54. Women At War 2: The Schoolteacher (Berthe Auroy)

by Diana S. |
Berthe Auroy

Why is it that knowing how to remain alone in Paris for a year in a miserable room teaches a man more than a hundred literary salons and forty years’ experience of ‘Parisian life’?

― Albert Camus, diary entry, 1940

It’s the continuation of my new miniseries on a subject extremely near and dear to my heart: Women In War! For the next few weeks I’ll be focusing on the experiences of women in France during World War II: fighting the resistance, collaborating with the Nazis, keeping children alive against the odds, and trying to figure out the right way to live in a world that seemed upside down. The idea of this series first took shape before I even began this podcast, and I’m thrilled to bring it to you now.

Picking up where my previous episode left off, we’re following the return of the Exodus to Paris, and the beginning of a new, uncanny kind of existence: Occupation. 

Episode 54: “Women At War 2: The Schoolteacher (Berthe Auroy)”

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Berthe Auroy

There isn’t much about Berthe besides her diary itself. What there is exists mostly in the Caen Memorial museum:

Berthe Auroy Diary

 

Berthe Auroy passage
Passages from Berthe Auroy’s diary

Transcript

Bienvenue and welcome back to the Land of Desire. I’m your host, Diana. Before I dive into our new episode, a bit of important housekeeping – I offer listeners two ways to support the show, by contributing on Patreon or by signing up for a paid newsletter on Substack. These are two different websites, and contributing money on Patreon will not mean you receive a paid subscription on Substack. I think this is confusing for everyone, so I’m going to take away the $5 tier on Patreon. If you’re already subscribing at the $5 level, I’ll email you personally to help! Keep an eye on your inbox. In the meantime, if you’re interested in receiving the monthly newsletter, please make sure you sign up at thelandofdesire dot substack dot com. Thanks!
 
This week we’re continuing our series “Women At War”, focusing on the experiences of women during the German occupation of Paris during World War II. In each episode, I’m focusing on a specific woman’s journey, to see how she navigated the twists and turns of such a strange, uncanny, dangerous experience. Last week, we followed along with a schoolgirl as she and her mother and four out of every five Parisians hit the road to escape the Germany army, culminating in a French surrender. This week, we pick up where her story left off, as a stunned population slowly returns home and settles into a new, unfamiliar world.
 
 
In June 1940, the famous songwriter Oscar Hammerstein II sat down at his piano, unable to focus. He was supposed to be working on a new musical called Sunny River, set in New Orleans during the 19th century, but his mind was elsewhere. Earlier that afternoon, Oscar heard the dreadful news over the radio: Paris had fallen. Oscar had first visited the beautiful city in 1906, when his father toured the continent looking for new vaudeville acts. He’d returned over and over again, falling in love with Parisian girls and Parisian streets. At the age of 17, Oscar was so intimidated by the flirtations of a beautiful Parisian girl that he got up from his sidewalk cafe table and ran away. Now, the beautiful Parisian girls he remembered so fondly were hiking down dusty roads in their finest clothes, ducking underneath trees to avoid the strafing bullets of German planes overhead. Despite America’s official neutrality in 1940, Oscar was leading the fight against Nazis, having founded the Anti-Nazi League in Hollywood to encourage his countrymen to pay attention to what was happening overseas. How could Oscar focus on old-timey bayou ballads at a time like this? On June 10, 1940, Oscar Hammerstein II did something extraordinary: for one of the only times in his entire career, a career which spanned 850 songs, he wrote a song for himself. It had nothing to do with Sunny River, nothing to do with any play at all, it was simply an attempt to capture his feelings at a historic moment. That week, he called his writing partner, Jerome Kern, and read his lyrics over the phone. By the end of the year, his song was a sensation, and radios all around the world were broadcasting Oscar’s heartfelt tribute to a city under siege:
 
[INSERT “The Last Time I Saw Paris” SNIPPET]
 
Occupied Paris was a unique, in-between state, one which is almost impossible to conjure now. It is hard to look back, with modern hindsight, and remember that no one knew when the Occupation would end – or whether the Germans would ever leave. Everything must be evaluated through this lens of uncertainty. What constituted collaboration and what constituted survival? Was it collaborating to cooperate with a Nazi government after the first thirty days? What about the first 300 days? What about the first 1000 days? How would you or I behave if we didn’t know how the war would turn out? What would we do to protect ourselves? What would we do to protect our children?
 
The Occupation was a phenomenon mostly navigated and experienced by women, who faced the challenge of keeping not only themselves safe, but their loved ones, too. France’s men were in prisoner-of-war camps, injured, killed in action, or making their way to the Free French or the Allied forces. French women found themselves responsible not only for their own safety, but for the safety of young children and elderly relatives and neighbors. It’s one thing to risk your own life to fight for a cause – and many young women without dependents were willing to do so – but would you risk the life of your children? What about your mother? What would you be willing to do to keep them hidden? What would you be willing to do to keep them fed? These weren’t hypothetical questions, they were concrete realities, realities which began to set in almost immediately after the Fall of Paris. In this episode, I want to focus on an experience which is strangely overlooked in most WWII literature: unheroic, everyday life under the Occupation. 
 
