House of Glass

So on 26 May 1940, two weeks after Hitler launched his offensive on France, Jacques joined the Foreign Legion. Almost a year earlier Alex had joined the Foreign Legion – which was the only French military service open to foreigners at this point – and, just as he did when they were children back in Chrzanow and skipping school, he nagged his older brother to join him. But Jacques probably would have done so anyway without Alex’s cajoling. The Glass children still held Reuben up as their moral ideal and given that he joined the army in the First World War to fight for the Austro-Hungarian Empire, it isn’t that surprising that the son who was always the most like him would do so too.

Jacques (kneeling in front) in the Foreign Legion.

And just as Reuben had realised almost twenty-five years earlier, immigrant Jews in France knew that no matter how bad their country was now, if it lost to these enemies their lives would become much, much worse. Jacques signed up for the 23rd Régiment de Marche de Volontaires Étrangers, one of various regiments created by the French Foreign Legion to accommodate all the immigrants who wanted to fight for France, some out of loyalty towards the country, others because they saw it as a path towards naturalisation. While immigrant Jews generally accounted for 30 per cent of the soldiers in these regiments,[13] Jacques’s own small unit had double that,[14] and the names are a testament to the loyalty of foreign Jews to their new country, no matter how much it legislated against them: Pinkus Rak, Moise Graf, Icek Zajdenverg. And from this unit of twenty-five men, at least five of the survivors would later be killed in concentration camps.

The 23rd Régiment de Marche de Volontaires Étrangers was a poorly equipped rag-tag troop of multiple nationalities and languages, and its life was short, brutal and eventful. After training in Le Barcarès in the Pyrénées, they were sent on 3 June 1940 to defend Soissons in the north of France, and then went to the south of Paris to try to contain the advance of German armoured divisions at Pont-sur-Yonne. From there, they were next sent back to the north to the Canal de l’Ourcq, where they managed not just to slow down the German advance but kill General Hermann Ritter von Speck, the only enemy general killed during the Battle of France. All this happened in the space of only two weeks. But the fighting had been costly, and many had been killed. The 23rd RMVE was dissolved in July 1940.

Jacques did manage to survive, but only because he was taken prisoner. When I was going through the shoebox at the back of my grandmother’s closet it was the small rectangular metal plate, reading ‘GLASS, Prisonnier Cambrai, 1940’ that caused me the most puzzlement: I knew Alex had fought for France, but I was pretty sure he hadn’t been taken prisoner. I hadn’t considered the possibility that Jacques – the mysterious great-uncle I never met – had also fought.

Cambrai, up in the north of France, was bombed by the Luftwaffe on 17 May 1940 and captured the following day. The Nazis then used it as a place to keep some of their prisoners, including Jacques, who was captured during the fighting either around Soissons or Canal de l’Ourcq. The real mystery is how he then got out, which he obviously did because he was soon back in Paris, but there is no record of prisoners being released from Cambrai. There are, however, records of them running away. A British sergeant-major, Frederick Read, was taken prisoner around this time and he describes in his memoir being held at the barracks in Cambrai in August 1940,[15] where life was monotonous and dispiriting, with the Germans bullying the prisoners with rubber truncheons and shouting orders at them. Every day they were sent out to work in the town at local flour mills, sugar factories and garages and these excursions were remarkably unsupervised. Read recounts his own failed escape attempt, which was hampered by his poor language skills. Jacques could speak French, albeit heavily accented with Yiddish, so he would have found it relatively easy to hide in the countryside. At least one other man from his regiment was captured and, according to military records, escaped, so the two might have run off together. It’s hard to imagine Jacques running away from the Germans on his own, but with a friend there to encourage him and tell him what to do, the scenario becomes much more plausible. As to the metal plate – ‘GLASS, Prisonnier Cambrai, 1940’ – a fellow prisoner probably made it for him as a souvenir, and perhaps Jacques then sent it to my grandmother almost as a trophy commemorating his escape. Or maybe he just wanted his sister to know where he had been, and that he was OK. Whichever it was, this would not be the last time he would send Sara mementos from prison.

Jacques was officially demobilised on 3 September 1940 and, although Paris was now under Nazi occupation, he returned to Mila on rue de la Tour, apparently never even considering that maybe they ought to go somewhere else. But why would he? Jacques was the least assimilated culturally of the Glasses, but of all of them he took his social assimilation for granted the most: he believed that because the French took him in they would therefore never hurt him.

Just three weeks after he returned home, Jacques’s assumptions were looking increasingly shaky. Once France had agreed to stop fighting with Germany on 22 June 1940, it became effectively a collaborator, and Marshal Pétain, an old war hero from the First World War, was the new head of state. Under him, the French government fled to the town of Vichy in central France, and the country was chopped in half between German-occupied France and the new Vichy government: northern and western France, including Paris, was occupied by Germany (the occupied zone, zone occupée), while the south and what little else was left was controlled by Vichy (the unoccupied zone, zone libre). And Vichy did not wait long to go after the Jews.

