Some of the other internees were sons of American doughboys, Teddies, who had abandoned their mothers when they went home in 1918. Although legally American, many spoke no English and few had visited the United States. Some chose American citizenship over French solely to avoid French military conscription. They had little in common with the American-born captives, and there was occasional hostility between the two groups.
Sumner met Americans he knew. Some had been his patients at the hospital. One was the architect who designed the American Hospital’s Memorial Building, Charles Knight. Another was the organist of the American Cathedral, Lawrence K. Whipp. Whipp had been in the camp, where he gave occasional organ concerts, since the first round-up in January. In another barracks were Charles Bedaux and his son, Charles Emile.
While Dr Jackson had been ready with his baggage for internment, the 5 a.m. knock on the door of his Ritz Hotel suite came as a shock to Charles Bedaux. Bedaux, who usually slept with the aid of sleeping pills, opened his door to Gestapo officers who informed him he was under arrest. He produced documents, including a cadre de mission issued by Pierre Laval on 25 August, to show that he was directing a German-approved project in French Africa. They left him and Fern to sleep. Less than an hour later, more Germans arrived with an order to take Mrs Bedaux. Again, Charles brought out the papers to prove that he was in favour with high-ranking German officials. Again, the Gestapo withdrew.
Instead of going back to sleep, Bedaux drove across the Seine to the Hôtel Lutetia to confer with friendly Wehrmacht officers. They knew of no order for his arrest, but they promised to make inquiries. Bedaux returned to the Ritz to await word. Later, the officers arrived to tell him that, because all Americans were being interned, they could not help him. The Gestapo took Bedaux and his son to a German police station near the avenue Foch and locked them into the lavatory along with fifteen other American men. The degradation of confinement in a police lavatory worried Bedaux less than what might be happening to Fern. The Germans had taken her as well, and he did not know where she was. He waited with his son and countrymen all day in the lavatory, until at nightfall a bus transported them to the camp for British internees at Saint-Denis. The French driver of the bus, Charles Junior recalled, thoughtfully drove a long route via Paris’s more beautiful monuments. The driver told young Bedaux he wanted them to have a last look at the city.
The next day, the Americans at Saint-Denis were put on a train to Compiègne, where Charles and his son were strip-searched and given a medical examination. Bedaux father and son settled into Barracks 13, either for the duration of hostilities or until Charles’s influence produced their release. In the evenings, Charles Junior played Monopoly with other internees on a board he made. Charles Senior made up his mind to help obtain the release of other prisoners, mainly those in poor health or who were young. Among the names on a list he compiled, he told Charles Emile, was Dr Sumner Jackson. Bedaux liked Jackson, whose medical unit had ministered to the Americans at the Château de Candé in 1940.
On 28 September, the French Foreign Ministry in Vichy confirmed to the American Embassy that the Americans had been seized. The embassy cabled the Secretary of State the same day: ‘On the grounds of reprisals for alleged arrests of Germans in the United States on September 24, about one thousand Americans (men) and four hundred American women were arrested in Paris … The men arrested were sent to St. Denis. They will be eventually sent to Compiègne where other Americans are now interned. Americans over 65 years of age and children under sixteen have not been taken.’ The embassy said it had previously sent ‘circular letters urging the Americans to go home’. Some had ignored the letters, while family, professional or personal commitments made it impossible for the others to leave.
Frontstalag 122’s Section B, an American internment camp since the previous January, had improved with regular Red Cross visits and the efforts of long-term inmates to make it habitable. Donald Lowrie of the Young Men’s Christian Association (YMCA), which shared with the Red Cross the privilege of access to camps during the war, visited Frontstalag 122 in October, shortly after the latest influx of internees. His inspection report stated,The new arrivals have been well received and rapidly accustomed themselves to the camp. There are among them several talented artists who are improving the evening entertainments and the concerts. With regard to the food there is nothing to be desired. They [the internees] even use the word ‘perfect’ when discussing this matter. As for the heating there are enough stoves and the supply of coal is the envy of the local Parisians. All the foregoing obviously has an influence on the general morale, but that also is very good. We have never found in a camp such a pleasant atmosphere.
