Americans in Paris: Life & Death Under Nazi Occupation (44 page)

Although the State Department informed the press that Bedaux stood accused of ‘trading with the enemy’ with a maximum penalty of ‘ten years’ imprisonment, a $10,000 fine and forfeiture of property used in the offense’, no one told Bedaux of what he was accused. He and his son could not prepare a defence until they knew what the charges were. They gradually adapted to US Army routine. They ate in the soldiers’ canteen and shared their bathroom. When the MPs got to know Bedaux better, they stopped posting an armed guard outside his door.

Confinement was forcing father and son into an unaccustomed intimacy. Until now, they were almost strangers. Waiting in the desert, they had time to discover why they never liked each other.

 

Percy Foxworth and Harold Haberfeld of the FBI did not reach Algiers to see Charles Bedaux as planned on 18 January. Foxworth had been right to show concern about the ‘type of plane to be used’. Soon after their military aircraft took off from the airfield at Natal, Brazil, for the eastward crossing of the Atlantic, it crashed. Everyone on board died. The FBI sent two other operatives to Algeria, but they did not have Foxworth’s long experience investigating the exploits of Charles Eugene Bedaux.

The loss of the two FBI men’s lives apparently tormented Bedaux. His brother Gaston wrote that Charles Junior told him of the ‘sadness and disheartenment of his father. He was distressed that his own life had caused the death of two men.’

 

Charles Eugene and Charles Emile Bedaux had been cooped up together before–for two weeks at the Compiègne internment camp in September 1942 and more recently in Algiers. Theirs was an unusual distinction, that of having been prisoners of the Germans, French and Americans. In Compiègne and Algiers, they shared quarters with other prisoners. Now, they had only each other in the villa outside El Biar guarded by American Military Police. Circumstances were forcing father and son into the intimacy that they had avoided all of 33-year-old Charles’s life. There was little alternative but to speak more meaningfully than they had before. The father thought they might as well tell each other their life stories. After all, they were almost strangers.

For Charles Junior, the monologue could not have been easy. He had once viewed his father in heroic mould, as most other little boys do. His earliest memory was of flying above the French countryside in a two-seater aeroplane piloted by his father. That had been in the spring of 1914, when flying was a novelty, France was enjoying its final days of peace and Charles Emile was four. France and Germany went to war in August, and Charles Senior volunteered as an American for the French Foreign Legion. Charles Junior’s mother, Blanche, took their son home to Grand Rapids, Michigan. Thus began the first of many separations from his father.

Charles Senior was discharged in December 1914, without seeing action, after an accidental injury to his foot. He came home to Michigan, and the family took a rest on Michigan’s northern peninsula amid the wild Indian country of woods and rivers that Hemingway wrote about from his own childhood. Back in Grand Rapids, while his father grew rich and began to make himself famous as a businessman-engineer, young Charles’s world dissolved. Charles Senior’s affair in 1916 with his secretary, a young woman named Kathryn Glarum, caused tension at home. Blanche somehow convinced the mistress that they were both victims of her husband’s licentiousness, and both women left Bedaux. Blanche embarked on a tour of the Orient, taking young Charles and Kathryn with her. Aged seven, the boy would not see his father for six years.

In Japan, Blanche learned that Kathryn was communicating with her husband and sent the girl back to the United States. Continuing her eastern voyage with young Charles, Blanche met an American millionaire named Alfred Bagnall. Bagnall was, as Bedaux then aspired to be, a millionaire. Like Bedaux, he worked as an engineer–not of efficiency, but of electricity. He brought Thomas Alva Edison’s electric lighting to the Orient, first to the streets of American-occupied Manila, then to Japan. Sixty-year-old Bagnall was a philanthropist, whose charitable donations were often unsought and anonymous. When 27-year-old Blanche’s divorce became final, they married and moved with Charles Junior to Bagnall’s ranch in Orange County, California.

In the prison villa at El Biar, the son must have told his father about his education at the Harvard School on Venice Boulevard in Los Angeles, growing up in California during Prohibition and other aspects of his life about which the older man knew nothing. His first post-divorce meeting with his father took place in 1922, when, aged 13, the boy went to New York. It was a stiff, formal encounter in his father’s suite at the Ritz, and it did nothing to bring the absent father and abandoned son closer. The glamorous stepmother, Fern Lombard, was in the room the whole time. A few questions and answers were all the boy recalled of the meeting.

