clearclassics: two unusual history books.

Late one Friday night channel-hopping, I happened on a subtitled French film about a smiling, pleasant doctor who went around on a bike with a little cart behind it, in what was obviously wartime Paris (Second World War), who talked kindly and reassuringly to patients in his consulting rooms (also his home) and then led them into a small, strange room where he seemed to kill them. I thought that this was some absurdist French black comedy – the actor, Michel Serrault had dark, mobile features that lent themselves to that interpretation. Not long after that I picked up this book in a bookshop and found that the film (which I looked up on the internet and found was called Docteur Petiot (1990)) was in fact a historical drama. The book was by an American historian, David King, Death in the City of Light.

Serrault was a brilliant actor because the real Marcel Petiot, during the Paris Occupation, was a highly ambiguous and very plausible person. He was believed by many to be a hero of the Resistance, especially because of his earlier life as a Socialist local politician under Blum’s Popular Front in the 1930s. He was a good doctor, very kind to sick children, and he often treated people for nothing. But he coldly and cruelly murdered up to 23 people (possibly more) making him France’s worst serial killer. He did this for gain, but also out of a kind of twisted joy at exercising power over people.

King builds the story backwards from the discovery of the bodies in 1944, in and under Petiot’s house in Paris’s elegant 16e arrondisement, and then brings us through the investigation and what it revealed. Posing as a member of the Resistance (which he seems to have been) Petiot put the word out that he could, for a price, help people (mostly Jews who lived in daily fear of deportation, some gangsters in flight from the law, and some Jewish gangsters) to escape to Argentina. There were many people in Occupied Europe during these years who helped Jews to escape, or who hid them, for gain or for altruism, but whatever the motive, some money always changed hands. So nobody suspected Petiot. He was very clever. He asked his victims to come to his surgery/house,out of hours, bringing their money with them and their luggage, he gave them a sedative to calm their nerves, and then led them to the ‘waiting-room’ into which he pumped gas to kill them. (At least, this is King’s theory. Others believe he gave them a lethal injection.) He kept their money and their valuables.

When his crimes were discovered in 1944, the police and the German authorities moved to prosecute Petiot, of course, which is a little ironic, given that robbing Jews of all their possessions and then murdering them was something they were doing (or facilitating) on an industrial scale. When Petiot was finally tried, after the war, it was almost impossible to untangle the threads of argument of either his prosecution or his defence, and the ins and outs of the trial make for very disturbing reading. There was no doubt about his guilt, and he went to the guillotine joking, with perfect calm. He was a callous and brutal murderer who took advantage of people at their most vulnerable and it did not cost him a moment’s unease. He believed himself always to be on the moral high ground. After all, he was a Socialist and a member of the Resistance!

Another book published shortly before King’s (I have read more recent popular history by the way, but these are classics) was Kevin C.Kearns’ The Bombing of Dublin’s North Strand. Kearns has written gripping, moving histories of Dublin. He published his first book, Dublin Tenement Life: an oral history, in 1994, and I remember reading it on the Dublin-Galway train and having to put my hand up to my face so that other passengers would not see me crying. This book came out in 2009. Of course I had heard of the North Strand bombing, but I hadn’t realised that the Luftwaffe plane which dropped the industrial-target-sized bomb (500 lb) had been circling around Dublin for about an hour, and that our Defence Forces had sent up flares and fired anti-aircraft missiles at it, or that three other bombs – smaller – had been dropped on Dublin that Friday night/Saturday morning at 2.05 a.m, 31 May. (It was the Whit weekend).

Nor had I realized that the North Strand was such a strong community unto itself, between the Five Lamps and Newcomen Bridge, socially mixed between working-class tradespeople, dockers, small businesses and white-collar workers. Forty people were killed in the bombing, hundreds were injured and many people who were rendered homeless were scattered out to Cabra and the new housing estates. The social fabric of the area was changed utterly; 11 small shops, a mission hall and a post office were among the casualties. Damage to those at the epicentre – the city side of Newcomen Bridge – was devastating. Whole families were wiped out in heartbreaking stories that are too sad to repeat. The death toll would have been higher had it not been for the fact that many of the area’s young men and women had gone into town dancing and were still ‘out’ at the kind of hour that was frowned upon by their elders and betters.

There was a lot of heroism by those searching for the missing and comforting the survivors. One man who had been on his feet for 60 hours, found that when he went to take off his clothes his waist was eaten alive by bugs which had got under the elastic of his underpants – a comment on the poor housing conditions of the time. He had to have a bath in Jeyes Fluid. Locals whose houses were still standing brought mugs or jamjars of tea to the rescue workers, whose throats were clogged with dust. There were a lot of dead cats, all undamaged, who looked as if they were stretched out asleep. The blast was extremely loud and reverberated very far, the newspapers were on the scene straightaway and spread the news far and wide, and controlling the crowds who came to view the scene the following day to help and to pray, became a public order problem. Yet – and it is this kind of detail which lifts Kearns’ books out of the ordinary run of historical works – when Muriel Godden of Clontarf reported for work at the Bank of Ireland in College Green after that terrifying night (banks still opened Saturday mornings and bomb or no bomb it was business as usual), none of her colleagues in the bank spoke about the bombing, none at all.

The final chapter goes into the likely explanations for the bombing. Was it pilot error? Hardly – he had over an hour to discover where he was. (But why did it take him an hour?) And it was a bright, clear night. A far-fetched theory favoured by pro-German Irish nationalists was that it was the British trying to bring us into the war by ‘bending the beam’ (no, I don’t know what it means either) so as to disorient German bombers. The most likely explanation is that this was Germany’s retaliation against Ireland for ‘violating our neutrality’ by sending fire engines from Dublin and Louth on two separate occasions to Belfast in the previous few weeks to help them during their blitz. This was deeply appreciated by Northern Ireland, and a fund was raised in Belfast to help the victims of the North Strand bombing. Never were the two jurisdictions so united before and never would they be, again.

As in all his books, Kearns uses oral testimony extensively and manages to convey the Dublin accent, not in the comical Ross O’Carroll-Kelly way of mangling the spelling, but by emphasising certain words, as Dublin people do. Here are the words of a member of St John Ambulance (p.148):

….the sky got all red. We seen the flash. I figured a big bomb had been released. We didn’t wait; I hopped on my bike and down to the North Strand.

Both of these books are intensely readable and also, very scholarly; both would be regarded as ‘popular history’. It is the only kind of history I want to read.

David King, Death in the City of Light: the true story of the serial killer who terrorised wartime Paris (London: Sphere 2011)

Kevin C.Kearns, The Bombing of Dublin’s North Strand 1941: the untold story (Dublin: Gill & Macmillan 2009).