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By Root 2576 0

sewn conspicuously onto their outer clothing, Clara recognized a man and a woman whom, on her June 1940 flight from Paris, she had seen picnicking beside the road, ‘seated at a tiny folding-table which formed part of their Rolls-Royce equipment’. The gentleman with the neatly trimmed beard and his elegant wife were back in Paris. Clara wrote, ‘I met them walking down one of the streets near the American Library. The man was still well-dressed but wore a yellow star; to his credit, he wore it jauntily.’ The library staff still delivered books to the houses of its remaining Jewish readers, whose numbers decreased with the deportations to concentration camps.

While observing the letter of Dr Fuchs’s rules, Clara contrived to violate their spirit: ‘Without actually raising salaries, I arranged to have the staff admitted to a free canteen in the neighboring building and instituted an “off the ledger” system of gifts at Christmas and Easter, and bonuses which made living possible.’ In the meantime, Clara managed the library with a light hand, noting that ‘my small staff whose quality made up for its quantity did better without me. So instead of exhibiting my technical incompetence in the cataloguing department or at the distributing desk, I remained in my office, made regular rounds of the building, and kept myself in readiness to give help in case it was requested.’ Her free time was devoted to writing a new book on William Shakespeare’s life and works, to be published in English as Shakespeare Rediscovered. When Aldebert was not sleeping at the American Hospital, he and Clara went to plays. Their usual venue was the Théâtre de l’Odéon, ‘which being a few blocks from the house was easy of access, and allowed us, even in case of an alert, sufficient time to return to our own home without being shepherded into an abri [shelter]. But occasionally we were tempted to Montparnasse, where the show was always worth seeing, and even to the Français [Comédie Française] which is more difficult of access.’

To reach the Comédie Française near the Louvre, Clara and Aldebert took the subway across the Seine. Clara was unlikely to have stood up when the train pulled into the George-V Metro station, as many other Parisians did in defiant tribute to the late British monarch. Clara had little patience with meaningless acts of resistance and none at all for direct assaults on the Germans. When Clara and Aldebert were exiting the Barbès Metro station one evening, she recalled, ‘There was a deafening noise, whether of a pistol or a hand-grenade I could not tell: then the sound of running feet.’ Suddenly, German military police ordered, ‘Hands up!’ Clara, Aldebert and the other passengers were led single file to two police examiners. The 69-year-old matron was frisked ‘from throat to ankle’ for firearms, an indignity she endured with her usual sangfroid.

What had happened? A young officer belonging to the German Navy had been killed by a shot fired from behind by a self-styled patriot who took to his heels and escaped, but meanwhile every individual passenger in the station had to be passed through the police sieve and if any suspicious objects were found they were certain of arrest and imprisonment. What was much more grave, following their customs of reprisal against which Vichy never failed to protest until finally the Germans renounced its practice, at least twenty Frenchmen were put to death for a crime with which they had nothing to do.

This was the first assassination in occupied Paris of a German, a naval cadet named Moser, on 21 August 1941. The culprit, 21-year-old communist Pierre Fabien, was later captured by the Gestapo on suspicion of other offences and escaped. In response to such attacks, hostages–communists, Jews, Freemasons, captured résistants or anyone held in a police station for violating the midnight curfew–were shot. On 20 October 1941, the Nazis executed fifty hostages in response to the killing of one lieutenant colonel. An anonymous American in Paris wrote to The Nation in New York about the reaction to the knifing