A Troubled Peace

by L. M. Elliott

  It took incredible bravery and commitment to peace to stand for forgiveness, for healing, during this time. Yet many did. One woman, whose husband died in Buchenwald for his Resistance work, served briefly as her village’s mayor and counted her largest accomplishment as being the fact that no female was shaved during her watch.

  Hunger ravaged Europe. The Allies sent massive shipments of foods, but until Hitler was defeated, the majority of supplies went to troops on the front lines. Once the peace accord was signed, relief efforts began in earnest, spurred by slogans like: “Let’s finish the job.” In May 1945, for instance, the U.S. Air Corps flew 400 emergency flights over the Netherlands, dropping more than 800 tons of K-rations for the starving Dutch. The British also dropped tons of powdered milk, eggs, and chocolate. Church groups across the United States organized clothing drives with the same gusto American youths had scrounged old pans for scrap metal for bombs during the war. In one day a Catholic church in Richmond collected 2,416 useable garments; in a week a West Coast synagogue collected 10,000 pounds of coats.

  But even with such aid coming in, the infrastructure to deliver food and clothes was nonexistent. Most French railroads, bridges, and canals were destroyed. Coal had to be mined to run what trains were working, but there was nothing to transport the coal to the stations.

  In this void, some seized the opportunity to make fortunes selling food and stolen Allied goods on the black market. Sometimes they exploited age-old tensions between France’s farmers and city dwellers, the peasants’ resentment of the urban rich, to convince them to risk selling their crops illegally on the black market rather than through government channels. And certainly the differences in profits were tempting. The French government-controlled markets could pay 3,000 francs for a cow, for instance, while a farmer could sell the same animal for 18,000 francs on the black market.

  Establishing a legal, reliable market for food, then, was the biggest challenge facing the French in 1945. A report written by the new United Nations in March of that year found that many Europeans were trying to survive on a diet of 1,000 calories a day. (Between 2,000 and 2,500 a day is considered healthy, while the typical American will consume 5,000 calories at a single Thanksgiving meal.) The rate of malnutrition illnesses—like rickets, which bows the bones of children who don’t have enough milk to drink—skyrocketed. The French tried to establish food priorities for returning “absents” and growing children. Even so, given the shortages, these allowances were paltry compared to what we enjoy today. Each French child from newborn to age three was guaranteed only one dried banana, for example, for the year of 1945. Food riots and demonstrations became common, such as the time 4,000 mothers marched on the Ministry of Supply at the Hôtel de Ville, shouting, “Milk for our little ones.”

  Faced with so many hurdles, political friction among the French started immediately. There was an uneasy alliance between predominantly communist and socialist Resistance fighters, or maquis, and General Charles de Gaulle, who headed the Free French army—soldiers who had escaped to England or North Africa when France fell to regroup and fight with the Allies. While their common goal was to liberate the nation, they coordinated their efforts well. Together, after D-day, they stabilized town and regional governments and controlled the purge, sending 40,000 collaborators to jail as opposed to their being killed on the street.

  But the maquis and de Gaulle did not trust one another. De Gaulle often underplayed how important the Resistance had been during the war, and the maquis responded that they risked their lives in covert actions while he sat safely in London making plans. De Gaulle was more traditional and nationalistic in his thinking than the more radical maquis, who hoped to create a new social order as they rebuilt France. De Gaulle wanted a strong and independent France, a republic free of any outside political influences—America, Britain, or Soviet communism.

  One way for de Gaulle to accomplish that was to create a sense of French pride and cohesiveness, a national myth—that France was united during the war and that the overwhelming majority of French bravely resisted the occupation. At Paris’s liberation de Gaulle droned: “Paris broken! Paris martyrized! But Paris liberated! Liberated by itself, by its own people with the help of the armies of France, with the support and aid of France as a whole, of fighting France….” Rarely did de Gaulle mention the Resistance or the Allies in his speeches, even as his soldiers paraded with tanks and trucks provided by the United States.

