The Cost of Courage (13 page)

On March 20, André is moved to Jaraba, where he reconnects with André Rondenay, who had been his fellow student at the Lycée Janson de Sailly, as well as at the elite Ecole polytechnique, a decade earlier.
^†

The twenty-nine-year-old Rondenay is the son of a French general who served as the commandant of the military school at Saint-Maixent. The son is a charismatic fighter and a legendary forger. Fifteen months earlier he had created fake documents that enabled him to walk out the front gate of a German prison camp where
he was incarcerated. Now he presents André with the impeccable identity card of a German officer, to assist in
his
escape.

From Jaraba, André is once again transferred to Pamplona. On the evening of April 5, the Spanish guards there are distracted long enough to allow André and a fellow prisoner named Jean Martin to escape. It takes them several days to walk more than a hundred miles to Ariza. There they board a train to Madrid. In the Spanish capital, they locate another contact given to them by Rondenay, who introduces them to the British consul.

Ten days later, they are driven to an address that has been provided by their British contact. At the beginning of May, they cross the Spanish frontier into Portugal, reaching Lisbon on May 3. Two days later, they board a plane for Bristol, England.

There is exciting news from North Africa as soon as André reaches England. On May 7, American and British forces capture Tunis and Bizerte, and 160,000 German and Italian soldiers surrender. Six days later, German Afrika Korps commander General Dietloff Jürgen von Arnim surrenders another 275,000 troops.

Like Postel-Vinay before him, André is dispatched to Patriotic School as soon as he lands in England. Once he has convinced the British that he is indeed a “sheep” — a genuine enemy of the Germans — he seeks out Charles de Gaulle at his headquarters in London.

André is excited at the prospect of the massive invasion to be led by the Americans, although his British handlers have noted that his “deep satisfaction” with the growing strength of the Allies “is mingled with a fear of eventual blunders by American authorities, due to a lack of understanding of aspirations in the occupied countries.”

André tells de Gaulle that he wants to return to France with the forthcoming Allied invasion. But the French general is still desperately short of men to send back to occupied France. The fifty-two-year-old general tells the twenty-seven-year-old engineer that he
requires him in occupied Paris as soon as possible, so that he can be the general’s military delegate, coordinating all Resistance activity in northern France.

Flattered by the general’s invitation, André immediately accepts his commission. André is assigned to the action division of the intelligence section of BCRA, which coordinates with the British foreign intelligence agency, MI6, while the action section focuses on sabotage operations in France. To prepare him for his return to Paris, the French send him to the British espionage school, where he is given the agent name Roger Doneau.

The first officer to work with him is Lieutenant Colonel Hutchison. He describes André as a “capable type, enthusiastic, straightforward, intelligent. Has a pleasing personality and is helpful, in a quiet way, towards his less brilliant comrades. Is modest. Not very communicative about himself. Should turn out to be A.1 from security point of view.”

His next instructor echoes Hutchison’s assessment: “An outstanding man. He has considerable previous experience but has shown himself very keen to learn. He is very pleasant to work with.” The base commandant also finds him “very quick to learn. Is intelligent and possesses powers of Leadership. Should do well.”

André goes on to win superlatives in almost every clandestine competition: “physical training, very fit and enthusiastic; field-craft, excellent; weapon training, a good shot; explosives & demolitions, very competent, previous experience stands him in good stead; signaling & communications, very good; he has an incisive brain and completely understands the requirements of any given situation.”

He earns a General Agent Grading of “A” for “Outstanding,” and his intelligence rating is 9, which also puts him in the top category: “Superior Intelligence.”

BUT NONE OF THESE QUALITIES
is enough to prevent André’s capture by the Germans less than four months after his return to Paris.

Lying in his prison hospital bed in January 1944, recovering from his gunshot wounds, André reflects on his many narrow escapes. Still delirious in his postoperative state, he decides that he still has the strength to liberate himself.