Historians seem strangely incurious about such a subject. One historian noted in 1961 that nearly all the work of the past 15 years “does not concern itself with the difficulties of daily life for the man in the street in Occupied Paris. History is lived we know, not only by ministers, generals, bankers and explorers, but also by shopkeepers, butchers, gossips, railway workers, housewives and children…Why not write not only about the blood stained adventures along the routes of the Exodus but also about the difficulties of buying bread each day and the battles to find enough food to live on?” Luckily, the work of the past 20 years – especially a lot of work by female academics – is beginning to shed new light on this unique experience.
 
Who was the average Occupied Parisian? First of all, she was a woman. Statistically speaking, she wasn’t in the Résistance, at least not for most of the war, and she wasn’t gleefully collaborating with the Germans, but rather somewhere in between. She was middle class, and responsible for 2-3 children, and usually at least one set of elderly parents. Let us leave aside the question of extraordinary bravery or exceptional villainry. Let us choose someone without vast reserves of wealth and influence, someone who spent the war just trying to keep their head down and get by. Let us choose someone like Berthe Auroy.
 
In the summer of 1940, Berthe Auroy was counting down the days to retirement. At the age of 60, Berthe was wrapping up a long teaching career in Chartres. Berthe – and her students – were new to Chartres. For the past 20 years, Berthe and her older sister, Jeanne, had taught at well-to-do local schools in Paris. Following the outbreak of war, however, the sisters’ students had been evacuated to the countryside, and where the students went, Berthe and Jeanne followed. Berthe and Jeanne rented a small cottage in a village just outside Chartres, where they planned to spend a few more weeks finishing out the schoolyear, perhaps a few weeks enjoying the country air, before returning to their homes in Paris to begin their new lives in retirement. Like the rest of the country, however, Berthe was caught by surprise at the sudden collapse of the French army, and before long, the residents of Chartres, like their compatriots in Paris, began to hit the road.
 
On June 10th, Berthe’s friends offered to give her and her sister a ride out of town. “The hour of escape is tolling,” she admitted, but she turned down the offer. She wanted to wrap up her career properly. “I’m going to go to Chartres on my last day of class, which will probably be the last day of my career, as well. It is almost moving. It is certain they will close the school today. Chartres emptied out yesterday.” Stuffing herself on a abnormally crowded train, Berthe made her regular commute from the cottage in the village into downtown Chartres. When she arrived at the school, she discovered it was already closed “for the summer break” – in other words, for the German army. With no class to attend to, Berthe walked around Chartres in a daze, unsure where to go. The train home never arrived. “I was caught, like a mouse in a mousetrap.” Like so many elderly women that week, Berthe resolved to make it back to her cottage on foot, a distance of nearly 15 miles. Wandering back to her school for the last time, she grabbed a few personal belongings from her classroom and then, she noticed a stack of composition books in a supply closet. On an impulse, she grabbed the stack of notebooks and added them to her bag, knowing that this would be a day worth recording. On her way out, Berthe ran into the school principal. Upon hearing Berthe’s plans to hitchhike, she insisted that Berthe stay the night. She barely slept, tossing and turning, listening to sounds of refugees pouring through the streets, and the sounds of their babies crying long into the night. On the night of June 10, 1940, Berthe opened one of the composition books and began writing down the events of the day. She would continue to record her day-to-day life for the entire duration of the war. 
 
A few days later, Berthe finally found a train and climbed aboard, without a suitcase, without any food, without a place to sit, and wearing, like all respectable women her age, a deeply uncomfortable girdle. Switching trains, Berthe travelled the last leg of her journey without a ticket. Like the conscientious bourgoise she was, Berthe felt guilty about fare hopping, but she reassured herself that even if she’d wanted to, no conductors were around to sell her a proper ticket. For days and days, Berthe hopped trains and buses, until finally, on June 15th, after four days of traveling, Berthe was reunited with her sister, and they traveled together to the house of an acquaintance in Moulin. “I let myself fall into an armchair, all energy spent to recount the story of my painful journey. I asked only for a little warm soup if there was any left and some water, just water to drink. Madame made up a bed and with real delight, I took off all my clothes which I had been wearing for the last four days. The sheets were clean, the silence exquisite.”
 
