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‘The British were very keen to hear about French people’s morale, so it is likely Alex was writing reports on that and sending them to Britain.’
‘Perhaps he was just communicating with the Sizaines?’ I suggested. But what I really meant was, maybe he wasn’t doing anything at all. Maybe he was just having a nice year in Espinasse with Imre. Not every Frenchman, after all, was a member of the Resistance, no matter what they said after the war.
But Picandet shook his head firmly and pulled out a piece of paper on the top of my pack of notes, which were photocopies from the various files I’d found on Alex scattered around France. This particular piece of paper was a certificate and on it was written the following:
‘I the undersigned, the commanding officer of Zone 13, certify that Mr Alex Glass, an active member of the French Forces of the Interior, is allowed to move freely and for all reasons. He is entitled to any help he requires in order to do so.’
It was signed, stamped and dated 7 September 1944, meaning it was given to Alex when he was still at the Aymards’.
‘This certificate proves without a doubt he was working in the Resistance. Other members of the Resistance in this area, Zone 13, didn’t have such certificates, so Alex had powerful people behind him, and he was in contact with them while he was here,’ Picandet said.
Alex left the Aymards in the winter of 1944 after more than a year in their attic. He first went to Cannes to get his mother, the Yiddish-speaking, kosher-keeping Polish Jew who, miraculously, had somehow survived the war. Her survival is a testament to Alex’s friend, Madame Armande, who hid Chaya during the war, and to Alex who had the wisdom to place his mother with her. Paris was now liberated and Alex, along with Chaya, was among the group of Jews who had managed to survive the war and now returned to the capital city. It was a shockingly depleted group. During the war, of the 300,000 Jews who were in France in 1939, more than 80,000 had been sent to the concentration camps from France – mostly, but not entirely, immigrants. Only 3% returned alive.[12] Alex and Chaya arrived to find the wreckage of their family. Henri and Sonia were alive and waiting for them.
Alex could be a Zelig figure, slipping in and out of different social sets and leaving few ties behind him. But he stayed in touch with the Aymards for years – proof of how much he loved his time with them. Madame Aymard even worked as his housekeeper in Paris for some years and he invited Jeanne to visit him several times during her childhood and teenage years. ‘But when I came, there was no more cheek pinching, no more “ma petite Jeanne”. He was a different man in Paris – more formal, serious. Different,’ she recalled. There were many versions of Alex, and he left one of them behind in Espinasse. He was now back to his Parisian self.
The Germans and collaborators kept better records than the resisters, who destroyed everything as they went along for their own safety, and Alex threw away his own records later. When you’ve been arrested three times and lost your brother and most of your extended family to state-sanctioned murder you tend to be cautious about what you reveal. In fact, Alex never fully trusted France again, even though he lived there for the rest of his life. When he became phenomenally wealthy in later life, he kept his money in more than two dozen bank accounts in as many different countries. France had turned against him once, how could he know it wouldn’t again? So who could blame him, really, for keeping some things to himself? As I left Espinasse I thought how, even though I knew most of the story, I would never know for sure about his relationship with Perré, or even if Perré was the powerful person who saved his life. Some things will just have to stay in the shadows and be taken on faith. But when I got back home to London, something very unexpected was waiting for me.
My uncle Rich had found another copy of Alex’s memoir, which was identical to the previous one but with one crucial difference: the pages that were missing in the copy were present in this one. They were crumpled up, like someone had thrown them away but then (someone else?) rescued them from the rubbish bin at the last minute. And they detailed exactly what happened immediately after Alex jumped from the train.
‘Staying in Lyon was suicidal. I needed to find a place to hide. The thought that contacting General Perré in Vichy would be a good move seems quite mad today. But that’s what I did because I had total confidence in Perré. He was a soldier and, although the personal bodyguard of Pétain, he could not betray a fellow soldier,’ Alex wrote.
According to Alex, he simply phoned Perré’s house and spoke first to Perré’s wife who ‘couldn’t believe what had happened to me’ which, if true, says a lot about the Perrés’ self-deluding hypocrisy, given that what had happened to Alex was what Perré was ensuring would happen to the Jews in France. Alex writes that Perré sent one of his senior officers to pick up Alex – still dressed as a railway worker – in Lyon and bring him to Vichy ‘in a car flying the flag of the military headquarters’.
