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Was this just a fluke? Did twelve pages merely get lost over the years, and did those twelve pages just happen to be the ones on which Alex described his war years? Or did Alex write those sections up and then decide he didn’t want anyone to read them and so threw them away? Had he, in fact, been a collaborator?
Plenty of big-name fashion designers collaborated or at least worked with the Nazi occupiers, including C
oco Chanel, Louis Vuitton and Jeanne Lanvin. Cristóbal Balenciaga designed for Franco’s wife, Jean Patou made dresses for Hermann Göring’s wife, and Hugo Boss – who was German and based in Germany – not only joined the Nazi party but made the Nazi Youth uniforms.[4] Marcel Rochas refused even to say hello to former customers and friends if they were Jewish, pointedly crossing the road to avoid them.[5] Pretty much the only people in France at that time who could afford high fashion were Nazis and collaborators, so the few designers who continued to work in Paris during the war would have worked with them. It wasn’t impossible that Alex might have done too, and if so, that would have explained how he, a Polish Jew, didn’t just survive the war but flourished.
Alex himself might have been opaque about what he had to do to survive the war, but the records were not. During the war he became such a person of interest that the files on him at the CGQJ could barely contain all the letters and records of his various comings and goings. Repeatedly investigations were conducted into his business affairs, and repeatedly nothing happened. This was remarkable, given how blatantly Alex was hosting Resistance meetings in his salon, but it turns out there was a simple reason: in his CGQJ file there are letters from his old friend and protector, now known as General Perré, defending Alex’s right to own a shop. Even more remarkably, Xavier Vallat, the Commissioner General for Jewish Affairs (head of the CGQJ), personally wrote a letter on 13 February 1942, ordering that Alex’s case should be looked at favourably and he be left alone:
J’ai l’honneur de vous faire connaître que les renseignements sur l’intéressé étant favorables, il conviendrait de lui faire savoir que je ne vois pas d’inconvénient à ce qu’il exerce la profession de couturier créateur modeliste …
When I initially found this letter in a file about Alex in a French archive, my stomach sank into my shoes. Vallat was a vicious anti-Semite who looked like a movie villain straight from central casting, having lost an eye and a leg in the First World War. He was also the most important person in the CGQJ – in other words, the man in charge of all anti-Semitic activity in France. He was the man charged with the Aryanisation of the French economy – conducted entirely by the Vichy government with no pressure from the Germans – and his passion was the elimination of Jewish culture from French life. All of this made his defence of Alex’s shop seem especially bizarre, and the first time I read it I was sure that I’d found, at long last, confirmation of my worst suspicions: Alex was a collaborator, a spy for the enemy, and this is why he was so protected.
But the morality of French politics during the war was far too blurred to be confined by simplistic black-and-white outlines, and, as various war historians later explained to me, what this letter reveals has, in fact, little to do with Alex. Instead, it shows the changing and conflicting loyalties in the Vichy government. Yet whereas most Jews in France suffered – to say the least – from these political shifts, Alex benefitted from them.
Like Perré and Pétain, Vallat was another old military vet, and while he was a massive anti-Semite, he was, above all, a Catholic nationalist, almost as anti-German as he was anti-Semitic, one who saw the sanctity of France as his first priority.[6] So anyone who fought for France was, for him, a Frenchman of honour, even if that man was a Polish Jew. Thus, because Alex was a decorated veteran of the Narvik campaign, Vallat intervened on his behalf, which was almost like the British Home Secretary stepping in to adjudicate on a small local matter, but that was how much he cared about those who fought for France, whatever their religion. Vallat’s priorities would soon prove to be his undoing. Within weeks of writing in defence of Alex, the German ambassador to Vichy, Otto Abetz, ordered Pétain to dismiss him, which he did. Vallat was all for the Aryanisation of France, but not at the cost of turning it into Germany, and his uncooperativeness became too much for Nazi Germany. They replaced him with Louis Darquier de Pellepoix, a pro-Nazi French politician who was in Germany’s pay before the war, and it was Darquier de Pellepoix who ensured the deportation of France’s Jews, including Jacques, to Auschwitz. Darquier de Pellepoix definitely did not care about Jacques’s war record, or that of any Jew, so for the Jews he was worse than Vallat, but in Vichy it was all relative. Vallat remained an unrepentant anti-Semite for the rest of his life, and there is no evidence he ever met Alex or that Alex ever knew he owed his wartime livelihood to him.
Even though Alex’s connection to Vallat turned out to be innocent, a fog of suspicion started to form around Alex in the eyes of both Vichy and his fellow Resistance fighters. He didn’t especially help himself: when General Perré came to visit the shop, Alex made a big show of presenting him with a military cap. Alex didn’t care that Perré was on the other side: he saw him as an old friend and, more importantly, a useful connection. And when Alex went to Perré for help when he heard that his cousin Josek Ornstein had been arrested, the rumours really began.
‘My Cannes branch was busy, too busy for some. People saw military officers and beautiful women there, which created doubts. Was I even kosher?’ Alex wrote.
As deeply as Alex loved France and believed in defending the Jews, there was always one cause that Alex believed in above all, and that was Alex. He would do whatever it took to survive, and if that meant being friendly with some people in Vichy during the war, well, he would say, that wasn’t the worst thing in the world. He was still, and would always be, the hungry little boy in Chrzanow, determined to scrape his way from the bottom of the sewer to reach the stars. He grew up thinking, ‘No one will help you except you.’ And that was the lesson he lived by for the rest of his life.
During 1941 and 1942, Alex and the Sizaines ran Resistance missions to Paris. Alex was one of the few Jewish members of the group, and thus he risked more than most, as it was forbidden for a Jew to go into the occupied zone. For Alex, the danger was the appeal.