Before long, however, the two sisters were confronted with an uncomfortable reality. For the millions of French men and women who hit the road, they now faced nothing but resentment at their destination. “It is obvious that we are an embarrassment in the house. This is certainly not the cordial, intimate welcome I had expected.” All across the country, rural French families treated desperate refugees with disdain – these were intruders, more mouths to feed in uncertain times. Within a week, the German army had rolled into Moulin as well. Like so many Parisians, Berthe’s first glimpse of a German soldier happened not in Paris, but in the place she’d fled to in the Exodus. From the cellar of her resentful host, Berthe could hear the sounds of the German motorcycles and boots overhead. “The Germans have entered Moulins. All night we heard the trepidation of the engines…An uninterrupted flood of tanks, armored cars, cannons, trucks, motorcycles filing by with a hellish noise and at a fearful speed…The soldiers riding them stand proudly, arms crossed as fierce victors…I have just realized the totality of our poor country’s defeat. I feel crushed by these tanks.” Over the course of the next week, the German army ransacked Moulin, leaving nothing for Berthe and Jeanne, trying to gather the necessary elements of daily life in their new town. In a chilling preview of the years to come, Berthe wrote of the impossibility of shopping. “The Germans beat us to the lingerie shops. They’ve captured the most beautiful finery, the silk pajamas. The saleswomen show a revolting eagerness.” Resented by their host, alienated from their friends, intimidated by the occupying soldiers, miles away from their homes and belongings, the situation on the road had become “untenable.” And so, like most of the millions of men and women of the great French Exodus of 1940, Berthe and her sister had no choice but to return home, to an uncertain, unsteady, unfamiliar Occupied Paris.
At first, there was only silence. The city of Paris stood shell-shocked, the streets empty of cars, the buildings empty of people. As the Germans rolled into the city, they heard no noises except their own. Only 20% of Parisians had stayed behind during the Exodus, and now even their numbers were shrinking. By the end of June 14th, the day the Germans first rolled into Paris, no fewer than 16 Parisians had committed suicide. Even the birds were silent, choked to death by the burning archives and fuel depots the French government had left as it fled to the spa town of Vichy. On June 28th, Adolf Hilter conducted his famous tour of Paris, as covered in episode 26 of this podcast, “A Visit from Hitler”. The sculptor Arno Breker, who accompanied Hitler on his whirlwind tour, remembers the astonishing contrast between the conquered city before him and the bustling Paris he’d known in his youth. “Paris seemed dead. Not a soul. Groups of buildings that life seemed to have abandoned passed by, ghost-like and unreal.”
 
For the last two weeks, the streets of Paris had been jammed with cars, beeping their horns, while the Parisians inside shouted to one another over the crush of noise. Now, the Germans found themselves surrounded by an empty capital. Even while the German front line brought chaos and noise to the refugee-packed countryside, soldiers stationed in the capital heard nothing but unnerving silence. For those first few days, the Germans seemed to have Paris to themselves, and they wasted no time taking advantage of the opportunity. 70-80% of the population of Paris had hit the road alongside Elisabeth Kaufmann and her mother, Berthe Auroy and her sister. Over the next few weeks, once the initial shockwaves passed and the reality of Occupation set in, the Exodus would slowly ebb, and its participants would straggle back into the capital, dazed and bewildered. They were traumatized by their journeys, and eager to return to daily life as they remembered it. As one participant in the Exodus recalled, “At the time, we were so glad to get home and to get on with our lives, we just wanted to forget about it. We were home safe and sound and that was the end of it.” The Paris they left was not the Paris to which they now returned. Everything – from the streets to the apartments to the grocery stores to the sidewalks – had been changed while they were gone. As Berthe, her sister, and the millions of men and women who had joined them on the road returned, they found themselves unwilling participants in a great experiment: how does one live in an occupied city? How does one navigate in a home that is not their own?
 
—
 
The first German plunder was shelter. Right at the start, the Germans began requisitioning the city’s luxury hotels to serve as the headquarters of their armed forces and other critical departments. After moving in, the Germans promptly constructed hideous concrete barricades and fortresses in front of the elegant façades. Once offices spaces had been secured, the Germans set about looking for living quarters. At this moment, Parisians had a chilling realization:
 
“They knew where everything was.” As was immediately obvious to the dumbfounded locals, the German army had spent months preparing for the occupation of Paris, studying city maps and architectural blueprints. It was one thing to know where to find Paris’s premier hotels were located – that was, after all, the point – but as the Germans began to secure living quarters for their officers and high-ranking officials, it became clear just how much research they’d done. The Germans knew, with the fluency of the natives, the layout of the subway tunnels, the neighborhoods, the sewers, even the catacombs. They knew where to find the most famous bakeries and the most infamous brothels. The Germans had studied which families lived in which buildings in which neighborhoods, especially if those families were Jewish. Those Jewish families found themselves evicted from their homes and stripped of their possessions, without any warning, forced to flee to the countryside or another country. Many of those families would consider themselves lucky for leaving so early.
 
Meanwhile, on the other side of town, life wasn’t much better for the poor and wretched of Paris, either. 80 years earlier, Baron von Haussmann had evicted entire neighborhoods in order to raze them and build new apartment buildings in their place. The poorest evictees gathered together outside the city limits, constructing ersatz shantytowns. Now, the Germans promptly set to work razing those shantytowns to the ground Where would the poor migrate next? The Germans were perfectly happy to offer accommodations – in a munitions factory, or a work camp.
 
