Paris was not so bad under the Nazis, photos show

They thrust a piece of paper with a warning into your hand when you enter the latest photo exhibition at the Paris Historical Library. It tells you not to be fooled by the 270 images on display.

They are issuing the notice on the mayor's orders because the show has upset some visitors and media. No sex, violence or religion is involved. Its offence is showing Paris in world war two as a sunny place, where people got on happily with life along with their sympathique Nazi occupiers.

In the collective memory, Paris from 1940-44 was a grim, black-and-white place of hunger, roundups, humiliation and resistance. Films and books have in recent decades modified that cliché, which was promoted in the aftermath of the war. The picture series by André Zucca, a well-regarded French photographer, is breathtaking because it offers, as never before, a panorama of a Paris that was not suffering great hardship. The quantity and quality of the pictures has stirred old ghosts. The warning says that Zucca, a collaborator who worked for Signal, the Germany military magazine, avoided the "reality of occupation and its tragic aspects."

Paris looks eerily familiar in Zucca's chronicle of life under the Germans, which he shot for his own interest, not for publication.

Well-dressed citizens shop on the boulevards and stroll in the parks; the young crowd night-clubs; bikini-clad women sunbathe near the Champs Elysées. The terraces of the big cafes are crowded and commuters with briefcases march into the Métro as they do now. The jewelry shop and newspaper kiosk on the corner of the Place de l'Opera, by our office, look almost the same as today. In the sunshine this morning the Boulevard des Italiens felt like the Zucca picture. 

   

The differences in his photos are the absent traffic, the bicycle taxis, Wehrmacht uniforms and the red swastikas hanging from the grandest facades.  In one sinister picture, an old woman wears a bright yellow star of David, the insignia that Jews were forced to display. The shot was taken by the exhibition gallery in the Marais, the old Jewish quarter.

According to the critics, the organisers failed to make clear enough that Zucca, a respected pre-war photographer, was working for the German propaganda machine. The show was little short of scandalous, said Pierre Assouline, a writer. "In the shadows of these same streets, they were dying of hunger and cold. Raids and torture were taking place. Here we see only relaxation, joie de vivre, the nonchalance of a kind of happiness." 

After the outcry, Christophe Girard, the deputy Mayor in charge of culture, said that he found the exhibition "embarrassing, ambiguous and poorly explained". Jean Derens, director of the Library, shrugged off the fuss, saying that everyone knew that the photographer was un collabo. "If there is a visitor who is unaware of the nature of the occupation, it's sad, but that does not mean that everything has to be re-explained every time."

The critics are not content with the warning, which says:  "Zucca portrays a casual, even carefree Paris. He has opted for a vision that does not show... the queues...the rounding up of Jews, posters announcing executions."

The library praises the artistic skill of Zucca "who played on colours like an aesthete" using rare Agfacolor film that he was supplied by the Wehrmacht. The sunny aspect the city stemmed from the need to shoot the early colour film in bright light, it adds.

I think they are being too defensive and the critics are showing the continuing bad conscience over the occupation. Enough has come out since the 1970s to demolish the idea that everyone resisted or that no-one enjoyed socialising with the Germans. Getting on with life was what everyone tried to do in the occupation -- as the inhabitants did in the occupied British Channel Islands.

A text in the exhibition reminds viewers that Paris was relatively comfortable under the Nazis because Joseph Goebbels, Hitler's propaganda chief, decreed that the capital should be "animated and gay," to show off the "new Europe". Theatres and cinemas were kept busy and German bands played in the parks. Edith Piaf sang and young Herbert von Karajan conducted Beethoven.

The collection, restored to the original colour with digital techniques, was bought by the city from Zucca's family in 1985. Some of the pictures were first shown in the Paris in Colour exhibition that I mentioned in the winter. The photographer was arrested after the liberation but never prosecuted. He worked until his death in 1976 under an assumed name as a wedding photographer in Dreux, west of Paris.

Comments

[dot king]

Of course Parisians, those that weren't being persecuted, got on with life. What else would they do?

In Camus' "La Peste", which is an allegory of the Occupation, the Germans being "La Peste", after initially heeding the health warnings not to frequent crowded places, the population (of Oran in the novel) gradually took up their former habits, going to cafés, cinemas, theatres, and ignored the way the plague was killing people in the darkness, out of sight.
The message was that human beings will find a way to live with anything - they will adjust, even if blind eyes have to be turned.

There was this side to Paris under the Occupation, I don't doubt it. It wasn't for everybody, but then comfort and ease of living never are for everybody.
It's as valid an aspect of WW2 in Paris as are the other aspects we are now well-acquainted with. It doesn't devalue them nor make them untrue, it simply shows another side of the story.

[John]

I don't know if the critics are showing bad conscience over the Occupation, but it is certainly a fact that Parisians suffered a lot during WW2 (although not as much as people from Warsaw or other martyred cities, to be sure). Here are three figures that tell more than many words:
- between the French censuses of 1921 and 1936, the population of Greater Paris grew from 5,682,598 to 6,785,750
- at the 1946 census, the population of Greater Paris had dropped to 6,597,758

As for the Résistance, of course the active resistants were a minority, but don't forget the passive resitance. The vast majority of Parisians disliked the Germans, even if they didn't take an active part in the Résistance. My grandfather, who was a refugee in southern France at the time and who lost everything during the war thanks to German bombing, told me once how his cousin, who had lost her husband during WW1, saw a woman near Montmartre during WW2 who was flirting with German soldiers. She was so outraged that she came to the woman and broke her umbrella on her head. That reflects the feelings of many Parisians during the war.

[peter kinsley www.peterkinsley.com]

In the car park of a supermarket in Ibiza I saw a sticker on the back window of a car which said: GIVE THE NAZIS A CHANCE.
Young tourists can see that all those films were just propaganda against the kindly German visitors. What a pity Andre Zucca had not been sent by Signal magazine to Thierenstadt when the Red Cross were making that nice film about the inmates enjoying the good life. He could have done stills of the children with their yellow stars, studying in the library, paddling in the pool, helping Mummy and Daddy in
the garden, just before they went on holiday to Auschwitz. Prague could stage a tourist exhibition of those pictures. Or he could have gone to Ravensbruck to snap the French resistance women and British agents gardening before they were executed.
The French themselves should demand that this German propaganda exhibition is CLOSED.

[ken]

Right on, Peter. If there is some aspect of a complicated truth you don't like, ban it.

[dada]

http://fr.youtube.com/watch?v=HcWyA0jHGnU

[Daniel Strohl]

"bikini-clad women"

Charles, I am afraid the above is very close to an anachronism :))
[Well, two-piece swim-suits. I know, the bikini wasn't invented till over five years later. CB]

[peter kinsley www.peterkinsley.com]

Cheers, Ken! I'll have a l'eau Drancy.

[Lily]

« The French themselves should demand that this German propaganda exhibition is CLOSED. » (Peter Kinsley)

I agree with Dot and Ken.

Peter,

This exhibition is about Art and History. If the historic context hadn’t been clear enough in the beginning, the information people receive when entering the exhibition clears all possible doubts.

The photographer worked in his own time and for a purpose that we may despise of. I doubt that this exhibition could have taken place shortly after WW II. In 2008 the exhibition can be shown because people won’t read present-day Nazi propaganda into it. The photos show ONE other face of occupied Paris, even if those photos were chosen deliberately. The people shown on these photos were as real at that time as the atrocities around the corner.

Please don’t call the exhibition “German” propaganda exhibition. If anything, this was about Nazi propaganda in its historic context. Yes, the Nazis were German. But not all Germans were or are Nazis.

If I hear of a German propaganda exhibition in 2008, I visualize other things than this Nazi topic that is so prominent in British media that I sometimes doubt whether this is only about keeping a memory alive, or why would British interest in Nazi-related topics be much more important than the French’s interest therein or the Germans’ own reflection?

I have just looked into “timesonline” archives: The latest article on Germany is “The Holocaust and the iPod generation”, of 17 April 2008. There were articles on an exhibition within another exhibition of a model of Hitler’s “Germania” (Berlin), about – well, I forgot. The topic is recurrent and often not as prominent within the German media, not because Germans would deny their nation’s shameful history but because Germans these days have the same worries and concerns as their British and French and other neighbours. They worry about rising oil prices and their purchase power. If there are a few individuals who turn to Nazism to find answers and who will put bumper stickers on their cars to provoke a reaction, then I don’t think that these same individuals will find any more support following this exhibition which aims in no way at denying the Holocaust or praising Nazism.

Let me quote Richard Holbrooke whose mother was German and immigrated to the United States in 1933 and who (RH) was the US Ambassador to Germany in 1993. In an interview with the German news magazine “Der Spiegel” on 10.06.2007, he said:

“The present generation of Germans belongs to the most democratic, humane and progressive people worldwide.” -

This is “German” “propaganda” 60 years later. ;)

[Francois D]

A camera has an objective,
a photographer, an objectivity.

[dot king]

Peter K, I understand your reaction, but I don't agree with the vehemence with which you oppose this exhibition. It is after all, possible to regard these as simply photos, taken in Paris at a particular time.
Here in this village, there is a street which bears the sign "Rue Louis CAMES, tué par les Allemands le (date 1944)". I often wonder how necessary is the second part of the street name in the 21st Century. The Camès family are still here and his name is read out with the War Dead on 11th Nov every year.

On the square where I live there are houses on two adjacent sides. Diagonally opposite each other live families one of which was entirely in the Résistance, the other was more involved in having quiet words with the occupiers.
My immediate neighbour, a remarkable elderly lady of 90, told me the following story:

Early one morning, during the Occupation, an Englishwoman living in the village (don't know who or why, that is a research for the future) came banging on her back door saying the Germans were on their way. All the male members of her family were resting in the house at the time, with weapons (hunting rifles) and she had to wake them and get them out PDQ. They left through the gardens behind,(including what is now my garden - high walls) over the cliff, down and across the river into wooded country.

