MORE SORROW THAN PITY

...These unglamorous actions can often require as much courage as is required for charging the enemy in battle...

...And then to sit in that movie and see Duclos, old Communist party hack, "who cried when Stalin died," claim the Resistance as a certificate of his party's patriotism—that was hard to bear...

...second, that it is one of the few movies to break with the myth of an occupied France Gaullist from the start, resisting the invader in spirit before breaking out in a liberating insurrection...

...putting up a visitor without question...

...They were also the most exposed to being victims of acts of sabotage or Allied bombing...

...A civil servant with tenure...

...We thought the revolutionary wishes of our good clean hearts could make it come true...

...If, following Anthony Eden's advice in the film, we dare not judge harshly the French who survived, can we nevertheless maintain our own will not to let it happen again...

...The mental health specialist Claude Levy comments that France was the only country that cooperated in deporting Jews, thus making all Frenchmen guilty of that crime...

...Yet part of them knows that after 1940 the fight was in other hands and there was little they could do to affect the final outcome...

...disappeared" in 1937), who owed their escapeto their capacity for passing as French...

...The wages were good, and when the closing of a French firm left them unemployed, they were more responsive to the recruiters for German factories...

...What is he trying to achieve...

...The war reversed the terms of trade, and they made money from city dwellers who came on weekends to buy butter, cheese, chickens, and eggs at black-market prices...

...And although the message projected is: "Why didn't you fight," "be ashamed that you did not fight," the message conveyed is often enough, "things were tough and we were all in this leaky boat together...

...Such Frenchmen would expect to see how easy it is to be timorous in the face of overwhelming force—that is, the sadness of being occupied...

...Oh, to take back all those dead, the mas sacres of women and children, the peasants who froze to death in the trains taking them to Siberia...

...Jean Zay, minister of education in the Popular Front government—shot by an anti-Semitic goon squad—is mentioned by Mendes-France as being non-Jewish: he had converted to Protestantism, but his early writings would not lead one to believe that his faith was particularly ardent...

...No one asks Duclos: When did the Communist party begin to resist...

...Certainly not a better climate for a united Europe...

...Still, if one day he were in Laval's shoes, would he refuse to sacrifice Arabs or Slays if he thought it could save Jews...

...As liberation approached and people became bolder, emery powder found its way into ball bearings...

...Railway workers were by the fatality of their trade among the greatest de facto collaborationists...

...Who would condemn them...

...bourgeois "radicals," either of the Left or of the Right, although left-wing radicalism was more likely to lead to resistance than did admiration for Charles Maurras...

...Whatever Madame Solange was 28 years ago, she is not a base woman today...

...The ordinary citizen wants to work, love, raise his children in peace, and the active minorities are constantly dogging him, telling him he has been humiliated, he must seek revenge, life will be so much better if he will follow this particular dream, for without a dream he will perish...

...Klein's nose in the dirt...

...the professional bicyclist does not even remember the Germans being much in evidence...

...This aristocrat who joined the Waffen SS in August 1944 when it was obvious to all (including himself) that the Nazis were a losing proposition, impresses by the shrewdness of his analysis and his refusal to make excuses for himself beyond the Geist of his social milieu and the ambiguities of Vichy policy...

...527-28...

...What would have happened to the Communist resistance in France if Russia and Germany had signed a separate peace before the Allied landings...

...That night I broke it off...

...La Maziere has a powerful role in the film...

...My impression is that the petite bourgeoisie, which represented nearly a third of the population, was overrepresented...

...We are never going to be very successful in avoiding inhumanity if we keep on believing that it is inherent in a certain nationality, race, or class...

...The interviewers do not probe this devastating comment...

...But in The Sorrow and the Pity there is no mention of the spontaneous and obscure help that many Frenchmen gave, sometimes at the peril of their life...

...Yes, we did not know...

...Life was simple, there were no choices...

...To be brave and idealistic is, for the young, to give all to the supreme value (the Fuehrer, the Motherland, the Revolution), and to gain through the total gift of self the ennoblement that older people search for painfully through the daily cares of breadwinning and parenthood...

...In southern France an anticlerical and left-wing tradition, a city-oriented type of agriculture (wine, fruit trees, truck farming) made the peasantry more accessible to resistance activities, be it only by refusing to report parachute drops to the police and feeding the Maquis...

...Laval must have shrugged his shoulders: a deal is a deal...

