Americans in Paris_ Life and Death Under Nazi Occupation - Charles Glass [180]
At lunchtime, the Jacksons invited the miliciens to eat with them. Afterwards, Sumner and the Milice commander smoked cigars in the garden. Phillip used the opportunity to arrange the curtains onto the side street, rue Traktir, to indicate to anyone from Goélette-Frégate that a meeting scheduled for that evening was cancelled. The Jacksons were not allowed to use the telephone and remained under Milice guard all night.
The Milice roused the family early in the morning and crammed them into the back of a police Citroën. They headed into the countryside south of Paris and did not stop until they reached Vichy. The miliciens deposited Phillip at their headquarters in the Petit Casino. They took Sumner and Toquette onto another interrogation centre in the Château des Brosses. This mid-nineteenth-century folly had two great turrets and a double exterior staircase up to the main door. Sumner and Toquette were led inside and taken upstairs, where they were locked in separate rooms for the night. The miliciens kept them apart until the next evening, when they permitted them to have dinner together on a terrace outside. The treatment of the doctor and his wife was strangely courteous. They were even allowed to speak English, something they took advantage of to agree what to say under interrogation.
Toquette wrote, ‘We were all arrested on May 25th [the day they were taken from Paris], not because we were Americans, but because we were working for the underground liberation movements, what we call the “Resistance”, we were therefore political prisoners and much worse off than regular prisoners of war.’
After two nights at the Château des Brosses, Sumner and Toquette were taken back to Vichy and locked up in the Petit Casino. The Milice headquarters in the casino had evolved into a centre of secret confinement, interrogation and torture. The Vichy government had also authorized the Milice to hold trials and execute defendants. The Milice put Sumner in a cell on the first second floor with his son, and they installed Toquette alone on the one above. Phillip had spent the three previous days without food in the chateau’s dungeon, fearful, hungry and occasionally hysterical. The 16-year-old boy was under intense strain, but his father’s arrival was comforting. Then, the interrogations began. The Milice questioned the Jacksons separately, a standard police tactic to uncover contradictions and lies. Toquette managed to send a letter to her sister, Tat, on Wednesday, 31 May, which referred to two previous letters she had written. ‘Today is the day Pete should have taken his examinations for the Baccalaureate,’ she wrote, ‘and I haven’t seen him since Friday.’ She complained that she had not been able to change her clothes or wash since she left Paris six days earlier, but she was relieved to be wearing a tartan skirt ‘that doesn’t get crumpled and a gray sweater, flexible and comfortable.’ She asked her sister to tell Elisabeth Comte at the American Hospital where they were and to deal with various household matters. She added, ‘My courage is being tested to the extreme not so much for me as for Pete and also for Jack; if I knew that he was free my particular fate would be less painful.’
On 6 June, the Allies assaulted the Normandy coast and fought one of history’s greatest battles for a foothold in France. Many of the young airmen flying over the beaches, as well as some of the soldiers fighting on the ground, made it to D-Day only because Dr Sumner Jackson had helped them to escape from France. They had been spared prison, but Jackson had not. Sumner, Toquette and Pete Jackson, enduring Milice interrogation in the Petit Casino, were unaware that the liberation they longed for was underway. The Milice turned them over to the Gestapo on 7 June, twenty-four hours after the invasion. ‘We had spent 8 days at the Militia (in the cellars) at Vichy, then 16 days at the Gestapo, also at Vichy,