Original subtitles

[dramatic music]

[slow dramatic music]

In the early '30s,

the rise of fascism in Europe pushed artists

to become politically engaged.

Aragon pledged his unconditional allegiance to Moscow,

causing the breakup of the surrealist group.

After much hesitation

and at the risk of weakening the only country

capable of opposing Nazi Germany,

Andre Gide published his Return from the U.S.S.R.

The Spanish Civil War broke out in 1936.

Andre Malraux went off to join the Republicans

against the fascists.

Franco took control of Spain,

while in the distance, the rumblings of a new conflict

were already disrupting the stability of the world.

[slow dramatic music]

1939.

Europe was being torn asunder

under the advance of an invincible army.

Borders were being ripped apart by the feldgrau fury.

Austria was the first to fall.

Then Czechoslovakia.

And Poland.

The descent into war had begun.

The voice of the poet Robert Desnos

could still be heard on the Poste Parisien radio waves.

[man speaking in foreign language]

[guns firing] [explosions booming]

[people shouting faintly]

[man speaking in foreign language]

[bright instrumental music]

Robert Desnos, the former wakeful sleeper

of the little gang of Surrealists,

was now interpreting the dreams of listeners

on his show, "The Key to Dreams."

But not for long,

because France had entered the war.

The program came to an end for lack of enlistees.

Desnos was called up to other fronts.

The dreams would wait. [slow dramatic music]

So here we go again, just like in 1914.

The war that was supposed to be the war to end all wars

had come back to haunt those going off to the front.

It was the beginning of the Phoney War, the Sitzkrieg,

or the sitting war, as the Germans called it.

Robert Desnos, in spite of his myopia,

was sent off to the Maginot Line,

where the French were waiting for the enemy with confidence,

protected by a barrier that was thought to be impassable.

Louis Aragon left for the Belgian border.

Paul Eluard was assigned to the supply corps.

Andre Gide, who was over 72 years old,

vacated his Vaneau street apartment with his little gang.

Dali would soon run from

his provocative-slash-Hitlerian tendencies

by emigrating to the Americas.

Matisse was already living on the Riviera.

Andre Breton fled to Marseille,

before jumping on a boat to New York.

[boat whistle blaring]

Everywhere in Europe,

works of art were being removed for safekeeping.

In Paris, giant statues were encased in wooden frames

and taken away in trucks, loaned by the Comedie Francaise.

[people chattering faintly]

Huge paintings were hoisted onto trailers.

The Winged Victory of Samothrace,

the Mona Lisa, porcelain from Sevres, rare manuscripts,

antique jewelry from previous centuries,

all of the country's national treasures

were being moved out.

[slow dramatic music]

[footsteps thudding] [door clanking]

[trucks and tanks rumbling]

In the spring of 1940,

to the surprise of French military leaders,

the German army bypassed the Maginot Line,

pushed through Belgium and invaded France.

On June the 17th, 1940,

the sun rose over a Paris shrouded by a veil of mourning.

The German troops had just entered the city.

At 8:00, the tanks drove up to Les Invalides.

At noon, the swastika floated over the Senate.

The war was over.

It had lasted five weeks.

[clock ticking] [bell tolling]

The next day, all of the clocks were moved

forward one hour. [slow dramatic music]

Paris was now on Berlin time.

[people chattering faintly]

[door creaking]

Soon afterwards, in July, 1940,

art and culture were brought

under the heel of the occupiers.

[indistinct hammering]

Jewish artists were banned

from working in music, film, and theater.

Their names were erased from the cast and credits.

Declared anti-Nazis were given the same treatment.

Films made during the Popular Front administration

were banned.

Certain scenes, played by Jewish actors

or enemies of the new regime,

were censored and re-shot with other actors.

Dalio vanished from "The Curtain Rises,"

Erich von Stroheim from "Personal Column."

Art galleries were controlled,

the collections of Jewish dealers were raided

and shipped off to Germany.

Jewish publishing houses,

such as Calmann-Levy and Fernand Nathan, disappeared.

The Bernhard and then the Otto lists banned books by Jewish,

Marxist, or anti-German writers.

Freedom of the press no longer existed.

In a city under guard, like Paris,

how could one continue to paint or write?

After being demobilized,

Sergeant Desnos had returned to Paris.

[slow dramatic music]

He went back to working as a journalist.