On 27 September 1940 the first specifically anti-Jewish legislations came into effect: Jews who had fled to the unoccupied zone were prohibited from returning; Jewish shopkeepers had to post a yellow sign in their windows reading ‘entreprise Juive – Jüdisches Geschäft’. A census of Jews in the occupied zone was ordered, in which more than 150,000 Jews presented themselves for registration at local police stations and their names and addresses were then handed over to Section IV J of the Gestapo. In October 1940, all Jews had to have ‘Juif’ stamped on their identity card. The following year, Jewish businesses in the occupied zone were Aryanised – in other words, they were taken away from the Jews – and Jacques was forced to sign over his fur business to Jacques Revillon, the scion of a large fur company. When he joined the Legion to risk his life for France he had little; now, after fighting for his country, he had even less.

Pétain had been celebrated for his bravery against the Germans during the First World War, so much so that he was k

nown as the Lion of Verdun in recognition of his courage at the Battle of Verdun. But as France’s chief of state during the Second World War, he dealt with the Germans by capitulation and active collaboration. Having seen the damage war exacted on France and the French people in the First World War, he was willing to do anything to prevent it happening again, even if that meant submitting to his former enemies. But he went further than mere obedience.

Vichy France was the only western European country under Nazi occupation that enacted its own measures against the Jews. Despite the claims by French politicians over the years that Vichy was compelled to do this by the Nazis, they in fact came up with anti-Semitic regulations Berlin hadn’t asked for. As Pétain’s chief of staff later said: ‘Germany was not at the origin of the anti-Jewish legislation of Vichy. That legislation was spontaneous and autonomous.’[16] When Vichy introduced the ‘Statut des Juifs’ in October 1940 and discriminatory legislation aimed solely at the Jews in June 1941, Jewish people – in the unoccupied zone as well as the occupied one – were excluded from the army, press, commerce and industry and the civil service, but there was no evidence anywhere that the Germans demanded this of France. As historian Jean Edward Smith later put it, ‘anti-Semitism was not new to France, but it became one of the hallmarks of the Vichy regime. The Statute on Jews illustrated the Vichy government’s willingness to act on its own authority without German pressure and was an ominous sign for the future’.[17] The Vichy government even ordered the French police to participate in anti-Jewish thuggery, and the Germans later said they could never have accomplished as much as they did without the help of the French police.[18]

Vichy didn’t want to exterminate all Jews like the Nazis did. Not exactly: it wanted to get rid of the foreign Jews, marginalise French Jews and eliminate Jewish culture from French life[19] to protect the sanctity and unity of French culture. The high number of anti-Semitic fanatics in Vichy – such as Xavier Vallat, the first Vichy Commissioner General for Jewish Affairs, who would soon take a special interest in Alex Maguy – certainly didn’t do anything to stop France’s anti-Jewish mood. As a result France quickly proved to be very keen to introduce anti-Semitic legislation, and in some cases was even more efficient at enacting it than the Germans.

After the war, senior Vichy officials argued that the government felt it had to outpace the Germans in order to save the French Jews and – more pressingly for Vichy – to prevent the fascists from staging a coup in the government. In other words, the way to help the French Jews was by throwing the foreign Jews under a bus, and that by giving the enemy what they wanted they would, in some back-handed way, retain authority. And it is true that the majority of French Jews survived the war. But no government has ever achieved a political, or moral, victory by trying to outpace the far right, let alone actual fascists. The Germans quickly saw through Vichy’s strategy and would soon exploit it in their pursuit of foreign Jews, and Vichy – especially from 1942 onwards – eagerly helped them, rushing to meet the deportation quotas set by the Germans by sending them Jews – babies, children, the sick – the Nazis hadn’t even demanded.[20]

This has caused France some unpleasant reckonings ever since. Serge Klarsfeld, the French activist and Nazi hunter (and, later, a friend of Alex’s), has done more than pretty much anyone in making France confront its culpability during the war, and just one instance of this occurred in 1991. While doing some research at the French Ministry of War Veterans, he happened upon a file of frayed and faded index cards. These were the remnants of the 1940 census of the French and foreign Jews, which was used to deport 75,000 people to the concentration camps.[21] For more than fifty years, historians had thought the cards had been destroyed and yet all the while some researchers within the ministry had known the cards existed and kept them hidden. Many in France were horrified by the discovery – especially, it turned out, those whose names were on it. So while historians insisted that the list be preserved for history, those named were terrified by such a prospect.