The first casualty of the German occupation was the flaneur – the famous Parisian who walks for the pleasure of walking. First, the flaneur found himself restricted in space. Wherever the Germans set up camp, the French were soon prohibited. In the grands boulevards in the center of Paris, where the German headquarters had set up their offices, even bicycles were banned. The very same route which Elisabeth Kaufmann had pedaled through just a few weeks earlier was now empty of everyone except German soldiers. Entire sections of the city were off-limits to the people who lived there. Next, the flaneur found himself restricted in time, courtesy of a new curfew extending from 10 PM until 5 AM. Or perhaps I should say 11 PM to 4 AM? The Germans moved the clocks of Paris forward an hour to match the time in Berlin. This meant everyone had more daylight hours before the curfew set in – and as a bonus, it meant everyone was alienated and confused. In any effect, the Parisians hardly needed a curfew. No one wanted to move around after sunset anymore, because the City of Light had been plunged into darkness. No streetlights, no headlights, and electricity that continuously flickered in and out, meant Parisians found themselves fumbling around blind on a regular basis. Before long, the most precious household item for any Parisian was a reliable flashlight. 
 
It was to this dark, hemmed in Paris that Berthe returned a few weeks after the Exodus. On July 6th, Berthe and Jeanne stepped off a train. The two elderly women had spent the trip in a cattle car, standing up most of the way or leaning against their battered luggage, but at least they were finally home. Berthe walked up familiar hills until she reached the rue Lepic, nestled in the maze of Montmartre. Her sister Jeanne lived a few hundred yards away. Berthe opened the door and saw, to her relief, that her apartment was just as she’d left it. After a bewildering, disorienting month of panic and flight, Berthe was surrounded by the familiar again. “It seems to me,” she wrote in her journal that night, “that I have woken up from a terrible dream.” 
 
In fact, Berthe was simply lucky: lucky to be a Parisian, living in a city Hitler respected and wished to preserve, intact. Others were not so lucky. As Berthe and Jeanne resettled into their Parisian homes, they traveled back and forth to the tiny village outside of Chartres, where they’d been sharing a cottage, in order to collect the things they’d moved there during the summer and to say goodbye to the friends they’d made in the countryside. They found a stunning landscape, subjected to the full force of the German blitzkrieg. “It’s a vision of hell.” Berthe wrote. “Twisted, burned cars lie on the side of a broken road. Every few miles, wooden crosses mark hastily dug graves. The graves are topped with objects found nearby, to help research the person’s identity some later day: a purse, a photo, a letter, a shoe. We are moving forward, dumb with horror.” While the sister’s country cottage had not been bombed, it had been looted and ransacked during the weeks they’d been on the road. Sifting through the remains of their life in the country, Berthe and Jeanne packed up what few belongings were still intact, attended the village’s funeral for those killed in the German invasion, and returned to Paris for good. Putting the last horrible month behind her, Berthe set her mind to a new task: now that she was fully retired, it was time for Berthe to begin building her new life. Her first challenge was simple, but dire: as an unmarried, aging retiree, how would Berthe get what she needed to survive the winter?
 
Writing for a collaborationist newspaper, the writer Colette had three pieces of advice for Parisian women trying to survive the war: “lie low, stay home as much as possible, and find food.” Simple enough when you’re Colette – she lived right above the legendary Grand Vefour, where she was on such good terms with the manager that he’d send plates of black-market goodies upstairs as a courtesy. For the rest of the women in Paris, grocery shopping transformed from a straightforward daily errand to a deadly game of cat-and-mouse. “In Paris, the situation is incredibly difficult,” Berthe wrote. “The market in the rue Lepic, which used to have so much, now has so very little.”
 
There were two reasons Germany occupied France instead of bombing it to smithereens: they wanted to look civilized to the rest of the world, and they wanted to fatten up German soldiers on French food. Like Belgium, France would be a great bread basket for the German army, and therefore the French would be largely cut off from their own food supply. Rations were imposed immediately, and they couldn’t have come at a worse time. 1940 was a terrible year for French farmers: there hadn’t been enough rain in the spring, there hadn’t been enough men in the summer, and so there wasn’t going to be enough food in the fall. Meat, milk, potatoes, sugar beets and wheat yields were all shockingly low. But whatever food there was had to be reported to the authorities, who would redistribute French food according to their own hierarchy, and at the top of that hierarchy were the Germans.
 
As Lizzie Collingham writes in her incredible book, The Taste of War, “Germany exported wartime hunger to the countries it occupied.” If French farmers reported accurate crop yields to the authorities, most of those foods would end up in German stomachs. It wasn’t just a matter of rations – the exchange rate between the franc and the mark was so artificially distorted that German soldiers were frequently seen staggering out of stores with all the food they could carry. 
 
