As an unintended sequel to Robert Antelme’s The Human Race—which Marguerite Duras mentions towards the end of the first part of her book, the part that deals with waiting for Antelme to come back, his return, battle against death and slow convalescence (during which she tells him she wants the divorce, because she wants to have a child with Antelme’s best friend, Dionys Mascolo)—The War is superb, since it allows the reader to witness not only what happened after Antelme shared that cigarette with the Russian inmate in the quarantine barracks at Dachau, but to see what Antelme looked like—the impression he made—upon others who had known and loved him before he had been arrested by the Gestapo and sent to Buchenwald in the first place (the place and time at which The Human Race begins)[1].
But the second part of Duras’s narrative is no less fascinating, as it deals with the period during which Antelme was still held in Fresnes, before being deported to Germany. He was arrested on the 1st of June, 1944, and less than a week later the Allies had successfully disembarked at Normandy, and began fighting their way east. Duras’s portrait of the French Gestapo agent who arrested her husband, and was the first man to interrogate him (with his fists and shoes and a cudgel, no doubt, among other persuasive means), is remarkable, as this man is obviously attracted to her, and yet sufficiently a gentleman to refrain from asking to come up after escorting her to the building she lived in, alone now, after one of their daily meetings—because Morland (alias François Mitterrand), who was the head of Duras’s resistance group, insisted that she not lose contact with the man she calls Pierre Rabier, for obvious reasons, while she too had a personal motive in maintaining this contact, since it provided her with a tenuous link with her husband, whom she was never allowed to see.
On pages 76 to 78 Duras describes the way this Gestapo agent appeared in the street soon after she had first met him in the police building on Rue des Saussaies, just when she was acting as a liaison between two members of the Resistance who did not know each other. Rabier notices her and snaps his fingers when he says her name, calling her to him. She has already made contact with one of her comrades, and is casually speaking to him, but she obeys Rabier’s call, all the while worrying that the other man she is supposed to meet might think the Gestapo agent is the resistance man he is supposed to rendezvous with, and come over and shake his hand.
What happened in France during the war was in many ways unique. Unlike the Dutch, who not only surrendered immediately to the Germans, but also became aligned with them in many ways—with hundreds if not thousands of Dutchmen volunteering to join the German forces—France was split in two and occupied in the north, while the south remained under the viceroy-style rule of Marshal Pétain. In addition, the country was full of refugees from all over Europe, including thousands of Spaniards with experience of fighting the Nazis. These men (and women) formed the backbone of the spontaneous guerilla resistance movement known as the maquis. Meanwhile, and throughout France, most people—most Frenchmen and women—either collaborated with the German occupiers or the French Vichy regime in one way or another, or became members of the various and diverse underground resistance movements, in one capacity or another. In this way French society, which was already deeply split along class lines, became schizophrenic as well.
And in this way—as throughout all of Europe at that time—common people, ordinary people, normal men and women, and even children, just like those you would see anywhere, those all around you right now, your friends and neighbors, the guy in the bank, the woman in line at the green grocers, all ended up doing—and suffering—the most uncommon, incredible and abnormal things: becoming spies, runners, informers, turncoats, saboteurs, mistresses to the occupiers and masters of the conquered, soldiers, torturers, assassins and their victims—all for the duration of the war.
Courage and cowardice at this time became less exceptional and more clearly defined, perhaps, and heroes and villains mushroomed everywhere—if only because each individual was forced to decide, and those decisions always implied stark consequences.