From the WSJ Opinion Archives
LEISURE & ARTS
A Tour of War and Remembrance
An American in Paris sees the sights of its liberation.
PARIS--Despite having been born as recently as 1960, I have a fascination with World War II. Judging by the best-seller lists and the recent release of such films as "The Great Raid," it seems I am scarcely alone. In recent years, that obsession has found an outlet in a surge of war-related tourism, with caravans of air-conditioned motor coaches plying the back roads of Normandy, following in the footsteps of "Saving Private Ryan" and "Band of Brothers." Since the youngest veterans are now in their late 70s, it seems safe to say that the tour operators can't be catering to them exclusively.
But when my wife and daughter and I planned a short visit to Paris recently, there was no time for an excursion to Normandy. A few days before leaving, however, we caught on television the 1966 movie "Is Paris Burning?" recounting the dramatic story of the city's liberation from the Germans in 1944 and its unlikely hero, German Gen. Dietrich von Choltitz. He successfully stalled carrying out Hitler's mad command to destroy the city rather than let it fall intact into Allied hands. Intrigued, I immediately began seeking out someone who might be able to give us a tour of the sights relating to the dramatic events of August 1944.
Several enquiries led to dead ends. When not even historian David Pryce-Jones--whose excellent "Paris in the Third Reich" is now sadly out of print--could give me a contact, I began wondering if my particular interest was perhaps a bit too esoteric to be satisfied.
Then I heard about Rachel Kaplan and her company French Links. An American long-time resident in Paris, she founded French Links six years ago to provide customized tours for visitors with singular or specialized tastes. Her Web site even includes a "tour request form," where you can outline your particular needs, whether it be a tour of the sights of the French Revolution and Napoleon or the art of the Renaissance. Touring the Liberation of Paris, it turned out, presented no challenges for her.
For $750 (French Links charges in dollars, not euros, which was nice before the recent strengthening of the U.S. currency), we got the full-day services of Pierre Letin, a wonderfully engaging and energetic native Parisian and speaker of impeccable English. He also lived through the German occupation as a child, and so was a fount of interesting, unusual and often witty facts about his native city and its unhappy experience with foreign rule.
For example, the Germans couldn't resist using Paris's best-known landmark for propaganda purposes.
"Early in the Occupation, the Germans hung a huge sign on the first level of the Eiffel Tower, 'Deutschland Siegt an Allen Fronten,' or 'Germany Is Victorious on All Fronts,' " Pierre said. "As the war went on, the sign became a source of much public amusement."
Since we were staying on the Avenue de Breteuil, just three blocks from Les Invalides, Pierre thought the Musée de l'Armée behind Napoleon's Tomb would be the best place to start. (While he was understandably skeptical of the presence of our 4-year-old daughter on what would be an eight-hour journey through museums, Mimi was extremely well-behaved throughout.) Not only is there a magnificent museum of the history of the French Army (including an example of the famed "Marne taxicabs" that conveyed troops to the front in World War I), but Hitler spent nearly an hour of the 2 1/2 he spent in Paris on his only visit in June 1940 gazing at the tomb of the great Corsican.
But historical comparisons weren't the only thing on the German's mind. He found time to settle some scores as well. On the walk up the avenue toward the museum complex, Pierre pointed out to us the statue of World War I French Gen. Charles Mangin, standing on the Place du President Mithouard, behind the St. Francis Xavier church. Mangin became a French national hero in the epic battle of Verdun in 1916, and the statue replaces one Hitler ordered destroyed on the day he played tourist. (He also demanded the destruction of the statue of Edith Cavell--the executed World War I British nurse who helped Allied soldiers escape from German-occupied Belgium--in the Jardin de Tuileries. It, too, has been replaced.)
Despite what many Americans imagine about how the French view their recent military history, the striking thing for an American visiting the Musée de l'Armée (as well as the Museum of the Liberation at the Gare Montparnasse, which was our next stop) is the remarkable degree of honesty about France's fall and capitulation in 1940 and the subsequent conduct of the Vichy regime. While the focus is understandably on Charles de Gaulle and his Free French forces, France's British, American and, yes, Russian allies receive their due. The only glaring bias I could detect was a wall map purporting to show that more Frenchmen died in World War II than Americans.
Again, small details supplied by Pierre made the tour worthwhile. The plaque at the Gare Montparnasse commemorating the surrender of German forces in the city on Aug. 25, 1944, is both wrongly placed--it is situated at the base of the (ugly) Montparnasse office tower, some 300 yards from the train station where French Gen. Philippe Leclerc had his headquarters--and misleadingly worded. Gen. Von Choltitz, the German commander, surrendered at the Prefecture de Police across the square from Notre Dame, not at the train station as the plaque suggests.
The Prefecture, where the resistance uprising chronicled so well in Larry Collins and Dominque LaPierre's book "Is Paris Burning?" began, is still Paris's police headquarters and is not open to the public. But the building still bears the scars of battle. At the main entrance opposite Notre Dame's front door, just beneath the plaque that was placed on the 50th anniversary in 1994, you can still see the chip in the wall made by the first tank shell that struck the building after it was seized by the Resistance on the morning of Aug. 19, 1944.
On the other side of the Seine is the Hotel de Ville, where the first Allied tanks, dispatched into the city from Gen. Leclerc's Second Armored Division (Free French), arrived early on the evening of Aug. 24, the act that began the final phase of the city's liberation.
Also well worth a look is the museum honoring Gen. Leclerc and another honoring underground leader Jean Moulin. The latter was treacherously betrayed to the Gestapo (almost certainly by communists looking to eliminate Gaullist rivals) and died in German captivity. Both of these museums are in the same complex at the Gare Montparnasse as the Museum of the Liberation.
We ended our tour, appropriately, in the dining room of the Hotel Meurice on the Rue de Rivoli. The hotel served as the Stadt-Kommandantur für Gross-Paris (City Headquarters for Greater Paris), and Gen. Von Choltitz lived in room 213. In the lobby, you can still see the balcony where the German machine gunner fired on the Free French squad led by Lt. Henri Karchi that burst through the front door to arrest Gen. Von Choltitz and his staff, and the staircase up which Lt. Karcher led his men to make the capture. There is nothing to mark this aspect of the hotel's history, and if guests ask to stay in the general's old quarters, as some used to do in the Watergate burglars' suite at the old Howard Johnson Motor Lodge in Washington, the discreet hotel staff isn't saying.
Reservations for any of FrenchLinks' tours can be made online at www.frenchlinks.com, or by calling their Paris office, 20, rue St. Charles 75015 Paris, +33-1-45-77-01-63. Evenings and weekends: +33-1-47-58-12-21.
Mr. Barnes, a corporate communications executive with Pfizer Inc., is the author of "John F. Kennedy on Leadership" (Amacom Books).
