by Alex Kershaw
Each day brought better news for the occupiers. On October 3, 1940, the Vichy regime passed a law, unprompted by Knochen and his Gestapo colleagues, that excluded Jews from any kind of public service. The next day Field Marshal Walther von Brauchitsch, the head of army high command, gave formal permission for Knochen to “investigate anti-German activities carried out by Jews, immigrants, communists, and church groups in the occupied zone.” Knochen and his colleagues could also seize these enemies’ assets: artwork, furniture, and countless cars. Before long, Knochen’s and other Gestapo offices on Avenue Foch were among the best decorated in all Europe.
On October 18, Jews were banned from owning or directing any business, much to the delight of many envious French. So began the process of Aryanization, in other words state-sanctioned theft, by which Jewish concerns were taken over by gentiles. The owner of number 55, Jewish businessman Pierre Wertheimer, had long since fled, moving to the United States, but he had arranged for an associate to take over his stake in Chanel Perfumes to keep it out of Nazi hands. The designer Coco Chanel wrote to the German authorities demanding that she, not the associate, receive Wertheimer’s share. “Parfums Chanel is still the property of Jews,” she complained. “Your mission is to make these Jews cede their property to Aryans.”
As the last leaves fell throughout France, on October 24, 1940, Marshal Pétain and Hitler met at Montoire-sur-le-Loir (Montoire on the Loire). As London suffered the worst of the Blitz, the eighty-four-year-old Pétain was photographed shaking Hitler’s hand. “It is with honor,” Pétain declared, “and in order to maintain French unity, a unity which has lasted ten centuries, and in the framework of the constructive activity of the new European order, that today I am embarking on the path of collaboration.”
By the time Pétain had met Hitler, there was another new occupant on Avenue Foch, perhaps the most sinister, certainly among the most deranged. It was in late September that twenty-seven-year-old SS Hauptsturmführer Theo Dannecker, a former textile salesman, took up residence at Number 31 as head of the Gestapo’s Jewish Affairs Office in Paris. He already knew one of his neighbors. “Dr. Bones,” or rather Knochen, had been his boss for two years, from 1937 to 1939, at Gestapo section II-11, specializing in “Churches, Jews, and Freemasons.” How times had changed. Dannecker and Knochen were no longer ambitious outsiders, bonded by their shared fascination with the secrets of European freemasonry and hatred of the Jews. Each now had his own mansion on the most exclusive avenue in Nazi-occupied Europe. Dannecker’s new base was in fact less than fifty yards from Knochen's offices at 72.
Dannecker was determined to solve the “Jewish problem” in France as swiftly as possible. That fall, with Knochen’s help, he quickly set about doing so. He did not of course see himself as a psychopathic racist. He was an irrepressible warrior, just like Knochen, in Hitler’s war against the Bolshevik Jews. In fact, he was evil incarnate, a nihilistic predator who would soon send thousands of Parisians to the gas chambers in Auschwitz, committing mass murder from his elegant new office just a short stroll from the Jacksons’ home.
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ONE DAY that October, at the Jacksons’ lakeside home in Enghien, Sumner pulled an envelope from a pocket and handed it to Toquette.
Phillip watched as his mother read out a letter from the director general of the American Hospital:
Dear Dr. Jackson,
Please advise the medical staff that the Republic has awarded the Croix de Guerre with Palm [a military honor] to the hospital and staff….I am pleased to advise you personally that you are among those decorated and cited for “A magnificent effort, voluntarily treating the wounded and aiding prisoners day and night in the face of the enemy…saving a great number of human lives.” Please accept my warmest thanks and appreciation for your exceptional devotion to duty in this trying period.
Sumner was silent. He was never one to claim sole credit for any of the hospital’s achievements. According to Toquette’s sister, who was also present, Sumner had simply stood with his arms folded across his chest, speechless, as Toquette read out the citation.
