the well-guarded border passed uneventfully, but once across, while looking for a bus to take him to Lyons, Aaron was stopped by the police. His only papers carried the clear stamp of ‘Juif’. This time, he was sent to one of the new work camps for Jews and internees in the south and trained as a woodcutter. Very occasionally he was granted leave to visit Sara and the children in Paris, where, all through 1941, further rafles, round-ups, were herding Jews into captivity.

  For the first time, a small number of French Jews were also being picked up. Until this moment, many had continued to convince themselves that they were different in the eyes of the Germans from the foreign Jews, and that, providing they made no trouble, nothing bad would happen to them. As respected generations of French academicians, members of the bar, bankers and scientists, with impeccable French accents, how could any of this apply to them? As the writer and journalist Philippe Erlanger later described it, what was taking place was like an accident, a sort of calamity that happened to other people but not to you. On 12 December, 743 notables, distinguished French Jews, many of them doctors and lawyers, including Léon Blum’s brother René, were arrested. And after an assassination attempt on a German officer, 100 hostages were shot, 1,000 Jews rounded up and the Jewish community in the occupied zone was fined a billion francs in reprisal. It was becoming horribly clear that the supposedly secular state, of which they felt themselves to be so viscerally a part, was no longer going to protect anyone.

  Xavier Vallat, deemed too soft and lenient, was soon replaced by Darquier de Pellepoix, a man who had repeatedly spoken of the need to amputate the limb of Jewish plutocracy: no Jew, he said, should be shaken by the hand. Darquier was less tricky and more biddable than Vallat, a lazy, brutal, rapacious bon viveur who intended to carry out his task of executing the Nazis’ anti-Semitic policies of ‘economic Aryanisation’ with verve and dedication, while personally profiting from them as much as possible. He forbade Jews the use of their first names – so that Aaron became ‘le Juif Liwerant’ – and set about doubling the staff of the CGQJ to 1,000 men and women. These were now put to plundering, spying and offering bribes to informers. As Darquier saw it, Jews were historical enemies whose racial characteristics were putting France in danger.

  It was the yellow star that changed everything for Simon. Jews in Poland had been forced to wear identifying stars since 1939, and at the end of May 1942 came orders for this to be extended to all Jews in the occupied zone of France. The star, the size of a man’s fist, was to be worn by every Jew over the age of six, placed somewhere visible on the left side on outer garments, paid for with one coupon of rationed clothing each. People of doubtful parentage were forced to sign certificates of ‘not belonging to the Jewish race’.

  Simon found the yellow star deeply upsetting, particularly after people started shouting ‘sale Juif’ at him as he walked to school, so that he took to wearing it only when he could not avoid it, though he knew how dangerous this could be. He was top of his class, after a poor start before his teachers realised that he was profoundly short-sighted. Sara was just managing to bring in enough money to buy food, as the kindly workshop owner was continuing, despite the prohibitions on Jewish workers, to bring her clasps to cover. Restrictions were closing them all in. As a Jew, she could shop only between three and four in the afternoon, when the shops had emptied of most of their provisions, and on the Métro she could travel only in the last carriage. Music halls, theatres, cinemas, camping sites, public telephones were all out of bounds.

  All over Paris, Jews were hungry and cold, living on their savings or the kindness of their French neighbours, themselves short of food, coal and clothing now that the Germans had turned much of French industry over to production for the Reich and trains full of loot of every kind were leaving most days from the Gare de l’Est for Berlin. At night, in the blacked-out capital, you could see the lights of bicycles shining like fireflies. Soon the French were down to a little more than a third of their pre-war coal. The winter of 1939 had been the coldest since Waterloo; those of 1940 and 1941 were little better. Even in Vichy there was very little fuel and Pétain’s 30,000 civil servants lived in a permanent haze of woodsmoke from their makeshift stoves with pipes running out of the window. Coffee, of a kind, was being made from chestnuts, chickpeas, dried apples and lupin seeds; sugar from liquorice, boiled pumpkin and grape juice. In his father’s absence, 13-year-old Simon felt responsible for the family, all the more so as Sara spoke French with a strong foreign accent. Her health had always been bad, and the birth of Jacques had further weakened her kidneys.

  In November 1941, perceiving that it would be helpful if Jews could assist in their own destruction, Vichy had ordered the setting up of the Union Générale des Israélites de France – the UGIF – to coordinate all existing welfare organisations. These were now dissolved as separate entities. Some, sensing that this was merely a trap whereby Jews could be better identified and their addresses centrally registered, chose not to join and went underground; others accepted, believing that there wa
s no other way to help the growing numbers of destitute people. Between them all they had some 40,000 people on their books. All Jews were now obliged to pay a tithe to the UGIF. Since the start of the hostilities, Jewish leaders had been protesting vigorously – and in vain – against the repressive measures. Long after evidence of Nazi planning and Vichy compliance seemed plain to everyone, many of these leaders continued to express their ‘lucid desire to remain both an excellent Jew and an excellent Frenchman’, but their intense wish to remain loyal to Pétain seemed to lock them into a vicious circle of docility and prudence. Others tried to flee. By now, some 35,000 Jews had applied to leave France, mainly for the United States, Latin America and China, but most were thwarted by the expense and the bureaucratic obstacles to obtaining visas.

  Even as Darquier was taking over at the Commissariat in Vichy, in Berlin meticulous plans were advancing for the deportation of France’s Jewish population. By now, Drancy, a disused housing estate on the outskirts of Paris, had become a way station for convoys of goods wagons bearing Jews to camps in the east, though these first departures were still shrouded in secrecy. In April 1942, 57-year-old Pierre Laval, who had never made a secret of his desire for closer collaboration with Germany, had returned to power with the portfolios of the Interior, Foreign Affairs and Information, as well as the vice presidency of the Council, which effectively made him head of state. His reappearance signalled an end to most illusions about Vichy’s intentions. Swarthy, stocky and shrewd, Laval was often to be seen wearing a tailcoat; he came from the Auvergne and his father was a butcher. Pétain, it was fast becoming clear, would no longer stand as a symbol of independence or protection against German demands.