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- [00:01]
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- [00:59]
David Musgrove
There's a hotel in central Paris that lived several lives in the tortured times of the 1930s and 40s. A pre war centre of anti Nazi German dissidents in exile from Hitler's Reich, a wartime HQ for German military intelligence and eventually a post war deportee relocation hub. In this episode of the History Extra podcast, David Musgrove asked Jane Rogoiska to reveal the remarkable story of the ever evolving Hotel Letitia.
- [01:31]
Podcast Host
Today I am talking to Jane Rogoiska about her new book, Hotel Exile. Jane, welcome to the podcast. How are you?
- [01:37]
Jane Rogoska
Thank you, I'm very well, very pleased to be here.
- [01:40]
Podcast Host
So it's the story of the Second World War from a different angle through the prism of one place. The Hotel Lutetia in Paris. Maybe I've pronounced that wrong, you can probably correct me. Can you quickly introduce me to this hotel please?
- [01:54]
Jane Rogoska
So the Hotel Lutetia serves, as you said, as the prison through which we tell the story of three groups of people who are all connected to this hotel during a period between 1933 and 1945. So the hotel itself is the only grand hotel on the left bank of Paris. So it sits in the 6th arrondissement. Paris is divided into these areas and it's an area that was known primarily as full of students, full of educational institutions, publishers, philosophers, politicians. And the hotel reflects that it's always had quite a sort of special place in the hearts of Parisians. Now it's undergone a sort of massive revamp in 2018 and it comes under the Mandarin Oriental brand and it's more than a five star hotel now. It's at what they call a Palais. It's A sort of palace. And I think it would set you back enormous quantities of money if you wanted to stay there now.
- [02:52]
Podcast Host
Okay, and the name Lutetia, that's kind of the old Roman name for Paris, is that right?
- [02:59]
Jane Rogoska
That's correct, yes. And it shares the same sort of symbol. So its crest is a picture of a ship on the waves, and it has the same motto as Paris, which in Latin, which I'm probably going to mispronounce, is fluctuat nec mergetur, which means tossed by the waves, yet doesn't sink. Which actually starts to become quite a sort of strong metaphor for the fate of the characters we meet in the book.
- [03:22]
Podcast Host
Yes, exactly. So it's a grand hotel, slap bang in the middle of Paris. And the story you tell is in three parts, pre wartime and post war. So we'll dive into those bits in detail in a minute. But do you just want to very quickly sketch out these elements for us?
- [03:39]
Jane Rogoska
Absolutely. So part one goes from 1933 to 1939 and features a group of prominent anti Nazi Germans who were forced to flee Germany when Adolf Hitler came to power. So these were well known writers, philosophers, journalists, politicians, who had to face a very difficult decision of either stay, be arrested, end up in prison, possibly killed, or flee. And many of them fled to Paris. So part one deals with them. So in part two, we're dealing with the occupation of France. So that's from 1940 to 1944. And we see the hotels in Paris being requisitioned by the German military authorities. And the Hotel Lutetia was requisitioned by the Abwehr, which is German military intelligence, responsible for, amongst other things, sort of espionage and intelligence. And in part three, we're looking at a short period just at the very end of the war. So between April 1945 and August, September 1945, when the hotel was requisitioned once again, this time by General de Gaulle's provisional government. And it acted as a reception center for deportees returning from concentration camps. So these would have been members of the Resistance or Jews who had been deported and who had survived and came back through this reception center.
- [04:59]
Podcast Host
So a remarkable place then, with a remarkable series of stories which helps us to understand the generality of the experience of life for people moving around Europe in these troubled times. So let's go back to that pre war story. So we've got this influx of refugees coming into France from Germany, as you said, as Hitler's grip on power tightens. So what sort of people are they? You mentioned they were sort of writers and radicals. What sort of people? Give me some names.
