Americans in Paris_ Life and Death Under Nazi Occupation - Charles Glass [172]
Hugh Fullerton, one of the American diplomats who came to know Bedaux at the Château de Candé in 1940, wrote, ‘Had Charles waited, he would have been cleared of all charges.’ Fullerton may have been correct regarding the accusation of treason. Article Three, Section Three, of the US Constitution states: ‘Treason against the United States shall consist only in levying War against them, or in adhering to their Enemies, giving them Aid and Comfort. No Person shall be accused of Treason unless on the Testimony of two Witnesses to the same overt Act, or on Confession in open Court.’ Circumstantial evidence in a treason trial would have been insufficient for a conviction. Bedaux was unlikely to make a confession, and there were no witnesses in the United States to any acts that might have been treasonable. On the charge of trading with the enemy, Bedaux had already convicted himself.
FORTY-ONE
Springtime in Paris
MARY BERG, HER MOTHER AND SISTER had been living in the camp at Vittel since early 1943. In August that year, Mary’s father arrived with other men from the concentration camp at Tittmoning. At last, the family was reunited. They waited to go to America before they, like other Jews at Vittel whose American passports the Germans arbitrarily ceased to recognize, were shipped to Auschwitz. Even in the luxurious surroundings of the Vittel resort, Auschwitz hung over them.
On 1 March 1944, 160 internees at Vittel were told that they would be exchanged for Germans detained in the United States. The Bergs were among them. They were sent in a train to Biarritz, near the Spanish border, where Mary saw the arrival of German internees. ‘They have come from America to be exchanged for us,’ she wrote. ‘All of us actually pitied these Germans.’ The Germans were going into the inferno. Mary and her family were heading to a land untouched by war and death camps. On 15 March, from the deck of the Swedish-American cruise ship Gripsholm, the Bergs at last saw the Statue of Liberty.
On board the Gripsholm as it docked at Pier F in Jersey City were 559 US citizens and 103 Latin Americans, all repatriated under the exchange with Germany. Among them were thirty-five wounded American soldiers, 160 internees from Vittel and the American diplomats from Vichy, who had been interned by the French at Lourdes and then by the Germans at Baden-Baden. Douglas MacArthur, the embassy’s third secretary, told reporters, ‘It’s swell to be back–but not half as fine as it will be to get back to work at the job.’ A former Vittel internee, a medical student named Helen Landis, said the Nazis had kicked out five of her teeth when they caught her attempting to reach Spain in June 1943. The ship was ‘boarded by an official party of several hundred, including the State Department, Army and Navy intelligence officers, agents of the Federal Bureau of Investigation and customs and immigration inspectors’. Those whose papers were not in order were taken to Ellis Island for investigation to make certain they were not German spies.
One passenger was a former fashion writer for the New York Times, Kathleen Cannel. She had been in Paris throughout the occupation and had left it only two weeks earlier. Her eyewitness account of life in the city was the first the newspaper had published from a staff member in four years. She said that Parisians were eating less food than ever and many were malnourished or anaemic. Electricity shortages closed the Metro for most of the day and all night. When it did run, its carriages were so crowded that ‘the sardine box is spacious and deliciously perfumed by comparison’. Many civilians on the Metro ‘have their clothes torn off, children are trampled under foot, aged persons are thrown out of the cars and fist fights are so common no one even turns