...Some, like Laval, seem to have felt little commiseration for the Jews they delivered to the Germans (they were supposed to be settled in a Jewish state near Cracow...

...To take back the Moscow Trials, the denunciations, the terror of the knock on MOVIES the door at night...

...Some 40,000 people were summarily executed during the months after the Vichy authority collapsed and before the Gaullist regime established itself—nearly twice as many as were shot by the Germans during the four years of occupation...

...Some killed themselves rather than board the trains or boats into which the Americans herded them...

...One bystander, well-dressed, white mustache, homburg and all, got angry and started to express his indignation...

...Privatization was a narcotic: he remembers his joy when hunting was permitted once more...

...The trouble is that before the war there were many Jews who had converted to Catholicism or Protestantism...

...And when the cameramen and editors are not showing contempt by their questions and editing, they prod their subjects to show it—Mendes-France toward his judges, General Spears toward the French in general, Waffen SS veteran La Maziere toward Parisian society, D'Astier de la Vigerie toward his own family, the Grave brothers toward the Socialist party...

...Maurice Chevalier gives excuses for his trips to Germany that sound like mute accusations against himself...

...But in some regions the Maquis secured their food at gun point, and in some instances took along the silverware...

...Still, the early Free French were very much "Maurrassien," as was de Gaulle if we simplify things a bit...

...MOVIES 115 that she was the victim of a machination by a woman whose hobby was imitating her friends' handwriting, a fact confirmed by the woman's husband during the trial...

...In the Mendes-France interview, Ophuls's admiration is certainly warranted, and the tale of how his escape from a Vichy prison was nearly foiled by the presence of two lovers debating whether they should go to bed is a rare study of courage, humor, modesty...

...And yet patriotism (which is part gut ethnocentrism and part ideology) is not wrong either, since the film shows that occupation by an enemy is one of the worst social systems in which man can live, since it makes it all the more difficult to realize one's humanity and all the easier to fall victim to one's weaknesses...

...But the 2 Histoire de Vichy (Paris: Artheme Fayard, 1954), pp...

...I know of two Soviet women, mother and daughter (the father having MOVIES them, fed them, warned them of their danger...

...Although everything in his own past and in the background of the French side of his family leads him to respect and admiration for the Resistance, he feels that it is time to transcend the mythology of its victory...

...If we believe in the devil theory of evil, the logic of the search for the good means a dictatorship of the anointed and the extermination of the evil ones...

...I did not belong to myself any more...

...They prefer a condescending idealization of the workers and peasants...

...and although the great majority survived, their moral even more than their physical suffering was one of the shames of that time...

...French villages do not seem, even in peacetime, to correspond to Robert Redfield's rather romantic view of folk society...

...La Maziere here doesn't seem to me to be coming out with great truths but, rather, his passive political outlook seems like the other side of the coin of the old (and now disillusioned) fascist...

...to take back the October Revolution...

...Of course, it said, in order to keep control it had to give some satisfactions to the Germans...

...Ophuls uses German remarks about their successes during the occupation with the mademoiselles and about Alsace being really German, which must set French teeth on edge...

...the lycee professors, like the bent and seedy birds in the school courtyard, cannot remember the names of resisting students...

...Yet there were also resisters from that milieu and they often had more in common with pro-German collaborationists in their class than with their attentiste cousins, and here D'Astier is close to being right...

...A friend of mine told me that once he found himself at a railway station where Jews were being put on a train, with the usual crying, screaming of women, people clutching one another, and the German soldiers shoving people with their rifle butts...

...And a bit like some of the old and once die-hard CPers who now are disillusioned...

...When de Gaulle assumed power in 1944 part of the bargain he made with the French people was to return to it a feeling of glory— on condition it would agree to define Petain and Laval as usurpers of French legitimacy...

...Why only after the Nazi invasion of Russia...

...Who knows...

...Is this a convenient alibi or was this tenebrous affair another French histoire de f esse, with a wife trying to get rid of a rival...

...Or must it inevitably be the blindness and the anger, the dehumanization of the enemy, the cycle of defeat and revenge, the eternal return...

...The Nazis followed...

...Furthermore, he commits himself to surrender to the Germans 3,000 foreign Jews residing in the free zone, as well as all the German Jews.3 "Upon learning of the agreement," writes Aron, "Petain is indignant...

