Americans in Paris_ Life and Death Under Nazi Occupation - Charles Glass [193]
Outside, the tank continued its patrol, and an officer ordered French workmen to demolish a roadblock. They ripped it down, and he told the crowd, ‘Anyone can take the wood.’ It took only a few minutes for people to grab all the firewood they could carry, leaving a pile of sand where the barricade had been.
Clara had promised ‘the children’, René and Josée, to protect their apartment in the Place du Palais Bourbon, ‘to see whether all was going well, to inquire if their domestic needed anything and if a high morale was being maintained’. That meant walking a couple of miles each way, past one German Stützpunkt, strongpoint, after another and through the Resistance barricades that had been erected all over Paris. To impress guards sporting French tricolour scarves and Gaullist Crosses of Lorraine at the roadblocks, Clara wore the ribbons and medals that she had been awarded over the years: ‘a jewel-studded cross of the Legion of Honor and the palmes académiques offered me by the town of Fez’. She also wore a social work medal and ‘the blueribboned insignia of the Society of Colonial Dames’. She pinned them to her breast in a distinguished row, like a general: ‘I must say they looked very smart on a black Creed tailor-made suit.’ She marched from the rue de Vaugirard to the boulevard Raspail without hindrance, but at the rue de Grenelle a crowd of armed youngsters stopped her. Imperiously, she told their leader, ‘My young friend, here it is I who command.’ Undoubtedly stunned by the 70-year-old countess’s hauteur, he let her through. Soon, though, Clara found herself in the midst of a fire-fight, with bullets coming ‘more or less from every direction’. She made it to René and Josée’s house, where Elie Ruel, the cook, assured her that all was well. She walked back, ‘arrived safely at home not having been asked even to “show cause” at the three barricades made principally of kitchen chairs and tables’. Young résistants facing Wehrmacht tanks were too prudent to confront a determined American matron in a Creed tailor-made suit with a chest full of medals.
FORTY-NINE
Tout Mourir
THE NAZIS HAD SENT TOQUETTE JACKSON from Moulins to Romainville, near Paris, on 2 August. At Romainville, the Germans were holding 550 female political prisoners. Toquette was one of three American citizens in the camp. The others were Lucienne Dixon, originally French and married to an American engineer, and Virginia d’Albert-Lake. Born Virginia Roush in Dayton, Ohio, in 1909, she spent her childhood in St Petersburg, Florida. She married a Frenchman and moved to Paris in 1937. In 1943, she and her husband joined the Comet Resistance network, which had the twin distinctions of facilitating more Allied escapes and surviving longer than any other network. She had been arrested by the Feldgendarmerie in June, just after D-Day, while escorting South African airmen through the countryside. The Germans interrogated her at Fresnes prison in Paris and moved her to Romainville with most of the other women political prisoners. The Swedish Consul General Raoul Nordling was frantically attempting to obtain the release of all the women, as well as that of Jewish prisoners at Drancy, from General Dietrich von Choltitz. Von Choltitz and the regular army exerted little influence with the SS and Gestapo, especially after the failed 20 July plot.
Romainville was one of the camps that the Red Cross was permitted to visit, and conditions were better than Toquette had experienced in Vichy and Moulins. Toquette’s sister, Tat, was allowed to enter the camp on 10 August to spend half an hour with her. Toquette was unable to tell her what had become of Sumner and Phillip after their confinement at Moulins, where