A Train in Winter (19 page)

All through the spring and early summer of 1942, France as a whole remained unmoved by the fate of its 350,000 Jewish inhabitants. The country that had so fervently embraced the Rights of Man seemed curiously willing to sit by while one decree after another was enacted against the Jews, watching them debarred from professions, forbidden places of entertainment, relegated to the last carriages on the métro, and now herded on to cattle trucks bound for Poland. The Germans had not actually asked for the cattle trucks; this initiative came from the French railways, the SNCF. It was on French trains, driven by French engine drivers, that deportees were conveyed to the border.

Not everyone, however, sat by unprotesting. Once the deportations got under way and trains began to leave regularly, sometimes as often as three times a week, from the central camp for Jews at Drancy on the outskirts of Paris, the general sense of hostility to the Germans, already on the increase, began to rise. The compulsory wearing of the yellow star by Jews saw a flowering of other yellow symbols, worn by non-Jews, patches of material shaped like roses or rosettes and pinned on to clothes. In Paris, the
zazous
, the youthful, flamboyant admirers of jazz, in their quirky clothes and dark glasses, took to adding a yellow star to their outfits. In due course, a group of cardinals and archbishops in the occupied zone wrote an open letter to Pétain, in the name of ‘humanity and Christian principles’, protesting against the round-up of the Jews. Hélène Beer, a Jewish student, self-consciously walking around Paris in her new yellow star, noted in her diary that strangers often smiled warmly at her as they never had before. But the deportations went on.

In July, the Germans agreed with Vichy that there would be a new round-up of 30,000 Jews. Twenty thousand were to be taken from Paris; the rest from the free zone. Until now the policy had been to take only men. It was Pierre Laval, once again Prime Minister in the Vichy government and constantly negotiating compromises with the Germans, who proposed adding women and children, not least because when the convoys left children behind, the frantic scenes of their desperate parents upset the police. On the 16th and 17th, a great
rafle
took place in Paris. It was conducted by the French and the German police working together, and it netted 3,031 men, 5,802 women and 4,051 children, less than the desired amount but enough to fill many trains.

Around seven thousand were taken to the Vélodrome d’hiver, a cycling stadium in the 15th arrondissement, where, in September 1936, 30,000 people had turned out to hear Dolores Ibárruri, La Pasionaria, call for an international struggle against Fascism. Here, in acute discomfort and extreme apprehension, they awaited events. Some of them, at least, now knew what to expect. Since the spring, Radio London had been putting out broadcasts about the extermination camps in Poland, and on 1 July there had been a report on 700,000 Polish Jews massacred since the invasion of Poland by the Germans. News-sheets describing the gassing of childen and old people had been handed out in Paris.

One of the people caught up in the
chasse aux Juifs
, the hunt for Jews, was a tough-minded, outspoken doctor from Alsace. Dr Adelaïde Hautval was not Jewish herself, but one of seven children of a Protestant pastor. In April 1942 Adelaïde was crossing the demarcation line to visit her sick grandmother in the free zone when she saw a group of German soldiers mistreating a family of Jews in Bourges station. She had spent several years working in neuropsychiatric hospitals in German-speaking Alsace and spoke good German. Adelaïde approached the soldiers and told them to leave the Jewish family alone. ‘Don’t you see that they’re Jewish?’ one of the soldiers asked her. ‘So what?’ replied Adelaïde. ‘They are human beings like you and me.’ She was arrested and taken to Bourges prison. A few weeks later, she was asked whether she would care to take back her words. She did not choose to. ‘In that case,’ said the officer in charge, ‘you will share their fate.’ It was only now that she discovered just what this fate consisted of.

She had been in Pithiviers internment camp, in the Loiret, for less than twenty-four hours when she witnessed the departure of a convoy of lorries full of Jews bound for Drancy. It was organised by French police, helped by French frontier guards.

That evening the camp was empty but for a few others, like herself, whose ‘cases were not clear’. The Germans had pinned a yellow star on her chest with the words ‘Friend of the Jews’.

In Pithiviers there were two barracks for women and before they left, some managed to tell Adelaïde their stories. One, elderly and blind, could not quite take in what was happening. Another, a young woman nearly deranged with anxiety, told her that when the police came for her she had been made to abandon her six-month-old baby in an empty house and that there was no one who would know that he was alone and who would go to get him. Several of the women were heavily pregnant. ‘It’s hard for the normal human mind to recognise the unthinkable,’ Adelaïde wrote.

Over the next few days, five thousand other Jewish men, women and children arrived at Pithiviers. The camp turned into mud; there was very little water and not much food. Adelaïde was allowed to take over an enormous hangar just outside the gates as an infirmary and here, with the help of a 19-year-old Lithuanian girl, she did her best to look after the sick. A few seemed to have lost their senses. As their names were called, people thrust little packets of money and jewellery into Adelaïde’s hands, begging her to find a way of getting them to their relations who were still at home. Outside the camp, the French guards shaved the heads of the men, so that soon the surrounding mud was deep in hair. The Gestapo, carrying buckets, went around seizing anything of any value that they spotted. Suitcases were ransacked, eiderdowns slit open. Duck feathers and goose down floated in the air.

