Many of the women, once released, made their way directly to the Lutetia, the vast, Art Deco hotel on the Left Bank straddling the Boulevard Raspail and the Rue de Sèvres, built in the more confident days of 1910. In September 1939 the hotel housed numerous refugees, including several artists and musicians fleeing to Paris ahead of German forces. But when Paris fell, the Germans requisitioned the hotel, and its fine cellar was enjoyed by German military intelligence, the Abwehr, who used it as a base. At the Liberation it was converted into a chaotic repatriation centre for prisoners of war, displaced persons and returnees from German camps, many of whom had not slept in beds for years and were unable to do so now, some still wearing their striped prison garb. Accounts of relatives coming daily with hopeful eyes to post requests or scan lists are among the most agonizing of all occupation and war stories. They throw long shadows. In many cases the desperation, illness, suicide and death come years later, beyond the timeframe of this book. Few stories in real life had a happy or straightforward ending, as the tale of Marguerite Duras well illustrates. In 1942 she and Antelme had a stillborn child, and soon after this tragedy she began a love affair with a mutual friend, Dionys Mascolo, which continued while Antelme was imprisoned in the camps. In 1945 Mascolo helped nurse Antelme back to health, but Duras and Antelme divorced in 1946 and the following year she and Mascolo had a son, Jean.
As well as losing loved ones, many had to face the further grief on their return arising from the loss of all their possessions, often with no one still alive to help. Looting furniture, not just fine works of art but everyday household objects, predominantly from Jews, had been a major preoccupation of the German occupiers. The confiscation was partly to dehumanize those from whom it had been stolen and partly to provide small luxuries for German citizens at home and soldiers in the colonized east. It was another sphere where the Germans had been assisted by willing collaboration from the Vichy regime and French civilians to create what they considered was a proper process. Although occasionally concierges (and friends, such as Jeanne Bucher in the case of Vieira da Silva) managed to protect empty Jewish homes, when the dwellings were looted it was the concierge, usually female, who was asked to witness the removal of the goods by Parisian removal companies, thus giving authority to the theft; but she might already have helped herself in advance. Between July 1943 and August 1944 nearly 800 prisoners spent anything from a few weeks to a year in one of the storage warehouses, where they were subjected to forced labour, mostly sorting furniture and objects seized by the Germans.*
The vast scope of the looting may not have been acknowledged at the time amid the general wartime chaos, but tens of thousands of homes had been completely emptied between 1942 and 1944. A report by Kurt von Behr, dated 31 July 1944, mentions a total of 69,619 dwellings emptied, 38,000 of which were in Paris. As the Germans retreated in the summer of 1944, some goods were simply abandoned in these warehouses, and it was here that the provisional government made a start in the long and painful process of restitution for returnees, almost all of whom were Jewish. Returning small items of furniture was a less traumatic process than giving back disputed homes, as it required no dispossession of current users but, at a time of scarce resources and personnel, reuniting furniture and other objects with their rightful owners was an exceptionally fraught task. Some argued that it might have been easier simply to distribute any abandoned goods to whomever seemed most in need, of whom there were thousands, and, from November 1944, some such warehouses were set up. But it was never enough. When twenty-year-old Frida Wattenberg returned to the family flat in 1944 she found not only the furniture and all personal possessions gone but even the light switches had been dismantled to remove the copper. At the same time as the new government, determined to impose unity on the country, was trying to enforce an ordonnance of November 1944 to return expropriated goods, there were also dozens of associations set up that aimed to legitimize certain French wartime acquisitions and make them permanent. The Union Confédérale des Locataires de France petitioned the authorities in August 1945, threatening that if the government attempted to enforce the ordonnance it would risk ‘strengthening the already existing strains of anti-Semitism in the country’.
However, after many setbacks, including the fact that some 135,000 lots of stolen goods had been sold off before their owners had had a chance to claim them, so that some Jews had to resort to buying their possessions back from the French state as the only way of reclaiming them, legislation was passed and a budget allocated for the newly created Service de Restitution des Biens Spoliés (SRBS).