1942–44 German occupying authorities and French military police jointly involved in roundups and deportation of Jews.
June 1944 Allied landings in Normandy.
August 1944 Liberation of Paris. German forces retreat through France; some commit atrocities.
May 1945 Final defeat of Hitler’s Germany; end of war in Europe.
Further reading
A brief selection of books giving further historical background and survivors’ accounts from the period covered in this book:
Austria and the Anschluss
Sir Malcolm Bullock, Austria 1918–38: A Study in Failure (1939). Chronicles the years leading up to the Anschluss.
Oswald Dutch, Thus Died Austria (1938). Analytical account of the period by a Viennese journalist.
G.E.R. Gedye, Fallen Bastions (1939). Vivid, emotive eye-witness account by a foreign correspondent.
France 1938–45, Nazi occupation, camps and survivors’ experiences
Saul Friedländer, When Memory Comes (1978); Memory, History and the Extermination of the Jews of Europe (1993). Pierre Vidal-Naquet, The Jews, History, Memory and the Present (1996). Interesting not just for the memories that parallel some of those in this book, but also for their analysis and reflection on questions of Nazi-period history.
Susan Zuccotti, The Holocaust, the French, and the Jews (1993). French wartime history as it affected Jews, detailing the phases of anti-Semitic legislation and persecution.
Renée Poznanski, Jews in France during World War II (1994). The author covers Belvès in the War, mentioning several individuals in Scheyer’s account.
Arthur Koestler, The Scum of the Earth (1941). Koestler’s gripping tale of arrest, imprisonment, and escape to London from Nazi-occupied France.
David Rousset, A World Apart (1945). One of the earliest accounts of the Nazi camps, by a French non-Jewish prisoner and Resistance fighter. The book mentions Benjamin Crémieux, an acquaintance of Scheyer’s.
Claudine Vegh, I Didn’t Say Goodbye: Interviews with Children of the Holocaust (1979). 14 brief monologues by French Jewish children, who survived the Nazis through being adopted by non-Jewish families.
J. Crémieux-Dunand, La Vie à Drancy (1945). Vivid account by internee, documenting horrific conditions at the notorious Paris holding camp, from which nearly 70,000 people were deported to their deaths.
Georges Wellers, L’Étoile jaune à l’heure de Vichy: de Drancy à Auschwitz (1973). Survivor’s account documenting persecution of French Jews and especially life at Drancy.
Robert Antelme, L’Espèce humaine (1947). Important testimony and reflection on Nazi concentration camps and their victims by Resistance fighter and survivor of Buchenwald and Dachau.
French Resistance
H. R. Kedward, Occupied France: Collaboration and Resistance, 1940–44 (1985). Fine account of the French Resistance.
Georges Rebière, Aimez-vous cueillir les noisettes? (2006). Wartime memoir of a Belvès Resistance fighter and friend of the Rispal family.
Translator’s acknowledgements
I have incurred a number of debts in the course of my work on this book, which it is a pleasure to acknowledge. In particular, my sincere thanks go to Jonathan Coe, Mark Geller, Thomas Rütten and Tamsyn Barton for their support, advice and encouragement at various stages of the project; to Georges Rebière for answering my questions on persons and experiences of the Resistance in Belvès, as well as for sharing with me his photographs from that time, and to Cherith Beglan for introducing me to him; to my cousin, Hilary Fawcett, for sending me her photographs of Gabriel and Hélène Rispal and of the portrait of Grete Scheyer; to my brother, Michael Singer, who actually first pulled the typescript out of a long-neglected suitcase; to the Wingate Trust, whose financial support allowed me time to complete the translation and research the background to the book; and last but by no means least to Mark Ellingham at Profile Books for his enthusiasm and for his meticulous and sensitive editorial input.
My greatest debt remains that to my father, Konrad Singer. It is, of course, a debt that goes far beyond his specific contribution to this book; yet that contribution was itself–ironically–a huge one. In spite of his personal rejection of his stepfather’s work, he spent many hours, both before and after the discovery of the typescript, patiently sharing his own memories of and perspectives on the people and events of this narrative, as well as their historical, moral and political background. He has undoubtedly shaped the book, as far as my own contribution to it is concerned, at least as much as its main author.
