A Train in Winter Read Online Free

1930s with plans for Franco-German co-operation. Abetz was 37, a genial, somewhat stout man, who had once been an art master, and though recognised to be charming and to love France, was viewed by both French and Germans with suspicion, not least because his somewhat ambiguous instructions made him ‘responsible for political questions in both occupied and unoccupied France’. From his sumptuous embassy in the rue de Lille, Abetz embarked on collaboration ‘with a light touch’. Paris, as he saw it, was to become once again the cité de lumière , and at the same time would serve as the perfect place of delight and pleasure for its German conquerors. Not long after visiting Paris, Hitler had declared that every German soldier would be entitled to a visit to the city.
    Despite the fact that all these separate forces were, in theory, subordinated to the German military command, in practice they had every intention of operating independently. And, when dissent and resistance began to grow, so the military command was increasingly happy to let the unofficial bodies of repression deal with any signs of rebellion. Paris would eventually become a little Berlin, with all the rivalries and clans and divisions of the Fatherland, the difference being that they shared a common goal: that of dominating, ruling, exploiting and spying on the country they were occupying.
    Though the French police—of which there were some 100,000 throughout France in the summer of 1940—had at first been ordered to surrender their weapons, they were soon instructed to take them back, as it was immediately clear that the Germans were desperately short of policemen. The 15,000 men originally working for the Paris police were told to resume their jobs, shadowed by men of the Feldkommandatur. A few resigned; most chose not to think, but just to obey orders; but there were others for whom the German occupation would prove a step to rapid promotion.
    The only German police presence that the military were tacitly prepared to accept as independent of their control was that of the anti-Jewish service, sent by Eichmann, under a tall, thin, 27-year-old Bavarian called Theo Dannecker. By the end of September, Dannecker had also set himself up in the avenue Foch and was making plans for what would become the Institut d’Etudes des Questions Juives. His job was made infinitely easier when it became clear that Pétain and the Vichy government were eager to anticipate his wishes. At this stage in the war, the Germans were less interested in arresting the Jews in the occupied zone than in getting rid of them by sending them to the free zone, though Pétain was no less determined not to have them. According to a new census, there were around 330,000 Jews living in France in 1940, of which only half were French nationals, the others having arrived as a result of waves of persecution across Europe.
    At the time of the 1789 revolution, France had been the first country to emancipate and integrate its Jews as French citizens. All through the 1920s and 1930s the country had never distinguished between its citizens on the basis of race or religion. Within weeks of the German invasion, posters were seen on Parisian walls with the words ‘Our enemy is the Jew’. Since the Germans felt that it was important to maintain the illusion—if illusion it was—that anti-Jewish measures were the result of direct orders by the Vichy government and stemmed from innate French anti-Semitism, Dannecker began by merely ‘prompting’ a number of ‘spontaneous’ anti-Jewish demonstrations. ‘Young guards’ were secretly recruited to hang about in front of Jewish shops to scare customers away. In early August, they ransacked a number of Jewish shops. On the 20th, a grande action saw the windows of Jewish shops in the Champs-Elysées stoned. One of the Rothschilds’ châteaux was stripped of its art, which gave Göring six Matisses, five Renoirs, twenty Braques, two Delacroix and