- [05:24]
Jane Rogoska
Well, so in the first wave, and there were many subsequent waves, and they got larger and more sort of desperate and poorer as they came in this first wave, they were really quite often very prominent people. So there were people like Heinrich Mann, who was the older brother of the now much better known Thomas Mann. So he was a writer and became the sort of figurehead for a lot of the anti Nazi movement abroad. There were politicians, so there was the very well known at the time, communist propagandist Willy Munzenberg, who was the sort of left wing equivalent, if you like, of Goebbels on the Nazi side. He was an incredibly powerful organizer. There was Walter Benjamin, you know, Walter Benjamin, the well known cultural philosopher and writer, and Anna Zegers, a novelist. So we meet a group of people, some of whom people will have heard of now, some of whom are more obscure. But what they have in common is that they were people who had stood up very publicly against Nazism in the first instance and who for whatever reason, either because of their prominence, because of their political beliefs, were forced to flee. And it was a very stark choice. You get a totalitarian regime that has taken hold of the levers of power and basically if you stayed behind, you would be thrown in prison or into one of the newly created concentration camps. So two concentration camps were opened specifically for opponents of the Nazi regime, or you might be killed, as many prominent people who stayed behind and who were unlucky enough to be arrested did. So obviously when you flee a country and you have to make this very urgent choice to leave your hitherto comfortable life behind, people tend to go not very far from where they live. And of course history offers us hindsight, which is a wonderful thing, but at the time they had no idea how long this would last. And Hitler had been preceded by a series of very short lived governments. And there was no reason to imagine that it was going to survive any longer than six months to a year. So they went to places like Czechoslovakia. There was a big refugee contingent in Prague. They went to Holland. Bertolt Brecht, the famous playwright, went to Denmark, but the large majority of them ended up in France. And although there was a sort of wealthier older contingent who went to the south of France, mainly around a colony called Saint Ay Sioux Mer. Heinrich Mann went to Nice, but most of them went to Paris because it was familiar, it was a city they knew well. A lot of them were scholarly, they're journalists, they're been in Paris Many times they loved the city. They spoke French, some of them. And also it was the only place where they might have some sort of fighting chance of getting some paid work.
- [08:00]
Podcast Host
And I think that the answer to this question changes over time a bit as we progress through your period. But how were they received when they came to Paris? Were they well received?
- [08:07]
Jane Rogoska
Well, you're absolutely right. It's a reaction that changes over time. So when they first arrived, there was a welcome for them. These were prominent people. They were not all Jewish. They were people that people had heard of. And, you know, generally speaking, the French. French admired them for standing up to Hitler. But as time went past and the waves got larger, poorer, more desperate as the 1930s continued, you had these big moments of crisis, culminating in, as you approach 1938, huge numbers of people flowing over the borders. And then it became actively hostile. But even from the beginning, governments were always kind of fudging the issue that on the one hand they were welcoming, and on the other hand they tried to make it practically quite difficult for anyone to stay. Nobody really wanted refugees to stay. And Paris at this time had a. Well, France generally had a large immigrant population. There was a lot of hostility towards Germans, a legacy of World War I. There was a lot of anti Semitism as well. So it was a very mixed picture, even in this early stage.
- [09:12]
Podcast Host
And let's go to the hotel that we've been talking about then, because we need to find out what its role in the story was. And perhaps we can do that by talking about the committee, the Lutetia Committee. What was that?
- [09:23]
Jane Rogoska
Yes. So the Hotel Lutecia, which was opened in 1910 and had long been this sort of center for Parisians and foreigners to hold meetings, use the bar, use the restaurant. But it had a large number of large salons which were for hire. And you would have, you know, annual balls there, shareholders meetings. And so the group of Germans who met there were one of many groups who paid for a room and used to meet there. And they called themselves the Lutetia Committee because they met at the Lutetia, in the President's Salon, their grandest salon. And what this was was a concerted effort that started round about 1935 to try to form a Popular Front. This was a sort of movement trying to unite opposition to fascism which was spreading across Europe. France in 1936 had a popular Front government. The Spanish briefly had a Popular Front government. There was a legacy of tremendous disagreement between the two factions of the left, particularly the Communists and the Socialists. But there were also don't forget there were many other smaller groups represented amongst this sort of exiled community. There were pacifists, there were Catholics, there were people who were non aligned politically. And William, who I mentioned before, and Heinrich Mann sort of together tried to corral them all to form this oppositional government that would be ready to take control once Hitler fell from power. Now obviously this was a doomed experiment, partly because they all ended up squabbling amongst themselves and bringing with them a lot of the disagreements of the Weimar period. But also because it was a doomed experiment anyway. There were a very small group of people, they couldn't really affect the change they wanted.
- [11:01]
Podcast Host
Did they do much beyond talking? Did they have any actual practical methods that they employed?
