No Way Out: The Irish ib Wartime France 1939-1945

CONTENTS

List of Abbreviations

4

Acknowledgements 5 Introduction 7 1

Trouble at the Legation

15

2

All Quiet on the Western Front

21

3

Detention and Destitution

31

4

Organising Help

92

5

Hiding, Fleeing, Begging for Money

155

6

Dire Straits

185

7

Darkness before the Dawn

229

8

Helping Jews

265

9

The Skies Brighten ‌ for Some

280

Endnotes 304 Bibliography 331 Index 343

INTRODUCTION In February 1941 the Irish Legation to the État français, set up in Vichy following France’s defeat by Germany in June 1940, sent a cable to the Department of External Affairs (DEA) in Dublin stating that ‘the number of Irish citizens and those of Irish birth now requesting passports who are or soon will be destitute is about 300 (not including religious)’.1 If one includes the religious, those not in danger of falling into destitution and those who did not request an Irish passport ( James Joyce being the most famous example), then it seems reasonable to suggest that the number of Irish or quasi-Irish people in France at this time was somewhat higher than 300. The DEA estimated that there were between 700 and 800 Irish people still in France in November 1941, but another estimate from the same year put the number of Irish in occupied France alone at 2,000.2 Along with priests and nuns, a high proportion of these people were governesses to well-to-do French families. One also finds ‘men of letters’ such as Samuel Beckett, a number of men and women working in the horse industry around Paris, students and teachers, as well as people involved in a variety of other professions, many of whom had already been in France for years. This book will relate the wartime experiences of some of these people – from well-known figures, including James Joyce and Samuel Beckett, to the misadventures of more obscure individuals such as Stephen Rice and Una Whyte.

Some of those in France at this time had chosen to be there.

On 3 September 1939 Samuel Beckett rushed back to Paris from Dublin and tried to join the French army, famously justifying this rash decision by stating that he ‘preferred France in war to Ireland in peace’.3 In 1945 the bold Una Whyte, an eccentric art student from County Leitrim, wrote to Irish consular officials working hard

8 NO WAY OUT

for her release from a cold and hungry winter spent in a French prison: ‘I hope repatriation is not the condition of my release.’4 But more typically, many Irish wisely decided to leave France in 1939–1940. Those still in the country when the Germans overran it grew ever more anxious to leave, as living conditions progressively deteriorated. James Joyce had arrived in Paris from Trieste in 1920 with no serious plans to stay for more than a few days, but ended up staying there for over nineteen years because, as he said to Arthur Power, it was ‘a very convenient city’. But the war forced Joyce from Paris, first to a small village in the centre of France and then eventually to Switzerland where his wife, Nora, told Seán Lester, last secretary of the League of Nations, that she had been trying for the previous two or three years to convince her husband to return to Ireland.5 However, escape from occupied France proved well-nigh impossible for most people.

In short, Beckett aside, it would no doubt be an exaggeration to say that the Irish actually ‘preferred’ wartime France to neutral Ireland. Most Irish still in France when the Germans conquered the country in June 1940 were probably there more by chance or by necessity than by choice, having, for one reason or another, failed to organise their departure in time. A small number of Irish managed to return to Ireland during the Occupation, having had to face a wall of bureaucracy to obtain the various entrance and exit visas needed to get to Lisbon, and then having to stump up large sums of money to secure a place on a British Overseas Airways Corporation (BOAC) flight to the United Kingdom or on one of the Irish merchant ships plying their trade between Iberia and Ireland.

The Irish community that remained in France was replenished at intervals by others who invariably wished they were somewhere else. These included, most notably, shipwrecked seamen and shotdown airmen on the run. At the outbreak of war, France’s Irish community was also augmented by a few individuals interned by

Introduction 9

the Third Republic under measures that bore a resemblance to the loi des suspects that sent people to prison without trial during the French Revolution.

Coming from virtually the only English-speaking country not to declare war against Germany, Irish men and women had a unique status in occupied France that heightened Vichy French and German suspicions about them. Many Irish people in France did not have an Irish passport; some, like James Joyce, did not want one and clung to their British identity instead, at least initially. The Irish in occupied France thus found themselves caught up in two internment drives launched by the Germans in the early part of the Occupation. The first, in the autumn of 1940, resulted in several dozen Irishmen being interned, mostly in the camp set up in a military barracks in Saint-Denis, just outside Paris. A second wave of internments at the end of 1940 focused on those who had been left behind in the first round-up – women (including members of religious orders) and old men.

Irish people were initially placed with other English speakers in an old, unheated military fort in Besançon in eastern France.

While many were quickly released, some were then transferred to a more comfortable camp in the spa town of Vittel.