...The politicians of the Fourth Republic continued the contract...

...In short, the mark of a great man...

...BUT MARCEL OPHULS'S MOVIE is not at all in this tone...

...MARCEL OPHULS FOCUSES a good deal of his movie on the Jewish question, as well he might, since there were some 600,000 Jews in France at the start of the war...

...A hotelkeeper remembers the Germans as people who took girls to their rooms...

...but in return Laval is to order the French police to arrest foreign Jews in Paris...

...It also required the possibility of allocating one's time, maximal for students and professionals but minimal for workers...

...The sadness of occupation—with the fear, the police, the self-doubt, the denunciations, the obvious comforts of those who fraternize with the victor—is that it takes so much more will to get through the day without abasement...

...All this anger and contempt does not prevent many in the audience from finding here and there in a four-hour "documentary" enough to feed the needs they brought to the movie house...

...These werethe days of "Uncle Joe": "we did not know...

...that the Resistance, including the London Free French, involved only a small number of people— probably no more than five per thousand in the adolescent and adult population—while the militant collaborationists may have reached about half that number...

...Perhaps it is because I am at an age where I go back as often as I go forward that I do not feel as much need as in the past to separate myself from the weak and the sinful...

...he worried so much about food shortages that he overfed his child...

...Surviving in the world conflict was already an achievement...

...Nevertheless, his inertia has probably saved society from many a disaster...

...Perhaps the Graves did not get along with their neighbors to start with...

...We see the face of Marius Klein with that sickening smile of humiliation denied...

...Thus the young deny the relevance of our everyday judgment, which they fear, by rushing into a cosmic danger they fear less...

...Many of these people had no desire to return to Russia...

...Of those deported by the Germans (Foreign and French Jews, resisters, hostages, gypsies, even some black marketeers and common criminals), 150,000 did not return...

...The amount of emotional strain that Madame Solange tries to contain in her voice as she describes the torture of being nearly drowned in a bathtub (a method favored by the Gestapo and apparently picked up by "Gaullist" interrogators) is quite moving even if one doubts her story...

...Its success seems to derive from two main sources: first, that it deals with such eternal themes as humiliation, powerlessness, and conflicting moral demands, the problem of courage and cowardice...

...foreigners, Jewish or not, come second...

...The richer ones will make their way to America...

...Were these conversions of convenience or were they surrenders of the soul to the superiority of Christianity...

...The Germans, once so pleased with French workers in the Lorient submarine pens, did not trust them any more...

...and that is the pity of it all...

...Whether at the wedding of ex-captain Tausend's daughter or during the visit of the Sigmaringen castle, the Germans are shown as beer-swilling, fat with porcine eyes, militaristic (lingering shots of the Bundeswehr officers at the wedding...

...So while ordinary people took the posture of "wait-and-see," the marginals went toward 118 "deviant" commitments, signifying triumph or dishonor, and/or an early death...

...Vichy was upset by the German order, and the following transaction occurred: The Germans will not deport French Jews in the occupied zone (until November 1942 France was divided into a zone occupied by the Germans and a free zone where Vichy had effective sovereignty...

...My friend says he often thinks of that man...

...to take back forced collectivization...

...people of good faith could be confused, paralyzed in their will...

...116 French police would not move without orders from Vichy, which paid their salaries...

...Robert Aron, who wrote a history of Vichy,2 seems to believe that the "avoidance of Polandization" argument has some merit, at least until the end of 1942...

...people who had committed misalliances or were the offspring of one...

...Instead, she sticks to her guns and tells of her admiration for the Marshal...

...And some 60,000 men, women, and children were killed in Allied bombing...

...Ophuls shows contempt for such Frenchmen as Verdier, the pharmacist, whose resistance was limited to hiring two Jewish girls, and who had deadened the meaning of defeat for himself by comparing the war to a lost football game...

...There is another striking person, Madame Solange, the hairdresser who was arrested at the time of the Liberation, had her head shorn, was tortured, and sentenced to six years in prison for having written, allegedly, anonymous letters of denunciation.' She claims l In a small town of some 3,000 people, a postmaster told me that he used to intercept every week a dozen letters of denunciation addressed to the local German Kommandantur...

...Nor is it possible to approve of the film's presentation of the Germans, which plays straight into all the cartoon stereotypes held by French nationalists (and many American intellectuals...