He took advantage of the cracks

in the system that the Germans had left

during the first weeks of the Occupation,

to slip a few banana peels under their feet.

He had no qualms about attacking collaborationist writers,

beginning with Louis-Ferdinand Celine.

Who, in turn, retorted, "Why doesn't Mr. Desnos shout out

"what he really feels in his heart and which is killing him

"because he's holding it in?

"'Death to Celine and long live the Jews!'

"Mr. Desnos, it seems to me,

"is leading a philo-kike campaign."

Desnos soon became a victim of censorship

and the far-right press.

He sold anonymous drawings to the newspaper "Aujourd'hui,"

in order to survive.

It was barely enough to get by.

For the last 10 years,

Robert Desnos had been living in Saint Germain des Pres

with Youki, [gentle orchestral music]

pink snow in Japanese,

who had once been married to the painter Foujita.

[door clanking] [footsteps thudding]

She would sit and smoke under the big portrait

that Foujita had made of her a few years earlier.

On the floor, were abstract or surrealist paintings

waiting to be hung.

[cat meows]

[people chattering faintly]

[man whistling]

Every day, Robert Desnos would go to a small restaurant

on Rue des Grands Augustins called the Catalan.

It wasn't to eat, he couldn't afford it.

[people chattering faintly] [people laughing]

He came to get the leftovers from meals, for Youki's cat.

He would open the door

and belt out his usual battle cry, "They're screwed!"

Then he would go from table to table, greet people,

tell jokes, retrieve a paper bag of scraps, and return home.

[gentle orchestral music]

The Catalan was Picasso's headquarters.

He too would go there every day.

Dora Maar or a few friends would be invited

to share a meal of good, rare, and expensive food

from the black market.

The Occupation was gentler here than in other places.

Picasso's works were exhibited all over the world,

everywhere except in occupied Europe.

In Paris, some of them were packed into a room

at the Jeu de Paume Museum,

where the Germans had put away the paintings

of artists considered to be degenerate.

Braque, Cezanne, Dali, Gauguin, Matisse,

Manet, Monet, Renoir, and Soutine

were all are prohibited from displaying

or exhibiting their works.

Many artists decided to leave Paris.

Picasso chose to stay, [slow dramatic music]

his fame and his Spanish citizenship,

which made him neutral, protected him.

[coal rustling]

[bell tolling]

[people chattering faintly]

He would give postcards of Guernica

to the Germans who came to see his work.

When one of them asked him, "Did you do that?"

He replied, "No, it was you who did it."

Picasso was extremely critical

of anyone who associated with the occupier

or who visited Hitler's Germany.

His door was closed for good

to those former companions from the Bateau Lavoir,

who now rubbed shoulders with the Nazis,

Vlaminck, Derain, Van Dongen.

[door knocking] [door creaks]

Almost everyone else was welcome,

and almost all of the time.

Jean Cocteau was a very frequent visitor

to Picasso's studio on Grands-Augustins Street.

He would be accompanied by Jean Marais.

One was a slender, if not emaciated, gentleman

in his 50s, elegant to a tee,

with forearms encased in tight cuffs

that left his wrists free to pirouette

around the delicacies of the world.

The other, 25 years younger,

was as beautiful as a living statue.

[gentle orchestral music]

They had known each other since 1937.

One day that year,

Jean Marais went to the Hotel de Castille,

where the poet was living.

Cocteau was looking for an actor for his play "Oedipus Rex."

A strange smell wafted through the hotel room,

which contained a number of peculiar objects,

a silver platter, jade rings, an oil lamp,

pipes with long stems.

Cocteau was lying on the bed.

He was inhaling the opium with long breaths.

In spite of the drug-induced haze of the surroundings,

Jean Marais read the first act of the play with brio.

The second act was done a little later.

When Jean Marais came back for the final act,

Cocteau fell into his arms

and confessed to him, "I love you."

And the curtain down came on the bed of the poet

and his gorgeous catch.

Cocteau never read the newspapers.

He preferred to stay away from the affairs of the world.

As for his political views,

the tragedy, in those terrible times,

was that he had no political views.

[people chattering faintly] [people laughing]

During the Occupation, Jean Cocteau kept himself busy.

He wasn't the only one and certainly not the worst.

