HOTEL EXILE

So much history under one roof.

The Lutetia is a rare grand hotel on Paris’ Left Bank. A “transatlantic liner of a place,” in historian Rogoyska’s words, it’s a 1910 edifice whose “undulating façade” is festooned with “shell-like canopies…vine motifs [and] greedy cherubs.” Pablo Picasso and Henri Matisse were repeat guests, James Joyce lived there for a time, and Ernest Hemingway drank at its basement bar. In 1933, as the Nazis came to power, thousands of German refugees, most of them Jewish, fled to Paris, many gathering at the Lutetia; it came to be known as the “Switzerland of Paris” for hosting, among other exiles, the writer Heinrich Mann. As Rogoyska shows in her lively and well-paced account, this began an improbable chapter in the hotel’s history. Shortly after Nazis took control of Paris in 1940—she reminds readers that more than 90,000 French soldiers were killed fighting the Nazis—the German army’s intelligence service, the Abwehr, installed itself in the hotel. Four years later, after the Germans were pushed out of the city, the Lutetia served as a hospital of sorts for almost 20,000 returning deportees who needed medical attention and nourishment. The author’s present-tense narration adds an unnecessary sense of urgency, but she includes plenty of details that will resonate with readers. For example, a member of the Abwehr, not knowing how to eat an artichoke, angrily accused a chef of trying to have him choke: “They are, at heart, insecure, these occupiers,” Rogoyska writes. Keen to keep wines and champagnes from the Nazis, staffers squirreled away bottles in the cellar, then built a wall to hide them. And, poignantly, Red Cross volunteers walked into a room with breakfast for three resistance fighters who had been at the Buchenwald concentration camp. One dropped a plate, shocked by what she saw: “They had tried to sleep on the big, comfortable hotel beds but had lost the habit,” Rogoyska writes, “so they ended up on the floor.”

The unlikely past of a luxury hotel—during a horrific time—rendered with vigor and pathos.