‘I crossed the line of demarcation several times with a guide,’ he writes. ‘I was always in front to open the way. Nothing could frighten me. A rage to live burned within me. I felt invincible.’
What Alex was actually doing on these missions remains somewhat mysterious. According to letters from his cousins Renée and Roger, he was meeting up with them and his siblings, and his memoir corroborates this. Given that Renée and Roger Goldberg were in the Resistance, it looks like they were his main points of contact for passing information back and forth. He was, according to Sonia and Henri, at Mila’s bedside when Lily was born in 1942, and he repeatedly appears at Sonia’s lunches in Renée’s letters of that year. He also, at some point, managed to smuggle Chaya out of Paris and down to Cannes, where she stayed with one of his fashion clients, a Madame Armande. Alex achieved an enormous amount in his life, escaping the depths of the Polish pogroms to climb to the top of the French art world, all thanks to his cunning and determination. But that he managed to sneak his truculent, strictly kosher, non-French-speaking mother across the demarcation line was possibly his most extraordinary feat.
He also wanted to check on his business, because it was no longer his. A man called Joseph Paquin took it over in 1941, when businesses in the occupied zone were Aryanised, and Alex is as vicious about Paquin in his memoir as he is about the Nazis who killed so many members of his family, describing him alternately as ‘a rat’, ‘a bastard’ and ‘the little shit’. Alex would have hated anyone taking over his business, but the story of Paquin reveals something more about the world of French collaboration than Alex’s ego.
Born in 1873 in the small north-eastern village of Mont-Bonvillers, Joseph Nicolas Paquin also worked in fashion. He married his wife, Hélène, on 23 December 1894, and on the morning of his wedding, every newspaper had the same front page: a photo of Colonel Alfred Dreyfus who, the day before, had been unanimously found guilty by seven judges of passing on French military secrets to the Germans. As the newly wedded Monsieur and Madame Paquin began their married life, they did so against the backdrop of what remains a universal symbol of anti-Semitism.
Paquin was a less successful Paris couturier than Alex. As well as Alex’s business, he was given the businesses of three other Jewish designers – at least one of whom was then killed in Auschwitz – and he was paid 2,000 francs a month for each. Madame Paquin certainly enjoyed the financial benefits of seizing control of Jewish businesses: during the war she enthusiastically redecorated their apartment with expensive furniture and what one fellow designer described as ‘bibelots anciens’ (antique trinkets). Paquin protected his freebies: when Alex was given permission to open an Alex Maguy salon in Cannes, he wrote a cross letter to the CGQJ, saying this would create ‘confusion’ for customers and should not be allowed. (Thanks to Alex’s high-ranking friends, this letter was ignored.) Paquin drove the CGQJ somewhat mad during the war, constantly writing letters demanding more money, more help and more effective measures taken against Alex’s business in the south. As I read his letters, I understood better why Alex called him ‘a worm’: his tone was whiny and weasely. It infuriated Alex that such a man had his hands on his beloved business in Paris, and he vowed he would have his revenge. He would not have to wait long to get it.
Back in Cannes, Alex’s life continued peacefully, building his business, finding kosher food for his mother. In November 1942 the Italian army invaded Nice and because the Italians weren’t especially interested in Germany’s anti-Semitic focus, the only way Alex’s life changed was that he started to pick up some Italian vocabulary. But on 9 September 1943, the Germans took over the Italian zones a
nd Alex’s life changed in the worst possible ways.
According to Alex’s official testimonies given after the war, he was arrested three times in the south of France. Twice his powerful friends were able to help him, despite his being a foreign Jew. The third time he pushed his luck too far.
The evening of 18 September 1943 was warm, and after a long day of working in the salon Alex decided to relax in the way he’d been relaxing for two decades, which was by going to a nightclub. This time he chose the Pam Pam in Nice and, as usual, Alex had his own table and was drinking with his friends, talking with the few remaining Italians left in the city.
‘Suddenly, I heard a German song being played by the orchestra. My blood rose. Disgusted and furious, I summoned the headwaiter. “Please ask the bandleader to come speak with me. I have something to say to him,”’ Alex writes in his memoir.
When the bandleader came to Alex’s table, he loudly ordered him to ‘stop playing these goddamn Kraut songs’. Instead, they should play French and British military songs, starting with Le Boudin, the official song of the French Foreign Legion, followed by La Marseillaise.
The headwaiter begged Alex to leave, saying there were senior members of the Gestapo in the room. The Nazis had arrived in the city just over a week earlier. Alois Brunner, the notorious Jew hunter, came to Nice on 10 September and his police had already started conducting raids. The Germans seized control of the roads and train stations, and the Jews were now in what Serge Klarsfeld, then a child in Nice, described as ‘a kind of trap’.[7] Even French Jews, who had previously been able to take their safety for granted, knew that the leniency they’d enjoyed under the Italians was over. What had been happening to their friends and families in the north was about to happen to them, and every Jew in the region was terrified. But Alex refused to back down.
‘I’m a French soldier – I am not leaving,’ he replied.
‘They’re giving you five minutes to go,’ the waiter pleaded.
‘Like hell will a Kraut give me orders! I’m a Legionnaire and nothing scares me,’ Alex replied.
He looked at the table where the waiter had run over from, and saw three members of the Gestapo sitting with a woman. One of the men took his pistol out of its holster and pointed it straight at Alex.
‘Look at this coward! With a woman at his table he pulls a revolver,’ Alex crowed to the now silent room, all staring at what was going on.
The Nazi got out from behind his table and walked towards Alex, keeping his gun pointed at Alex’s head. When he got to Alex’s table, Alex stood up.
