First time I went to Paris, I started noticing the plaques.  I expected them to be the equivalent of our blue plaques, famous bloke (or occasionally woman) was born/lived/died/did something famous here.  Instead they were, as often as not, recording the fact that someone whose name is not otherwise known fell here, during the Liberation of the city from its Nazi occupiers.  Or that someone whose name is not otherwise known lived here until they were deported by the French police and handed over to the Nazi occupiers, because they were Jewish.  I became mildly obsessed.  Without a camera phone at that time (it was that long ago) and having gone out unarmed with notebooks, I searched when we got home for information and found an amazing website which aimed to record all such plaques, with a photograph and a brief note about the person or event commemorated.  Sadly, that has disappeared now.

So when we went back, I set myself the task of photographing every WWII related plaque that we passed on our travels, and finding out what I could about the background.  What follows is an account of what we found – it captures only so very few of the commemorative markers, only those which happened to be on the routes we chose for our walks, those which we spotted, unobscured by scaffolding or parked vans, those which I could get close enough to photograph.

But even so, they tell a rich and fascinating story.

Day 1

10th arrondissement

Ecole élémentaire Récollets, 19 passage des Récollets

The plaque is generic, one of many installed in the early 2000s at schools some of whose pupils had been deported during the Occupation.  It makes specific reference to the number of schoolchildren deported from the 10th arrondissement, but nothing about this school in particular.   These plaques represent the sea change that took place following President Jacques Chirac’s public recognition in 1995 of France’s responsibility for deporting thousands of Jews to Nazi death camps during the German occupation in World War II.   The photograph was taken on the day that Marine le Pen made a press statement denying that responsibility.   More of that anon.

Day 2

6th arrondissement

Starting at the rue de Sevres, in search of the childhood residence of Michel Butor, we found instead the plaque commemorating Marc Bloch, noted French historian.

Bloch joined the Resistance in 1942, was captured in Lyon by Vichy police in 1944 and turned over to the Gestapo. He was tortured and interrogated by Klaus Barbie.   Ten days after D Day, he was taken with around 28 Resistance prisoners to a meadow near Saint Didier de Formans, where they were executed by firing squad.

5th arrondissement

62 blvd St Michel

Pierre Bounin was a member of one of the independent cavalry brigades, known as Spahi (from the Turkish word for horseman), which saw active service in France in 1940 and one of which subsequently joined forces with the Free French.  This mechanised regiment served in Egypt, Libya and Tunisia, and was part of the French forces that liberated Paris in August 1944.  This area saw intense fighting to liberate the city, and Bounin is just one of the combattants commemorated.

At 60 blvd St Michel, 24 year old  Jean Montvallier-Boulogne was killed, on the same day as Bounin.  The wall behind his plaque is pitted with bullet holes from the bombardment of the city in 1918, and from the fighting in 1944.

On rue St Jacques, another generic school plaque:

On to the Pont des Arts:

Jacques Lecompte-Boinet was a Compagnon de la Liberation Fondateur and headed the movement Ceux de la Resistance. The Pont des Arts was the location for clandestine meetings with comrades who, like him, risked torture and death.   Here Vercors passed on to him publications from the Editions de minuit, intended for General de Gaulle.

Lecompte-Boinet initially joined the Mouvement de Liberation Nationale, which became Combat.  Subsequently he set up Ceux de la Résistance with Pierre Arrighi.  He was involved in the first meeting of the Conseil national de la Résistance (CNR), 27 May 1943, then left for London in October, from where he travelled to Algiers, returning to France in February 1944.   He had a distinguished diplomatic career after the war, and died in November 1974.

Just round the corner is the plaque commemorating Vercors himself – real name Jean Bruller – who wrote Le Silence de la mer, one of the key texts of the literary resistance.  It was written in 1941 and published secretly in 1942, the first publication of the Editions de minuit, which Bruller co-founded. Their publications were distributed via clandestine networks, hand to hand.  Along with Vercors, they published works by Francois Mauriac, Paul Eluard and Louis Aragon, and after the war established a reputation for publishing new writers such as Michel Butor.

7th arrondissement

Further along the banks of the Seine, the role of the former Gare d’Orsay (now the Musée d’Orsay), as a reception point for those who had escaped or been liberated from concentration camps and forced labour camps is commemorated.

The other major reception point was the Hotel Lutetia, which had been the HQ of the Abwehr during the Occupation, and here the photographs of those who had been deported were displayed, as family members waited in hope of finding those they had lost, and returning deportees waited in hope of finding that someone was looking for them.  The survivors of the death camps took longer to come home, often requiring months of medical treatment before they were fit to travel.  Their reception was traumatic, for them and for those waiting for them. 

Day 3

13th arrondissement

Another railway station, this time the Gare d’Austerlitz.

