Americans in Paris: Life & Death Under Nazi Occupation

by Charles Glass

  Sylvia was pleased to meet ‘our lovely Drue Tartière’ and to see again ‘our genius sculptress’ Mabel Gardner ‘in a long cloak, her golden hair like the angels in the Italian pictures’. Drue called Mabel Gardner the ‘sculptress who had lived in Montparnasse for many years’ and saw her as ‘a middle aged woman who looked somewhat untidy, but was perfectly serene and had a detached, mystic air’. Sylvia introduced Drue to Katherine Dudley, ‘friend of my friend “Baron” Molet and of Picasso’. Through Katherine, Drue met ‘Noel Murphy, a tall, blond, middle-aged woman who looked like a Viking. She had studied lieder in Germany and sang in concerts in Paris. Mrs. Murphy had won the Croix de Guerre in 1940 for her work in evacuating refugees under shellfire.’ After meeting many old and new friends in the monkey house, Drue noticed an incongruous sight.

  My attention was drawn to a woman who was sitting on the edge of a cot with an ermine wrap around her feet. She was passing around a five-pound box of chocolates to her friends. I learned that she was Mrs. Charles Bedaux, at whose château the Duke of Windsor married Mrs. Simpson. Mrs. Bedaux said in a very loud voice that she did not expect to be with us long, and that she was waiting for Otto Abetz, the Nazi fifth columnist in France before the war and the new Nazi Ambassador in France, to come and get her and her sister released.

  Sylvia was surprised to see, as more and more women arrived, American nuns from convents all over the Occupied Zone. The community of American women in France, Sylvia wrote, was an extraordinary mélange: ‘There were Americans coming from every kind of milieu–a number of artists as it was Paris, a number of French war-brides of American soldiers from World War I, some teachers, some whores, some dancers, a milliner or two, a poet or two, a lady who lived at the Ritz, the wife of Bedaux the spy and quite a few crazy women whose case was not improved by capture.’

  Sarah Watson was, in Sylvia’s words, ‘busy trying to make us all as comfortable as though in her pleasant hostel, which was with only these cots around the walls, close together, and as we discovered soon when it rained, water dripping from a leak in the roof on our faces’. The conditions affected some of the women more than others. ‘Sick women were lying on their cots, moaning,’ Drue wrote. ‘Nervous and anxious wives and mothers were walking up and down restlessly. Everybody was crammed together in this uncomfortable room, where puddles of rain had gathered from leaks in the glass roof.’ Worse, Nazi guards lurking in the bathroom ‘did not seem at all embarrassed at the duty of watching us’. Many of the women, including Sylvia and Drue, had doctors’ letters certifying that internment would damage their health.

  After a dinner of ‘soup, meat loaf, and potatoes and German black bread’, the women retired to their dormitories. Some of them cried, until, as Drue noted, ‘this wailing gave way to a cacophony of snores’. In the darkness, leaking rainwater drenched Drue’s feet. German soldiers with flashlights stomped into the room to count the women. A few screamed, and one blurted, ‘Don’t look now. I’ve got a man in my bed.’ Drue wrote, ‘When the Germans had counted methodically up to a number, like forty-four, some of the women would shout, “sixty-four,” and get them so mixed up that they had to start all over again. The soldiers yelled roughly, “Sei still!” but it did no good. The women roared with laughter at them.’ Sylvia remembered, ‘All night long, they would flash the lights in our faces. To count us. They went around counting us, and we were never the same number. And they found this a great bore.’

  In the early morning, soldiers woke the women and went to the gallery above the dormitory to watch them get dressed. Not every woman, Drue commented, was embarrassed.

  As they were putting on their girdles and stockings, the women resented this intrusion and shouted remarks at the Nazis. One of them, who wore a big pink hat and a silver-fox cape and had henna-dyed hair, let down the front of her slip, bared her heavy breasts and dashed eau de cologne under her armpits. Putting her hands on her hips, she shouted up at the Nazis, ‘I do hope you’re enjoying yourselves! ’ They retired hastily.