German soldiers, then German workers, then other Germans, then French employees working in occupied munitions factories, then French women with children, then French civilians without children, then prisoners of war and finally, at the bottom of the heap, were the Jews. As an elderly unmarried woman without children, Berthe’s official rations were impossibly small. By September 1940, the basic ration provided 1,325 calories per day, and most of those calories are empty. 350 grams of bread, or about one and a half baguettes, provided enough carbohydrates to get people through the day, but what about real nutrition? The ration provided 50 grams of cheese – that’s 1.5 ounces, or about 2 thin slices, like you might put on a sandwich – and those two slices had to last a whole week. The ration allowed 300 grams of meat per week, or about 1 small serving of protein per day. This is assuming you can even acquire your rations, which was no guarantee. Like the other women in her street, Berthe made her way down to the market only to stand in line for hours, during which time the vendor would often run out of food – or at least say that they had. The situation was intolerable. As one shopkeeper, standing in front of her empty shelves, remarked in 1941, “We have returned to a scene of famine, the kind seen 200 years ago.” Over and over again, historians read tirades from French women who are exhausted, hangry, and fed up with the marketplace. Riots broke out. More than one female member of the Résistance was recruited straight from the bread lines. Women’s diaries reveal an obsession with food, counting the lines they stand in and for what and with what results, over and over again. In one example, a Parisian woman spent her morning making six trips to different stores, spending four and a half hours in line, and had nothing to show for any of it. French farmers were going broke, and French citizens were going hungry, so it didn’t take long for new channels to spring up, rediverting food away from German eyes and into hidden cupboards. Selling produce on the black market helped French farmers earn more money and gave the French a fighting chance at their own groceries, but the black market exaggerated the social inequity of French society even further. As Collingham notes, “urban office workers, clerks, civil servants and the old suffered disproportionately as they lacked the cash or the luxury goods to barter for supplementary food.” Even the legitimate lines had social inequality baked right in – mothers could send their children to stand in line for food while they went off to work. Women who lived alone, like Berthe, had to make a terrible choice every day: food or money? food or money? Again, we can picture Colette, rich and famous, literally waiting for black market steak au poivre to arrive unannounced at her apartment, while Berthe Auroy, an elderly, unmarried, retired woman without children has to use every social connection she has to get her hands on an orange. “No more potatoes,” she writes in her diary, “no more dried vegetables, butter, eggs, cheese, meat, fish. A total absence of coffee, cooking oil, and soap.” Before long, even Parisians took matters into their own hands, and began hiding rabbits and chickens in their apartments. “One day,” Blanche recalled in her diary, “I was giving a lesson in a smart apartment on the rue Blanche when suddenly a resounding ‘cock-a-doodle-do’ sounded from the room next door. A rooster and a hen had been caged under the sink for over a month, and the poor old hen was still able to lay an egg in this sorry excuse for a hen house. Lots of top-floor maids’ rooms were home to rabbits and poultry, which were killed on the days when it was impossible to find any meat to buy.”
 
The food rations would only get worse as the war went on. Each year, Germany tried to squeeze more and more of the French harvest for its soldiers. In 1942, Hermann Goring met with the administrators of the Occupied territory to demand more food. “As far as France is concerned, i am positive that its soil is not cultivated to the maximum…and also, the French stuff themselves to a shameful extent…Collaboration from the French I see in one way only: let them deliver as much as they can.” The administrators balked at Goring’s demand: he wanted 15 to 20 percent of all the wheat, meat and butter in France. With housewives rioting in the streets of Paris, the Occupying forces were terrified of the repercussions of Goring’s orders. Goring roared abck, “God knows, you are not sent out there to work for the welfare of the people in your charge, but to get the utmost out of them, so that the German people can live!” Eventually, the administrators were able to talk Goring out of his proposal for other reasons, but his point was clear. As they returned to their territories, Goring’s words rang in their ears: “It makes no difference to me in this connection if you say that your people will starve. Let them do so, as long as no German collapses from hunger.” By 1943, public health officials in France were begging for adjustments to the ration, and the Resistance was beginning to recruit members from housewives on the brink of a breakdown in the grocery lines. By 1944, France produced only 2/3 of the food it produced before the war, and when you factored out the amount taken by the Germans, French citizens had access to half the amount of food available in 1938. The mortality rate among French citizens rose by 12% during the course of the war,  due mostly to malnutrition and the diseases which follow.
 
While food rations were by far the most consequential, German rations extended to every facet of French life. Those who had miraculously maintained possession of their cars couldn’t drive them anyway – gasoline was rationed. Those who were unaffected by one ration might find themselves paralyzed by another. In the countryside, farmers and their families spent the war relatively well-fed, scarcely affected by rationing, but they were desperate to get their hands on enough clothing to make it through cold rural winters. In the cities, hungry women were nevertheless able to keep up with fashion trends in their own ways. Parisians learned to transform old-fashioned clothing into something more stylish, while their well-fed compatriots hunted like truffle pigs through wheatfields, looking for the silk parachutes of British soldiers, which might be turned into new lingerie, blouses, or even wedding dresses. By the middle of the war, anyone with connections to the countryside bartered what they had for what they could. As the war went on, Berthe realized her time in the countryside before the war could come in handy. She travelled back to the village where she and her sister had lived in 1940, and bartered her knitting wool for tins of food and even an incredibly precious jar of honey. “It represented a bit of security for the difficult days ahead.” By 1942, grocery queueing had its own peculiar soundtrack: the sound of Parisiennes clop-clopping down to the market in their wooden-soled shoes, no longer able to get their hands on leather or rubber. The search for clothing and shoes is especially exhausting to mothers, trying to keep pace with their growing children. Many shoemakers created an exchange system for children’s shoes, so women could return those her child had outgrown for a bigger pair, and the smaller pair could be given to a younger child. In one particularly infuriating decree, French mothers were given scratchy black wool to make clothing for their fussy infants. Meanwhile, as Berthe notes bitterly, “gray uniforms are everywhere. They come out of shops, their arms filled with packages.” No matter what French women were shopping for, the trip was exhausting, humiliating and often fruitless, but partaking in the ritual was the key to survival. As Berthe noted in her diary, “Despite the food shortages, everybody is still hoping to get in some provisions for the terrible winter which has been officially forecast.”
 