Two other YMCA officials, Auguste Senaud and Hemming Andermo, heard from the internees’ representatives ‘that there was a fine spirit in the camp, that the new arrivals had quickly adapted themselves to the conditions, and that there was no lack of food’. Their report continued,The kitchen was ‘excellent.’ They received sufficient Red Cross parcels and were able to devide [sic] them up amongst themselves regularly. In the Canteen fruit and vegetables are available. The German authorities of the camp had now permitted to serve warm drinks to the relatives of the interned men on visiting days. This was received with great satisfaction as the camp is 3 km distant from the railway station, and in bad weather the visitors need something to restore them after the long walk.
One of the earliest visitors was Gaston Bedaux, who obtained the permission of the Feldkommandatur in Beauvais to visit the camp during Charles’s first week there. He brought bedclothes and what he called some ‘pitiful food’ for his two relatives. He recalled,The visit was passionate. They would not let us be alone, a guard was present. We met in one of the barracks of the famous camp, which comprised a patrol-way and observation towers with armed sentries and guard dogs with restless characters.
Charles was as cool and cheerful as usual despite the bizarre uniform in which he had been ridiculously dressed, and he had the audacity in front of everyone to criticize the organization of the camp and to give very wise advice in the calmest tone and the most persuasive way to the chief guard who was watching him, emphasizing that the terrible hygiene of the camp was repugnant to men from the New World.
Charles had two ideas in his mind: to free his wife whose situation he did not exactly know and to attend to the common conditions [in the camp].
Gaston attempted to assure his brother that the Germans would not treat Americans harshly, while about two million Germans in the United States might suffer as a result. ‘My brother,’ Gaston wrote, ‘spoke to me of his future African expedition, which worried me even more. I tried, by teasing him, to make him abandon the project that really seemed to me impossible under the circumstances.’ He enumerated the obstacles: obtaining permits to travel, overcoming the red tape and acquiring equipment and materials to build a pipeline across the Sahara. But Charles was adamant that he would succeed. He already had Laval’s cadre de mission authorizing him to ‘undertake a study of the means for the improvement of the manufacture of oil in French West Africa and the transport of oil to Metropolitan France’. Dr Franz Medicus was hopeful that the Wehrmacht would provide steel and construction equipment. Gaston counselled his older brother, ‘You are comfortably lodged at Compiègne. You have soldiers to guard you, dogs that do the rounds for you all night, no one dreams of robbing you, and I who have kept your accounts for a long time notice that this is the first time you’ve made some economies.’ Charles laughed. Gaston, knowing his brother would return to the pipeline as soon as he was released, feared no good would come of it.
The camp commander permitted Dr Sumner Jackson to offer medical care to African colonial troops of the French army in an adjoining camp. The Germans’ treatment of the black, mostly French West African, soldiers disgusted him. He witnessed guards beating an African soldier and forcing him to drink urine from a chamber pot used by the whole barracks. Jackson was not allowed into Sector C, the Jewish ca
mp, where he correctly surmised conditions were worse.
‘The Boches continued to annoy me with their paperwork,’ Jackson told Clemence Bock. ‘I had to sign and re-sign their papers. I’ve never written my name so often.’ The Germans never asked him whether he had helped British or French soldiers to escape to England, apparently suspecting nothing about his work for the Allies. Negotiations for the release or repatriation of some of the Americans were taking place in Paris and Vichy, while the internees awaited news of their fate. On Jackson’s behalf, General Aldebert de Chambrun lobbied powerful friends in the French administration. Jackson lingered in the camp for a week, until General de Chambrun ‘came to get me in a Red Cross car with a chauffeur. He handed me copies of press clippings. We were famous!’
‘Several Americans Released in France’, ran the headline in the New York Times on 3 October, ‘Dr. Jackson of Hospital at Neuilly Is Among Those Freed.’ Fame was unwelcome to Sumner Jackson. He had every reason to avoid drawing attention to the hospital, while Allied soldiers waited there to rejoin their units in England.
