Americans in Paris_ Life and Death Under Nazi Occupation - Charles Glass [76]
Polly drove her ambulance in mid-September to a hospital for wounded prisoners at Rouen, near Paris. A physician there said that hospitalized French soldiers who were well enough had been taken to a train three days before, part of the German programme to transfer 1.58 million French prisoners of war to camps in Germany. When two French officers leaned out of one train to take a last breath of French air, a sentry shouted at them in German. The doctor thought that ‘they either hadn’t heard or hadn’t understood, for the two officers went right on looking, and talking to each other. The sentry addressed them again; still nothing happened. He then picked up his rifle and shot them both through the head.’ One was killed instantly, and the other died in the hospital an hour before Polly arrived.
The American Volunteer Ambulance Corps, forced out of service by German meddling, let most of its volunteer drivers go. ‘With no more work to do,’ Polly wrote, ‘I began thinking of packing my bags, but I couldn’t quite adjust myself to the thought of leaving the country, knowing it might be years before I was able to return.’ She was young and had enough money to live, so she stayed. ‘The first of October, ’ she noted, ‘found the schools opened. The streets and the “Metros” were crowded with children carrying their satchels full of copy-books and sharpened pencils. Most of the children had been removed from the Capital at the outbreak of war, and had only just returned. Their funny little faces were serious and composed: they too reflected the tragedy of defeat.’ Many Parisians remained traumatized by the German bombing of the refugee columns the previous June. In the Gare de l’Est, Polly saw a distracted woman clutching a blue flannel bundle. When a railway official approached her, she said, ‘You can’t have him.’ The woman was sobbing. ‘I have buried four of them. Four of them along the road … this is my youngest and my last … nobody shall take him from me!’ When the official looked inside the blanket, it was empty.
Sanctions against Jews in Paris became the norm. From 15 September, the Germans prohibited all Jews, as well as Africans and Algerians, who had fled Paris during the invasion from returning to their homes. The property and safe deposit boxes of the absentees were then seized. Polly witnessed a savage assault by French youths, who smashed the windows of Jewish-owned shops on the Champs-Elysées. Another American eyewitness to the pogrom, French Vogue editor Thomas Kernan, recalled, ‘One day in September, 1940, I happened to be standing on the balcony of my office in the Champs-Elysées, talking with one of my colleagues, when we heard shouting up toward the Etoile. A yellow roadster sped down the almost deserted avenue at 50 miles an hour, with a vaguely uniformed young man standing up in the tonneau yelling, “A bas les Juifs!” (“Down with the Jews!”).’ Kernan watched uniformed thugs hurling bricks through each window the roadster passed. ‘Before my startled eyes, the great windows of Cedric, Vanina, Annabel, Brunswick, Marie-Louise, Toutmain–a million francs worth of plate glass–fell into shards on the pavement. Most, if not all, of these shops were owned by Jews, and had been reopened by their faithful French employees, who stood trembling and weeping in the aisles.’ Kernan saw the perpetrators strut into the headquarters at 36 avenue des Champs-Elysées of the fascist Front Jeune, Youth Front. Its members, in Kernan’s words, were ‘pimply-faced youths of fifteen or sixteen years, of the Montmartre gutter type’. The police pretended not to notice, but a German officer coming out of the Claridge Hotel grabbed one of the brick-throwers. The youth handed the German a card. Kernan wrote, ‘What it said I do not know, but I saw the officer glance at it and then promptly release the prisoner.’
Kernan felt that ‘Paris