  De Gaulle repeatedly pardoned collaborators that the maquis-controlled courts condemned; he commuted 73 percent of all death sentences. (He was not lenient on journalists or military officers, those who influenced others.) De Gaulle did this to push the country forward and to keep businesses running and local governments intact, operating with less offensive ex-Vichy bureaucrats. It also slowed the maquis’ growing influence in the new government. He alienated many during “the Return” of the deportees by declaring: “The time for tears is over. The time for glory has returned.” (It was not until 1954 that France established a day to commemorate the deported.) Although a war hero, de Gaulle’s standing among the people was also marred by the horrendous food shortages and his failure to mention how he planned to provide them butter in his long speeches about “eternal France.” Instead, the “battle for beef” was waged mostly by socialist reformers and committees of angry housewives. Ultimately, de Gaulle and the Resistance had difficulty governing together. As a result, de Gaulle withdrew from politics in 1946. But, in 1958, he returned to power, helping to reorganize France into its Fifth Republic, to end its war in Algiers, and to serve as its president until 1969, overseeing a decade of great economic growth for France.

  The Cold War—the nuclear standoff between the Soviet Union and the United States—began the instant Germany collapsed. Stalin immediately absorbed Romania, Poland, and Czechoslovakia into the Soviet Communist bloc, behind his “iron curtain.” His persecution of certain Eastern European ethnic groups was as bad as Hitler’s. Stalin ruthlessly eliminated those who spoke out against his policies. The estimates of how many people died under his repressive regime—executed or sent to Gulag labor camps in Siberia—vary. But a conservative figure is 20 million.

  Our understandable distrust of Stalin and his Soviet Union’s brutal communism was so strong, the United States and Great Britain would secretly use notorious Gestapo like Klaus Barbie to spy on the Soviets because their intelligence gathering had been so precise during the war. Barbie had been headquartered in southern France, in Lyon, where Resistance groups were strong. Under his command, 7,500 people were deported, and 4,342 murdered. Barbie was so cruel in his interrogations and fanatical in his hunting of the maquis and Jews, the French called him “the butcher of Lyon.” He was the officer who insisted on tracking down and executing the 44 Jewish children, aged four to 17, whom Sabine Zlatin had hidden in Izieu.

  For ten years after the war, Barbie ran an anticommunist spy network for British and American intelligence communities in Germany and France. When the French realized he still lived and sought to arrest him, the U.S. Counter Intelligence Corps (CIC) helped him escape to Bolivia. In 1987, he was finally brought to trial and sentenced to life for crimes against humanity.

  Yes, Madame Zlatin, the manager of the Lutetia’s deportation center, existed. (She lived to testify against Barbie.) My portrayal of the Vercors’s le patron, Father Gagnol, and “the bearded” priest are based on the real people. The Vercors maquis, desperate for trained soldiers, did liberate 52 Senegalese soldiers from a Nazi garrison, and risked a raid into Grenoble headquarters to steal plaster to set the broken arm of an SOE officer. The Vercors was crushed, their brave citizens “exterminated” in the gruesome manners described, and worse. One of the few prisoners the Nazis spared was the young OSS officer from South Carolina. They typically showed more mercy to Americans than to the French, whom Hitler hated.

  Paris was indeed a hotbed of political excitement and idealistic dreams following the war. New ways of governing
were enthusiastically debated over pâté and brie in the cafés of the city’s Saint Germain-de-Prés quarter. French philosophers and writers—Albert Camus, Jean-Paul Sartre, and Simone de Beauvoir—were daily regulars at the Café des Deux Magots and Café Flore. Parisians gathered to listen to them—especially Camus, whose underground newspaper, Combat, had been such an inspirational voice during the Resistance. Painter Pablo Picasso was also a large presence in Paris at the time, adding his voice to the French communist movement.

  French women were granted the vote for the first time in 1944. As the country was liberated town by town, women often became mayors or other officials until the 1.5 million French POWs could be released and come home to govern. Activists like the fictional character Claudette, emboldened by their work in the Resistance, campaigned for new feminist laws and permanent seats in legislatures. In October 1945, 33 women were elected to the Constituent Assembly, which wrote France’s new constitution. Called “the Glorious 33,” nineteen had been in the Resistance, seven were arrested and imprisoned, and three survived Ravensbruck.