This was not a place of welcome but a place of despatch.  From here, cattle trucks took men, women and children rounded up in Paris to the internment camps of Pithiviers and Beane-la-Rolande, from where most of them were subsequently transported to Auschwitz.

Francois Mauriac, in his clandestine Editions de minuit publication under the pseudonym Forez, Le Cahier noir (1943), wrote of what his wife saw here:

At what other moment in history have the gates of the prison camps closed on so many innocents, at what other epoque have children been dragged away from their mothers and crammed into cattle trucks, as witnessed one sombre morning at the Gare d’Austerlitz?

We were here not only for this bit of history, but for the links to W G Sebald’s novel Austerlitz, the topic of a separate blog.

On the avenue des Gobelins, the deportations from the 13th arrondissement following the Vel d’Hiv round-ups are specifically commemorated.  This is quite clear – the round-ups were carried out by ‘la police de l’état francais’.  When the Armistice was signed, and Marshall Pétain took on the role of head of state, the vast majority of the French, however much they mourned the defeat, accepted that this was now France.  Private citizens and public institutions treated it as such, with at least initially only a small number refusing to accept the authority of the Vichy regime and throwing in their lot with de Gaulle and/or the nascent Resistance.  When it came to anti-semitic legislation, Vichy was ahead of its new masters, and as far as the round-ups of Jews are concerned, whilst the Nazis are responsible for the ultimate destination, Auschwitz, those arrested on 16 July 1942 saw only French police until they were on the way to extermination.  French police drew up the lists, French police organised the buses and blocked the ends of the streets where their targets lived.  French police hammered on the doors in the early hours, and forced the residents to pack swiftly and abandon their homes and most of what they owned.  French police transported single adults straight to the internment camps, and families to the stadium, the Velodrome d’hiver.  French police guarded them there until they in turn were transferred to the internment camps, and guarded them there too, separating men from women and parents from children until the trucks took them away.

So, inevitably, to Marine le Pen.  Her entirely cynical denial of French responsibility is shameful.  Le Monde‘s editorial is a perfectly balanced and crystal clear response:

In affirming on Sunday 9 April … that ‘France was not responsible for the Vel d’Hiv’, Marine le Pen has crossed a line: that of the national consensus on the reading of some of the most painful episodes in the history of France, the deportation of French Jews under the German occupation. …

In declaring, at the 1995 commemoration of the event, that ‘France, on that day, did something irreparable’, Jacques Chirac, then President of the Republic, marked a definitive new reading of the deportation of the Jews.  The moment had come to recognise clearly the responsiblity of the collaborationist French state … First ministers Lionel Jospin and Jean Pierre Raffarin confirmed his judgement.  President Sarkozy judged that there was ‘nothing to retract and nothing to add to this fine statement’.  Later, President Francois Hollande, in turn, denounced ‘a crime commited in France for France’.

In rejecting this consensus, Marine le Pen claims to be following in the footsteps of General de Gaulle.  On Sunday, to justify her statement, she referred to a ruling from August 1944, published in Algiers by de Gaulle’s provisional government and intended to remove all legality from the Vichy regime.  But we are no longer in 1944, nor even in 1981, and Marine le Pen is not Charles de Gaulle, whose heritage was embodied far better by Chirac than by her.  We are in 2017.  Nearly 3/4 of a century has passed since the Liberation, at least three generations, tens of thousands of pages of history have been written, debated, analysed and taught.  The ‘national story’ which [le Pen] wants to promote is anachronistic and sickening.  It is based not on a refusal to repent, but on a refusal to recognise an indispensable truth about the nation’s history.  Incidentally, Mme le Pen jeopardises (but that’s her problem) years of trying to de-demonise her party, which led her to exclude her own father, unfortunately famous as the man who called the gas chambers a ‘detail’.

Marine le Pen affirmed that ‘France is mentally abused’ by those who teach this critical view.  No, Mme le Pen, what abuses France is a version of history which leads it back to the denial of the post-war period.  In 1995, Jacques Chirac called for ‘vigilance’.  The FN candidate shows that he was right.

At 137 blvd de l’Hopital, previous inhabitants are commemorated; ten of whom (ranging in age from 9 months to 58) were deported and murdered because they were Jews, and another who was shot as a resistant in 1944:

3rd arrondissement.  We’re now in Le Marais.

Two more school plaques, commemorating over 500 children from the 3rd, many of whom attended the Lycée Victor Hugo or the Ecole de filles de la rue de Sévigné (now the Atelier des Beaux-arts).

On the rue Perrée, two plaques commemorate members of the union of merchants of the Carreau du Temple who died for France.

Day 4

7th arrondissement

After visiting the Musée de l’Ordre de la Liberation, housed within the Musée de l’Armée, which tells the story of occupation, deportation, resistance and finally liberation, we paid our respects at avenue Elysée Reclus, near the Eiffel Tower, home of Hélène Berr.  I’ve written often about Hélène, whose journal, not published until 2008, is one of the most powerful documents of the Occupation.

