A Train in Winter (20 page)

From his repeated and brutal questioning of the Pican–Dallidet–Cadras prisoners, Commissioner David had discovered that, alongside the network of editors, journalists and publishers, there existed a second network, an
équipe de militants techniques
, a team of printers and typesetters who actually produced the clandestine papers, along with forged identity cards and military passes. The Germans continued to find the Underground press extremely threatening, and though the earlier arrests had resulted in a momentary drop in publications, numbers picked up again, as other editors and journalists took over from their imprisoned colleagues. But it was not until late March 1942 that David’s inspectors began to remark on a young man to be seen frequently in the rue Saint-Ambroise, in the 11th arrondissement, exchanging packets and baskets with a series of companions. They nicknamed him
Ambroise 1
and set about following him.

Ambroise 1
turned out to be a 29-year-old machine fitter called Arthur Tintelin, who had been an active member of the Jeunesse Communiste before the war. Tintelin was seen to visit a number of printing shops, carrying a bag. Sometimes he travelled by métro, sometimes he walked, hurrying along the street, constantly looking over his shoulder. On 7 April he was spotted talking to a young woman in brightly coloured clothes which made her stand out against the drab greyness that had settled over the city with the second year of occupation. This was the short-sighted stenographer, Jacqueline Quatremaire, who had lost her job with the Labour Exchange and become a liaison officer for the printers.

Femme Saint-Maur
—David’s men continued to use nicknames taken from the names of Parisian streets and métro stations—whom Tintelin met next, was Danielle’s 21-year-old protégée Mado, with whom, to dispel the loneliness, Jacqueline sometimes spent her evenings. A third young woman with whom Tintelin was evidently closely in contact was Lulu, who with her sister Carmen was busy transporting stocks of paper on a wheelbarrow from one printing press to the next.

All of Tintelin’s contacts, the inspectors reported, appeared highly nervous. On the night of 17 June, David decided that the time had come to strike. Mado was one of the first to fall. As she was being arrested at her parents’ house in Ivry, her father said to the police: ‘I have taken a picture of you. If you harm my daughter, I will find you.’

That same day, Lulu had gone to visit her small son Paul, who was living in the country with her parents-in-law. Returning to Paris, she went straight to a friend’s house, bearing a litre of milk for his sick wife. The door was opened by inspectors from the Brigades Spéciales. Seeing the men, Lulu turned round and ran down the street, broke the bottle of milk and, with a piece of glass in her hand, struck out at the policemen following her. She was cornered, pinned down, handcuffed and dragged along the pavement to a waiting van. As she struggled, she shouted out to the people walking by: ‘They’re arresting me because I am a French patriot!’ I won’t come back alive. Tell everyone that they have arrested Lucienne Serre, a mother who will never see her child again.’ In their report, the inspectors called her
la tigresse
. Though the crowd watched in silence, news of her arrest was given to the concierge of her building, who in turn, via the Underground, got it to her mother in Marseilles. Her sister Carmen, arrested in the same sweep, gave a false name. It was as Renée Lymber that she would be registered, and for a long time no one discovered that she and Lulu were sisters. Sensing that it was better this way, they feigned no knowledge of each other.

In the basement of the Prefecture, the two young women plotted their escape. They discovered a poorly secured window and persuaded some of the other women held with them to cover their departure. But as darkness fell, and Lulu and Carmen prepared to unscrew the window, a police lorry suddenly turned up full of prostitutes who had been arrested, and the whole place was flooded with light. The two sisters did not get a second chance.

Over the next twenty-four hours David arrested thirty-seven printers, typesetters, distributors and their liaison officers, discovered two large illegal presses, six depots of clandestine material, and two secret photographic studios. As with his earlier
filatures
, his tailing and shadowing of suspects, each detainee filled in yet one more piece in the jigsaw, every name, every address, leading to more arrests. Before he was done,
l’affaire Tintelin
had drawn in a hundred suspects. One of David’s most important catches was Henri Daubeuf, a somewhat truculent printer who claimed that he had been coerced and blackmailed into working for the Underground. His wife Viva, the Italian Socialist leader Nenni’s daughter, could have got away. All her friends begged her to flee. Instead she chose to visit her husband every day in detention, to bring him clothes and food and cigarettes; eventually, the police decided to arrest her as well. As she prepared to leave the prison after a visit, they informed her that she was no longer free to go.