In 1929, aged 20, Charles Emile returned to New York to see his father again. He had finished school and was contemplating university, although he was already older than usual for entrance. On this occasion, his father received him in his office on the sixty-third floor of the Chrysler Building. Charles sat through two business meetings, one with IBM chief Thomas Watson, before his father took him out to lunch. As in 1922, the session was uncomfortable. Yet, some of his early admiration for his father must have lingered, because the young man said he wanted to study engineering. He hoped to enter Harvard, but his father said Yale would be better. The son went to Yale.

The long discussion at El Biar, over days and nights between meals with the MPs, would have tried any father and son–especially two with mutual resentments. But it was leading to an understanding of a kind. Charles Emile enlightened his father about Albert Ramond, his former employee who had taken control of the American Bedaux company in 1937. It seemed that Ramond’s wife had attempted to seduce young Charles in the summer of 1930, while they were together in the Ramonds’ country house in north Michigan. He turned her down, more from youthful panic than moral qualm, because she was nearly ten years older than he was. The spurned woman told her husband that the youth had made a play for her. Enraged, Albert Ramond confronted the boy and swore revenge against his family. The revenge came in 1937, when he seized control of Bedaux’s company.

When Charles Senior’s turn came, he took even longer to regale his son with the adventure that had, until then, been his life. From sandhog to multimillionaire, semi-literate Montmartre street tout to friend of kings and presidents, he had enjoyed a life that was nothing if not eventful. There had been countless lovers, year-long safaris, financial achievements and scandals, his passion for Fern, exploring British Columbia for a safe route to Alaska, all leading to what should have been his greatest accomplishment and adventure: uniting the two halves of Africa with a pipeline across the Sahara. His regret at not having seen more of his son was mitigated by a belief that Blanche had taught the boy to hate him as she did.

On Wednesday evenings at El Biar, Charles Senior withdrew from his son. He said that Fern, a devout Christian Scientist, would be praying then and he wanted to share the moment with her. It was obvious to the son that his father missed her. Towards the end of Charles Senior’s days-long narrative, he told his son that his Austrian friend in Paris, Count Joseph von Ledebur, was part of Germany’s anti-Nazi underground. Charles Junior later told his father’s biographer, Jim Christy, that his father concluded, ‘It is better that you don’t know what I have done to deceive the Germans. Just remember the words
Schwarze Kapelle
. I shall say no more.’
Schwarze Kapelle
, German for Black Orchestra, meant nothing to the son. He told Christy that the exchange of life histories helped him to understand his father. But he still did not like him.

SYLVIA BEACH’S FRIENDS IN PARIS and Vichy lobbied the Nazis for her liberty. Adrienne wrote to Tudor Wilkinson on 20 January 1943 to remind him of his pledge that Sylvia would be home by Christmas. He responded the next day, ‘After receiving your letter this morning, I telephoned the Authorities and they were like me very surprised that Miss Beach has not been freed. But I have been assured that the order has been given for her liberation.’ The ‘Authorities’, presumably the German police command, blamed red tape in Vittel for the delay. Still, nothing happened.

On the same day that Tudor Wilkinson wrote to Adrienne, Vittel received a fresh contingent of internees. If the American women in the camp were desperate to get out, the arrivals from Poland were grateful to be allowed in. Nominally American citizens, most had never seen the United States. The Nazis had taken them from the Warsaw Ghetto, where they confined and terrorized the city’s Jewish population, because they held US passports by right of birth, marriage or family connection. One of them, Gutta Eizenzweig, wrote of her arrival at Vittel, ‘I stood there in shock, for we had suddenly crossed the divide from hell to paradise.’ Eighteen-year-old Miriam Wattenberg, whose mother had been born in the United States but moved to Poland as a child, was one whose US passport brought her to Vittel that winter morning. Her mother Anglicized the children’s names to make them sound more American, and Miriam Wattenberg became Mary Berg. The teenager wrote in her diary that the Germans did not tell her, her mother and sister where they were going. They and other US passport holders had been in a camp at Pawiak, where she wrote, ‘While we are waiting here we can see transports of people being sent out of the Pawiak to the Oswiecim camp. Is that where the Nazis intend to send us, too?’ By then, young Mary had seen 300,000 people marched off to Oswiecim, the Polish town that the Germans called Auschwitz. It was only when the train taking her from Pawiak headed west that she realized her family’s destination was not to be the infamous death camp. Crossing the frontier into France and seeing Vittel for the first time, the sensitive and thoughtful teenager wrote, ‘Not a trace of the snow that covered Warsaw. Here everything is sunny and spring is in the air.’