The most sickening departure witnessed by Adelaïde took place on 2 August. A decision had been taken that in this convoy only children aged over 15 would accompany their parents to Drancy and then Poland. Adelaïde watched as babies were wrenched out of their mothers’ arms. When the convoy of lorries drew away, rows of small children lined the fence inside the camp, staring or crying; on to the clothes of the smallest were sewn bands giving their names and ages, and Adelaïde wondered how they would ever be found by their parents if the bands came off. Over the next few days, four children went completely mute. It was only when a guard, arriving from Drancy, announced that all the armbands, even those on the babies, were to be removed, that Adelaïde fully understood what was intended for them. By the time Pithiviers was closed, 12,000 Jews had been deported to the east, 1,800 of them children.
^*

Over the next few weeks, having been moved to the camp of Beaune-la-Rolande, 18 kilometres away, Adelaïde nursed the detainees who had dysentery, spending her nights emptying the overflowing pails with a jam jar. She wrote to her sister that she was covered in fleas, that she had caught diphtheria, and that she was also trying to help look after a three-year-old boy who had been brought in on his own. This child had been found and cared for by friends after his parents had been arrested and taken away and he was spotted wandering the streets. But the police tracked him down and brought him to Beaune. A few days later he caught diphtheria and died. Adelaïde herself was eventually moved to a prison in Orléans, after an order was issued that there were to be no more Aryans in camps for Jews. There was a moment when she might have escaped, passing herself off as a Red Cross worker, but a German soldier suddenly appeared and the moment was lost. She was a prisoner, and there were no more offers of release.

Adelaïde was not alone in finding the behaviour of the French towards the Jews repugnant. After witnessing heart-rending scenes during the round-ups of Jews in Paris, a young lorry driver called Pierrot, whose father ran a cafe in the rue des Amandiers near the Père Lachaise cemetery, decided to organise an escape route of his own. His fiancée, Madeleine Morin, ran a hairdressing salon with her widowed mother in the same street, and the salon proved the perfect cover for setting up and running the network.

At first, Pierrot hid families of Jews in crates in his lorry and took them to the demarcation line. Later, realising that he was not getting enough people out, he joined forces with friends and together they printed false identity cards and train tickets and set up a chain leading from Paris to the free zone. Madeleine’s salon became the place where the papers were collected and given out. But one morning a group of clandestine travellers was stopped by the police and when their papers were found not to match those registered with the police, they were arrested. Following the chain back to its source led the Gestapo to Madeleine’s salon in the rue des Amandiers. She and her mother were arrested, taken to the rue des Saussaies and badly beaten. Unexpectedly released, they insisted on returning to the salon, in spite of warnings, and were soon picked up again, this time for good. They were joined by Olga Melin, another woman in the chain, whose husband was a prisoner of war and who had a 13-year-old son, disabled by polio. Olga and her husband were on the point of divorcing when war broke out.

Some time in 1941 Jacques Solomon and Georges Politzer had asked Marie-Elisa Nordmann, their Jewish scientist friend, whether she would help them to distribute anti-German material throughout the Sorbonne. As a prominent research chemist, Marie-Elisa was closely in touch with both students and faculty. She joined the editors of
L’Université Libre
, wrote and prepared articles and, in the evenings, helped by her widowed mother, put the news-sheets into envelopes and posted them through people’s doors. She also continued to provide her friend France Bloch with chemical ingredients for the explosives that France was making for the new united Francs-Tireurs et Partisans in her secret laboratory in the rue du Danube.

However, in the late spring of 1942, the Brigades Spéciales arrested three young men working for the armed Resistance, and, after carrying out what their reports referred to as ‘une intérrogatoire énergique’, they heard that a young chemist known as ‘Claudia’ was producing gunpowder, medicines and vaccines for the Resistance. They soon extracted enough information to lead them to the rue du Danube, where they spotted a young woman, ‘1m58, pretty face, frizzy brown hair, of “bohemian appearance”, glasses’ and a particular way of walking, her feet splayed outwards. ‘Claudia’ was observed handing a bottle to a man in the street. ‘Claudia’ was France Bloch. She was placed under observation.

Towards the middle of May 1942, the Underground learnt that Frédo Sérazin, France’s husband, interned in a camp at Voves for communist activities, was about to be shot. Plans, in which France and Marie-Elisa were included, were made to free him. France went home to collect some clothes and found the police waiting for her.

When arrested, France would say only that she had a two-year-old son, that she was the daughter of the historian Jean-Richard Bloch, now in Russia, and that she had indeed given a bottle of sulphuric acid to a man in the street, but who he was and what it was for she had no idea. From France’s laboratory, the police took away ammunition, batteries, cordite, metal tubes, false identity papers and chemicals of every kind.

Marie-Elisa Nordmann and her friend France Bloch, makers of explosives, with Francis

It was not long before David’s inspectors tracked down Marie-Elisa Nordmann, having identified her as one of France’s close friends. Marie-Elisa was taken to the depot of the Prefecture to be questioned, first by the French police, later by the Germans, before joining France in La Santé. What the Brigades Spéciales did not know was that the two women were Jewish. After Marie-Elisa, many others from this same
réseau
were picked up, men and women who, after more
intérrogatoires énergiques
, admitted using false identity cards, taking in other resisters, and helping to plan and carry out acts of sabotage against the Germans. Under questioning, Marie-Elisa agreed that she had known France for eight years, but maintained that they had never discussed politics. What she did not learn until later—when a friend smuggled in to her a note concealed in a cigarette packet—was that her widowed mother, who was in her sixties and had been helping to look after her son Francis, had also been arrested, and after being beaten, had admitted that she was Jewish. Frantic with worry about her mother, and not knowing where Francis might be, Marie-Elisa could only wait. On 24 June, news reached the two women that France’s husband Frédo had been shot. As Jews, Marie-Elisa and France had the added terror of being sent at any moment to Drancy for deportation to the east; as resisters, neither they nor any of the other women had any idea of what might happen to them.

What the Brigades Spéciales referred to as
l’affaire Sérazin
brought into captivity five more women.

There were two more early networks in the Resistance in which women played a crucial part. Their downfall was once again a mixture of painstaking work on the part of the French police, and bad luck. As with
l’affaire Pican
, the ball of wool, once it started to unravel, led far and wide.