Americans in Paris_ Life and Death Under Nazi Occupation - Charles Glass [124]
Charles Bedaux, meanwhile, turned down a German offer of release. He insisted on a renewed French commitment to support the construction of his consummate ambition: the Trans-Sahara Pipeline. Without it, he would remain with his son in Frontstalag 122.
TWENTY-FIVE
‘Inturned’
GERMAN POLICE CONTINUED TO CALL on Sylvia Beach in her isolated mezzanine apartment above the shell of Shakespeare and Company. She remembered that ‘the Gestapo would come and they’d say, “You have a Jewish girl–you had–in the bookshop. And you have a black mark against you.” I said, “Okay, okay.” And they said, “We’ll come for you, you know.” I always said okay to them. One day, they did come.’ On 24 September 1942, Sylvia was out. A rumour that honey was available somewhere near the Church of the Madeleine sent Sylvia off on her bicycle to ‘queue up for an hour or two, and perhaps come away without filling your can’. After waiting two hours for the precious honey, she cycled home to see Mme Allier, her concierge, weeping. She told Sylvia ‘that “they” had come for me and I was to get ready at once’. She put away her honey, and ‘they’ arrived in a large military truck. The first internment of American women in Paris was underway.
‘I must pack up only what I could carry,’ Sylvia wrote. ‘I thought as winter was coming and we might be taken to a cold German camp, woollies were the best: and flustered, with the soldier with a kind of dinnerplate hanging from his neck watching me as I dressed and hurrying me (schnel mächen), I put into my rucksack the woollies and by mistake two bibles and 2 complete Shakespeares as the most condensed portable reading.’ Adrienne came down to say goodbye. Mme Allier continued crying, and the coal man opposite ‘was for some reason in tears as well’. The commotion in the rue de l’Odéon brought out the neighbours, residents and shopkeepers alike, who ‘gathered as close as possible around the truck that I climbed into’.
The German truck was already carrying other American women. The first Sylvia recognized was her old friend Katherine Dudley, ‘dressed as though for a vernissage, very smart, and in her usual good spirits’. Katherine was one of the four glamorous Dudley sisters, daughters of a well-connected Chicago gynaecologist, who had come to Europe before the First World War. The eldest, Helen, was a poet and had for a time been the mistress of Bertrand Russell. Dorothy Dudley, who had once been engaged to John Dos Passos, was a writer and the mother of painter Anne Harvey. Caroline Dudley had been instrumental in bringing the Revue Nègre, featuring a young Josephine Baker and jazz clarinettist Sydney Bechet, to Paris in 1925. With her husband, Joseph Delteil, she wrote some of the pieces for the Revue that astounded Paris and added to the allure of black American jazz among fashionable Parisians. Katherine was an accomplished painter, known mainly for her portraits. She was taking care of Gertrude Stein and Alice B. Toklas’s Paris apartment in the rue Christine, near her own at 13 rue de Seine. Stein and Toklas were living at their country house in Bilignin in the Vichy Zone, where Americans were not being interned.
The truck trundled through Paris from the house of one American woman to another. Each time the Germans failed to find anyone, the women cheered