The soldiers knocked at the front door just as she was looking round making sure nothing was left to show anyone had been there.
Then she had the presence of mind to wake the baby (now her oldest daughter) and make her cry before opening the door. So the soldiers were met by a bleary-eyed young woman with a screaming baby in her arms.
While the soldiers searched, the officer, who spoke some French, asked if he could hold the baby. Apprehensively, feeling unable to refuse, she handed her over, and the officer and told her he had a son at home who had been the same age the last time he'd seen him, two years previously.
The search over, nothing found, the search party left. From then on, Mme L told me, every time that particular officer drove by, he would wave, and she worried about being taken by other villagers as a collaborator. Her main worry was that he would ask to see the baby in the pram because there were often weapons under the mattress.

It had been someone from the family across the square who had tipped off the Germans. It's still the same family in the same house.
Naturally, I asked her how she felt about that - after all - it could have meant deportment or execution for all of them. Her reply was: "Oh, it was in another time, another context. We all survived and we have to move on."

[peter kinsley www.peterkinsley.com]

Good story, Dot K, similar to the one in my French village, except that Doktor Matlan, Gestapo, returned on holiday when the brother of Henri Mas (murdered in Buchenwald) was away, to see his old collabo. friends (he was denounced on D-day by his neighbours, laughing in their doorway) The wife of a viticulteur grabbed the 12-bore from him, saying: "You'll go to jail. We'll lose everything...the vines.."
Note the sub-editor's headline: PARIS WAS NOT SO BAD UNDER THE NAZIS, PHOTOS SHOW.
Propaganda is the operative word, and young visitors may believe it: not an eye blacked, not a tooth or fingernail pulled, it's all lovely, and Zucca was paid by SIGNAL as a propagandist and given Agfacolor, unobtainable elsewhere, and his family sold the photos in 1985, to the City of Paris, who very kindly give 10 free copies to the TV and papers.
Propaganda: like fighter pilot Adolf Galland, drunk and nasty in Ireland (and in The World at War on TV) repeating that Hitler said the Battle of Britain was merely a 'feint' to prepare for Barbarossa. Ha ha. The RAF had shot down half his Luftwaffe and Churchill was preparing for "Fritz frites" with oil ablaze on the Channel. That's why little AH had to abandon Sealion.
Propaganda: Up until Franco died, Spanish children's comics had the Germans winning the war! I was living with German friends in Ibiza when Spanish women attacked German tourists on the Vara de Rey after their TV showed the Holocaust for the first time. Babies thrown into gas ovens? Why had they not been told this before?
Propaganda: I had a friend who had a recurring nightmare: HARRY PROCTOR HANGED in a newspaper headline. Thw World's Press News advert said English broadcast journalist required. The letter enclosing 1st class tickets, Leeds to Berlin, was signed by Doktor Goebbels. He could not find the tickets in the house, so William Joyce got the job: "Lord Haw-Haw", the British called him.***
Propaganda and lies poured from him throughout WWII. But he was Irish, and Ireland had been neutral, the court was told. He was also an informer (against the IRA) and collaborator with the British SIS, who had given him a UK passport. That passport hanged him.
Propaganda: How fashionable and happy the Parisiennes look, in the sunshine not far from the Avenue Foche, where Christopher Burney (a British diplomat, Paris Embassy) is being punched by the Gestapo, accused of being an agent (he was) but he was claiming that he was a deserter after Dunkirk. The German guard at Fresnes looked at his black eyes and split lip and said:
"That was some examination."**
No photographs of the jolly young German secretaries, fondly known as "the grey mice" herocally giving up their lunch hour to go and watch Captain Yeo-Thomas ("The White Rabbit", a British agent) having his testicles beaten to make him confess (he didn't).
*** Harry Proctor's wife had burnt the tickets when she saw who had signed the letter.
** Christopher Burney, after Buchenwald, said of this: "No, it was not too bad -- compared with the 16 year old French boy before me, who refused to name resistants. They took out his teeth, his tongue and his eyes and sent him back to his mother like that."
Asked if he had any advice for the young, he replied: "Yes. Beware the Warrior-King."

[christopher muir]

It's possible that all those Parisians photographed looking happy and relaxed are actually wearing masks that hide their true feelings. After all. survival is everything and you've got to create some normality around you in such complex circumstances. I hope I never have to confront such a dilemma. Klaus Mann's novel "Mephisto" deals brilliantly with living with the uncomfortable truth. As a student in Paris ten years after the occupation, I was surprised by the reluctance of French friends to discuss their lives under the Germans.

[“The present generation of Germans belongs to the most democratic, humane and progressive people worldwide.”] richard holbrooke (quoted by Lily)

the time is long past to treat nazism as though it is a present-day reality (and i don't mean of the 'skinhead' variety, which exists in most western democracies).

the young (east) german student who guided me through sachenhausen a few years ago was as self-aware and brutally honest about the past atrocities in that evil place as any modern-day student his age, anywhere.

in fact, in this era of facebook and paris hilton, it may german youth who preserve the unvarnished reality of nazism. many of the rest of the world's kids probably think nazism is a video game.

[dot king]

Peter, we all know that everything you say is true.
That there are photos showing another side of things, whether they were meant as propaganda or not, doesn't change anything of the reality you describe. Not everyone was captured, tortured and/or deported during the War.
And as Christopher Muir says, many were in fear, or hid their mépris of the occupiers in order simply to survive. The Germans were THERE - there was nothing ordinary Parisians, neither hero nor coward, could do about it.
Take another look at the photos and try to see that, like my neighbour, who smiled and waved at a German officer every time she passed him (it wasn't just to tell you a "nice story", Peter, you were supposed to infer something), any one of those people might have been doing their "bit" for the Résistance:- documents about their person, messages in their heads - whatever.

The photos, viewed now, don't PROMOTE Nazism. Not everyone's a hero and they had to live.
Sure, the photographer chose his locations and his subjects, don't they all? but nor he nor we know what is going on in their heads.

Why shouldn't people, in full knowledge of what else was happening at the same time, be shown what the German nation was being led to believe?
It wasn't only the Germans who published propaganda, surely?
(You should see the WW2 poster (original) I have in a frame: "Textile Talks n° 4" all about what those at home should be doing to help our brave boys at The Front - it was exerting that people SAVE, money in the textile barons' banks. Not the noblest of messages.)

If I were in Paris, I would go to this exhibition, because photography is an art-form I particularly like - especially old photographs. I wouldn't come away from it "fooled", or thinking war isn't so bad after all, or that I ought to allow for extreme right-wing views in my listening and taking-on-board criteria.
I would look knowing what I know, and knowing that what I was seeing was only a part of the truth.
If you feel it should be censored, then you mustn't go, that's the choice, I'm afraid.
I'm surprised you are in favour of censureship of photos that are simply showing a reality of war. Would you rather an exhibition of photos of torture and executions so that we don't get mixed up?
Don't do us an injustice of this kind, not you, Peter.

[dot king]

"many of the rest of the world's kids probably think nazism is a video game." (anon, suspect azloon)

couldn't agree more - you've said what i wanted to say about the Ibiza car-sticker

[Lily]

Re : Keeping the memory alive

“Propaganda is the operative word, and young visitors may believe it: not an eye blacked, not a tooth or fingernail pulled”
“Up until Franco died, Spanish children's comics had the Germans winning the war!”
“No photographs of the jolly young German secretaries, fondly known as "the grey mice" herocally giving up their lunch hour to go and watch Captain Yeo-Thomas ("The White Rabbit", a British agent) having his testicles beaten to make him confess (he didn't).”
“They took out his teeth, his tongue and his eyes and sent him back to his mother like that."”
(P. Kinsley)

Is it necessary to reiterate these atrocities over and over again to keep a memory alive?

I don’t think so. It is important to be aware of them, to hear of them once and acknowledge that these accounts are true.

It may be important to remind people living in a dictatorship and who are not fully aware of the crimes committed by their leaders, in order to inform and bring about change. The above, however, doesn’t serve any good purpose. The French and all Europe are enlightened enough to KNOW the truth, and all teach their young accordingly. It is possible to show this exhibition without doing any damage.

If we want to cite atrocities and brutalities, we can also point to other people. Evil is not German by its very nature. It is important to know ones lesson but it is also important, as time moves on, to allow for the lesson to become ‘generalized’. Not 'all' Germans (or Russians or Rwandese or Chinese, etc.) are evil but there is a fragile trait that runs through mankind since the beginning of human history. It reminds of genocides and dictatorships today, of racism and of torture and of intolerance.

Mr Kinsley may wish to continue to tell his dark tales. I still find people’s interest in brutal behaviour of any kind mind-bogglingly outrageous. –

I am full of compassion for the pain victims suffered and continue to suffer due to wars and within dictatorships, through torture and human loss and who mostly tend to be much quieter about what they go/went through because it would be too painful to recount their pain. If they do, it is truly moving.

[Roger Goodacre]

The celebrated 4 1/2 hour documentary 'Le Chagrin et la Pitié' by Marcel Ophuls gave a sober and, to many, shocking portrayal of how people comported themselves under the Occupation, whether bravely or ignobly.

That was banned from French television for many years: when the ban was lifted in 1981, it apparently attracted no less than 15 million viewers, suggesting not surprisingly that people want to see the evidence for themselves. (See a review here on the English section of filmsdefrance.com - http://filmsdefrance.com/FDF_Le_Chagrin_et_la_pitie_rev.html

yes, i 'disappeared' while at the home of my grandchildren in chicago, on another computer.