With Dr Jackson’s release, General Karl Oberg unknowingly forfeited a key operative in one of the largest escape networks in occupied Paris. It would not have been difficult to put Dr Jackson under surveillance. He lived in a street with bureaus of both the Nazi Party’s Sicherheitsdienst (SD) at 19 avenue Foch and the Gestapo at Number 43. The American Hospital where Jackson worked was directly opposite the Germans’ Neuilly Kommandatur. In failing to notice the physician’s importance, the ‘Butcher of Paris’ missed an opportunity to shut down an important Allied escape route. But Jackson, rather than count himself lucky and avoid suspicion, looked for means to do more, not less, to resist. He sent ambulances to bring seriously ill Jews from the transit camps to the American Hospital. Tragically, when the patients recovered, the Germans sent them to their deaths.
Sumner and Toquette joined one of the many Resistance groups under the umbrella of Charles de Gaulle’s Free French in London. Through trusted friends, they had contacted the Goélette-Frégate network established in 1941 by Georges Combeau, code-named Chaloupe. Combeau worked for Maurice Duclos, one of de Gaulle’s staff officers whose nom de guerre was Saint-Jacques. Goélette-Frégate included many railway labourers, who for the most part supported active resistance to the Nazis, at Issoudun in Berry. Their primary objective was to send intelligence to de Gaulle and the Allies in London. The Jacksons’ apartment in avenue Foch became one of their mail drops. A courier using the code name Verdier (Greenfinch) picked up and stored papers there. This work was perhaps more dangerous than aiding the escape of soldiers. At the hospital, people came and went without question. Bringing résistants and compromising documents into their apartment exposed Sumner and Toquette to denunciation from watchful eyes in a quarter of Paris filled with Pétainist Frenchmen and Nazi intelligence offices.
Charles Bedaux, meanwhile, turned down a German offer of release. He insisted on a renewed French commitment to support the construction of his consummate ambition: the Trans-Sahara Pipeline. Without it, he would remain with his son in Frontstalag 122.
TWENTY-FIVE
‘Inturned’
GERMAN POLICE CONTINUED TO CALL on Sylvia Beach in her isolated mezzanine apartment above the shell of Shakespeare and Company. She remembered that ‘the Gestapo would come and they’d say, “You have a Jewish girl–you had–in the bookshop. And you have a black mark against you.” I said, “Okay, okay.” And they said, “We’ll come for you, you know.” I always said okay to them. One day, they did come.’ On 24 September 1942, Sylvia was out. A rumour that honey was available somewhere near the Church of the Madeleine sent Sylvia off on her bicycle to ‘queue up for an hour or two, and perhaps come away without filling your can’. After waiting two hours for the precious honey, she cycled home to see Mme Allier, her concierge, weeping. She told Sylvia ‘that “they” had come for me and I was to get ready at once’. She put away her honey, and ‘they’ arrived in a large military truck. The first internment of American women in Paris was underway.
‘I must pack up only what I could carry,’ Sylvia wrote. ‘I thought as winter was coming and we might be taken to a cold German camp, woollies were the best: and flustered, with the soldier with a kind of dinnerplate hanging from his neck watching me as I dressed and hurrying me (schnel mächen), I put into my rucksack the woollies and by mistake two bibles and 2 complete Shakespeares as the most condensed portable reading.’ Adrienne came down to say goodbye. Mme Allier continued crying, and the coal man opposite ‘was for some reason in tears as well’. The commotion in the rue de l’Odéon brought out the neighbours, residents and shopkeepers alike, who ‘gathered as close as possible around the truck that I climbed into’.
The German truck was already carrying other American women. The first Sylvia recognized was her old friend Katherine Dudley, ‘dressed as though for a vernissage, very smart, and in her usual good spirits’. Katherine was one of the four glamorous Dudley sisters, daughters of a well-connected Chicago gynaecologist, who had come to Europe before the First World War. The eldest, Helen, was a poet and had for a time been the mistress of Bertrand Russell. Dorothy Dudley, who had once been engaged to John Dos Passos, was a writer and the mother of painter Anne Harvey. Caroline Dudley had been instrumental in bringing the Revue Nègre, featuring a young Josephine Baker and jazz clarinettist Sydney Bechet, to Paris in 1925. With her husband, Joseph Delteil, she wrote some of the pieces for the Revue that astounded Paris and added to the allure of black American jazz among fashionable Parisians. Katherine was an accomplished painter, known mainly for her portraits. She was taking care of Gertrude Stein and Alice B. Toklas’s Paris apartment in the rue Christine, near her own at 13 rue de Seine. Stein and Toklas were living at their country house in Bilignin in the Vichy Zone, where Americans were not being interned.
