Alex's Wake
Page 21
Almost immediately, the Vichy government began a dual campaign promoting the emergence of this new “true France” and affixing blame for the country’s quick and humiliating defeat on the battlefield in the spring. At the heart of both efforts was the desire to weed out “undesirables,” those whose treachery, Pétain believed, had undermined what otherwise would have been a decisive victory against the German invader. These undesirables, long termed the Anti-France by the right wing, included Protestants, Freemasons, foreigners, Communists, and Jews.
Although additional undesirable elements of the French population, including Gypsies, left-wingers, and homosexuals, were targets of official discrimination, the campaign of anti-Semitism that began almost immediately after the establishment of the Vichy government was nothing short of an all-out assault. The French undoubtedly studied the Nazis’ Nuremburg Laws for guidance, but the flood of edicts and ordinances that began in July 1940 was not prompted by orders from Berlin. Henri du Moulin de Labarthète, who served as Marshal Pétain’s chief of staff, declared unambiguously, “Germany was not at the origin of the anti-Jewish legislation of Vichy. This legislation was, if I dare say it, spontaneous, native.” In 1947, Helmut Knochen, a German storm trooper and the director of the security police in France, recalled that “we found no difficulties with the Vichy government in implementing Jewish policy.”
The objective of the new government’s initial laws was the restriction of the rights of foreigners living in France, measures that, while affecting foreign Jews, weren’t specifically anti-Semitic. On July 13, Pétain issued an edict stating that “only men of French parentage” would be allowed to belong to the civil service. On July 22, another decree was announced, this one allowing the government to revoke the citizenship of all French men and women who had acquired their status since the passage of the liberal naturalization law of 1927. The next day saw the passage of a law that called for the annulment of citizenship and the confiscation of the property of all French nationals who had fled France after May 10, the start of the German offensive, without an officially recognized reason. This was the first measure that seemed specifically aimed at Jews, and among those singled out was Baron Robert de Rothschild, who had helped to fund the agricultural center at Martigny-les-Bains. The Vichy officials justified this new law by charging that Rothschild and his co-religionists had revealed themselves to be “Jews before they were French” by abandoning their country at the very moment it needed them most; thus, they declared, these people no longer deserved the honor of French citizenship.
Over the next ten weeks, more laws were issued in the Vichy regime’s by now undisguised attempt to solve its “Jewish problem.” On August 27, the Daladier-Marchandeau ordinance of 1939, prohibiting anti-Semitism in the press, was repealed, and several notorious Jew-baiting publishers were permitted to renew their activities in print. On August 16, the government announced that, henceforth, only members of the newly created Ordre des Médecins would be allowed to practice medicine, whether as doctors, dentists, or pharmacists. The catch was that membership in the Ordre was restricted to persons born in France of French fathers, and by now the designation “French” was in the process of being radically redefined. On September 10, a similar decree was announced that affected the practice of law. The Vichy minister of the interior, Marcel Peyrouton, declared that doctors and lawyers were under an obligation to exclude from their ranks those “elements” who by certain “acts or attitudes” had shown themselves “unworthy to exercise their profession in the manner the present situation demands.”
The definition of what constituted a “French” person and what constituted a Jew was spelled out in a decree issued on September 27. Taking its cue from the notorious 1935 Nuremberg Laws, the measure stated that anyone who had more than two grandparents “of the Jewish race” was a Jew. The law went on to declare that any Jew who had fled to the Unoccupied Zone was henceforth banned from returning to the Occupied Zone. It also called for a census of Jews in the Occupied Zone to be conducted within the coming month, required that the word Juif now be stamped on identity cards belonging to Jews, and called for yellow signs to be placed in the windows of stores owned by Jews. The signs were to carry the words, in both French and German, “Jewish Business.” Other stores, of their own volition, soon began sporting signs that read “This business is 100 percent French.”
