Asylum

by Moriz Scheyer

  And not least this same Pierre Laval, though in his case one would have expected nothing else. This was a man who had in fact remained faithful to one thing only: his vile reputation. Politics to him had always been a kind of playing of the market, whereby he exploited régimes for the benefit of his shady business deals and vice versa. His political convictions had always been based on the dividends that they might yield him; and one has to admit that he understood his market perfectly. A ‘son of the people’, Pierre Laval had become one of the richest men in France. In fact, if anyone could have afforded himself the luxury of one moment of moral decency, it would have been Pierre Laval; but of course a leopard cannot get rid of its spots. He offered himself to the Germans, and the Germans took him.

  Laval’s speciality had always been that of playing a double game, of serving two sides at once; and this characteristic, which had made people so suspicious of him in the past, might have given them some hope, after the défaite - the feeling being that he would support their interests as it were behind the scenes, in opposition to those of the Occupying Power. The Germans exploited this to their advantage: with every new broken promise, with every fresh violation they appeared nonetheless to be extending to the French people this vague hope: ‘True, Laval has had to give in again this time; but patience! He is a crafty rogue–a clever customer who at the end of the game will turn the tables on the Germans.’

  In this particular case, though, Laval’s calculations had failed him. Because at a certain point the Germans went too far for even the most gullible ‘man in the street’ to be able to give the slightest credence to Laval’s emollient assurances. For their part, too, the Germans knew the man too well to let him out of their sight. It became impossible for him to move over to the other camp. He was caught on the rod, whether he liked it or not, just as if he had been one of those idiots he despised so–the ones who actually have a political conviction.

  And then there were the other rascals in the servants’ quarters that was Vichy, the villains, great and small, in the realms of finance, industry, science, art, the press and the radio. It was not merely that they all rushed to obey the slightest gesture that emanated from the Nazis; they actually sang heavenly hymns of praise before the products of Hitler’s hell.

  These people could be pressed to any task; it was merely a question of what price they required. Although there were some who offered their services purely out of personal rancour, envy and malice; and others who did not even need this motivation: people who were content with the simple fact that they were hobnobbing with the Germans. These last counted it as the greatest moment of their lives if a Nazi hand had the condescension to pat them on the shoulder in public. These lackeys made the Master Race a gift of their abjectness, quite without thought of personal reward.

  But that is not all. There were even devotees whose collaboration was carried out at some personal cost. Their greatest pride was to be able to display their intimate daily intercourse with the Victors, to be able to make house visits with the top brass of the Occupying Criminals, and to make themselves worthy of such honour by paying for glittering parties and costly gifts. Which was no small sacrifice, in that time of ever-worsening shortages, when ordinary folk had to queue for hours for the prize of a pound of swede, and the weekly meat ration had been cut to thirty grams. But–as mentioned already–the organisational genius of the Germans had developed the marché noir to such a degree that, for the right money, even the most discriminating culinary demands could be met. The proud victors had, moreover, in their concern for the good of the people, sanctioned the opening of certain restaurants where they themselves preferred to eat, and where they were quite open to invitations from their French admirers. In the more modest of these establishments, where the clientele was not subject to official limitations or an entry fee, it was possible to eat and drink quite acceptably for 200 francs per head. If one wished to entertain a Nazi guest in the appropriate manner, however, one had to go to a particular restaurant in the Champs-Élysées, where the prix fixe was 5,000 francs. Per person, of course.

  It can be seen, then, that life was by no means easy for the parvenus and snobs of the Collaboration: they had to dig deep in their own pockets. Collaboration oblige.

  What satisfaction, what pride, to be able to say, just in passing: ‘General Schaumburg?–Oh, a charming man. We had him to dinner yesterday.’ What an achievement, to be able to boast: ‘Tomorrow we are dining at Headquarters.’ Or: ‘Frau Abetz* simply insists that I accompany her whenever she goes shopping. She phoned me again, just today. She doesn’t go anywhere without me.’

