In Europe

sources speak of 9,000 policemen in total, but what is certain is that the SS could not have acted effectively without the assistance and organisational talent of the Parispolice. At the same time, this series of raids was almost certainly sabotaged by the police as well: the SS had hoped to make 25,000 arrests. Annette Kriegel, fifteen years old at the time, described the start of the round-up along her own street, the rue de Turenne: ‘I saw a policeman carrying suitcases in both hands and weeping. I will never forget the tears running down that rough, ruddy face, for you will agree with me that one rarely sees a policeman cry in public. He walked down the street, followed by a little group of children and old people, all carrying little bundles.’ Annette escaped, but did not know where to go. Finally she sat down on a park bench and waited: ‘It was on that bench that I left my childhood behind.’
    In Vichy and the surrounding countryside, the rounding up of Jews was a matter for the French themselves. In an enormous razzia held between 26–8 August, 1942, at least 10,000 policemen combed the woods and neighbouring mountains in search of runaway Polish and German Jews who had considered themselves safe in non-occupied France. In Marseilles, Lyons, Sète and Toulouse, too, the French police mounted large-scale raids.
    French cooperation in the deportations stood in stark contrast to the growing resistance in the country's Italian zone. In spring 1943, the Italian authorities in Valence, Chambéry and Annecy forbade the rounding up of Jews, both refugees and non-refugees, by French prefects. In Megève, the Fascist police chief blocked the arrests of 7,000 Jews. Under the watchful eye of the Italians, Nice actually became a blossoming Jewish centre. The refugees were issued their own identity cards, and the commander of the
carabinieri
announced that any French policeman who dared to touch a hair on their head would be arrested himself. In addition, on 21 March, 1943, the Italian occupation forces in France received an urgent personal missive from Mussolini: ‘The first priority is to bring to safety those Jews living in that part of French territory occupied by our troops, whether they be of Italian, French or any other nationality.’ The German and French authorities were enraged. As soon as the Italians withdrew in September 1943, huge razzias were held in the area they had occupied. Several thousand Jews were arrested, but the vast majority were able to escape into the mountains.

Chapter FORTY-THREE
Saint-Blimont
    ‘ WE FIND OURSELVES IN THE EXASPERATING SITUATION IN WHICH THE fate of France no longer depends on the French themselves,’ Marc Bloch wrote in summer 1940.
    It was a feeling he shared with many of his countrymen. ‘For my father, Vichy was synonymous with treason,’ Lucienne Gaillard, president of the Veterans of the Resistance in Picardy, told me. She was the daughter of André Gaillard, better known in the Resistance by his pseudonym ‘Léon’, watchman at the sugar beet processing plant in Saint-Blimont. He was a true French patriot, he abhorred all forms of collaboration. As soon as the surrender was signed he began, on his own at first, with small acts of defiance against the occupier: slogans on walls, the sabotage of machinery and transports. Later he and his comrades began attacking German outposts, mostly to obtain weapons. ‘They called my father and his friends terrorists and communists. But it was really a political mish-mash, they didn't belong to any political party,’ Lucienne Gaillard said.
    And so began the Resistance: as an ad hoc grass-roots movement of French men and women of every background, a guerrilla group comprised of enthusiastic amateurs. Soon they were receiving weapons from England and training from British undercover agents, yet they remained autonomous and self-willed. The communists hesitated at first, but after the German invasion of the Soviet Union they, too, joined the Resistance in numbers. Along with them came hundreds of thousands of refugees who often set up separate cells of their own, and quite frequently played a heroic role. In the south-western corner of the country the Spanish communists had their own 14th Corps, which had thirty-four guerrilla fighters by June 1944. The Poles ran their own intelligence service, theR2, an important factor in the struggle. Spaniards were the first to set up a Maquis group in the Ardèche, German