Over six thousand children were sent to Auschwitz in 1942. A thousand of them were less than two years of age. The remainder were under seventeen. Of those, two and a half thousand were between six and twelve years of age. There are no accounts of the experiences of these children. We know that, whether aged nine months or thirteen, they had no food, no water, no air and no light on the journey to Auschwitz. As they could not be put to work, it is most probable that the children who did not die on the way were immediately exterminated, or taken, as so many children were, for medical experiments. We do know that none of the Vel' d'Hiv' children returned to France.
17
Having Fun
LOUIS DARQUIER WAS “a bon-vivant, a bohemian, surrounded by many friends—creditors I believe—who received many favours in return,” reported one of his former employees to the police after the Liberation. “However, I don't think he was paid for any of this, despite his reputation for taking bribes. In reality, his services were probably rewarded by the bunfights he revelled in and in which his wife was very much involved. Of Irish origin, she was only too willing to display her anglophile feelings in public.”1
The pretence of Irish nationality was a sensible approach for Myrtle during these years. There are many glimpses of her, almost always in Paris, almost always associated with dinners in restaurants, or in the nightclubs and cafés of the city. In a few photographs of this time she is so thin she is almost unrecognisable except for the Jones mouth and her fetching hats, though her numbed expression could well have been a look of boredom. Her French remained primitive, and usually such photographs were taken at the launch of one or another of Louis' new associations, he standing under a portrait of Pétain, talking for far too long about Jews, she standing to attention, eyes glazed.
Myrtle, with her Australian and British citizenship, should have been in a Nazi concentration camp for enemy aliens, first in Besançon and then in Vittel.2 In the early days of the war the Nazis arrested all British citizens—mostly nannies and butlers, dancers and English teachers—and a thousand British women spent the war in internment camps. At first it was hoped that Australia could be persuaded to “move out of the orbit of Great Britain”;3 this hope soon disappeared. Everything English-owned was requisitioned, and the British embassy in Paris became a furniture depository. American women, who were not interned, had to report to the police every week—they were not allowed to own a horse, but they could own a bicycle, while English women left at liberty had to report to the police daily, and for them horses were allowed, but not bicycles.
Myrtle, neither English nor American, had other protectors besides Louis. Embassy life in Paris and Vichy, particularly that of neutral countries, was a hotbed of intrigue and subversion during the war. Franco's general staff had long been hand in glove with its German equivalent. The Spanish embassy on the avenue George V filtered mutual exchange of information and espionage activity, linking the Gestapo with French, Spanish and Italian secret police. José de Lequerica, the ambassador, a close friend of Otto Abetz and “a notorious collaborator,” often requested favours of Darquier, whom by 1943 he was addressing as “my dear Commissioner and friend.”4 Lequerica's military attaché in Paris for almost a decade from 1934, Barroso y Sánchez-Guerra, held just the kind of banquets Darquier most appreciated.5
Barroso, like Abetz, had been instructed to invite to the embassy people who were sympathetic to the Francoist cause. He was close to Franco, part of his immediate circle during the Civil War and one of his most devoted collaborators. Like Louis Darquier he was large, said to be corrupt, and was the kind of hunting-and-shooting military man much appreciated by Pétain. “Louis always said that Barroso owed him”6—like Taittinger, it seems that Barroso received nuggets from Louis Darquier's CGQ J pot of gold.
