Americans in Paris_ Life and Death Under Nazi Occupation - Charles Glass [196]
By the time Clara looked out of her window again, German troops were barricading themselves into the Senate and digging tank trenches in the gardens for Panzers of the Fifth Sicherregiment. The tanks were well positioned to fire on any armed Frenchmen coming their way. General Dietrich von Choltitz was delaying execution of Hitler’s order to destroy Paris. He needed a ceasefire to calm the popular uprising, negotiate with the striking policemen and free his troops to fight the Allies. While he parleyed with the Resistance through Sweden’s courageous consul general, Raoul Nordling, the SS unit at the Palais du Luxembourg argued for the immediate destruction of the palace and a fight to the death against the partisans. On the lawns nearby, German firing squads ordered French prisoners to dig their own graves before executing them. Cornered and fearful, the German army, despite von Choltitz’s caution, became more menacing than at any other time during the four-year occupation.
Clara did not know that, in a school a few streets away, veteran and newly recruited résistants with captured German weapons were planning to attack the Palais du Luxembourg. Their leader, 25-year-old Pierre Fabien, was one of those whose actions, in his case assassinating a German naval cadet at the Barbès Metro station in 1941, had been strongly condemned by Clara. Their assault would give the SS a pretext to blast the explosives under the building. With the clash looming, most of the rue de Vaugirard’s residents evacuated. Clara would not budge. From her balcony vantage, she kept a detached lookout on résistants and German soldiers below. The whole neighbourhood might be destroyed at any moment. But Clara’s only fear was for Aldebert, who rang to tell her that a battle was raging in Neuilly at the gates of the American Hospital.
While Clara was apprehensive about the stand-off below her window, Sylvia Beach was thrilled to learn that résistants were liberating one Parisian quarter after another. She received an unexpected visit from the painter Paul-Emile Becat, husband of Adrienne’s sister Rinette: ‘He came on his bicycle, which was ornamented with a little French flag.’ Becat arrived in time to see the Germans destroy the old Hôtel Corneille near Sylvia’s flat. ‘The Germans had used it as offices,’ Sylvia wrote, ‘and, when they left, they destroyed it, with all their papers.’ Sylvia had been fond of the Corneille, because James Joyce had lived there, ‘and, before Joyce, Yeats and Synge’. Becat said he had come to offer congratulations on the liberation of Paris. Seeing the hotel on fire and the skirmishing near the Luxembourg Gardens, he realized his congratulations would have to wait. He left, carrying his bicycle, through a maze of cellars under the houses.
When General Aldebert de Chambrun called Clara at two o’clock, he was in his office at the American Hospital. The Resistance, which had lost its first battle at Neuilly Town Hall on 19 August, had returned to destroy or capture the German Kommandatur a few hundred yards from the hospital. Aldebert described the scene to Clara, ‘Cannon is roaring. Leclerc or the Americans can’t be very far away, but the trouble is the Germans have organized a veritable fortified camp and have posted big guns in all the avenues leading towards us. They seem to possess quantities of machine guns and wherever you look you can see boche soldiers. It would be pretty sad if they eliminated the hospital.’ Aldebert explained later, ‘The hospital found itself in the middle of the skirmish line and was equally endangered on both sides. After repeated colloquy with the German commander he became convinced that further resistance would only entail much bloodshed and the destruction of the hospital.’ Colonel Bernhuber needed the hospital for German wounded, and fighting while the Germans were about to surrender Paris had become senseless to him. At nine o’clock in the morning,