Americans in Paris_ Life and Death Under Nazi Occupation - Charles Glass [43]
In Paris, Kennan dropped Coster and his luggage at the Hôtel Bristol, ‘a place of refuge for the remaining Americans’. After making a nostalgic tour and dropping his car at the American Embassy after the ten o’clock curfew, Kennan walked to the Hôtel Bristol. ‘At the hotel the ambulance driver and I, feeling much too near the end of the world to think of sleep, cracked out a bottle of rye,’ Kennan noted. ‘We were joined by our next-door neighbor, a female and no longer entirely young. She was a true product of Parisian America and was accepting her privations with such excellent good humor that she kept us in gales of laughter with the account of her experiences.’ The next day, Kennan drove through the city looking up ‘friends of friends’. Having known Paris before the war, he thought the German-occupied city looked the same but was no longer itself: ‘Was there not some Greek myth about the man who tried to ravish the goddess, only to have her turn to stone when he touched her? That is literally what has happened to Paris. When the Germans came, the soul simply went out of it; and what is left is only stone.’
Coster learned that a French officer had seen his Ambulance Number 20 near Amiens, burned out with four charred corpses beside it. ‘This explained why King, Wait, Clement and I had been awarded the Croix de Guerre–posthumously!’ Rather than linger at the Bristol or return to his room at Cité Universitaire, Coster went to the American Hospital at Neuilly. There was no indication that he knew Dr Sumner Jackson, but he asked the surgeon for help.
Donald Coster was more than a naïve volunteer. After his graduation from Princeton in 1929, he moved to Montreal, the nearest venue for American diplomats and others to perfect their French. He worked there as an advertising executive, and he had no difficulty leaving the job in 1940 to serve in France. When he arrived in Brussels from Amiens on 14 June, he had the option of awaiting repatriation with his colleagues. Instead, he went to Paris. Coming back to France after the Germans had arrested him once was a gamble. Under international law, as an American he would not have been apprehended. The Nazis could have arrested him only if they suspected him of being a spy. Coster probably returned to Paris to collect–not his clothes–but information on France, German troop strength or the new escape routes through which British and French soldiers were making their way to England. Dr Jackson, having served in the British and American armies in the last war against Germany, was organizing an underground railroad. When Coster found him, Jackson agreed to obtain the papers he would need to cross the border to Spain. Until the false identity documents were ready, Coster stayed out of sight under the American Hospital.
The American Hospital of Paris continued its assistance to the war’s victims after Paris fell under Nazi domination. ‘The Germans permitted Dr. Jackson to set up a dressing station for the French wounded at Fontainbleau [sic] and to evacuate selected patients to the American Hospital,’ wrote Dr Morris Sanders, chief anaesthesiologist at the American Hospital in 1940. Sanders, who called Sumner ‘Dr Jack’, went on the first ambulance to Fontainebleau with Drs Jackson and Gros, and he took part in surgery on the French wounded there. ‘With the Occupation of Paris,’ Sanders wrote, ‘Dr. Jack worked long hours, gave his blood numerous times and slept in the building, and visited his family only on weekends.’
From the first day of the occupation of Paris, the American Hospital expanded its operations from field hospitals to prison camps, where many of the newly interned soldiers were either ill or wounded. Facilities for prisoners were rudimentary, if only because the Germans were not wholly prepared to deal with almost two million captives. Otto Gresser, the hospital’s Swiss superintendent, recalled, ‘An impressive line of ambulances packed with bread and other essential products,