- [11:07]
Jane Rogoska
Not really. I mean there was a lot of, you know, the most active amongst the anti fascists were desperately trying to alert the rest of the world to the dangers of Nazism. And so there was a lot of publicizing, writing articles, getting petitions, sort of enlisting French intellectuals to help public publicize these things. There were a lot of meetings and committees and you know, they tried their best to alert a largely indifferent world to what was going on because they felt that they themselves had failed to stand up and stop Nazism in its tracks and they really wanted this fate not to happen to their fellow European countries.
- [11:48]
Podcast Host
I'm thinking of the story about the seed packets.
- [11:51]
Jane Rogoska
You're absolutely right, yes, I was going to mention that and I forgot. So one of the things that the activists did was, was part of the sort of resistance within Germany and outside of Germany was to write little pamphlets, sort of anti Nazi pamphlets or sentences, and hide them within sort of innocent looking objects. So they were called Tansschriften secret writings. So for example, you might get a packet of tomato seeds and inside you'd pull out and you'd find the instructions for how to plant them. And then underneath that there would be some message, an anti fascist message or you know, a camera might, camera might have the little instructions with it and then along with the instructions would be a pamphlet. And so this was quite widespread. There was resistance within Germany. People risked their lives to try to continue sending out these pamphlets and messages and kept on valiantly doing it as long as they could.
- [12:45]
Podcast Host
So is it reasonable to say that the hotel was kind of the hub of German resistance to Hitler's regime?
- [12:52]
Jane Rogoska
I think you could say that for a time it was, it was certainly the most prominent effort to stand up to the regime within France and obviously the hotel at the time. The relationship of these refugees to the hotel was very much as customers. So they made a very slight mark on the history of the Lutetia. And when I came across this story, when I was actually really focusing on these exiles, I found one line about the Lutetia committee and I got very excited about that. But it was just one line. And it was then that I discovered this wider, darker story which pulled me into making a kind of three part book in the end.
- [13:31]
Podcast Host
So I assume then, given the presence of all these radicals and malcontents versus Hitler's regime, that Hitler wasn't too happy about that. Did he kind of send Gestapo to try and infiltrate them?
- [13:43]
Jane Rogoska
Well, Gestapo spies were everywhere. You know, it was a very widely known fact. And, you know, a lot of people dismissed the German spheres as being sort of paranoid. It happened in the UK as well. There was a much smaller number of German refugees in London, for example, but there were some notorious cases where Gestapo spies managed to infiltrate the exiled communities. And there was a very famous case of a kidnapping of a veteran pacifist called Bertolt Jakob. That's a whole other story. It's fascinating as well. But yeah, they were spied on, definitely. And a lot of the spies would sort of pretend to be newly arrived emigres. They would use a cover story about being a journalist or being a social democrat, being a communist, and try to sort of wheedle their way into these groups and then rat on them.
- [14:29]
Podcast Host
Okay, so before we move on to the next part of the story, we should try and just sort of summarise whether this group achieved very much at all or not. It sounds like you think that maybe they didn't. And certainly, you know, we know the benefit of hindsight tells us that Hitler did in fact start the Second World War and invaded Paris. So on that basis they didn't. But what was their impact, would you say?
- [14:49]
Jane Rogoska
Well, I suppose I'm sad to say that their impact was fairly minimal in the long run. You know, it was a doomed attempt. They were sort of a load of Cassandras, really, you know, prophesying into the darkness. One of the interesting things about when political activists go into exile, it becomes very difficult. They lose their power, they lose their language, they lose their position. And a lot of the time they become sort of disregarded and considered irrelevant. So unfortunately, I think one would say that they probably didn't achieve very much except to provide a fascinating source where people. When people tend to say, well, there was no resistance to Nazism within Germany. Well, there was, but it was stamped out right at the beginning, you know, it was stamped out so brutally in a way that, you know, you can find parallels in any time in history in totalitarian regimes about how they stamp out resistance. But it was very effective and they were, you know, heroic, at least in their failure.
- [15:46]
Podcast Host
Now, before we move on to the next part, let me just mark listeners cars. If you're interested in the Germans who resisted the Nazis, check out another podcast in our back catalogue by Katrine Clay. You can hear some good stories there. And if you want to find out how the Germans managed to get into France, then you might enjoy the podcast why the Maginot Line Couldn't Stop the German Invasion of France. And that's with Kevin Passmore. So a couple in our back catalogue have a listen, but let's move on. So in 1940, Germany invaded France and Paris was soon occupied. So what happened to these people in the Lutetia Committee? Presumably they weren't very happy about that.