[peter kinsley www.peterkinsley.com]

"IS PARIS BURNING?"
Do I hear Hitler screaming down the phone?
There has been a terrible smell wafting over England today, finally tracked down to Germany, and then I looked at the calendar: of course, It's Hitler's birthday on the 20th April reminding me of Spain again, and the yachts and power boats flying the Kriegsmarine swastika flags off Majorca and in Madrid the men in SS uniform arriving at the church where they said mass every year for the repose of the soul of Adolf Hitler. That was 1954 and they were still celebrating 20 April into the 70s and 80s but no uniforms now and the streets still cordoned off by the Guardia Civil.
I have a queston: If this Paris exhibition is NOT propaganda, why are there men at the door telling visitors that it is?
Here's an idea -- take it on tour: London, Rotterdam, Warsaw, Moscow.
So they are wearing masks in the photo are they? They really are resistants behind those fashionable specs. Perhaps it is Violette Szabo, 23, Denise Bloch, 29 and Lilian Rolfe, 30, before they were caught, beaten, raped, brutalised and sent to Ravensbruck to be shot in the back of the neck, just weeks before the war ended?
The exhibition you must visit, Dot King, is not the Zucca collabo. propaganda one but the S.O.E. memorial in Valencay, Indre, for the 55 women agents (13 were killed) sent to join the 30,000 women and children in Ravensbruck.
Zucca should have been given 2 years in Fresnes, but General de Gaulle knew how to play his cards to stay in power: not, as Churchill preached In Victory - Magnanimity, but Prudence before Pride. When he learned the true extent of collaboration by the French, he wisely swept it under the carpet, which is why Mitterrand was able to stay in power and shield wanted men for 50 years.
Captain George Millar, MC, DSO, Croix de Guerre, Medaille Militar, briefly my colleague on the Daily Express in the 60's, heard that General de Gaulle had read his book Maquis, in 1946,and an emissary came aboard Millar's yacht, moored on the Seine, asked him to dress, took him to a shop for the ribbons for the Croix de Guerre and the Medaille Militar, and took him to meet de Gaulle near the Invalides.
"Ah, bonjour, Emile, comment allez-vous? he said, standing up, and discussed the book. "You say the book displeases you. But it has its merits, it has perspective and perspective is history, Emile, when allied with truth...That village, Vieilley, you made yourself part of it. According to your book it was paradise." de Gaulle told Millar he had side tracked his route near Besancon to visit the village, and told a grizzled old man: "You and your ladies were very kind to Emile." "Emile" he said "mon General, what happened to that devil? Did the Germans get him in the end?" de Gaulle went back to the farmhouse and was introduced to the wife and daughters of the farmer, who suddenly shouted at his wife: "Didn't I alway say that sacre Emile was no more English than I am. The accent was assumed. He was working for General de Gaulle all the time."
"I wanted to pass this on to you, Emile, so gave instructions that the next time you entered France I was to be told. I wanted to tell you that I had to put an immediate, sometimes painful, end to Resistance fantasies, with an iron hand for the well-being of France, and hope that none of your friends unduly suffered, and I ask that you neither talk about nor write about our meeting today."
de Gaulle shook Millar's hand and said: "Another point. Do you remember if the main street had a name, the street under which you hid in a sewer?"
"I cannot remember noticing any name"
"Well, now it is the rue Charles de Gaulle. Amusing, is it not?"
Millar thought it was, especialy as de Gaulle had been sentenced to death by Petain and the Vichy collabos, and laughed along with the General.
As for Hitler, I won't celebrate his birthday. I'll wait until the 20th April, his Deathday. The three ladies mentioned above, one Jewish, the others Catholic, had refused their SOE cyanide pills, but Hitler and Himmler took theirs. They just could not stand pain. Unless they were inflicting it on others.

[Maggie]

"As for Hitler, I won't celebrate his birthday." (PK)

Peter, April 20th isn't just Hitler's birthday; lots of other people were born on that day too. Some of them are very nice!!

Like ME, for example!!

[colin grayson]

churchill apparently said.....there are lies , there are damned lies , and there are statistics !
the paris census figures quoted prove....absolutely nothing ;in rural france , where I have a home ,old people still remember the wartime when lots of people left paris to return to their roots where they were able to subsist ....grow their own vegetables , no house without a potager here ; a pig , some chickens ....a simple life perhaps, but many ASPIRE to it today

I have often stood in front a war memorial in some small french town or village , choked with rage [ old age I suppose ] at the sheer waste of young lives ; I feel it today as much as I ever did

but I have an impression that whereas the country people gave their lives in huge numbers for their beloved france, the percentage of parisians who managed to shirk was immeasurably higher... and it has never been forgotten here ; when I moved in , many years ago , I was greeted with ....well, you are not from paris so you are welcome !! that to an englishman !
anyway , I don't suppose the statistics exist about the relative casualty figure by departement , so will never know the truth

having said this , it will surprise no-one that I have a feeling that the paris population did the same in WW2 , only suddenly becoming super patriotic after the germans were driven out ; a french jewish friend of mine , now deceased , said that the shame of france was that whereas the country people would shelter jews during ww2 , people in paris would betray them to the germans - for their own advantage ....maybe just his own experience , but as has been correctly said , a history is just one persons version of events

but to peter kinsley I would say regarding this photo reportage ...is this true ? did it happen ?
it is not going to cause public panic , so on what grounds do you wish this to be closed ? we have seen societies where the people in control suppress what they don't like , haven't we ; they still exist , do they not ?

by the way , around here we no longer have signs saying ...shot by the germans ; they have been been changed to ...shot by the nazis .

political correctness has arrived in rural france

[richard jones]

Part I

And maybe a tad off-blog

I was in France during the German occupation. I had missed the last boat out of Dunkerque by literally minutes. I could see three or four small vessels from near the horizon to perhaps a kilometer offshore. Anyway, too late!!
This was 3 or 4 June 1940. I got to the UK in late November of that same year thus my time was short and certainly I was never anywhere near Paris, nor in my circumstances did I want to be.
So the Germans arrived at around midday. We stacked arms. We were marched off, as far as we could figure to the north-east. Somehow I and my party of five: two bedraggles from the East Surreys (or was it Sussex??), a poilu from Toulouse (initially totally incomprehensible) who became a lifelong friend and two walking wounded from the Welsh Guardsmen (left over from the Boulogne escape) who viewed me with consummate suspiscion. I was wearing a French uniform (caporal) and actually spoke better Welsh (the Argentinian link) than they did when without thinking I joined in their musings. I was inordinately careful not to say anything in Schwyzerdeutsch on the way to Dunkerque as my words would have been taken as High German and they would have shot me without any ado.
The Germans marched us prisoners roughly towards Ostende and we suffered more harassment from the Guards’ admonitions to march properly than from our German shepherds. We slept rough and were exhausted. Our worst moment was the second morning when our German shepherds (typically service rather than frontline units but not bad troops) started to scream at us to move, move, move to the bottom of our sleeping field and over the next stone wall away from the road. I translated and hussled people along although I knew not why. One Welsh Guard told me he didn’t care whosoever I might be. Or who I was spying for, but either he or his sons, or one of his brothers would shoot me or pulp me to an early death. I found his family after the War. He had died after being repatriated in 1944 with T.B..
All the hallabuloo was because a unit of the Totenkopf was passing and they took no prisoners. We had already heard these rumours to do with shooting unarmed Norfolks. I helped our shepherds get us away from danger. Next day on the outskirts of a place called Middelkerke our guards changed.
The replacements were clearly ‘whoever they could find’ men – some were Dutch, some were Belgian who from their language seemed to almost all to be Vlams, some were French troops, from Alsace by their German. The whole lot was policed by a saber-scarred Hauptmann, two clearly worse for booze Leutnants and three or four Military Police Feldwebel (with metal brassards across their chests).

We were told we were going to be transported to Ostende then trained into deepest Germany. The next day’s decamp and transport parade was a disaster. Fred Kano’s army at its best. I tapped mon poilu René on the shoulder as he like me was very shaken by the thought of a thousand years in Tiefste Deutschland. We managed in the total anarchy to slip away behind some store bundles, over a low wall and into the small garden of a terraced (very UK like as I was to discover that winter) house. We two lay in the vegetable garden too tired and too scared to move.
Suddenly a head and shoulders appeared over the neighbouring wall and we were manhandled over it by three or four men into the tiniest garden shed imaginable. We were again five. Three others with the same idea. A thousand years of Charlie Chaplin and those Punch and Judy speeches was enough to move us on quickly.
The others had already got ‘les bleus’ over their uniforms. The three introduced themselves: all British. One was 19, a Boulton Paul Defiant gunner (looked great - like a Spit but could only fire backwards and then only when it didn’t jam). Our rescuers, Belgian soldiers who’d slipped unnoticed back into civilian life, were already to ship him out across country somehow along the sandy island coast into a Dutch coastal village and get his pickup from there. He left with a Belgian identity card (fake) as a baker; a Vlams baker, which was some kind of inverted Belgian joke in that purportedly only the Wallon could make proper bread. I have no idea what befell him, but as you will see from what follows it was probably horrid.
René and I spent two days with these men and much like others we came across what was uppermost in their minds was much more parochial than what dastardly acts the German occupiers would wreak on them. The four were all Vlams, although one was a Dutch soldier from (I think Roosendaal). They were much more angry about the Belgian surrender (May 28th) and the Dutch (neutral in WWI) armies lack of everything, until surrender (May 11 or 13 or thereabouts). The Vlams felt that once more that had paid for France and Wallonia, as their fathers had before them. Some said they should have simply surrendered immediately as there were no Walloon regiments in the line anyway and all they were doing was buying time for France, which made us feel insecure, whilst others said they should have fought on despite the ‘Walloon king’ and forced the French to fight. I could not follow either argument very well at the time.
By the time René, who with his typical imperfect and pluperfect subjunctive usage (still more prevalent in the Midi to this day) and his complex math (75 = 60 + 15 or 93 = 4 x 20 + 13) sometimes jangled nerves. It was easier for more as I, as per Vlams when speaking French (obligatory school language), also used ‘septante, octante (more often quatre-vingt tho’) and nonante and complex subjunctives were unlikely to be precise in person, ending or syntax, plans had changed (and I witter).
So my abiding feeling in many ways before we left our Belgian garden, we’d been shared along the terrace of three or four houses on roughly an eight hour move, was more that the Germans were in the way of some kind of national settling up, one in which violence had not necessarily rubbed off the list of strategies of tactics.
The second feeling was of wonderment as to how these men, there were others (women too), but more in a support role, could get an organization together so quickly. Finally, I never saw any of them taken so how hard the Germans were I have no idea.
The new plan was carefully explained to us and is in the form of a second post as this is lengthy to say the least

[dot king]

"I have a queston: If this Paris exhibition is NOT propaganda, why are there men at the door telling visitors that it is?" Peter Kinsley

The exhibition isn't propaganda to promote Nazism and the people on the door are telling viitors that it WAS propaganda - AT THE TIME THE PICTURES WERE TAKEN.