Unlike Postel-Vinay, who tried to plunge to his death, André believes that he can ascend to freedom. The wounded man will use his bare hands to scale the curtains in his room, which lead to the skylight above him — and a faint possibility of escape, if he can shatter the glass to reach the roof.

André starts slowly, gripping the curtain with one fist right above the other. Superhuman determination carries him up a couple of yards; then he loses his grip and crashes down on the floor.

As soon as he hits the ground, he realizes that he has popped most of the stitches in his stomach. Despite excruciating pain, he manages to pull himself back onto the bed.

The Germans don’t discover his ruptured wound until their next examination, eight days later. Then they do a very poor job of suturing him a second time. For a long time afterward, his organs are covered only by a frighteningly thin layer of skin.

A week after his arrest, his sisters decide to organize André’s escape. Their cousin, the surgeon Funck-Brentano, works in a hospital right next to the one where André is a prisoner. He is the surgeon who had assisted André in his unsuccessful attempt to liberate Postel-Vinay from the same prison hospital two years before.

Funck-Brentano has worked with André ever since his return to Paris, sometimes performing forbidden operations on Resistance members who have suffered gunshot wounds. Gradually he becomes so involved in the secret war that he acquires his own code name: Paulin.

With the surgeon’s help, a group of André’s friends locate the underground passage that connects the two hospitals, and an escape attempt is organized at the end of January. Christiane and Jacqueline rent an apartment near the hospital so that they can receive their wounded brother after his escape.

The two sisters spend a horrible night together in the apartment. With their stomachs in knots, they are so scared the neighbors will hear them that they don’t dare even to turn on a water tap.

Their surgeon-cousin takes the first Métro at dawn so that he will be at the secret apartment when André gets there. But by the time he arrives, the sisters already know that the escape has failed.

The plotters have been unable to penetrate the floor of his prison hospital room from the basement below. Hearing the awful news, Christiane and Jacqueline fall into each other’s arms and dissolve into tears.

Their cousin, fearing a trap, immediately flees the apartment.

ANDRÉ
’
S FIRST INTERROGATION
by the Gestapo occurs at the hospital at the end of January 1944.

This is the baffling part of his story.

André and his chief aide, Charles Gimpel, have been arrested together on January 12, 1944.

Gimpel is brutally tortured by the Germans, but he survives the torture — and never talks.

Unlike Gimpel, André is shot at the time of his arrest, and that may explain why he never suffered the same way his deputy did — if André has told the truth about the way he was treated.

It is possible that by the time he had recovered enough from his gunshot wounds to be interrogated, whatever information he had was no longer worth much, because by then his unarrested comrades had all moved on to new secret locations.

Or else the Germans felt they had already learned whatever
they needed to know from Jacques, the Sorbonne student who had betrayed him and brought the Gestapo to his door.

Later, André tells his sister that his interrogators read him excerpts of their interview with Jacques, including this passage: “I was recruited by Christiane Boulloche. She lives with her parents and her sister Jacqueline at 28, avenue d’Eylau, third floor on the right. Her brother is my boss. He is living in a clandestine apartment on rue de la Santé in the Thirteenth.”

When his German interrogators demanded confirmation of Jacques’s words, André said that he used a formula that failed for scores of others but somehow worked for him: He identified himself as a French officer on a military mission. Therefore, under the rules of war, he cannot speak.

“If you found yourself in the same circumstances,” he tells the German officers standing over him, “you would certainly do the same, and remain silent.”

After that, André always said, the Germans stopped trying to interrogate him that day.
^‡

The strongest counterevidence to this claim appears in the secret British file about André’s wartime activities, which was declassified almost six decades later, at my request. There was only one item in the file that contradicted anything that he had told his family.

It is this entry from 1946: “in spite of [his wounds]
and of cruel tortures
[emphasis supplied], he gave away no compromising information.” (Later, for his valor he was awarded the King’s Medal for Courage.)