Phillip was proud of his father but rather less pleased with his decision to send Phillip to a strict Catholic school near Enghien that October. Sumner believed it would be better for Phillip to be away from Avenue Foch, known now as “Avenue Boche” by Parisians because so many of Helmut Knochen’s fellow Gestapo had set up base there. Phillip badly missed his old school and classmates at the Lycée Janson de Sailly, a ten-minute walk from 11, Avenue Foch. He kept in touch with several friends, eager for their news, yearning to rejoin them the following year.
Phillip learned that some of the older students from his school were involved in the first noteworthy act of resistance in France. On November 11, Armistice Day, several hundred pupils from Phillip’s school and others near the Place de l’Étoile disobeyed their teachers, walked out of their classrooms and marched toward the Arc de Triomphe singing “La Marseillaise.” Around three thousand students soon gathered at the Étoile, hemmed in by French police. German soldiers watched apprehensively. The students had organized a collection to pay for a wreath that they planned to place that afternoon at the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier, a favorite with visiting German soldiers. However, the wreath was made in the form of the Cross of Lorraine—the same symbol that General de Gaulle, condemned to death by Pétain that August, had adopted for his Free French Forces in London.
It was just before four o’clock when two brave students laid the wreath on the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier. Some of Phillip’s schoolmates were dressed from head to toe in black and wore ribbons colored red, white, and blue—the French tricolor had been banned in Occupied France. Loud cries of “Down with Hitler!” and “Down with Pétain!” could be heard close by on Avenue Foch. Pandemonium broke out as the French police and heavily armed German soldiers tried to break up the crowd. Around 150 people were arrested, most of them students. Some were taken to a military prison, where they were beaten, dragged by their hair, and forced to stand in the pouring rain, hour after hour, with their hands on their heads. Others were ordered to line up against a wall by a group of soldiers. These students believed they were going to be shot until a senior German officer appeared and cried out in protest: “But they are just children!”
Had Phillip not been at the Catholic school in Enghien, where he had to recite Ave Maria each morning, he, too, could have walked out of class and marched shoulder to shoulder with his former schoolmates who, just like him and his parents, hated Hitler and admired de Gaulle. But there was one advantage to being in Enghien, the upscale spa resort eight miles north of Avenue Foch. As the first snows fell, promising a bitter first winter under the “Fritzes,” Phillip was able to spend much of his free time with his mother, who was no longer working at the American Hospital.
The family home in Enghien stood beside a large lake where Sumner and Toquette had boated while they were courting twenty years before. On sunny days, after the lake had frozen, locals gathered to skate across the gleaming ice, visible from the Jacksons’ living room. However, reaching the ivy-covered three-story home from Avenue Foch or the American Hospital in Neuilly was an ordeal for the Jacksons, who were forced to cycle all the way to Enghien, well over an hour’s ride from central Paris.
Sumner had reluctantly given up using the family car after quickly burning through the last few gallons of fuel after the Germans imposed severe restrictions on private ownership of vehicles. For a while he roared around on a motorbike but then it, too, ran out of fuel and he, like Phillip and Toquette and indeed millions of other Parisians, was compelled to hop on a bicycle instead. Less than five thousand people were allowed driving permits in a city that officially had 350,000 parking places for cars. At gasoline pumps in central Paris, there was never a queue. Bicycle garages, specializing in repairs and tune-ups, sprang up on corners of some of the busiest boulevards.
While the Jacksons spent most of their weekends together in Enghien, they did still visit t
heir home on Avenue Foch from time to time. Phillip would sit in his old bedroom, which faced a small garden enclosed by tall black iron railings, and look out of the window as Germans passed by, riding horses along a bridle lane on the north side of the avenue. The only vehicles allowed on the broad avenue belonged either to collaborators or the Gestapo, and so Phillip could actually hear the thump of the horses’ hooves. Sometimes he was woken by the guttural songs of German soldiers marching in the freezing morning air along the avenue on their way to exercises in the Bois de Boulogne.
Because he spent so much time with Toquette, Phillip was aware of how much energy she devoted early that winter of 1940 to finding food. Toquette, her sister Alice, and the family’s maid, a proud Alsatian in her thirties called Louise Heile, had to spend long hours hunting for rutabaga and potatoes, which had fast become staples at breakfast, lunch, and dinner. Rationing was strict, though undreamed-of delicacies could be found on the blossoming black market. Sadly, many Parisians stopped inviting friends over for dinner. Toquette was in the same bind as so many others: she would have to ask invitees to bring food obtained with their food tickets or she would have to sacrifice the family’s ration, which she could not do, as it was barely enough to get by on.
