On August 14, 1941 German occupation troops marched through the streets of a still docile Paris posting huge placards announcing the execution of three young Frenchmen. These men were the first martyrs of the underground. Two of them, Henri Bekerman and A. Tishelman, were Jews.
Within a few days, the placards were key rallying points for Parisians who had already lived under the Nazi boot for a bleak year. Women stopped foraging the markets for food long enough to make a furtive sign of the cross over the Jewish names. Their husbands stood silently by and, when the police were not looking, scribbled anti-Nazi slogans.
Thus was the spark of French resistance first fanned, and Jewish names continued to be linked with the story of freedom until the final expulsion of the Germans. After Bekerman and Tishelman, came thousands of doctors, merchants, working men, young wives and war widows who merged their different backgrounds and beliefs to form a powerful sector in the army of the underground. They fought a war all French patriots will remember with gratitude and which all Jews can remember with pride.
Bekerman was a shy, slim boy, a medical student, who was captured by the Gestapo while brazenly distributing leaflets calling for a mass demonstration, the first public defiance of the Nazis, on Bastille Day. The demonstration, organized by student groups, went off on schedule, but Bekerman was already in a torture cell.
Hundreds of young men, aware that they were making history, had assembled nervously at the Porte St. Denis. At exactly 4 P.M. they formed orderly lines, unfurled three flags of the Republic and marched down the boulevards singing the Marseillaise. On the sidewalks amazed Parisians, ashamed of their first shocked silence, found voice and cheered:
German military police rumbled through the boulevards in crowded trucks and opened fire on both the students and bystanders. The flag-bearer, surrounded by a picked group of guards, slowly fell back along a side street. Among the guards was Tishelman, a seventeen-year-old lad. He had managed to get hold of a rusty World War I revolver, and while the other boys retreated, Tishelman exchanged fire with the well-armed Germans until his bullets were gone. A moment later he was seized.
General von Stuelpnagel, the Nazi occupation boss, realized at once that this demonstration by a handful of ragged students was the beginning of a battle. By publicly announcing the executions of his youthful prisoners, he intended to show the French that the Germans would be ruthless in the face of resistance.
Stuelpnagel committed a historic error in assuming that two Jews could never become heroes to the French. Though the underground then consisted of little more than isolated islands of hatred and hope, small demonstrations began to break out almost every day. Soon Stuelpnagel’s troops posted a second placard with another Jewish name on it—Rolnikas, a lawyer and social worker. Again Frenchmen quietly congregated and, peering guardedly into each other’s eyes, found the starved look of freedom.
A few days later the Germans methodically cleaned out the Belleville district in the first house-to-house manhunt of Jews. Every Jewish male rounded up was hurled into sealed vans headed for the murder camps of Maidanek and Auschwitz. For them it was the end, but the Germans could not imprison every patriotic Frenchman, nor even every Jew. The early heroism of Bekerman, Tishelman and Rolnikas was the handwriting on the wall for the enemy. Slowly, the French underground began to take shape.
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The Jewish army was a vital part of this underground. It participated in every important blow against the Nazis and begged for the most dangerous missions. It was a separate unit, however, because we, the Jews of France, wished to provoke the Nazis by letting them know that a special Jewish army was resisting them. While millions of other Jews throughout Europe, tragically outnumbered and historically isolated, could be herded into death factories in long hopeless lines, we wanted to redeem their dignity by open warfare.
I shall never forget the night on which our decision was reached. It was on August 22, just eight days after the first placards had been posted. A group of Jewish leaders had gathered in a small apartment in the heart of the Belleville district to discuss the latest decree—the death penalty for every form of anti-German activity. The measured, menacing steps of a German patrol floated up to us through the too-still night. Tonight, they passed on.
We had to decide quickly: were the Jews to join in the underground as individuals, lost in the mass, or were they to form independent groups? One of us, a business man who was later to prove his bravery a hundred times, said:
This is a war for survival between us and the Nazis. Perhaps our first duty is to make certain that some form of Jewish life will continue. Let us not risk total extermination.
Another man spoke. Just an hour before, he had escaped a German detail by climbing over his apartment house roof in the Rue d’Angoulème to a neighboring street that had been “purged” of Jews a few days before. He said:
When I heard the German boots on my stairs tonight, I realized how ridiculous it would be for me to fall into their hands without a struggle. I couldn’t just sit there and wait for them to murder me. You all know that I am not athletic, but that thought gave me strength to jump from roof to roof. I am sure that all Jews will find such strength now.
