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

arrival. It is likely that the Maquis achieved the work of twenty divisions.”

      General Dwight D. Eisenhower concurred, though his assessment was more conservative:

      “G.H.Q. estimated that, at times, the help lent by the Free French forces to our campaign represented the equivalent of fifteen divisions. Their support considerably enhanced the speed of our advance through France.”

      *

      I remember little from that period. The names of three small towns in southwestern France -- Barbotan, Cazaubon and Estang -- evoke images of frequent and hurried treks between them, by car, bicycle, on foot, in the middle of the night as a huge yellow moon cast a ghostly pallor upon my parents’ faces. What stands out in this hodgepodge of mangled memories is the name of an old chateau: Bégué. In his book, Chronicles of the War Years, 1939-1945, author and Résistance veteran, Pierre Cames, describes its role in the war years as epic:

      “[Bégué] was, for the Jews, an island of humanity in an ocean of barbarism. Like hunted beasts, most of the men and women who took refuge in this precarious haven had clawed their way out of a pit of human bestiality. They had eluded frightening manhunts and the implacable cruelty of Nazi madness; they could now catch their breath.”

      Turning the chateau into a shelter for fugitive Jews was the brainchild of Father Elie -- Alexandre Glasberg -- the Polish-born Jew who converted to Catholicism in the early 1930s and served the Résistance with uncommon valor. Father Elie had overstepped his authority and taken uncommon risks by defying the predominantly anti-Semitic and collaborationist Catholic hierarchy. He is remembered as a hero of the Résistance and was recognized by the State of Israel as Righteous among the Nations.

      The little I remember of the Chateau de Bégué is faded, gossamer, and threadbare, like fragments of a dissolving dream: A large common dining room swarming with loud, restive throngs; a place throbbing with anticipation and anxiety, hope and foreboding; a shelter where broken spirits could mend and, if they were up to the task, train for the long fight the Résistance aimed to bring to the enemy. My parents and I spent some time there. Days? Weeks? I couldn’t say.

      *

      Recollected with near perfect clarity, two incidents would remain forever etched in my memory. I vouch for their authenticity; I can’t assign them a specific place or time. Nor can I reconstruct with any degree of accuracy, the events that preceded or followed. They loom from the depths of my memory, isolated and visible like the tip of an iceberg in an otherwise empty sea.

      Food was scarce during the occupation but members of the Maquis and their families seldom wanted. Farmers gave generously and my father accepted potatoes, leeks, onions, eggs and an occasional wedge of cheese in lieu of honorarium whenever he delivered a baby or tended to sick or wounded comrades. Fresh meat was more difficult to obtain due in part to a shortage of livestock. Hunting was discouraged because shooting guns invariably drew the Germans’ attention.

      Despite these restrictions, we could count on our weekly allotment, about five hundred grams of beef, horsemeat or lamb. My mother would remove the meat from the coarse brown paper wrappings, assess freshness by color and smell and cook it immediately. One day, the deliveryman brought a piece of meat that was unlike any other my mother had ever seen. Pinkish rather than red, the flesh had an unfamiliar consistency and appearance. Worse, it emitted an indescribable pungency and was adorned on one side with a patch of soft, short flaxen hair. Suspicious, my mother asked the man to wait while she summoned my father.

      “Ari, look at this. What is it?”

      My father exploded. “It’s not what but who!” He retched. My mother ran out of the house screaming.

      The deliveryman turned white and nearly fainted. “What do you mean, who,” he asked, his eyes big with outrage and disbelief.

      “This is part of a human thigh,” my father bellowed. “Where did you get it?”

      The man mentioned a name.

      “Find out where it came from. I demand an answer next time I see you, you understand? Take this monstrosity with you and bury it.”

      The story, as I can best reconstruct it, is that a poacher had shot and killed a German soldier, cut up usable parts of his body, and distributed them through the underground food network. It is likely that some less enlightened -- or less finicky -- end-users dined on their gruesome ration that week.

      My father later told me that he would have “beaten the poacher unconscious” had he run into him.

      Something my old friend Max said thirty years later gave this incident fresh metaphorical poignancy. Max kept large land crabs in a cistern in the lush garden behind his house in Barbados. He used them for bait and fed them scraps of fish he’d caught earlier in the day.

      “It gives the crabs a chance to get even -- in advance,” Max had remarked without a trace of sarcasm.

      *

      Attacks on German soldiers were swiftly countered with public executions. Staged to set an example and deter further aggression against the occupier, these grisly pageants also palliated the enemy’s frustration while satisfying their need for vengeance. One morning, I recall, ten men, eight of them veterans of the First World War, were dragged to the village square, lined up against the church wall and shot to avenge the murder of a German officer who’d been screwing the baker’s daughter. I saw them crumple, lifeless, on the cobbled sidewalk. Their duty done, ten pink-faced young men barely out of their teens placed their rifles on their shoulders, spun on their heels and marched away, single file, expressionless, robot-like in their mustard-brown uniforms. I remember staring at the pitiful assemblage of inert, scrunched bodies, blood oozing from their open mouths, their eyes staring in the void, like the eyes of a doll. I also remember telling myself over and over that I’d been treated to a grotesque but otherwise harmless spectacle, a dramatization of unimaginable realism, mere cinema. It began to rain and a steady downpour washed away the blood as onlookers scattered and dissolved in a gray sulfur-laden mist.

      The baker’s daughter survived the war only to have her head shaved in a public orgy of bestiality and later beaten to death by exultant “freedom fighters,” many of whom had screwed France to the bone when nobody looked.

      *

      Responding to German bombardments, Allied air forces began attacking German cities. The first raid on Lübeck in March 1942 gave the enemy a foretaste of the infernos that would engulf Berlin, Dresden, Hamburg, Frankfurt and Munich during the next two years. Wave after wave, thousands of planes dropped their deadly cargo in “saturation bombing” runs that flattened most of Germany’s urban centers. American planes released nearly one million tons of bombs over Europe. The British dropped well over a quarter of a million tons of high explosives.

      In France, the first major Allied raid killed 600 and wounded 1,500 civilians in and around the Renault factory. A second expedition in 1943 over Longchamps killed 400 and wounded 500. Allied planes then attacked seaports and industrial centers. The bombardment of Nantes, an important harbor on the Atlantic, killed 1,200 civilians when several bombs struck, “by mistake,” an entire neighborhood. In Toulon, on the Mediterranean, 450 civilians were killed. Preceding and accompanying the Allied landings, American raids on Lyon, Marseille and the Paris region claimed an additional 2,000 lives.

      French reaction to the bombings was a function of political conviction and varied, depending on the damage the bombs inflicted. Reassurances and impassioned exhortations by armchair stoics did little to comfort the victims. For the parents and children of the thousands pulverized by direct hits or reduced to pulp under tons of stone and concrete, knowing that the bombs came from the “liberators” was of very little consolation.

      Resentment against the raids was not limited to collaborators, Nazi sympathizers or communists. Expressing consternation and bitterness to his handlers in London, a key Résistance chieftain, characterized as “moronic and criminal” bombardments that “exterminated Frenchmen by the hundreds but failed to meet the Allies’ military