It was galling indeed for Toquette and her French neighbors to live so close to some of Paris’s finest restaurants. She had only to step out of a side door and then walk to her right for a few yards to reach the Restaurant Prunier, all the rage with fur-clad collaborators and the more refined SS men like Helmut Knochen. Many evenings, his gluttonous colleagues could be found feasting on superb seafood, washed down with a nice, crisp white like Pouilly-Fuissé or Sancerre, while flirting with some Russian countess or other at the marble oyster bar.
While Toquette lined up in the cold for their ration of root vegetables, Phillip sometimes watched films at the cinemas on the Champs-Élysées, but mostly he spent the long winter evenings with his head in a good book: record numbers of novels would be published during the occupation despite paper rationing. Phillip’s favorites were The Swiss Family Robinson, with its thrilling shipwreck scenes; The Marvelous Voyage of Nils Holgersson, the story of a boy flying to strange lands on the back of a swan; and James Fenimore Cooper’s Last of the Mohicans. His father reminded him with his rugged frame of one of the book’s Yankee heroes.
When Phillip grew tired of reading, he could while away his time by performing chemistry experiments in the laboratory that Sumner no longer used, located just across the hallway from his bedroom. He would create special concoctions with chemicals his father had once mixed to treat his wealthy private patients before the war. He had no idea what was happening elsewhere on the avenue after dark that first December of Nazi rule as sleek Hotchkiss cars sped by the window, driven by Gestapo officers, headed for one of the grand villas sequestered by Helmut Knochen and his colleagues.
The only time Phillip spent with Sumner, who was busier than ever at the American Hospital, was at weekends when they would wrap up warm and go into the garden at the house in Enghien to cut wood together. It was as if such chores reminded Sumner of all that he missed about America—the woods, his family in Maine, and the gritty values of small New England towns. Even though he had treated royalty and the rich and famous, including Ernest Hemingway, who had come to him with a nasty gash in his head, he was still a practical, forthright man, “a man of Maine” according to a colleague at the American Hospital, “who had never become Frenchified,” so much more comfortable in the woods, hunting, and on the ocean, fishing, than in the status-obsessed salons of Avenue Foch.
The sawing, chopping, and stacking was an important task now that there was precious little coal and Paris was soon in the grip of one of the coldest winters on record. Throughout the city, people sat in cafés and restaurants wearing their heaviest overcoats and donned ski jackets indoors. Women could be seen wearing wool trousers, suddenly high fashion. Demand for fur—of any kind—soared. Some wore crazy striped designs using the pelts of cats and dogs and horses. That winter would break every record in the book with its extraordinary number of days below freezing—seventy in all.
The first Christmas under Nazi rule approached. On December 23 red posters appeared, emblazoned on buildings around the city. They announced the execution of a young man, Jacques Bonsergent, the first Parisian to have stood and faced a Nazi firing squad. His crime had been to jostle a German officer in the Gare Saint-Lazare. The posters announced not just an execution but also the Germans’ true intentions: to control every aspect of French society and, when necessary, terrorize. Two days later, the Jacksons, as with all other Parisians, were forbidden from attending Christmas Mass at midnight. France’s new masters had decreed that all services be held at 5:00 p.m. because of a specially imposed curfew. Nothing in the French tradition—no date of worship, even—was any longer sacred.
PART TWO
ARMIES OF THE NIGHT
SEVEN
ON DOCTOR’S ORDERS
THE MAN WAS totally blind. Once in a while that January of 1941 he would say something to a nurse or doctor he trusted. He felt protected in the American Hospital. Dr. Sumner Jackson had made sure of that. He was sometimes spotted walking through the hospital’s grounds, using a stick, no doubt following Sumner’s advice, trying to regain strength in his legs and restore his muscle tone.