IMO it's as useful and valuable to see how the propaganda machine worked so that people can be on their guard against it in the future.
I don't say people should be blinded to any side of war or occupation.
BTW Peter, FYI, whilst I haven't been to the exhibitions you say I should go to, I have been to others and even taken school trips to some. I had also read all my dad's books about the war, usually biographies and autobiographies, mostly before I was even a teenager.

BTW you have Hitler both being born and dying on April 20th, perhaps he did, by coincidence die on his birthday, I don't know and am not interested enough to look it up, what's important is that he is DEAD.

[peter kinsley www.peterkinsley.com]

Maggie - Happy Birthday.
I made a typing error re Hitler's day of Departure == 30th April, when he practised on Blondie*** My friend Harry Ashbrook accused the Russians in the bunker of taking the remains, saying Sir Bernard Spilsbury, the world's leading pathologist, had assured him the teeth would remain. So the British and American correspondents got a pig from a Master Sergeant in supplies and put it on the grill, put a German (Nazi?)** cap on it, photographed it, and used the same jerricans of petrol to try to destroy it. The teeth remained.
Of recent date it has been admitted that the KGB and SMERSH had the teeth and skull in their files, but the remains they said, had been buried under cement near bins by a parade ground in Mecklenburg, dug up, ground up, and flushed down a toilet into the town's sewage system.
*** Re: the dog. At an opera in London, when the Russians were on their knees, begging Churchil to send tanks etc., their Ambassador turned to a titled lady and said: "You British do not like us. It is because we murdered our Royal Family, the Tsar, who was related to yours."
"That is not the reason."
"Oh, what is it then?"
"We do not like you because you killed the dogs. What had the poor little dogs done to you?"
As Mr. Grayson says, it is p.c. gone mad: the BBC radio and TV, newspapers and magazines all talk of The Nazis.
Lily ***You know it was a political party,the NATIONAL SOCIALIST GERMAN WORKERS' PARTY.
If you want a good laugh, read its Manifesto. Shares for workers? Alfreid Krupp had slave labourers hanged in his factory yard ...pour encourager les autres! Wolves don't share!
Delete: "New Labour and Conservative trooops attacked the Taliban on the left flank while Democrat and Republican forces attacked on the right"
Substitute: "British troops attacked on the left and Americans on the right."
I'm sure you are a very nice person, but call a spade a spade and don't fall for PROPAGANDA.
Very few of my usual suspects have come out of the woodwork on this "thread" but our old friend Azloon rightly says that the youth of today would think "Nazis" is a game. EXACTLY, A-Z Loon, that is why the exhibition is dangerous when Paris will be crowded this summer with young impressionable people, saying: "Hey, look at this. Living under German occupation wasn't so bad after all."
You have enough idiots voting for Le Penn in France and the National Front in England are crowing about the number of votes they will get by their promise to throw immigrants out. New Labour has succeded in sending out an army of totally illiterate and semi literate kids who can't get jobs and do not know why. They think Hitler played for Tottenham Hotspur or was on guitar with the Ratband Boys.
When Patrick Leigh Fermor walked from London to Istanbul in the 30's he met young Germans who had joined the Communist Party. On his return, he discovered that they were in SS uniform, and, asking why, they said it was more "attractive - and they give you a uniform and a dagger."
In Pezenas, for the Mirandella des Arts, they had an exhibition of all the German propaganda posters, the jew-baiting, russia-hating, military might boasting hoardings. The French kids there know who Adolf Hitler was!
P.S: You can buy Marcel Ophuls' "Le Chagrin et la Pitie" for 10 or 12 Euros on amazon. All French schools should show it annually, lest we forget.

[christopher muir]

I fished out the birthdays of some ignominious leaders of the past and two from the present (with a little daring, I could have added an extra name or two from the present). We’ve heard about Hitler’s entry-into-the-world date, but others’ ETA were:
Pol Pot May 19
Stalin Dec. 18
Franco Nov 20
Osama Bin Laden March 20
Robert Mugabe (KCB) February 21

If you add Hitler’s April 20, twenty stands out rather bleakly. Possible somebody with a flair for astrology can find another common factor between these dangerous figures. Otherwise, I think that it's best to forget their birthdays.

Happy birthday, Maggie.

[dot king]

"You have enough idiots voting for Le Penn in France" (Peter Kinsley)

No, Peter, there are hardly any Le Pen voters left in France, Le Paquebot (HQ) is up for sale and Le Pen is 80 or thereabouts, his daughter Marine didn't get elected even locally.

You are beginning to read like the Thought Police - though we know you mean the opposite.

[Monika]

Peter,

Your opinion as such is all right with me, but I so often get the impression that you're someone really angry when I read your posts (not only on this particular topic). That might be why people react quite strongly on your posts I guess. It has probably less to do with what you write but how you do it. It is probably not meant that way but to me there seems to be a lot of agressiveness in it.

[azloon]

[Very few of my usual suspects have come out of the woodwork on this "thread" but our old friend Azloon rightly says that the youth of today would think "Nazis" is a game. EXACTLY, A-Z Loon...] Peter K

A-Z Loon? ouch !!

Peter, he's always had such nice things to say about you. :)

schools and family are probably best to teach nazism/holocaust awareness. not artists.

if artists want to display photos of nazi-occupied paris that appear to show an air of 'normalcy,' then let media lead the debate:

desperation beneath the smiling faces?

a deliberate attempt by nazis to scrub the french capital of a nazi pall?

overly-friendly parisians seeking to curry nazi favor?

the historical context of these photos is good starting point for discussion. nothing more, but quite worthwhile.

[John Gregory Flinn]

Yes, happy birthday Maggie - many happy returns!

A balanced piece by Charles that nevertheless might prompt the question - so, what's new?

The red swastikas have been replaced by the EU flag, the yellow star of david replaced by the islamic headscarf or veil.
Joseph Goebbels would have marvelled at how the media industry has become so subtle with propaganda that does, inter alia, essentially the same thing - show off the "new Europe"!

The Agfacolour film became an east-German slide-film product which I found faded over the years - perhaps the cunning communists included a time-pigment which did this. Many of my images of the their showcase case state are just blank slides now....

Perhaps the critics of this exhibition can dig up some photos of a city in eastern Poland that was occupied by the Soviets. Just by way of comparison.

No, I'm not fooled!

[A little update. As a result of our publicity, Mayor Delanoe has decided to take the posters for the exhibition off the city's notice boards and they are going to make it close before the scheduled July 1 date. That's a pity. CB]

[Daniel Strohl]

Maggie,

Happy birthday!

[Romain]

Happy birthday , Maggie.
Richard Jones, waiting for your Part.2
All
Very interesting comments.

My parents were not in Paris during that time. They are from the Basque French side. Different place, different story :
Our region was neither "occupied" nor "free" zone, it was "prohibited" zone : zone interdite, with the clomplete German war package.
It was a sort of continuum of the Spanish civil war, when the Luftwaffe bombarded Guernika and Bilbao. Many Basques had to flee Franco's persecutions and arrived in France to ironically end up head on with German troops.
There was a strong Jewish community in Bayonne, who had been pushed out of Spain and Portugal by "La Reconquista" from the end of the XV.th century.Our folks protected "their" jewish people; out of the 662 local people who died in concentration camps, two thirds were non-jewish.
My grand parents were active members of the "Comet network" (le réseau Comète) headed by Colonel Remy. It was a Franco-Belgian organisation who was in charge of exfiltrating Anglo-American aviators on a long road from North Sea to Spain. Around 770 aviators made it to Spain, most of them found temporary shelter in our family house in Anglet.
Offered some medals on behalf of King Georges the VIth after war, my grandparents politely declined saying they just did what they though they had to do. My grand aunt kept the portrait of Philippe Pétain untill she died.

[peter kinsley www.peterkinsley.com]

Thank you, Mayor Delanoe. You have made the right decision, to close before the young, i m p r e s s i o n a b l e back packers arrive in Paris in August. I know how the young can be brainwashed (ask any Jesuit), and Parisians have a bad enough reputation for their rudeness with visitors.
Monsieur le Maire: please substitue it with an exhibition of the sketches made and dated by Picasso as he worked right through the Liberation without being distracted by the guns below in his street, knowing that, if the world survives, his genius will be admired five hundred years from now. Picasso was an a r t i s t. Zucca was a good photogapher.
I rest my case.
Monika: you are right, I do get angry. Volume I of my memoirs will do much to explain why, but I do have a lighter, humourous side, I hope, admired by the following: John Schlesinger; Marty Feldman; Peter Sellers; Peter Cook; Dudley Moor; Alan Sillitoe; Lynne Reid Banks; Barry Norman; Neal Ascherson; Penny Richie Calder, Curator, Imperial War Museum; Magnus Linklater; Bette Davis; Cary Grant.
The pity is I cannot manage to sell many books. Did you see my letter in The Times that British public libraries are putting books, some brand new, into landfill sites?
Angry? Moi?