Whether detained or not, one common thread unifying the Irish in France during the war was penury. Ireland’s diplomats in Vichy were reduced to living on ration cards, but for many others it was much worse. Examples of people who did not suffer from lack of financial resources are hard to come by. Before America joined the war at the end of 1941, Irish people in France with British passports could count on food and money that the British authorities were able to channel through American charities. But those with Irish passports – and after Pearl Harbour even those with British passports – were excluded from this lifeline and were dependent on help from Ireland, which the authorities were slow to organise and always keen to restrict to a bare minimum.

10 NO WAY OUT

Matters were not helped by the strict capital controls the Irish authorities exercised. After much hesitation, a system was put in place in the course of 1941 to allow families in Ireland to send money to their hard-pressed relatives in France. But the maximum that could be sent each month was £15 per adult. This monthly allowance was raised by 50 per cent in the spring of 1944 – but in the meantime high inflation for a steadily falling supply of basic necessities, combined with a lack of work, meant that many Irish, like their French neighbours, fell below the breadline.

The installation in 1940 of the Demarcation Line made communication between German-occupied northern France and the southern rump, which was left unoccupied until November 1942, extremely difficult. During the military debacle of May–June 1940 that led to France’s defeat, Irish people joined the exodus of fearful French who headed south, away from the advancing Germans. Many found themselves in southern France when an armistice was signed in June 1940. These people lived a perilous existence, unable to return to their jobs and homes without special authorisations (even though, ironically enough, intra-French communication became easier after the Germans marched into the zone libre in November 1942).

The Irish were lucky to have the benefit of the services of ‘special plenipotentiary’ Count Gerald O’Kelly de Gallagh, who bravely side-stepped German and Vichy French instructions for all diplomatic staff to be based in Vichy. This colourful, unjustly forgotten Irishman managed to combine outstanding service on behalf of the Irish community in France with somewhat less avowable business dealings during the war. For the first year of the Occupation, O’Kelly ran consular services out of the premises of his wine company, Vendôme Wines, on the Place Vendôme in the centre of Paris. Combined with the Legation staff in Vichy, O’Kelly and some of his business friends were able to provide a

Introduction 11

measure of relief to Irish people and ensure that most of them were quickly released from internment – sometimes through the liberal distribution of locally printed Irish passports.

The Irish in France – or at least in Paris – also had other places to turn. Of special importance was St Joseph’s church, run by Irish Passionists, on the avenue Hoche in the 8th arrondissement.

Before the outbreak of war, the church had been a meeting place for the cohorts of governesses that Ireland supplied to upper-class French families; during the war, Irish people who knocked on the presbytery door could reliably depend on a bed for the night or a bite to eat. St Joseph’s church also helped downed Allied airmen as they tried to escape France, earning thanks from the American War Department after the conflict. Another rallying point was the convent on the rue Murillo, not far from St Joseph’s, staffed

by Irish nuns from the Poor Servants of the Mother of God order.

Before the war, the nuns in rue Murillo ran a hostel for Irish and British girls in the French capital who were studying or working as governesses. The nuns continued this activity throughout the Occupation – although few of the convent’s lay residents were able to pay for the spartan fare on offer. Even in 1946 lodgers and nuns alike were still pleading for parcels from the Irish Red Cross.

The vast majority of the Irish stuck in France in 1940 were apolitical, and simply intent on survival in increasingly difficult cir­cumstances (when not looking for ways to get out of France via Lisbon). As was the case with most of the native population, the Irish in France hunkered down and had little energy left over to become actively involved politically for one side or the other.

But, as always, politics had an unfortunate tendency to catch up with individuals. Just as the Service du Travail Obligatoire (STO) scheme that coerced young Frenchmen to work in German factories proved an outstanding recruiter for the Maquis (those legions of young Frenchmen who lived in complete autarchy in the wilderness, occasionally turning into Resistance fighting

12 NO WAY OUT

units), so the appearance of shot-down Allied airmen in their midst pushed Irish people to become involved in their exfiltration from France.

Irish involvement in Resistance activities went further. Samuel Beckett collated and translated Resistance reports for transmission to London, and Janie McCarthy sent reports to London right from the start of the Occupation. Dubliner Robert Vernon was a radio operator for a Resistance movement in the south of France, and the British occasionally sent agents of Irish origin into occupied France, including Special Operations Executive agents Mary Herbert, Patricia O’Sullivan and William Cunningham. But things should be kept in proportion: just as the actual contribution of the French Resistance to the Anglo-American liberation of France in 1944 is debatable, the involvement of France’s Irish community in the struggle against Nazism made little difference to the outcome of the war.

A number of Irish whom the Germans attempted to use against the Allied cause made brief appearances in Paris (Frank Ryan, Desmond Nolan, Joseph Lenihan), but the only two known French residents who were troubled in any serious way by French justice after the Liberation were Michael Farmer and Denis Corr.

The former’s tendency to consort with the Gestapo earned him a few months of detention, while shopkeeper Corr and his wife became noted for their collaborationist tendencies in the southern town of Biarritz. But the sum of these indivi­duals’ contributions to the German war effort can confidently be estimated at virtually nil.