The culmination of this legal attack on the rights and position of Jews living in France was the Statut des Juifs, or Statute on Jews, enacted by the Vichy government on October 3, 1940. The law began by reiterating that anyone with more than two Jewish grandparents would be considered a member of the Jewish “race”; from now on spouses of Jews would also be designated Jewish. But the main intent of the statute was to affirm the second-class standing of the Jews of France by specifically banning them from many positions in public life. Henceforth no Jew could be a member of the officer corps in the military or a civil servant, such as a judge, a teacher, or an administrator; no Jew could work as a journalist, a publisher, a radio broadcaster, or an actor on stage or in films; no Jew could work as a banker, a realtor, or a member of the stock exchange.
Other anti-Semitic statutes would follow in the coming months, laws that called for the confiscation of radios and telephones from Jewish homes in France, established curfews that allowed Jews to be on the public streets for only certain hours every day, and confined Jews to using only the last car in the trains of the Paris Métro.
Though the drumbeat of official anti-Semitism had been growing ever louder since the establishment of the Vichy regime in July, the cymbal crash of October 3 was a stunning blow to the Jews of France, who had certainly heard tales of Nazi atrocities from across the German border but who had never expected such measures would be enacted in their homeland. Raymond-Raoul Lambert, the CAR director who had met the St. Louis passengers at Boulogne-sur-Mer, wrote in his diary after the announcement of the Statut des Juifs, “I wept last night like a man who has been suddenly abandoned by the woman who has been the only love of his life, the only guide of his thoughts, the only inspiration of his action.” It would not be long, however, before feelings of betrayal would give way to fears of a far greater danger than a broken heart.
But where the Jews saw peril in the Statut, others saw opportunity. If one of the stated goals of the still-new government was the segregation of Jews from mainstream French society, then exceptional vigor in the pursuit of that goal could only win favor in the eyes of Vichy officials. On October 4, an addendum to the previous day’s law authorized officials throughout France to place under confinement or into conditions of forced labor any foreign-born Jews who might be living in their jurisdictions. Thus a young man from Montauban whose meteoric rise through the French bureaucracy had been propelled by tragedy saw his opening.
René Bousquet was born in Montauban in 1909, the son of a radical socialist notary. As a boy, he became fast friends with Adolphe Poult, whose father, Emile Poult, was the chief executive of a successful French confectioner. The firm, Biscuits Poult, was founded in 1883. It manufactured cakes, biscuits, wafers, tarts, and cookies of all shapes and sizes, which were consumed with relish in Montauban, site of its main factory, and throughout France. Emile Poult was thus a wealthy man, and his son Adolphe and René Bousquet spent many happy hours together at the Poult family estate.
The River Tarn, which flows through Montauban, has long been the source of the worst flooding in all Europe, with the possible exception of the Danube. In March 1930, following a winter of high snows near the river’s source in the Cevennes Mountains and exceptionally heavy spring rains at lower altitudes, the Tarn flowed deep and fast through Montauban, rising more than fifty-six feet above its normal level in just twenty-four hours. In what was subsequently termed a millennial flood, about a third of the surrounding departement was under water, thousands of houses were swept away, much of the low-lying regions of Montauban were destroyed, and more than three hundred people drowned.
For what were termed his “belles actions,” Bousquet became something of a national hero, awarded both a gold medal and the Legion of Honor. He also won the undying affection and loyalty of his friend’s father, Emile, who was devastated by the loss of his son and embraced young René as his surrogate heir.
Over the next ten years, Bousquet quickly rose from one high-profile position to the next, initially boosted by his celebrity and then well served by his unerring ability to cultivate mentors. Bousquet began as the protégé of Maurice Sarraut, a socialist senator and the publisher of an influential newspaper in nearby Toulouse. In April 1938, Sarraut became minister of the interior in the government of the Popular Front and appointed his protégé to the position of sous-préfet, or ministerial representative, for a city in northern France. In 1940, shortly after the armistice, Bousquet, at age thirty-one, was serving as prefect. But Sarraut had been swept out of power with the rest of the Third Republic. In order to remain in favor with his new superiors in Vichy, Bousquet knew that he would have to do something to catch their attention.
