A Paler Shade of Red: Memoirs of a Radical. W. E. Gutman

      Some memories canter on wooden clogs, others amble on rubber soles. Memory is often threadbare, short and mulish. It’s almost always deformed.

      *

      There once was another Paris, a microcosm from which radiated a larger universe beyond. The address: 2, rue du Pont Neuf. A large, cheerful apartment doubling as my father’s medical office, with fin-de-siècle windows facing the Louvre on one side in the distance, in full view of the Palais de Justice, La Sainte Chapelle and Notre Dame’s sublime profile on the other. Across the street, the festooned façade of La Samaritaine, the department store where, my parents often told me, I’d been purchased “at a rummage sale.”

      My birth, infinitely more prosaic, took place in a private clinic of the 16th arrondissement where chic ladies had their babies -- or aborted them -- depending on their whim. My godfather, Ernö, the anesthesiologist, and my father -- his cousin -- were both there to witness a delivery that elicited not a single joke. The procedure nearly killed my mother. A sickly, diminutive woman, she lived on to endure with quiet dignity the agonies of war, the sorrows of a discordant marriage and the affronts of chronic ill health. I would not have survived the trauma of parturition had it not been for the frantic thrashing I received at the hands of the attending obstetrician. It would be my first and last spanking.

      A difficult pregnancy and a near-fatal delivery convinced my parents not to try again, at least for the time being. Discretion became the better part of valor when France, which had been cowering under the threat of war, finally fell to the German hordes. Ensuing events would vindicate my parents’ decision.

      *

      On June 3, 1940, the Germans bombarded Paris, killing nearly 300 people and injuring more than 600. Two days earlier, the Wehrmacht had launched a lightning three-pronged attack; three Panzer divisions, 1,000 tanks each, headed for the cities of Amiens, Rouen and Dijon. On June 7, fearing another bombardment, French General Vuillemin ordered the evacuation of Paris. General Weygand, a hero of the First World War and supreme commander of the French armed forces, directed that children 16 and younger also be evacuated. The next day, ignoring the children, Weygand chose instead to remove the entire government, “except for members of the cabinet, whose presence may be necessary.” This decree would later be likened to the cowardice of Roman senators as they groveled before the Barbarians and laid down their arms.

      The mass migration began on the night of June 9 amid incredible confusion. The air ministry requisitioned 600 trucks to carry its staff, their families, furniture and personal belongings, whereas impassioned appeals for vehicles to transport the wounded away from the front fell on deaf ears and fleeing archivists let tons of documents fall into enemy hands. Thousands of retreating French infantrymen were booted out of Paris and rerouted toward the south, on foot. Signaling the imminent capture of the capital, over 25,000 soldiers were quickly taken prisoner by the Germans north of Paris.

      Since May 10 an endless stream of refugees had cascaded into Paris from Belgium and northern France, both overrun by the Germans. The inextricable tangle of civilians and soldiers became an easy target of German planes. The French military had tried to stanch the unending flow and quell the panic but nothing worked against a bewildered populace distracted by the occupation and terrorized by government claims that a “fifth column,” invisible but omnipresent, had infiltrated and was now subverting France.

      In the early days of June, tens of thousands of Parisians fled the capital by car and on foot. Trains headed south were packed. Thousands more camped in railway stations. The stragglers nervously watched the sky darken in the distance.

      “We were struck,” wrote a journalist who took part in the exodus, “by an eerie gloom that spread out before us at the horizon and which, as if in the throes of some gigantic seizure, turned the sky from lead to coal black. All of us who witnessed it saw in this phenomenon an omen of cosmic dimension, the presage of untold misfortunes to come.” What this ten-million-strong ribbon of humanity beheld as it unfurled on the open road, were the oil tanks of the port city of Le Havre burning out of control.

      South of Paris, the rout created enormous bottlenecks. German planes strafed bridges and fields, leaving hundreds of bodies carbonized beyond recognition in smoldering, bullet-riddled cars or slumped in the shallow ditches lining the road. The survivors, men and women on bicycles, others pushing wheelbarrows filled with luggage or hauling horseless carts carrying infants, cripples and old folks, kept going, their backs arched against dead weight, their eyes scanning past the blackened clouds for signs of an impending assault from the air. Half-crazed with terror and grief, some of the women wrung their hands or beat their kerchief-covered heads repeatedly. Others shuttled among the dazed, the exhausted, the downhearted, offering hope, sharing food and water. Children cried unremittingly in long, mournful, almost perfunctory wails. Men, many of them patriarchs, cursed and shook their fists at their tormentors. “Ah, les sales boches. They’ll pay for this....” Deliverance and payback were still five years away.

      On June 14, 1940, the Germans crossed the ancient city gates. Huge flags -- a red swastika on a field of black and white -- were hoisted over palaces and ministerial buildings, replacing the French tricolor. Some German soldiers were seen buffing their boots with it, arousing laughter among the troops.

      Paris crumbled. A ghastly silence seemed to hover over the once bustling boulevards, plazas and age-old streets. Public buildings were empty. It was as if the city had lost its soul. On Place Pigalle, on the Champs Elysées, in the open vastness of the Place de la Concorde, everywhere it seemed, small groups of Parisians greeted and feted the invaders. Many volunteered their services. Others offered their bodies for bread or wine or money to expiate France’s fervid capitulation in a symbolic act of self-immolation.

      I saw Parisians standing motionless, weeping openly, a quiet rage burning in their eyes while Germans soldiers -- the reincarnated Sons of Darkness -- strutted freely in the magnificent and now cowed City of Light. I would never forget their tears. I remember taking my father’s hand and huddling next to him for warmth and comfort. Sensing disquiet, he’d picked me up and held me in his arms. He’d smiled reassuringly and pressed me closer to him and I saw sadness in his face, sadness and fear.

      I was three.

      *

      Revisionists, at best, have short memories. Most are either cretins or hate-mongers. Sixty years after the fact, they continue to suggest that France’s “fifth column,” a term first used during the Spanish Civil War, was a myth. Less frivolous, but equally misguided, apologists claim that its cast of spies and counterspies -- propagandists, aspiring and also-ran politicians, anti-communist noblemen, wealthy industrialists, clerics, pacifists and agents provocateurs spirited across the border or parachuted under the cover of darkness in remote rural areas -- was grossly exaggerated.

      If the magnitude and influence of a fifth column was overstated (as was the prowess and effectiveness