Inferno - Max Hastings [256]
In mainland France, the Resistance enjoyed support from only a small minority of people until the Germans’ 1943 introduction of forced labour persuaded many young men to flee to join maquis groups, for which they afterwards fought with varying degrees of enthusiasm. To challenge the occupiers was difficult and highly dangerous. Given the strong French tradition of anti-Semitism, there was little appetite for assisting Jews to escape the death camps. Much of France’s aristocracy collaborated with the Germans, as well as with the Vichy regime which governed central and southern France until the Germans took them over in November 1942.
There were honourable exceptions, however, notable among them Countess Lily de Pastré. She was born in 1891, her mother a Russian and her father a rich French member of the Noilly Prat vermouth dynasty. In 1916 she married Count Pastré, who had his own fortune derived from a nineteenth-century family shipping business. One of their three children, Nadia, assisted wartime Allied escape lines. In 1940 the countess was divorced, but continued to live in style at her family’s Château de Montredon, south of Marseilles. She began to lavish her fortune on making Montredon a haven for artists, many of them Jewish, who had escaped from the German-occupied zone. She created an organisation, Pour que l’Esprit Vive—“So that the spirit may survive”—to finance and shelter people at risk. Up to forty fugitives at any one time—writers, musicians, painters—became long-stay guests at the château, including such artists as André Masson and the Czech Rudolf Kundera, together with the Jewish pianist Clara Haskil and harpist Lily Laskine. Pastré arranged for Haskil’s treatment for a brain tumour and her subsequent escape to Switzerland.
There were regular recitals and afternoon concerts by residents. To stimulate her guests’ creativity, the countess offered a 5,000-franc prize for the best interpretation of a Brahms piano work. The highlight of her wartime career was a moonlight performance of A Midsummer Night’s Dream staged on 25 July 1942, with a cast of fifty-two and incidental music played by an orchestra with a Jewish conductor. Costumes were created by the young Christian Dior, mostly from Montredon’s curtains. Lily de Pastré’s activities were brutally curtailed in the latter part of the war, after German troops took over her château. Some of her former guests, such as German Jewish composer Alfred Tokayer, were arrested and shipped to death camps. But the countess’s efforts to succour some of the most vulnerable victims of Nazi persecution stand in distinguished contrast to the passivity of most of France’s rich, who declined to risk loss of their property as well as their lives. She died broke in 1974, having exhausted her huge fortune in the service of philanthropy, much of this during the war years.
Elsewhere, some small countries showed bolder defiance than did the French. The Danes, alone among European societies, refused to participate in the deportation of their Jews, almost all of whom survived. Few of the 293,000