  Some of the women were released quickly because of ill-health or age. Miss Greenough, who would be over the 65-year age limit in two weeks, was permitted to return home. Fern Bedaux was freed for other reasons. Drue watched as a ‘group of French collaborationists, obviously personages high in treachery, arrived with an important German in uniform. They were very respectful to Mrs. Bedaux, helped her pack her things, and out she swept while the rest of us were enraged at this exhibition of the power of social and political influence.’ United Press reported from Vichy a few days later, ‘Mrs. Charles Bedaux, who was arrested at the castle she and her husband provided for the honeymoon of the Duke and Duchess of Windsor, has been released but her French-born husband is still interned at St.-Denis.’

  On Monday morning, 28 September, the Germans took 292 of the American women from the monkey house to buses just outside the zoo. They gave each one ‘a sausage, a small piece of cheese and a loaf of bread’. Among this group of Americans were Drue Tartière, Gladys Delmass and sculptresses Elsa Blanchard and Mabel Gardner. While they waited to board their bus, a nurse screamed, ‘My God, Drue, you still in this country!’ It was Ruth Dubonnet, American wife of André Dubonnet, the former First World War aviator and friend of Charles Bedaux and Aldebert de Chambrun. Ruth, who looked ‘very chic in her Red Cross uniform’, shouted again, ‘What are you doing here?’ Then, even louder, she demanded, ‘Is it true what I’ve heard about Jacques being killed?’ Drue shuddered and shouted back, ‘No, I don’t think so, that’s the first I’ve heard of it.’

  Drue knew that her husband, Jacques Tartière, was dead. Since the fall of France, when Jacques escaped to London to join Charles de Gaulle, Drue had denied all knowledge of his whereabouts. She told the police in Barbizon that she was waiting for his return, possibly from a prisoner of war camp, and let them believe she had a lover. This gave Drue a reason to remain in France that the police would accept. It also removed suspicion from Jean Fraysse, the putative boyfriend, when he stayed at her house in Barbizon to pass messages to his agents. Fraysse, Drue’s former director at Radio Mondiale, had enlisted Drue in one of the earliest Resistance networks. Taking part in the Resistance was her way to support her husband and his country. Jacques was killed fighting for the Free French in 1941, when the British captured Syria and Lebanon from Vichy. Drue told no one of his death, lest the Germans investigate the widow of a Gaullist officer. To continue working effectively as a résistante, the former Hollywood actress posed as a harmless wife abandoned by a roaming French husband.

  At the Paris zoo on the morning of 28 September, Drue feared that Ruth Dubonnet’s chance remark, if overheard by the Germans, would endanger Jean Fraysse and the rest of his network. No one else appeared to hear, but Drue was not reassured when Ruth, whom she now saw as a collaborator, said, ‘I’m going to get you out of this, don’t worry.’

  Drue asked the French driver of her bus to send a letter to one of her accomplices in Barbizon. The driver, who said he was ashamed to be driving for the Germans, hid her letter and promised to mail it. He recognized Mabel Gardner, his neighbour in Montparnasse, and offered to convey messages for her. Mabel recited a list of greetings for the cobbler, his daughter, the cheese seller and the rest of the neighbourhood. The driver told Drue that Mabel was ‘much loved in our quarter’. As the buses pulled out, the French husband of the other sculptress, Elsa Blanchard, arrived. He was in tears. Elsa smiled at him, but, when he was out of sight, ‘she broke down and wept’. The transfer of the Americans would take place at the small Pantin station, a less conspicuous venue than one of the mainline terminals. Nonetheless, the secret got out. Students from the Foyer International des Etudiantes somehow learned that their directress, Sarah Watson, would be there and were waiting when the buses drove up. The Germans would not allow the girls near, so they screamed goodbye to Sarah over the railway tracks.

  Sylvia recalled being driven ‘to a remote railway station, where a train of miserable third class cars we
re awaiting us. Our destination was not mentioned. The cars were sealed up, we started on a journey lasting all day and into the middle of the night.’

  Drue, Gladys Delmass, Elsa Blanchard and five other women shared a compartment in a filthy third-class carriage that had not been cleaned from its last load of prisoners. The train headed east, reaching Nancy that night in the midst of Allied bombing. The German guards locked the American women into the train and ran for shelter. When the raid ended, German Red Cross nurses distributed hot coffee to the soldiers. The Americans asked for some, but the nurses ‘took pleasure in throwing the dregs from the empty cups in our faces’. One German soldier gave Drue water from his canteen. In the morning, the train arrived in Vittel.