  Well-known authors and war correspondents—like Ernest Hemingway and George Orwell—were in Paris as well, staying at the Hotel Scribe. Hemingway made an early entrance into the city during its fight for liberation, and gleefully joined in the roundups of what Nazis remained. George Orwell was in and out of Paris throughout the spring of 1945. He filed nineteen dispatches on the war for the London Observer and Manchester Evening News. He was definitely in town on VE day, and carried a Colt .32 that Hemingway gave him. Sadly, Orwell’s wife had just died and would not see the publication of his groundbreaking satire of Stalin’s collectivist farms—Animal Farm—in August 1945. Orwell died of tuberculosis five years later.

  One thing Americans were reluctant to discuss following WWII was the emotional trauma many veterans faced. Back then readjustment issues we now know as symptoms of post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) were simply called “battle fatigue” or being “flak-happy.” Often such troubles were dismissed as something veterans would get over with time and their return to normal, civilian life.

  Coping was perhaps easier for WWII veterans than it would be later for Vietnam soldiers, who came home to war protests condemning their actions and who ended up suffering staggering rates of substance abuse, violence, and failed relationships. By comparison, WWII vets were hailed as heroes, the economy boomed, and they found jobs. Even so, the National Center for PTSD now estimates that one in twenty WWII vets suffered PTSD symptoms such as bad dreams, extreme irritability, and flashbacks. Those who did struggle with readjustment often masked their distress by becoming workaholics or drinking heavily at before-dinner cocktail hours—behaviors that were accepted norms during the 1950s and ’60s.

  Sadly, many of our surviving and elderly WWII veterans experience delayed onset of PTSD as their memory falters in general. Their ability to suppress disturbing images or flashbacks has eroded. Some are experiencing combat nightmares or violent reactions when awakened by spouses or caretakers. It is disturbing proof of how long lasting the impact of war is, that decades later, self-defense reflexes are still so ingrained in the subconscious of 80-year-old retirees.

  The longer a person serves in combat situations, the more vulnerable he or she is to PTSD. In 2008, a Defense Department study found one in six soldiers and marines returning from Iraq suffered PTSD or depression. Many of these individuals had to serve multiple tours of duty.

  PTSD symptoms include: nightmares and difficulty sleeping; flashbacks; memories intruding into present-day situations; hypervigilance, jumpiness, or persistent anxiety; sudden, overreactive rage or violence; feelings of profound guilt; and an inability to relate properly to others.

  These are feelings and disturbances Henry combats as he fights to negotiate his own internal peace.

  Before writing this novel, I read memoirs by Resistance fighters, Ravensbruck prisoners, U.S. soldiers, American diplomats, and writers like Simone de Beauvoir and Marguerite Duras. I wept through many. Their pain and their phenomenal triumph of spirit cut clear through me. These journals also provided palpable day-to-day details—things like Paris’s euphoric celebration of VE Day; the staggering price of eggs; being rationed to one hour of electricity a day; riots over strawberries and butter; people jailed for fighting over matches because replacement boxes could not be found; catchphrases such as “suitcase bearers” and “absents;” the lilacs dropped in puddles at the sight of returning deportees; the degradation of deportees being sprayed with DDT to remove lice; or the heartbreaking pleas of starved deportees to taste cherries.

  Pamphlets like “112 Gripes about the French,” issued in 1945 by the Information and Educational Division of the U.S. Occupational Forces, highlighted the era’s lingo and misunderstandings between French civilians and American GIs. (Tragically, some deportees did die after our troops liberated concentration camps because, in pity and shock, GIs would hand whatever candy or K-rations they had in their pockets to the starving prisoners. Their stomachs were not ready for real food.) Newspaper articles told of German POWs carving swastikas into peaches; Parisians wearing “lampshade” skirts fashioned from strips of any material they could find; elderly Frenchmen pulling out Jazz Age cigarette holders to smoke discarded butts down to their very last centimeter of nicotine; and the extraordinary efforts to evacuate and hide 400,000 Louvre treasures before Hitler marched into Paris. Photos taken by photojournalists like Lee Miller sparked scenes such as the girl selling milk from a dog-drawn cart, sweat-soaked men madly pedaling bicycles to generate electricity for hair dryers in Parisian salons; and children taking shelter in cardboard and bench teepees.

