A handful of protesters took the decision to wear a yellow star out of sympathy even though they were not Jewish, and called themselves ‘Friends of Jews’; some wore a star with the word Zazou printed in the middle, the Zazou style being a kind of spontaneous teenage rebellion, more popular with boys than girls, deriving from jazz and anti-fascism. Although the Zazous were spread throughout France, they were concentrated in Paris and met in cafés or basement clubs, mocking the Nazis and their Vichy collaborators. After a government decree that hair should be collected from barber shops to be made into slippers, Zazous grew their hair longer. Cartier even had a customer who commissioned an expensive gold-star brooch to be made as a rather futile grand gesture, but a gesture nonetheless, while one young girl was imprisoned for tying the yellow star to the tail of her dog. Hundreds of Jews, if they thought they could avoid being identified, took the decision not to wear the star at all. Of course they risked being denounced by those who knew they were Jewish, so well-known Jews had little choice other than to write to Vichy, which had not yet imposed the star on its citizens, anxiously requesting that they might be granted special dispensation by Pétain himself.
Claire Chevrillon, hoping that the Parisian authorities had not discovered that her mother was Jewish, advised her to risk not wearing it. But her law-abiding mother decided she should and queued up to buy her three badges. ‘First my mother wore the star. Then she took it off. Then she put it on again. She oscillated this way for several months – certainly the worst thing to do – and finally stopped wearing it altogether. Later through the underground I got her a false identity card with the name of Mme Charpentier, which at least allowed her to avoid being caught in a street round-up.’
Some women saw in the regulations an opportunity for revenge or for a meagre payment from the authorities. One anonymous informer wrote about the daughter of M.A., ‘a former dancer who was not wearing the star. This person, not satisfied with being Jewish, debauches the husbands of genuine French women … Defend women against Jewesses … and you would be returning a French husband to his wife.’ It was typical of many such letters.
Hélène Berr agonized for herself too but then decided she must obey. ‘It is cowardly not to wear the star vis-à-vis people who will,’ she wrote. One day a stranger approached her and offered his hand saying loudly, ‘A French Catholic shakes your hand … and when it’s over we’ll let them have it.’ It was, she felt, the decent thing to do. Similarly she concluded that leaving the country would be an act of cowardice: ‘enforced cowardice, it would be cowardly towards the other internees and the wretched poor’.
But on 23 June – ‘a radiant morning’, as Hélène noted – her father was, without warning, arrested. Hélène was the first in the family to discover that he had been taken from his office for questioning at the Avenue Foch, and she rushed home to tell her mother. The Avenue Foch was a wide boulevard in the heart of fashionable Paris where three magnificent nineteenth-century villas at numbers 82, 84 and 86 had been taken over by the notorious SiPo-SD (Sicherheitsdienst), the counter-intelligence branch of the Nazi SS, as their French headquarters in Paris. Number 84, used for the imprisonment and interrogation of foreign agents captured in France, soon became a byword for cruelty, torture and terror. Later that day the Berr family learned from a surreal conversation with a French police officer, who telephoned to give them further details, that M. Berr had been detained because his yellow star was not correctly stitched on. Mme Berr then explained that she had put it on with hooks and press studs ‘so Papa could wear it on different suits. The officer insisted that the press studs were what had prompted Papa’s internment. “At the Drancy camp all the stars are stitched on.” So that made us realise that he was on his way to Drancy.’
In the boiling heat of the day, so hot that Hélène was ‘drenched in sweat’, she, her sister Denise and her mother rushed around gathering essentials such as a toothbrush, which they had been told they could deliver to the Préfecture de Police, where he was being held.
We tramped up endless staircases, along blank-walled corridors with small doors leading off to left and right; I wondered if they were cells and if Papa was in one of them. We were redirected from one floor to another … the baggage was heavy. Maman found it hard to get up the top flight of stairs. I told myself: ‘Come on now, it’ll soon be over.’ It was close to excruciating.
After several false starts they found the usually dapper industrialist, without tie, braces or shoelaces, already looking like a man in custody. As the dismal family group sat on a bench Mme Berr started sewing on his star again. ‘I was trying to get a solid grip on what was happening,’ Hélène wrote. As she took in the scene she reflected: ‘You might have wondered what we were all doing there … we were among French people.’ There was not a German in sight.