And, as in all the other police sweeps, there were people who fell into the net by accident. Madeleine Dechavassine was a chemical engineer who had already spent some time in prison for distributing clandestine copies of
L’Humanité
. Having escaped once, she had since managed to elude capture for her activities as a chemist preparing explosives for the FTP when the rest of her group was caught. Now, she happened to be with Jacqueline, whom she had known before the war, when David’s men came to the house. The police were delighted with their additional prisoner.

Crucial to the network of printers was Cécile Charua, known to the police only as the
Cygne d’Enghien
. Cécile had been spotted on 1 June in a cafe in the rue d’Amsterdam, talking to
Nancy
, a man called Grancoign whom the police had been tailing for some time. On 8 June an inspector spotted her again with Grancoign outside a tobacconist’s in the rue Lafayette; they strolled for a while together along the boulevards then sat on a bench in the sunshine. In all, she was seen and followed on eight occasions. But Cécile managed to avoid the round-up on 17 June.

Sitting on a bus on her way to a meeting with a printer, she noticed that the man in front of her was wearing a jacket with a very shiny lapel; and shiny lapels were a sure sign of the police, since they were worn smooth by being flicked back to reveal the police badge. As she got off the bus, Cécile managed to whisper out of the side of her mouth to the member of the Resistance waiting for her at the bus stop that she was being followed; she aborted her visit to the printer, and when she failed to turn up, he hid all evidence of his clandestine work.

Hearing of the arrests of her colleagues, Cécile moved house and lay low for a while, then joined a new network. One day, returning to her small flat, where she was hiding two Lithuanian Jews, she was told by her sympathetic concierge that two policemen had come to the house while they were all out, and left a very clear and insistent message that she and her two Jewish lodgers should ‘certainly be at home’ that afternoon. As Cécile would later say, the French police could occasionally behave decently. She took heed, and they all moved to live elsewhere.

Her luck, however, did not last. On 5 August, shopping in the Place Monge in the 5th, she was spotted by a policeman who had once tailed her to a meeting with Tintelin. He and his colleague arrested her, found that she was carrying false papers and ration cards concealed inside the pages of a newspaper, and a key, and took her to the Prefecture for questioning. Cécile told the police that she was an out of work furrier, that she had a child being cared for by a foster family, and that she had joined the Communist Party in 1937. She admitted that she had indeed worked as a liaison officer for the French Communist Party and been paid a small salary. However, as to the identity of the men she had been seen meeting, she had no idea at all. She also refused to say what door the key opened. In fact she claimed she had no idea how it had got into her bag.

Tracking down a certain Goliardo Consani, whom the police established to be Cécile’s lover, they found in his flat a series of her notebooks, with pages of coded names and amounts of money to be paid. But who the codes referred to and what it was all about, Cécile declined to say. Consani told the police that he had met Cécile in a restaurant, that she had been his mistress for a year, but that he knew nothing at all about her activities. They never talked about politics. Confronted later with the leaders of the Tintelin group, the men who had given her the sums of money to be passed on to the printers, Cécile declared that they were all complete strangers to her. The men said they had never set eyes on her. To her immense relief, though the police refused to release her, she was only briefly interrogated: they assumed her to be the missing 101st person on their Tintelin list, and had not realised that she had since worked with another group. She was taken to join the other women in custody, among whom she found her friends Lulu and Carmen.

Seventeen of the
équipe technicienne
arrested by David’s men were women. Ten were in their twenties, and several had young children. Paul, Lulu’s son, was not quite two.

The men in the Tintelin group, appallingly tortured by David’s inspectors, were turned over, half dead, to the Gestapo. On the morning of 11 August, before it was light, the women woke to the sounds of the Marseillaise. It was only then that they learnt that their husbands were already on their way to Mont-Valérien, to be shot as part of a group of one hundred hostages, executed in reprisal for a grenade thrown at members of the Luftwaffe training in a Paris stadium, and for the death of a number of others in the preceding weeks. Of the one hundred, only four had actually been condemned to death by a German tribunal, though several had been ‘especially marked out for execution’ as dangerous terrorists; the rest were hostages. Viva was not permitted to see her husband to say goodbye.

