The Monuments Men (29 page)

The wind blew chill down the streets of Paris. Even with her heavy coat, it was so cold that Rose Valland stepped off the sidewalk into the shelter of a doorway. She was close to James Rorimer’s apartment, just another block or two, and she really did feel like she was approaching a decision. She lit a cigarette. She lived an ascetic life: small apartment, bare furnishings, not many luxuries or friends. It was part of her protective shell. She had no attachments the Nazis could exploit. She had no close companions to discover her secrets, personal and professional. She was safe. Her closest personal contact, she realized, may very well have been her boss, Jacques Jaujard. She admired him immensely, and would be forever grateful for the opportunity he had given her.

But was Jaujard now pushing her toward Rorimer? It was a question she had puzzled over for a week. The American Monuments Man definitely had Jaujard’s trust and admiration. He had pushed them to work together several times, which in turn had led not only to progress in the recovery of Parisian property but to a growing friendship between them.

But could she confide in him? She had spent four years gathering her information. Four years of deprivation. For the first months, it had been nothing but fear. But she had grown into her position. In July 1941, the French curator at the Jeu de Paume fell ill, and Jaujard placed her in charge of the museum in the
paid
position of attaché—and later “Assistante du Jeu de Paume,” after all those years as a volunteer! By then, she was running the maintenance staffs for the Nazis, a task that made her indispensable and allowed her free movement throughout the museum. She was also passing information regularly to Jaujard, oftentimes through his loyal secretary Jacqueline Bouchot-Saupique. Sometimes her reports were written on Louvre stationery, most often they were scribbled on whatever slip of paper was available. On occasion they were oral reports conveyed during a brief visit to Jaujard’s office. As attaché for the Jeu de Paume, Valland had the right of passage into the Louvre. She knew her homely looks, carefully cultivated during those years, allowed her to slip past the guards without being searched.

In later years, as her fear subsided, she began to accept the risk. The shipping manifests, train numbers, and addresses were too hard to memorize, so she began to take notes. Then she began to take them home at night so she could copy them down, always returning them to their files before the Nazis arrived the next morning. She trolled for information from packers, secretaries, and Nazi officers. She memorized overheard conversations, the Nazis never suspecting that she understood German. The Nazis were fastidious about documentation; they reported and photographed everything. She filched and then developed negatives at night, so she had photographs of them all: Hofer, von Behr, Lohse, and Göring studying looted art. She even had the watchman’s logbook. She had information on everyone who had come and gone through those closed halls. And she had lists: of artworks, of traincars, of destinations.

It had cost her so much. Years of sleepless nights. Weeks of terror, subsiding to the dull knowledge that she might never make it out of the occupation alive. Could she really share everything she had learned and gathered with an officer of the U.S. Army?

She stared across the street at a nondescript doorway, watched a bundled woman go trudging by. Instead of the answer to her question, what came was the elation, after all those years, at her ability to make the decision as a free French woman. She recalled that moment of hope when the first shots of resistance rang out on August 19, 1944. Who could forget that date? The Metro workers had gone on strike; then the police; finally the postal service. Everyone expected the uprising any day, but when they heard the first shots… the skies of Paris lifted like the lid off a frying pan. The city resounded with the enthusiasm and joy of its inhabitants. She was at the Louvre with the other curators. They wanted to raise the French flag over the museum. Jaujard said no. Their duty was to protect the collections. They could not risk a German reaction.
5

She left the Louvre and went to the Jeu de Paume, determined to stay with the art to the end. On the corner outside was a German observation tower. On the steps, the German machine-gun barrels were still hot from firing. All night, German units descended on the Jardin des Tuileries to prepare their defenses. Across the garden from the museum, partisans cut down trees and tore up paving stones to form barricades. From a window on the top floor, she could see Citroën sedans painted with the emblems of the Free French (FFI). But nothing happened; for days, Paris simmered.

The tension broke on the night of August 24. Lightning split the sky; the police rose up. Artillery shells whistled down the Seine. The barrels of the German guns shone red-hot in the thunderstorm. The next day, German soldiers were crouched behind statues in the courtyard of the museum, surrounded by sandbags. She saw them shot dead, one by one. A terrified young soldier became separated from his unit and was gunned down on the museum steps. The rest surrendered. Within two hours, General Leclerc’s tanks were lined up on Rue de Rivoli. His troops stacked captured German ammunition and helmets inside the Jeu de Paume while Parisians crowded the terrace, cheering the soldiers down the street.

And then the sound of gunfire, screaming, the crowd tumbling through the doors and windows of the Jeu de Paume. A museum attendent, foolish enough to climb on the roof to watch the arrival of Leclerc, was accused of being a German spotter. She had to plead with several of Leclerc’s officers before one finally intervened. When she wouldn’t let the mob into the basement, where the Jeu de Paume’s permanent collection was stored, they accused her of harboring Germans. Collaborator! Collaborator! A French soldier pressed a gun to her back. As she descended the staircase into the basement, she thought of the young German soldier she had discovered earlier in the day, huddled in one of the sentry boxes. What if they found another? She had wondered, after all she had been through, if this was the way it was going to end.
My duty
, she thought then, as she did now,
is to the art
.