  In this context, pride of place in the Collaborative Hall of Fame would without doubt have to go to a particular group of women. There is a famous work by Michelet portraying a series of female characters from the French Revolution; it would need a second Michelet to do justice to these Women of the Collaboration.

  I am not talking here about ‘professionals’. Compared with these women, the ‘professionals’ behaved with a degree of reserve; they in some sense maintained the dignity of their profession. Prostitution was their job. They lived by prostitution. But these Women of the Collaboration lived for prostitution.

  Officers and private soldiers; dignitaries and Gestapo spies–they were all simply spoiled for choice. The most hideous specimen of Nazi subhumanity was able to take on the role of a Nordic hero, to whom these ladies’ hearts were in thrall. This kind of woman would run after a German; throw himself at him; sue for his noble favour–and end up in his bed.

  It would be wrong to imagine that these admirers of brutality were to be found mainly among the ‘people’. On the contrary, the volunteers were far more numerous–at least proportionally–in those circles normally described as ‘good society’. The most appalling manifestation of this shameless courting of German favour was probably the competitive zeal with which certain patrician ladies attempted, after the invasion of France, to win over the invaders in their turn, to capture them in a pénétration pacifique, laying before them the best that their kitchen, their cellar and their bodies had to offer.

  For this kind of woman, the tragedy of France offered a level of excitement which far exceeded all the enjoyments and luxuries of the pre-war period. Here was something really new; an opportunity one could simply not afford to miss.

  The crimes and atrocities of the Germans; the horrors visited on the Jews; all the inexhaustible varieties of Nazi sadism, creating ever newer and more grisly tortures in its cold, efficient laboratories of pain; the bodily and spiritual vivisection, performed for no other reason than to satisfy their evil passions; all this was a turn-on for these women–so much more stimulating than the normal methods of killing, or than the stale old guillotine. This Nazi aphrodisiac was something quite without rival.

  Many, then, were the Judiths who took a Holofernes, from the Wehrmacht or the Gestapo, into their bed. But they did him no harm–God forbid! They slept with him, and next morning, full of desire, begged him to return as soon as he could.

  One evening–the evening of a day which had broken to the grisly spectacle of yet another hecatomb of hostages, executed on the order of General Stülpnagel–a dinner was hosted by the extremely rich wife of a well-known writer, in her magnificent private palace. It was a dinner in honour of the Military Commander in France, General Stülpnagel.

  All the guests were there; only the general himself had not yet arrived.

  The lady of the house was beginning to show signs of anxiety. To have at one’s table the man whose name had, through the red posters, become a household name, to entertain this mass murderer was a widely sought-after distinction, one accorded to only a select few. What a disgrace if he failed to turn up after all!

  At last His Excellency was announced, to great sighs of relief. A crooked, deformed, gnome of a man appeared in the doorway: the Military Commander of France, the Representative of Hitler. The signatory of the red posters.

  The lady of the house rush
ed up to him with an enchanting smile. And what words did she find to greet her exalted guest?

  ‘Ah, le voilà enfin, notre gracieux vainqueur!’ (Ah, here he is at last, our gracious conqueror!)

  Her exact words.

  12

  From ‘The Israelites’ to ‘The Jew’

  AMID ALL THE FLOOD OF LIES with which Hitler–the High Priest of the Lie–inundated the world, like so much sewage, one of the most pernicious of all was his assurance that he did not regard National Socialism as something to be exported.

  His desire to export anti-Semitism, however–that chief article of his faith–was something that Hitler had never concealed. He boasted about it, in fact. And in the context of this anti-Semitic brutality, he did not need to subject it to the slightest modification. Here he encountered neither obstacles nor resistance; this was a completely defenceless group, against which the Aryan ‘Comrades of the People’ and their accomplices in all places could give free rein to their murderous and covetous desires, in the most cowardly way, without let or hindrance. Here they could turn naked robbery into persecution, and persecution into naked robbery, to their hearts’ content.