  Vittel was a luxurious spa town in the Vosges Mountains in eastern France. An enterprising lawyer from Rodez, Louis Bouloumié, had transformed the village into a resort with lavish hotels, casino and thermal baths shortly after he bought its Fountain of Gérémoy in 1854. The bounty of hotel rooms had made it an ideal locale for interning British women in France in 1940. The camp was a large fenced-in area where most of Vittel’s hotels were grouped around a beautiful park. Only barbed wire in the storm-fences and Nazi flags signalled that Vittel was a prison rather than a resort. Red Cross inspections in 1940 and 1941 reported that Frontstalag 194 at Vittel was the best German camp in Europe, although most other camps were so horrible that comparison was meaningless. Inmates lived in hotels. They did their own cooking and ate in their rooms. They received mail, monthly visitors and packages of food from their families and the Red Cross.

  The new internees, apart from a few invalids who were taken in ambulances, walked from the train station through Vittel to Frontstalag 194. ‘As we marched along,’ Drue wrote, ‘weary and dispirited, the Englishwomen who had been interned since 1940 hung out of the windows of the hotels where they were quartered and gave us a wild reception. They cheered, shouted greetings to us, and sang.’ Like Drue, Sylvia remembered that the British internees ‘cheered us as we arrived. We were to join them in what, thanks to their genius for colonizing, was a model internment camp.’

  The somewhat squalid Hôtel Central was being renovated for the Americans, but it was not ready. The Swiss Consul explained in a report for the US State Department, ‘The haste with which the arrests were made did not permit the authorities to prepare a building where the Americans might be placed upon their arrival.’ Until the Hôtel Central was ready, the British women had to make room for their American allies. ‘While awaiting the opening of the Hôtel Central the director of the camp placed the new arrivals in the Grand Hotel where they were temporarily assigned to the large rooms already occupied by two or three British internees,’ wrote the Swiss Consul. ‘Additional beds were placed in these rooms so that altogether four persons were accommodated. Each of these rooms had a private toilet and bath … Everywhere the conditions of sanitation and ventilation were perfect.’

  Frontstalag 194 already housed 1,123 women, mostly British, and 282 mainly older men, who had been released from the Saint-Denis camp to be with their wives. Married couples stayed in the Hôtel des Sources, and most of the British women lived in the five-storey belle époque Grand Hotel. Not all of the British women were pleased to share space and, for the first week, their Red Cross packages with the Americans.

  The fresh arrivals had to deposit their money with the Germans, who allowed them to keep 600 francs each and to draw another 600 francs monthly from their accounts. Drue hid an extra 3,000 francs and her medical certificate in a shoe. As soon as she could, she approached the camp’s commandant, whom she described as ‘a short, stocky German with a pleasant face’. Captain Otto Landhauser was in fact an Austrian, who had been a physical education and singing teacher before the war. Drue asked him whether she and her group of friends–‘Elsa Blanchard, Katherine Dudley, Princess Murat, Gladys Delmass and Noel Murphy’–could share a room. Landhauser and his assistant, an officer named Damasky who had lived in Canada for fifteen years and spoke English fluently, ‘agreed at once’. German officers inspected the women’s luggage for ‘paper, envelopes, flashlights, which were forbidden for fear of signaling to planes, and reading matter, which was returned after examination by censors’. Drue said to the Gestapo officer going through her suitcase,‘There’s nothing in there that would interest you. Why bother?’

  He looked up at me and smiled. ‘Gee, why the hell didn’t you go home?’ he asked.

  ‘How do you happen to speak English like that?’ I asked.

  ‘I worked in a sugar factory in Yonkers until the war started,’ he said. ‘Do you know Yonkers?’

  Although a Gestapo officer, he planned to return to Yonkers as soon as the war ended. After the suitcases had been cleared, Senegalese men, probably prisoners of war, carried them into the hotel for the women. Drue and her companions found their room, where two Englishwomen were waiting for them with a pot of tea. One was an old friend of hers and her husband’s, Mary Walker. Mary had been suspected of working for British intelligence, and the Germans had held her for four months in solitary confinement at the Santé Prison in Paris. ‘She looked terribly broken in health and was obviously still suffering from the nervous shock resulting from her experience.’ The living quarters were better than anything Drue had expected: ‘Our big room had a balcony overlooking the Vittel parc and a valley of the Vosges. It was fine, rolling country, but fog often settled in the valleys and made the weather miserable. There were tennis courts, a bowling green, and even a maypole, and some of the women had brought along tennis rackets or managed to get some sent to them.’