She thought of the near disaster with the art train: priceless artwork sitting on a side track for two months because of a bureaucratic muddle. She was concerned that some members of the art establishment might think that she was selfish. That she was withholding her information to make herself more important. Some were already whispering that she had made it all up, that she didn’t have anything worthwhile to share. After all, she was a mere assistant, not even a curator. They suspected she was just trying to make a name for herself.

Maybe they had a point. She had been incensed when
Le Figaro
ran a story about the art train on October 25 because it gave the French rail system credit for the recovery. She had written Jaujard, reminding him that the article “deprived the National Museums of the merit that they deserve.” But her real frustration had been evident in an earlier paragraph. “At a personal level,” she had written, “I would deem myself happy if this clarification reestablishes the facts as they are, for without the information I was able to provide, it would have been impossible to report and pinpoint this shipment of stolen paintings among the numerous convoys headed to Germany.”
6

She threw down her cigarette and stared out at the snowy Parisian street. Yes, she wanted credit for the work she had done. Destiny might have placed her in the right place at the right time, but she had seized it. Others had run or hid; some had even turned to the Nazi side. She had risked her life for her principles and her country. It wasn’t for personal glory. It never was. She had protected the art. She had stood up for what was right. And the best thing for the artwork, she knew, was to cut through the bureaucracy and the infighting of the French government and go straight to James Rorimer. There simply wasn’t time for anything else. The American military would be the first to reach the Nazi repositories in Germany and Austria. Rorimer was the only man she could trust. And Jaujard trusted him, too. She felt sure Jaujard wanted her to go to Rorimer, even if he’d never said so out loud.

She started walking. A few minutes later, she arrived at the American’s apartment. Inside, the room was lit by candles because of the nightly blackouts, still a fact of Parisian life. There was a small fire in the hearth; the room was warm. He took her coat and offered her a seat. It was a world away from the frozen reality of the front lines, but intimately connected to it. Sometimes the parameters of a mission are decided in a little back room over a glass of champagne.

In later years, James Rorimer would write that this Christmas meeting was a turning point. Perhaps for him it was, because for the first time Rose Valland gave him a hint of the breadth and scope of the information she possessed: in short, everything the right person would need to find the stolen patrimony of France.

But for Valland, what happened that night was merely another confirmation that James Rorimer was her man. His trust, his insight, his respect and intelligence and bulldog intensity were all on display, as always. It would be difficult for him to understand her sacrifice, she realized sadly, but that was a meaningless personal consideration. She could see that he shared something more important: her sense of purpose. Like Valland, Rorimer believed that his destiny was bound up in the information she possessed.

“Please give me the information,” Rorimer said. “Share it with me.”

She knew she would. She had of course given her reports and some of her hastily prepared notes to Jacques Jaujard, because that was her obligation. But she was so suspicious of the bureaucracy, because one careless or stubborn person, anywhere in the chain of command, could bring the flow of information to a halt. And that’s exactly what happened. Months later, long after the end of the war, photographs provided to SHAEF by Valland were found shoved in a file drawer in some out-of-the-way office with a bunch of other “useless” documents.

Fortunately, she had another copy of the documents for Rorimer. But she didn’t give them to him, at least not in December 1944. She had one more condition. She didn’t want Rorimer passing her information to someone else. She didn’t know about the good, capable men of the MFAA already on the front lines: Stout, Hancock, Posey, Balfour. But even if she had known about them, it wouldn’t have mattered. Valland didn’t want Rorimer sharing information, she wanted him using it. And that meant he needed to be at the front.

She had been hinting for weeks, but she tried again. “You’re wasted here, James. We need men like you in Germany, not Paris.”

“Your information,” he said.

She knew he was going to the front. He couldn’t resist the challenge… and the opportunity. It was only a matter of time. But time was not a luxury they could afford. She had only one trump card to play: her information. Her mind turned. She would have more leverage if she held back; it was safer to wait until she was sure he was going to Germany. Or maybe, she thought, she really did like the attention and respect her secrets brought.

“Rose,” he said, grasping her hand lightly.

She turned away. “
Je suis désolée, James
,” she whispered. “
Je ne peux pas
.”

I’m sorry. I can’t.

SECTION

III

Germany

CHAPTER 24

A German Jew in the U.S. Army

Givet, Belgium

January 1945

E
very morning, Harry Ettlinger, the last boy to celebrate his bar mitzvah in Karlsruhe, Germany, took a commuter bus from his home in upper Newark, New Jersey, to his high school downtown. After three years in America, his father had finally secured his first job, as a nightwatchman in a luggage factory. The family was so poor that Harry barely noticed the war rationing. But along the bus route, the changes were clear. In the tiny front yards of urban New Jersey, everyone was growing beans, carrots, and cabbage, just as Eleanor Roosevelt was doing on the front lawn of the White House. “Victory gardens,” they called them. Even the empty lots had been cleaned by schoolchildren and planted with beans. Those children and their parents now rode “victory bikes,” made of reclaimed rubber and metals not needed for the war effort. The bus passed a poster taped to a lightpole: “When you ride alone, you ride with Hitler.” It was a plea to use public transportation, or at least to carpool. Harry was glad his family didn’t have a car. Nobody drove anymore; it was almost a sin to consider it. He heard rumors you could be fined if you were caught pleasure-driving with no particular place to go.