After five days in the camp, Mary Berg met ‘a number of American nuns, handsome young girls’. Mary, whose English was fluent, told them she had come from Poland. They asked whether she had received Red Cross parcels there.

Mary met Dr Jean Lévy, who had done so much for Drue Tartière and other women at Vittel. ‘His wife and child are in a camp near Paris, whence transports are constantly sent to Poland,’ she wrote. ‘He keeps asking us whether all that is said about Treblinka is true. He refuses to believe that people are killed there by the thousands with poison gas and steam.’ She was pleased to discover the camp had a Resistance movement and a secret radio: ‘It seems that the Germans suspect something of the kind, for yesterday they searched the hotel, but they could not find the radio. It is said that while the Germans carried on their search someone was walking in the park carrying the radio in a suitcase. ’

Some of the American internees became pregnant. A YMCA inspector observed after a visit on 8 February 1943, ‘A problem which concerns the International Red Cross more than us was laid before us: How are the necessary layettes to be secured for the 21 babies expected in the next few months?’ More than layettes, some of the women needed husbands. Sylvia wrote that German soldiers respected expectant mothers so much that they found the fathers and told them to marry the women. ‘Resistance was overcome and weddings with the bride in white veil and orange blossoms almost like in peacetime,’ Sylvia wrote. Some of the brides, though, ‘were pale as they had suffered considerably with nausea’.

 

Sylvia Beach was desperate to leave Vittel as her sixth month of captivity began in February 1943. The camp, however comfortable, meant the denial of the companionship, mainly of Adrienne Monnier, and freedom she needed to survive. Mary Berg, coming from Poland, discovered freedom in Frontstalag 194. ‘There is no more wonderful feeling than freedom,’ she wrote in her diary for 24 February 1943. ‘In Vittel I have a taste of it for the first time in three years. Although I can see the barbed wire and the Nazi guards a few steps away, I feel myself under the protection of the American flag.’ Yet the protection of her mother’s flag and passport did not stop her mind from roaming back to Warsaw. ‘The internees try to make the time pass by organizing all sorts of entertainments, dramatic circles, sports clubs, education groups, etc. But we do not share in all these games. My thoughts are constantly in Warsaw. What is happening there?’ In March, the Germans moved the Polish Americans into the Hôtel Nouvel, where the Berg family’s rooms ‘were pleasant and clean’. In the hotel, Mary observed the American and English women: ‘The relations between them are not of the best, for the English are rather snobbish.’ On 29 March, the Germans sent all the American males who had been allowed to stay with their wives at Vittel back to Compiègne. Mary wrote, ‘The Nazis gave the ridiculous excuse that German war prisoners are being badly treated in America. The camp authorities exempted from this order only Mr. D., who was recently operated on and is still in the hospital, Rabbi R., as a clergyman, and the [Brazilian] consul and his son. It is very lonely here without the men.’

Sylvia’s detention allowed her to write to her sister, Holly Beach Dennis, via the Red Cross. A letter that she sent to Holly in October 1942 arrived only in March 1943. Neither Holly’s reply nor a package of clothing she sent reached Sylvia at Vittel. In the early spring, Sylvia learned that her release might be imminent: ‘Various friends at home who were on sufficiently good terms with the Enemy were continually working on our problem.’ Sylvia placed her hopes in Tudor Wilkinson. Adrienne, on the other hand, had lost faith in Wilkinson’s promises. She appealed to Jacques Benoist-Méchin, the early devotee of their bookshops who had been first to translate parts of
Ulysses
into French. As a minister for police in the Vichy government, he had helped the Germans to round up Jews, Freemasons and
résistants
. Adrienne’s beliefs were in direct opposition to everything Benoist-Méchin represented, but under the occupation friends made compromises to help friends.