A Train in Winter (11 page)

In the early autumn of 1941, however, Germaine herself was in detention, suspected of running the Resistance in the Seine-Inférieure in the absence of her husband, and her two daughters were in hiding. Claudine’s mother and Germaine were among the relatively few women resisters already in prison, the myth of the unpolitical, home-loving woman still prevailing across much of France. Germaine was held in a prison in Rouen, and Claudine came with her bicycle every day and the two exchanged news through an open window. In October, Claudine was sent to a boarding
lycée
in Paris, and from here she took over Germaine’s job as liaison officer, transmitting messages from the capital to Rouen. She was a bright student, having already taken and passed her first baccalaureate.

Not far away and waiting to be allocated a task was 23-year-old Madeleine Dissoubray. Early in 1941, Madeleine had joined the Resistance and gone underground. She took a false name, Mme Duteurtre and under this she rented a room, though she occasionally went by the name of Thérèse Pasquier. Madeleine’s mother was dead and her elder brother and sister were already in the Resistance; their father, an agricultural engineer and a socialist, had brought his children up to be politically active. A veteran of the First World War, he would say that Léon Blum and the Front Populaire had given him the first paid holidays of his life. During the Spanish Civil War, the Dissoubrays took in refugees from Spain.

Madeleine was studying to be a sports instructor, though she had thoughts of switching to mathematics. Among her sports-minded friends, there was much talk of trying to cross to England to join the Free French. They told each other that they would keep faith with the true France, even if it meant death. Death, they said, had to be ‘tamed’. Seeing the German posters going up on the walls of Rouen, with their menaces and threats, Madeleine knew exactly what she was risking. It only made her feel greater solidarity with her friends. As she would later say, they were terrified, talking of what they could do, ‘not only for ourselves but for each other’. Public dances had been forbidden by the Germans, but not dancing lessons, and it was in these classes, the boys with hair slicked back with vegetable oil, the girls with fashionable black and blond streaks in their hair, that they met and discussed their plans. ‘How could you not resist?’ Madeleine would later say. ‘You couldn’t live under the Nazis. You just couldn’t accept it.’ By the autumn of 1941, Madeleine was an important member of the communist secretariat for Rouen.

The attack on Rouen, set for 19 October, was to involve the derailment of a train just outside the station of Malaunay. Local engine drivers and railwaymen working for the Resistance had agreed to unscrew the heavy bolts holding the rails together, but it was noisy work and Madeleine, acting as a lookout for the frequent German patrols, was given a revolver in case of discovery. In the event, a number of rail tracks were successfully loosened without the Germans noticing, and a train carrying materiel for the eastern front slid off the tracks. There were no casualties, but considerable damage. Next day, the local French police chief arrested 150 people he suspected of belonging to the PCF. Madeleine managed to avoid capture.

The second attack, on the 20th, was more ambitious. Two young resisters, Gilbert Brustlein and Guisco Spartico, sent from Paris to Nantes, where there was a large garrison of troops, spotted two German officers crossing the cathedral square. They followed them and drew out their revolvers. Spartico’s jammed; Brustlein’s worked. Lieutenant-Colonel Holtz, ‘squealing like a pig’, fell to the ground. Once again, the two attackers got away. ‘What are they waiting for,’ asked Robert Brassilach in the newspaper
Je Suis Partout
, ‘before they start shooting communists?’

The third attack, the shooting of a member of the German military command in Bordeaux called Reimers, on the night of 21 October, had not yet taken place when the Germans reacted against the attack on Holtz. Von Stülpnagel sent one of his officers to the internment camp at Chateaubriand in Brittany, to demand a list of detainees. A poster went up, announcing that since an officer had been murdered ‘by cowardly criminals in the pay of England and Moscow’, fifty hostages would be shot immediately, and fifty more if those responsible for the attacks were not in custody by midnight on the 23rd. A reward of 15 million francs was offered for information leading to the capture of the culprits. After the attack on Bordeaux and the death of Reimers, a further hundred men were earmarked to be shot. It was later said that the Minister of the Interior, Pucheu, when shown the list of names, exchanged those of ‘40 good Frenchmen’,
anciens combattants
of the First World War, for those of the ‘most dangerous communists’.