In my 2012 Holocaust Memorial Day blog, I wrote this:

She was 20 when Paris was occupied, from a thoroughly assimilated French Jewish family, a student at the Sorbonne.   She was 21 when she started the journal in which, at first, the war and the Nazi persecution are almost background noise.  She was almost 23 when she was arrested, a few months before Paris was liberated, and then deported to Auschwitz on one of the convoys from Drancy.   It was her 23rd birthday when she was moved from Auschwitz to Bergen Belsen.   She was 24 when she died, in Bergen Belsen, 5 days before the camp was liberated.    Her journal, kept by surviving members of her family after the war, was finally published in 2008 and when I read it I loved her, and I grieved for the fate I already knew would be hers.   Another voice that wasn’t quite silenced, after all.

Near the Champ de Mars, on avenue de la Bourdonnais, the place where  the ‘national insurrection’ of 19-25 August 1944 was planned.

Jean Alexandre Melchior de Vogüé (Vaillant),  Alfred Antoine Malleret (Joinville), Raymond Massiet (Dufresne).  All three survived the war.

Day 5

4th arrondissement

We began at the Mémorial de la Shoah.  I had braced myself for this, knowing the terrible history that would be illustrated there.  Nonetheless, seeing the Wall of Names, I felt the air being sucked from my lungs, realising that I was seeing in that moment only a fragment, only some of the names from only one of the years.

Further in, another sharp intake of breath, another moment where the experience of seeing what I knew I was going to see, the photographs of some of the children deported to extermination camps, overwhelmed me.

The Memorial is a powerful experience.  It cannot but move you.  And in order that one does not give in to despair about humanity, one leaves the Memorial for the Allée des Justes, and another list of names, this time of those who have been recognised for their actions during those dark years, actions which jeopardised their own lives in order to help Jewish friends, colleagues, neighbours and total strangers.

At 23 rue des Ecouffes, in the heart of the Jewish quarter, a family memorial.

This family could be a symbol of the French Resistance.  Jewish and Communist, they paid a heavy price.

Rosalie Engros was arrested in August 1942, and deported a month later, to Auschwitz.  She was 51.  Isaac Engros was murdered at Auschwitz in February 1944, aged 54. They had three sons. Marcel, arrested on 6 May 1942 and shot at Mont Valerien, aged 25. Lucien, arrested and tortured in May 1942, shot 22 August 1942, aged 22, along with a dozen other resistants. Andre, part of the FTP-MOI group of young Jewish resistants, arrested July 1943, tortured and shot 1 October 1943 at Mont-Valerien, aged 16.

3rd arrondissement:

Another school plaque, this time for the Lycée Turgot, on the rue de Turbigo.

On to the rue Meslay, where Yves Toudic is commemorated.  He was shot by the Brigade Speciale, a French police unit specialising in tracking down “internal enemies” (i.e. resistants), dissidents, escaped prisoners, Jews and those evading the STO. They worked in direct collaboration with the German civil, secret and military police.

Toudic was 43 when he was killed.  Son of a labourer, he was a militant communist and resistant.  From September 1940 he was in charge of the Comités populaires du Batiment for the Paris region, and continued in that role until he was shot by the Brigade Speciale, at the time of the 14 July demonstration in the place de la République, which he helped to organise.

10th arrondissement:

Rue René Boulanger.  Another young resistant shot down during the battles to liberate the city.  I can find nothing about Jean Sulpice, partly because he has a contemporary namesake, a chef.  He was 25 when he died.

On the facade of the Bourse du travail, 3 rue du Château-d’Eau, a plaque commemorates the recapturing of the building by ‘the workers of Paris’.

I missed so many.  And there is so much more I want to know about those whose names appear here, for posterity.  There’s not only the history of the occupation engraved on the walls of Paris, but the history of how it was understood and interpreted and communicated.  From the stone plaques marking the spots where resisters fell, installed soon after the liberation, to the much more recent black marble plaques acknowledging how Jewish children disappeared from Paris schools, as they and their families were rounded up and deported.

Paris has of course a rich history outside of those four dark and terrible years.  We saw some of it, beautiful buildings and great art.  But it seems ever more pertinent to explore what happened in one of the most sophisticated, cosmopolitan and cultured cities of Europe when an occupying power tapped into and found a rich spring of anti-semitism and more generalised xenophobia, and found willing, even enthusiastic partners in their great project to wipe out the Jewish race.  Most of those who participated did not know (at least, not for sure) what would be the fate of those they helped to deport.  It seems, though, that they didn’t actually care – once the Jews were no longer France’s problem, they had no interest in what would happen to them.  We dwell on this not to bad-mouth the French – this happened not only in France but across Europe, and it can happen anywhere, if the right conditions prevail.

We must remember, we must understand, and we must be vigilant.