He was even a saint, compared to the clique of writers

sympathetic to the far right, [slow dramatic music]

Celine, Rebatet, Sachs, or Drieu la Rochelle,

who blatantly called for the extermination of the Jews,

the Communists and the Freemasons.

But still, Cocteau was a socialite

who was invited to chic salons,

in which collaborators puffed themselves up

and deployed their wit.

Those who came to these banquets, were actors,

theater people,

and fashionable ladies. [speaking in foreign language]

They could be found at the Moulin Rouge,

at the Opera, in the cabarets, and music halls of Paris.

[people chattering faintly] [people laughing]

They flocked to the Tour d'Argent,

which continued to serve its famous pressed duck.

Amidst the swish of evening gowns and tailcoats

coming out of the Casino de Paris,

which was off limits to dogs and Jews,

the joyful night-lifers might occasionally

run into a dark figure walking along the walls,

trying to be invisible.

It was Chaim Soutine.

He was wanted by the Gestapo as a Jew,

a stateless person and a degenerate artist.

In the street,

he would turn the rim of his hat down over his eyes,

hoping one would recognize him.

[people chattering faintly]

[man breathing heavily]

He was sick. [dogs barking]

He was reduced to eating nothing but potato mush and soups.

He was excruciatingly thin.

The ulcers he had suffered from in the early days,

when he would wait for Modigliani

in the back of the Rotonde, had not healed.

He was living in hiding,

with his new mistress, Marie-Berthe Aurenche,

who had been Max Ernst's second wife.

Then, one terrible day in 1942,

the concierge denounced him.

Soutine fled to Touraine.

Marie-Berthe dragged him from hotel to hotel,

until they found a secluded house to move into,

a tiny refuge of hope.

[birds chirping] [doors creaking]

[slow dramatic music] [bell tolling]

[people chattering faintly] [baby crying]

[bell ringing]

World War I had wiped out Montmartre.

World War II drove the artists away from Montparnasse.

Their new stomping ground was now Saint-Germain-des-Pres.

The Cafe de Flore had replaced the Closerie des Lilas,

the Dome and the Rotonde.

Inside, it was warm.

[gentle orchestral music]

The black market flourished discreetly between its tables.

And it was a pleasant place to work.

Friends would come by.

In case of an alert, the metro was just a few steps away.

Some people even had the privilege

of turning the Cafe de Flore into their personal office.

The pipe smoker sitting near the stove, for example.

Jean-Paul Sartre.

He would arrive around nine in the morning.

A waiter would immediately serve him his coffee.

He would pull a sheaf of papers out of his briefcase

and start to write.

From time to time, he would dive under the table,

looking for cigarette butts,

that he would break up into the bowl of his pipe.

He often exchanged a few friendly gestures

with a woman who was writing

at a table nearby, Simone de Beauvoir.

Sartre had been taken prisoner by the Germans

at the end of the Phoney War.

One day in March, 1941,

he showed up at the Cafe de Flore

and found Simone de Beauvoir.

He had just returned from captivity.

The Occupation seemed worse than war to him.

War was the result of a refusal, which it then perpetuated.

The Occupation prohibited people

from acting and thinking.

"His New Ethics," wrote Simone de Beauvoir,

"Based on the notion of authenticity,

"and which he sought to put into practice,

"required that human beings assume their situation

"and the only way to do so

"was to transcend it through action."

[man speaking in foreign language]

How? By joining the Resistance.

[people chattering faintly]

He founded a Resistance movement, "Socialism and Liberty,"

that included a group of fifty writers and professors.

They wrote leaflets and typed up programs

that were passed out in the academic halls

of the Ecole Normale.

[typewriter clacking] [people chattering faintly]

But it wasn't enough.

Simone and Jean-Paul decided to build up the network

in the free zone, in Southern France.

[gentle orchestral music]

There, they would surely find people animated

by the spirit of resistance.

To begin with, the two great intellectual activists

of the '30s were down there,

the two Andres, Gide and Malraux.

Early in the summer of 1941, they got two bicycles,

took the train to Montceau-les-Mines

and secretly crossed the demarcation line.

Then they rode, on the first day, for 40 kilometers.

Sartre was in front.

Simone had a hard time pedaling up the slopes.

Occasionally, they would fall.

At night, they were exhausted.

They stopped at a hotel.

Slept the sleep of athletes.

Left early the next morning.

They often stopped at inns,

where Sartre would take a few notes.