Overall, one discerns a sliding scale of involvement in the conflict among the Irish residents of France, whether on one side or the other. At one end, examples of fully committed members of the armed Resistance – those involved in blowing up troop trains or placing bombs, acts often carried out by the communists – are hard to come by. The Irish were far more prominent

Introduction 13

in what has been termed ‘civil resistance’, which involved helping Allied airmen, publishing and distributing propaganda tracts, and sending messages to London. No Irish person seems to have tilted to the other extreme of the sliding scale by becoming involved in the Milice (the paramilitary force set up by the Vichy government to combat the Resistance) or in Gestapo outfits that systemically practised torture of their victims. Nor are there many clear-cut cases of the Irish acting as Vertrauensmänner (V-men or moles) for the occupiers.6 Perhaps the most intriguing destinies were lived by those Irish people in France who do not fit easily into the categories of résistant, of collabo or even of apolitical immigrant just trying to survive. They could best be described as interlopers, in the wrong place at the wrong time. They were in France by chance and unable to get out, except sometimes in a cattle truck heading towards concentration camps in Germany and further east. A couple of Irishmen even washed up on French shores and spent almost the entire period of the Occupation roaming around Paris penniless and homeless, without any possibility of getting back to Ireland, dependent on handouts from charities and from the Irish Legation in Vichy.

There were efforts to help Irish citizens – as exemplified by Count O’Kelly’s deeds in Paris – but means were limited and communication inside France, let alone with Ireland, was difficult. The Legation’s ability (and sometimes willingness) to deal with the Irish who did not have Irish passports was even more restricted.

It did help by issuing passports to people it felt could legitimately claim one, hence helping some individuals to extract themselves from detention and others to avoid it altogether. But while Irish passports were granted quite quickly to a few people whose claims to one were tenuous (Susan Hilton, Desmond Nolan, Florence Owen), others with more legitimate claims but who did not meet the Legation’s favour often had to wait a bit longer.

14 NO WAY OUT

The cautious approach of Irish officialdom is most evident in the treatment of Jews. Attention was given to the idea of gran­ ting Irish entry visas to about 200 Jewish families who had been placed in the internment camp in Vittel. But after much shuffling of paper between Dublin, Vichy and Berlin, German refusal to strike a deal with the Irish meant that nothing came of the scheme, or of one to charter a ship to bring Jewish children to Palestine. Moreover, both these projects originated with Jewish groups in London; as Professor Dermot Keogh has pointed out, the Irish authorities did not act proactively to save Jews in occupied France.7 Irish honour was upheld by the voluntary aid provided by people such as Mary Elmes, who worked for a Quaker organisation and was honoured as a ‘righteous among nations’ by Israel after the war; by the Irish Red Cross, which set up a field hospital in Normandy in 1945; and by the Irish nursing sisters who worked in various French hospitals during the war years.

To conclude, the experiences of the Irish in France between 1939 and 1945 varied considerably. But all suffered from the breakdown in communications with the home country and, to different degrees, from the scarcity of basic necessities and a lack of financial resources. Older people and people in poor health suffered the most, while the younger generation muddled through. Indeed, while the bravery of some individuals deserves to be saluted, what is perhaps most remarkable is just how resourceful the Irish in France were when in truly dire straits.

This is their story.

1

TROUBLE AT THE LEGATION The Irish Legation moved into its new premises at rue de Villejust (now rue Paul Valéry) in the posh 16th arrondissement of Paris in early 1931, having been housed briefly at 7 rue GeorgesVille, just around the corner. Bar a hiatus from 1940 to 1944, the Legation was to remain there until 1954, when the new Irish embassy transferred to its current location at rue Rude, a short distance from the Arc de Triomphe.

The first of Ireland’s plenipotentiaries to occupy rue de Villejust was Count Gerald O’Kelly de Gallagh et de Tycooly, a member of the so-called ‘Clongowes Mafia’ who occupied many diplomatic positions in the early years of the Irish Free State. But the count, who played a central role in the fate of the Parisian Irish during the German Occupation, quickly found himself out of favour when the new government of Éamon de Valera came to power in 1932. He was forced into early retirement in 1935, aged forty-five, having spent much of his adult career serving Ireland.1 In many respects, O’Kelly was a remarkable man, described as ‘brillant et subtil, agréable causeur et spirituel’ (brilliant and tactful, a delightful conversationalist and witty) by a distant French relative.2 Born into a family of Catholic landowners in Gurtragh, north County Tipperary in 1890, he went to school at Clongowes Wood and then studied at the Royal University.3 His title was the legacy of an ancestor who had served the Habsburg Empire during the reign of Empress Maria Theresa in the eighteenth century.4 His father was John Appleyard O’Kelly, whose family had arrived in Gurtragh in 1830, and his mother, Mary O’Byrne, also had illustrious Wild Geese ancestors and was born and grew up in a manor house near Toulouse in south-west France.