Марк Леви – The Children of Freedom (страница 2)
You must understand the context within which we were living; context is important, as in the case of a sentence, for example. Once removed from its context it often changes its meaning, and during the years to come, so many sentences will be removed from their context in order to judge in a partial way and to condemn more easily. It’s a habit that won’t be lost.
In the first days of September, Hitler’s armies had invaded Poland; France had declared war and nobody here or there doubted that our troops would drive back the enemy at the borders. Then the flood of German armoured divisions had swept through Belgium, and in a few weeks a hundred thousand of our soldiers would die on the battlefields of the North and the Somme.
Marshal Pétain was appointed to head the government; two days later, a general who refused to accept defeat launched an appeal for resistance from London. Pétain chose to sign the surrender of all our hopes. We had lost the war so quickly.
By swearing allegiance to Nazi Germany, Marshal Pétain led France into one of the darkest periods of her history. The Republic was abolished in favour of what would henceforth be called the French State. The map was divided by a horizontal line and the nation separated into two zones, one in the north, which was occupied, and the other in the south, which was allegedly free. But freedom there was entirely relative. Each day saw its share of decrees published, driving back into danger two million foreign men, women and children who now lived in France without rights: the right to carry out their professions, to go to school, to move around freely and soon, very soon, the very right to exist.
The nation had become amnesiac about the foreigners who came from Poland, Romania, Hungary, these Spanish or Italian refugees, and yet it had desperate need of them. It had been vitally necessary to repopulate a France that, twenty-five years earlier, had been deprived of a million and a half men who had died in the trenches of the Great War. Almost all my friends were foreigners, and they had all experienced the repression and abuses of power already perpetrated in their country for several years. German democrats knew who Hitler was, combatants in the Spanish Civil War knew about Franco’s dictatorship, and those from Italy knew about Mussolini’s Fascism. They had been the first witnesses of all the hatred, all the intolerance, of this pandemic that was infesting Europe, with its terrible funeral cortège of deaths and misery. Everyone already knew that defeat was only a foretaste; the worst was yet to come. But who would have wanted to listen to the bearers of bad news? France now no longer needed them. So, whether they had come from the East or the South, these exiles were arrested and interned in camps.
Marshal Pétain had not only given up, he was going to collude with Europe’s dictators, and in our country, which was falling asleep around this old man, they were all already crowding around: the head of the government, ministers, prefects, judges, the police, and the Militia; each more eager than the last to carry out their terrible work.
Everything began like a children’s game, three years earlier, on 10 November 1940. The unimpressive French Marshal, surrounded by a few prefects with silver laurels, came to Toulouse to start a tour of the
Those directionless crowds were a strange paradox, filled with wonder as they watched the Marshal raise his baton, the sceptre of a former leader who had returned to power, bringing a new order with him. But Pétain’s new order would be an order of misery, segregation, denunciations, exclusions, murders and barbarity.
Some of those who would soon form our brigade knew about the internment camps, where the French government had locked up all those who had made the mistake of being foreigners, Jews or Communists. And in these camps in the South West, whether at Gurs, Argelès, Noé or Rivesaltes, life was abominable. Suffice to say that for anyone who had friends or family members who were prisoners, the arrival of the Marshal felt like a final assault on the small amount of freedom we had left.
Since the population was preparing to acclaim this very Marshal, we had to sound our alarm bell, awake people from this terribly dangerous fear, this fear that overcomes crowds and leads them to throw in the towel, to accept anything; to keep silent, with the sole, cowardly excuse that their neighbours are doing the same and that if their neighbours are doing the same, then that’s what they should do.
For Caussat, one of my little brother’s best friends, for Bertrand, Clouet or Delacourt, there’s no question of throwing in the towel, no question of keeping silent, and the sinister parade that is about to take place in the streets of Toulouse will be the setting for a committed declaration.
What matters today is that words of truth, a few words of courage and dignity, rain down upon the procession. A text that is clumsily written, but that nonetheless denounces what ought to be denounced; and after that, what does it matter what the text says or doesn’t say? Then we still have to work out how to make the tracts as broadly balanced as possible, without getting ourselves arrested on the spot by the forces of order.
But my friends have it all worked out. A few hours before the procession, they cross Esquirol Square with armfuls of parcels. The police are on duty, but who cares about these innocent-looking adolescents? Here they are at the right spot, a building at the corner of rue de Metz. So, all four slip into the stairwell and climb up to the roof, hoping that there won’t be any observer up there. The horizon is empty and the city stretched out at their feet.
Caussat assembles the mechanism that he and his friends have devised. At the edge of the roof, a small board lies on a small trestle, ready to tip up like a swing. On one side they lay the pile of tracts that they have typed out, on the other side a can full of water. There is a small hole in the bottom of the vessel. Look: the water is trickling out into the guttering while they are already running off towards the street.
The Marshal’s car is approaching; Caussat lifts his head and smiles. The limousine, a convertible, moves slowly up the street. On the roof, the can is almost empty and no longer weighs anything; so the plank tips up and the tracts flutter down. Today, 10 November 1940, will be the felonious Marshal’s first autumn. Look at the sky: the sheets of paper pirouette and, to the supreme delight of these street urchins with their improvised courage, a few of them land on Marshal Pétain’s peaked cap. People in the crowd bend down and pick up the leaflets. There is total confusion, the police are running about in all directions, and those who think they seek these kids cheering the procession like all the others don’t realise that it’s their own first victory that they’re celebrating.
They have dispersed and are now going their separate ways. As he goes home this evening, Caussat cannot have any idea that three days later he’ll be denounced and arrested, and will spend two years in the municipal jails of Nîmes. Delacourt doesn’t know that in a few months he will be killed by French police officers in a church in Agen, after being pursued and taking refuge there; Clouet is unaware that, next year, he will be executed by firing squad in Lyon; as for Bertrand, nobody will find the corner of a field beneath which he lies. On leaving prison, his lungs eaten away by tuberculosis, Caussat will rejoin the Maquis. Arrested once again, this time he will be deported. He was twenty-two years old when he died at Buchenwald.