We knew that in the camp at Drancy more than 3,000 Jews were being “processed” through the first stage of their one-way journey to Auschwitz, Birkenau and Buchenwald. Thousands more would follow them; there was no way of telling which of us might be alive in a month. Still, the course had been set, for we too would leap over roofs, not to escape the Nazi but to ambush him, to drive him insane and to kill him.
Within a year that small group had mushroomed into a complex army of men and women between the ages of 18 and 50 who served as killers, spies, saboteurs, strong-arm units, liaison officers and messengers. We were to derail trains, blast key anti-aircraft batteries, pillage German stores, kill thousands of enemy troops and completely undermine the morale of the enemy. In those first months, however, freedom could not wait for an efficient organization to be developed. Our people went to war using primitive arms and substituting courage for training.
Hersh Zimmerman and Salomon Bat typify this period. They were the first Jews to kill German soldiers, to throw bombs—and to die at their posts. Bat, a violinist, learned to taper his fingers around a revolver. Remembering the American gangster movies, so popular in Paris a decade before, he carried his bombs in his violin case. Zimmerman was a brilliant young chemist and he made the bombs.
It must be realized that these young men began their underground activity long before resistance became an almost public badge of honor in France. They were pioneers who improvised and they went along and hoped that others, afterward, would improve on their crude techniques.
To get the ingredients for explosives, Bat and Zimmerman spent dangerous weeks going from one pharmacy to another and buying a small amount of drugs in each. They armed themselves by waylaying German officers at night and taking their revolvers. Their bombs were tin cans filled with explosives. The wicks had to be lit before the bombs were thrown and the danger of premature explosion was, of course, tremendous.
For their first attack they chose the Porte D’Orleans, a crowded street constantly used by German detachments. The plan was to throw two bombs simultaneously, one at the head of a marching column, and one at its end. When the column approached, the conspirators saw they had a prize, for it was an elite group of Nazis from an officers’ school nearby. At the precise moment they lit the wicks with their cigarettes, waited an agonizing few seconds and hurled the homemade bombs. Scores of Germans died in an explosion that made Jewish resistance a reality.
The two men escaped and returned to their clandestine laboratory. Those of us who had known Bat as a sensitive young musician were shocked to see him changing into a tough fighting man. As time passed, and other young Jews changed in the same manner, I understood what had happened. Like that first man on the roof, Bat had found unexpected strength and stamina. That he was fighting back for the first time in his life made him very happy.
One night, while Bat and Zimmerman were attacking a military target in the Latin Quarter, a violent explosion rocked the entire district. The violinist was found dead, and the chemist, dying. Apparently the crude bombs had had gone off prematurely. It was an end they both had expected.
Soon after this the Gestapo made several arrests and discovered that a separate Jewish organization was functioning. We heard of Stuelpnagel’s reaction through a French police commissioner who, posing as a collaborator, was in constant contact with the underground. “What!” shouted the German leader, “those cowardly Jews dare to fight? We’ll teach them what it means to attack German soldiers.”
On December 15 the papers carried a communiqué from Stuelpnagel which leveled a billion-franc fine on the Jews of occupied France, ordered new deportations to forced-labor camps and announced the execution of one hundred “Jews, Communists and Anarchists, who have certain connections with the authors of the attacks.”
Despite such threats, the Jewish resistance, an army within an army, rapidly expanded. Though all our plans were approved by the General Military Committee, each of our units had to work independently, support itself, find its own arms and choose its own objectives. Jewish fighters were in much greater danger than others—the French, Italians, Spaniards or Poles. They could always hide out among relatives or friends. But since all Jewish homes were subject to raids at any moment our men could never think of spending even one night in a Jewish home or of using a Jewish office as a “front.”
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Finding a place to live was a constant problem which ended only with liberation. Our next biggest problem was identification papers. Obviously it was impossible for a resistance man to function without forged papers, and as ration cards were issued monthly, it was also necessary for us to print forged cards every month. After some time the authorities learned of what we were doing and complicated the system. Finally we settled the matter by storming the ration offices on the last day of every month and carrying off the cards prepared for the next month. The cards, however, were worthless without money, so we also had to raid tax offices, post offices and brokerage houses.
These raids were carried out only to keep us alive and give us tools for our resistance work, yet hundreds of our people lost their lives in them for eventually the police became able to anticipate the attacks.