For Myrtle, embassies had other uses. The Republic of Ireland had an ambassador to Occupied France, an expatriate Irishman, Count O'Kelley of Gallagh.7 According to her family in Tasmania, O'Kelley revealed after the war that Myrtle had hidden British airmen during the Occupation. Her family also believe that she saved people from deportation and the gas chambers, but did not like to talk about it: when asked, her gift for fantasy seemed to fail her and she would not elaborate. There are no records of any of these events, but there are accounts of Myrtle describing such activities to others which, if true, would be equally bizarre. In such tales she took the role of Pauline, whose Perils she perhaps saw too much of in the early days of the cinema. She talked about intervening and saving people, leading them over the Alps, hiding them in apartments she did not have. She talked too of grand furniture and beautiful possessions, and also claimed to be a descendant of Inigo Jones. In fact, until early 1943 the Hôtel Fortuny remained the Darquiers' address. Myrtle was never seen at Louis' office, though her existence was well-known by his staff. She was his wife in the French way, a person apart, not interested in politics—there was a daughter somewhere?8
“I think there were two personalities in Darquier,” said a Darquier family friend in Cahors. “There was comedy. It was an act. He was a comedian of the boulevard. His title—you know how over the top they were about aristocratic names between the wars; his monocle from which he was never separated…he was a double man, he had two persons inside himself.”9
Louis Darquier's aim was to acquire as much money as possible— money to spend, not to hoard—with, preferably, fame and applause as an accompaniment. All this, embedded within a nationalist and aristocratic carapace, required that achievement should involve the least amount of work possible in the trade he had chosen, that of a professional anti-Semite. Myrtle was identical in this: there was her fantasy world, and her real charm and humour. Each accepted the other for different peccadilloes. Myrtle believed in Louis “like a GOD”10 and Louis understood Myrtle: “Myrtle,” it was said, “drank because the sky was blue and because it was not blue. She was an alcoholic.”11 In addition to his womanising, Louis Darquier, like his father, had a fearful temper; he beat Myrtle, but he also told her, often, how much he loved her.
Vichy instituted jours sans, forbidding the selling of hard liquor on Mondays, Wednesdays and Saturdays, and of Pernod all the time, but Myrtle could always get wine. On dry days restaurants would sell it in teacups, and within walking distance of her hotel was the “well-established wine business in the place Vendôme” of Count O'Kelley's expatriate family, “able to provide much more than just wine.”12 Yet Myrtle tried desperately not to drink, and not to appear drunk, because she feared Louis' anger more than anything.
Where did the money go? Louis' bar and restaurant bills were always enormous, but photographs suggest that Myrtle was not eating much black-market beefsteak or foie gras. Anne later said she took drugs. In public Louis repeatedly proclaimed that drug trafficking was the work of Jews, as part of their attempts to corrupt the French people, that they used “the bindings of the Talmud to circulate cocaine…The Jew Lyon not only sells the drug, but also makes it. Three other Jews are his accomplices …”13 Domestically, his views seem to have been otherwise.
But there was no shortage of drugs from non-Jewish sources. Louis spoke on the radio as often as he could, and there was a drug ring associ ated with Radio-Mondial, the international radio station. Fernand de Brinon, Vichy's ambassador in Paris, was said to have dealt in drugs in his earlier days, and by 1942 “everything concerning Paris passed through him.” Jean Cocteau, living in the Palais Royal, worried “How will I get my opium?” “The answer was as usual, from someone friendly on the staff of a restaurant in the rue Royale, who was apparently tolerated as a supplier by the SD [the intelligence service of the SS].”14 Doctors could also supply drugs; not only was Jean Darquier to hand, but his wife Janot qualified as a doctor in 1943. 15 The most likely source however was Admiral René-Charles Platon at Vichy, a known user of cocaine.16 If Platon supplied Myrtle it must have been by way of Louis, because Platon's rancorous anglophobia reached the point of hysteria after Dunkirk, where he had been governor and
commander of the French forces.
Louis still visited Vichy. He worked for Laval, and had meetings with him twice a month. As Darquier dealt with Jews for Vichy, Admiral Platon, a rabid anti-Semite, dealt with secret societies and Masons; but what connected the two men most firmly was their shared animosity for René Bousquet and a shared admiration for Charles Maurras. Convinced that Bousquet was a Mason, Platon pursued him, becoming a laughingstock for this at Vichy, as well as for the gaiters and monocle he wore. This latter resemblance to Louis Darquier was to prove fatal.
All of Germany wanted to come to Paris during the war years; it was the prime posting. The murky grey-green uniforms of the Wehrmacht, the chic black of the SS, the brown-gold elegance of German diplomats and officials were everywhere. Beautifully accoutred German officers filled the churches on Sundays “to show their Catholicism [and] demonstrate that they do not persecute religions.”17 Beneath enormous publicity posters presenting the Russian, British and American flags, behind which lurked an enormous caricature of a Jew—“The Power behind our enemies: the Jew!”18—Parisians had to step off the pavement to make way for any German who cared to pass.