- [16:21]
Jane Rogoska
Well, I mean, my book covers sort of chronologically does also cover 1939. So there was obviously the sort of nine month hiatus of the, you know, what we call the phoney war. And they were all interned as enemy aliens and then they were freed again, and then they were interned again as the Germans invaded. And after the collapse of France, the absolute imperative came for them to flee. So we follow groups of individuals through this story. It's constructed in a very narrative way. It's constructed in some ways a bit like a novel. So we engage with individuals and we follow their fate through the book. So although the Lutetia is this kind of central point, during part two, we do find out what happens to these exiles, most of whom tried to flee south to Marseille, which was the only port remaining open where you could flee France. Many of them ended up in places like Mexico or the United States. There were prominent people like Arthur Koestler who ended up in England. Anna Zegers ended up in Mexico. Heinrich Manny ended up in the States in California. And William Munsenberg, unfortunately, when he was interned a second time, was found dead, ostensibly suicide, but in fact he had been murdered, most likely not by the Gestapo, but by the nkvd, because during the period of the Stalinist terror, he had fallen out with Stalin and that was his punishment.
- [17:44]
Podcast Host
So listeners read the book for some of those extraordinary stories, because we're not going to go into them here, but there is some really remarkable stories Jane goes through. Let's go back to the hotel. So the hotel in the centre of Paris, now occupied the Germans, suddenly has a completely new role. So tell us about German military intelligence moving in.
- [18:05]
Jane Rogoska
Well, so, yes, Paris is occupied. It's not been damaged. It becomes the jewel in the crown of the German military occupation. And the German military authorities act with remarkable haste to get their hands on some of the finest buildings in Paris to serve as their headquarters. Now, most of the top brass choose the Rive Droit, the Right bank, and the sort of swanky arrondissements, the 1st, the 8th, the 16th, and they go to hotels like the Crillon, the Georges Sing. And then, isolated slightly as it is on the Left bank, the Rutesse becomes the headquarters for German military intelligence, the Abwehr. So this is an organization under the leadership of Naval Admiral Canaris, a very ambiguous figure, very well known for loving his two dachshunds more than he loved any human being being, I think the Abwehr was not a sort of rabidly Nazi organization. They considered themselves in opposition a lot of the time to the Gestapo and the ss. But nevertheless, what they were engaged in, principally during their time in Paris, was espionage, counterintelligence and the like. All these hotels are being requisitioned and suddenly the staff of the Lutetia find themselves with these uninvited guests of people wearing uniforms who are going to spend the next four years occupying the hotel. 100 staff, the men lived in the hotel. The female auxiliaries had to stay in a smaller hotel nearby. But they all worked there. And the hotel was transformed not just into a place where they would stay, but into a place of work. So they had telephones and they had safes and they had desks put in. And this became their home for four years. And if you can imagine, if you were a German officer posted to France for this four year period, in many ways, whatever work you were engaged on, it could be quite a cushy sort of posting. I mean, certainly from a material point of view, they enjoyed luxurious surroundings, they were served marvellous food, they drank excellent wine. And all of this at a time when the French were subjected to very strict rationing and were living off the infamous Ruttebaga, which is Swedes, and drinking chicory coffee. So it became a very interesting. I became quite fascinated, never having really given much thought to hotels before, about the idea of service. You know that a grand hotel, it is nothing if it is not about service. The staff, many of them were retained while the Abwehr were there and prided themselves on being able to offer this excellent service, whoever it was that they were serving. But there are one or two stories which suggest a slightly subversive edge. So I was lucky enough to find this documentary that was made in 1980 by a German director. He interviewed the head of wine mach, Marcel Weber, who tells an anecdote about how before the Germans arrived, he thought to himself, underneath the hotel there were these cellars full of all these fantastic vintage wines. I mean, just caves full of them. And he decided that he didn't want them to get their hands on his finest vintages. So he got some of his colleagues together and they built a fake wall and they hid all the best vintages behind the wall. When the Germans asked for a map of the underground cellars, it wasn't shown and they never found it. So I suppose there was kind of sly sense of resistance in the fact that the Germans were, you know, falling over themselves to praise how this marvelously sophisticated wine and the people serving them, you know, had a little wink to know that actually this was not the best that the French could have.
- [21:40]
Podcast Host
It wasn't the best stuff. Yeah, that's a great story. It is a great story.
