Americans in Paris_ Life and Death Under Nazi Occupation - Charles Glass [203]
The captain asked Aldebert what Ruel’s alleged crime was. Aldebert answered, ‘The same offense as mine: loyalism. He is superior to me, though, in that he is a very good cook, without whose services my wife and I will be deprived of our evening soup and noodles.’ The captain dismissed the firing squad. Clara and Aldebert spent nights at René and Josée’s to protect the place. The old count and countess left René’s house early each day for work at the American Library and the American Hospital. Before dawn on 9 September, Aldebert heard unusual noises outside and told Clara, ‘The Fifis seem to be coming here. You had better disappear.’ She went into the bathroom, but not before a band of armed men broke in. One pointed a submachine gun at her while she changed out of her nightgown. As they were led outside, a local policeman saw them and called for help. Seven more gendarmes appeared on the scene and persuaded the Fifis to bring Aldebert and Clara to the Prefecture of Police rather than to their own headquarters in rue du Helder. This probably saved the count and countess from the mobs and revolutionary courts that were executing suspected collaborators.
At the Prefecture of Police, the count and countess were held in what Clara called ‘filthy conditions’. A sympathetic woman jailer allowed them to receive food from a local café in the tiny cell where they spent the night. Elisabeth Comte of the American Hospital lobbied hard for their release. At the American Embassy, diplomats told her they could not become involved. Miss Comte went to Aldebert’s brother, Charles, a respected diplomat with credibility among the Gaullists for his opposition to the Nazis. He called de Gaulle’s office to declare he ‘would hold de Gaulle’s chief of staff personally responsible’ if his brother and Clara were not released at once. Miss Comte took Aldebert and Clara in a hospital car that evening from the Prefecture to their house in the rue de Vaugirard, which had been looted in their absence.
In the months that followed, Aldebert and Clara were gradually eased out of their jobs at the hospital and the library. Post-liberation correspondence by the boards of both institutions referred obliquely to the ‘Chambrun situation’. Rather than pay them tribute for having saved Paris’s two main American institutions from the Nazis, the governors curried favour with the Gaullists by distancing themselves from a couple who had been too close to Pierre Laval and Maréchal Pétain. When the passions of the épuration, or purge, that followed liberation eased, René and Josée de Chambrun came out of hiding. Personae non gratae with the new French government and the US Embassy, they spent the rest of their lives exonerating her father Pierre Laval’s wartime legacy and published many books on his career. Along with Aldebert, they were with the 80-year-old Clara at her bedside when she died at home in Paris on 1 June 1954. Aldebert died a year later.
During the liberation of Paris, Sumner Jackson was working fourteen hours a day on a forge at the Neuengamme concentration camp near Hamburg. His middle finger became infected and had to be amputated by a fellow prisoner, a Czech surgeon. His 17-year-old son Phillip laboured in the kitchen from midnight to two o’clock each afternoon. A spilled vat of boiling water inflicted third degree burns on his foot. But father and son survived better than most of the inmates, who died of exhaustion or were murdered by the German guards. Some time in the spring of 1945, Sumner was reassigned from factory work to the camp infirmary.
In the eight months prior to April 1945, as Germany was falling to the Allies, Phillip estimated that the Germans murdered 35,000 prisoners. On 21 April, the British army reached the outskirts of Neuengamme. The Nazis herded its remaining inmates into cattle trucks for the train journey to Lübeck. Ten days later, most of the prisoners were