The Gestapo, meantime, began flooding Paris with spies who posed as Jews and claimed they wanted to join our organization. An elaborate examination system was set up to guard against such infiltration. The Commission des Cadres had scouts out scrutinizing each applicant, and often their work turned into counter-espionage. Despite all Gestapo ruses, we suffered very few losses through spies.
Once we were certain an applicant was legitimate, a further examination was still necessary. Would the applicant handle himself or herself courageously on missions of great danger? How would he act if caught and tortured? Usually, one of our people would take long walks with an applicant, probing into his background and his motives. One fifteen-year-old boy told the following story:
My mother, father and two younger sisters were taken away to Germany. When the Nazis came for them I happened to be out, and as I reached home my family was being pushed into the police car. For a moment my youngest sister’s eyes fell on me, and I shrank back farther into a comer. To this day I do not know whether I did the right thing in not joining them. At that time I was not yet fifteen. How could I have known what to do? Now I know. I beg you to admit me to your organization.
The boy was accepted, along with musicians without music, housewives without husbands and schoolboys without schools; and by 1943 the Jewish resistance organization in Paris was supporting thirty direct-action groups. There was a military committee coordinating all plans, a political committee training the newcomers, a technical committee setting up laboratories and providing arms and a medical committee operating underground hospitals.
Our three-man military committee met once a week to set in motion orders passed on by the over-all underground organization. If an attack in some general area was ordered, the committee selected the likeliest objectives. Then the scouting committee was told to bring back a detailed report on those objectives, usually German parking lots. This meant that the women and girls who worked as scouts spent many dangerous hours near German buildings, and to pass unnoticed they often changed their clothes two or three times a day. The better dressed they were the less they looked like Jews.
After the scouts had made their report, the men who had been chosen to carry out the attack were given their assignments one day in advance, so they could casually reconnoiter the scene. The technical committee was told to deliver the needed bombs and guns.
The coordinating of these committees had to be done on a split-second schedule. No committee members knew the addresses of the others. They met before an attack at a safe rendezvous and would remain only five minutes. If for any reason one group failed to show up, the action was postponed and the men quickly scattered.
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In such a clandestine organization, where an accident or betrayal could have eliminated a key man in a few seconds, disaster was always expected. For example, the technical committee used the apartment of a pretty young woman in the 15th Arrondissement, near the Porte de Versailles, as a laboratory for explosives. This woman dressed with style and furnished her apartment handsomely, making it clear to the neighbors that she cared little for politics and meant to live through the war as comfortably as possible. She also let it be known that the man who visited her regularly was her lover. Actually, he was a resistance scientist who went there to make the explosives.
One night the laboratory table suddenly caught fire and the scientist’s face was horribly burned. He threw his coat over his head and raced out of the building. Luckily, the police had not been called and he was able to escape. In a few minutes, however, his suffering was so great that he could no longer walk. Knowing he was lost if he remained in the open, the chemist gambled on the sympathies of a woman passer-by. He explained that he was a patriot and begged her to help him. The woman took him to her home, but he wouldn’t let her call a doctor and a few hours later, after resting, he left. Lurching along the blackedout streets for two hours he at last reached the apartment of a friend. By this time it was too late to call one of the underground doctors, and he had to spend a very painful night.
The doctor did come the next day to remove the chemist to a sanitorium. Even this was only a temporary expedient, for the police had discovered the cause of the explosion and knew that a man with a burned face had fled the apartment. Already detectives were checking all hospitals and institutions. When a sympathetic policeman warned the sanitorium officials that the search was headed their way, the chemist was taken to the near-by home of a schoolteacher. Again his rest was a short one, for a neighbor, suspected of being an informer, had seen the stretcher bring him in and the next day he was transferred to a safer hideout.
The resistance was lucky in this case, and in several months the chemist was making explosives again. Still, many persons exposed themselves to save him, and if he had been captured they all would have been executed. Despite such hazards, some of the most important attacks in Paris during the winter and summer of 1943 were made by Jewish groups. These included throwing hand grenades into a German officers’ canteen during a New Year’s Day brawl, the killing of scores of Germans as they left the Folies Berg&egreve;re, an attack on a group of enemy soldiers near the École Militaire and the raiding of a gasoline depot near the Porte de Vincennes.
