• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

By Root 2485 0

But we do not share in all these games. My thoughts are constantly in Warsaw. What is happening there?’ In March, the Germans moved the Polish Americans into the Hôtel Nouvel, where the Berg family’s rooms ‘were pleasant and clean’. In the hotel, Mary observed the American and English women: ‘The relations between them are not of the best, for the English are rather snobbish.’ On 29 March, the Germans sent all the American males who had been allowed to stay with their wives at Vittel back to Compiègne. Mary wrote, ‘The Nazis gave the ridiculous excuse that German war prisoners are being badly treated in America. The camp authorities exempted from this order only Mr. D., who was recently operated on and is still in the hospital, Rabbi R., as a clergyman, and the [Brazilian] consul and his son. It is very lonely here without the men.’

Sylvia’s detention allowed her to write to her sister, Holly Beach Dennis, via the Red Cross. A letter that she sent to Holly in October 1942 arrived only in March 1943. Neither Holly’s reply nor a package of clothing she sent reached Sylvia at Vittel. In the early spring, Sylvia learned that her release might be imminent: ‘Various friends at home who were on sufficiently good terms with the Enemy were continually working on our problem.’ Sylvia placed her hopes in Tudor Wilkinson. Adrienne, on the other hand, had lost faith in Wilkinson’s promises. She appealed to Jacques Benoist-Méchin, the early devotee of their bookshops who had been first to translate parts of Ulysses into French. As a minister for police in the Vichy government, he had helped the Germans to round up Jews, Freemasons and résistants. Adrienne’s beliefs were in direct opposition to everything Benoist-Méchin represented, but under the occupation friends made compromises to help friends.

In March, the camp loudspeaker called Sylvia Beach’s name. She was told she could leave Vittel at once. Mabel Gardner helped her pack, and she went to the commandant’s office to obtain her release papers. When she told the officer in charge that she had no money to pay for the train to Paris, he threw her documents into the waste basket. Mary Dickson from the Paris students’ hostel lent her money for the ticket, and the officer retrieved Sylvia’s papers. A soldier was ordered to escort her out of the camp. Sylvia, who had been craving her freedom, nonetheless took no satisfaction from it: ‘And what if my dear dear friends left behind in the camp were not released? This thought spoiled all the pleasure of release for me.’

Occupied Paris in the spring of 1943 was a harder place to live than the camp at Vittel. Although Sylvia could walk or cycle anywhere in the city, she was afraid of being interned again at any moment. ‘I came back to Paris and hid for fear they’d think I was well enough to go back,’ she said. Rather than move into her flat, where the Germans could find her, she took the advice of friends to ‘disappear’. She wrote, ‘Miss Sarah Watson undertook to hide me in her Foyer des Etudiantes (Students’ Hostel) at 93 boulevard Saint-Michel. I lived happily in the little kitchen at the top of the house with Miss Watson and her assistant, Madame Marcelle Fournier.’ She enjoyed student life for the first time in twenty-five years, taking lunch with Sarah Watson and the girls in the cafeteria and using the hostel’s library. Best of all was that ‘nobody let on that I was there’.

Every day, Sylvia made secret visits to Adrienne in the rue de l’Odéon. In Adrienne’s shop, she read the first copies of the underground Editions de Minuit. Jean Bruller, Yvonne Paraf and Yvonne Desvignes had begun publishing the Midnight Editions’ books shortly after Pearl Harbor with 5,000 francs donated by a Paris doctor. The first was Bruller’s war classic, Le Silence de la mer, which he wrote using the nom de plume ‘Vercors’. Vercors was the region where, even then, their friend and Hemingway’s old sparring partner, Jean Prévost, was fighting in eastern France. Many of her and Adrienne’s other friends were writing for the series under pen names. ‘François la