A Train in Winter (18 page)

Next morning, her mother managed to deliver some clothes and food, which she shared with the other women. Two days later, she glimpsed André leaving the cell opposite hers, in handcuffs and leaning heavily on the arm of another man. His face was white and swollen and she could barely recognise him; but he saw her, and next day they managed to have a few minutes together.

The food in the depot was terrible and there was very little of it. Despite the efforts of the older women, who did what they could to look after the schoolgirls among them, Simone grew thinner, more depressed and increasingly weak. She was haunted by fears of what might happen to André, whom she had not been allowed to see again. Finally a doctor had her transferred to the prison at Fresnes, on the outskirts of Paris, another jail shared between the French and the Germans. Conditions here were little better, but Fresnes had an infirmary; the nuns gave her a proper bed, sheets and food, and slowly nursed her back to health.

Simone was still in Fresnes when she heard that André had been shot. Moijase Feld was also shot; Isidore Grindberg, referred to by the French as a ‘dangerous criminal’, was guillotined. Before being led out into the courtyard, he said that the only thing he regretted was not having killed more Germans. Just before dying, Feld wrote to his sister, asking her to break the news gently to their parents. He was 17.

May 1942, in the words of Aragon, which soon became part of the vocabulary of the French Resistance, was
le mai noir
, the black May. Marie-Claude would later say that it was a time of almost spiritual purity and heroism, when the prisoners in German custody tried to behave with perfect dignity and pride. Several of the women had by now been in solitary confinement for many weeks. One was Yvonne Emorine, who had left her four-year-old daughter with her mother in order to organise the Resistance in the Charente. Yvonne’s husband, Antoine, a trade unionist in the mines, had been arrested before her and was also held in La Santé. Antoine was believed to have informed on the others and to have begged ‘les Messieurs de la Gestapo’ to spare his life; but he now died. The Germans said that he had committed suicide, but a prisoner who saw him carried back from interrogation, lying senseless and badly battered, said that he had been in no condition to hang himself.

The Pican–Politzer–Dallidet women had been joined by the two Alizon sisters from Rennes. Brought separately from other jails, Marie and Poupette were kept in isolation, and did not even know of each other’s presence until alerted by the other prisoners through the air vents. Poupette, 17 and extremely lonely, begged the guards to be allowed to see her sister, but the men were immovable. She derived what comfort she could from knowing that Marie was not too far away, but it would be several months before the girls were allowed to meet, and when Marie turned 21 on 9 May, all Poupette could do was send her a message. There was also a schoolteacher from Indre-et-Loire called Germaine Renaud who had helped Raymonde Sergent and the abbé Lacour ferry people across the demarcation line, and who had been so badly beaten that she arrived at La Santé covered in blood. And in another cell on her own was a young woman called Marie-Jeanne Dupont, arrested soon after her 20th birthday, who tried to kill herself by breaking a light bulb and swallowing the shards of glass. ‘We are indulgent towards women,’ a German captain told one of the detainees. ‘Very indulgent.’

But there was worse to come. Since spring, when Oberg had taken command, the SS had increasingly been choosing to bypass all tribunals and to make their own administrative decisions as to the fate of the arrested members of the Resistance. Now that Otto von Stülpnagel had gone, Oberg thought that mass executions should be resumed, in order to inject terror in people apparently disposed to rebel. The SS were given the task of selecting the hostages and arranging the date, place and time for the executions. On 12 April, the French police handed
I’affaire Pican
over to the Gestapo. On 22 May, the women in La Santé learnt that a number of their men were to be shot the following day in reprisal for a series of attacks that had left two Germans dead in an exchange of fire. Those whose husbands were to die were told that they might see them once to say goodbye.

Among the first to be shot were André Pican, husband of Germaine, Georges Politzer, husband of Maï, Jacques Solomon, husband of Hélène, and Charlotte’s husband, Georges Dudach. A few days earlier, Politzer had whispered through the air vents that he had finally completed a new book of philosophy in his head, and that if he could only get hold of some paper, he would be able to write it straight out. After seeing him for the last time, Maï wrote to his parents that Politzer had been ‘sublime … he seemed particularly happy to be dying on French soil’. Politzer, the Hungarian refugee, had always admired the French. When Germaine Pican was taken to see André, she found that his face and much of his body were covered with bruises from torture. André had drawn a car on the wall of his cell. It was full of suitcases. ‘Look,’ he said to her. ‘This is for our holiday in Italy.’ Pican was 41 and the eldest of the four to die.

