Paris Undercover: An Excerpt
June 1, 1942
The Statue of Liberty, that great gift of France, glowed dimly in the thin morning light as the mercy ship entered New York Harbor. The day had broken gray and damp and unusually cool for the beginning of June, and in the distance the limestone towers of lower Manhattan brooded with a sense of incompleteness, the peaks of the taller skyscrapers having vanished into low-hanging clouds. At the start of the new work week the city was stirring to life, and in the streets the heavy smell of frying oil mixed with the sharp salt tang of sea air, and coffee brewing in Automats and luncheonettes, and smoke that was already drifting in from factories uptown and across the Hudson. Drivers of vans bearing newspaper logos with ornate antique typefaces tossed string-tied bundles against the sides of wooden kiosks; within moments the strings would be cut and the papers stacked in piles under cast-iron weights or hung up on clothespins like wash on a line.
The front pages that day brought news of an air raid conducted two nights earlier against the German city of Cologne; more than one thousand bombers of the Royal Air Force, an armada with a destructive force greater than any the world had yet seen, had dropped 1,500 metric tons of high-explosive and incendiary bombs on the city, reducing much of its historic center to ruins. In New York, the papers gave special attention to an American navigator flying along with the RAF, Brooklyn’s own Charlie Honychurch, of whom it was noted, inevitably, that he was “nuts” about the Dodgers. Honychurch told the reporter from the United Press that his crew had been part of a later wave, and by the time they arrived overhead Cologne had been turned into a vast sea of fire; it was, he said, “like looking down the mouth of hell.”
Entering the harbor, the Drottningholm made a ghostly shimmering in the mist; the ship was entirely white but for the painted blue and yellow bands and the words SVERIGE and DIPLOMAT in black letters thirteen feet high on the hull. Once a luxury liner of the Swedish American Line, with plushly appointed salons and arched skylights and polished woodwork that gleamed in the light, the Drottningholm had recently been chartered by the U.S. State Department to carry out a series of civilian exchanges with Germany. Unlike other ships on the high seas in a time of war, the Drottningholmhad sailed in the most conspicuous possible manner, with specially installed floodlights that blazed through the night to alert enemy submarines that this was a repatriation voyage – a protected mission derived from the rules of the Geneva Convention, the details of which had been delicately negotiated between Germany and the United States through intermediaries from Switzerland and Sweden. The ship was returning now from ten days at sea, having just crossed the North Atlantic from Lisbon. She carried 908 passengers, including diplomatic personnel, foreign correspondents, civilian internees, and refugees and their families, released by the German authorities in exchange for a comparable number of citizens of the Axis powers who had been held in detention camps in the United States and Latin America.
One of the passengers on this voyage, Etta Shiber, was still asleep when the Statue of Liberty came into view. She would say later that she regretted missing that first treasured glimpse of home, but the fact was she had a lot of sleep to catch up on, having only recently endured eighteen months of nights on narrow prison mattresses stuffed with straw, plus untold weeks of fitful, anxious nights before that. In 1942 Etta was sixty-four years old, and though she had never had children she would invariably be described by journalists as “grandmotherly.” She wore a pair of horn-rimmed spectacles over her large brown eyes with their heavy brows; she had a long nose and a smile that turned up slightly on one side, and her hair was newly cut, colored, and permed. Her skin was still sallow, though, and there were lines in her face that she did not recognize. She had lost more than twenty-five pounds while in prison, and with it much of the plumpness that had vexed her since college; but this was weight loss, she well understood, that fatigued rather than invigorated, born of food that was repugnant rather than healthful: dreary meals of thin soup and stale crusts of bread, occasionally supplemented by slices of dried meat that tasted as if it had been produced in one of Germany’s famed chemical plants.
In prison, half-starved, she had often dreamed of lavish meals; now, freed, Etta was surprised by the modesty of her own body’s demands. As in the Yiddish story of the good peasant who, allowed any wish by the Heavenly Tribunal, asks only for a warm buttered roll, so too did she find that it was not caviar or pâté, or a thick steak, or Paris’s jewel-like pastries that she most craved, but simply butter, good butter made from real cream, and in the mornings aboard ship she found herself almost overcome with pleasure in eating the buttered toast that arrived alongside her eggs and sausages.
A filling meal, a hot bath, shampoo: such were her newfound luxuries. Thinking about the life ahead of her, Etta looked forward to the prospect of going to a movie or attending the theater all by herself; solitude, which had been such a misery when her husband died, now seemed another luxury, having been denied to her for so long. While she was waiting for the Drottningholm to set sail, one of the officials from the American Consulate had suggested to Etta that she was the Edith Cavell of this war – Edith Cavell, the English nurse who had helped Allied soldiers to escape from occupied Belgium during the First World War. The man had meant it sincerely, and had been kind in his intentions, but Etta couldn’t accept the sentiment. For her bravery, Cavell had been executed by a German firing squad, whereas she, Etta, was sailing home safely, eating roast chicken and potatoes with gleaming silverware, a snow-white linen napkin on her lap. If anyone was the new Edith Cavell (in the coming months she would insist on this over and over, though hardly anyone seemed to be listening), it was her friend Kitty, another English worker for the Red Cross in occupied territory: Kitty, whose firm voice and imperious manner could intimidate even Nazi border guards; Kitty, who hummed to herself as she assembled a package of chocolate and silk stockings to bribe a German officer; Kitty, whose beautiful slender hands, the last time Etta saw her, were pitted with the dark craters of cigarette burns.
Kate Bonnefous – “Kitty” to her friends – was nine years younger than Etta; born Kate Robins into a prosperous English family, she had married a French wine merchant named Henri Bonnefous in 1926 and opened a small dress shop in Paris’s ninth arrondissement. That was where Etta first met her, on one of her yearly trips to France, and almost immediately the two became close friends. At the time Etta was living on the Upper East Side of New York with her husband Bill and her cousin Irving, but in 1933 Irving died from a chronic heart condition and three years later William Shiber, too, died of a heart attack. Suddenly Etta was all alone in that New York apartment, consumed by grief, thrown for the first time upon herself. She would later write that she had always depended on Bill and Irving to look out for her, “and without them I was lost.” The following year, Kate wired Etta suggesting that they live together in Paris, and Etta immediately accepted; it was there that the two women intended to spend the remainder of their lives.
Between Etta’s savings and the trust left Kate by her father, they seemed to have everything they could need. Their apartment was not far from the Parc Monceau, where they walked their three beloved cocker spaniels; they browsed books and old magazines at the stalls run by the bouquinistes along the Seine, haunted the city’s antiques shops and flea markets. The two women were intelligent and well read, and they shared a love of food and wine and all things Parisian. In personality, though, they were very different: Kate was sociable where Etta was retiring, self-confident where Etta was anxious, daring where Etta was cautious. To anyone who knew Etta Shiber, she was about the last person who would be the subject of the biographical index card that the Associated Press made for her:
Is second American woman to be held by Nazis in France, 13/12/40
Taken into custody by Germans in occupied France, 14/12/40
Released by Germans after arrest in Paris, 24/12/40
Arrested again in Paris; charged with “escape” plot, 14/2/41
All of that, however, had indeed happened to her (though in fact she was the first American woman to be held by the Nazis in France, not the second), and any time Etta was asked about it, she confessed to being more astonished than anyone.
