When the Light Went Out

...It was not only the German parents who had to face this question when their children were old enough to ask it in the 1950s and the 1960s...

...Arts and letters flourished, along with the opera, the stage, the cabarets, the brothels, the racecourses, the schools, the couturiers, the galleries, the salons, the restaurateurs, the specialty shops, the importers, the dramatists (including Sartre), the publishers, the painters (including Picasso), the entertainers (Piaf, Chevalier...

...A pitiful picture, one more pitiful picture—if of France, then of Man...

...There were only too many terrible villains, to be sure, who needed some sort of corrective treatment, petty villains who needed some sort of rebuke, and close to the Whole population of men and women of little heart, who instinctively, and cleverly, or at the very least carefully, preferred living on their knees to dying on their feet...

...Save your money until there is an inexpensive publication of the text alone...

...But to the English-speaking world, and especially to us Americans, the story of Hitlerism, and of such aspects of it as this in particular, is forever revelatory, forever instructive...

...Within a month the German bureaucracy was settled in—the trains running on time—and nearly all who fled had returned...

...In the summer of 1942, in German-occupied Paris, the collaborationist French authorities, eager to outdo the bestiality of their conquerors, decided (with Nazi concurrence) on the deportation to the death camps of 4,000 already orphaned Jewish children, some a few months old, none over twelve...

...The youngsters were thrown into the cattle cars, and the transport took off...

...David Pryce-Jones has done a splendid job...

...Every Frenchwoman...

...What else was there for them to do...

...Half of the three million Parisians fled as the German army approached the "open," undefended city in June 1940...

...Why not...

...And the rest of us, of us who as yet have no history...

...The Parisian resistance was negligible, a "hit-and-run affair," as David Pryce-Jones calls it in Paris in the Third Reich...

...At the railhead the German transport officials insisted on a roll call, which had to be abandoned because too many of the deportees did not recognize their own last (or even first) names...

...Milton Mayer (Milton Mayer is the roving editor of The Progressive...

...A cautionary tale...

...Then read it...

...A pitiful picture in spades, the informers informed against and lynched, the denouncers denounced and shot, the murderers taken and murdered...

...Remember: A "collabo," on the basis of his Faustian contact with the conquerors, might be, and frequently was, able to be of real use to a friend or neighbor caught in the Nazi web...

...A European of that time—the Swede and the Swiss excepted—has a history...

...Papa...

...Passersby who saw the children being taken to the train testified after the war that the spectacle was heart-breaking—but what could they do...

...in Warsaw, a city one-third the size of Paris, 30,000 died apart from the Jews of the ghetto...

...Filled with the joy of living," said Simone de Beauvoir, "I regained my old conviction that life both can and ought to be a real pleasure...

...As soon as the Germans pulled out of Paris and the flags on the public buildings were changed, the massacre of retribution began higgledy-piggledy...

...The French, too...

...The way to get rich, or to stay rich, was to be agreeable to the conquerors, who themselves took pains to be agreeable and "correct," and who, wanting the French to seem to be running things, were always in the market for French, including bureaucrats great and small, who were willing...

...It is a pitiful picture of uncivilized France, the light of the world, under the heel of the barbarian Nazis and the relatively (but only relatively) cultivated pre-Nazi army officers who ran the Parisian Kommandatura and held their noses and served their own barbarian superiors in the Party echelons, beginning, always beginning, with the police...

...Among his books is "They Thought They Were Free: the Germans, 1933-1945...

...An American has none...

...Money, even then, even there, bought everything...

...Shall we suppose that an American's history, should the time ever come for him to have one, will be different from theirs...

...everything he says has been in print or otherwise chronicled in France...

...He tells us nothing substantially new...

...Nearly every last one of them collaborated passively, daily making the desperate choice of a sort unimaginable to an American: A woman who refused a seat in a tram when a German soldier politely offered it might, if a Nazi policeman saw the incident, be making the choice of freedom or prison, even, conceivably, of life or death...

...Every Frenchman...

...Perhaps 1,000 Parisians lost their lives in the 1944 liberation...

...And weep...

...What did you do in the war...

...Nearly all of them in occupied Paris did as nearly nothing as possible, neither collaborating actively nor resisting actively...

...The book, of coffee-table size, is lavishly manufactured and most lavishly illustrated...

...Some 3,000 Parisian Jews survived—75,000 didn't—some as "honorary Aryans," some as specialists like the little tailor who sewed for the military...

...Paris went on being Paris...

...The poor had rations and black market extras, the rich had caviar and champagne, always champagne...

...Relieved, for the next four years, of the cares of the nation, the state, the city, of all the turmoil of the crumbling republic, relieved of self-government, the people of Paris, unless they were Jews or "political," survived well enough and many of them much better than that...

...There were, says Pryce-Jones, more Parisians summarily put up against the wall after the liberation than were executed during the occupation...

...What did you do in the war...