‘How could French historians presume to serenely make use of a tool that in other times served a racist and criminal system?’ one person wrote to Klarsfeld.

‘It’s clearly worrying that a listing of categories of citizens exists,’ said Jean Kahn, the then head of the French Jewish community.

It didn’t matter that most of the people on the census were long dead. Nor that France was no longer under Vichy and Nazi control. To the people whose family’s names were on it, or who just saw names similar to their own, the past was ever present, and always at risk of returning. (Eventually, President Jacques Chirac gave the Fichier Juif – Jewish registration file – to the Shoah Memorial in Paris.)

That was how Alex and Henri felt in 1940, and unsurprisingly so, given what they’d already lived through. So it didn’t even occur to Alex to put his name on the census, and Henri, after careful deliberation with Sonia, decided against it too. But Jacques was always different from his brothers. Despite having been politically aware enough to join the Foreign Legion, he was remarkably resistant to learning the lessons of the past. So even though he had had to flee his home town because of anti-Semitism, and he had just escaped from a Nazi war prison, he still had a submissive soul. Henri pleaded with him not to register, but Jacques, urged on by his frightened wife, who believed obedience was a form of self-protection, dutifully registered himself and Mila as Jewish, giving their home address – which Vichy had anyway, because they were still living in their shop which had been officially Aryanised. Henri and Alex were horrified when they found out but he waved their concerns away. He had just saved his life by taking action and disobeying authorities when he ran away from Cambrai, but the only lesson he seemed to have learned from that incident was that he shouldn’t try to fight again. No, Jacques felt, it was always better to obey authorities. After all, if you did what they said, why would they hurt you?

Couturier Alex Maguy.

5

ALEX – Defiance

Paris, 1930s

ON A WARM NIGHT in the summer of 1936, Alex was in a nightclub in Montmartre with his friends. These friends included the artists Moïse Kisling and Jules Pascin, a jazz band leader called Ray Ventura and various other musicians and artists, several of whom he’d met through his first friend in the art world, Marc Chagall. This was his regular social circle, and tonight was a pretty typical night for him. He met his friends at the glamorous Opéra Comique theatre, where they attended the opening night of a new show. They then went to Montparnasse for the cafés there – La Coupole, Le Dôme, Le Café de la Rotonde – which were open late and attracted artistic sorts. There, they met up with Ventura’s friend, a young singer called Edith Piaf, and the group went on to a small club nearby where Charles Trenet was singing. They next headed off to the Montmartre nightclubs, and after that, dancing at the Boeuf sur le Toit, a cabaret where the avant-garde artists hung out until the purple morning hours. It would be another night with no sleep for Alex – there was just too much to do and to see and to drink and to eat. Who has time in Paris to sleep more than one night a week?

In the decade and a half since Alex arrived in Paris, he had lifted himself out of poverty and put himself at the absolute centre of the city’s artistic and bohemian demi-monde. Everything around him was glittering and fabulous, and for the first time in his life Alex felt like he belonged. The Galician savage, he liked to say, had become the darling of Paris. Forty years later, when writing about this brief period, he described it as ‘the happiest time of my life’. But on that particular night, as he sat in that cabaret, he felt a terrible tug of sadness. Because as he looked around at all that he had, everything he had ever wanted, he knew he would have to give it up.

By 1936, Alex was running a thriving couture house, built up purely by word of mouth, that employed over sixty people and put out four collections a year. When he had turned down Nina Ricci’s offer a decade earlier to work with her at Raffin he had bet everything he had that he could make it on his o

wn. Against the most extraordinary odds, his bet had paid off.

‘[Alex Maguy] was responsible for the livelihood of all of his workers. He was personally concerned with each, from the smallest of the petites mains [the seamstresses] to his salespeople,’ reads Alex’s entry in the book, The Dressmakers of France. Alex became known for his tailoring and his coats, and long after he switched from fashion design to art dealing, the coats he designed for my grandmother that I saw in her closet were always beautifully made, always with a clever detail like a fluted sleeve or exaggerated collar, and always still looking new even though my grandmother had been wearing them for decades.

‘His own studio, his preoccupation with art, made one suspect he would prefer [to make] evening clothes. But here, too, the fine balance of what was wanted showed him to be an excellent businessman,’ according to The Dressmakers of France.

Alex was so busy he had to hire an assistant to help him with his sketches, as drawing was never Alex’s talent. ‘A distinguished young man, though quite timid, came to show me his sketches,’ Alex later wrote. ‘I was quite impressed. He was an extraordinary draughtsman, with strong personality revealed by his drawings. His name was Christian Dior.’ And Alex and Dior, two seemingly very different men, would go on to have strikingly parallel lives over the next few decades.