Jacques Solomon, the quantum physicist, had a few minutes with Hélène; she found that his elbow had been broken and that he had a deep gash in his head.

Just before dawn, a soldier came to Charlotte’s cell. ‘Get dressed, if you want to see your husband one more time,’ he said. She followed him to Dudach’s cell. When the moment came to part, she clung to his hand. The soldier took her back to her own cell and there, she wrote later, ‘my companions laid me down on my cot. They asked no questions and I told them nothing, nothing of what I said to him who was about to die.’

Germaine, Maï, Hélène and Charlotte were now widows. Charlotte was 28—the same age as Dudach—and Maï and Hélène were in their thirties. Germaine was 41. Both Maï’s son Michel and Germaine’s two daughters had lost a father. The worst that could have happened had arrived with extreme suddenness. The other women prisoners in La Santé, with husbands and lovers in custody, began to live in a state of dread.

The popular image of the
fusillade
, the shooting of hostages and resisters, was of a man standing, tied to a post, upright and resolute. The reality was neither as clean nor as clear. Most of the executions in Paris were carried out on the site of a disused barracks on a green hill west of the city, Mont-Valérien, where Napoleon III’s adversaries had been held in the 1850s and which had served more recently as a school for military telegraphy. The men about to be shot were kept in the old chapel, guarded by the SS, until led up the hill to the execution ground. Some found time to scratch last-minute messages on the walls. But the path was very steep, and at times of rain or ice extremely slippery, and those who had been badly tortured found the climb difficult. Those unable to stand at the post were shot lying down. A German soldier was once heard to observe that these occasions were
fêtes sportives
, sporting events.

A modest, quiet-spoken, Francophile and fundamentally decent German priest, the abbé Stock, had been appointed military chaplain to the Paris prisons and it was he who accompanied the men on their last walk. The bodies were put into coffins and driven to a number of different cemeteries around Paris, where they were buried in unmarked graves, so that the plots should not become shrines. When the numbers of those shot on any one day were particularly high, some of the bodies were taken to Père Lachaise, where they were cremated and their ashes placed in urns with no names. Privately, after each execution, the abbé Stock noted down in a lesson book all the details, so that families could later find their dead. Most of the two thousand or so men the abbé Stock accompanied to the stake went to their deaths, he wrote later, with exceptional courage, refusing to have their eyes bandaged, silent, ‘disdainful and strong’.

Many years later, Georges Dudach’s body was exhumed and reinterred next to that of his guillotined friend, André Woog, in the section of Père Lachaise reserved for members of the PCF.

The next group to die, a week later, included Arthur Dallidet, his face so battered and swollen that he could no longer open his eyes; one of his arms was paralysed. Dallidet had become a hero to the other resisters, having informed on no one, despite weeks of appalling torture. He had no wife or girlfriend, but before he was taken to Mont-Valérien, Marie-Claude was allowed to see him. ‘Now, my old friend,’ Dallidet said to her, ‘it’s all over with me. But you others, whom I love, you must continue…’ He was 36.

With Dallidet went Félix Cadras who, forbidden to write a farewell letter to his family, managed to scribble a few words on a handkerchief, which they later found tucked into the lining of his coat when his clothes were returned to them. That day also saw the death of the tall, sporty, scholarly Decour, Maï’s lover, who in his final letter to his parents asked them to return to her parents some things of hers that were in his flat: a copy of La Fontaine’s
Fables
, recordings of Wagner’s
Tristan
and Strauss’s
Four Seasons
, and two watercolours. He wanted his fountain pen, propelling pencil, wallet and watch to go to Maï’s son, Michel. His own death, wrote Decour, was not to be seen as a catastrophe. He had no religious faith, but he now saw himself as a ‘bit like a leaf, which falls from the tree and becomes compost’. Within the space of just over a week, Maï had lost both her husband and her lover.

