end of the year mysteries - enquiring minds want to know..

well, a lot of things including what happened in November but apart from that... Is there a difference between marzipan and almond paste? Aren't they both from almonds? And why did a man, I've never met, leave me a book with a friend in Paris. A book, that I'd heard had been pulled by the publisher? How were copies even available?

To backtrack, years ago I'd heard about Lucienne Goldfarb, aka Katia la Roquinne (the redhead), who owned a Parisian bordello, was a police informer, opera aficionado, had friends in high places and was an alleged Jewish traitor to the resistance. This came from an interview with Paulette Sarcelle, a female Resistant who'd been caught and survived a camp. Paulette knew Lucienne, as she was called then, in Paris when Lucienne and Paulette were members of the Jewish communist worker cell of the FTP-MOI. This cell was betrayed and the members executed, which is described in the quoted article below by Madeleine Meyer. Paulette grew visibly upset telling me Lucienne Goldfarb had written an autobiography with such blatant lies that the surviving Resistants were able to finally have the publisher pull the book. But here in my hands was the book, published in 1976, which consisted of Lucienne talking about her life after 1947, how she'd worked for love, respected the police and informed for them. Opera was her passion. She worked for no one but her girls and her clients and had bought a hotel by herself at 10bis rue Debarcadere. An infamous address, it seems and yet when I went there in 2014, it was closed. The cafe owner across the street shrugged, 'she lived there upstairs for years, fell down and is in a retirement home.' She intrigued me. Did she betray her friends? Did nothing stick to her because of her work for the police and close ties to Roland Dumas below - formerly in the Ministry and a high powered attorney. But until this book came into my hands, I'd found nothing, until Lucienne popped back up in the news a week later. All this within two weeks of each other.

She'd retired and sold her hotel/bordello and the hotel reopening is trading on her name and the notoriety. This is her in 2014.

How could Lucienne deny her past? Yet she had refused to speak about it. Here's what Madeline Meyer said in an article in Libèration: Madeleine Meyer, shows an old class picture. In it the face of a teenage girl with curly hair is surrounded in black pencil. "She was called Lucienne." A redhead, round. "She began to say she wanted to engage in the Resistance," Madeleine says, "she was actually trying to infiltrate." On March 23, 1943, the special brigades carried out their first raid against the network of young Jews of the FTP-MOI of Paris. 57 people were arrested. Since 1943, the survivors of which Henri Krasucki, future secretary-general of the CGT, accused Lucienne Goldfarb of being the informer to the police. In 1943, nobody was suspicious of Lucienne in their working class district. Her father, arrested in 1941, was deported in 1942. Her mother and brother have just been taken to Drancy. She is 18 years old. "The street was a little schtetel (Jewish village)," recalls Simon Rayman, arrested with the Manouchian group in October 1943. All the young people know. The Communists are numerous. Lucienne goes to find Ginette, a friend of school, tells him that she wants to enter a resistance group to avenge her deported relatives. "It worried me," said Adams Rayski at Liberation. "The next day, I was followed from my apartment. Later arrested." A few days before the roundup, Madeleine Meyer and her parents were visited by a police officer. "He said he was a police inspector and that our apartment had been denounced by Lucienne Goldfarb." The next day, Madeleine saw two German officers come out of a carriage, accompanied by a red-haired girl. "My aunt said to me: but here she is, La Lucienne," she remembers. After the war, Henri Krasucki filed a complaint against the policemen who tortured him in the police station of Puteaux, but also against Lucienne Goldfarb. Nothing happened. For the police, she quickly became a high placed informer and untouchable. Now after forty years it's gone from brothel to chic hotel that opened in late June. I'm still wondering why this book landed in my hands Cara - Tuesday

Pantheon Resistance

At the Pantheon last week two men and two women, were honored for their roles in fighting the Nazi occupation during World War Two. They joined the 'Greats' of France' in a reburial ceremony in the Pantheon.

Last year, President Francois Hollande promised that they would receive the honor of being buried among the "national heroes" entombed in the Pantheon mausoleum.

Germaine Tillion, Geneviève de Gaulle-Anthonioz, Jean Zay and Pierre Brossolette – "embodied the values of France during their time on earth", Hollande said. "I wanted the spirit of the Resistance to be celebrated," he added.

A procession made up of family members, former Resistance fighters, students and school pupils accompanied the coffins into the Pantheon. Until now only two women were buried there: Nobel prize-winning scientist Marie Curie

 and Sophie Berthelot, the wife of chemist Marcellin Berthelot. Two women previously out of hundreds of men including: Voltaire, Rousseau, Victor Hugo, Émile Zola, Jean Moulin, Louis Braille, Jean Jaurès and Toussaint L'Overture the slave who freed Haiti among many others.  

