A Life in Paris – March 21, 1942

But the sweet light has returned. And that is stronger than everything. This morning, toward 11, I took the longest way to walk back home, along the quays…

Photography print available at Found View Gallery.

But the sweet light has returned. And that is stronger than everything. This morning, toward 11, I took the longest way to walk back home, along the quays. The air was silvery over the Seine, the palaces, the city, so peaceful. The sun was inflaming the poplar trees and the windows of the Louvre. The streets were just about empty. What silence! Never, for centuries, had spring set up its quarters so tranquilly in Paris. The river was bubbling. The nymph of the Seine had come into the city….Should I have turned my back on this felicity?

Jean Guéhenno

Notes:
• From Diary of the Dark Years, 1940-1944
• Jean Guéhenno was a French writer and intellectual who kept a diary during the WWII German occupation of France.

A Life in Paris – February 22, 1943

Photography print available at Found View Gallery.

(To the German I pass by on the street.) I don’t know exactly what I feel when I’m near you. I don’t hate you, I don’t hate you anymore. I know you will never be my master. I pretend not to see you. I act as if you did not exist. I promised myself never to talk to you. I understand your language, but if you talk to me, I raise my arms in the air and act like someone who doesn’t understand. And yet the other day on the Place du Châtelet, you walked up to me: you were wandering around like any lost little soldier, looking for Notre-Dame cathedral. So I pointed to the towers rising in the sky on the other side of the river, staring you in the face. You felt stupid, you blushed, and I was glad. It has come to this.

What do you think you look like with your green uniform on our streets, in our public squares? A soldier in Paris, in France, is blue, or dark red. You’re too buttoned up. And those gentleman’s gloves you wear? You’re far too proper. And what about your dagger? And your revolver? A gloved executioner. And your boots? How many pairs of shoes could be cut out of them for people who now go barefoot?

I do not hate you. I don’t know how to hate. When you get into the metro we squeezed together to make room for you. You are the Untouchable. I lower my head a bit so you won’t see where my eyes are going, to deprive you of the joy of an exchange of glances. There you are in the midst of us, like an object, in a circle of cold silence.

Jean Guéhenno

Notes:
• From Diary of the Dark Years, 1940-1944
• Jean Guéhenno was a French writer and intellectual who kept a diary during the WWII German occupation of France.

A Life in Paris – February 21, 1941

It’s snowing again. But the few nice days we’ve just had were frightening. The planes were beginning to make their rounds again…

Photography print available at Found View Gallery.

It’s snowing again. But the few nice days we’ve just had were frightening. The planes were beginning to make their rounds again. This bad weather gives us some respite, but anxiety never leaves me. The green men whom I pass on the street seem pitiful to me. They have the silly, vapid look of soldiers in every country on earth, dragging their boots around uselessly while they wait to give blood in accordance with the rules of their job.

One feels rather ashamed to eat. The poor people in the neighborhood have no more bread. As of now, they have used up all their February ration tickets. If we’re still eating in our house, it’s because we’re member of the bourgeoisie and can send for packages from Brittany at great expense. […]

In the evening, the Gestapo searched the Musée de l’Homme and arrested fourteen people. Julien Cain, the former administrator of the National Library and a Jew, has been arrested, The grounds: he was too visible.

Jean Guéhenno

Notes:
• From Diary of the Dark Years, 1940-1944
• Jean Guéhenno was a French writer and intellectual who kept a diary during the WWII German occupation of France.

A Life in Paris – February 15, 1944

The monstrous incomprehensibility and illogical horror of the whole thing boggle the mind. But there’s probably nothing to work out, because the Germans aren’t even trying to give a reason or purpose…

Photography print available at Found View Gallery.

So why do German soldiers I pass on the street not slap or insult me? Why do they quite often hold the métro door open for me and say: “Excuse me, miss” when they pass in front? Why? Because those people do not know, or rather, they have stopped thinking; they just want to obey orders. So they do not even see the incomprehensible illogicality of opening a door for me one day and perhaps deporting me the next day: yet I would still be the same person.

Hélène Berr

Notes:
• From The Journal of Hélène Berr
• Hélène Berr was twenty-one years old when she started to keep a diary in 1942. She had grown up in a well-to-do Jewish family with strong ties to Parisian society and was a student at the Sorbonne. In March 1944, Hélène and her parents were arrested and deported to Auschwitz. Her parents died within months. Hélène was transferred to Bergen Belsen where she died days before the British liberated the camps.