It was easier than putting up a tent,

camping has never been

one of the strong points of philosophers.

They went down to Marseille and then to Grasse,

where Andre Gide was expecting them.

Gide had taken refuge down on the Mediterranean coast,

followed by his friends and family.

He had believed, for a few weeks,

that Petain would be a bulwark against Hitler.

He refused to write for the "NRF,"

the literary journal that was now under the diktat

of Drieu la Rochelle.

At 72, he didn't feel he had the strength

to do anything more.

That's what he told Simone and Jean-Paul.

In exactly 20 minutes.

It was his way of turning them down.

After Gide, they set their sights on Malraux.

Simone and Jean-Paul expected more from him.

After the defeat of the Spanish Republicans,

he had acted on behalf of the refugees

interned in French camps.

In 1940, he had been transferred to the tank corps

in Provins as a lowly soldier,

he who had once been a colonel

in the Spanish Republican army.

In June, 1940, he had escaped.

In short, he was a hero.

Simone and Jean-Paul rode their bicycles

down to Cap d'Ail, near Saint-Jean-Cap-Ferrat.

Malraux received them in the villa

where he could enjoy the fresh air and the sun

with Josette Clotis and their newborn baby.

They admired the sea from the deck chairs on the lawn

and talked a little about literature

before sitting down to lunch.

John-Paul waited until the dessert

to ask the critical question, "What about the war?"

Malraux had already had several visitors

come to ask him the same question,

would he be willing to join a Resistance movement

that was embryonic, but growing day by day?

He had explained his point of view to all of them

and given them the same answer

that he gave to his present guests,

"It was no use going against the Germans."

He had seen them at work in Spain.

One could not fight unarmed

against the slaughterers of Guernica.

[gentle orchestral music]

It was time to go home.

Beauvoir and Sartre would go on to pursue

a lifetime of political engagement,

but for now, they had had the door slammed in their face

by those whose place they would soon be taking.

They returned to Paris by train.

Traveling in the other direction,

was a man who was going down to Marseille.

It was the poet, Rene Char.

He was in a compartment next to a woman

who offered him a cigarette.

He took it.

She handed the packet to the man next to her,

a German officer.

Char immediately gave the cigarette back to him,

got up, and left the compartment.

From his surrealist years,

Rene Char had developed a taste for saying things clearly

and for acting decisively.

He was absolutely intransigent.

Some writers did not resist the Occupier.

Many published their writings or had their plays

performed in front of assemblies of Nazi luminaries.

[speaking in foreign language]

A few, like Vercors, Francois Mauriac,

and Jean Guehenno, published in secret

with the "Editions de Minuit" publishing house

or in underground periodicals.

Others, like Rene Char, took a position and stuck to it

for the entire duration of the war, they refused to publish.

Anything at all.

Those who, like Char, laid down the pen

to attack the Germans with guns and rifles,

were exceedingly rare.

In the spring of 1941, [gentle orchestral music]

the poet took refuge in Cereste,

a small village in the mountains around Apt,

in the Lower Alps.

From there, he began weaving his network,

by going out to the surrounding villages.

He was a warlord, a soldier in the Secret Army.

[gun firing]

Armed with his two Colts,

he went into cafes where the Germans might be lurking.

He set up ambushes.

He scouted out the areas

that would be receiving weapons from London.

He picked them up and distributed them.

He shot traitors.

[gun fires]

He also wrote, he "Was a poet at war.

[gun firing]

"We must overcome our rage and disgust,

"we must make sure they are shared by others

"in order to raise up and extend our action

"like a moral code."

He was in Isle-sur-la-Sorgue, his hometown,

when he heard the extraordinary news

that would change the course of the war.

On June the 22nd, 1941,

at three in the morning, [slow dramatic music]

Hitler launched his Operation Barbarossa,

[plane engines rumbling]

from Finland to the Black Sea,

three million Wehrmacht soldiers set out

to take on the Soviet Union.

[guns firing]

Along a front that was nearly 2,500 kilometers long,

190 divisions backed by 5,000 airplanes and 500 tanks

crossed the border and headed into the steppe.

[engines rumbling] [men shouting]

The war was entering a new phase.

[warning siren wailing]

On that day, June the 22nd, 1941,

the news was celebrated in the Desnos home in Paris.

The guests raised their glasses to the forthcoming victory.