[Valentin]

Monika to Peter:

"Your opinion as such is all right with me, but I so often get the impression that you're someone really angry"

:) Peter sometimes sounds as viscerally against nazism as I am against communism - with all the inconveniences qui en découlent.

CB:
"As a result of our publicity, Mayor Delanoe has decided to take the posters for the exhibition off the city's notice boards"

As a result of OUR PUBLICITY ?! City policies would now be shaped with an eye on CB's blog? :)
It's a shame, I was going to pay a visit to paris.fr to see more on the exhibition. Now I'll certainly go see it.
(hopefully that won't make Delanoe shut the show down starting tomorrow...)

[Peter]

It would appear that a perspective of history changes according to who is in power at any given time.

I'm now in my early 60's yet find that the glorious deeds I was taught at school in the 1950's are, today, considered to be anathema to the people who draw up the school curriculum.

I know it is said that if we forget our past shortcomings then we are bound to repeat them, but one only has to look at all the most prestigious avenues in Paris - Iena, Wagram etc; or the railway stations and squares in London - Waterloo, Trafalgar etc, to see that what were bloody killing fields of yesteryear - with the accompanying rape, pillage and massacre of civilians - are just names on a town-plan today.

Just last week, I had lunch in a ministry restaurant where 65 years ago the Gestapo were torturing Frenchmen and women. My meal didn't taste any the worse for my reflecting on this fact. Furthermore, the group I was with(representing about 30 different nationalities and at least 4 different religions) were all polite, educated and entertaining and a pleasure to be with, despite having been at each others throats in other circumstances.

So let's just look to the future - and keep the past, where it belongs, in our memories - whether by photo or anecdote.

[dave]

SO, a photographer enjoyed himself playing with the new colour- film, for his own pleasure, and we now have a heated debate . (Or at least some heated comments .)

Anyone with an inkling of knowledge about the Occupation knows that the reality had little connection to the myths produced since .

Unless the panicky instigators of "health warnings" to this exhibition can prove that all those photographed were actors making propaganda , they would best have been advised to pay it cool !

SO, the guy filmed what he wanted to, which does not make it fake .

The reaction of the protesters is more worrying than anything else involved . If they think people are so stupid as to believe all was rosy under the Occupation, from a few stills, they of course could be correct .

But then, this could open up a widespread argument, and discussion, which might perhaps educate them out of such stupidity ?

[azloon]

I agree CB. closing the exhibition early would be a pity -- and a sorrow.

what the hell was the war all about if not about freedom of expression, against the tyranny of totalitarian thought, the necessity of public debate, and acceptance of citizens' ability to think for themselves, draw their own conclusions, without fascist imbeciles like mayor delanoe interceding to do it for them.

we vigorously debated free speech on this blog awhile back, and i was struck by the many french bloggers who insisted that some subjects simply were not acceptable for public discussion.

for a great country like france, this is a shame -- which only compounds the earlier shame.

[qwerty]

There's an interesting article in L'Express this week about Paris under the occupation (and the erotic thrills of colluding with the enemy - le fantasme des uniformes et de la domination...).

The French government was the only European government to effectively remain in place during the war - the other countries were under direct German rule and their governments were in exile. If that's not a heavy weight on the conscience collective of the French, what is? It was the only institutionalised collaboration with the enemy in Europe.

And they continued to dance on tables in cabarets? Whereas it must have been barely possible not to see that their Jewish neighbours were being "raflé" by French police assisting German occupants and sent God knew where, but they must have intuited it?

I used to know a family who became rich in the war, through dénonciations and who seem to have passed on their basic antisemitism to their descendants. Totally unrepentant. They slipped through the épuration. So the sins of the fathers are NOT visited on the sons & daughters, ils sont au contraire revendiqués.

(My English just doesn't seem to be in place this morning, I must have been dreaming in French).

[Romain]

without fascist imbeciles like mayor delanoe interceding to do it for them. (Azloon)
Not being a Delanoe cronie either, I would not brand him as a fascist, he is one of le Parti Socialiste leaders (among two dozens).
I would be opposed to the closure of that exhibition, unlike our great and vehement story teller Peter Kinsley, who I understand is not French.

[dot king]

Just think, if those photos were dated 1946 (Ok, I know there are some uniforms visible here and there) but let's imagine it was an exhibition entitled "Paris Freed from Occupation" or "Paris Liberated", what difference woul dit make to the photos and the content - would Peter still say they were propaganda? And in whose interests? To show the occupiers that Paris had lifted its head? That they hadn't ceded under the Nazi jackboot?
These pictures show just scenes (the ones we see in CB's article at least) on only one are 3 young ladies looking at the camera and smiling - and tell me please, what does any young woman or group of young women do when someone points a camera at them and says "smile please"?
Unless Zucca was weariing a uniform or an armband saying "Official Gestapo Propaganda Photographer", how could they have known?

Peter K, would you have the photos used as landfill? Would you have them burned?
They are documents just as much as, if not more than, your books (or anyone's), and they are historical documents as well as photographs - from another era.

[peter kinsley www.peterkinsley.com]

A la Recherche du Torture Perdu:

"Well, here we are, having lunch in the very place where the Gestapo used to torture their victims, thirty of us, all different nationalities and four different religions here."
"Doesn't it bother you? That woman, what was her name? She got the George Cross, the same medal as Malta got for bravery. She had a little girl, bought her a dress in Paris, wore it when the King pinned the medal. To think that the Gestapo raped her right here! They shot her in Ravensbruck, just weeks from the end of the war."
"Foreign name, wasn't it?"
"Szabo. Violette. Her husband was a French officer, killed at Tobruck. Her mother was French, her father English. She was an SOE agent."
"And she bought a dress here for her child?"
"Yes, Paris was great then, we had the Buerre, Oeuf et Fromages, of course, and night life: Chevalier, Piaf, Suzy Solidor..."
"It wasn't a bad war, really, was it?"
"OK if you weren't in Auschwitz.."
"You shouldn't joke about it you know -- bit of an insult to the memory of all those French women and children in the Ravensbruck and the men in Buchenwald."
"Stop, stop. A glass of Liebfraumklch?"
"Merci, mein lieber, lieber freund, mais je boire que de l'eau..."
"Garcon! Encore une bouteille de l'eau Drancy for my English friend..."

[Valentin]

Azloon:
"struck by the many french bloggers who insisted that some subjects simply were not acceptable for public discussion."

You mix everything up, Azloon. The subjects that would not be acceptable in France are the same kind as those that would not be so in the US: hate speech, racist speech, libel, child abuse websites, now pro-anorexia ones.
On the contrary, the US is the land of the PC, terrible kind of censure not far from thought policing. Or this is exactly what seems to motivate Mayor Delanoe. So rejoice and be glad, we're getting closer to cher Oncle Sam on this matter :-/

[azloon]

Romain --

i knew, late last night, as soon as i'd pressed 'send,' that 'fascist' to describe delanoe was was an inaccurate overstatement. 'imbecile' surely would have sufficed.

i will conveniently blame this on having to babysit my 2 and 5 year-old grandchildren all day yesterday. this can turn a normally reasonably sane person (not me) into a hyperbolic lunatic.

[peter kinsley www.peterkinsley.com]

In view of The Thunderer's bloggers wishing to "put the past where it belongs, in our memories, and "look to the future", and while pointing out that freedom of speech at international lunches with 4 religions present, are only able to take place because 50 million people died between 1939-1945, most of them for just this freedom, the Paris Authorities, conscious of a duty to be politicallhy correct, have decided to cancel Liberation (V.E.) Day (May 8). Approaches will be made to the British Government to follow suit by cancelling the Cenotaph ceremony in November, and ask the police to arrest anyone seen wearing a poppy.

They shall grow not old, as we that are left grow old:
Age shall not weary lthem, nor the years condemn.
At the going down of the sun, and in the morning,
We will forget them.

[dot king]

"Paris Authorities, conscious of a duty to be politicallhy correct, have decided to cancel Liberation (V.E.) Day (May 8)." Peter Kinsley

Have they? First I've heard of it, if so.

[azloon]

Valentin --

yes, PC has a problem in the u.s., tho less so now that ten years ago. but in france, it seems, certain forms of PC are institutionalized or written into law.

the 'white, male american' is seeing a resurgence after years of self-perceived relegation to a status lower than that of the 'other gender,' and minorities of both genders, all in the name of 'fairness' and a supposed redressing of past inequities. (i intend no value judgement of this development).

americans had become weary of reverse discrimination and the PC which supported it. courts have ruled unconstitutional laws which provided for it.

and, it's not the u.s. which is taking legal measures against anorexia-abetting websites, or moving to criminalize child-abuse websites (unless pornography is involved), or sites containing racist material. this is your imagination.

as obnoxious as they are, these sites are forms of 'protected speech' as defined by the u.s. constitution (which says, "Congress shall make no law... abridging the freedom of speech.")

as former supreme court justice hugo black of south carolina used to ask attorneys, arguing before the supreme court in free speech cases: "attorney smith, does the constitution mean SOME laws, or does it mean NO laws?"

in other words, other than libel laws (in which the aggrieved must approve actual malice, and prior knowledge of inaccuracy, in order to prevail), there are NO u.s. laws abridging freedom of speech.

so, pleeeeeze, spare me the nonsense about france being the same as the u.s. in the matters you cited in your post.

p.s. despite being egregiously 'out to lunch' on a wide variety of issues, you are still a sweetheart. :)

[peter kinsley www.peterkinsley.com]

No, Dot, but tomorrow is cancelled through lack of interest.
Au revoir, mes enfants.