By 1942 most of the French were scrabbling for food, for the Germans took everything—“ils nous prennent tout ”—and what they did not take to Germany, they ate and drank in situ. When together, “Baron and Baroness Darquier de Pellepoix” had at their disposal all the food, fizz and frivolities of Occupied Paris. This they could enjoy with many old comrades. Charles Trochu became president of the Paris city council when Louis was reappointed a councillor in 1941, and Pierre Tait tinger followed him. Louis was on various council committees, but rarely attended.
The most active and entertained group in Paris were the journalists and fascists of Louis' pre-war world. Nothing had changed. Some were subsidised by Laval, some by Pétain, all by one or another of the German services, and the unbridled rivalry and disputations between the Paris collabos were as acrimonious as ever. Céline was Shakespeare to all of them; they needed him because the Liste Otto, named after Abetz, banned nearly a thousand writers, including of course all Jewish writers and thinkers, and extending its disapproval to Shakespeare and Virginia Woolf.
Goebbels and Rosenberg came to Paris, and so did Goering in his white Reichsmarschall uniform, bejewelled and decorated, out-shopping them all and truffling out works of art for himself and Hitler. They, and now Louis, could afford the Folies-Bergère, only one of the famous cabarets and nightclubs which defied the blackout throughout the Occupation. Myrtle and Louis could stay up till five in the morning at clubs like the Lido, always full of German officers, or watch the Gypsy extravaganzas at another German favourite, the Shéhérazade, where champagne flowed through the dark nights. Maxim's, taken over by the Berlin restaurateur Otto Horcher, could get through twenty thousand bottles of champagne a month. Myrtle and Louis could go there, or to the Ritz, or to the Catalan in the rue des Grands Augustins where Picasso also had his studio, or to the Café de Paris, Laval's favoured lunching place. Poets and writers and painters still frequented the Lipp and the Deux Magots; Simone de Beauvoir remained comfortably warm at the Flore.
Myrtle and Louis always lived in hotel rooms near the Champs-élysées, whose cafés included Louis' favourite, Le Select, which was, like all those of Paris, full of Germans and French watching the midday parade of goose-stepping Nazi soldiers and whiling the hours away. The Champs-élysées throbbed with activity. There were supper clubs and nightspots such as the Européen, a “sumptuous rubbish bin” for collabos, next to dens like Le Colisée Café, notorious for black-market dealings, gigolos and gangs of wide boys.19 The offices of Radio-Paris and Radio-City were also in the Champs-élysées. The notorious broadcaster Jean-Hérold Paquis20 announced every day, “England, like Carthage, will be destroyed,” and often referred to the United States as led by “Roosevelt and his three hundred rabbis.”21 At numbers 31 and 33 was Organisation Todt, Albert Speer's construction office, responsible for forced, slave and paid labour, and at 52 was the Paris Propaganda Staffel which Louis Darquier used so often to issue his plans for the disposal of the Jews.
“Blindly following the Marshal,” Maurice Chevalier chirped the loudest of all the French singers who performed throughout the Occupation.22 The music halls, honky-tonks and cafés of Montparnasse and Montmartre did roaring trade, and prostitutes earned a fortune from the occupying Germans, wifeless in Paris. Germans in uniform and their French companions attended “fantastic dinner parties, with all the right French guests, Marquis So-and-so and Comte Tra-la-la.”23 Helmut Knochen met Anatole de Monzie at the salon of the American heiress Florence Gould, whose Thursday lunches gathered every French and German of collaborative note together.
Fashion houses and couturiers, led by the horizontal collaboration of the indomitably anti-Semitic Coco Chanel, did excellent business, providing the wives and otherwise of German and collaborationist Paris with the clothes Myrtle so loved. With material rationed, much of the genius of Parisian haute couture was poured into the production of hats of fabulous construction, reaching from the heavens in avalanches of frills, flowers, stuffed birds or haricot beans, or, much more chic, little black netted pillboxes—most of these hats looked like feminine implements of war.