CHAPTER EIGHT

‘We have other plans for them’

Bordeaux and its surroundings were crucial to the Resistance, the long beaches between La Rochelle and Bordeaux perfect for escape routes. The Charente, Charente-Maritime, Gironde, Landes and Basses-Pyrénées, traditionally strong in trade unionists and communists, had from the beginning of the war been building up Resistance networks of their own. They had been able to draw on the help of those men who, in the late 1930s, had crossed the border into Spain to serve with the International Brigades, and returned more militant and better trained, and on the Spaniards who had come to south-west France as refugees from Franco.

But the long stretch of sandy coast running north from the Pyrenees up to Brittany was no less crucial for the Germans. From the port of Bordeaux, a natural safe harbour for minesweepers, torpedo boats and submarines, cargo boats left for Indonesia and Japan to collect rubber and rare metals for the war industry. Not far away was the airport of Mérignac, soon transformed into an important German military base. The mayor of Bordeaux who had welcomed General Kleinst’s army of occupation as the Germans entered the city towards the end of June 1940, was a dentist called Adrien Marquet, well known for his admiration for Mussolini; Marquet was a good friend of the German ambassador, Otto Abetz. Then there was the Prefect of the Gironde, Pierre Alype, a devoted Pétainist, and Georges Reige, a zealous, passionately pro-German senior civil servant who worked in Alype’s office. All three were keen to do the Germans’ bidding.

In the wake of the occupying troops had arrived the new commandant of
Gross-Bordeaux
, General Moritz von Faber du Faur, a man whose courteous and distinguished appearance belied a cold heart. Within hours, the swastika was flying from every public building,
lycées
had been converted into German offices, a German military tribunal was established and the military camp at Souge, 25 kilometres south-west of Bordeaux, was turned into a barracks. In the middle, a clearing was left for executions. As in Paris, the German troops had been ordered to behave correctly; as in the capital, the people of Bordeaux were wooed with military bands playing Beethoven. And, for a while, like the Parisians, the Bordelais remained quiescent and watchful, though they complained bitterly about the shortage of fish, scared from the coastline by the artillery or commandeered to feed the occupiers.

Long before Hans Gottfried Reimers of the Wehrmacht was shot dead by the armed wing of the Paris Resistance on the corner of the Boulevard George V with two bullets to his spine in October 1941, however, the Germans had taken the Resistance in Bordeaux and its surrounding departments seriously. All infractions—tracts, posters, messages scribbled on walls—had been put down swiftly and harshly. By the autumn of 1941, the area was being rigorously patrolled by members of the Feldgendarmerie, the Geheime Feldpolizei, the Abwehr and several dozen Gestapo agents, under an anti-Semitic SS colonel called Herbert Hagen, who took all those suspected of Resistance activities to the old medieval Fort du Hâ or to the barracks in the rue de Persac. For a while Hagen, a colleague of Eichmann’s, lived on the yacht belonging to the King of Belgium, which had been abandoned at the outbreak of war in the port of Bordeaux.

It was not only the Germans, nor indeed principally the Germans, however, who had embarked on a determined
chasse aux résistants
, but the French police themselves, under a chubby, smooth-faced, black-haired commissioner called Pierre Napoleon Poinsot. When it came to brutality, Poinsot was inventive and thorough.

Born in 1907, Poinsot was a former seminarian, who had joined the French air force in Casablanca before entering the police force. There, thanks to his immense ambition and above average intelligence, he rose rapidly through the ranks, despite clumsy attempts to bypass his superiors. By 1936 he was known for his hatred of the Front Populaire and the Communists. With the arrival of the Germans in 1940, Poinsot’s career took a promising leap when both the Prefect and his assistant quickly perceived how useful a fanatical anti-communist could be to them. In January 1941, in a police report, Alype gave Poinsot a mark of 20/20 for ‘professional qualities’.