[V]

Azloon:

Concerning PC: Hallelujah !

Concerning child-abuse: indeed I meant pornography, pro-paedophilia websites etc.

Concerning hate or racist speech: I didn't say websites, I said speech. You can't mean one can go on a televised talk show and openly promote anti-black or anti-semitic activity, right.

Concerning pro-anorexia websites: I admit americans sort of have the opposite kind of problem :P
For the rest, France is the same as the US regarding free speech (with a little plus on the PC issue).

(or else you'll have to give me at least ONE example of free speech abuse in France - or restrictions on speech not being openly and directly endangering human lives)

(I know, I know, you SO hate doing that - research, actual proof of what you shout out loud... sorry to do that to you dear, who sound so glorious in your parabolic statements... but you really have to give up your right to free speech, when it becomes a right to saying n'importe quoi... I love you too, darling :P)

[Christopher H]

The French didn't turn against the Germans until it was obvious they were beaten. Francois Mitterand was twice President of France and he never stopped boasting about his time in the Resistence from 1943. He had a lot less to say about his time as a Vichy official between 1940 and 1943. There were plenty like him - the French don't like to admit, that is all

[colin grayson]

how about controlling what music is allowed on radio stations v ?

[V]

Colin, I really don't know where you anglos got the impression France would restrict free speech. Nanny state, yes (not more than Blair's Britain tho'). And to hear that from champions of political correctness and thought control, now really !

[V]

"how about controlling what music is allowed on radio stations"

Here, a nice story from the US. Enjoy your lesson giver selves :)

http://www.freemuse.org/sw24511.asp

[dot king]

"the 'white, male american' is seeing a resurgence after years of self-perceived relegation to a status lower than that of the 'other gender,'" Azloon

To quote an illustrious blogger:

"yeah, so what's your point?" : )

[Ros]

Peter kingsley: "P.S: You can buy Marcel Ophuls' "Le Chagrin et la Pitie" for 10 or 12 Euros on amazon. All French schools should show it annually, lest we forget."
Indeed, my late French husband was at school in Clermont Ferrand at the Lycée Blaise Pascal. We saw the film together when it came out & he confirmed its absolute integrity from all points of view - he even recognised his Latin teacher ( a Resistant) but that certainly wasn't the case of everyone!

[peter kinsley www.peterkinsley.com]

Pierre Mendes France, who was framed because he was a Jew and sentenced to six years in prison for "desertion" from the army (he Actully escaped from prison and got to the South), mentions in Le Chagrin et la Pitie that one of the go-betweens in Vichy Govt was called -- Giscard d-Estaing.

[richard jones]

Part II

I’ve had a bad couple of days with blood pressure (too much) and this is Orthodox Holy Week so there are unannounced (very Greek ) visitors.
There will be a short Part 3, as for the second time in my life I unburden all this stuff.

The logic behind the new plan was that the Germans were massing just inside France for a three-pronged attack. The mass was so dense we could not go north. I mean these guys had cycling maps (all the rage at the time) and navigation compasses and it was a very impressive intelligence exercise. Where they got their ‘inside’ info. On German plans I know not nor never.
On or about the 7th or 8th of June, latest 10th they would start two major and two minor drives. Major 1 was to Paris for the 14th of June ‘drive-in’ (the Germans, according to our Vlams protectors thought that was Bastille Day) – Major 2 was to take Lille (already gone we found out later) and then march in supply line order only along the coast from Boulogne to Brest (major naval base), through Le Havre, St. Malo etc. by end June. Minor 1 was to march south-east and reclaim Alsace-Lorraine, formally back into the Fatherland. Minor 2 was to drive to some agreed line of surrender with the French, our minders said, probably initially the Swiss border (but not for long they added) and across to the south of Lyon down to Toulouse then back north-west to Bourdeaux.
Again I digress: thus our route was south in an ‘lightly occupied corridor’ after Lens or about along to Amiens, Rouen, Le Mans, Laval, Fougères, and then hideout in the Granville – Coutance area (some relative of the Dutchman there). Then…..
However, the hard bit was first as we had to get through the cloying sponge of Germans from Middelkerke to Lens, especially round Ieper. So we were given identity cards as Belgian bakers, each with an incredibly deep spindle-splintery fold right across the photographs that were supposed to be of us. My name was Benoit de Kulver and the intrepid René was monika’d as René de Henin-Boss. We were told, if asked, to say these were the very newest Reichkarten. We also carried Baker’s Union cards and some obscure document that proved we were not bankrupt. No photos on these last two.
We set out with two Belgians on bicycles, one of whom had met us over the garden wall and the other was the quite a bit younger brother of another of our minders. We were claiming to be bakers working for the German General Staff who were moving so far, so fast we could not keep up.
As we were leaving an old lady, quite frail, came into the garden where we stuffing rear wheel panniers with what stuff we could carry. She gave us some bread she had made because, she said, commercial life was starting to fall apart. We said she should keep it, but she replied in the most harmoniously modulated French I’ve ever heard that we would look stupid were we to be caught without our stock in trade wares and pushed ‘des miches’ upon us. She gave René, whom she clearly viewed as more a warrior than I, a tiny scent bottle, which she told him to secretly pour on the bread if the Germans tried to steal it. ‘They will shit themselves to death,’ she said, ‘and if they don’t they’ll never f*** a woman again. It will be the same as last time.’ This was the most anti-German comment we heard albeit from our Belgaic seclusion.
We set off around 08:00 on the 7th of June. A wonderful sunny morning after a heavy, thundery shower such that the cobblestones ‘les pavés’ steamed. We wended to the outskirts of Middelkerke and our first sentry block. We did not even stop but were waved annoyingly through as if our passage had quite deliberately disturbed the intricate clockwork planning of German military movement.
As we moved along to Ieper the road became busier and busier and as more and more heavy armour passed with clearly no intention of stopping to ask who we were but leaving no safe place for a bicycle alongside. So we took to the byways and country tracks. We were roughing it anyway for the first two nights. We had a meeting with ‘somebody special’ in, or around, Béthune. We were told to make sure to approach Béthune along a certain road so we figured the ‘special person’ lived on the outskirts.
It was early evening. Our food, except the old ladies bread, had run out and we were exhausted. We could see the church in the graying haze and so far had seen no Reichswehr other than on the horizon or the smoke and material damage they’d left, when round the bend came a motosidecar, a sort of jeep, followed by a truck with about 12 soldiers. We dismounted and they were upon us. They did not ask us who we were but told/signed us there was an Abendglocke (curfew) at 21:00. We were given an Ausweiss (chit) to get passage into Béthune should we be late and told to keep off the roads for the next two days. They left and within minutes a baker’s horse dray turned up to take us and our bicycles the last 2 or 3 kilometers to the ‘special persons’ home.
Our man was the baker’s union man for the North of France and a Communist with an already well-developed hatred of the German hierarchy. He spoke endlessly of how France and the rest of the German Empire would soon be totally enslaved and ground down. He saw Hitler as a tool of the German bourgeoisie. We split up here and bade farewell to our Belgian guides. We lodged in the barn on the baker’s small holding for two days as more and more troops marched or rode past (obviously the elite only was motorized), either to the west and the sea or southish and Paris.
We were shuffled across Béthune and changed professions. We became pipe fitters, which for me as an ETH (Zurich) graduate was more my style than flour and yeast. The method used to get us to Granville et le Cotentin was inordinately cheeky. We were supposed, under German guard, to go from garage to garage and modify the feed pieces on the pumps to fill
fuel tankers as the Germans advanced and for future facilitation. The big German joke was that these modifications made it virtually impossible to refuel such French cars as there were. We’d practiced for two days.
We had a white van with Iron Cross type markings and an escort of a motorcycle, complete with sidecar machine gun and gunner front and back. In the small van we were four. Our new contact did nothing but drive and got the job as he was petrol-supplier for the whole region and would know where the garages were. René et moi and a sickly youth called Maurice who was the second son of the ‘special person’ and was supposed to disappear eventually into the woodwork just like us.
We were covering the region roughly St. Quentin, Amiens, Arras and the main problem seemed to be that we could well end up back in Béthune as no contract end had been negociated with the Germans. We heard – a few days late – that Italy had declared war on everybody. Then we heard Paris had fallen (June 14th) and began to see refugees in some numbers again such as we had never seen since the roads to Dunkerque. They were all heading south.
In the van we hear rumours that there are still RAF units near Rennes that maybe we can reach and still small ports evacuating BEF remnants. And this amongst other chatter of how people will use the Germans to destroy others. This was a very common phenomena: people of one class, or region or whatever din felt threatened by all other classes and kinds. One had no trust at all in the other, even if they had barely met any of the other sort. They all felt the Germans would side with one of these other nefarious groups. It was almost as if the danger was not the Germans themselves but the Germans at one remove as the catalyst of anger.
We did our garage-fixing job with one return to Béthune to pick up more parts now shipping in from Germany and of far greater precision and quality than the now defunct French goods. Our range is increased down to Rouen and Beauvais – all going swimmingly well. Now we see more and more refugees heading south. Our guards fire in the air to get them out of the way.
Next thing we knew, 22nd June I think, we heard France had surrendered in some deliberate parody of the 1918 German surrender.
Things changed. We were given cards with our names (viz Benoit de Kulver), the address of our Béthunic special person and overstamped with ‘Prisonnier de guerres (I know) - 1940 – Frankreich’, our régime became tougher, longer hours, more shouting and hassling our old guards now constantly changed.
Supply fitments were now corralled in many larger towns and our Béthunic suggested René and I slipping into one of these depots and low-profile there. We managed to fiddle the warehouse in Laval. We got there somewhere around 10 or 12 July and bunked in the longhouse next to the warehouse. We were two out of 12 or so and whilst we kept out of German sight we did not escape scrutiny from our workmates. This scrutiny was reinvigorated as we heard what was happening with Philippe Pétanque (as René always called him) and the Germans and the very first spatulettes of Resistance emerged.