He saw his chance in the edict of October 4, which gave prefects the authority to intern or place under house arrest any foreign-born Jews within their jurisdiction. Bousquet did some research and found that in the nearby departement of Vosges, there were sixty German Jews living in a camp in Sionne. He quickly called his counterpart in Vosges and offered to take these “undesirables” off his hands. The other man agreed, leaving Bousquet with a nice cache of refugees but with no place to house them. Bousquet asked Émile Poult, now a powerful figure in the largely right-wing French business world, if he knew of a space sufficiently commodious to house sixty Jews for a few weeks. The older man offered his dear young friend the use of his factory in Montauban. The area within the factory gates where trucks were loaded with their daily shipments of cookies and cakes was large enough for sixty cots, with extra space for exercise. The high walls that surrounded the factory would make escape unlikely and its location was highly convenient: just a few hundred yards down the street from the Montauban railway station.
Thus, on October 13, 1940, Grandfather Alex and Uncle Helmut arrived at the Gare de Montauban-Ville-Bourbon on a train from the north. They and their fifty-eight fellow undesirables were quickly marched about two blocks down the Avenue de Mayenne, turned right, and walked through the open gate of Biscuits Poult, which would serve as their address for the next four weeks.
I really have no idea how Alex and Helmut spent that month within the walls of the cookie factory. I like to think that they were allowed to walk around the lot several times a day, that they were fed generously, and that M. Poult begrudged them at least one wafer or tartelette from his vast inventory at each meal. I cannot imagine how they came to terms with being prisoners held behind secure walls after the comfort of their initial warm welcome in France. I know that on November 6, Marshal Pétain, on a tour of the Unoccupied Zone, made a stop in Montauban, where he gave a speech in the Place Nationale before a wildly cheering crowd. Perhaps Alex and Helmut could hear bits of the celebration from the open-air Poult courtyard. I know that two days later, on November 8, the prefect of the departement of Tarn-et-Garonne sent a memorandum to the chief of police of Montauban that stated, “Per our telephone conversation, I have the honor of requesting from you a patrol to accompany sixty foreign Jewish refugees to Camp Agde. Those individuals will assemble at noon in the custody of the municipal police at the Poult building. The train is due to depart for Agde at 3:30 p.m.” Indeed on the following day, November 9, 1940, two years to the day after Kristallnacht, under the watchful eyes of the police, Alex and Helmut walked back up the Avenue de Mayenne to the station and boarded a train heading south to the shores of the Mediterranean Sea, as their forced odyssey through France continued.
René Bousquet, whose friendship with Emile Poult brought my relatives to Montauban, continued his rapid rise through the ranks of the Vichy regime. Less than two years later, he was made secretary-general of the national police. In that capacity, he planned and carried out the infamous roundup of more than thirteen thousand Jews on July 16 and 17, 1942. His victims were first held for five days at an enclosed bicycle track in Paris—the Vélodrome d’Hiver, or Winter Velodrome—and then shipped to various extermination camps. After the war, Bousquet was tried on charges of “compromising the interests of the national defense” and received a sentence of five years of dégradation nationale, or a ceremonial loss of rank. But that judgment was immediately lifted because Bousquet made a convincing case that, while appearing to collaborate with the Nazis, he had been secretly assisting the Resistance all along. After lying low for a while, Bousquet returned to politics and helped finance François Mitterrand’s successful campaign for president in 1981. Then, in the late 1980s, the Romanian-born Nazi hunter Serge Klarsfeld filed a complaint against Bousquet for crimes against humanity. After many delays a trial date was set, but before Bousquet ever saw the inside of a courtroom, he was assassinated in his own home on June 8, 1993. The gunman was reportedly a right-wing sympathizer who did not want the full story of René Bousquet to be revealed.
Bousquet’s imprisonment of the Jews at the Velodrome in Paris in July 1942 was one of the shameful preludes to the mass deportations that began the following month when the Vichy government approved transports that delivered the Jews of France to the killing centers of Germany and Poland. In late August 1942, the spiritual descendant of the bishop of Montauban, the gentle man who welcomed the Osage and helped them return to their homeland in 1830, raised his voice in protest. Pierre-Marie Théas, bishop of Montauban since 1940, wrote a pastoral letter condemning the deportations, declaring, “I give voice to the outraged protest of Christian conscience and I proclaim that all men and women, whatever their race or religion, have the right to be respected. Hence, the recent antisemitic measures are an affront to human dignity and a violation of the most sacred rights of the individual and the family.” He planned to mail his letter to his fellow priests in the surrounding parishes so that they could help amplify his protest.