The move to include two women resistance fighters followed protests from feminist groups and a complaint from an official body for France's monuments urged the president to fix what it called a "wide gender imbalance" at the almost exclusively male-dominated Pantheon.

But while the coffins of the men, Jean Zay and Pierre Brossolette will be laid to rest alongside some of the country's most famed writers, artists and scientists only soil from the graves of the two women will be buried in a symbolic move.

It comes after the families of De Gaulle-Anthonioz and Tillion objected to having their bodies removed from the family graves where they currently lie.

Tillion, an ethnologist who died aged 100, was a founding member of a famed Resistance cell of intellectuals and academics. She was sent to the Ravensbruck concentration camp for women, escaped and eventually wrote an insightful account of her time there.

De Gaulle-Anthonioz, a niece of General Charles de Gaulle, was another Resistance member who was sent to Ravensbruck and also wrote a memoir of that time.

Cara - Tuesday

PS at our Bay Area Book Festival this weekend I'm moderating a Nordic Noir panel with none other than our own YRSA - can't wait to see her and instead of Oli she's bringing her 18 yr old daughter.

Ancien Resistant

“But no one...rien personne... acknowledges what the Jewish Resistance did.” Naftali Skrobek, 84 years old - the same age as my mother - gestures from his desk in his apartment in the Marais. Balding and short and with kind red-rimmed eyes that water frequently he offers me coffee. “The documents, I have the documents. The accounts written after the war are here, if you look for them.”
Toli, as he tells me to call him, has sat me down by a bookcase filled ceiling high with books. A veritable history collection in Yiddish and French of World War II. I’m to learn, he says, the structure of the Francs-tireurs et partisans – main-d'œuvre immigrée (FTP-MOI) who were a sub-group of the Francs-tireurs et partisans (FTP) organization, a component of the French Resistance. A wing composed mostly of foreigners and Jews, the MOI maintained an armed force to oppose the German occupation of France during World War II. The Main-d'œuvre immigrée was the "Immigrant Movement" of the FTP.
We spend a long afternoon that goes into the evening. Toli insists I understand the political and organizational structure of the Workers Communist party before he tells me his story of being in the Resistance here in the Marais, the same quarter where he lives now, from April 1944 until Liberation in August. After awhile he shows me a picture of him and his father.

Emotion clouds his face when he shows me the last picture of his father taken by the Germans in Strufhof-Natweiler concentration camp near Strausbourg before he was gassed in 1943.

I’ve found Toli through an Armenian association who promotes the activist story of the Armenian Resistance part of MOI which were recently profiled in the film The Army of Crime - a story of Isak Manouchian, an Armenian poet who ‘led’ sabotage acts against the Germans and immortalized in the famous poster l’affiche rouge...a poster that became the emblem of resistance before the group were executed in 1943.
But Toli has agreed to meet me, spend time with me, only if I get the real story. Manouchian did lead the FTP MOI group - but for three months - until a traitor revealed the group to the Gestapo. Patience, he said, and I would hear the story of his father's work in the Resistance.
Toli was born in Poland of activist Communist Jewish parents - his father was a journalist, magazine editor and militant in the Warsaw trade unions, who fled Poland in the 30’s when the government targeted him. Toli’s family found sanctuary in Paris when he was eight years old.
But given my less than perfect French and Toli’s sidetracking when I ask specifc details, we’re still in the 1930’s when it gets dark. Toli's son comes to visit and agrees to translate the intricacies of trade union organizations that I can’t ferret. ‘My father, he’s obsessed, with this.’ His son rolls his eyes. And I’m still no further in my goal of hearing Toli’s role as a 16 year old here in the Marais in the Resistance before Liberation. My real goal.
When I ask specific questions, his son translates and they argue. ‘He insists you understand the framework, the context of the time, these men who formed the organization,’ his son says throwing up his arms. Toli accuses his son of not caring or being interested. It gets uncomfortable. Finally, his son smiles and says, it takes time with my father. Bear with him. And leaves at least they’re on speaking terms.
I’ve taken notes, recorded several hours of Toli’s account and feeling still at sea, when Toli says. “Want to go for a ride? See where I lived, the bordello across the street, my school?’
Sensing this would be a way into his story, his way, I jump at the chance. Off we go. Toli, drives slow, which in Paris is more dangerous than driving at the usual breakneck speed. I close my eyes several times as taxi’s zip past almost shaving his headlights, missing a bus by centimeters but then living dangerously becomes my motto that night. If Toli fought in the Resistance against the Germans Paris traffic was nothing, right?
Over several weeks Toli and I had several more adventures, meals together, more hours at his desk and the crowing highlight was to be his guest at the November 11th armistice commemoration at the Arc de Triomphe and sitting with him and ancien combattants in the rain as Sarkozy strode past to honor the unknown WWI soldier at the eternal flame. More to come.
Cara - Tuesday