[peter kinsley www.peterkinsley.com]

Ros: French friends have told me that ALL schoolchildren were taken to the local war memorial where flowers were placed. One was from Aubin, nr Decazville, where the memorial has many Polish names -- coal miners from the now defunct open mine, the biggest in Europe.
Maitre Rochat who defended Mendes France said he was approached and asked for a copy of the court proceedings "for the Marechal" who was concerned about what was obviously a frame-up. Rochat gave him a copy. "Nothing came of it," said M-F: "and the name of that man was Giscard d'Estaing."

[azloon]

To quote an illustrious blogger:

"yeah, so what's your point?" : ) DOT

i said i was making no value judgement on this development (i was sympathetic to affirmative action, up to a point). it is, however, a natural evolution out of reverse discrimination.

:)

[azloon]

V --

yes, we are fat and proud of it. :)

no anti-fat campaign here, other than voluntary ones (unlike france's governmental tampering in the anorexia issue).

areas of restricted speech in france: nazi/holocaust subjects. OTOH, u.s. nazis were permitted by court order to march through skokie, illinois, a predominantly. jewish town. disgusting, but guaranteed under our constitution.

yes, anti-semitic, racist speech on a tv show would be probably be edited out if on tape delay -- but discussed subsequently. otherwise, it would be rounded denounced by other participants in a live discussion, or by a studio audience.

so differences exist, tho not huge (except for the waist line of the average citizen which we now know is achieved thru self-starvation in france).

[Peter]

Richard jones, thank you so much for your very fine first-hand account of the rout of 1940.

My own father was in the RAF from 1939 to 1946 - flying first Short-Sterlings then Halifaxes then Wellington's and finally Avro-Lancaster Bombers - as navigator/bomb-aimer/front-gunner. He completed 3 tours of active duty (almost 100 operations - a real Catch-22 situation). Yet, postwar, he never spoke about it either - except with former aircrew or men, from other service-arms, he was close to and who could understand the context. I only found out the details when I inherited his papers and logbooks on his death. I still have some heavy-duty maps with the wax-crayon tracings showing out- and home-flight's to Peenemünde and Dresden. I discovered that he had lost his entire aircrew 2-times (he survived a)because he was on compassionate leave having lost a brother in the Atlantic Convoys, then b) he was getting married). I do know, however, that he always felt guilty about survival because whereas the average age of his aircrew was 23, he was almost 30 when the war broke out and felt a 'big-brotherly' responsibility to his comrades.

My wife's father was with the Free French air-force and served in N.Africe from 1937 to 1943, then out of the UK (Hereford) till 1945, before being sent to Vietnam where he served until 1954 (including many missions in Dakota's in Dien-Bien-Phu). He died of heart-disease brought on by flying too many missions at high altitudes in unpressurised aircraft (and heavy smoking).

The point of all this is to say to Peter Kinsley that I wasn't being flippant in what I wrote in my contribution higher up the thread. I am as aware as he is of the debt owed by my generation to the previous one(s) (I use the plural because my maternal grandmother lost her two brothers in July 1916 -on the same day in a Pal's regiment) for my having been able to live and study and work and thrive (and not just survive) in a relatively peaceful European environment, thanks to their sacrifice. But I refuse to wear sackcloth and ashes, and eat gruel and dripping, and be bitter and bear malice and hatred towards all and sundry, every-day. I decided a very long time that I was going to be happy and have always attempted to have a positive outlook on life.

The aforementioned restaurant (or, very up-market canteen if you wish) EXISTS today in a building that the Gestapo occupied in WW2. This is where the meeting's organisers booked the lunch. Did you expect the French state to tear down all such buildings after the war? Or bring in an army of exorcists to drive out the evil done there? Humans have to move on with their lives - otherwise we would still be fighting blood-feuds (as I read about in Albania) from slights that were committed generations ago and lost in the mists of time.

As Pat Condell on YouTube says:

Peace !

[dot king]

"a natural evolution out of reverse discrimination." Azloon

evolution?
that'll be the day . . . : )

[peter kinsley www.peterkinsley.com]

Peter (?) is sore because of what I wrote following his comment about Gestapo HQ in Paris where the torturing took place:
"My meal didn't taste any the worse for my reflecting on this fact." Well, mine did!
I simply pointed out that he and his group of 29 other nationlities and 4 religions would not have the freedom to do this had it not been for a lot of brave people who fought Hitler's degenerates, including the French women who died horribly at their hands. The lunchtime fare on BBC TV on 17th inst. was "Carve her Name with Pride", which brought back memories of German cruelty which cannot be dismissed with levity. It was made worse yesterday when the film I had ordered, Le Chagrin et la Pitie arrived early. Checking it (for censorship. There is too much of that going on now), They have cut parts concerning students and teachers and a woman doctor who protested about treatment of Jews and was sent to Auschwitz and the wife of a Captain, Marinet Menut "Heroine de Mont Mouchet", aged 30, denounced by a Madame Solange, beautician, in Clermont Ferrand, was stripped and whipped with dog whips until her spine showed. The film does not say (there is a cut here) why she was arrested, but her husband,Commandant Menut was told by her cellmatess whathad happened when he could not identify her body.
The Germans tore off her nipples, branded her with a hot iron before whipping her. "She was in a coma from being whipped," her husband said, "She was still alive when they buried her. No one had the decency to finish her off. It was one of the executioners who told me that he shoved a broom handle up her vagina." Maitre Henri Rochat, who had defended Mendes-France, was also involved in the case where 3 Milice had ripped the eyes of of two Resistants, put bugs in and sewn them up."
No doubt I shall be criticised again for giving the cruel hard facts, but I reiterate what I said about schoolchildren being shown this film. Elsewhere here I told of Spanish women attacking German tourists when they saw, in the 70's the Holocaust on TV. Franco had censored everything for 40 years. And my German friends in Spain told they had been told as children in school that the films of the concentration camps were "American propaganda."
Either you face the truth or hide it.
I understand that there has been a great deal of anguish in Paris caused by the photo exhibition, threatened with withdrawl on Saturday but now allowed to run the allotted time. I suggest they place a visitors book at the exit, and let us see what visitors think of the Occupation from viewing this show.

[Valentin]

Azloon:
"nazis were permitted by court order to march through skokie, illinois"

Myes but did they do nazi propaganda - praised AH, the aryan race, demanded that all filthy jews, blacks and mexicans be exterminated? Or were they more like what we call far right here, a bit of whining against immigrants who would take locals' jobs, some squarehead nationalism, few clumsy imitations of the goose step and the hail salute, and that's that?

Holocaust is a delicate topic alright. It's stupid to impose history books by law. Still when people say Birkenau is but a fairytale, and make the point that nazism wasn't genocidal, not even criminal, you can feel something's odd about their use of free speech. Political correctness was as a defence against shrewd rhetoricists capable to turn an argument in order to reach a goal - or less shrewd using certain names with thàt particular twinkling in the eyes. What PC ignores that free expression always finds a way around interdictions, and so we but end up seeing monsters everywhere. The notion of honest, one-meaning language becomes obsolete and people who think otherwise are deemed naive.
To make a wide leap, that too is part of why people like Sarkozy or Berlusconi win elections. When JM Le Pen was rambling against the ECB and Sarkozy was not disagreeing, to politically correct fingerpointing he replied: if JMLP says the sun is yellow, I'm not gonna say it's blue to avoid being called far-right! Is Obama made of the same kind of wood? You tell me.

[V]

"no anti-fat campaign here, other than voluntary ones"

Also no pro-fat campaigns either, I suspect - and that's not qite equivalent, fat excess doesn't necessarily kill. Meanwhile here, the issue is about promoting excessive thinness that leads straight to a horrible illness and downright death. It's not at all about ordering people how much they should eat.
Re PC, I wonder whether the famous Danish cartoons were published in the land of free-speech.

"If this Paris exhibition is NOT propaganda, why are there men at the door telling visitors that it is?" PK

Unfortunately, I don't have the time to read all the way back to my own last comment from this cyberspot in Spain... just to say that I agree with Monika above; I'd like to add that I read a lot of VOYEURISM in PK's posts. I dare say so, even if my parents' generation wouldn't.

PETER, the people at the entrance of the exhibition call it propaganda because it was propaganda IN ITS TIME (but someone might have given you this comment already).

¡MAGGIE, I hope you had a wonderful birthday!

[MCDofUSA]

Lack of freedom of speech.

Brigitte Bardot?

[dot king]

"Le Chagrin et la Pitie arrived early. Checking it (for censorship. There is too much of that going on now)," Peter Kinsley

But Peter, you are arguing IN FAVOUR of censorship all through this thread.
Perhaps the censors of the film you've bought wanted to spare watchers the gruesome details you "regale" us with anyway.
I have to say that if I had a child in school who was routinely shown direct film of the torture you describe, I would protest very strongly.
Your preoccupation with describing Nazi torture in such graphic detail, with its sickening and voyeuristic elements, is beginning to go seriously against your arguments.

"Either you face the truth or hide it." Peter Kinsley
Well, quite. The exhibition which brings out so much anger in you is another side of an ugly truth.
So face it. In the same way you expect us to face the truth you prefer.

[elemjay]

Peter K

There are wicked things that happened all over the place. If we thought about them all every time we had lunch then we'd go mad. For example, go to the Tower of London where many many people were imprisoned, tortured and murdered. Doesn't seem to put the tourists off their icecreams - and nor should it. After a while, it's past.

And BTW I find your lascivious descriptions of the violence to those poor women more than a little disturbing.