It was clear to everyone that a second front in the East,

combined with the strength of the Red Army,

would eventually force Germany to its knees.

The Barbarossa plan would be the undoing of the Great Reich.

[whistle blaring]

[footsteps thudding]

[windows creaking]

In compliance with passive defense measures,

the blackout curtains were drawn,

and candles were used for light.

[people chattering faintly] [people laughing]

A few bottles that had been carefully preserved

from the prewar days,

to celebrate such an event, were uncorked.

[cat meows]

The games, the automatic writing,

the waking dreams that had

once brought the surrealists together

were now things of the past,

but Eluard and Desnos,

who had never excommunicated each other,

[gentle orchestral music] celebrated hope,

with the spirit of their youthful days.

[glasses clanking]

"Evening has folded its wings over Paris in despair.

"Our lamp supports the night as a captive does freedom."

Most of their friends left a few minutes before the curfew.

Those who lived too far away

or who missed the last subway slept there.

As for Robert, he went up into the loft

he had built over his library.

[cat meows]

Amongst the privacy of his books,

he put together a few confidential documents

he had taken from the newspaper "Aujourd'hui,"

diagrams, troop movements,

the addresses of senior German officials.

He would pass them on the next day,

to members of his network,

who had ties with the Intelligence Service.

So every night before going to bed,

Robert Desnos became a Poet Resistant,

but no one knew it.

[people chattering faintly]

In Paris, opposition to the Occupation was quite rare.

In the world of art, culture and entertainment,

many were simply neither-nor,

they neither collaborated nor resisted.

They put up with what was going on,

with a little discomfort for the most well-off,

with some annoyance for those who were less well-seated,

caught between a rock and a hard place for the rest.

Jean Cocteau hovered,

not between collaboration or resistance,

but rather between the Vichy government

and the German administration.

In 1941, when his play "The Typewriter" was banned

by the French censors, [slow dramatic music]

Cocteau turned to the Occupiers for help.

[typewriters clacking] [people chattering faintly]

The Germans overturned the French decision.

When the play opened, there were violent reprisals.

Alain Laubreaux, a leading theater critic

at the paper "Je suis partout,"

slandered Cocteau and Marais in vulgar terms.

Unfortunately for Laubreaux,

one evening he was dining in a restaurant

on Boulevard des Batignolles,

where Cocteau and Marais were regular customers.

The actor went up to the pen-pusher and said,

"If you confirm that you're Laubreaux, I'll spit on you."

[man spits] Laubreaux confirmed

who he was, and Marais spit.

They flew at each other.

The journalist was roundly thrashed.

In his friends' eyes,

Cocteau was seen as a shrewd tactician.

He was attacked by those who insulted him before the war,

defended by the friendly and distinguished

set of Germans who considered themselves Francophiles

and were open to dialogue with the occupied.

Yet Cocteau did not lack courage.

During the Occupation, he defended the poet

and imprisoned thief, Jean Genet.

As well as, alas, Arno Breker,

an official sculptor sponsored by the Reich

and a friend of Hitler's,

who had an exhibition at the Orangerie in May, 1942.

The event, which was organized by Laval,

attracted the who's who of the collaborationist crowd.

In the pro-collaboration press, Cocteau wrote,

"I salute you Breker.

"I salute you from the high homeland of the poets.

"I salute you, because in the high homeland

"where we are compatriots, you speak to me of France."

In reaction, perhaps, to the monumental statuary

that was being exhibited everywhere,

Picasso took up sculpture again.

[slow engaging music]

While Maurice Vlaminck was writing

in the newspaper "Comoedia",

that Picasso was "Guilty of having led French painting

"into the deadliest of impasses,"

enormous figures were emerging

under the studio's wooden arch.

An imposing bust of Dora Maar sat on a wooden pedestal.

"Man with a Lamb" was created in 1943,

a clay sculpture standing over two-meters high,

erected with the help of his friend, Eluard.

The huge, peaceful Mediterranean shepherd

watched over the studio like a sentinel,

fending off the many attacks that were aimed at Picasso.

Although Picasso suffered less than others

from the hardships of the Occupation,

war was a constant theme in his work.

His still-lifes revealed the concerns of the time,

hunger, cold, restrictions, constraints.

"Painting is not made for decorating apartments.

"It's an offensive and defensive instrument

"of war against the enemy," Picasso would later say.

