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policies that Heydrich was instituting in Czechoslovakia. The Gestapo chief, Colonel Helmut Knocken, fell under his command, as did the Criminal Police (Kripo), the SS and the SD. Oberg commanded 10,000 German military and political policemen, and he had the support of ten times that many French police who took their orders from Vichy. He had two missions: to send Jews from France to die in Poland and to destroy the French Resistance. He ordered what became known as la rafle du Vel d’Hiv, the round-up of the Vélodrome d’Hiver, on 16 July. The Germans dragged 13,000 Jews without French citizenship from their homes in Paris to the bicycle stadium where the French government had interned unwanted foreigners like Arthur Koestler in 1940. Among those held there without proper sanitation or sufficient food and water were 4,000 children. When the hierarchy of the Catholic Church appealed to Laval on their behalf, Laval answered, ‘They all must go.’ The Vélodrome d’Hiver was a transit point from which the helpless Jewish men, women and children were taken to Drancy, herded onto trains and sent to death camps in Poland.

Oberg’s vicious treatment of Jews was nearly matched by the ferocity of his campaign against the Resistance. On 10 July 1942, he declared, in addition to résistants themselves, he would punish their families. To intimidate ‘saboteurs and troublemakers’, he announced, ‘One. All close male relatives in ascending line, including brothers-in-law and cousins of the age of eighteen, will be shot. Two. All similarly related females will be sentenced to hard labor. Three. All children of men and women affected by these measures, who are under the age of seventeen, will be put in reform schools.’ Oberg hunted down assassins who were shooting German soldiers in the streets and Metro stations of Paris as well as résistants who were killing German soldiers and mutilating their bodies in the countryside. His network of French informers spied on and denounced their countrymen. His agents tortured everyone they suspected of possessing information on Allied pilots escaping to England. Executioners worked full-time shooting résistants and hostages in the prison at Mont Valérian and outdoors beside the waterfall in the Bois de Boulogne. It did not take long for Oberg to earn the sobriquet ‘Butcher of Paris’.

Summer should have led to relief of some kind. Instead, the Germans made life worse. On 1 June, the German military government decreed that all Jews must wear the étoile jaune, a yellow Star of David, sewn onto their outer garments. Within days, some of the estimated 110,000 Jews still in Paris bravely demonstrated against the order. Jewish war veterans wore their military decorations beside the yellow stars, and, to the irritation of the German police, ‘let it be known that they were proud to be wearing their national emblem’. Gaullists, communists and Zazous, young Parisians with a counter-cultural affinity for American jazz music and long hair, sported yellow flowers, yellow handkerchiefs and paper stars in solidarity. Such sympathizers were a brave minority. The star had a practical purpose: it identified Jews who violated General Karl Oberg’s order prohibiting them from entering restaurants, cafés, theatres, cinemas, music halls, markets, swimming pools, beaches, museums, libraries, historic monuments, race tracks and parks.

Sylvia Beach, always sensitive to the hurts of others, felt the indignity inflicted on her Jewish friends. Her assistant, Françoise Bernheim, who had remained close to Sylvia after the shop closed, was also forced to wear the star. Displaying it brought derisive stares, and occasional attacks, from anti-Semites. Not displaying it meant arrest. Sylvia wrote that

as I went about with Françoise, I shared with her some of the special restrictions on Jews–though not the large yellow Star of David that she wore on her coat or dress. We went about on bicycles, the only form of transportation. We could not enter public places such as theatres, cinemas, cafés, concert halls or sit down on park benches or