Earlier that year the introduction of the hated Service du Travail Obligatoire (STO) was promoted by Vichy with posters suggesting that Frenchmen who worked in Germany under the scheme were being good fathers by helping to provide for the wives and children they had left behind. But the STO merely added to the general unpopularity of a regime which, it was by now clear, had salvaged nothing from the defeat and was not even a buffer between the French and the Germans. Since November 1942 Vichy had been a mere puppet government clinging to the remnants of power but losing authority. This prompted Vichy in January 1943 to set up its own paramilitary force, the Milice, headed by Joseph Darnand, mandated to fight the resistance and root out Jews and given its own programme for the Nazification of France. Then Drancy, the increasingly overcrowded and unhygienic internment camp in Paris, which had initially been under the control of French police,* loyal to Vichy ideals, was in early July handed over to the Germans. As the Nazis stepped up their Europe-wide mass-extermination policy, the task of running the camp was handed to the loathed and vicious SS Hauptsturmführer Alois Brunner.
The sixty-six-year-old Bernard Herz, from his desperate corner in Drancy, was witness to the increasingly brutal round-ups that were bringing in more and more Jews. All the while he retained the faintest hope that he might any day be summoned to the Rothschild Hospital and from there effect an escape.? Meanwhile Suzanne Belperron, running the jewellery company singlehandedly and at the same time doing her best to get Herz released, was harassed constantly by the Gestapo demanding to see official documents – baptism and burial certificates – proving she was not Jewish. What seems clear today, from a study of the Herz file – innumerable microfilmed pages in the National Archives in Paris showing detailed floor plans made by French officials of Herz’s home in Chantilly as well as inventories of his flat and possessions – is that the Germans were determined to seize his assets. On 21 February he wrote to Suzanne, his ‘Chère Amie’, what appears to be an agonizing final communication from his ‘disgusting’ prison. In tiny writing on a fragment of brown paper, he thanks her for the little parcels she was sending him, recounts the interminable boredom of Drancy and tells her where to find his will. He ends: ‘I do not at all regret staying in Paris, as I thereby shortened the time I will spend away from it. If I had my time again, I would do it all again. Forgive me for all the trouble I caused you. It seems I bring you nothing else when what I wanted so much was your happiness. Thank you for everything.’ After seven months at Drancy, Bernard Herz was deported to Auschwitz on 2 September 1943, where he was murdered.
But as more ordinary French people now witnessed cruelty and barbarity on a massive scale, and with children often torn screaming from their parents, public opinion slowly turned. Consequently, 1943 saw a steady growth in resistance groups, not only those in the countryside, swollen with fugitives from the forced-labour draft (now known as the Maquis or Maquisards because of the scrubland they often hid in), but also in towns and villages throughout France. Small cells or networks were now growing with various types of subterfuge undertaken. Many individuals simply wanted ‘to do something’ to thwart the Germans, without necessarily joining a group. Alongside the collaborators, still buying, still eating, many Parisiennes now put their lives on the line.