In February, André is moved to Fresnes, one of the largest prisons in France, in the town of Fresnes, Val-de-Marne, just outside Paris. Most of the other prisoners are fellow Resistance members,
and many of them have already been tortured. On February 15, he undergoes his second interrogation. By then he has been a prisoner for just over a month. The Germans read him a list of names and ask him to identify the ones he knows. Once again he refuses to cooperate.

By now his information is so old, most of it is probably worthless anyway. That could be why he again avoids being tortured.

“The Gestapo wasn’t always logical.” That is his sister Christiane’s only explanation for the way her brother says he was treated. Or, as Postel-Vinay put it, pondering his own survival without ever being tortured, “Perhaps I was wrong to look for logic in an organization in which ability, incoherence, chance, barbarism and political rivalries were constantly warring for the upper hand.”

TIPPED OFF
that her brother has been moved to Fresnes, Christiane tries to deliver packages to him there. Occasionally they are accepted, but usually they are rejected.

One night in March, André reconnects with fellow prisoner Gilbert Farges, a former rugby player whom he had met a few times before. They stay up all night talking about their families, their arrests, and the “loving attention” they have both received from the Gestapo. Despite their circumstances, they also talk about the future, and their determination to escape. About this André is “inflexible, inexhaustible — and full of imagination.”

By dawn, Farges and Boulloche have become good friends. For André, this will quickly become a lifesaving friendship.

On April 7, André is moved to the transit camp of Royallieu, in Compiègne, fifty miles north of Paris. Compiègne has been the hunting grounds of the kings of France since the eighth century. In 1944, it becomes the final stop for thousands of French patriots hunted down by the enemy, before they are deported to Germany.

Despite his badly tended wound, André is already becoming a leader of his fellow prisoners, through his dignity, his serenity, and his intellectual strength. In Fresnes, he had been kept in an underground cell. Now, for the first time in months, he can occasionally see the sun.

To Gilbert Farges, Compiègne feels like “semiliberty” compared to Fresnes: “The simple fact of seeing the sky and the sun, of being able to walk around and talk, feel like precious gifts. But we were barely nourished and many of us were already in terrible health.”

André reconnects with another important person here: Charles Gimpel, his deputy in Paris before their arrest, now a fellow prisoner. As Gimpel’s British handlers noted before his return to France, Gimpel is “an excellent man,” “physically well above average,” with “an excellent brain,” an “outstanding” personality and a “keenness on the job” that is “infectious.” (After the war, the British also award Gimpel the King’s Medal for Courage.)

During their walks outside in the prison courtyard, the men are buoyed by glimpses of squadrons of American B-17 Flying Fortresses and B-24 Liberators filling the sky on their way to Germany.

Another fellow prisoner, Michel Bommelaer, finds it incredibly moving “to watch these heads from a mortuary … following the planes as they flew east, where a promised land of unimaginable cruelty awaits us.”

In the third week of April, Christiane gets a tip that André is about to be shipped off to Germany. Hoping to catch a final glimpse of him, Christiane and Jacqueline travel with their parents to Compiègne, where they spend the night in a squalid hotel. The next morning, they spot André in the courtyard, hunched over because of his badly tended wound. When André sees them, Christiane tries to throw him a loaf of bread with a file hidden in the middle of it, but the Gestapo shout at her and push her away.

At this moment it occurs to André that this may be the last time that he will ever see his family. But despite his family’s horror over his departure, there is also an element of hope: “When we learned one of our comrades would be deported, we were relieved,” Christiane remembered. “Because it meant that they hadn’t been tortured to death.”

André boards the deportation train on April 27, 1944 — forty days before the Allied invasion at Normandy. Gilbert Farges pushes him into a corner of the car to make it easier to protect him. Then Farges asks Rémy, a beefy man from the Basque region, to stand next to both of them. From then on, André leans on one of these two men, concentrating all the time to conserve his energy.

Seventeen hundred prisoners are put in seventeen cattle cars: one hundred crammed into each car. Their destination is Auschwitz. Among them are thirty-nine employees of the French national railroad, two poets, twenty priests, and members of sixty-four different Resistance organizations.