On February 23 of that same year the Jewish legion carried out the first important attack against enemy positions in the Paris area: the wiping out of powerful anti-aircraft batteries the Nazis had set up just a few days before on the Passy Bridge over the Seine. Our attack group had to pass through a four-block area swarming with secret police who were on a special alert, yet they blew up the batteries and killed some thirty Germans without a single loss to themselves.
Just a month later two Jews managed to steal aboard a Versailles train crowded with German officers returning from the Russian front and dumped grenades into two of the cars which killed or wounded at least sixty Nazis.
The desperate enemy launched new pogroms, but they only brought us new recruits, as even the most timid of our Jews was inspired to join the crusade.
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At this time our women volunteers, veterans of communications and medical work, began to beg for front-line missions. In some cases their personal losses at the hands of the Nazis had been such that their pleas could not be denied. Thus we began to produce heroines as well as heroes, and of them, three who will never be forgotten are Helen Kron, Haya Igla and Rega.
Helen Kron, the pretty blonde wife of a prisoner of war, attracted the whistles and winks of, the Germans as she walked through the streets carrying a market basket in which revolvers and grenades were hidden. Haya Igla joined us after her husband had been caught and killed by the Germans. Rega, a tiny, chirpy woman who always seemed to be on her way to exchange recipes with some other housewife, hid under her smile a sly technique for slipping through police cordons at strategic points.
These women formed a team that worked in German parking lots. They disguised themselves as peddlers, but carried bombs in their baskets, and ach time they moved through a lot the Germans lost six cars. Finally the Gestapo trapped them, and they were tortured with special devices reserved for Jewesses who worked in the underground.
Helen Kron, the prettiest, got the most brutal and humiliating treatment. After the Germans had ravished her they took her with them when they went to search her apartment. Her four-year-old son was there, and she asked the guards to remove her handcuffs so that she could embrace the child for the last time. Confident the woman could not escape, the guards opened the handcuffs. Helen Kron held her son, calmed his frightened cries and gently put him back to bed. Then she plunged through a window to her death. Haya Igla and Rega were murdered a few days later in a camp in Silesia.
It was early in 1944 that the Nazis, realizing at last that the underground could not be crushed by deportations and executions, resurrected one of their oldest propaganda tricks. They launched a nationwide campaign “proving” that the liberation forces were composed entirely of Jews and “other criminals.”
The campaign began with the first big public trial of patriots. Ten Jews were among the twenty-four defendants. In the past resisters had been murdered without benefit of judge and jury, but this time the Germans wanted to single out the Jews and make them seem responsible for the miseries of the Occupation. Posters were hung throughout the countryside showing photographs of the Jewish defendants superimposed upon gory shots of wrecked trains and mutilated bodies. Each poster bore such captions as, “I am a Jew from Poland,” or “I am a Jew from Russia.” There was also a list of the many “innocent Frenchmen” each was supposed to have killed.
At the same time movie houses featured films in which German actors impersonated Jewish fighters. Documentaries were put on showing ruined houses and mangled bodies—allegedly, the work of our people. Actually the films had been taken in Warsaw and other bombed cities.
This clumsy propaganda was a failure. Frenchmen cheered the resisters in the movie houses and wrote sympathetic comments on the extravagant posters. They also laughed.
In the so-called Free Zone, which was not occupied until November 11, 1942, Jewish patriots in the cities quietly supported the more spectacular maquis, who were gangs of young people hiding in the woods and hills to escape the slave-labor gangs. After Paris the most powerful underground center was in Lyons, and here again our people were prominent. Located on the hub of two of France’s most important highways—Paris-Marseilles and Bordeaux-Toulouse-Geneva—Lyons was an ideal headquarters for the entire underground. Its narrow, winding streets and houses with double exits gave patriots a protection they found nowhere else.
The Lyons Jews became famous throughout France because of their leader, Simon Fried, one of the legendary heroes of the liberation movement. Fried planned and led a number of bold attacks on the Nazis and their collaborators. He finally was wounded and captured during a raid on an office and was sentenced to death by a collaborator judge named Finaly.
After Fried was guillotined the underground, following a grim tradition, condemned the judge to death. The very next morning three Jews, carrying the forged cards of Gestapo agents, rang the bell of Finaly’s private apartment. The judge thought they had been assigned to protect him and greeted them cordially. A moment later he was dead.
In such a way did the Jews of France fight back. But by far the largest part of the story is still untold. This is but one chapter.
