Americans in Paris by Charles Glass

Paris is the city of light, the literary capital of the western world, a gathering place, a place of love and yet for one dark period it was an occupied city with the bleak flags of the Nazi horror fluttering from every post and building and the sound of the Jackboot replacing the light murmur of the streets.  The city was saved because it declared no resistance and we all better off because of that.

But the people suffered from lack of heat, lack of food, lack of freedom and life in occupied places is not pleasant for anyone.  The potential knock on the door, the Gestapo and all the other horrid institutions of intimidation were always there and a neighbor might choose to turn you in for false reasons just because they are angry at you.

But this is only a story of the French in that it is there city and their institutions and their battle, instead it is the story of the Americans who lived there and chose to stay for the occupation.  In the beginning, America was not in the war so they were not subject to the ill treatment of the French, and especially the Jews and the minorities.

The cast of people is a fascinating combination of shopkeepers, doctors, actress, businessmen who each played a significant role in the drama.  We follow a businessman who is so intrigued by his own genius that he is happy to pursue his ideas with anyone who has the power in cash and so he becomes involved with the Nazis as easily as the British, French and Americans he has previously worked with.  Even after the US enters the war and the Americans are captured and put in controlled structures within the controlled city.

There is the couple who saves the American Hospital and the American Library, but has no time for the resistance movement.  We meet the owner of the Shakespeare bookstore who has been a friend of Hemingway, Joyce and numerous other important literary figures – Hemingway even makes an appearance at the beginning and the end.

Doctor Jackson and his family save lives in the hospital and also save pilots through an underground railroad that gets many American fighters out of France, but ultimately all of his family will be sent to prison camp and in a terrible irony die when the British blow up three ships that are filled with prisoners shortly before the war ends.

And then there is the story of the black pilot who had to fly for the French because the Americans prejudice was so great.   He saw how the American’s forced the French to remove Africans from their ranks and refused to allow blacks to walk in the victory parade through Paris – a city that did not share these terrible racial traits – traits that were more in line with the Nazis.  In the city of enlightenment it was obvious that the great American Nation stilled needed its own enlightenment in this area and that would be the next big chapter in American history.