[sirens wailing] [slow dramatic music]

In November, 1942, the Spanish painter's dark colors

seemed to take over the entire country.

On November 11th, in reaction to the Allied landings

in North Africa, the Germans crossed the demarcation line.

The Southern zone no longer existed.

Everyone who had fled and sought refuge

under the precarious cover of the supposedly free zone

was now looking for somewhere else to live.

One night, the publisher, Pierre Seghers,

received a phone call from Elsa Triolet,

who had been laying low in the Southern zone

for the last few months with Aragon.

She was panic-stricken.

What should they do?

Where could they hide?

Louis Aragon seemed as distraught as she was.

And yet, at 42, he had left for the front

with the same verve and courage as when he was 20.

[bell tolling]

A few months before the beginning of the war,

he and Elsa had got married.

In the wedding basket, there were three jewels:

love, literature, and Stalin.

[car engine whirring] [gentle orchestral music]

Pierre Seghers drove his friends to Villeneuve-les-Avignon.

From there, they went to Dieulefit,

then continued for a few kilometers,

until they reached a ruined house cut off from the world,

which was only accessible on foot.

[bell ringing]

They named their new refuge Heaven.

[slow dramatic music]

They would live there alone for some time,

in absolute secrecy.

The house had only one room.

That is where they would write,

Elsa Triolet, "The White Horse,"

Louis Aragon, "Aurelien."

The few neighbors they had knew them

as Elisabeth Marie and Lucien Louis Andrieu.

No one knew that the poet had created

the National Committee of Writers for the Southern zone.

They would occasionally take a break and go to Lyon,

the capital of the French Resistance effort.

Aragon had created an underground distribution system

via which the journal, "Poetes Casques," "Poets in Helmets,"

published by Pierre Seghers, could be circulated.

Many rebel writers wrote for it, all under pseudonyms.

Elsa and Louis sometimes traveled to Paris.

[train wheels clacking] [train whistle blaring]

10 years after leaving the group

in the wake of the Kharkov Congress,

they would go to meet Paul Eluard,

their old friend from the days

of the great surrealist battles.

[brakes squealing]

Paul and Nush met Louis and Elsa

at the Gare de Lyon train station.

[whistle blaring]

They went to celebrate their renewed friendship

in a restaurant, in the 5th arrondissement.

What was important now, was to unite their efforts,

in order resist the Occupiers together.

Rather than talk about their differences,

the two men emphasized the things they had in common.

They were both hiding out

under the cover of false identities.

They had broken off with Andre Breton,

who had left for America.

Both of them were leading figures

in the Writers' Committee, one in the Southern zone,

the other in the Northern zone.

They were both members of the underground Communist Party,

and thus subject to the death penalty.

[ominous music]

Like Aragon and Elsa Triolet,

Paul Eluard had not stopped publishing his works.

He was willing to submit them to the official censors,

but he also published in underground journals.

In the summer of 1941, he had written a poem for Nush.

Then he realized that the only word that he had in his mind

was the word, liberty.

He published, undercover,

a collection entitled "Poesie et verite," in 1942,

[bright orchestral music]

"Poetry and Truth," which opens with this poem,

thousands of copies were dropped over France,

from the planes of the Royal Air Force.

"On my notebooks from school.

"On my desk and the trees.

"On the sand, on the snow.

"I write your name.

"On every page I read.

"On every blank page.

"Stone blood paper or ashes.

"I write your name.

"On the golden images.

"On the weapons of warriors.

"On the crowns of kings.

"I write your name."

[waves crashing]

[birds chirping] [water burbling]

On May the 27th, 1943, people strolling in the Tuileries

noticed a column of acrid black smoke

swirling over the gardens.

They might have thought it was a fire.

[fire crackling] Fire!

It was an auto-da-fe of paintings

that had been removed by the Germans,

to be burned in the inner courtyard

of the Jeu de Paume Museum,

in a corner of the Tuileries,

along the Place de la Concorde.

[people chattering faintly]

After breaking the frames and slashing the works

by artists deemed to be degenerate,

they had piled them up and set them on fire.

[fire crackling] [slow dramatic music]

And so, in the mild twilight of the month of May,

500 paintings were going up in smoke,

works by artists as vile, corrupt, and perverted

as Kisling, Paul Klee, Fernand Leger, Francis Picabia,

Max Ernst, Juan Miro, Suzanne Valadon,

Pablo Picasso, and Chaim Soutine.

