Authors: Caroline Moorehead
A Train in Winter (15 page)
Marie and Poupette Alizon, the last picture of them taken together
By now the Alizons had been warned that Johnny had been infiltrated. Marie’s boyfriend, breaking his ankle while trying to escape arrest by jumping through a second-floor window in Quimper, was said to be in detention. There were rumours of torture and confessions. On 13 March 1942, the Feldgendarmerie arrived to arrest Marie, while Poupette was at school. Marie was taken to Rennes central prison and held for three days before being sent to La Santé in Paris.
Poupette waited. She stopped going to school. She could have gone into hiding, but was worried about her parents. Five days later, at eleven o’clock in the morning, two German officers arrived at the Arvor to arrest her. They took her to Rennes prison, questioned her, slapped her about, and told her that they were putting her on a train for Paris where she would be questioned further. Her parents, notified that she would be leaving by train, went to the station and stood all day, hoping to speak to her. When the car bringing her to the station reached the forecourt, Poupette tried to seem nonchalant and cheerful; she was, she kept telling herself, just a schoolgirl, and they would surely not keep her for long. She was almost proud that the Germans had sent three armed soldiers to guard a teenager who had only just celebrated her 17th birthday and who still looked like a child. Her parents appeared grey with misery.
Along with Raymonde Sergent, Marie and Poupette were among the first women arrested. The others, one by one and in little groups, in Paris, on the demarcation line, on the farms of Brittany and Normandy, in their homes in Bordeaux, were all about to fall into German hands.
The late winter of 1941 was terrible for the resisters. The group from the Musée de l’Homme went on trial and all seven of the men—anthropologists, ethnographers, social scientists—were sentenced to death for writing and distributing anti-German material. While an icy wind gripped most of France, and people shivered inside their unheated houses, the Brigades Spéciales in Paris, under David and Hénoque, prepared to score their first major success. Their operation was like an immense ball of wool and as it unravelled, one discovery at a time, one name, one letter drop, one informer, each led to another; sometimes the French police officers must have thought they would never get to the end.
In Paris, the clandestine journalists, publishers, printers and distributors worked without pause.
Le Silence de la Mer
was being copied and roneoed and bound by hand ready for distribution. All over Paris, groups of writers, doctors, artists, scientists, actors and teachers were at work on their own committees and their own news-sheets. It had become hard to find supplies of paper, which had been rationed by the Germans. Marie-Claude, Danielle and Maï continued to meet, elegantly dressed and passing as old friends out shopping, but covertly exchanging edited pages and planning future strategy. Cécile and Betty were still travelling from one end of Paris to the other, and one end of France to the other, carrying orders and distributing money.
What none of them knew was that bit by bit, item by item, David’s men were preparing dossiers. Often, the police still had no names for the men and women they were following. Betty was still ‘Ongles Rouges’, Danielle ‘Femme No. 1 de Balard’. But their doggedness and meticulous note-taking was about to pay off. It was not the carelessness of the resisters, well schooled by Dallidet, that was about to let them down, but the single-mindedness of their opponents.
The first to fall into Commissioner David’s hands was Marie-Claude; and that was almost by accident. The Brigades Spéciales had been laying a
sourcière
, a trap, for another suspect when one of the inspectors noticed her visiting the same house. He did not know who she was, but he thought he remembered her face from following André Pican. He went back to the office and checked the records: the description matched. On 4 February, David decided to arrest her; his policeman picked her up as she was carrying a pound of butter to the family of a prisoner of war. Taken to the police station and questioned, she would give only her name.
David’s next move was one of the only errors he would make in the entire operation. He put a photograph of Marie-Claude, together with an advertisement, in a daily paper called
Le Petit Parisien
, asking whether anyone knew the identity and address of this woman, found wandering in the streets, confused and having lost her memory. When they showed the paper to Marie-Claude, she was secretly delighted; she knew it would warn the others that she was under arrest, and that they would then avoid all fixed meeting places and take extra precautions. Dallidet had impressed on all of them to do everything they could to give nothing away for at least twenty-four hours, which would give the others time to cover their tracks.
