MICHEL MARTIN, HOST:
Sometimes, taking a picture can be an act of resistance. This is the story of hundreds of pictures taken by an unknown amateur photographer in Nazi-occupied Paris, and one journalist's quest to identify him 80 years later. NPR's Eleanor Beardsley reports.
ELEANOR BEARDSLEY, BYLINE: It all began with an old scrapbook found at a flea market in the south of France.
STEPHANIE COLAUX: Come through.
BEARDSLEY: (Speaking French.)
COLAUX: (Laughter).
BEARDSLEY: Nice to meet you.
COLAUX: (Speaking French).
BEARDSLEY: Stephanie Colaux found the album in the summer of 2020. Shoeboxes full of old photos clutter the documentary producer's kitchen table in Paris. She remembers opening the battered scrapbook that day because she'd found nothing else.
COLAUX: (Through interpreter) As I flipped through the pages, I realized, my God - it's all scenes of occupied Paris. I knew immediately I found a treasure, and then I read the little note in the front. If you find this album, it said, take care of it and have the courage to look at it. And I thought someone sent a message in a bottle, and I just found it.
BEARDSLEY: Inside the album were 377 small black-and-white photos taken between 1940 and 1942 - street scenes with civilians and the ubiquitous German soldier and no indication of who took them. But during the German occupation of France, the Nazis strictly prohibited outdoor photography, and taking photos could have led to imprisonment or death. Colaux wanted to know who could have taken them, so she called her good friend Philippe Broussard, an investigative journalist with newspaper Le Monde.
PHILIPPE BROUSSARD: It's obvious that they were taken by someone who was an amateur, not a professional, and someone who was, I would say, like a shadow behind the back of the Germans. And you have to imagine the risk he was taking.
BEARDSLEY: Adding to the intrigue were the captions on the back of the photos. Not only was the location, date and exact time of day noted, but there was often a snarky caption about the German soldiers, who the photographer referred to pejoratively as Fritzes.
BROUSSARD: The words are very sarcastic. There is a kind of irony. For example, he says, our protectors.
BEARDSLEY: Broussard began to dig through archives and talk to historians. Julien Blanc is a specialist of the occupation and resistance. He says there are other pictures of occupied Paris.
JULIEN BLANC: (Through interpreter) But they're propaganda pictures by Nazi-approved photographers. These are very different. They're clandestine photos. They let us see the real city - not glamorous, but deserted streets, no cars. They are hard, gray and sad.
BEARDSLEY: Broussard discovered the same photos in two other places. One is the Museum of National Resistance, east of Paris in Champigny-sur-Marne.
MANUEL MANGOT NICAISE: Alors.
BEARDSLEY: Museum curator Manuel Mangot Nicaise uses gloves to unwrap some of the carefully boxed prints. One shows a German soldier on the street looking at a map. The caption? Mr. Fritz wonders where his carcass will rot one day. The pictures were donated to the museum 25 years ago by a man whose father had them. He didn't know the photographer, either.
NICAISE: (Speaking French).
BEARDSLEY: "It was an act of resistance to take and develop these pictures and write the mocking comments," says Mangot Nicaise. "They showed what the occupation was really like." As the investigation dragged into its fourth year, Broussard says he was at once discouraged and obsessed, like a cop in front of a cold case.
BROUSSARD: There were moments where I say, well, it's time to give up. You'll never find. But I continued.
BEARDSLEY: He discovered a second, smaller collection of the photos. They had belonged to a woman who worked at the perfume counter of department store Le Printemps during the war. The store archivist then found an internal newsletter from the 1960s with one of the photos and the photographer's name.
BROUSSARD: So on the famous Friday, April the 12, I will remember all my life, I discovered that the name of the man who took the photos is Raoul Minot. He was an employee of Le Printemps. He was not a professional photographer and who decided to take his own camera and to go in the streets of Paris and take as many pictures as possible.
BEARDSLEY: Raoul Minot took the photos with his wife, Marthe, who also worked at Le Printemps. They printed them in the store's professional studio, which explains how they got the paper during wartime rationing. But amidst the resistance were traitors. In early 1943, someone denounced the couple. Broussard has a copy of what he calls the terrible anonymous letter.
BROUSSARD: It is written, oh, you should have a look at a couple working at Le Printemps. They're taking photos. They're developing the films inside the department store.
BEARDSLEY: The police arrested Raoul and Marthe Minot at their apartment, seizing hundreds of photos and the camera, a small Kodak Brownie that Minot had held on his chest under his coat. He was interrogated by the Gestapo and deported to a Nazi concentration camp. He never came back. After the war, Marthe searched for him in vain. History forgot him until now. Broussard says this story is about more than World War II. It's a universal story.
BROUSSARD: It's the story of a normal man who try to fight, even if he's in front of the biggest army of that time, in front of colleagues who can be traitors. It's a story of courage, of love of his wife, who wanted to know what happened to him.
BEARDSLEY: Broussard's four-year investigation appeared as a five-part series in Le Monde this fall, which led to Minot being recognized by the French government as a resistant who died for France, bearing witness to the reality of German occupation, and to the discovery of another photo - his own. In his ID picture, Minot wears a tie, a proud look and a slight smile. Broussard says it's a face that radiates goodness.
Eleanor Beardsley, NPR News, Paris.
(SOUNDBITE OF LOUIS ARMSTRONG SONG, "LA VIE EN ROSE") Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright NPR.
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