And a terrible winter it turned out to be. Coal was rationed at 50 kilos a month. Berthe had stockpiled as much as she could, but it wouldn’t be nearly enough to get her through a winter which set in early. “How,” she wrote, “are you supposed to heat yourself and take a bath?” Berthe’s neighbor came to the rescue – another man in her building acquired large lumps of coal, broke it into chunks and distributed the pieces to needy neighbors like Berthe. That winter, she broke her coal lumps into smaller and smaller pieces, filling her kitchen with black dust. Like so many Parisians, Berthe spent the winter of 1940 huddled in front of her stove:
 
“In order not to lose any heat, I live exclusively in my kitchen. I look like an Eskimo in her hut, the only island of warmth in this Spitzberg that is the apartment. The enemy is there, who watches me behind the door in order to pinch and bite me….Dressing, undressing, toilette, meals, visits, correspondence, etc., everything happens in the kitchen. At night, I jump into my bed, heated with hot water bottles…in order to escape from the enemy, which wants to bite my nose and the nape of my neck.”
 
It was a miserable winter, with the temperature dropping below freezing at least sixty times. Berthe tried to go shopping, but there was nothing left except long lines of freezing people. Berthe created a special outfit just for wintertime queuing: “Two of three layers of woollen garments, a small scarf pointing out from under my cape. My head wrapped in a woollen hood. Thick knitted stockings, so thick in fact that they stay up on their own…best of all is my big grey shawl with pink stripes.” Perhaps the worst indignity of all was having to stand in line for hours, staring into the windows of restaurants filled with rich Parisians and Germans, stuffing themselves on black market delights. As one fashionable Parisian recounted after attending a fancy dinner, “The finest of wines are flowing. The rich are triumphant in the New Order. With money, lots of money, you can always eat until you’re fit to burst, while housewives queue for hours in the snow to get a slice of rutabaga.”
 
By the time the winter passed, Parisians in the spring of 1941 found themselves facing two conditions, equally awful to contemplate: having spent whatever funds they had on coal and fire and winter rations, everyone was now broke. Worse yet, after four months of hibernation in front of a desperate little kitchen stove, everyone was bored.
 
For the past few months, cooped up in their apartments, these cold city-dwellers had nothing to take their minds off their misery. The radio was a joke – all the radio stations had been shut down and replaced by the Nazi’s own station, Radio-Paris. The only reason to bother was the hope that you might catch an illicit broadcast from the world outside. “With regards to Radio Paris,” Berthe wrote bitterly, “everybody knows that Radio Paris lies. Radio Paris is German..when the broadcasts from London or from Boston start, the radio transforms itself into a drum…It is very hard to discern the words under the Germans jamming the frequency. Sometimes you have to give up. But it is such a reassurance to hear the English or American voices.” At least there was the slight chance of hearing a snippet of the BBC or Free French radio stations – there was no similar breakthrough in the press. In 1939, Parisians had at their disposal over 200 daily newspapers. By the winter of 1940 they had four, and all of them were run by Nazis. With dwindling heat and unreliable electricity, most restaurants and cafés simply closed down for the winter. By the time spring arrived, many of them stayed that way. Of course, there was always entertainment for the rich and famous – the Ritz was never short on champagne – but most everyday Parisians lived tiny lives inside a shut-down city. 
 
The German soldiers, excited to be stationed in gay, glittering Paris, were shocked by what they found, especially if they’d visited Paris before the war. The famous writer Ernst Junger, who’d spent his 20s living a bohemian life in Paris, couldn’t believe the transformation he saw in the city’s nightlife and its cultural landmarks. 
 
“The city…still has its charm, but it is a secret, sad charm…In the richer quarters, around the Place de l’Etoile, for instance, one only sees closed shutters. The same is true for the most elegant businesses and mansions. In the Rue de la Paix, a Luftwaffe lieutenant affirms: “Good God! Everything is closed here!” The [Place de la concorde], the Champs-Elysees without cars or buses is almost incomprehensible. The Louvre, emptied for the most part except for some large, ancient statuary, the Cluny museum closed; at the Carnavalet, where I went to celebrate my return, half of its contents are gone, and everything that remains is in impossible disorder…The theaters are not well heated and only half full. Attendance is split between Wehrmacht soldiers and Parisians.”
 
