Americans in Paris_ Life and Death Under Nazi Occupation - Charles Glass [95]
In November, Congress repealed the Neutrality Act of 1939 that most Americans had believed would keep them out of the war. The United States was, in President Roosevelt’s words, the ‘arsenal of democracy’ against the Axis dictatorships. Although their embassy in Paris had closed in May, more than two thousand American citizens remained in the City of Light to endure with the French the privations of occupation. Some hoped America would stay out of the war so that they would not be arrested as enemy aliens. The rest longed for the American army to liberate them from German rule.
United Press correspondent Ralph Heinzen came to Paris from Vichy in September 1941 to write about the American Library, where he ‘found both the reading and reference rooms crowded chiefly with French scholars. The files are intact, but since the armistice there has been a complete interruption of mails and no recent American books or magazines are available.’ Heinzen noted that Clara had taken over the library on Dorothy Reeder’s departure and enjoyed ‘an exceptional position in European letters’. Heinzen may have been encouraged to write the article by his friend René de Chambrun. ‘Gift books are distributed to prison camps and military hospitals,’ he wrote. ‘A special circulating library takes care of the reading needs of the British civilians interned in concentration camps at Besançon and Vittel.’
Heinzen also visited the American Hospital, writing that ‘General de Chambrun slept in the hospital to protect that property until its status under occupation was definitely established.’ He inspected one floor dedicated to military wounded. Of the civilian patients, there were equal numbers of Americans, French and British. He noted that Sumner Jackson had become chief of the medical staff following the departure of Dr Gros. ‘Since General de Chambrun has assumed the management of the hospital, there has not been a vacant bed,’ he wrote, discreetly avoiding the observation that the general and Dr Jackson kept the hospital full to deny the Germans a foothold they could use to assume complete control.
Aldebert and Clara de Chambrun directed the two leading American institutions in France, because the boards of both had fled to the United States. If Germany and the United States went to war, the Chambruns could not guarantee that their meticulous legal and financial planning would protect the hospital or the library. Rarely had the fate of an entire American community in wartime rested in the hands of two members of the same family. Clara and Aldebert waited to discover whether they could save the hospital, the library and the staffs of both on the day that American citizenship became anathema to the Nazi occupiers of Paris.
Many Americans had run out of money after more than a year under occupation, since the US Treasury had restricted the transfer of funds to German-occupied territory. A few turned for help to the American Hospital. On 6 November 1941, General de Chambrun sent a memorandum to Nelson Dean Jay and Edward B. Close that made it clear the hospital would live up to the purpose for which it had been founded in 1909: ‘We have already been obliged to accept in the Hospital five American destitutes and it is my intention to do all I can for this category which may increase and which may become a heavy burden if nothing is done to help the countrymen which