By now, however, David and his men had become increasingly aware that the men and women they were following—André Pican, ‘Moustaches’, ‘Femmes Trocadéro’, ‘République’, ‘Franklin’ and the others—had become excessively nervous, constantly changing direction as they moved around Paris, entering and then leaving métro stations, crossing roads only to re-cross them. On 15 February, David, fearing that they might all disappear underground, decided that he should delay no longer. Sixty police officers were dispatched to arrest all those they had been following, if possible in the street rather than at their homes, where they might be able to destroy any evidence and, most important, lists of names and addresses.
The Brigades Spéciales began by staking out Maï and Georges Politzer’s flat in the rue de Grenelles. Maï, they had now established, was ‘Femme Vincennes’ (1.60m, 32, fair hair, glasses…). They watched and waited until they observed Jacques Decour press the bell, and then they closed in. Decour had come around to warn his friends that he feared the police were on his trail. On him was found a small photograph of Maï. Under a bag of potatoes in the kitchen were discovered manuscripts intended for the
Lettres Françaises
. Decour, charged with ‘aiding the enemy’ and endangering the lives of German soldiers with his anti-German propaganda, was taken into ‘ultra secret’ detention.
David then had the sense to leave two police inspectors in the Politzer flat, and this way he caught Danielle, when she rang the bell later that morning. She was carrying a small sack of coal she was bringing as a present. Danielle was identified as ‘Femme No. 1 de Balard’, and she was taken to join the Politzers in the Paris Prefecture for questioning.
Next, it was the turn of André and Germaine Pican. Germaine, who had recently been released from prison, had come to join her husband in Paris, leaving their two daughters in Rouen. They stayed at the house of their friends Raoul and Marie-Louise Jourdan— ‘Femme No. 34’ —who ran a dry-cleaning business in the 18th, which doubled as an occasional safe house for the Resistance. It was here that David’s men found all four of them, sitting inside, behind closed shutters. They had no chance to escape.
On seeing the police, André tried to swallow a list of names and addresses, but the inspectors were too quick for him. He was stripped and searched. In his shoes were a false ID in the name of Léon Rochand and another list with names and the date of a forthcoming meeting. One of the names on the list was that of Yvonne Emorine, a dressmaker living at 39 rue Crimée. Two inspectors were sent to arrest her. When they searched her, they discovered 3,000 francs in cash in her bag. Yvonne refused to give them the names of any of her clients and insisted that she had won the money on the National Lottery, though she appeared unable to recall the date the lottery had been drawn. Yvonne’s husband, Antoine, was already in custody, having been detained earlier as a prominent member of the Communist Party. David’s men then turned their attention to Germaine. In her pocket was a letter from Claudine Guérin: the police set off to arrest her from her
lycée
not far away. Claudine was still only 16.
This first sweep, to the great satisfaction of the Brigades Spéciales, brought in nineteen people, all either leading figures in the Communist Party, or liaison officers for the Resistance. Nine of them were women. Many had large sums of money on them as well as false documents and they were clearly on the verge of disappearing underground. One of the crucial figures turned out to be a draughtsman and trade unionist called Félix Cadras, who had been helping to organise the Resistance in the south. Arrested outside his house, Cadras shouted out a warning to his wife, and when the police forced the door, they found her standing on a radiator in the process of throwing a shopping bag full of documents out of the window. They retrieved it and discovered reports on Resistance activities all over the country. What became known as the first phase, the
phase Pican
, had proved exceptionally fruitful.
