Jane Rogoyska

Paris, proverbially the City of Light, has had its darker moments, too: the St Bartholomew’s Day Massacre in 1572, the Revolution and Terror, and the siege and Commune of 1871, but none darker than the German occupation during the Second World War. Hotel Exile is a moving account of the plight of the people, mostly German Jewish, who sought refuge in Paris from the Nazis during the 1930s only to find, in 1940, that they were once again living under the malevolent eye of the Third Reich.

The ‘hotel’ of the book’s title is the famous Hotel Lutetia in Paris, the only one of the city’s grand hotels located on the Left Bank. Opened in 1910, it marks, stylistically, ‘a bridge between Art Nouveau and Art Deco, with its undulating façade and shell-like canopies’ lining the street. Readers expecting a history of the hotel – which would be fascinating, pace the author’s assertion that ‘the walls of a building tell no story’ – are doomed to disappointment. The well-appointed public spaces and comfortable rooms of the Lutetia are the setting for parts of Rogoyska’s book, rather than its subject.

The book divides into three parts. The first examines the earnest, threadbare and perpetually broke exiles who lived in Paris during the 1930s, mostly German Jewish intellectuals and politicians, contemptuous of ‘Hitler and his goose-stepping acolytes’. The second part tells the story of the German occupation of Paris when the Hotel Lutetia was requisitioned as the headquarters of the Abwehr, German military intelligence. The third part recounts the pain of the immediate aftermath of war in 1945, when the Lutetia was the main repatriation centre in Paris for deportees returning to France from the concentration camps. This third section is profoundly moving, reducing the unimaginably vast horror of the Holocaust to the fates of individuals and their families. Few were spared the pain, and afterwards, Rogoyska writes, came ‘the great silence’ which lasted for decades. The compromises of occupation were too difficult to discuss.

In some ways, Hotel Exile is an unusual book: the author constructs her narrative not by means of sweeping chapters but in small sections, giving it a slightly fractured feel. It is written in the present tense, an unorthodox device in a history book but one which confers a sense of immediacy to events of eighty-plus years ago. Nonetheless, Exile Hotel tells a vivid story, full of courage and cruelty, fear and optimism, of man’s inhumanity to man, one which should never be forgotten, especially nowadays.