Once Alex was at Perré’s headquarters, Perré offered to provide him with a military disguise.
‘I told him I preferred to remain in plain clothes and rejoin the Resistance,’ Alex told the man whose specific job was cracking down on the Resistance. But Perré again agreed to help. He told Alex that his officers had contacts in the resistance in the Auvergne, so he would take him there so he could rejoin them. Alex describes how he and Perré would discuss how much danger they were in: Alex would be condemned to death if captured, but Perré was in an almost equally perilous position. He was, he said, being watched by the Gestapo, and they had been to his house to interview him multiple times. And yet despite this, Perré incredibly took the risk to visit Alex several times in Espinasse, and Alex would try to persuade him to flee to London with him. But Perré refused, partly because of his sense of duty to Pétain, and partly because he didn’t want to be in the same city as de Gaulle, Alex was disappointed but he understood. He knew that Perré could not desert his post.
Alex and Perré had a friendship that went deeper than either ever acknowledged publicly, and although Perré’s old rivalry with de Gaulle stopped him from escaping with Alex to London, it’s clear from the risks Perré took how much he respected Alex, and loved him. As for what Alex was actually doing in Espinasse, all he says is that he was ‘a noisy recruiter for the Resistance’, and then the story ends again, and Alex’s memoir slips briskly on to after the war. Some stories are still in the shadows.
After the war finished, Perré went on trial in November 1946, not for hiding Alex, but for collaborating with the Nazis. More than 300,000 people in France were investigated in the ‘épuration légale’ – or legal purge – as part of the country’s desperate attempt to maintain the myth that the majority of its citizens were part of the Resistance and only the bad apples were collaborators. The people caught up in this country-wide blood-letting were, in the main, certainly guilty, but also served as convenient scapegoats for a country mortified by its collective culpability. Probably the most notorious example of this was the vilification of Frenchwomen accused of ‘horizontal collaboration’ – sleeping with Nazis, in other words – who had their heads shaved and were marched through the streets, where they were jeered and attacked by people who may well have done a fair amount of collaborating of their own.
The trials of the high-ranking Vichy officials presented their own kind of weird hypocrisy, in that while some of the most high-profile figures were tried, many were not, including lots of Vichy civil servants, simply because General de Gaulle, who was now in charge, knew he needed them to help run the country. Others were simply too big to convict. It would take another half-century, when President Chirac was in the Élysée Palace in the 1990s, until France would truly look at its past and summon people for their long overdue trials for their crimes against humanity.
Perré, however, had the misfortune of being prominent enough to grab attention, but not so high-ranking that he could avoid a trial in the 1940s, like his boss Bousquet. Details of his trial are kept in an archive in Poitiers and the initial testimonies against him, from soldiers who knew him, are devastating: he was accused of sending children to concentration camps; committing war crimes against military families (sending them to the camps, in other words); punishing any officers who showed sympathy for resisters and viciously repressing the Resistance. But French historian Camille Chevallier, who helped me with my work in Poitiers, told me she was sceptical about some of the claims: ‘My opinion as a historian is that the accusatio
ns about General Perré are exaggerated. This is often the case with these trials with the German enemy, so that the accused are punished quickly and severely so that the French can only remember the Resistance and erase all traces of collaboration. I think that the accusations are not false but they are probably exaggerated and expanded so that Jean Perré was condemned quickly. There was also a strong national desire for revenge settling of accounts between collaborator and Resistance.’
The testimonies in Perré’s defence told a much more complex picture than the sweeping prosecutions. One man, Charles Levy, said in his testimony: ‘All I know is that under the German occupation, my friend Émile Perrot went to [Perré] to get me an identity card in the name of Leroy instead of Levy, which allowed me to escape the racial persecutions. I am grateful to General Perré.’ And then I read the testimony of Captain Dodane, made on 26 November 1946: General Perré, he said, ‘continued to camouflage equipment and gave many non-commissioned officers false identity cards, food to allow them to foil the Gestapo. At the same time, he hosted and concealed Mr Alex Maguy, wanted by the Germans.’ According to the court records I read, Alex did not give a witness statement at the trial, but he did attend it: on a small slip of paper in the archive file about Perré’s trial is a list of nineteen names, including Perré’s son and various military officials. Number four on the list is Alex Glass. Alex would have had to give his real name to get into court, although General Perré – having met Alex originally when he was his daughter’s couturier – would have known him only as Alex Maguy, which is why he was referred to as such during the trial. And yet, according to Alex’s memoir, he didn’t just give testimony at the trial in Perré’s defence. He – as he characteristically puts it in the chapter heading – saved Perré’s life. He describes telling the tribunal about his escape from the train, and how afterwards, Perré put him in touch with the Maquis, thereby saving him. ‘I made the jury cry, and they were not – believe me – little girls who cried easily,’ Alex wrote.
