Americans in Paris_ Life and Death Under Nazi Occupation - Charles Glass [74]
When the meeting ended at 6.45 p.m., General de Chambrun went back to the business of keeping the hospital open and free of German control. A veteran of the First World War, he still called the Germans ‘Boches’. Despite the policy of collaboration adopted by his in-law, Pierre Laval, Aldebert vowed never to give a bed to a Boche soldier.
Aldebert de Chambrun, Sumner Jackson, Otto Gresser, Elisabeth Comte and the rest of the staff improvised so that the hospital could function without many of the necessities the Germans had either requisitioned or prohibited. The Germans did not seize the American Hospital’s ambulances, and the governors voted to donate six or seven of the fleet of ten to ‘services or municipal organizations where they could be utilized in the best interest of the parties concerned’. Without petrol, ambulances had to be converted to run on gazogene. The remaining ambulances were vital, not only for transporting patients, but for bringing food from farms around Paris to feed 500 people a day. ‘The Winter 1940–1941 was exceptionally cold,’ Otto Gresser remembered, ‘and no fuel oil was available. The Boiler-Room had to be converted to be heated with coal of very bad quality. The hospital cars were run with charcoal. Contracts were drawn up with farmers for supply of potatoes and other vegetables and fruits and sometimes beef was hidden in the car and covered with salad.’
Dr Jackson challenged Gresser one day about the food shortages. ‘Look here,’ he said, ‘we have so many patients and so little meat and it’s absolutely insufficient. If we can’t do any better, some patients are going to have malnutrition.’ Gresser asked a butcher he knew to send the hospital more meat. A week later, when Gresser came to work, he saw a large German car parked in the courtyard. ‘Then I noticed,’ the superintendent recalled, ‘that they were unloading three hundred kilos [of beef] into the storeroom. I immediately called the butcher and asked what the devil was going on since there were Germans at the hospital delivering meat. And he answered, “Well, these are not Germans, these are French volunteers in German uniforms having joined the German Army and they brought it in a German car from out in the country. You don’t risk anything.”’ Nonetheless, Gresser was worried, especially with the German Kommandatur only a few hundred yards away.
The next day, German officials paid a visit to the hospital and demanded to see Mr Gresser. ‘They asked me if I had seen a German car at the hospital with such and such a number, and I replied that I never took note of car numbers.’ When they asked how much meat was in the kitchen, Gresser admitted only to the legal limit of 60 kilograms. ‘After more questions,’ Gresser said later,
they wanted to talk to the Chief Cook to verify my story. Trying to act calm and not cause suspicion, I offered them seats in the lobby and slowly left to go to the kitchen where at this exact moment they were in the process of taking care of the three hundred kilos of meat. I said, ‘Throw that meat out in the garden. I don’t want to see it. And you go up and tell the Germans you have sixty kilos and you are not responsible for the purchasing of the meat supply.’ The Chief Cook answered the Germans’ questions. They seemed satisfied, said they would make a report and left.
Fearing he would be arrested, Gresser returned to the hospital with a suitcase of clothes and other essentials he would need in prison. He told General de Chambrun about the hidden meat and the German inspection. ‘Now look here, Gresser,’ the general said, ‘we’ve been talking about this for nearly a half hour, and nothing has happened. All is fine. Why do you worry?’ Gresser was not arrested.
With no gas for cooking in the kitchen, the chef boiled vegetables in cauldrons over open fires in the courtyard.