Americans in Paris_ Life and Death Under Nazi Occupation - Charles Glass [158]
Phillip went to bed feeling he had failed his first test as a résistant. He was about to sleep, when Erika slipped silently into his room and gave him the camera. The two youngsters spent the rest of the night together, but Phillip did not tell her why he needed the camera. The next day, she took him back to Saint-Nazaire. They revisited the church, again climbing the stairs to the top. He snapped one picture after another, until the roll ran out. If the Germans had seen him photographing their installations, they would have executed him on the spot. Phillip and Erika went back down and walked unobserved to the train station. At Erika’s house, Phillip removed the exposed film. Erika replaced the camera in her father’s hiding place. All Phillip had to do next was get the film to Paris.
The courier, Verdier, met him again in Pontchâteau and rode beside him on the Paris train. They cleared the German checkpoints and arrived safely at the Gare de Montparnasse. There, R met them and retrieved the film to send the priceless photographs to London. Phillip was now the third member of the Jackson family to be a fully fledged partisan in la Résistance.
THIRTY-SIX
Clara under Suspicion
KING JOHN WAS STILL PLAYING at the Odéon in late June, when a ‘new and peculiar sort of reader’ appeared at the American Library. These fake readers did not speak to Clara, but they asked about her and ‘looked darkly at any member of staff they chanced to encounter’. Clearly, German undercover agents were taking a renewed interest in the library. Had she or one of the staff been denounced? Hilda Frikart, the secretary whose sister, Florence, Clara had saved from execution almost three years earlier, told her one morning in late June 1943 that Dr Hermann Fuchs had telephoned. He apologized for not being able to call on her and asked whether the countess would come to his office near the Hôtel Majestic before business hours. Clara went the next morning with Hilda Frikart to see Dr Fuchs. Aldebert waited across the street, ‘in case we did, or did not, come out’.
When Clara and Hilda walked into the office, Dr Fuchs pointedly remained seated at his desk. He warned Clara to speak only the truth. Before he could ask anything, she defended her management of the library. Her duty, she stated, was ‘to safeguard the institution and avoid trouble by any so-called “resistance”’. Dr Fuchs said someone had accused her of circulating anti-Hitler propaganda. As Clara knew from her involvement with Hilda’s sister in 1940, the Nazis could impose the death penalty for that offence. Dr Fuchs said that magazines from the library with certain caricatures outlined in red ink were in circulation. ‘Certain caricatures’ were comic illustrations of Adolf Hitler in a pre-war issue of Henry Luce’s Fortune magazine. Clara said that periodicals were not permitted outside the reading room. ‘If they have been circulated, it must be by Germans who carry them off. They have been particularly attached to the magazine room of late. I assure you, Dr. Fuchs, I am neither knave enough nor fool enough to betray the institution I have promised to safeguard.’ Fuchs, uncomfortable during the encounter, warned her not to show any periodicals to Germans without a card issued by himself. The next matter, he said, was more serious. Someone had denounced Countess de Chambrun for conspiring with Dr Karl Epting, director of the German Institute in Paris, to keep the library open by fraud. It appeared Dr Epting, who socialized with her son and his wife and had attended