  Anti-Semitism offers fat profits and no losses. This was a truth that even the slowest individual would quickly master.

  Before the invasion there had, in spite of all the best efforts of the Third Reich, been no significant practical anti-Semitism in France. The most one came across was the attitude of certain doctors and lawyers, who would modestly hide their professional envy behind a smokescreen of anti-Semitism. Otherwise, anti-Semitism was confined to a more or less theoretical position of purely class-based prejudice which one found in certain circles of the aristocracy or high bourgeoisie.

  The ordinary people, however, were not anti-Semitic. For them a French person, or a foreigner, might happen to be ‘israélite’, just as he or she might happen to be Catholic or Protestant. And there was no Frenchman, however well versed in ethnographic studies, who had the vaguest notion, before Hitler, of what an ‘Aryan’ might be.

  After their entry into Paris, chief among the concerns of the Germans was to put an end to this situation once and for all. To begin with, however, they proceeded with appropriate caution. The Frenchman is a born individualist and rebel; he doesn’t like having things laid down to him–not even his anti-Semitism. The job could not be done overnight; they were going to have to progress by stages.

  The first was to replace the designation ‘Israelite’ with ‘Jewish’. This was followed shortly by propaganda pronouncements which no longer spoke of French and foreign Jews, but just of Jews. The next stage after this was the terminology ‘Le Juif’–The Jew: the singular used to imply a collective denigration.

  The first Commissaire aux questions juives, Xavier Vallat,* had drawn up a programme, which he laid before his Nazi superior–an expert, who expressed his severe dissatisfaction. ‘What are you thinking of?’ he said to Vallat. ‘You are trying to move much too quickly.’

  ‘Too quickly?’ Vallat was wide-eyed with astonishment.

  ‘Certainly: too quickly. We must avoid acting too fast, and so provoking sympathy for the Jews. Just don’t overdo it. This way we shall end up with a result that your programme could not even have dreamed of. You can depend on it.’

  And indeed you could. You could depend on it to such an extent that in the end Vallat, who must still have had some trace of a sense of shame, did not want to continue his involvement–even though, of course, things were to get a great deal worse than they were then. He went, and was replaced by the notorious figure of Darquier,* a rogue, who had more than one crime in his past, and who was prepared to stoop to anything in his compliance. Besides, none of his previous jobs had ever brought him such a great material reward.

  Laval, who had not shrunk from including Darquier in his ‘government’, may perhaps in his quiet moments have regretted that, instead of playing the role of Prime Minister, he had not rather requested from his German employers the much more lucrative, though admittedly more modest, position of Commissaire général aux questions juives.

  Thus, the programme of ‘extermination’ had begun with a devilishly graded, mind-poisoning propaganda programme: the witch-hunt in the press and on the radio, in lectures, in countless brightly coloured posters and other depictions; the word ‘JUIF’ stamped in red on the identity card; the yellow Star of David, bearing the word ‘JUIF’ in a large type, imitating the style of Hebrew letters. The fact that this Star of David was made from linen, incidentally, meant that to obtain it one had to pay the appropriate number of points from one’s textile ration card at the police commissariat.

  Then there was the ban on frequenting public bars or restaurants, and the stipulation of certain times at which one was allowed to do one’s food shopping–times at which everything had long since been sold. And there were many more regulations besides.

  And hand in hand with these went the other ‘measures’. First of all there was the Statut des Juifs, which ‘merely’ deprived Jews of any possibility of earning money. Then there was the whole series of decrees, slowly growing to an avalanche, all of which had the effect of putting Jews outside the law–of handing them over to the mercy of any arbitrary action without any protection or possibility of redress. Worst of all, of course, was what did not appear in any journal officiel–the perpetration of atrocities of a kind unparalleled in the annals of barbarism.

  What was the reaction of the people?

  Here it is important to avoid generalisation. What can be said, however, is that–with noble, indeed quite wonderful exceptions–the Nazi seed had fallen on fruitful ground.

