Jean Babilée in Nazi-Occupied Paris

Then as now, one of the secrets of the Paris Opera Ballet's success was its ballet school, which put its students, long nicknamed les petits rats, through the kind of tough regime needed to prepare them for a career on the stage.  Some petits rats from that time would later become famous: Roland Petit as a choreographer, Juliette Gréco as a singer and Jean Babilée, just twelve when he entered the school in 1935, as one of France's great postwar dancers, famous above all for his soaring leaps. "I loved the work," he recalled decades later, "all the girls around me, appearing as an extra in operas. It was marvelous."  In 1940, as the Wehrmacht approached Paris, he left for a family farm in the south of France, accompanied by his friend Petit.  But while Petit soon returned to Paris, Babilée instead joined the Ballet de Cannes, where, now seventeen, he was given lead roles in Les Sylphides and Le Spectre de la rose.  In early 1942, he decided to return to Paris and, too old for the ballet school, he was auditioned by Lifar and accepted into the corps de ballet.

Babilée nonetheless knew he was taking a risk: he had borrowed his stage name from his mother, but the name on his identity papers -- Gutman -- was that of his Jewish father.  Inside the Palais Garnier, he was soon reminded of that. "One day in the dressing room we all shared, someone painted a large yellow star and the word Juif on my mirror," he said.  "I purposefully ignored it, but it stayed there for three days.  Then one afternoon the school's dresser saw it and said, 'Aren't you ashamed of yourselves, boys?' And he wiped it off."

More dangerous were the German patrols, not least because the Nazi Kommandantur, or commander's office, was in the place de l'Opera.  "Once I was stopped and asked for my papers," Babilée remembered.  "The German saw 'Gutman' and asked, German?  I nodded and he let me go." He had a narrower escape during the mass roundup of Jews known as the rafle du Vel'd'Hiv' in July 1942.  He was staying in a cheap hotel on the rue du Sentier when he was awakened at six a.m. on July 16 by someone banging on his door.

"There was a huge Frenchman in a leather overcoat," Babilée recalled.  "He asked for my papers, put them in his pocket and told me to get a blanket and a bag and go downstairs.  I looked out of the window and saw a parked bus.  I had no way out.  I dressed and started going down the stairs slowly.  I suddenly heard footsteps.   The same guy was hurrying back up.  'Are these your papers?'  I nodded.   'With this name, it's too dangerous.  Go back to bed.' "

In early 1943, like hundreds of thousands of other young men, Babilée received a summons to work in Germany.  The director of the opera, Marcel Samuel-Rousseau, refused him a certificate stating that he was on contract to the opera house.  "He said Germany would do me good," Babilée related.  A German doctor then rejected his claim to be excused on medical grounds.  "I decided I would not go and would leave my papers at a friend's house," Babilée said.  "As I came out of the métro, I saw two German soldiers at the exit.  I turned and ran, I heard cries as they followed me.  I jumped over the gate to the platform and got into a métro car as it was leaving.  My coat caught in the door."  The next day, he fled Paris and spent the rest of the war with the maquis in the Touraine region.  After the liberation, he refused to return to the Opera Ballet and instead joined the new Ballets des Champs-
Élysées, which Roland Petit had just created.  "I was disgusted with the Opera," he said.

And the Show went on: Cultural life in Nazi-Occupied Paris by Alan Riding. 2011. Pages 159-160.