Have you ever asked yourself what you would have done if you had found yourself in
Paris on June 14, 1940, when the German army rolled into town?
Collaboration so quickly became the norm that this fundamental question
-- would I have run, fought, played ball or just kept my head down? --
rarely gets posed in public. Of course, the answer would have depended
largely on whether you were Jewish, or French, or both. But whatever
your origins, or your politics, the practical and moral choices
presented that day still trouble the conscience and demand debate.
Two
exhibitions now running in New York describe the different paths taken
by French writers -- mostly less than admirable -- when Nazism swept over
a country reputed to be imbued with Enlightenment principles of liberty
and tolerance. At the New York Public Library, the ambitious show
"Between Collaboration and Resistance" describes the life of the
literati under the Occupation; at the Museum of Jewish Heritage we can
observe the depressing trajectory of the "French"-Jewish novelist Irene
Nemirovsky, whose life and death mirror the intellectual evasion so
prevalent under Nazi and Vichy rule in her adopted homeland.
As
a writer and publisher, I don't pretend to know what I would have done,
much as I like to fantasize that I would have joined the Resistance,
or, like Romain Gary, fled to London to follow de Gaulle. My
hypothetical moral dilemma is too bound up in the experience of my
French mother, who spent the war in the occupied zone in relative
comfort though anguished isolation. Her father was anti-German and
pro-British, but he nonetheless kept his wood-veneer factory running
full tilt to meet the demand of German furniture makers. His
justification, in part, was to prevent his employees from being
deported to work in German munitions factories (some were forced to go
anyway). But I wish he had lived long enough for me to ask why, if he
was so anti-German, he didn't enter into clandestine resistance along
with the tiny minority who chose to stay and fight.
My
grandfather died when I was six, so I didn't get the chance.
Paradoxically, some of the money he made during the war helped pay for
my private schooling in America, and a good education is what enabled
me to study with the great historian of Vichy France, Robert Paxton.
But
we imagine intellectuals to be more principled, or at least more
thoughtful, than ordinary businessmen. Unfortunately, there is nothing
in the public-library exhibition (curated by a team led by Paxton) to
suggest that French writers behaved any better than other Frenchmen. To
be sure, there were notable exceptions, like the novelist Louis Aragon,
a communist, and his wife, Elsa Triolet (as well as the French-writing
Irishman Samuel Beckett), who actively resisted. Other literary figures
of Jewish origin, like Jacques Schiffrin (aided by Andre Gide) and
Andre Maurois, wisely found refuge in America, where they were able to
work for the anti-Nazi cause.
But paradox and hypocrisy were the
order of the day. Some non-collaborators wrote for collaborationist
journals and, for a time, even Maurois naively supported Marechal
Philippe Petain, the head of the collaborationist Vichy regime that
governed the so-called free zone in the south and eventually conducted
its own roundups of Jews. As the historian Thomas Christofferson
writes, "Purity never existed, not even among intellectuals. . . . For
the most part, the intellectual resistance was a limited, Parisian
phenomenon that very few people experienced firsthand."
One of
the most damning pieces of evidence at the library is a short dismissal
letter dated Nov. 5, 1940, written by the publisher Gaston Gallimard to
Schiffrin to place his company in conformity with Vichy's anti-Semitic
laws: "Dear Sir, Reorganizing our publishing house on new bases, I must
end your participation in the production of the collection 'Biblioteque
de la Pleiade'. ... Please be assured, sir, of my sincerest regards."
This odious bit of realpolitik did not, however, prevent Aragon and
Camus in 1942, and Sartre in 1943, from having their books published by
Gallimard.
Other publishers conducted themselves no more
honorably, firing their Jewish employees with little or no hesitation.
In muted contrast was Albin Michel, which reluctantly continued to
subsidize Nemirovsky while she sought safety with her family in a
village in Burgundy. But Nemirovsky was, like Poe's purloined letter,
hidden in plain sight. If many intellectuals blinded themselves to
Vichy's fraudulent declarations of independence, Nemirovsky virtually
committed suicide in pursuit of "Frenchness" in the eyes of Vichy. At
the Museum of Jewish Heritage, we can read her pathetic letter to
Petain of Sept. 13, 1940, in which she seeks special status by
differentiating herself from other, supposedly less desirable Jewish
immigrants to France. By now converted to Catholicism, she writes: "I
cannot believe . . . that one makes no distinction between the
undesirables and the honorable foreigners who, if they have received
royal hospitality from France, are conscious of having done their best
to deserve it."
A very fine writer, Nemirovsky, but politically
tone deaf. Raised in a monied banking family that fled Russia during
the Bolshevik revolution, her snobbery and sense of class entitlement
trumped her common sense -- she seems literally to have believed that
writing well in French, along with her upper-class credentials and
religious conversion, would spare her the fate reserved for all Jews by
Hitler. Already in 1938, Irene and her banker husband had been denied
French citizenship, but she didn't take the hint. In any event, Vichy's
anti-Jewish laws were applied without prodding from the Germans, so
French anti-Semitism was homegrown and citizenship was no protection.
Less than two years after she wrote to Petain, Nemirovsky was arrested
by the French police inside the occupied zone and deported to
Auschwitz, where she was gassed to death.
But as disgracefully as
the French responded to Hitler -- and as well presented as these two
exhibitions are -- there's something disturbing about watching Americans
proceed in shocked judgment of foreigners and their moral crimes. In
the end, the Occupation is a French story that may continue to
fascinate Americans simply because France is more interesting than,
say, Holland, where a higher percentage of the Jewish population was
deported. It may also be that Americans, in their perpetual innocence,
prefer to consider the sins of others rather than examine their own
history.
Before we get to feeling too self-righteous, we ought
to mount a public exhibition on American policy toward Vichy (where the
U.S. ambassador remained until May 1942), Jewish refugees (the
Roosevelt State Department turned away convoys loaded with fleeing Jews
from East Coast ports and maintained its strict quotas on immigration
throughout the war), and the death camps themselves (the U.S.
government played down early reports of the growing Holocaust). The
exhibit could include a section, drawn from Charles Glass's forthcoming
book, Americans in Paris, on the 5,000 or so Americans who remained in
Paris during the Occupation, not all of whom distinguished themselves
ethically.
One of those Americans was the very wealthy Florence
Gould, a willing collaborator who presided over a Franco-German
literary and artists' salon all through those four dark years. The
Florence Gould Foundation is a major funder of the library exhibition,
which is to say that some moral questions are very complex.