LITMIR.BIZ

      Delivered for Russian consumption, and heard by communists everywhere, the challenge was not lost on the Résistance.

      “We were in urgent need of weapons,” my father recounted. “Our arsenal was derisory: clubs, truncheons, meat cleavers, pocketknives, axes, picks, rusty revolvers, ante-bellum shotguns. In extremis, and not without perceptible enjoyment, some of our men used their bare hands. We gained considerably more fire power with the addition of explosives, incendiary devices, and a number of small-caliber machine guns, some pilfered from the men we killed, others procured in England and parachuted behind enemy lines.

      “Our orders were to engage the enemy in desperate and unavoidable situations only, and to ‘disperse like mercury’ which, when clasped, scatters into tiny droplets that are impossible to seize.”

      Orders were often ignored and lone wolves or splinter groups carried out several daring attacks. The assassination of two of Hitler’s point men in France, General Schaumburg and Dr. Ritter, was the handiwork of a Jewish phalanx led by 19-year-old Marcel Rayman. Rayman was executed in 1944 by the French collaborationist Brigades Spéciales. Meanwhile, weapons remained in short supply and minor successes were often offset by disastrous failures. Alarmed that elements of the Résistance were joining forces and creating a “red army” on French soil, London held back additional arms shipments, thus preventing modest, isolated strikes from achieving greater tactical success. Although a document circulated by the Communist Party’s Central Committee in 1944 added some weight to London’s suspicions, such concern had no legitimacy. The presence of British and American troops in France was to have a decidedly inhibiting effect and the communists succeeded only in securing a voice, often strident and disruptive but never dominant, in France’s otherwise habitually chaotic political life.

      *

      Much has been written about the Résistance. Opinions and facts heretofore withheld or yet to be exhumed will provide grist for future mills. The final verdict will depend on how one beholds history -- with selective amnesia or preclusive memory. Judgment will also be influenced by the role an ever-shrinking number of WWII veterans may have played in the Résistance. Whether it engages in homage or apologia, exaltation or calumny, a final chapter must justly conclude that France’s liberation apparatus was neither monolithic nor homogeneous. In fact, it lacked congruence; it was crippled by discord, given to dissimulation and often compromised by paranoia. Some of its members demonstrated extraordinary daring and sublime selflessness. Others, succumbing to cowardice or greed, betrayed their comrades-in-arms and delivered their compatriots into the enemy’s jaws.

      “These were humans, not angels,” my father would remark; “men at war.” Indeed, many served the Résistance with honor and distinction. Others used it, fed on it. Here was a microcosm of society: misfits, intellectuals, desperadoes, liberal clergymen, Socialists and Marxists, idealists and opportunists, patriots and survivalists, deserters, decorated line officers and madmen in search of a cause. Circumstance and moral fiber -- not rank or class -- set them apart. Common men died like heroes; blue bloods broke rank, defected. Stranger gave his life to save another’s; friend betrayed friend to save his own. In the death camps – Auschwitz-Birkenau, Buchenwald, Dachau, to name a few -- starving prisoners offered their last piece of bread to feed a dying child. Others smothered their bunkmates to steal their rations. Some slept with German officers for an extra bowl of soup. A few became ruthless trustees who could be counted on to beat, torture and kill other Jews.

      “C’est comme ça,” my father would conclude. That’s how it is “Don’t try to figure this out. There’s no explanation.”