In the early afternoon of the 22nd, German soldiers driving lorries arrived to collect twenty-seven men from the camp at Chateaubriand to take them to a sandy quarry two kilometres away. They included a Communist deputy called Charles Michels, a number of prominent trade union leaders, a doctor and some teachers. The youngest was a schoolboy, Guy Môquet, the son of a Communist politician. Each of the men was given a sheet of paper, an envelope and a pencil with which to write a farewell letter. ‘I am going to die!’ Guy wrote to his mother, begging her to be brave, as he hoped to be, brave as those going with him. As the lorries drove out through the camp gates, onlookers removed their hats. The men were singing the Marseillaise, and they kept on singing even as they were led before the firing squad, in three batches. Not one accepted a blindfold. ‘The victors that day,’ noted one of the Germans present, ‘were not us but those who died.’

Chateaubriand would not be the only site of mass reprisals; indeed, in the days that followed, other communist schoolteachers and trade unionists followed these first men to firing squads elsewhere. But the name Chateaubriand would enter the consciousness not only of the French, but of the Allies, as a symbol of German brutality. On the Sunday after the executions, though expressly forbidden to do so, the inhabitants of the town laid wreaths in the sand quarry. The bodies had carefully been scattered between nine different cemeteries, to avoid shrines of martyrdom.

Both Roosevelt and Churchill issued statements condemning the killings and warned that when the war ended, punishment would follow. De Gaulle, however, was more circumspect. It was perfectly right and proper, he declared, for Frenchmen to kill Germans. But wars involved tactics. And it was he personally, together with the National Committee, who was in charge of strategy. As fighters, the FTP should follow orders, and his orders were not to kill Germans, because it made it too easy for the enemy to massacre people who were ‘momentarily disarmed’. The time would come for armed action, but it was still too soon. Danielle, Cécile, Madeleine, Maï and the Bataillons de la Jeunesse paid little attention to his words, but from Berlin Hitler ordered that the names of Gaullists be removed from the lists of hostages in the camps.

For the Germans occupying France, the assassinations at Nantes and Bordeaux marked another step on the road to ever more brutal repression. They wanted immediate, decisive retribution, and they intended to get it. But for the moment at least, von Stülpnagel continued to argue that the French must do their own policing, albeit greatly aided by the Wehrmacht and the Gestapo. Pétain, who had briefly thought of offering to take the place of one of the hostages until dissuaded by Pucheu, announced that Vichy was more committed to collaboration than ever, even if he personally bewailed the ‘river of blood’ caused by the mass executions. ‘With a broken voice, I appeal to you,’ he told the French, over the radio, ‘do not let more harm come to France… With the armistice, we agreed to lay down our weapons. We have no right to take them up again in order to shoot Germans in the back.’ He made no comment about the ratio of one hundred French lives for every one German one. Hostages, he reassured his listeners, would be taken only from among those ‘whose guilt has definitely been proved’. Seventeen-year-old Guy Môquet was conveniently forgotten.

It was, however, becoming harder than ever for French collaborators to do the Germans’ bidding. In order to fulfil fresh undertakings to redouble surveillance, discover the culprits and run to ground all Communist leaders, new forces were needed. Vichy was about to find them in a proliferation of specialised police groups,
polices d’occasion
, police for all occasions, devoted entirely to
la chasse
, the hunt, for resisters.

What no one expected was how tenaciously and bravely the resisters would fight back. In the weeks and months to come, more German soldiers and informers were shot, there were explosions on railway lines, grenades were rolled into German restaurants, bombs thrown at depots, at German libraries and German canteens. The industrial zone of the Seine-Inférieure, where Germaine Pican and Claudine Guérin were active, was the scene of constant attacks—railway lines cut, petrol bombs thrown, engines sabotaged by a collection of Gaullists, communists, Catholics and socialists working together, many of them students or railway workers. At one point, the attacks on the railways were so frequent that the Germans placed a number of French civilian hostages on board all trains carrying German soldiers. When the resisters ran out of money, they held up local
mairies
, and made off with whatever cash they could find.

For Betty, travelling up and down France as a courier, hearing herself and her companions described as terrorists, was to misunderstand the meaning of the word. Terrorists were people who shot innocent bystanders; she and her friends were fighters, engaged in war against the enemy. They felt elated.