The man was an RAF pilot who had lost his sight when he was shot down. He was not the only Allied soldier whom Sumner had decided to help rehabilitate as best he could before he was sent along an escape line, bearing false papers. Others may have been smuggled out of Paris in the hospital’s ambulances, which the Germans often neglected to search at the so-called Line of Demarcation at Moulins, the border crossing between Occupied and Vichy France. Then, at great risk, volunteers would accompany such escapees to Toulouse, from where guides would lead them across the Pyrenées to neutral Spain.
Sumner was not acting alone at the hospital. Other doctors and nurses helped him hide Allied airmen and soldiers until they could be sent to safety. Nothing was formally organized and no real names ever used, not a word written down. All those involved were sworn to utter secrecy. Sumner may not even have told Toquette. Only after the war would piecemeal accounts emerge of how evaders had checked into the American Hospital and then several weeks later appeared in London. There was, for example, the case of a wounded soldier who one day confided to André Guillon, a fellow Frenchman at the hospital, that he was suffering from a bad case of gonorrhea. “The American doctor [Sumner] who took care of him with sulfa drugs at a very high dosage…accomplished an exploit in healing,” recalled Guillon. “We learned that three weeks after he left the hospital, he was in London.” One morning there was no sign of the blind RAF officer who had been wandering the grounds and corridors of the American Hospital. He, too, had gone missing. Several weeks later he also turned up in England.
To avoid detection, it was essential to keep the Germans out of the American Hospital. Sumner had to ensure the beds were all full and therefore he arranged for the hospital to take patients from internment camps for the British near Paris, and at Vittel and Saint-Denis. One of those Jackson treated was a young Englishwoman. One day, she pinned a poem on a bulletin board:
PORTRAIT OF AN AMERICAN
We all agree he’s a perfect dear
Altho at times he inspires fear
And we quake in our beds as he draws near
Oh! so severe!
But those eyes so stern and steel blue
Can gleam with humour and laughter too
And life takes on a brighter hue
When he smiles at you.
Sumner soon found the poem and, embarrassed, took it down. The following day the poem was back in place. Whether he liked it or not, this patient was determined that everyone should know how much she appreciated him.
Sumner’s famously short temper was fully tested that spring of 1941, as keeping the hospital going as an independent organization, not under dire
ct Nazi supervision, became a huge challenge. Thankfully, the hospital’s governors appointed a governor-general, seventy-year-old General Aldebert de Chambrun, who quickly proved highly successful when it came to finding food and other essentials. The white-mustached decorated veteran of World War I was, much to Sumner’s distaste, a supporter of Pétain, but his gallant past compensated for his politics. He had fought valiantly for France throughout the bloodbaths of the Marne, the Somme, and Verdun, perhaps too much so. The general, a direct descendant of the Marquis de Lafayette, had reportedly written to his wife from the trenches about the “great pleasure” he had in shelling his own château with artillery, seeing “piece after piece come down” because it was occupied by German forces. The general’s wife was as well bred as her husband: sixty-seven-year-old Clara Longworth, a snobbish Shakespeare authority with a doctorate from the Sorbonne, was in fact a true American blueblood. Clara’s elder brother, Nicholas Longworth, was married to Alice Roosevelt, a rabid right-winger and the only daughter of the great American president Theodore Roosevelt.
Sumner was no admirer of French or American aristocrats. But he was determined to work as best he could with General de Chambrun for the sake of his patients and the hospital, and theirs soon became a formidable partnership. The general was a smart, savvy operator, just as Sumner was, being an experienced diplomat who had served as French ambassador to Rome in the thirties. Few were better connected. The general was able to call on the support of the most powerful collaborator in France after Pétain: no less than Pierre Laval. The general’s only child, thirty-seven-year-old René, a wiry figure with an intense, coiled energy, was actually married to Laval’s only child. According to Time magazine, René’s glamorous thirty-six-year-old wife, Josée, was as politically ambitious and swarthy as her father—his “right-hand woman.” They had traveled the world together. She had accompanied her father on his first visit to the United States as French premier in October 1931. Ever since, she had been his most loyal confidante.