A Life in Paris – February 14, 1944

More than a week ago I stopped writing this diary, wondering if I had reached a turning point in my external life. Nothing has happened yet…

Photography print available at Found View Gallery.

More than a week ago I stopped writing this diary, wondering if I had reached a turning point in my external life. Nothing has happened yet. I carry on sleeping at Andrée’s, and the parents sleep at the Loiselet’s. Every evening we are on the point of leaving, a question hangs in the air; uselessly, because we have already gone over things and are past reopening the discussion. We know that no one can aspire to being absolutely right, and we have no right to go against Papa, who has already been through it. It’s just fatigue, the temptation to spend the evening at home, to sleep in our own beds, which reawakens an opposition that has already been considered and consciously rejected. […]

During the alert the other day, thirty people with [yellow] stars were arrested, sent to Drancy and deported, just because they were out and about (simply to amuse themselves, obviously!)—Rabbi Sachs was returning from a funeral. Another man was turned out of the métro station at Cité (presumably not an official “Air Raid Shelter”) on his way back from a church service in memory of his son, who had died in the war, and was taken by the German police. “Aryans” who break the curfew get fined 1,500 francs, others are deported.

Hélène Berr

A Life in Paris – February 14, 1942

Nothing can express the monotony and the resigned stupidity of life in Paris. It is very cold. Everyone is huddled in his house without a fire…

Photography print available at Found View Gallery.

Nothing can express the monotony and the resigned stupidity of life in Paris. It is very cold. Everyone is huddled in his house without a fire. The only ones who can eat are those who are lucky enough to have relatives in the provinces to send them provisions. It is scientifically designed scarcity. […] If I have written nothing in these notebooks, it’s because it is not very useful, no doubt, to note that it is snowing, that we are hungry, that we are cold, that the executions are continuing, two or three every day (they no longer even have the honor of being on the front page of the papers), that people no longer think about it[….]

Jean Guéhenno

Notes:
• From Diary of the Dark Years, 1940-1944
• Jean Guéhenno was a French writer and intellectual who kept a diary during the WWII German occupation of France.

A Life in Paris – February 10, 1941

Symbolic: every evening at the Opera, I am told, German officers are extremely numerous…

Photography print available at Found View Gallery.

Symbolic: every evening at the Opera, I am told, German officers are extremely numerous. At the intermissions, following the custom of their country, they walk around the lobby in ranks of three or four, all in the same direction. Despite themselves, the French join in the procession and march in step, unconsciously. The boots impose their rhythm.

Jean Guéhenno

Notes:
• From Diary of the Dark Years, 1940-1944
• Jean Guéhenno was a French writer and intellectual who kept a diary during the WWII German occupation of France.

A Life in Paris – January 23, 1945

Paris would be beautiful if each snowflake were not a frozen tear for the cruelty of suffering it adds to civilian life here, even not to speak of men at the front…

Photography print available at Found View Gallery.

Paris would be beautiful if each snowflake were not a frozen tear for the cruelty of suffering it adds to civilian life here, even not to speak of men at the front. […] Little food for average, modest French families, no heat, no light between eight-thirty and five; coiffeurs closed until five, then open till eleven. [Robert] Capa, Life photographer, is here in my hotel. […]

I walked into Notre Dame last Sunday—and out. It meant nothing to me. I have never liked its nave, which I find hard, its columns of a too late Gothic; it was a period of my past which I was no longer interested in and on which I walked out. I seem to have no aesthetic interest left at all; it alarms me. It was my chief intellectual passion. I never read, never have; I was all eyes for beauty. If I no longer care for that, I might as well be blind, if I only use my eyes to see what I eat.

Janet Flanner, to a friend

Notes:
• From Darlinghissima: Letters to a Friend
• Janet Flanner was an American writer and journalist.

A Life in Paris – January 23, 1941

Too many of the days when I record nothing in this notebook are days of despair…

Photography print available at Found View Gallery.

Too many of the days when I record nothing in this notebook are days of despair. I know—one mustn’t let oneself go. And besides, we keep on living. We live out of habit, if that is living. We hold on, we last. But submerged by solitude and sorrow, overwhelmed by the very awareness of our own impotence. We have no temptations, no desires. Very rarely, a thought dares to spread its wings. It sinks as soon as it rises. What’s the use? The snow has melted in Paris; there’s a thaw. We merely think we’re going to be a little less cold.

Jean Guéhenno

Notes:
• From Diary of the Dark Years, 1940-1944
• Jean Guéhenno was a French writer and intellectual who kept a diary during the WWII German occupation of France.