Paris after the Liberation 1944-1949

fugitives arrived from Mussolini’s Italy and the Balkan dictatorships; then Jews, left-wingers and liberals from Hitler’s Germany and other countries subsequently occupied by the Nazis. Finally, in 1939, came the largest wave of all when over half a million defeated Spanish Republicans crossed the Pyrenees, fleeing Franco’s execution squads.
    The largest Jewish ghetto had been in the 20th
arrondissement,
‘
le village yiddish de Belleville
’ just north-west of Père Lachaise. The oldest was in the Marais; but the Jewish professional classes were spread all over the middle-class districts of Paris. People who had undergone the most appalling tortures and humiliations had to relearn how to be doctors, teachers, lawyers and businessmen. The only way they could do this was to lock away the past at the back of their minds and never to refer to it. Richard Artz, who grew up in a French Jewish family in the late 1940s, said that in his house the Holocaust and the sufferings of the Jews were simply never mentioned. When a female cousin became engaged to a German many years later, Arzt was astonished at the depths of rancour and pain that the announcement aroused.
    Other returning foreign exiles seemed to inhabit a completely different world, whether on the Left Bank or in the
beaux quartiers
. Gertrude Stein and Alice B. Toklas, apparently protected by their innocence or a guardian angel, had managed to live out the war in the Alpine foothills of Savoie. They had never imagined that they were in danger as Jews. German soldiers had been billeted on them but had not realized that Stein and Toklas were not French, and they had gazed blankly at the Picassos on the wall. Fortunately, the friendly mayor had kept their name off the register.
    Their return to the rue Christine was an emotional moment. ‘All the pictures were there, the apartment was all there, and it was all clean and beautiful. We just looked, and then everybody came running in, the concierge, the husband of the laundress downstairs, the secretary of our landlord, the bookbinder, they all came rushing in to say how do you do and to tell us about the visit of the Gestapo; their stamp was still on the door.’
    While Gertrude Stein found that her apartment had been protected,Nancy Cunard returned to a scene of devastation. She had known Paris from the days of the Surrealists in the Café Cyrano on the Place Blanche, when Louis Aragon had been her lover. Her greatest achievement was the Hours Press, which published original works, mainly poetry, by Ezra Pound, Richard Aldington, Robert Graves, Harold Acton and Samuel Beckett.
    Nancy Cunard reached Paris at the end of February 1945 and embraced a rather bewildered porter in blue overalls, the most accessible representative of the city’s working class. Over the next few days, she walked back and forth across the city, looking and remembering, and saw friends from the past, such as Janet Flanner and Diana Cooper, whom she had known before the First World War. But when she returned to her house at Réanville in Normandy she found that it had been looted and defiled, not by the Germans but by neighbours she had considered friends. The Hours Press was badly damaged, along with all her primitive statues. She was left in no doubt as to how much the locals had secretly disapproved of her left-wing causes and her lovers, especially her black lover, Henry Crowder.
    Samuel Beckett returned from his hiding place in Provence, where he had often listened to music composed by Henry Crowder, played on an upright piano. Nancy Cunard thought he looked like ‘an Aztec eagle’ and that he had a ‘feeling of the spareness of the desert about him’. Peggy Guggenheim, with whom he had a brief affair shortly before the war, described him more prosaically, but no less accurately, as ‘a tall lanky Irishman of about thirty with enormous green eyes that never looked at you’. He was so modest that after the war very few people knew that he had been awarded the Croix de Guerre and the Médaille de la Résistance.
    Others took longer to return home. Julien Green booked his passage back across the Atlantic on the
Erickson,
a former troopship which had lost little of its discomfort, but the poems of John Donne took his mind off it. Even if the danger of submarines was over, mines still floated in the English Channel. But what struck him most was the advice he received on reaching Paris when he asked after friends: ‘It’s better