[birds chirping]

Soutine was in hiding, in a small house near Chinon.

Three months after his works were destroyed

in the Tuileries Gardens,

he was in agony, [melancholy orchestral music]

suffering from a perforated stomach.

He was taken to the hospital in Chinon.

He begged the doctors to operate on him,

but Marie-Berthe refused.

She wanted to him to be treated by a specialist in Paris.

She hired an ambulance.

They went back to their secluded house

to get some paintings.

He burned a few of them.

[fire crackling]

24 hours later, when Soutine finally got to Paris,

after evading roadblocks and police checks,

his stomach was in shreds.

He was operated on, on August the 7th, 1943.

He died on the 9th, at six in the morning.

He was buried a few days later,

in the cemetery in Montparnasse,

in a burial plot belonging to the Aurenche family.

But not under his star.

Paradoxically, it is a cross that watches over him.

And that is not the only irregularity.

The date of birth is also wrong.

And his name is misspelled.

Picasso was at the funeral.

As well as Max Jacob, who had come out of his retreat,

in the abbey of Saint-Benoit-sur-Loire,

near Orleans, to be there.

Even though he had converted to Catholicism,

even though he taught catechism to children in the village,

Max still wore the yellow star.

Whether in Paris or in Saint-Benoit,

he could not go into cafes or public places

that were off-limits to Jews.

He was not allowed to publish anything.

His writer's royalties were confiscated.

Max Jacob placed some small stones on the tombstone,

as was the tradition, and then went back to St-Benoit.

That was where he felt safe. [indistinct chanting]

He was taken care of there, he didn't go hungry.

He lived by selling his manuscripts,

which he constantly recopied.

He no longer had any of the paintings

that his painter friends had given him.

One by one, his family members had been arrested.

Some had been tortured, all were deported.

"I am slowly becoming convinced

"that they will soon be shooting all of the Jews en masse,"

he wrote, at a time when anti-Semitic massacres

were still widely unknown.

[people chattering faintly]

During the night of July the 9th, 1943,

the Allies landed in Sicily.

Mussolini was removed from power and arrested.

On September the 8th,

Italy signed an armistice with the Allies.

[slow dramatic music] Meanwhile, in Paris,

Jean-Paul Sartre was having his play, "The Flies,"

performed for an audience of German officers.

[audience applauding]

At the dress rehearsal, he had met a writer whose works,

"The Stranger" and "The Myth of Sisyphus,"

had been published by Gallimard.

His name was Albert Camus.

The biggest difference between

the members of Sartre's family

and this stranger, who had come from Algeria,

was their background. [people chattering faintly]

Political engagement had been a meaningful part

of Camus' life for a long time.

In Algeria, before the war,

he had been active in defending the rights

of the Muslim population.

When he came to France as a journalist,

he became editor of the newspaper, "Combat," the voice

of the United Movements of Resistance organization.

Provided with false papers,

Albert Camus had set up the underground newspaper's meetings

in the back of a concierge's lodge.

He asked Beauvoir and Sartre if they wanted to join them.

They agreed and then disappeared.

By his own admission, Sartre, during the Occupation,

was more of a writer who resisted

than a Resistant who wrote. [slow dramatic music]

[thunder rumbling] [phone ringing]

On the morning of February the 22nd, 1944,

the phone rang in the Desnos apartment.

Robert answered it.

On the line, a friend warned him

that the Germans were coming.

They had just arrested two members of his Resistance group.

Youki implored him, "Go and hide somewhere!"

The poet refused.

He was afraid the Germans would arrest Youki in his place.

But he was confident.

He had cleared his library of all the prohibited books

and documents it contained [door knocking]

a month earlier.

The Germans arrived. They searched the apartment.

Desnos went pale when they came upon a paper

in the binding of a book he had forgotten to hide.

There were names on it, and the first, was that of Aragon.

Aragon, the wanted, outlawed Poet Resistant.

Desnos tried to defend himself,

"It's a list of art critics."

[slow dramatic music]

"Get dressed. Bring warm clothing.

"Where you're going, the nights are long and cold."

Robert Desnos took his Parker pen

out of the inside pocket of his jacket

and handed it to Youki, saying,

"Keep it for me, darling. I'll come back and get it."