...Youth's bravery is too often but the search of a young body for a paroxysmic "high" and a search for legitimation by people who are not quite sure any more where they stand...

...Can we fight for the truth of the mature man, elusive, conflicting, troublesome, against an enemy we shall not hate because we recognize the potential of all his errors in ourselves...

...But for Marcel Ophuls there are no differences between German Jews, Austrian Jews, or French Jews...

...acknowledging si lently the sign of a friend back from London that he does not want to be recognized...

...An officer made a sign and the soldiers shoved him in the train with the others...

...Middle-Aged Frenchmen, I would think, want to see The Sorrow and the Pity because they expect some recognition of such facts as that the average French approved of the 1940 armistice and supported Petain at least until 1943...

...The argument of the Vichy government was that by maintaining some form of legitimate French government it was able to reduce the total exactions of the enemy—what it called the "Polandization" of France...

...MOVIES...

...At the end of her interview she is asked about her attitude toward Petain...

...Nevertheless, we are still talking of groups that are contributing to that tiny percentage who resisted dangerously, heroically, before the Allied landings...

...I told her I could not afford to fall in love while in combat...

...Like the Germans, we blotted out the bloody truths that kept seeping under the door...

...On July 24 he tells Laval, "You must stop this dishonorable affair...

...The interviewer, certainly not loath to ask hard questions, is here curiously silent...

...Regardless of his political intent, Ophuls's respect for his craft brings out some superbly moving moments...

...bringing scarce food to a Jewish colleague fired from his teaching job and slowly starving in a cold flat...

...He speaks with the elegance of the aristocrat backing into the limelight...

...What then is left: our people, our freedom, a resolve that 20 years from now our children and grandchildren will not find themselves ruled by a Quisling, a Gomulka (a successful Laval) ; a hope that one day the equilibrium of mutual terror will become an equilibrium of mutual understanding...

...to take back the "Third Period" madness of the German Communist party which cooperated with the Nazis in destroying the Weimar Republic, one of the most humane and progressive regimes the Western world has ever known...

...We were like La Maziere, who went out to defend civilization against Bolshevism and found that the virile fraternity of the Waffen SS meant to defend Auschwitz, Dachau, Buchenwald...

...It is not easy to decide...

...This is also one reason I am tired of the juvenophilia and the bourgeoisphobia that dominate the film, its intimation that it was mostly the youth, the workers and peasants who resisted the Nazis, anointed breeds with a special disposition to the good and the brave...

...4 Many Frenchmen hid Jews, protected After the occupation of the free zone by the Germans in November 1942, even French Jews will be arrested and deported...

...If this is a film of sorrow and pity, it should not be for Marcel Ophuls, who spent the war in New York, to rub Mr...

...The question is hard, perhaps impossible, to answer, but this very fact should warn us against the temptation of righteousness...

...Resistance required white-collar savvy, what with the importance of messages and the capacity to utilize the interstices of the bureaucracy for plotting, spying, or sabotage...

...He gives the following example: On July 12, 1942, the German authorities ordered the arrest of all French Jews residing in the occupied zone, an order they could not carry out without the cooperation of the French police...

...Civil servants and policemen, through various forms of sabotage, did reduce the effectiveness of the German attempts to corral the Jews...

...Because she was waiting for me, it seemed much harder to risk death...

...Foreign Jews will find it harder to be come "color of wall...

...France had been beaten in an unfair fight, but beaten nevertheless, and that is a social "role" with its own momentum and exigencies...

...that relations between German soldiers and the population in the small towns and vil lages were "correct," sometimes even cordial...

...Who gained the most from this arrangement...

...Provided with scapegoats who were shot after dramatic trials (Laval, Darnand, Brassillach, de Brinon) or condemned to many years in prison (Petain and members of the Vichy government), the average Frenchman could then be tranquil with the knowledge that collaboration or even l'attentisme (wait and see) involved les autres (the others...

...Peasants, especially in regions voting conserMOVIES 117 vative, tended to be Vichy attentistes (waitandsee...

...They were marginals, people not well integrated into their milieu: impoverished aristocrats with a condottiere spirit...

...4 At the end of World War II the American forces delivered to the Soviet authorities all the Russian nationals they encountered in their march forward...

...It was Bolshevism that invented the theory of the concentration camp and of self-righteous genocide...

...TO MY KNOWLEDGE, no careful study of the social origins of active resisters has been made...