In the early days of the occupation, the Germans had been wary of the French police, suspecting them of being ardent republicans at heart. A few, indeed, were, and these quickly resigned. But for the most part the 15,000 men who policed Paris and the department of the Seine stayed at their posts, and, as the months passed, were drawn ever deeper into a web of collaboration, into Primo Levi’s ‘grey zone’, somewhere between occupier and occupied. Like many French people, they believed that Germany was bound to win the war. At best, they did what they could to mitigate the harshness of the occupiers; at worst, they became torturers.

A law had been passed in the summer of 1940 to the effect that any civil servant would be dismissed if he failed to give satisfaction. Infected by years of public hostility to the Communists, remembering the confrontations with ‘Blum’s creatures’ of the left, frightened for their jobs, coerced by appeals to their sense of duty, many French policemen chose simply to try to survive the war years unscathed and uncompromised. By the summer of 1941, it was becoming increasingly hard for them to do so.

The assassination at the Barbès métro, as well as the attacks in Rouen, Nantes and Bordeaux, merely speeded up a process that was already under way. Since Pucheu, as Minister of the Interior, was determined to do everything possible to prevent the monopoly of repression passing solely into German hands, plans were already well advanced for a reorganised, reinvigorated French police force, committed both to Vichy’s
révolution national
and to all-out attacks on the Resistance. All his best men, Pucheu promised von Stülpnagel, would be thrown against those guilty of the attacks. There was to be better pay for police officers, more training and new uniforms, but not, to their disappointment, new guns, for the Germans remained reluctant to see the French better armed.

Along with new sections dedicated to tracking down Jews, Freemasons and foreigners, run by their own ‘specialists’, came two new brigades, one for ‘Communists’, the other for ‘terrorists’. There had been
brigades spéciales
before, under the office of the Renseignements Généraux, the intelligence service of the French police, whose job it had been to spy on possible troublemakers, but these would be more ruthless, more independent, more skilful.

In the summer of 1941, the new Prefect of Police, instructed to hunt down enemies of the Reich, appointed a senior French policeman called Lucien Rottée as head of the Renseignements Généraux. Rottée, a tall, thin man, wore three-piece suits and went everywhere accompanied by a large dog. He loathed communists, whom he regarded as agents of the Soviet Union. No sooner was he appointed than Rottée brought in his protégé Fernand David to head the anti-communist Brigades Spéciales, and, shortly afterwards, his own nephew, René Hénoque, as head of the anti-terrorist unit. David, who was in his early thirties, was arrogant and extremely ambitious; he would soon be known as the ‘patriots’ executioner’. Both brigades were to work closely with the Germans, particularly with the Gestapo.

There was no trouble finding recruits. Offered better pay, more freedom, plain clothes rather than uniforms, the promise of rapid promotion, and the chance to catch ‘enemies’ rather than persecute Jews and Freemasons, few of the young men refused. In other parts of occupied France, policemen, similarly seduced by ideas of power and promotion, hastened to volunteer for similar local Brigades Spéciales. The first were chosen from men who had already distinguished themselves as interrogators, but soon the new recruits were busy learning about surveillance, letter drops, safe houses, how to detect suspicious behaviour, all the telltale signs of the clandestine life. Rottée treated them well, inviting them to receptions, singling out those who performed particularly well and calming the doubts of the few who were troubled by the morality of spying on their fellow citizens. Soon they were perceived as an elite, with special privileges, generous expenses, access to many rationed items and even, occasionally, the possibility of securing the release of a relative who was a prisoner of war from a camp in Germany.

What Rottée had quickly understood was that everything depended on surveillance. His men worked in shifts, returning to the office to write up detailed reports. He taught them to develop their memory, to study minutely faces and gestures and clothes and to write down precisely what they observed. Some brought years of knowledge of the Communist Party to the job; others were skilled at deciphering codes. In the offices on the second floor of the Prefecture, on the Ile de la Cité in Paris, a card index was slowly assembled, of names, addresses, contacts, activities, pseudonyms, identifying characteristics, all greatly assisted by an army of informers, resentful neighbours, jealous friends and zealous bosses. Some of the tale-bearers sent in photographs with their denunciations. Every lead was followed up, every dossier of suspected communists picked over. Blackmail, bribes, promises, all brought in information.