And if more troubles lie ahead, isn’t it my duty to be present?
This is the question that has really gotten under my skin. I never thought it would be so difficult to determine one’s duty, once one had put aside all personal considerations. And yet, for the last two weeks, I have been at war with myself.
I am impatient for news about all of you … If the only thing that Frenchmen still have is the affection of our families, at least ours won’t be the most badly divided.
André
André’s last sentiment did not turn out to be prescient.
His father’s response has not survived. But ten weeks after writing his letter, André has returned to France to resume the struggle against the Germans.
* This led, of course, to Churchill’s famous riposte eighteen months later: “Some chicken. Some neck!”
† Later, de Gaulle said of France’s collapse in 1940, “We staggered, it is true. But was this not, first of all, a result of all the blood we had shed twenty years before in others’ defense as much as our own?” (
Complete Wartime Memoirs
, p. 461).
‡ De Gaulle spoke on June 18, but Christiane thinks she didn’t hear the broadcast until it was repeated the following evening.
§ At the height of his fame, Lindbergh became one of Hitler’s most naïve supporters.
Six
The Resistance was irresistible.
— André Postel-Vinay
T HE FEARS Jacques Boulloche described in his letters of a permanent separation from his family were premature. At the end of the summer of 1940, his wife and daughters return to the French capital from Brittany, and they move back into the family’s spacious apartment.
Jacques’s youngest daughter, Christiane, has a visceral reaction to what she sees in the newly occupied capital. The French
tricolore
has been banned. In its place there are huge swastikas swaying in the wind, freshly painted street signs in German — “black on yellow,” she remembers clearly — and German drummer boys in front of Wehrmacht soldiers goose-stepping down the Champs-Élysées. “There would be parades in the morning and they would sing. And they sang well — that was especially annoying!”
Christiane is stunned by all of this. She sees it as “the visible proof of our defeat. Seeing the Germans in Paris is ghastly. You feel like you are no longer at home. We were touching the reality of the Occupation with our fingers. It was a succession of shocks.”
A German soldier complained to an attractive Parisian girl that her city seemed sad. “You should have been here before you got here,” she replied.
This is when Christiane begins to ride a bicycle, when there is no longer any heat in her parents’ apartment, and when she begins to feel hungry all the time. Jacqueline goes to work for an organization that sends packages to French soldiers who are imprisoned in Germany.
Jacques and Hélène Boulloche share their children’s revulsion at the German Occupation. As early as July 1940, Jacques writes to his wife that the new anti-Semitic campaign is going to make life difficult for one of his colleagues. Three months later, the government publishes its first “Jewish law,” which excludes Jews from the higher levels of public service, as well as professions like teaching and the press, where they might influence public opinion.
Back at her Paris lycée in the fall of 1940, Christiane and her friends take up a collection for Mademoiselle Klotz, a much-loved history teacher, who is fired after the publication of the new law. Christiane is shocked by the persecution of the Jews, especially when one of her classmates, Janine Grumbach, is forced to start wearing a yellow star.
Beginning in October 1940, all foreign Jews can be interned at the discretion of prefects. On November 1, even in the unoccupied zone, every Jewish-owned business must display a yellow poster in the window: ENTREPRISE JUIVE .
By the start of 1941, some forty thousand Jews are held in seven main camps, in
This is the question that has really gotten under my skin. I never thought it would be so difficult to determine one’s duty, once one had put aside all personal considerations. And yet, for the last two weeks, I have been at war with myself.
I am impatient for news about all of you … If the only thing that Frenchmen still have is the affection of our families, at least ours won’t be the most badly divided.
André
André’s last sentiment did not turn out to be prescient.
His father’s response has not survived. But ten weeks after writing his letter, André has returned to France to resume the struggle against the Germans.
* This led, of course, to Churchill’s famous riposte eighteen months later: “Some chicken. Some neck!”
† Later, de Gaulle said of France’s collapse in 1940, “We staggered, it is true. But was this not, first of all, a result of all the blood we had shed twenty years before in others’ defense as much as our own?” (
Complete Wartime Memoirs
, p. 461).
‡ De Gaulle spoke on June 18, but Christiane thinks she didn’t hear the broadcast until it was repeated the following evening.
§ At the height of his fame, Lindbergh became one of Hitler’s most naïve supporters.
Six
The Resistance was irresistible.
— André Postel-Vinay
T HE FEARS Jacques Boulloche described in his letters of a permanent separation from his family were premature. At the end of the summer of 1940, his wife and daughters return to the French capital from Brittany, and they move back into the family’s spacious apartment.
Jacques’s youngest daughter, Christiane, has a visceral reaction to what she sees in the newly occupied capital. The French
tricolore
has been banned. In its place there are huge swastikas swaying in the wind, freshly painted street signs in German — “black on yellow,” she remembers clearly — and German drummer boys in front of Wehrmacht soldiers goose-stepping down the Champs-Élysées. “There would be parades in the morning and they would sing. And they sang well — that was especially annoying!”
Christiane is stunned by all of this. She sees it as “the visible proof of our defeat. Seeing the Germans in Paris is ghastly. You feel like you are no longer at home. We were touching the reality of the Occupation with our fingers. It was a succession of shocks.”
A German soldier complained to an attractive Parisian girl that her city seemed sad. “You should have been here before you got here,” she replied.
This is when Christiane begins to ride a bicycle, when there is no longer any heat in her parents’ apartment, and when she begins to feel hungry all the time. Jacqueline goes to work for an organization that sends packages to French soldiers who are imprisoned in Germany.
Jacques and Hélène Boulloche share their children’s revulsion at the German Occupation. As early as July 1940, Jacques writes to his wife that the new anti-Semitic campaign is going to make life difficult for one of his colleagues. Three months later, the government publishes its first “Jewish law,” which excludes Jews from the higher levels of public service, as well as professions like teaching and the press, where they might influence public opinion.
Back at her Paris lycée in the fall of 1940, Christiane and her friends take up a collection for Mademoiselle Klotz, a much-loved history teacher, who is fired after the publication of the new law. Christiane is shocked by the persecution of the Jews, especially when one of her classmates, Janine Grumbach, is forced to start wearing a yellow star.
Beginning in October 1940, all foreign Jews can be interned at the discretion of prefects. On November 1, even in the unoccupied zone, every Jewish-owned business must display a yellow poster in the window: ENTREPRISE JUIVE .
By the start of 1941, some forty thousand Jews are held in seven main camps, in
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