Even if a café or a theater or a museum were open, most Parisians figured it wasn’t worth their life to attend. Hitler wasn’t interested in bombing Paris, but there was still a war going on outside the city limits, and sometimes the war broke through. One night, an RAF bomber crashed into the enormous department store across the street from the Louvre, burning down half the store. The next morning, the bodies of the pilot and his crew were found: on the roof of the Louvre itself.
 
In Berthe’s neighborhood, the lights stayed on – the better to entertain German soldiers. “Every day, around 5 PM, many trucks filled with soldiers park in front of the Moulin de la Galette.” Long before the war, Germans viewed France as a debaucherous country, full of illicit behavior and lewd activity, and once the Occupation began, they couldn’t wait to join in. The same exchange rate that helped Germans pay for groceries also helped them pay for escorts and dinners with beautiful cabaret dancers. Many of the German soldiers were 17 year old country boys and they prioritized their free time exactly the way you’d imagine. As one soldier from Hamburg wrote in his diary, “Ah, soldiers. They always find a brothel more readily than a church.” Sharp eared listeners will note that I seem to be dissolving the boundaries between brothels and cabarets – but this is exactly what Nazis seemed to do. While rich Parisian women fled the city, and middle class women like Berthe boarded themselves up in their apartments, only emerging from hibernation to speak with their neighbors, poor women in Paris didn’t have such a luxury. Women who had to work to make a living had few options when German soldiers showed up. Ordinary Parisians might look the other way when a woman allowed German soldiers to buy bread from her bakery, but they were appalled to see Parisian cabarets turning on their dazzling lights for Nazis while the rest of the city huddled together around stoves in the dark. Then again, it was often the Germans themselves turning on the lights – the Occupying Army officially ran at least 30 brothels in Paris. There’s an unwillingness to distinguish between the position of the madams and the cabaret owners, who were often powerful and well-connected, and the position of the women who worked for them. Prostitutes were extremely vulnerable, and anyone suspected of working in an illegal brothel, or of passing on venereal disease, could be sent off to a concentration camp, where they would often be forced to continue providing their services to German officers for free. If Berthe felt like her neighborhood was overrun with Nazis, the Nazis themselves agreed. As one German officer reported to his superiors, “The nastiest dance clubs with French whores of the worst sort in Montmartre and elsewhere are overfilled with German soldiers, whose behavior is often fully consistent with the environment.” By August 1941, the commandant of the occupation forces issued new orders that German soldiers ought to avoid Montmartre altogether, for their reputation and personal safety. It was the locals who had to fear for their safety, however: the historian Birgit Beck found at least 46 instances wherein the German army convicted their own soldiers of rape in France, to say nothing of the incidents which Germany declined to investigate. Most French women who had the means to do so went to great lengths to avoid contact with German soldiers. As one German soldier wrote home in June 1941, “In a quarter of an hour I saw so many young, elegant women, that I could have wished to be back in the dunes like last winter, where there’s no life. I slunk back to my quarters, wet with sweat in my heavy boots and my thick grey rags, like someone who’s been terribly beaten. The French women wore flowered summer dresses and big straw hats. They walked past us soldiers as if we were a wall.” But if the occasional German soldier found himself wishing for female companionship, it was nothing compared to the loneliness of the locals. 
 
In 1943, a young Albert Camus, was finishing up the first major draft of his novel The Plague. Like Berthe Auroy, Camus experienced World War II as a period of profound loneliness. As he recorded in his diary just before the Fall of France, “The world has become merely an unknown landscape where my heart can lean on nothing.” By the middle of the war, recovering his health far from the capital, Camus outlined the story of a plague which isolates a town from the outside world, and changes life into a dreamlike state of torpor and isolation.
 
“The plague forced inactivity on our townsfolk, limiting their movements to the same dull round inside the town, and throwing them, day after day, on the illusive solace of their memories. For in their aimless walks they kept on coming back to the same streets and usually, owing to the smallness of the town, these were streets in which, in happier days, they had walked with those who now were absent.”
 
Life for Parisians during the Occupation was defined by absence and loss: after all, most of those left in the capital were wives and children with fathers and sons fighting, fleeing, or imprisoned. Hungry and lonely and anxious, Occupied French citizens often turned on one another, and nobody was above suspicion. The most notorious example were the wives of prisoners of war. Before the Fall of France, those women had been praised for their courage and forebearance. Now, locals believed they were untrustworthy. By 1942, so many people suspected these women of turning to prostitution that the Vichy government passed a law against adultery which contained special penalties for prisoners’ wives. But they were hardly the only Parisians caught up in the paranoia of the Occupation – neighbors were accused of hoarding precious resources, young women were accused of sleeping with the enemy, even old women like Berthe were thought to be stealing food from the mouths of children. She wrote, “People now queue in silence. This general mistrust has a paralysing effect on me.” It was hard to know who to trust, so many Parisians simply began to retreat, little by little, from society. The same way that reduced coal supplies meant Parisians lived within a single room of their apartment during the winter, reduced social ties meant Parisians rarely left their own neighborhoods. Life on the hill of Montmartre was even more isolated. Berthe felt a world away from those living on the Left Bank or the Champs Elysees. Berthe found comfort in her sister, Jeanne, living down the street, and in her diary, which transformed from an impulsive record of her experience of the Exodus into a lifeline to an absent friend.
 
