The Sorrow and the Pity Page #14

-Do you consider that a partisan war?

-No.

For me, partisans are people

who wear armbands, helmets and the like.

What happened in that potato field

was assassination.

You must admit

that we were obliged to react.

I'd even say that it was our duty,

as officers

to demand security measures

for our troops.

After Liberation, I was given the task

of guarding German prisoners.

I supervised a whole commando,

but I never hurt them

and I never yelled at them.

If I'd treated them

the way they'd treated me

I wouldn't have been any better than them.

And I didn't want that.

These old guys were all veterans

from World War l, from the Shupo.

What could we possibly do

with men like that?

They hadn't hurt us.

The people who had hurt us

had taken off at high speed.

They were long gone.

But these old guys had done us no harm.

I remember one of these men

had broken his gun.

This man gave me an apple

as we were marching.

We'd been marching for three days,

and as we walked along,

the old guy slipped me an apple.

See what I mean?

That was the day we'd had

one loaf of bread for 22 men.

In the afternoon, of that same day,

at 3:
00, we were liberated.

To be a member of the Resistance,

did you need political training?

-No.

-What was your family background?

My family background

was always rather left wing.

I was never an extremist,

but I was always left wing.

-So what were you then?

-I was a Socialist.

I'm still a Socialist today.

And I'm proud of it.

Although the Party has a few people

which really should be...

They're people like me,

who are getting old.

Why get 80-year-old people

to govern our country?

We should put them out to pasture.

People say that some peasants

got rich during the war.

There are some.

There are some, that's for sure.

Maybe it would have been better

to get rich on the black market.

Then I'd be rich

and everyone would like me.

But I was in the Resistance,

so they think I'm dumb.

And rightly so!

Do you think

that having been in the Resistance

gives you a good or bad reputation

in the minds of others?

I think it has always given us

a bad reputation.

Because when we were active,

they called us terrorists

-or bandits.

-Yes, bandits.

-Many people still believe this.

-Some even called us profiteers.

Yes, because we did parachuting.

There were some people

who claimed to be in the Resistance

and took advantage of this

to steal and loot.

-That's why many people think--

-They were thieves.

Weren't there two types of Resistance?

There was the anti-German side,

and then the anti-Nazi side.

For us, German or Nazi,

they were both the same.

They were one and the same.

I used to feel that we should distinguish

between the German people and the Nazis.

But after I was taken prisoner,

thrashed, and fed by catapult...

I'm sorry, but I reacted

like any hungry man

and considered them one and the same.

There were some Germans

who weren't Nazis in their heart.

But those Germans

were in the concentration camps.

Don't forget that concentration camps

opened in Germany in 1933.

All Germans were Nazis.

Any Communists in Germany

were sent to the camps.

And when you met a German in a camp,

it wasn't like hurting a Communist.

-Did any Communists join the Nazis?

-Theoretically not.

But I wasn't about to ask them.

I don't speak German.

The Germans we fought in Auvergne

were all Nazis.

-Or members of the S.S.

-Nazis or members of the S.S.

-That was it.

-Did you kill any Krauts?

Probably, but we didn't see it.

When you are in a hole

standing behind your machine gun,

you don't know what you've hit.

And bad Frenchmen?

I knew many bad Frenchmen,

but I never killed any of them.

-And the rest of you?

-Me neither.

I was already a black sheep,

the odd man out.

I had married an American divorce,

a Grossfeld to boot.

I had done many things:

I had smoked opium,

I had written many extraordinary articles,

and I was considered a black sheep,

one who would never succeed.

It's always a shock for society

to see a black sheep succeed.

Despite my weakness for Communists,

the day I became a minister,

my family accepted me.

But what did I find in the Resistance?

The most important thing for me,

other than dignity

was that it was truly a classless society.

The problems of everyday life

ceased to exist.

We were very free.

What I'm going to say may sound mean,

but I think that to be a Resistant,

you had to be maladjusted.

We were free in the sense that,

as outcasts of society,

the organization of society

no longer concerned us in the least.

You can't imagine a real Resistant

being a full-fledged minister,

or a colonel or a businessman.

Such people have succeeded.

They would succeed

with Germans, Englishmen or Russians.

But we were failures

and I was one of those failures.

We had quixotic feelings

that are so typical of failures.

Some people are Resistants by nature.

In other words,

some people are naturally headstrong.

Others, on the contrary,

try to adapt to the circumstances,

and get what they can out of it.

If you are a Resistant over everything

and nothing, you're exaggerating.

But if you accept everything, you're lying.

There were six of us:

a gas-company worker, a pimp,

a public transport worker,

a butcher from Quipavas

and others like that.

On the quay of Port-Vendres,

I found men who were simply men

who had fled like others had fled,

Iike I had fled,

who asked me what they could do.

I said, "Why not join the Resistance?"

I went down along the coast

until I reached,

in St-Jean-de-Luz, an English ship

with orders to take no Frenchmen,

only a Polish division on its way to London.

So I said, "Let's go to headquarters,

"the 5th Marine Bureau,

where we can do something."

And so I went to Collioure.

The office had been set up in a brothel,

because there was

nothing else available in the area.

They said, "Why resist? You're mad."

And they demobilized me.

I went to Marseilles,

where, with a few men,

I realized we had to fight in France,

not abroad.

We were all aware of the fact that

we were appealing to the patriots,

who saw that we were people

who actually fought,

whereas many other people

were just full of talk about resisting.

We weren't talkers, we were fighters.

The patriots had seen the amazing gesture

of a militant Communist,

who was perhaps unaware

of the effect this gesture would have.

Just before being shot

by the Nazis in Chateaubriand,

the metallurgist

Jean-Pierre Timbaud cried out,

"Long live the German Communist Party!"

And that, you see...

Why are you anti-Communist, Colonel?

The main reason is that I'm a Catholic.

I know they helped the Resistance,

and I'm also aware of the fact that

they participated, for the most part,

in their own interests,

in order to defend Russia,

Communist Russia,

which is their motherland.

Russia is their motherland?

Although they claim to be international,

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