- [21:48]
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- [22:11]
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- [22:13]
Jane Rogoska
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- [22:19]
Podcast Host
I wonder, did the ABE choose this hotel to kind of cock a snook at the radicals who were occupied it previously? Or was it just because all the other hotels had already been requisitioned by the other elements of the German army?
- [22:31]
Jane Rogoska
I think it was probably more. I mean, I don't know for sure and I couldn't answer that 100%. But I think the most likely reason is because being in the 6th arrondissement, this was an area which was known for the kind of people who would have been reliably anti Nazi. So, you know, publishers, philosophers, politicians, and a lot of exiles and emigres as well. So I should think from Canaris point of view, it was sort of about situating yourself somewhere quite discreet and somewhere a little bit away from the centers of power. As I said, they had a rather ambiguous relationship with the more brutal side of Nazism. So I think it was more that. Not necessarily to deliberately cock a snook at the emigres.
- [23:11]
Podcast Host
And was everyone kind of aware what was going on in this building, that it was the centre of German military intelligence? Was it obvious?
- [23:18]
Jane Rogoska
Well, I think that's a good question. I'm not really sure. I think, because a lot of people misname it, they say, oh, the Lieutenant, it was occupied by the Gestapo, or that was occupied by. So I think there was a general level of uncertainty. Perhaps you didn't, as a member of the public in Paris, you didn't have access to these places unless you were going in there as a spy. So that you wouldn't necessarily know, but you probably, at the time, they probably knew. But it was quite quickly forgotten and it was also quite confusing. For example, all the various denominations of secret police within the Nazi hierarchy were quite complicated for the French to understand. And. And there were two buildings in Avenue Foch that they just referred to as Gestapo hq. And whether it was the SD or the SS or various other branches of these services was, you know, the French wouldn't necessarily know that.
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Podcast Host
So what sort of things went on when the Abweh were there? What sort of activities were they doing and how far did their role impact on the occupation of France, would you say?
- [24:17]
Jane Rogoska
Well, so I focus my story on one particular group, which is group 3F, which deals in espionage, counterintelligence, and their main role was to root out the Resistance. And so this involved recruiting spies and training them and then placing them in Resistance networks and then trying to bring these networks down. So the man in charge of this was Colonel Oskar Heile. And the reason why I focus on it is, you know, fairly practical. He wrote a memoir about it and it gave me access to sort of anecdotes about the Abbe and a lot of detail about his work. And the military archives built on that a bit. But it's quite difficult to get really detailed information about absolutely everything. And this was also the most sort of fascinating because it involved some stories that are really brutal. And there was one particular story of a notorious spy called Robert Alesh, who was a priest and who offered his services to the Abwehr and then went on to betray several networks. The way my book is structured around the stories of individuals, they all sort of connect together. I try to find as many threads that connect them. So there's this sort of thread that goes from James Joyce, who stayed in the Lutecia and actually lived there for a couple of months, who had a secretary called Paul Leon, who was a Russian Jew who went back to Paris in 1942 because his son was finishing his education there. He was arrested in one of the first roundups of Jewish and sent to Auschwitz. Samuel Becket, a friend of James Joyce and who also knew Paul, bumped into him the day before he was rounded up, before he was taken, and was so shocked by the horror of the fact that Paul had been taken, he joined the resistance the next day. The network that Samuel Beckett joined was betrayed by this priest, Robert Alish. So there's all these kind of threads of stories that follow through. So a lot of the motivation for covering particular activities comes from the character. So it's a very character driven thing. So the Abwehr were spying on people. As the war progressed, it became obviously the Resistance at the beginning of the war was almost non existent, very sporadic. Then as it developed, they had a few big successes of bringing down big networks. It then got more complicated as the resistance grew and their ability to act was curtailed. The Abwehr then came under control of the Gestapo and the SS and they had less power to act on their own. At the same time there was this kind of massive level of corruption going on around Paris. And this was not unique to the Abwehr, but every department had what was called a bureau de chat, a kind of purchase bureau, which was really a way for the Germans to buy anything that they wanted that the French produced at a price set at an exchange rate that the Germans themselves had set, which they helped themselves to and then sent back to Germany. And this became a sort of massive source of corruption and black marketeering. And there was quite an infamous bureau set within the Luteccia which was called Bureau Otto after the name of the man who ran it. And it was a kind of COVID for adverse spying. But it also became a source of tremendous kind of lining of the pockets of people who worked there.