The truck trundled through Paris from the house of one American woman to another. Each time the Germans failed to find anyone, the women cheered loudly. ‘After they had rounded up any American women to be found,’ Sylvia wrote, ‘we went on a long truckride but shut in as we were couldn’t see where on earth they were to deliver us.’ The Germans deposited the women at the northern edge of Paris in a place Sylvia ‘knew in better days as the Zoo’, the Jardin d’Acclimatation in the Bois de Boulogne. There, 350 American women were herded into the monkey house in which ‘we were the only monkeys’.
The Swiss Consulate in Paris, acting for the United States, prepared a report on the internments for the American Legation in Berne:The arrests began Thursday morning September 24, 1942 and ended on the evening of September 26. In the meantime each woman was examined not only from a medical point of view but also regarding her identity. Certain ones were immediately released due to their poor health.
Upon arrival of each bus the French Red Cross distributed gratuitously chocolate, biscuits and English books for the travel.
Sylvia received presents from friends who came to the zoo. The Germans allowed the women to take walks ‘in a minute garden where, over the distant hedge we could see any friends who cared to come and have a try at making themselves heard and at hearing our voices in unison calling loudly for that something in the top bureau drawer etc.’.
Drue Tartière, the American former actress and wife of Dr Thierry de Martel’s nephew, Jacques Terrane, had been picked up on 24 September from her house 20 miles south of Paris in Barbizon. Drue had left Radio Mondiale and become active in the Resistance, hiding Allied flyers in her house. She had rented a second house in the countryside as a rendezvous for résistants and a hiding place for British weapons and agents. She thought the Germans had arrested her as a résistante and feared that she might betray her comrades under torture. During two uncomfortable nights in German police custody with a 64-year-old American neighbour, Marion Greenough, she came to realize that she was being interned merely as an enemy alien. When she and Miss Greenough arrived in the Bois de Boulogne on 26 September, Drue wrote, ‘A
crowd was gathered around the large glass-enclosed structure as our bus drew up to the big door of the Jardin d’Acclimatation. People outside the glass windows along the terrace were trying anxiously to catch glimpses of their loved ones within.’ Outside, rain poured on the old men, women and children desperate to know what would happen to their imprisoned mothers and wives. A report by the YMCA noted, ‘On Sunday visitors were not allowed, but friends soon discovered that by paying five francs admission to the Zoo they could reach a place where they could see and talk with the American women through a double row of gratings with German guards in between. Everyone considered it a great joke that they could pay admission to see their friends in the Zoo.’
In a make-shift dormitory on the second floor of the monkey house, Drue enjoyed a reunion with old friends. ‘The first person I ran into was Gladys Delmass, who had worked at the Paris Mondiale radio station after war broke out,’ Drue wrote. ‘She was a very bright girl from Hartford, Connecticut, educated at Vassar and Cambridge, England, where she had become an authority on Elizabethan literature. ’ Gladys was married to a Frenchman, Jean Delmass, who worked for the Vichy government. Drue saw another friend, the sculptress Elsa Blanchard, whose family she had known in Pasadena, California. She was introduced to Sarah Watson, directress of the Paris student hostel, the Foyer International des Etudiantes, ‘short and round, with the pink skin of a baby, snow-white hair, and a kindly, illuminating smile’. Drue thought her ‘soft South Carolina accent added to her charm, and her attractions were enhanced by a lively wit and keen intelligence’. With Miss Watson was another directress of the hostel, Mary Dickson. Sarah Watson introduced Drue to Sylvia Beach, whom she knew by reputation as the ‘proprietor of the famous bookshop in the Rue de l’Odéon, Shakespeare and Company, and publisher and friend of James Joyce’. Sylvia, although she did not mention the fact in her own account of being, as she spelled it, ‘Inturned’, was wearing the ribbon of the Légion d’Honneur that she had been awarded in 1938.
Americans in Paris: Life & Death Under Nazi Occupation Page 27