Decorated as she liked, what Myrtle remembered most about her years in Paris during the Occupation was listening to the great German musicians who came to play there. Jewish composers were of course banned— though Offenbach's “Cancan” got away with it, in the interests of traditional French nightlife—but otherwise there was every kind of music. Wagner was sung wonderfully at the Paris Opera. There were concerts for workers, concerts in the parks and concerts by the regimental band of the Luftwaffe at Notre Dame. A Gypsy or a homosexual had more to fear from the Nazis than from Vichy during the Occupation, but it was safer to be neither. Django Reinhardt was a Manouche, a French Gypsy, but he saved himself by playing miraculous jazz at Porfiro Rubirosa's all-night parties and at the Moulin Rouge.
The Propaganda Staffel was a section of a much larger Nazi propaganda department, the Propaganda-Abteilung, responsible to Goebbels in Berlin. It controlled Parisian theatre, radio, cinema, art, music, literature, the press and publishing, including for the latter two the allocation of paper. Its primary aims, from the beginning, were the eradication of all traces of Jewish influence and the indoctrination of the French. To this end France was awash with posters and leaflets, tracts and brochures, plays, documentaries and newspapers explaining to the population the wonders of Nazi thought.
The Propaganda-Abteilung was attached to military command, the MBF, and it lacked finesse. Abetz and his French wife Suzanne held a more intellectually acceptable court at the embassy, but until the summer of 1942 he wrangled with Goebbels for control. Abetz won, and his Deutsche Institut (German Institute), under its director Karl Epting, became the centre for parties, lectures, exhibitions, language classes and social occasions. Through its doors and those of the embassy floated all of artistic and intellectual Paris, above all Céline, who loved music and of whom Epting was particularly fond. Darquier distanced himself a little from Céline after 1942; he was a rival prophet, rather than a hero now. But Myrtle could meet him often, because there were concerts at the German Institute more than once a week. All the masters of German music, amongst them Herbert von Karajan, Elisabeth Schwarzkopf, Walter Gieseking and Wilhelm Kempff, came to entertain and mix with the great and good of Paris.
Céline's third anti-Semitic blast, Les Beaux draps, was published in 1941, and Epting provided the paper to publish it and reprint its two predecessors, illustrated now with photographs of blacks, half-castes, communists and so on. Céline was fêted, better fed and wined than he had ever been, publishing articles and letters—“Céline Tells Us”—in Au Pilori, Je Suis partout, everywhere. He remained impossible. He destroyed one of Abetz's dinner parties in February 1944 by insisting that Hitler was already dead and a Jew was now impersonating him.
Myrtle love
d the theatre, and theatre, high and low, there was in abundance in Occupied Paris. While the Théâtre Sarah Bernhardt was forced to rename itself the Théâtre de la Cité, the Comédie-Française prospered, and most of the great actors of its company, including Jean-Louis Barrault, worked there throughout the war. Georges Courteline, a playwright Louise Darquier dined with during the First World War, had a play at the Comédie-Française during the Second, but his wife, who was Jewish, was not permitted to attend the rehearsals. Often the SEC “set their ambushes in the corridors of the metro, at the entrances of cinemas or the exits of theatres,”24 but Cocteau, Claudel, Giraudoux, Montherlant, Anouilh and Sartre all put on plays, with varying degrees of enthusiasm, under the German occupation.
The outlook, however, was uncertain. As the defeat of Germany became more than a whisper of hope among the French population, the Paris fascists clamoured for Vichy to declare war on the Allies. When the Allies landed in French North Africa on 8 November 1942, there were 100,000 Vichy troops in Algeria, Morocco and Tunisia. Darlan, still Vichy commander-in-chief, attempted to negotiate a cease-fire, but surrendered on 11 November and went over to the Allies, only to be assassinated six weeks later. Laval had a useless meeting with Hitler a few days earlier, begging him for “gestures” of approval and support. Hitler's reply was to invade the Vichy Zone on 11 November, and the German army moved into the villages and towns of the south. Vichy lost its empire, its fleet, which scuttled itself at Toulon, and its independence.
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