• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

By Root 2508 0

of a German officer in the Bastille Metro station: ‘Everyone on the platform and on the train was arrested. A certain number of them were allowed to see their families. They were optimistic and said they would be home soon. They were executed the next day.’ After the killing of a German soldier on 1 March 1942, the commander of Grossparis, General Ernst von Schaumburg, ordered the execution of twenty Jews and communists–with twenty more to follow if the culprits were not captured. Five months later, Schaumburg was himself the object of an assassination attempt when a 17-year-old Jewish communist, Marcel Rayman, threw a bomb into his car. More hostages were murdered in response.

Clara, characteristically, blamed the Resistance rather than the Germans for the executions. The attacks led the Germans, in Clara’s words, to come down ‘harder and harder upon all those who were known to be connected with England and the United States’. While Dr Fuchs’s assurances to the American Library were honoured, the American Hospital came in for scrutiny. Clara wrote, ‘Général de Chambrun received visit after visit from German medical officers of high rank with no other object in view than to take over the whole establishment for the use of their army. Every time, he pointed out that it was full to overflowing, and that it would not be large enough for them.’ In his obstinate refusal to admit German patients or to allow the Nazis a role in running the American Hospital, Aldebert was inadvertently assisting Dr Jackson to perform work for the Resistance that Clara abhorred.

In Princeton, New Jersey, Holly Beach Dennis began receiving unexpected letters from France. The authors claimed to be friends of her sister Sylvia. One letter, dated 27 August 1942, been posted from Orange in the Vaucluse. It said, ‘I am a friend of your sister Sylvia who asked me to tell you she was very well and not in need of anything, has enough to eat and is in all respects all right.’ It invited Holly to write to Sylvia at: ‘Mlle. F. Bernheim, c/o Mme. Cohen, Hotel des Princes, Orange, Vaucluse.’ The writer of the letter added, ‘I have been helping her in the shop a little this winter and enjoyed it.’ Holly, who had not received Sylvia’s letters for many months, did not know that Shakespeare and Company had closed in December. Another letter from Marseilles from an Alexis Roger Roubin said, ‘Dear Madame, I have had the pleasure to see, some days ago, your sister, Miss Sylvia Beach, whom I’ve met often in Paris.’ The writer urged Holly to write to her at an address he gave in Marseilles. Holly was understandably suspicious, particularly because Sylvia did not spend time in either Orange or Marseilles. Rather than reply, she sent the letters to the State Department. Had Sylvia known someone was writing to Holly in this way, she would have been certain that the German security services were attempting to incriminate her. The coincidence that all three names–Bernheim, Cohen and Roubin–were Jewish pointed to Gestapo entrapment.

TWENTY-FOUR

The Second Round-up

SUMNER JACKSON HAD A PREMONITION that the Germans would take him in. On a weekend break at Enghien in early September 1942, he told his son, Phillip, that he expected the ‘Boches’ to lock up Americans like himself to trade for Germans detained in the United States. A few weeks later, Brazil, which had declared war on the Axis after the United States did, interned German citizens within its borders. The German authorities in Paris responded on Thursday morning, 24 September, by rounding up 1,400 American citizens.

Dr Jackson’s bags were packed when the Germans swept through Paris that Thursday morning. Luckily, no escaped prisoners or British airmen were in sight at the American Hospital when the German troops arrived. Dr Jackson was examining a patient, but the soldiers ordered him to come with them immediately. Hospital staff, seeing the Germans leading their beloved ‘Dr Jack’ out of the hospital, mobbed him with presents. ‘Before leaving,’ Jackson later told Clemence Bock, his friend and former