- [27:35]
Podcast Host
Okay, let's move the story on to the end of the war. So we get D Day in 44 and the Liberation of France. Presumably the hotel is quite swiftly deoccupied by the Germans. Do they leave hot footed or do they leave in good order?
- [27:51]
Jane Rogoska
They leave in a hurry, that's for sure. So as the Allied armies approaches again, we have this testimony from this wine waiter who was there to witness it. And he took a great pleasure in describing how they left in a hurry and packed everything up. And Colonel Oscar Reiller, whose memoir I feature, who was in charge of the espionage division, describes how they emptied out the hotel. He sat down with his colleague for a final glass of champagne, said goodbye to the waiters who he couldn't understand why they weren't friendly towards him, and off they went into the night and back to there. In fact, you know, he survived back to his normal life. And so the hotel was then left empty for a while. And then for a short while, it was billeting Allied soldiers. And then we come to part three.
- [28:41]
Podcast Host
Yeah. And the part three for me was kind of perhaps the most interesting and affecting part of it. The whole book is brilliant, but this short story is perhaps the one that's quite got the most power to it. So it becomes this kind of relocation hub for refugees. So tell us what's going on? How did that happen?
- [28:58]
Jane Rogoska
So one of the extraordinary things when you think about war, we don't think, I think, often enough about what happens once the war finishes. So as the war was coming to a close, the Provisional government of Charles de Gaulle was already thinking about people who were returning. So there were 2 million French citizens who were outside the country who had been taken either as prisoners of war, as forced laborers, or they'd been deported to concentration camps, either as members of the Resistance or because they were Jewish. And initially, it was a kind of guessing game about how they were going to receive these people. And the first two groups, so forced laborers and POWs, there was quite a lot of information about them, and they were mainly sort of young men in relatively good health. So bringing them back was fairly straightforward. Forward, the deportees. There was almost no information about who had been taken when, where they were. Information about concentration camps, let alone death camps, was very, very minimal. People really had no idea what to expect. They set up this idea that they were going to greet them at the train station, perhaps with a band playing the Marseillaise, and they'd all be able to go home and join their families. Then these people started arriving who had literally been liberated from concentration camps a matter of weeks previously, still wearing the uniform of the striped pajamas. They're often described by witnesses as looking like ghosts or people, beings from another planet, weighing half their normal weight, covered in lice, suffering from diseases, typhus, all sorts of dreadful conditions, starved. The people who'd volunteered to organize this suddenly realized, well, obviously these people can't just go straight to off home. We have to find some way of looking after them. And of course, hotels being places that have a large number of bedrooms and the means to host large numbers of people. And the Lutecie was chosen partly because one of the main volunteers, a man called Henri Val, had grown up in that arrondissement. He knew it well. Charles de Gaulle had spent the first night of his honeymoon there. So he okayed it. They chucked out the French officers who were staying there and they prepared it as this sort of more like a hospital really. So as the deportees returned to France in small groups and large groups, they were met at the stations with buses and volunteer scouts, often boy scouts, sort of teenagers, would accompany them into the hotel and they were given a sort of basic medical treatment. I mean, they were greeted in a rather brutal fashion by DDT for the lice. They were subjected to interrogations because there were people hiding amongst them who were, were fake, who were trying to pass themselves off. But they were also questioned in order to try to help them identify who they were and what members of their family were still alive. So it was this kind of moment of humanity entirely staffed by volunteers, so scouts, as I've mentioned, nurses, doctors, huge operation run by these three women. Food was brought in. And so the only people from the hotel who were serving were the kitchen staff and the chambermaids. And the manager was still. It's a heartrending thing. And the sources that I had for that piece was mainly oral testimony. So there were lots and lots of interviews conducted with these people when they were in old age by various voluntary organizations. And it's just the most incredible source of first hand pictures, not just of returnees but of the volunteers. So amongst whom you find, for example, Michel Rocard, who went on to become Prime Minister of France. He was a 14 year old Scout and he was so affected by what he saw that it made him want to become a politician because he said he understood that the consequences of what had happened had been driven not by a military force, but by a democratic election in the first instance. It's a very moving part. And the families gathered outside the hotel waiting for their missing relatives because of course, because nobody had any idea who was where. They would all pin up photographs of these extraordinary photographs of their loved ones onto these boards outside the hotel. And then they would wait there. And some people waited for weeks and nobody came. And some people were lucky enough that they waited and they were reunited. And I suppose the most prominent, the well known figures was the two little daughters of the writer Irene Nemeowsky, who waited there for a really long time with little placards around their necks with their names on them for their mother and father to return. But they had both died in, in Auschwitz.
