And on 27 November Josée de Chambrun went with her friend Arletty to watch a gala performance at the Comédie-Fran?aise of Le Soulier de satin, (The Satin Shoe), by Paul Claudel which lasted in its original form for eleven hours but was reduced to a mere four on this occasion. ‘Fortunately there is not a pair,’ quipped Sacha Guitry. Arletty was equally stirred to wit by the occasion and commented that the audience consisted of ‘Les touts: Tout-Paris, Tout-Résistant, Tout-Occupant’. Clearly that was something of an overstatement, since that same day Noor was taken to Germany ‘for safe custody’ and in complete secrecy imprisoned at Pforzheim in solitary confinement as a Nacht und Nebel (literally ‘night and fog’) prisoner, condemned to disappear without trace. Two days earlier she had tried to make a daring escape with two other prisoners, but although she managed to saw through bars and get out of her cell she was arrested in the neighbourhood. From then on she was kept in chains, not allowed out for the next ten months.
The winter of 1943 was yet again fierce and bitterly cold, worse even, according to some accounts, than the previous icy wartime winters thanks to the lack of coal and the tense atmosphere. By December, the ten-year-old Rosa Liwarrak was totally alone. Her mother had died giving birth to her in 1933. Her elder sisters were in hiding and her father had been arrested in Paris in September. Before his arrest, he had tried to make arrangements with his accountant to look after Rosa and her brother, but the accountant had refused to take the brother as he was circumcised, and the money was now running out for Rosa. So she was put on the last civilian train to leave Paris for Brittany to live with her young stepmother in the country. But the train, which had a swastika on the roof and many German soldiers inside, was bombed by the British just after Rennes, killing hundreds of passengers. Amazingly Rosa (who had now changed her name to the more Breton-sounding Rose Livarec) survived and, as she did not look Jewish, one of the German soldiers on the train agreed to drive her in a jeep to her stepmother’s house. Pauline Bohic, who came from a devout Roman Catholic family, immediately fell on her knees when she saw Rosa, declaring it was a miracle: obviously, her prayers to the Virgin Mary had saved her. Within hours Rosa was converted by the local priest and for the next year attended a Catholic school in a local convent. It was, she said years later, such a relief. ‘The Catholic Church is very attractive to a child. Jesus is very forgiving and full of compassion. The church is full of lovely songs and pictures and sculptures. It isn’t full of rules about things you cannot do.’
Conversion was less help to Béatrice de Camondo Reinach in Drancy, who was constantly writing letters to her mother, Irène Sampieri, who was herself writing to Georges Prade, a fixer, who had close contacts with Jean Luchaire. Contacts were everything in this murky world. Why could he not fix the Camondo situation? Was there nothing left to barter or were they being punished for their earlier sense of security? On 31 March 1943, Georges Duhamel, Permanent Secretary of the French Academy, had asked Fernand de Brinon for clemency for the Reinach family and Brinon had passed on the request to Helmut Knochen, Senior Commander of the SiPo-SD. In response the SiPo-SD concluded that as various German authorities considered Léon Reinach a ‘typical and insolent Jew’ he should be deported from Drancy forthwith, although Béatrice could be kept longer. She was given a variety of chores, from sweeping and cleaning the floor to peeling vegetables for the soup. Her daughter Fanny was working in the infirmary acting as a nurse, while Bertrand, although separated in the men’s quarters with his father, made himself useful with carpentry.
The musician Marya Freund, who had taught Germaine Lubin, got to know the Camondo family during her own incarceration here at this time and spoke of Béatrice’s dignity. Freund, aged sixty-seven, had been arrested on 11 February at her Paris apartment and imprisoned in Drancy for five weeks, until 21 March, when she was transferred to the Rothschild Hospital, thanks to the intervention of the pianist Alfred Cortot. But even Cortot could not arrange Freund’s release from the hospital. Freund owed her second escape, and thus her life, to a doctor there who revealed to her a good moment to escape, information she used one day in July by walking out of a door when no one was looking, without coat or gloves (a noticeable deficiency at all times of the year in 1943), to spend the rest of the war in hiding.*