[train wheels clacking]

Robert Desnos would be interned at Compiegne,

then sent to the Floha work camp in Saxony.

He would be deported to Auschwitz,

then to Buchenwald and Flossenburg.

He wrote poems that he hid in a small tin box.

He managed to send a letter to Youki for her birthday.

[somber piano music]

"I wish I could give you 100,000 light cigarettes,

"twelve dresses by fashion designers,

"the apartment in Rue de Seine, an automobile,

"the little house in the forest of Compiegne

"and a little threepenny bouquet.

"While I'm gone, always buy flowers, I'll pay you back.

"And the rest, I promise, will come later."

[engine whirring rapidly]

A few days after Robert Desnos was arrested,

a black Citroen stopped at the door

of the Abbey de Saint-Benoit.

[bell tolling]

[footsteps marching]

Three Gestapo agents had come to get Max Jacob.

[man coughing]

[man sneezes]

[man sniffling]

They had a hard time taking him away.

The villagers had been alerted

and had gathered in front of the Abbey,

to try to save him, in vain.

[car engine firing]

In the car, just as the door was closing,

Max whispered, "Warn Picasso in Paris."

[door slams] [car engine revving]

[bright orchestral music] [men laughing]

Picasso, a door into his life

from the old Bateau-Lavoir days.

Those were happy times.

On the way back, after visiting his friend,

Max would stop at the night pharmacy

in the Saint Lazare train station,

to buy a bottle of ether.

At home, he would shut himself in and inhale,

all the while talking to God and the Virgin Mary.

The pharmaceutical vapors would whisk him away

on small white clouds that were so comfortable to relax on.

How far away those days were.

So many dreams for the present-day nightmare.

Max was taken to the military prison in Orleans,

and locked up in a cell.

He wrote letters to his friends in Paris,

begging them to save him.

He signed them, "Max Jacob, man of letters."

[slow dramatic music]

On February the 28th, they shoved him into a truck

and took him to the Orleans' station.

He was sent off to the camp in Drancy,

where he was detained, not as Catholic, but as a Jew.

He caught cold and developed a cough.

In Paris, Jean Cocteau was doing everything he could.

He made calls, circulated a petition.

Max was overcome by fever.

He was taken to the infirmary.

[indistinct rustling] [people chattering faintly]

His friends finally obtained the release order

they had been hoping for.

But when they arrived in Drancy, it was too late.

On March the 5th, 1944, Max Jacob succumbed

to violent attack of bronchial pneumonia.

[people shouting faintly] [water splashing]

On the 6th of June, 1944, the Allies landed at dawn,

on the beaches of Normandy. [slow engaging music]

A man leapt from one of the barges.

He was in water up to his waist.

He held his hands up high in order to protect his cameras.

For an hour and a half, while the bullets were flying,

Robert Capa took pictures of the D-day landing.

He had followed the Allied forces through Sicily and Italy.

Then he went to Bayeux, Cherbourg, and Mont Saint-Michel.

He was capturing the war for the American magazine, "Life."

He followed General Leclerc's 2nd Armored Division by car

and entered Paris on August the 25th.

[people cheering]

He photographed the Germans withdrawing,

the euphoria of the civilians.

[people chattering faintly] [people cheering]

General de Gaulle being welcomed as a liberator.

[people singing in foreign language]

The first tanks to enter Paris

bore Spanish names,

Guernica, Madrid, Guadalajara.

[slow dramatic music] Coincidence or destiny?

Those who had been the last to leave a devastated Spain,

were the first to enter a liberated Paris,

along with Robert Capa.

Paris had been liberated, but the war was not over.

It would take another year for Germany

to finally surrender, on May the 7th, 1945.

[ominous music]

On that day, the Red Cross

entered the Terezin concentration camp in Czechoslovakia.

A Czech nurse found Robert Desnos' name

on a list of survivors.

He was very weak.

He had contracted typhus and was admitted to the infirmary.

On June the 8th, 1945, the eyes of the poet,

who was known as the Waking Dreamer, would close forever.

[somber music] [chimes clinking]

And Guillaume Apollinaire, master of dreams and reveries,

would sing. [bright piano music]

"I picked this sprig of heather.

"Autumn has died, you must remember.

"We shall not see each other ever.

"I'm waiting, and you must remember.

"Time's perfume is a sprig of heather."

[slow engaging music]