Better than the people caught, in fact, were the things that the police found in their houses. Hidden behind water cisterns, under food, inside clothes and shoes and buried away in attics and cellars—all combed through by David’s men—were not only tracts, manuscripts and caches of money, but detailed lists and addresses of other members of the Resistance, as well as the fragments of cards and tickets destined to be used as the other halves of passes. Some of them related to operations in Paris. But many led to Rouen, Evreux, Tours, Cherbourg, Nantes and Ruffec. On Danielle were found the names of contacts as far away as the Pyrenees.
And so a second phase, the
phase de Province
, was launched. David had long been certain that Pican was part of an extensive network; but just how extensive he was only just beginning to understand.
In Cherbourg, using half a ticket found on Cadras, policemen, passing themselves off as members of the Resistance, visited a man called Mesnil, who, producing his own half, took them to a meeting of the section heads for Calvados and La Manche. This netted six resisters. Tours yielded nine others; Ruffec another nine; Nantes three; Evreux a further three.
Rouen turned out to be the most important centre of all. One of the
passes
found on André Pican, with an address attached, led to 20 rue Montbret. An Inspector Delarue, posing as a member of the Resistance, and carrying half a pass, was dispatched to investigate. The woman who opened the door was Madeleine Dissoubray, the teacher who had helped with the derailing of the train in October and who had provided Feldman, the young member of the armed wing of the Bataillons de la Jeunesse who carried out the attack, with a safe house in Rouen.
Once Madeleine had established that their passes matched, she told Delarue she was on her way to a meeting of the local heads of the Resistance. They went for a walk together and though she was evasive about all the names, she was very forthcoming about plans, printing presses and the way the Resistance was structured in Normandy. Delarue listened carefully, said little, and appeared convincingly part of the Resistance. When he judged there was nothing more he could learn from her, he showed her his police badge and told her she was under arrest. Madeleine struggled to get away, shouted for help, and threw herself to the ground. But Delarue held on and summoned reinforcements. Dragged to the police station and left alone in a first-floor room, Madeleine tried to escape by climbing down a drainpipe. Interrogated repeatedly for names, she said nothing. Later, waiting for a train to take her to Paris, she tried to escape again by throwing her suitcase against the legs of her guards, but she slipped and fell, badly grazing her legs. The
phase de Province
brought the number of the Pican network now in French police custody to over sixty.
But it was the third police operation, the
phase Dallidet
, that would prove most deadly. As with the arrest of Marie-Claude, it came about almost by accident.
On the evening of 28 February, while Paris still lay under deep snow, Arthur Dallidet, the canny security chief of the FTP, known to the others as ‘Emile’, was seen talking to a woman in a cafe by the métro station of Reuilly. The police had only picked up his trace that morning. For a long time, Dallidet’s intense caution had paid off; but his luck had not lasted. When arrested, Dallidet and his companion shouted for help, but the people in the street near them only stared. Dallidet was taken to La Santé prison, where he was chained and handcuffed. Beaten so badly that later his friends failed to recognise him, Dallidet gave nothing away. But he did not really need to, for a long list of names and addresses had been found on him.
One of these names was that of his most important liaison officer, Betty,
Ongles Rouges;
she was arrested in her flat in Paris at seven in the morning of 3 March by policemen posing as electricity inspectors. She and her companion, Lucien Dorland, were just on the verge of leaving for the south, where they were due to deliver money and orders to the Bordeaux Resistance. They would have left earlier, but she had slipped on the ice and hurt her knee. Later, she would remember that there were tell-tale signs that she was being followed—an odd-looking woman, hanging about with her shopping, a nonchalant school boy—but she had failed to register them. In the flat was found an important cache of false identity papers, manuscripts and a notebook with names and addresses. Conducted to La Santé, where she was soon referred to as ‘dure de dure’, the toughest of the tough, Betty was slapped, punched and repeatedly interrogated. Like Dallidet, she revealed nothing. Put into a punishment cell, in total darkness, without a bed or a mattress, she lost all sense of time and place. Later, she told her parents: ‘But I emerged as proud as when I went in, somewhat ill, but it soon passed.’