- [33:26]
Podcast Host
Yeah, I mean, it's very hard to think about how you wouldn't be impacted by that sort of raw emotional experience. And as you said, humanity but quite harsh humanity, because they were effectively fumigated and interrogated when they came in. So it just kind of just reminds us that even that element of humanity was quite shadowed in this time of harsh brutality. So basically it must have been just pure emotion flowing around the hotel and around the outside of it.
- [33:52]
Jane Rogoska
I think it was incredibly difficult. It was also a very ambiguous kind of thing because, you know, the whole end of the war, de Gaulle was trying to sort of promote this idea of France being very unified and France having resisted. And the sort of, you know, the collaboration and the history, the ambiguity of what had happened in France was very complex. And these people arriving were like a sort of reproach, really, in a way, because it was the Vichy government that had handed over, particularly handed over many of the Jews to the Nazis. And it was harsh, but it was also a moment of humanity. And there's a woman who's interviewed in this German documentary that I found, who was German as well, and she said it was the first moment of warmth. I think the Lutetia came to hold a really special place in a lot of the returnees, harps. And many of them would gather at the Lutetia every year after that to commemorate it.
- [34:46]
Podcast Host
We'll come back to just the. We'll finish with the story of the afterlife of the hotel. But before we do that, you just mentioned ambiguity there. It feels like there's a lot of ambiguities in all the stories that you tell there across the piece. I wonder if I can ask you to just sort of generalise a bit and tell me what you think you've learned, or what the listeners and readers might take about the dislocated experience of people living in the war, not necessarily the combatants, but just people having to move around Europe and having lives shattered by what was going on. What would your general observation be?
- [35:19]
Jane Rogoska
Well, I suppose what I was very motivated to try to do, and what I always try to do in my writing, is to place the reader in the position alongside the people who are experiencing what's going on. So although I write about history, I try to, in a way, take away the hindsight and the analysis and encourage the reader to imagine what would it be like to be in this situation. And so, in a way, it's just a sort of invitation to compassion, to understanding what it might be like to be a refugee, to be an exile, but also just to regard everyone as a human being and the gray areas of choices that people make. And it's very easy when you've never Been in one of those morally ambiguous situations to say, why didn't people do this? And why didn't people do that? And there are so many reasons why people have act the way they do, and that's what I find fascinating. So when I write about history, I find those human things. So although my book features quite a lot of famous people like James Joyce or Walter Benjamin, we meet them as human beings, and we meet James Joyce as a family man preoccupied with his family, not as the great author. And that's very much what I want people to take away from it. It's a human story, and it's looking at the three parts of it that gives you a chance in this kind of microcosm, seen through this building, to look at where this Nazi fascist ideology took humanity over this short period of time, of 12 years. That we engage with these characters, we see the effect on three different groups of people over that period of time and how appalling and destructive it is.
- [36:59]
Podcast Host
Yeah, absolutely. Okay, let's finish by just taking the story up to present day. You mentioned at the top of the interview at the hotel is now a very posh place, the sort of place that people with a lot of money go to. Are there many echoes of these stories that we've been talking about still surviving there?
- [37:15]
Jane Rogoska
No. I mean, when I first started researching it, obviously I had this sort of fond hope that maybe I'd turn up and they'd say, oh, we have a little attic available for you. Perhaps you'd like to do your research in that. Of course, not that. And as it is now a sort of luxury hotel that's sort of branded, obviously they're not particularly keen to associate them or to promote. Promote such a dark history. There's a little blue plaque on the outside of the building that was placed there by one of the voluntary organizations to commemorate the 40th anniversary of the liberation of the concentration camps. But that is really all there is. If you didn't know anything about it. You know, a hotel is not a museum. The building is the same, it looks the same, but you have to engage your imagination and read about the history of the people who've been in there to actually know what went on here. The building itself, I mean, I. I talked to quite a few former members of staff, and of course they'd say. They'd say, oh, it's, you know, it's lost its charm. The Lutecia is not quite what it used to be, but, you know, it's. It's a beautiful hotel and it has
- [38:17]
David Musgrove
an extraordinary history that was writer and historian Jane Rogoska in conversation with David Musgrove. Jane's new book, hotel Paris and the Shadow of War, is out now.