A French manuscript from World War II contains details of the harrowing life of writer and critic Léon Werth
This is a peculiar little book — an obscure voice from the past to remind us how easily things break.
Léon Werth’s “33 Days” is an eyewitness account by one of the two million people who fled Paris in June 1940, as German troops approached the city. It is a found document: Werth’s close friend Antoine de Saint-Exupéry found and smuggled the manuscript out of Nazi-occupied France that October. It vanished several years after that and only resurfaced a half century later.
Werth was a French writer and critic. Though an anarchist and onetime Bolshevik supporter, he served as a radio operator in World War I. He and his wife, Suzanne Canard, remained in Paris throughout World War II. Canard was active in the French Resistance, and she used their Paris apartment as a safe house for fugitive Jewish women, Allied pilots, secret resistance meetings and to store false identity papers and illegal radio transmitters.
But in June 1940, they hurriedly filled their car with suitcases and drove south out of Paris. “33 Days” captures the chaos and the helplessness of that retreat in real time. Werth presents the foolishness and desperation of people trying to make sense out of senselessness. Trapped in an endless jam of cars, running out of gas, he and his wife cling to rumors like snags in a swollen stream: If they can only cross the Loire River. If the French army regroups and repels. If the air force strikes back.
But none of that happens. Werth doesn’t know what we know all too well: that France would capitulate; that Germany would descend into bloody madness; that five years later the raked-over people of Europe would drag themselves up from their nightmare to stagger into the postwar era.
“Where to find refuge? Which roads are open and in what direction? We have friends in the Yonne, but hadn’t they fled?”
Within these 116 pages, the Holocaust has not begun, there is no news, no cigarette smoking Gestapo agents in trench coats. Not yet, anyway. We are watching a black and white newsreel from the farthest edge of the new war.
Like other exiles from the city, the Werths rely on the kindness of farmers. Some welcome the refugees, others turn them away, and some spot a business opportunity.
Madame Soutreux, shamefully immortalized here, speaks fluent German and showers the just-arrived squads of German infantry with more generosity than the tattered lines of defeated French soldiers. Even as Poland is being eviscerated, middle class Parisians and German soldiers stand in farmyards sharing clotheslines somewhere just north of the Loire.
“A soldier is washing at the well. An athlete lifting weights is tattooed on his arm. Not a swastika or a portrait of Hitler. It’s an athlete with bulging biceps. So the art of tattooing develops independently of regimes, faithful to itself.”
Werth refuses to interpret or embroider.
As he says, “I’m not looking for any explanations. I’m scrupulously recounting, in its natural order, reality.”
By sticking to his austere narrative, Werth provides little context for his tale.
He must have believed that all readers of the future would recognize the foibles of the French and the rapacity of the Germans.
But here and now, those of us who have not known war and who have not had to run for our lives can learn from quietly desperate moments like this:
“I found a piece of German bread in the woods. I was alone. No one saw me. I ate it.”