  Two lines in the preface to the French edition of Suite Française spawned the time frame and many of the plot twists of this novel. Suite Française is a bestselling novel about the German occupation written by Irene Némirovsky, a well-known Jewish author of the time. She was deported and died in Auschwitz before she could finish. Her two young daughters managed to carry the manuscript with them as their governess and a succession of nuns willing to protect them moved them from one hiding place to the next. It was published 60 years later. The two lines had to do with the daughters standing at the Gare de l’Est holding name signs, hoping Irene or their father would be among the thousands of returning “absents” stumbling off those trains. That image of Némirovsky’s children was haunting. Henry needed to find Pierre at that train station or the Hotel Lutetia.

  That required the novel to take place between April and September 1945, while the Lutetia’s center operated. Getting Henry into France in early 1945, not through the Air Force, was tricky. There was an outpouring of generosity from Americans in late 1945, as organizations (such as UNICEF) formed to ship over food, clothes, and livestock to replenish decimated farms. But they were just getting started in the spring of that year. I am grateful to Peggy Reiff Miller (www.seagoingcowboys.com) for sharing her research of “seagoing cowboys” and the boatloads of cows and horses organized by the Church of the Brethren and what became Heifer International. Trafford Doherty, director of New York’s Glenn H. Curtiss Museum, helped clarify the mechanics of flying a Curtiss Jenny biplane. Macs Smith did quick, smart research into little-known organizations like the Union de Femmes Françaises, which helped pinpoint historic events to include.

  My main thanks go to my family for their tremendous help with A Troubled Peace. My then 18-year-old daughter, Megan, traveled with me to Paris as my translator and coresearcher. In a whirlwind four days, we stayed at the Hotel Lutetia, visited war memorials and exhibits, and collected obscure writings about the return of the deportees. It took persistent digging, as information about that disturbing time is not readily advertised. She continued to translate websites and memoirs as I wrote. Without her fluent French and her astute, compassionate, and comprehensive questions, this novel would not be as complete a portrait as it is. My son, Peter, then 14, fielded constant hypothetical questions from me as I made choices regarding plot,
themes, scenes, and characters. He is a wonderful first-read editor, insightful about history and people, a manuscript’s pacing, and the clarity of its themes. Both he and his sister have a profound influence on my characters and the challenges I choose to hurl at them. And enduring thanks go to my husband, John, who has encouraged and advised me since college, patiently waiting through hundreds of deadlines and the emotional weight I carry when researching stories like this one. He reminds me of what truly matters in such stories and helps me find it in myself to write them.

  Finally, to my editors: Katherine Tegen trusted that a magazine journalist could write a compelling novel. Her nurturing and shrewd sense of story brought about Under a War-Torn Sky, the precursor tale of Henry’s survival behind the lines, and now A Troubled Peace. Thanks as well to Julie Lansky, who has added her deft editing strokes to Katherine’s in guiding this novel. My long-time editor at the Washingtonian magazine, Jack Limpert, wisely told me that the two hardest and most important things to do in writing are to make people laugh and to make them cry; to be sure to include elements of both where possible; and to let the inherent ironies of day-to-day life speak for themselves.

  Today, the Gare de l’Est still bustles. Its platforms are covered with vaulted glass ceilings supported by a lacy Art Deco latticework of green iron beams, creating a sense of airiness and light. The floor vibrates slightly as trains pull in and out. Short blasts of brakes and ringing bells signal arrivals and departures. Parisians and business travelers leaving the city for country and weekend holidays pass youths coming off the trains carrying overstuffed backpacks and excited expressions. They are greeted by the scent of just-out-of-the-oven rolls, warmed milk and coffee, and spring flowers in the booths along the tracks.