...It is a painful sequence because the cowardice and probably even selfdenial are patent...

...5 The philosopher Bergson, very much drawn toCatholicism toward the end of his life, refused to convert during the war out of solidarity with theJewish community, and wore the Star of Daviduntil his death in Paris in 1941...

...In some ways the Frenchmen of my generation want understanding (rather than pity) for not having fought harder in 1940, for not having gone to London or joined the Underground, or spoken loudly of their anger when Jews were made to wear the Star of David, or when families were herded into trucks for an unknown destination...

...I can understand Levy's bitterness, but the reality is more complex...

...As a working-class aristocracy—like the typographical workers—they were more involved in resistance activities and were given recognition after the War by movies (La Bataille du Rail...

...Many resisters were no angels, any more than all collaborationists were devils...

...A friend of mine, a flyer in World War II, once told me: When I flew my missions it was not too hard, until I once had a date that very same night with a Red Cross girl I had known in college days...

...To the normal quarrels of peacetime the war added its own, and at the Liberation there was some settlement of accounts that had tittle to do with collaboration or patriotism outraged...

...It has sadness but very little pity...

...But the petty bourgeoisie is a category despised by the French intelligentsia, although (or because...

...But I am tired of contempt...

...But the comment fed so well into the fantasies of the moviemakers...

...As a matter of fact, the purported idealism of youth and its bravery is a result of youth's marginality...

...To fall in love was to reenter civilian life too soon...

...When I was young I was ready to justify "the physical elimination of the ruling class" (Lenin) because "you can't make an omelet without breaking eggs...

...perhaps he should have done the same...

...If all citizens were politicized to the level of heroism, social life might be impossible...

...government did not have the excuseof being coerced by superior force...

...Industrial workers, especially in the metal trades, worked directly or indirectly for the German war machine...

...The Grave brothers, archetypal French peasants, also declare that their resistance to the Germans antagonized their neighbors toward them...

...YOUTHFUL BRAVERY, IDEALISM, self-sacrifice are often a turning away from complex and shadowy truths to a truth that is simple and promises eternal life even if one should die...

...The category most involved in sincere Vichyism (as contrasted with the militant collaborationism of Doriot and Deat in Paris) was the Catholic bourgeoisie...

...Shopkeepers—who profited greatly from the black market and are also often aggressively nationalistic—had trucks that were indispensable to resistance activities...

...We were growing fond of one another, and that mission was much harder than the previous ones...

...The British were known to be much more reluctant to deliver Russian "refugees" to the Soviet missions...

...It is his courage which evidently seduces the cameramen: it is a quality which becomes scarce among the losers...

...Others resigned themselves to the deportations as an inevitable price to avoid more hardships for the great mass of Frenchmen...

...It is the problem of all the marranos: who is to disentangle the mixture of sincerity,5 expediency, fear, and betrayal...

...they often come from it...

...Often in 1940 those who ran in front of the Germans had their houses ransacked by those who stayed behind...

...There is a painful moment in the film when storekeeper Marius Klein, whose name and appearance would lead one to believe him Jewish, is confronted with a notice he placed in the Clermont-Ferrand newspaper 27 years earlier, to the effect that although his name was Klein he was a Catholic...

...In case of trouble you help Frenchmen first...

...No wonder Stalin and Hitler fascinated one another...

...It is because youth is leaving the security of the parental home, while not having found as yet a new status security, that youth rushes into charismatic movements, national wars being a sort of institutionalized charismatic movement...

...D'Astier de la Vigerie states that the resistance was the vocation of the rates, black sheep like himself...

...Civil servants, clerks in town halls, schoolteachers, postal clerks had access to information networks that were strategic to the resistance...

...listening to the BBC...

...In an occupied society, honor often takes the form of humble actions: misleading the police when they ask about someone barely known to you...

...A part of me approves the inaction of the French masses...

...honor was sometimes invisible and silent, and audacity the excuse for sadism and banditry...

...she has the opportunity to ingratiate herself (we were deceived, he was a poor old man...

...Most French Jews will vanish into the countryside, secure certificates of baptism, or change their names and manage to survive...

...And the U.S...

...When de Chambrun (son-in-law of Laval) says that Vichy saved most of the French Jews, he thinks like a traditional French nationalist...

...1 he Sorrow and the Pity is a four-hour-long documentary film on life in France during the Nazi occupation...