Americans in Paris_ Life and Death Under Nazi Occupation - Charles Glass [106]
In 1941, the American Library and the American Hospital celebrated their first Christmas without the protection granted to neutrals in German-ruled Grossparis. The library’s staff together with wives, children, aunts and cousins exchanged presents in the rue de Téhèran beside a modest Christmas tree. Boris Netchaeff, the flamboyant White Russian who had worked at the library for almost twenty years, boiled up hot rum punch and mulled wine. The fireplace smouldered with the aroma of roasted chestnuts. A basket of oranges appeared, somehow smuggled up from the Vichy zone. General de Chambrun and some of the hospital’s personnel came along to help the library’s smaller staff enjoy the occasion. Netchaeff obliged Aldebert by telling him fabulous tales of the Russian czars and their courts. Clara thought the party ‘succeeded in stirring up enough gaiety to forget our pains, troubles and anxieties for a brief while’.
One of their anxieties was whether the library, which had grown out of the collection of books donated to the doughboys of the American Expeditionary Force in France in 1917 and 1918, would survive at all. The American Library of Paris held the largest collection of English books on the European continent, and it promoted democracy through American literature. As soon as the United States and Germany were at war, the Rockefeller Foundation in New York withdrew its funding to the library ‘under prevailing conditions’. When Edward A. Sumner read the Rockefeller decision, he wrote to its board that ‘the Library is being operated by its First Vice President of American birth and, we are confident, without interference from either the German or French authorities … I personally would rather recognize and confirm this action than have the Library closed or its book collection expropriated or seized.’ He asked the foundation to ‘keep an open mind on the efforts we are making to keep the Library operating as an independent American institution’. The Carnegie Endowment cancelled its subsidy as well, fearing the library ‘might become a tool of the German Occupation Forces or of the collaboration’. Communication with Clara in Paris had become almost impossible since the United States declared war on Germany, but Sumner and the board trusted her to keep it open and to protect its valuable collection. Clara was assisted in her task by the French Information Centre’s grant of 600,000 French francs to tide the library over the following three years.
The Christmas celebrations at the American Hospital in Neuilly were far more elaborate than those at the library. Clara recorded a repast unknown to most Parisians, who were losing weight on the starvation diet caused by rationing:
The hospital feast took the chef and his satellites months to prepare. Under the Germans’ very noses, clandestine pigs were raised and fattened, and the menu always included ham, bacon and sausage. The songs ran the musical gamut from ‘My Old Kentucky Home’ to ‘My Country, ’Tis of Thee.’ The entire staff, who were present, included French, Swiss, Danes, Swedes, and Russians, but on that particular evening all were typical Americans.
Clara recalled that ‘we encouraged one another by saying “this time it really is the last; next Christmas we shall be free”’. The hospital auctioned the chef’s hand-written Christmas menus to benefit wounded British and French soldiers, whom the hospital cared for under agreements with their two governments. Vichy paid the hospital directly for French servicemen, and the British Embassy in Spain reimbursed the hospital via American banks. The Germans approved the arrangement, one instance in which enemies cooperated while their armies savaged each other on the battlefield. The hospital usually cared for about one hundred French and thirty to forty British casualties at a time. When the soldiers’ wounds healed, most of them could look forward only