[peter kinsley www.peterkinsley.com]

Dot = This exhibition was not propaganda then, because it was not u s e d then. The photographer was using his supply of rare film for his own collection. His family sat on it until 1985 then sold it (the copyright, in law, had belonged to SIGNAL, his employers)to the City of Paris. We do not know if they "cherry picked" the ones which show Paris in the best light, smiling and sunbathing, out of a collection which may also contain photos of the rafle, the 4,051 crying children in the Vel d'Hiv, the Gendarmes at Drancy, working for the German occupiers, etc etc.
Yes, I am angry.*** If you think I get a kick out of "regalng" you with torture stories, you are wrong. There is no film of this, simply an amazingly heroic husband, Commandant Menut, holder of the Legion d'Honneur, describing how his wife died. These desciptions of how heroic Resisters suffered and died are in juxtaposition in this excellent, truthful film, with a bourgeoois chemist saying the war was awful because he could not get cigarettes and had to smoke artichoke leaves, and a member of the feared and hated German Miliary police complaining that he had been left on a stretcher in Clermont station and some people spat at him.
Describing torture is not a "preoccupation" with me. Truthful reporting of the facts may be, as I am a former Scotland Yard accredited crime reporter. In my recent novel, To Catch a Paedophile, which you may have read, I describe the act between the child violator and his victim, which led one reviewer in The Northern Echo,the paper that trained 4 famous editors, to say that particular part may give offence to a reader. It is not there to shock or offend, but to tell the reader the truth about what happens when child molesters and child violators (all too prevalent today, ask the Pope!) ruin the lives of their innocent victims.
I understand that there has been some emotion in Paris about the photos and some headlines. I am intersted to know how the Parisians who suffered in 1940-1945 feel about the exhibition. Are they German Propaganda or not? I maintain that they are, and, like Therienstadt, give a totally distorted impression of the reality.
*** I was angry when Lord Denning (I said he was born with a silver whitewash brush in his mouth) cleared all the grasping lawyers and lying hypocritical** politicians and denounced Keeler. Stephen Ward killed himself because of the lies told in court (He shouted out: "This is not fair!"
** The hypocritical Macmillan (the buffoon who cleared Kim Philby of spying!), expressing shock/horror at John Profumo (see my website)for sleeping with a woman like Keeler, but kept quiet the fact that he had been expelled from Eton for buggery
PS: re Censorship: Ten years ago French tricolour discs were placed on memorials to Resisters. Today (according to one item above) they are deleting "les Allemandes" and inserting "les Nazis", on plaques and street signs. Where is this country Naziland? Is it near Germany? Can they fool all of the people all of the time?

[dot king]

Dot = This exhibition was not propaganda then, because it was not u s e d then. The photographer was using his supply of rare film for his own collection. (Peter Kinsley)

If that is the case, then Zucca's photos were not "u s e d" as propaganda t-h-e-n and have no propaganda purpose nowadays as we aren't at war.

If the possibly existing other photos you mention might exist show "rafles" and torture, presumably you'd rather those went on exhibition?
If Zucca took pictures of deportations or worse, then I feel sure they wouldn't have been much use as propaganda either, as I don't think that the ordinary German back in the Fatherland would have felt very reassured by that particular kind of image.

[azloon]

[Also no pro-fat campaigns either, I suspect - and that's not qite equivalent, fat excess doesn't necessarily kill. Meanwhile here, the issue is about promoting excessive thinness that leads straight to a horrible illness and downright death} Valentin

V, obesity is no more or less fatal than anorexia/bulimia. how one gets there is perhaps less hideous (enjoying a meal vs. starving oneself).

[peter kinsley www.peterkinsley.com]

Andre Zucca was lucky to be employed by the Germans in 1940-1944. A Japanese journalist visiting Tyneside shipyards with Prince Akihito told me that his newspaper had 40 photographers killed in the first year of the war -- on the front line. Zucca made this private collection showing Paris as "a sunny place where people got on happily with life along with their sympathique Nazi occupiers", to quote Mr.Bremner's intro. The warning notice handed out to visitors says Zucca "avoided the reality of occupation and its tragic aspects"
They are Propaganda now because they are being s h o w n now (Propagated) and they whitewash the brutal occupation of Paris and France by the Germans, and there are many photos to prove that side of it. My question is: How many did Zucca's parents sell? These 270 are the sunny side of the street, which means the full collection could have been censored with that in mind.
There are some people blogging on this site who would make an agnostic out of a praying mantis.
To lighten this up, Dot, and hopefully to bring a smile to your face, here are some examples of people who might believe Paris was Pardise under the German heel:
American: 1st girl: "How long have you been here? 2nd girl: "Where?" "Here, you're in St Mark's Square, Venice. How long have you been here? 2nd girl: "Oh, a half hour." 1st girl: "I meant in Italy."
2nd girl: "Oh, Italy. Since last Monday."
British: Woman in Palma airport bar: "Four beers please." Barman: "Frio?" Woman: "No four-o."
American woman in the Louvre: "Say, Joe, is that the Mona Lisa, you know, the one without the arms?" Her husband (looking up at La Victoire de Samothrace): "No dear those are wings".
British woman on Ibiza harbour: "Is that the Mediterranean?" Woman tourist: "I don't know. We came by air."
American at Runnymede: "What time are they signing the Magna Carta?"
Guide: "You are mistaken, sir, that was in 12.15."
Tourist, looking at his watch and turning to his wife: "Geez, we just missed it by an hour.

[dot king]

"There are some people blogging on this site who would make an agnostic out of a praying mantis."

Peter, the only one trying is you.

Part III REALLY THE LAST i'M TIRED

There was a flurry of activity in our zone. There were three components as far as I was concerned. First the Germans had definitively won and managed a reasonable solution to their resource management tensions of having to manage the whole of France from the start. What had to be managed was now defined and the second line garrison troops started to arrive mostly by train to fulfill these occupational tasks.
This in turn reduced our ease of mobility because a man in a tank is not going to stop for some flies on bicycles: they do not threaten him in any way: he has no way of telling as he speeds past if the flies are normally there or not: they just stop him getting to war. A man, maybe two with rifles feels a keener threat, notices what’s new etc. etc..
The second component was the very first pin-prick resistance operations, although some sounded to me like accidents misconstrued by the paranoic. Most of the small tipples seemed to be a function of the last of the BEF, including the RAF, doing things in extremis on their way out. But one wasn’t and this was on one of the first railway journeys under the new régime. A point was purportedly blown out, near Rennes, the troop train derailed 2 killed, several injured. This resulted in moves starting in August to id-card everybody and generally see what was what. There was also the start of German thinking here perhaps that unless occupied territories were to make some sacrifice (less food, quality/quantity?) or offer some support by working in the German war machine they would not complete their war aims.
The third part was to do with the French fleet. The fleet moored largely in Toulon, Brest but in other Atlantic ports too slipped anchor and sailed for Mers-El-Kébir. This caused problems as the ‘armistice’ said all materiel militaire was German. The German attitude in Occupied France was severe in those regions that had ‘allowed the fleet to slip away’ leading to a forced evacuation, but not imprisonment, of French families (we heard about 10,000 people) from harbour sides on the Breton and Norman coasts. This became general later, nobody French within I think 20km of the whole Atlantic coast – Dunkerque to Biarritz – but this initial expulsion area, René and I discovered did us out of our friend’s relative in Granville. Then to our consternation that whilst the sea was barred the only place we stood a chance to link up for escape through to Spain was Rennes - since the train ‘accident’ highly populated with Germans and part of the first zone to id-carded. Rennes was a left over from the BEF escape trail and the new trails for downed fliers of which there were one or two, but there was another corollary here too! Many French naval men came from Rennes and around and the Brit sinking in Mers-el-Kébir had sprung rumours that Brit escapees were no longer welcome along that railway.
Somethings never change! Nothing happened in August and René and I made our way to isolated karst lands north-west of Rennes, twixt Rennes et Lamballe. The almost idyllic month of wandering with money in our pocket (more than many others we saw in the villages) set me thinking as to my own plans. Since missing the boat at Dunkerque I had thought of myself as a British soldier, although I still carried my French insignia bundled small and my French Army paybook. I held Swiss nationality and had my mother’s cousins never used phone number at the Swiss consulate in Marseille (I think he was the whole office – to do with the Swiss Merchant Navy – don’t laugh). I also held Argentinian nationality but could not pass as a Spaniard with the heavy ‘jo’ instead of ‘yo’ and other grammatical and syntactical likely errors. My parents usually spoke Welsh to each other as my mother was half-Welsh anyway and grew up in that language.
But now the scrutiny was starting. It was clear that neither René nor I was local, but just as clear where René came from and everybody advised him to get that side of the wire ASAP. People were not sure of me, from my spoken French (the written version was much more error prone) I was located variously as being Alsatian (thus now German pur et dur – and told to get back there), or a Vlam (from the numbers – septante et al – despite my every effort). Nobody completely trusted me, especially as my paybook was ascribed to Paris. It was made even worse by the fact that I could clearly, from Welsh, understand Breton, even weld simple sentences together. I made many Breton friends. Time to move on. But where?
Here in the Breton countryside there was the same mistrust I’d encountered on my trip so far, driven by region, language and culture. The number of times Albi, les Cathars, Oxydon, Languedoc and what Paris, and/or Vichy would do to Brittany given half a chance was mentioned I cannot count.
By start September it was clear that escape to sea was not on. It would be into Vichy and then…. We packed up as much as we could to live rough in cooling weather, got merged with 6 others and set out. We also knew that new id-cards were law as of 1 October and the ‘mobile offices’ had started to trundle into even the country districts.
Into Vichy on about 10 September. We crept in quite comfortably not too far away from Vichy itself, having taken the night train (they only r