P. N. Singer
About the Author and Translator
Moriz Scheyer (1886–1949) was arts editor of one of Vienna’s main newspapers, the Neues Wiener Tagblatt, from 1924 until his expulsion from Austria in 1938. In the early 1920s he lived in Paris and had previously traveled to the Near East and South America. In his lifetime he published three books inspired by those travels, as well as three volumes of literary-historical essays. After surviving the war with the help of the French Resistance, he died in France in 1949.
P. N. Singer is Scheyer’s step-grandson, a writer, and a translator.
1 ‘Austria’ (accompanied by a particular form of salute) was the official greeting sanctioned by the government
as the Austrian patriot’s alternative to ‘Heil Hitler’.
2 ‘Juda–verrecke!’ was the first line of a chant popular with Nazi activists. The verb, ‘verrecken’, is a vulgar one, and might be used in relation to vermin.
3 The writing of feuilleton was Scheyer’s main literary activity. The feuilleton, a characteristic element of continental quality newspapers (then and now) is essentially an essay, often prompted by a particular cultural event but going well beyond a review. Typical themes of the pre-war feuilleton, and Scheyer’s output in particular, were reflections on moments, or characters, in world history–as it were, historical novels in miniature. See appendix, ‘Moriz Scheyer: Writer’.
4 The reference is presumably to the ‘Association pour la libération de l’Autriche’ (of which Scheyer’s membership card survives).
5 The reference is to a motto that Napoleon used of his army: ‘every soldier carries a marshall’s baton in his knapsack’, signifying his encouragement of their individual sense of worth and potential for leadership.
6 The expression–literally ‘skull stuffing’–means a kind of propaganda or brainwashing and apparently derives from the specific context of the French army in 1914, among whose ranks it was used in reference to the misleading information then being sent back from the Front.
7 France was divided at the Armistice of 1940. Parts of the Rhineland on the border were now annexed to the Third Reich, while the main division was between the part under direct German Occupation and the so-called ‘zone libre’ or Unoccupied Zone, administered by the ‘Vichy’ régime under Pétain, although in collaboration with the German authorities. While the Occupied Zone (which constituted about three-fifths of the country) was mainly the northern part, on the western side it extended south almost as far as Spain (see map on page v); and thus the natural expectation of fugitives who had come as far as this, that they would not find themselves under direct German Occupation, was frustrated.
8 In Mein Kampf Hitler had described France as becoming increasingly ‘negroid’, on the grounds of supposed racial contamination from people from its African colonies.
9 Révolution nationale–propaganda term employed by Pierre Laval to suggest that it was an opportunity for a sort of ‘back-to-basics’ moral rejuvenation.
10 The pun is of course untranslatable: the same French word means ‘the South’ and ‘midday’.
11 ‘Operation Torch’, the British-American amphibious invasion of North Africa, which started on 8th November 1942.
12 Réfractaires: the term refers to people who went into hiding–and often also into some form of resistance–in response to the Service du Travail Obligatoire of 1942, whereby French men of military-service a
ge were sent to Germany to provide labour.
13 The milice was the French military police, which acted in collaboration with the Nazis.
14 The bald answer is that the vast majority of the inmates of Beaune-la-Rolande were deported to Auschwitz in 1942 (see Chronology) and killed there. I have not been able to trace all the names mentioned, but have found the following records. Ernst Friedezky (born Czechoslovakia, 1890), died at Auschwitz, September 19th 1942. Leon Schleuderer (born Austria, 1891), deported to Auschwitz, June 28th 1942. Alois Stern (born Czechoslovakia, 1896), died at Auschwitz, August 10th 1942. Oscar Wachsberger (born Czechoslovakia, 1896), died at Auschwitz September 2nd 1942.
15 Ahasuerus: although this is the name of various kings in the Bible (and in fact etymologically the same name as ‘Xerxes’), the name was also applied to the mythical figure of the ‘Wandering Jew’ from medieval times onward: a Jew who is cursed (probably as a result of mocking Jesus on his way to the Crucifixion) to wander the earth until the Second Coming. This mythical figure is often used as a symbol for the general fate of ‘the Jew’ in the diaspora.
16 With the exception of one brother, Egon, who escaped to England without his wife, and one brother-in-law, Jenö Kurz, who survived a concentration camp, all of Grete’s siblings (and their spouses), nephews and nieces died in the persecution, some at Terezín, the majority at Auschwitz. Her eldest brother, Leo, who had succeeded his father Sigmund as head of the Jewish community in their Czech home town, was executed for political opposition.
