pro-Nazi Vichy regime set as its objective the elimination of “all Jewish influence in the national economy.” The seizure of property belonging to French Jews followed. Of the 330,000 Jews living in France in 1941, about 75,000 were deported to Nazi death camps. Only 2,500 deportees returned. Lies and official trickery would long obscure the precise role France played in the deportation of Jews and the plundering of their assets during the war. We would never set foot in our apartment again. Half-hearted attempts to regain possession after the war failed. Despite sworn statements by several fellow-Maquisards, among them members of the Armagnac Bataillon, a snarled, hostile bureaucracy and a severe housing shortage dampened all hope of restitution.
*
Lyon was a crucial center of the Résistance during the occupation and my father lost no time contacting Jean-Pierre Lévy. Founder of Franc-Tireur (Sniper), a successful clandestine publication dedicated to Socialist and radical causes, Lévy found us a small room above a barbershop for the night. We left Lyon before dawn on the first leg of a circuitous journey that would take us west to Clermont-Ferrand, southeast to Le Puy, southwest to Rodez and Montauban, south to Toulouse and west again to Auch and Vic-Fézensac, in the heart of Gascony. Coded instructions signed by the people in Lyon and addressed to a Monsieur Lagorce, owner of a café in Vic-Fézensac, earned my father immediate conscription into the Maquis. He was given a new name -- Docteur Guillemin, a nom de guerre by which he would be widely known and remembered in the region well after the war.
*
It was at that time that I, too, assumed a new identity. My father’s miraculous escape from Fresnes Prison and our nighttime flight from Paris coincided with a scheme to erase in me any conscious sense of Jewish selfhood. This did not prove difficult; I’d never received any religious instruction. All I’d learned is that being Jewish can be detrimental to one’s health. The opportunity to playact, a pastime for which I seemed well suited at an early age (I was told I used to parody Hitler and Mussolini, and imitate Maurice Chevalier and Charlie Chaplin) added to the allure. Outlandish as it was inventive, the biography my parents concocted for me -- just in case they were intercepted and we became separated -- would have made Baron Munchausen blush with envy. We rehearsed, often and extemporaneously. My father would assume a heavy German accent, mimicking the overbearing manner of an SS interrogator.
“Vat is your name?”
“Wilhelm Guillaume.”
“Vere vere you born?”
“I was born in Surabaya, Java.”
“Vat vere you doink in Java?”
“My father was a career diplomat before the war.”
“Vat is your religion?”
“Lutheran.”
I also learned to cross myself and could recite by heart from Matthew, Mark, Luke and John. Owing an absence of any discernible stereotypical Semitic features, I managed to pass for the perfect little goy. This role would be further refined in a monastery where I was given refuge during a particularly perilous mission in which my mother took part. I tenaciously clung to this fiction until the end of the war.
The war, with all its dangers, uncertainties and twists and turns also taught me stealth, alacrity and patience. At an age when children are incapable of modulating their voices, when curiosity or exuberance yields an incessant flow of questions, when fun sparks laughter or a scraped knee elicits earsplitting shrieks, I learned to whisper, to hold my breath, to tiptoe, to make myself small, to sit still behind a bolted door as the cadence of German boots faded in the distance. I also learned how to wait, sick with worry at the edge of a forest clearing, for my father to emerge from the shadows in the middle of the night at the head of a dozen other men. I understood the uncompromising urgency to love him without uttering a single word and to see him vanish back in the woods with no guarantee that I’d ever see him again.
Patience is a form of self-respect.
*
It was in late 1942 that groups of insurgents joined forces and began to operate from mountain retreats, forest hideaways, swamps and caves. Efforts to finance the Maquis with public support bore little fruit. Everybody applauded it; few dared support it.
“Weapons were in short supply in the beginning,” my father told me. “Cells in the area took turns manning a lone submachine gun. Fortunately, the Germans had no idea how poorly equipped we were and they ventured into our turf with extreme circumspection.”
Several French Army officers eventually joined the Maquis. Pierre Dalloz, organizer of the Vercors, wrote:
“They had their idiosyncrasies, their apartments, their families in the big cities. They helped train us as best they could but when a risky operation was planned we had to act alone.”
Jean Galtier-Boissière, the editor of the satirical magazine Crapouillot and author of l’Histoire de la Guerre 1939-1945 (History of the War 1939-1945) wrote:
“Large sums were soon collected from raids on public funds. With the complicity of its director, one hundred million francs were withdrawn from a bank and parceled out to the families of the Maquisards -- 800 francs per wife, 500 francs per child.”
Despite their vigilance, the Germans did not take the Maquis seriously at first. German propaganda chief, Joseph Goebbels, called it a “revolution of the lazy to defend their tendency to do nothing.” This assessment was both premature and groundless. A few months later, the Abwehr and the S.D. (SS Intelligence Service) would denounce the “dastardly acts of the terrorists” against its troops and conduct punitive raids in which dozens of innocent civilians were lined up against a wall and shot.
The importance and exploits of the Maquis are still being contested. Many believe that its successes were rare and limited, and were offset by suffering and an unacceptably high loss of life. If the Maquis had not existed, some argue, France would have been retaken a month or two later, whereas German reprisals could have been avoided, as would have been the fratricidal bloodbath that followed the liberation of France.
Writing in the January 30, 1948 edition of the Liverpool Daily Post, Sir Basil Henry Liddell Hart (1895-1970), the British military scientist, agreed:
“The Résistance no doubt exerted considerable pressure on the Germans. The Maquis interfered with their ability to thwart the Allied advance. In analyzing these operations, however, it would appear that their efficacy was narrowly dependent on a sustained degree of coordination with regular military actions against the enemy. Thus, [the Maquis] rarely became more than an inconvenience. On the whole, its exploits proved less effective than passive resistance. Worse, they invited immediate and cruel retribution far out of proportion with the losses they might have inflicted on the Germans, and brought on enormous suffering on their compatriots.”
Liddell Hart was also skeptical of some of the Maquisards’ integrity:
“The Résistance attracted many undesirables and gave them the opportunity to indulge their evil instincts and to vent their hostilities under the cover of patriotism, thereby adding new meaning to Dr. [Samuel] Johnson’s historic remark that ‘patriotism is the last refuge of scoundrels.’”
Whereas German Generals Warlimont, Blaskowitz and von Wittersheim, of the 2nd Panzer Division, conceded that their troops had suffered “grave losses from the heroic actions of the Maquis.”
Americans, likewise, lavished praise on the “fifis” and acknowledged their invaluable role in assisting two Allied landings. Writing in Ultra Secret, war correspondent Robert Ingersoll acknowledges:
“We were amazed to discover that the Résistance was in fact so effective that six enemy divisions failed to paralyze it -- six divisions that we otherwise would have had to face alone. The most blasé among us quickly rallied when German officers confessed that they had