A decade earlier 1931, Berthe Auroy began tutoring a young boy named Jaques. His father was Maurice Marechal, a famous cellist, and his mother was an American actress named Lois. Well-educated, athletic and full of feminist ideals, Lois was an irresistible companion. Before long, Lois and Berthe became close friends, and they spent many hours together discussing the arts and literature. In 1934, Bethe and Lois even traveled to New York together. In October 1940, shortly after Berthe and Jeanne returned to Paris after their long exodus, Lois decided to move back to the United States while she still had the chance. Berthe was devastated, and immediately decided to continue keeping her diary, so she could share her thoughts and feelings with Lois after the war. “Oh! How I miss Lois! She brought me a little light and joy every day!” It was for Lois that Berthe kept a record of her adventures at the grocery store, and it was for Lois that Berthe detailed her struggles to stay warm. With Lois in mind, Berthe snipped out newspaper clippings and recorded milestones. As Berthe’s social life grew smaller and smaller, even the imaginary company of Lois grew more and more critical. Halfway through the war, Berthe writes, “Finally, I found Lois! Or almost, since I had the unexpected joy of reading some of her letters. Maurice himself read them to me.” These letters, old and new, are the closest Berthe will get to her friend over the course of hostilities. Once, when she receives a letter from Louis describing the Christmas festivities in New York that year, Berthe thinks, “She has maintained her physical and moral equilibrium. I’m certain she could never understand the oppressive atmosphere in which we live. Maurice is so brave in the shrinking life he leads.” 
 
As the United States entered the war, as her Jewish neighbors began wearing yellow stars, as the Resistance grew, and the confidence of the occupying forces faltered, Berthe kept a record for her friend – even as her record became more and more dangerous. By the end of 1942, Berthe grew spooked, and dug a hole in the back garden. Just as she’d buried a box of precious silverware behind her country cottage outside Chartres, now Berthe buried a box of composition books that were too dangerous to be stored above ground. But that didn’t mean Berthe stopped writing to Lois. Instead of her large, compromising notebooks, Berthe began writing on scraps of paper, which she sewed into a velvet cushion. On and on, through the long, boring days of the Occupation, Berthe continued her record of the everyday trivialities and earth-shaking news of the world around her, even as that world grew smaller and smaller with each day. Unmarried, without children, separated by thousands of miles from her best friend, with only her sister to keep her company, Berthe’s Occupied world was one of isolation. It is in this context of misery that one moment stands out: April 20, 1944. That night, the Allies launched a bombing campaign on the suburbs of Paris and then, to everyone’s surprise, on Paris itself. Like most Parisians, Berthe took the bombing campaign in stride at first – another step closer to the end of the war, which seemed to be almost in sight. But all of a sudden, Berthe realized the bombs were now falling right over her head. The houses shook. The explosions rattled. Sacre-Coeur turned red. Berthe looked out the window to a sky on fire. At first, her occupation instincts kicked in: back to bed, stay in hibernation. Frozen with terror and cold, the 64 year old Berthe prepared to die alone in the dark. Then, in the middle of the cacophany of falling bombs and exploding streets and roaring planes, Berthe heard an unfamiliar sound. Her upstairs neighbors were knocking on her door. She let them in, and for hours, they sat in one another’s company as the world crashed down around them. “We huddled together,” Berthe wrote in her diary to Lois that night. “We felt better facing the danger together.”
 
Thanks for listening to the Land of Desire. I’m so excited to be producing this series at last, and next month’s episode is going to shine a spotlight on one of the most notorious women of the Occupation – but you’ll have to wait to find out which one! Until then, visit the show’s Facebook page, or sign up for the monthly newsletter on Substack. Thanks to everyone who has helped get the discussion going over on Substack – I have a bunch of cozy French murder mysteries on back order now, and I can’t wait to tuck into them as the weather gets cold! I also enjoyed photos of everyone’s rendition of chicken with mushrooms, bon appetit indeed! Thank you to everyone who supports the show, whether it’s on Patreon, Substack, saying hi on Facebook or simply dropping me a line through email! It’s a joy to hear from all of you. Which reminds me – if you’re the gentleman who listens to my show while working on his boat, I tried to write back to you but your email address got garbled somewhere along the way and I couldn’t send you a reply. Thank you for writing, though, your email was a treat! Until next time, au revoir!

Sources

The subject of women in wartime is especially overlooked, and so much amazing historical scholarship has come out even in recent years. I’ll be sharing my full reading list in the newsletter, but here are some of the most important sources for this week’s episode:

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