  Sylvia’s migraine headaches earned her a place in the hospital, which was run by English nuns, on the first night. Her friend Sarah Watson joined her. Sylvia ‘fixed up a kind of supper for us both on an electric plate’. The nuns let Sylvia serve breakfast to the other patients. Among them were two charwomen, ‘who were very pleased at having their breakfast in bed’. Another woman, also named Sylvia, had lived in the Ritz and did not regard breakfast in bed as anything less than her due. Sylvia called her ‘the Giraff’. This lanky grande dame had brought all of her jewellery, including a pearl necklace that she asked Sylvia to fasten around her neck when she delivered the breakfast tray. The ‘Giraff’ wore ‘dainty nightgowns, so sheer that the German doctor was shocked to see her so plainly through them’. Medical care was excellent, under the direction of a German, Dr von Weber, with five other physicians, four French and one Scottish.

  Dr Donald Lowrie, the YMCA representative in Geneva, reported on 29 October 1942, a month after the American women had been installed at Vittel,All the previous reports we have had from Vittel and conversations with women here who had escaped from there give a picture of a camp which has practically all the features of a regular resort which Vittel is–space in the summer for tennis and other games, besides extensive parks, all open to the use of the internees. To be sure there is barbed wire around all this and it is actually an internment camp where the inmates, as Paris tries to point out, enjoy many comforts which those in liberty do not have.

  Sylvia Beach, Drue Tartière and most of the other American women, despite living in a de luxe prison with better food and amenities than they had at home, wanted to leave. Sylvia, who was already feeling cut off in Paris, missed Adrienne and the rue de l’Odéon. Drue was desperate to resume her work for the Resistance in Barbizon, her only reason for staying in France. Like many others in the camp, Sylvia and Drue used medical certificates from their physicians to make a case for release.

  When the Americans’ Red Cross packages finally arrived, Drue was delighted with her box of ‘tea, coffee, butter, marmalade, canned meats, puddings, and cigarettes. It was like receiving a fine Christmas present to get one of these boxes with things which had been unobtainable in occupied France, and it was wonderful to smoke English cigarettes again.’ Her maid in Barbizon, Nadine, sent ‘a dozen eggs, a few potatoes, some apples and other fruits’. Sylvia ‘fattened up considerab
ly on their contents: in fact we were far better off than were our friends at home who were continuing to do without condensed milk, sugar, coffee, prunes, chocolate and cigarettes, which we indulged in at our camp’. The women also bartered the contents of their care packages for soap and other luxuries.

  Sylvia compared the British favourably with her countrywomen: ‘We American internees were not much respected by our gaolers. They were accustomed to the English women who were serious people and not frivolous and lighthearted as most of us were. They had established themselves in the Grand Hotel, where they worked on their tea in a spirit of cooperation and discipline, keeping the Germans busy with their demands.’ The Englishwomen prepared meals for one another, ‘each with the name of the internee and the hour it was to be cooked and when to be taken off the stove’. Teatime was busiest. ‘The lift going up and down full of women with trays, with teapots and bread and butter and cakes: murmurs in sweet English voices, “have you had your tea? are you going to have your tea? …” They were all provided with teapots and cups and saucers and whatever else might be lacking in the camp.’

  Ninetta Jucker in Paris heard from a few of the American women released from Vittel that relations between the Americans and the British were not as cordial as they should have been between Allies:For the first few weeks they were billeted on the Englishwomen who were obliged to make room for them, and did so, I regret to say, with a very ill grace, though the Germans told them maliciously that they were to stage a reception for their Allies. They were no better pleased at having to share their Red Cross packages with the Americans until these received their own, so that although the English camp was very much larger, more comfortable and better organized than the one assigned to the United States citizens, it seems that the American women met with such cavalier treatment at the hands of the British that they were very thankful finally to be removed to a hotel of their own. Some of them however revenged themselves later by stealing the produce from the British vegetable gardens while their owners were at lunch.