Raymond Losserand, Cécile’s friend and mentor, was executed at the shooting range at Issy-les-Moulineaux; he, too, had been badly tortured.

In all, forty-six of the men caught in the Politzer–Pican–Dallidet
affaires
were shot. Only a few of them had done more than print and distribute anti-German material and talk with longing of the day when there would be no more Germans on French soil. Their deaths did nothing to silence the
résistance intellectuelle:
their places were immediately taken by others.
L’Université Libre
continued to appear,
Le Silence de la mer
, briefly held up, was published and swiftly sold 10,000 copies, and the
Lettres Françaises
were soon inspiring others to resist. ‘And I know that there are those who say: ‘they died for precious little,’ wrote Jean Paulhan, one of the men who took over as editor from Politzer and Decour. ‘To such people, one must reply: “it’s that they were on the side of life”.’

When, at dawn or at dusk—Pétain, fearing protests, had asked the Germans to be discreet—the men were collected from their cells to be taken to Mont-Valérien, the prisoners in La Santé began to sing. They sang the Marseillaise, which had become an anthem for the Resistance, sung at moments of despair and fear, and the sound of their voices rose clearly through the silent prison. From one cell could be heard the prayers for the dead, intoned in a high, fervent female voice. Afterwards, the women did what they could to comfort the new widows; for Germaine Pican, alone in her solitary cell, or Louisette Losserand, who had seen the way her husband Raymond had been battered by torture, there was very little comfort to be had.

One day, the women in La Santé learnt that four men arrested for demonstrating against the food restrictions imposed by the Germans were to be guillotined in the courtyard next morning. At dawn, they heard the boots of the soldiers arriving to collect them. Four male voices rose into the silence and the pale light, singing the Marseillaise; then three; then two; the last solitary voice fell silent in the middle of a word. Then, throughout the prison, people picked up the verse and began to sing.

Charlotte, Maï, Hélène and Germaine were all still in La Santé on 14 July, Bastille Day. At three o’clock the prison fell silent, to commemorate the men who had been shot; after which the Marseillaise, and the two best-known songs from the French revolution, ‘La Carmagnole’ and ‘le Chant du Départ’, were sung. The guards were edgy, and the women speculated that there might have been some major Allied breakthrough. All agreed that they were unlikely to be in German hands in a year’s time. ‘Even the frailest,’ noted Marie-Claude, ever prone to be of good cheer, ‘felt themselves grow stronger.’

CHAPTER SEVEN

Recognising the unthinkable

By early February 1942, the Germans had begun to prepare for the large-scale deportation of France’s Jews. Pétain expressed some unease at first, especially with regard to French Jews; he was less troubled by the fate of the 140,000 who were not French citizens. Even so, rounding up Jews provided René Bousquet, secretary-general to the Vichy police, with the chance to demonstrate his efficiency and commitment to collaboration. The numbers of Jews to deport were rapidly agreed on. The actual deportations were held up for a while because the spring offensive on the Russian front took all the available rolling stock. The first convoy of Jews left France for the extermination camps on 27 March.

Identifying the Jews in France, both citizens and foreign born, was made easier once all Jews over the age of six were required to wear stars, patches of yellow material, about the size of a clenched fist, on which the word
Juif
or
Juive
was written in black. Vichy briefly resisted the stars, which had been worn by Jews in Poland since the end of 1939, and in Germany since the summer of 1941. But, as with the matter of deportations, Pétain soon capitulated. ‘Liberate your regions of foreign Jews,’ Bousquet urged his prefects, and for the most part they were quick to obey. The yellow star became mandatory in the occupied zone in May. By now there were some two hundred internment camps, holding centres for Jews awaiting deportation, slightly more of them in the free than in the occupied zone. The cover of the catalogue for the exhibition Jews and France, mounted at the Palais Berlitz, showed a Jewish man, in rags and very dirty, his head covered in a prayer shawl, clutching a globe between two talons. Two hundred thousand people visited the exhibition.