Americans in Paris_ Life and Death Under Nazi Occupation - Charles Glass [185]
‘Nobody knew why they had been deported and Jackson never talked about it,’ author George Martelli wrote, with help from Hollard himself, in The Man Who Saved London.
A man of sixty [in fact, fifty-eight], very upright, with white hair, strong features, and a stern, almost hard expression, he appeared as a person of great energy and forceful character. He was extremely reserved in manner and this and the dignity with which he supported [i.e., stood] the camp life immediately aroused the sympathy of Michel, with whom he soon established a tacit understanding. During their weekly meetings few words were exchanged and those only of a strictly practical use.
To survive Neuengamme was almost impossible. Polish, Russian, Danish, French and other prisoners were worked to death, and many were murdered. For the slightest infraction, men were hanged in the camp square. The Nazis secretly hanged many more in a row of cells from ropes permanently attached to rings in the ceilings. As at Auschwitz, a crematorium disposed of the bodies.
Jackson told Michel Hollard of his desperation to let his family in America know that he and Phillip were alive. Hollard smuggled a post-card out of the camp to his sister in Switzerland. She wrote to Jackson’s sister, Freda Swensen, a nurse living in Belmont, Massachusetts. When Freda read the letter, she notified the American government. The United States was certain at last that Dr Jackson was alive. But the American army was a long way from Neuengamme.
In early August, another friend of Sylvia Beach’s died. The writer Jean Prévost, whom she and Adrienne had nurtured as a youthful author in the 1920s, had joined the Resistance early in 1943. Not content with being an écrivain résistant, circulating illicit pamphlets, the writer whose head was so hard that Hemingway had broken his thumb on it became a fighter in the Vercors. Using the nom de guerre Capitaine Goderville, he commanded maquisards in ambushes on German positions. Three days after the Allies invaded France, his unit mobilized to confront German troops throughout the hilly region in eastern France. Prévost and his band fought hard in the forests for six weeks. Then, at seven in the morning on 1 August, they were ambushed and killed. It was another hard loss for Sylvia, whose consolation was that another friend in the Resistance, Violaine Hoppenot, was still alive.
FORTY-SEVEN
One Family Now
AS THE ALLIES SURROUNDED PARIS and the Germans prepared to defend it to the end, the Laval and de Chambrun families withdrew into a tight family orbit. Aldebert and Clara found themselves in a unique position to observe the Vichy regime’s final political manoeuvres. They turned up at the prime minister’s official residence at the Hôtel Matignon for their usual family dinner on the night of 12 August. Pierre Laval himself was unexpectedly absent. He called his wife from Maréville, a town near Nancy. When Jeanne Laval hung up, she explained to Clara, Aldebert, René and Josée that her husband had just freed Edouard Herriot, the president of the Chamber of Deputies, and his wife from German captivity. Ambassador Otto Abetz and Foreign Minister Ribbentrop had approved the release. Laval’s old adversary Herriot was the parliamentarian whom Dr Keller at the German Embassy had offered to exchange for the release of Charles Bedaux. Laval was bringing Herriot to Paris to reconvene the National Assembly. His purpose was to ensure a legal transfer of authority from parliament to Charles de Gaulle and to avert a civil war between collaborators and résistants. Clara remembered that, when the dinner ended, ‘we all went home happy, and learned next day all had gone well’.
Laval appeared to have the assent, not only of the German Foreign Office, but of the United States. He was secretly dealing with America’s Office of Strategic Services chief in Switzerland, Allen Dulles, through André Enfière. Enfière, as a senior member of Charles de Gaulle’s Committee of National Resistance, had been attempting to obtain Herriot’s release for