But his secretary, Marie-Rose Gineste, warned the bishop that if he put his remarks in the mail, agents of the Vichy government would no doubt intercept the envelopes and destroy their contents. So she made multiple copies of his letter, which also implored parishioners to save Jews from deportation, mounted her bicycle, and over the next four days pedaled more than sixty-five miles over hilly roads through towns, villages, and hamlets to each parish in the surrounding region. On the following Sunday, August 30, Bishop Théas’s letter was read from every pulpit to packed congregations, the only exception being a church with a Vichy sympathizer as its priest. In response to the call, many French families began to shelter Jews in their homes.
Bishop Théas was arrested by the Gestapo in 1944, and sent to the concentration camp known as Stalag 122, which was located near the forest of Compiègne, the site of the French surrender. He survived the ordeal and died of natural causes in 1977 at the age of eighty-two. Marie-Rose Gineste took an active role in the Resistance, hiding Jews, forging identity cards, and leading many Jews to safe houses in the surrounding countryside. She remained in Montauban and continued to ride her sturdy little bicycle until she was eighty-nine years old. Then, in December 2000, she donated the bicycle to the Holocaust memorial at Yad Vashem in Israel. She died in the summer of 2010, aged ninety-nine.
For their efforts on behalf of humanity, Bishop Pierre-Marie Théas and Marie-Rose Gineste were both named by Yad Vashem as “Righteous Among the Nations.”
THURSDAY, MAY 26, 2011. I learn all this during two rich, full days under the
hot southern sun of Montauban, in the bracing company of Jean-Claude and Monique. Wednesday begins with a tour of the town. Jean-Claude points out local landmarks. We see the bullet holes that remain in the stone walls of the church of St. Jacques, where the outnumbered Occitan irregulars were defeated in 1621. There are the slightly raised cobblestones in the Place Nationale where tumbrels paused so that townspeople might jeer and hurl vegetables at the condemned victims of the Revolution on their way to the guillotine. Next is a little stone plaque on Rue Adolphe Poult, almost invisible on an embankment by the River Tarn, heralding the bravery of the young man during the great flood of 1930. Jean-Claude also takes us to the Place des Martyrs, where the four members of the Resistance were hanged in 1944. The public square still contains the withered stump of one of the four trees.
We visit the Musée de la Résistance et de la Déportation, which displays posters from the Pétain era illustrating the dangers of the international Jewish conspiracy that the National Revolution was determined to defeat. In one poster, taken from an exhibition called Le Juif et la France, a bearded man with an enormous nose, his eyes popping and beads of lascivious sweat breaking out on his forehead, fondles with clawlike fingers a globe of the world. In another, a righteous French policeman holds two wriggling, shifty-eyed men by the scruffs of their necks. They, too, sport oversized noses and are both clutching bags that are presumably filled with ill-gotten money. The poster is captioned with a single word: Assez! or Enough! When I ask Jean-Claude if he recalls seeing this sort of ugly propaganda in his youth, he sighs and says, “Everywhere.”
Our next stop is the Montauban city archives. There, in the police files from 1940, we find the index cards that helped me trace the movements of Grandfather Alex and Uncle Helmut. Both cards feature a red letter J in the upper-left corner, along with the assurance that the local prefect examined the cards on October 25. The cards note their arrival in Montauban on October 13 and their departure for Agde on November 9. They list Helmut’s profession as student and Alex’s as salesman and poultry farmer, revealing that my grandfather must have retained pleasant memories from his brief months in Martigny-les-Bains. Both cards indicate that Alex and Helmut’s address while in Montauban was the “Cantonnement Poult,” or the temporary quarters provided by the proprietor of the cookie factory.