Perré handwrote his own defence, which ran to sixteen pages. He didn’t mention Alex in it, and Camille Chevallier said this was probably because ‘out of friendship, he did not want to involve Alex in his trial, and also he knew it wouldn’t help him anyway’. But he does mention that he knew that some of his men had connections with the local Maquis. He also says that he provided ‘fake identity cards, food, etc. to enable [resisters] to carry out their task and foil the Gestapo’. He adds, somewhat improbably, that he was creating an armoured division to beat the ‘boches’ (pejorative word for Germans). Throughout his defence, Perré stresses Bousquet’s culpability, and Pétain’s innocence, a Pétainiste to the end. But his guilt, as he knew, was a given, and on 28 November 1946 he was found guilty of ‘national dégradation’, the most common conviction among the épuration légale, and almost 50,000 others were similarly condemned. He lost his pension, was banned from living in the area for a decade and was ordered to give up his worldly goods. For good measure, he was also sentenced to twenty years of hard labour.
In the immediate aftermath of the war, France was keen to make a show of punishing the traitors. But it was also desperate to move on and not stew over the past – forget it entirely, if possible. So in the end, Perré was punished very little. Like many other figures from Vichy who had been convicted under the legal purge, he saw his sentence commuted in the 1950s and then pretty much overturned. He died in 1971.[13]
As far as I know, Alex never mentioned Perré to anyone in his family. But occasional vague allegations of collaboration were lobbed at him, based on misunderstood whispered half-truths, and these continued long after he died. In 2014 he was named in a case against the Fred Jones Museum in Oklahoma, brought by a Frenchwoman called Leone Mayer, who claimed that a Pissarro painting on display in the American museum was rightfully hers as it had been confiscated from her father by the Nazis. During the trial Mayer mentioned other works owned by her late father, including a 1906 painting by Raoul Dufy, which had been sold in 1955 to Alex Maguy, who, the lawyer casually added and the stenographer faithfully recorded, ‘had been active with the occupying German forces during WWII in Paris’.
It is entirely possible Alex handled art that had been seized from Jews during the war – a lot of art was looted. But the idea that Alex was deliberately part of some kind of anti-Jewish art scene, let alone ‘active with occupying German forces’, is ludicrous. But it’s also understandable that some sensed a grey cloud of suspicion around him because to survive he lived in twilight, and it had long been that way. He admitted as much in his memoir when describing his too busy salon in Cannes. Maybe Alex simply understood, better than others, that in wartime nothing is simple.
Alex spent his life spinning webs, alternately obfuscating and exaggerating. This wasn’t simply to hide the truth, but to give him security and establish footholds – which he believed he needed to survive. And hadn’t the war proven he was right about that? After all, he’d survived only because he had connections. He always needed to make himself look more established than he was because he knew that, in the eyes of France, he would always be a Polish Jew.
Yet for all his obfuscations Alex wasn’t a Tom Ripley – yes, he talked a lot of nonsense, but he also had the goods. He really did know this person, own that painting, escape from a train. He hadn’t collaborated, but the person who saved him was a collaborator. The proof had always been in front of me: after all, against every odd, he’d survived. And like a good salesman, he took his best goods and put them in the shop window. The rest he kept in the closet.
11
THE SIBLINGS – The Ordinary and the Extraordinary
Post-war life – France and America
IN SEPTEMBER 1948 Sara finally sailed back to Paris. She made and froze enough meals to last Bill for her month-long absence, brought her two young sons, Ronald, then nine, and Richard, five, and boarded the ship. Sara was so excited that when she walked on French ground for the first time in nine years she cried with happiness. But as she and her boys travelled by train from Le Havre to Paris, and she saw what the war had done to the country she loved so much, she cried for a very different reason. Sara had spent the war dreaming of the time when she would go home; the journey from the dock to the French capital showed her there was no home to go back to.
