Years later, Paul Rosenberg’s granddaughter Anne Sinclair examined the few existing pictures of the IEQJ installation and listened to Radio-Paris describing with great pomp the Institute’s opening ceremony. ‘The wounding words of the speaker are unmistakably clear,’ Sinclair wrote. ‘“Today saw the rechristening of the building previously occupied by Rosenberg; the name alone tells you all you need to know.”‘ In the photographs and in the National Sound and Video Archives can be seen the novelist Louis-Ferdinand Céline, ‘a star guest with impeccable far-right credentials, parking his bike in front of my grandfather’s gallery, on which the name of that formidable new office stands out in capital letters. The porch and the famous exhibition hall are easily recognisable. A huge panel on the wall shows a woman on the ground covered with a French flag, a vulture perched on her belly, with the caption “Frenchmen, help me!”‘
In November yet another organization was set up, a Vichy initiative called the Union Générale des Israélites de France (UGIF), arguably the most painful of all as it ultimately forced Jews to administer and take responsibility for their own misery and destruction. The UGIF, to which all Jews living in France had to pay dues, thus not only raised money to help Jews but also, inevitably, was in possession of lists of Jewish names and addresses; it therefore became something of a trap. Those who were saved by being removed from its lists because they ‘knew someone’ are often ashamed and cannot talk openly of their survival. Historians estimate that the cumulative effect of all these measures meant that already, by the summer of 1941, half the Jews of Paris had been deprived of any means of subsistence.
But Parisian Jews who had fled earlier were now realizing that life in the so-called free zone was little safer. Miriam Sandzer and her parents felt trapped in the south, unable to secure transit and exit visas and all the other necessary paperwork for the family group now swollen to eleven, or to pay for tickets and hotels. As her mother was already ill from the cancer that would soon kill her, it was Miriam who was sent regularly to queue at the Spanish and Portuguese Consulates in Marseilles to seek visas. But progress was agonizingly slow so she decided to visit the Chamber of Shipping, find out what destinations ships were still leaving for and then try to obtain permits for those destinations.
As soon as she learned there were still sailings from Lisbon to Java, she set off for the Consulate of Java where she was granted an interview with the Consul, ‘a very handsome man’. He offered to supply her with the necessary paperwork if she could supply him in return with a diamond ring for his mistress; she immediately took off her beautiful platinum and pearl one, but he rejected this as inadequate. Then she managed to secure and pay for eleven visas for Shanghai from the Chinese Consulate, but her plans were stymied because there were no more ships sailing to Shanghai. All the consulates were besieged with desperate people like her, many with forged papers and no money, trying to escape the Nazis. Every opening seemed to finish in a dead end, but only after more of the family group’s dwindling resources had been used. Eventually Miriam was persuaded to go alone to Lisbon because she was being watched. Months later most of the group joined her there, and in November 1941, twenty-four hours before they were threatened with expulsion yet again, the British gave them a permit to reside in Jamaica. However, her two brothers had to remain in Lisbon as they were of military age and were required to join the Polish army. The depleted family sat out the rest of the war in the Gibraltar internment camp in Jamaica.*
In Paris itself it was becoming almost impossible for Jews to earn a living in any field, but jewellers especially were in difficulty since they could not acquire the raw materials of their trade. If a client ordered anything in gold they had to supply 100 per cent of the metal themselves and if platinum then 135 per cent. There were ways around this, and much 1940s jewellery was either hollow or lacy openwork or relied on large, semi-precious stones such as amethyst. Cartier turned to making other objects such as clocks, while Boucheron was not the only jeweller to develop a line of mostly silver ‘beauty boxes’. Parisian women, determined to flaunt something new and elegant, would take in sufficient quantities of family cutlery to be melted down into a stylish evening clutch bag of silver, possibly with some gold and embellished with a small stone or two on the outside, with special compartments for cigarettes or make-up fitted inside. It was a decidedly outré object, announcing that the user not only was aware of the latest fashions but was demonstrating she was a modern woman, smoking and putting on powder in public, both activities frowned upon in pre-war society.