  There were, for example, French ‘Aryans’, who, on meeting a stranger on the street or in the metro who was ‘branded’ with the mark of the Jew, made a deliberate display of doffing their hat. On the other hand, people flocked in droves to the ‘Exposition Juive’,* that absolute pinnacle of viciousness in anti-Semitic propaganda, which opened shortly after the Occupation was established.

  The most harmless group, relatively speaking, were those who took no position at all, and simply tried to ignore the crimes being perpetrated against Jews. At least these people did not commit actual harm. Alongside them, however, was the great mass of sheep-like individuals who echoed every slogan of the anti-Semitic propaganda, obediently, without reflection. And finally there were those who had sniffed blood at the appearance of anti-Semitism; who made it their profession and, in many cases, simply competed with the German bloodhounds. Of course, these collaborators in German anti-Semitism were simply following the example set by their superiors, in particular by that gang that went under the name of ‘Commissariat’–and should in reality have been called ‘Banditariat’–‘aux questions juives’.

  All in all, then, the Germans’ gamble had paid off. From the point of view of the French people, it was not just that taking anti-Semitism on board cost them nothing; rather, it involved participation in a hugely successful business, which offered the most attractive returns for no effort at all. And it must be said that to resist this kind of draw entails an inner strength which is not granted to many.

  It is no wonder that many who had no particular axe to grind against the Jews allowed themselves to be ‘persuaded’ to participate. Many of these accomplices in the Great Nazi Robbery–taking on the role of ‘buyers’, of ‘enforced or temporary administrators’–beat their breasts as they pocketed their gains, justifying their actions as stemming from friendly feeling towards the Jews. They had only done it to prevent someone else who in their place would have stolen far more.

  It is also no wonder that others did not even take the trouble to find such a pretext, an excuse, a self-exoneration: the plundering of Jewish possessions was not only sanctioned by law, after all, but positively encouraged by all occupying and occupied authorities: it was actually a duty. Why, then, the qualms…?

  A separate book would be needed to do justice to the industry of human misery that sprang from
the root of the Jewish persecutions; to do justice to all the exploiters of suffering, of torment, of fear of death–people who somehow or other had (or claimed to have) the power to save Jews, or at least to help them. Such power became in their hands a kind of capital, which they invested in the pursuit of what was truly the most shameless and evil of all rackets.

  It is hardly even worth mentioning those who got their hands on everything that Jewish people were forced to sell, at utterly derisory prices, if they were not to starve. These villains were men of honour compared with certain other traders on the black market of Jewish misery.

  There were, for example, the passeurs, who (as long as the Demarcation Line was still in existence) smuggled Jews from the Occupied into the Free Zone. When the line was removed, most of these philanthropic individuals were able to retire very comfortably. The harder the Germans made life in the Occupied Zone, the higher went the prices of the passeurs. To begin with it was 500 francs per person; by the end it had risen to 50,000 or more. Nor should we forget the profits that the authorities in ‘Free France’, too, pocketed on these occasions–under a quite grotesque pretext.

  It should be understood that every Jew who was lucky enough to cross the Ligne de démarcation was then prosecuted in the Free Zone for ‘Défaut de Visa’–that is to say, for failure to report to the police before the escape, or, even better, to announce the escape in advance. For failure, in other words, to put his or her own head in the noose. This legal process would entail a further cost of up to 4,000 francs per person…

  Still, these passeurs at least fulfilled their side of the bargain. What words can be used to describe those individuals–including police officers–who, after the German Occupation of the Free Zone, offered their services to Jews who were in fear of their lives, to take them over the Swiss border in exchange for the unconditional payment, in advance, of often enormous sums–and then simply abandoned them to their fate on the way, and in some cases actually handed them over directly to the German or French Gestapo? Here I speak from my own personal experience. A special concentration camp was built for Jews in this position, not far from the Swiss border, with a ‘deportation train’ that left every eight days for Germany and Poland.