A Paler Shade of Red: Memoirs of a Radical. W. E. Gutman

or scrubbed as a result of miscommunication and confusion. In defiance of a cardinal rule of espionage which called for agents to be identified by their initials, we were each given the name of a Paris Métro station. I was known as St. Paul -- a neat trick for a Jew -- because I met my handlers a block away, on Rue des Rosiers (then and now a predominantly Jewish neighborhood). Early successes, more a function of hazard than aim, confounded the enemy. For a while, the amateurs’ gamble paid off.”

      At first, the Résistance took on a political rather than military character. Great pains were taken to gather information and spread rumors crafted to keep the Germans in a perpetual state of alert and distraction. Teachers, lawyers, writers joined in the creation and dissemination of clandestine publications. One of them, Résistance, launched its first edition on December 15, 1940. A month later, acting on a tip, the German police raided a small warehouse, destroyed the presses and executed seven men. Three female employees were later deported and never seen again. Other tracts fared better, some miraculously evading the ever-narrowing German police nets for the duration of the war. One of them, the socialist Libération Nord, edited in the basement of a print shop specializing in religious pamphlets, circulated 50,000 copies a week through August 1944.

      In 1941, the Résistance, its ranks augmented by unemployed military officers, soldiers of fortune and leading intellectuals -- among them communist and Christian men of letters -- at last turned to guerrilla warfare.

      That year, Stalin had proclaimed:

      “In all regions occupied by the enemy must be created detachments of irregulars, on foot or horseback, charged with blowing up bridges, rendering roads unusable, downing power lines, crippling telephone communications, burning railroads, attacking convoys. It is the struggle for our nation’s liberty that will fuse with that of Europe and America to bring independence and democratic freedoms.”

      Delivered for Russian consumption, and heard by communists everywhere, the challenge was not lost on the Résistance.

      “We were in urgent need of weapons,” my father recounted. “Our arsenal was derisory: clubs, truncheons, meat cleavers, pocketknives, axes, picks, rusty revolvers, ante-bellum shotguns. In extremis, and not without perceptible enjoyment, some of our men used their bare hands. We gained considerably more fire power with the addition of explosives, incendiary devices, and a number of small-caliber machine guns, some pilfered from the men we killed, others procured in England and parachuted behind enemy lines.

      “Our orders were to engage the enemy in desperate and unavoidable situations only, and to ‘disperse like mercury’ which, when clasped, scatters into tiny droplets that are impossible to seize.”

      Orders were often ignored and lone wolves or splinter groups carried out several daring attacks. The assassination of two of Hitler’s point men in France, General Schaumburg and Dr. Ritter, was the handiwork of a Jewish phalanx led by 19-year-old Marcel Rayman. Rayman was executed in 1944 by the French collaborationist Brigades Spéciales. Meanwhile, weapons remained in short supply and minor successes were often offset by disastrous failures. Alarmed that elements of the Résistance were joining forces and creating a “red army” on French soil, London held back additional arms shipments, thus preventing modest, isolated strikes from achieving greater tactical success. Although a document circulated by the Communist Party’s Central Committee in 1944 added some weight to London’s suspicions, such concern had no legitimacy. The presence of British and American troops in France was to have a decidedly inhibiting effect and the communists succeeded only in securing a voice, often strident and disruptive but never dominant, in France’s otherwise habitually chaotic political life.

      *

      Much has been written about the Résistance. Opinions and facts heretofore withheld or yet to be exhumed will provide grist for future mills. The final verdict will depend on how one beholds history -- with selective amnesia or preclusive memory. Judgment will also be influenced by the role an ever-shrinking number of WWII veterans may have played in the Résistance. Whether it engages in homage or apologia, exaltation or calumny, a final chapter must justly conclude that France’s liberation apparatus was neither monolithic nor homogeneous. In fact, it lacked congruence; it was crippled by discord, given to dissimulation and often compromised by paranoia. Some of its members demonstrated extraordinary daring and sublime selflessness. Others, succumbing to cowardice or greed, betrayed their comrades-in-arms and delivered their compatriots into the enemy’s jaws.

      “These were humans, not angels,” my father would remark; “men at war.” Indeed, many served the Résistance with honor and distinction. Others used it, fed on it. Here was a microcosm of society: misfits, intellectuals, desperadoes, liberal clergymen, Socialists and Marxists, idealists and opportunists, patriots and survivalists, deserters, decorated line officers and madmen in search of a cause. Circumstance and moral fiber -- not rank or class -- set them apart. Common men died like heroes; blue bloods broke rank, defected. Stranger gave his life to save another’s; friend betrayed friend to save his own. In the death camps – Auschwitz-Birkenau, Buchenwald, Dachau, to name a few -- starving prisoners offered their last piece of bread to feed a dying child. Others smothered their bunkmates to steal their rations. Some slept with German officers for an extra bowl of soup. A few became ruthless trustees who could be counted on to beat, torture and kill other Jews.

      “C’est comme ça,” my father would conclude. That’s how it is “Don’t try to figure this out. There’s no explanation.”

      To explain evil is to trivialize it.

      BETRAYAL, FLIGHT

      It is how men exercise freewill under duress that earns them reverence or ignominy. The “Brigades Spéciales,” thugs and drifters hired by the French Police to do its dirty work, would earn, in four years, a reputation for perversion and cruelty second only to the Holy Inquisition. The methods they used to wrest confessions were so gruesome that, at his trial, a former Brigade member expressed shock at “the sadism of his compatriots.” His was a desperate if futile defense. It was also disingenuous in that it glossed over French history, past and contemporary. Frenchmen had long been at each-others’ throats -- quite literally during the 1789 Revolution. They would also bloody their hands during the Dreyfus “affair,” a scandal that inflamed political and religious passions, and very nearly brought France to the brink of civil war. Fifty years later, exploiting the chaos and jubilation of La Libération, Frenchmen killed again. Some settled old political scores; others slaughtered known collaborators. Compromised, their days numbered, those who had led double lives tracked down witnesses and eliminated potential turncoats. Over 9,000 collaborators were executed at war’s end; 1,500 were put to death following summary trials; 40,000 were sentenced to prison.

      If hatred was an exploitable form of energy the world would drown in an ocean of fuel.

      *

      In the “confessionals” of the Brigades Spéciales, an old man is denied food and drink for nine days. He expires on the tenth. A patriot’s hands are tied for hours to the metal surface of a freezer, then ripped free. Another is burned over ninety percent of his body with cigarettes. A wire is connected to a Résistant's handcuffs; another is inserted into his rectum; the ends are plugged into a live socket. In another cell a suspected communist is stripped naked and hanged by his thumbs as heavy weights are tied to his toes. A young priest accused of hiding insurgents in his church loses his penis, and his life, to sulfuric acid. A student is repeatedly sodomized then forced to drink his tormentors’ urine. The exotic is often followed by the prosaic: captives have their hair torn from their scalp. They are kicked, punched, whipped, slashed with carving knives. Bones are broken. Eyes are gouged. Ears are severed. Tongues are ripped out and, to stimulate memory or loosen recalcitrant ones, boiled and served to fellow prisoners. Hundreds of Frenchmen succumb to untold agonies at the hands of their concitoyens.

      Victims of ill treatment can, if they have the courage -- or the folly -- file a complaint and appear before hastily convened kangaroo courts presided by three anonymous judges (the judges “deliberate” behind closed doors!). Denied attorneys, the plaintiffs