Home
Search transcripts:    Advanced Search
Notable New     Yorkers
Select     Notable New Yorker

Andrew HeiskellAndrew Heiskell
Photo Gallery
Transcript

Session:         Page of 824

proper papers, and so on. And I was able to get a lot of war coverage through those sources. It was hairy living there then because you'd remember that the Germans were rolling through Holland, Belgium, and then France. The rumor factory was unbelievable. Nobody seemed to know where the Germans were at any one time; nobody knew what the French army was doing; there was total censorship; and there were in France a lot of people who were pro-German, who really rather looked forward to having the Germans take over. So you didn't even know who you could trust there.

Q:

Where was the office?

Heiskell:

The office was on the Champs Elysees on the ninth floor, sort of right down the middle of the Champs Elysees, and you'd stand on the balcony and watch them bombing the Renault factory across the river. Occasionally you'd go down into the shelters, but it was so unpleasant that you did not make a habit of that. And we were there not for very long. I guess it was--I wasn't there, in Paris itself, for more than about a month when the collapse was pretty near to complete, and we had to get out of Paris or be taken prisoners or whatever it would be. And I remember going shopping around for a car to get us out. Being a correspondent, I had rights to buying gasoline which other people didn't. And the only decent car I found was a magnificent old Auburn with great big pipes coming out of the engine, you know, weighing about five tons, probably. And I bought this and, oh, about four or five days before the Germans arrived we set off; a caravan of the whole office, including laboratory--





© 2006 Columbia University Libraries | Oral History Research Office | Rights and Permissions | Help