Hélène Berr wrote that as soon as she had heard the details of the rafle she felt guilty ‘that there was something I hadn’t been seeing and that this was reality’. She noted some facts: ‘How some children had to be dragged along the floor, how one whole family (mother, father and five children) gassed themselves to escape the round-up, how one woman threw herself out of a window … several policemen have been shot for warning people so they could escape … It appears that the SS have taken command in France and that Terror must follow.’ But for Berr the real agony was how to respond personally: should she try to leave and abandon struggle and heroism in exchange for dullness and despondency or do something proactive, like many factory girls who lived with Jews? ‘They are all coming forward to request permission to marry, to save their men from deportation.’ Then, with the painful honesty which makes her diary such a powerful document, she admitted that part of the reason she did not want to leave Paris was her love for Jean.
The round-up was only a partial success for the Germans in terms of numbers of people seized, as only half the Jews intended to be arrested were actually caught. The news had leaked and many Jews went into hiding. But in August 1942 René Bousquet, Vichy police chief, rewarded by the Germans with extra resources, organized several further deportations of Jews from French-administered camps such as Gurs and Rivesaltes in the so-called free zone. These Jews had been turned over to the Nazis by the Vichy authorities in accordance with a deal Bousquet had just struck with SS General Carl Oberg, the man in charge of German police in France. The Bousquet–Oberg accords of 2 July were presented to local officials as giving French police greater autonomy, but this was far from the truth and in reality French police were compelled to comply with German demands. Since the Germans did not have enough manpower in France in 1942 to undertake all these arrests themselves, the question remains: if Vichy had refused to comply at this time would more Jews have been saved? The first of the convoys consisting of Jews from the Free Zone delivered by Vichy to the Nazis according to the Bousquet–Oberg deal, Convoy no. 17, left Drancy for Auschwitz on 10 August 1942 carrying approximately 1,000 Jews, almost all German citizens, over half of whom were women. Three-quarters were gassed as soon as they arrived in Auschwitz. Throughout the month of August, convoy after convoy left the non-occupied zone, heading first to Drancy. New convoys were then formed, not always with the same Jews, which went from Drancy to Auschwitz.
Now it was clear nobody was safe. Those Jews who had convinced themselves that they had lived in France for so long or had contributed so much to the country that they were immune from the threat, that they were somehow protected, were plunged into terror. Many applied for special dispensation to Vichy, making their case for why they should not have to wear the yellow star. On 25 August, Heinz R?thke, the highest-ranking German official in charge of the camp at Drancy, listed twenty-six individuals who had been granted an exemption certificate.
Among those hand-picked to receive protection from Pétain, which meant, among other ‘privileges’, that they did not have to wear the yellow star, were wives of leading figures such as Lisette de Brinon, née Franck, whose husband, Fernand de Brinon, was the Vichy representative to the German authorities in Paris, and Marie-Louise, Marquise de Chasseloup-Laubat, daughter of the banker Edgar Stern, as well as her sister Lucie, Mme de Langlade. Both had converted to Catholicism years before. But several requests were rejected, including one made by Colette on behalf of her husband, Maurice Goudeket. He escaped on forged papers to the free zone for a while, but then returned and hid in the maid’s room above their apartment, believing that Colette could not survive without him. It was a brave gesture.