17 The textile industry was a major Jewish success story in early 20th-century Bohemia (the Zweig family’s prosperity, for example, had similar roots). One source of the firm’s growth had been the demand for industrially knitted garments for soldiers during the First World War–a fact which in turn led to the accusation from anti-Semitic sources that the owners of such successful factories were ‘Kriegsverdiener’ (war profiteers).
18 A habit of Moriz’s that my father recalled was that of getting up to open the windows at a certain point in the evening, during social gatherings in their apartment. This was a clear signal, understood by all his guests, that it was time for them to leave.
19 Two things were necessary for the would-be student immigrant: first, a British citizen prepared to act as financial guarantor; secondly, the offer of a place–and more particularly, of subsistence–at a university. The first service was provided by Marian Dunlop, one of a number of individuals who volunteered themselves in this way, apparently via a Quaker organisation, without having ever met the persons they were assisting; the second, by the Glasgow branch of the International Student Service. This, in effect, involved a whip-round amongst other students, organised by Alec Cairncross (later Sir Alec, a distinguished economist) to enable him and a handful of other refugees to be funded, at the minimal level of board and lodging with a local landlady. To both Marian Dunlop and Alec Cairncross my father retained a lifelong sense of his indebtedness.
20 Jacques Rispal, De la DST à Fresnes ou trente et un mois de prison (1990).
21 It provides a curious footnote to the story that my (secular Jewish) grandparents owed their survival to the combined exertions of the communist atheist Rispals and the Catholic Sisters, while my father and his brother owed theirs to the charitable activities of the rationalist Alec Cairncross, the Quakers who set up offices to assist refugees in Vienna, and the Christian spiritual teacher Marian Dunlop.
22 After 1938, and its ‘Aryanisation’ by the Nazis, the NWT was amalgamated with other titles; it appeared for the last time in 1945.
23 Scheyer, incidentally, wrote an obituary of Roth–the only article that I have been able to discover published during his time in Paris.
24 It is not for nothing that Freud admired Schnitzler: the sexual or erotic dimension of the recall of early memories is a central theme in Schnitzler’s male-female encounters.
25 Zweig’s musical obsessions extended to his acquiring manuscripts of the great composers, as well as (prominent in his Salzburg villa) a desk that had belonged to Beethoven.
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Contents
COVER
TITLE PAGE
WELCOME
INTRODUCTION BY P. N. SINGER
MORIZ SCHEYER’S MANUSCRIPT
Author’s foreword
1. The ‘Anschluss’
2. Breathing again: Switzerland
3. France: beloved France
4. Earning the first hundred francs
5. The men in berets
6. The ‘Drôle de Guerre’
7. Paris, ghost of an enchanted city
8. Paths of the Exodus
9. ‘Armistice’
10. Paris under the German boot
11. The French… and the French
12. From ‘the Israelites’ to ‘the Jew’
13. Stay of execution
14. ‘For examination of your situation’
15. Hut 8
16. Another stay of execution
17. ‘Zone libre’
18. Voiron
19. Nine gendarmes versus five Jews
20. Caserne Bizanet, Grenoble
21. A toast
22. Escape to Switzerland
23. A telegram
24. Labarde
25. Blessed are the poor in spirit
26. Nuns
27. A glimpse through a peephole
28. Music
29. Eugène le Roy
30. Informers
31. In place of a chapter on the Resistance
32. They’re coming–they’re not coming–they’re coming!
33. The morning of 6th June 1944
34. Summer
35. The first step into freedom
36. Carlos
37. In memory of my comrades from the concentration camp at Beaune-la-Rolande
38. The undeserving survivors
39. Still in Labarde: but free
Afterword
TRANSLATOR’S EPILOGUE
MORIZ SCHEYER: WRITER
PEOPLE MENTIONED IN THE TEXT
A CHRONOLOGY OF EVENTS 1933–1945
FURTHER READING
TRANSLATOR’S ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
ABOUT THE AUTHOR AND TRANSLATOR
NEWSLETTERS
COPYRIGHT
Copyright
Copyright © 2016 by P. N. Singer (Moriz Scheyer Estate)
Translation, introduction, and all end matter copyright © 2016 by P. N. Singer
Cover design by Mario J. Pulice
Cover photograph by STR / Stringer, Collection AFP / Getty Images
Cover copyright © 2016 by Hachette Book Group, Inc.
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First North American ebook edition, September 2016
Originally published in Great Britain by Profile Books, January 2016
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ISBN 978-0-316-27287-2
E3-20160818-JV-PC
Asylum Page 28