A Train in Winter (16 page)

Charlotte Delbo was in Buenos Aires, sitting on a beach reading the paper, when she saw that her friend André Woog had been guillotined. She hurried to find Jouvet, and told him that she had to go back to France. She could not bear to be safe, she said, while her friends were being killed. She wanted to share their risks. Jouvet did all he could to dissuade her. He pointed out how much easier it was for her husband Georges if his wife was safe in South America. As a soldier, fighting for the Resistance, it was better not to have responsibilities. For a while, Jouvet hid Charlotte’s passport, but she was adamant and booked a passage on a Brazilian ship bound for Europe. As she said goodbye to him, Jouvet told her: ‘Try not to get caught. You’re going into a lions’ den.’

Reaching France via Portugal, she met Georges in Pau. They travelled back to Paris separately, crossing the demarcation line from free into occupied France with different
passeurs
. While Georges came and went all over the Left Bank for the
Lettres Françaises
, Charlotte sat in their flat at 95 rue de la Faisanderie, chain-smoking, crouching at her desk wrapped up in a blanket to ward off the intense cold, transcribing and translating the news from Russian and British radio broadcasts, ready for inclusion in the Underground news-sheets. She and Georges had decided that it would be safer if they never went out together, but every time he was late coming home, her stomach knotted up in terror.

Charlotte had taken the name Madame Delepine. By now she and Georges knew that the Politzers, Decour, Danielle and Marie-Claude had all been arrested, but they were confident that not one of them would have given away any names. Just the same, it was impossible not to feel constantly afraid, to see in every stranger a policeman, in every unexpected knock a police raid. And what Charlotte did not know was that, when she left the flat, carrying baskets and bags which she exchanged with others at the cafes where she met her friends, she was followed.

On 2 March she was working at home when Georges returned, bringing with him a friend, a crucial early member of the
résistance intellectuelle
, Pierre Villon. The Alsacian son of a Jewish liberal rabbi—and Marie-Claude’s lover—Villon had been asked to take Politzer’s place as one of the editors of
Lettres Françaises
now that Politzer was in prison. He arrived in his pyjamas, hidden under an enormous overcoat, and his bedroom slippers—a not unfamiliar sight in a city in which many of the inhabitants had chilblains—having escaped arrest through a window that same morning when David’s men came to the house.

The news Villon had to report was bad: not only had his landlady, who had helped translate Russian broadcasts, been arrested but Jacques Solomon had failed to turn up for the last three rendezvous. No one had dared to go in search of Hélène. Georges told Charlotte that he thought he was being watched as well. They discussed how quickly it might be possible to leave Paris. As the three were talking, the bell rang. A voice called up the stairwell to say that it was a man come to read the gas meter.

Suspecting trouble, Charlotte pushed Villon into the bathroom, from where he escaped out of the window onto a roof and from there through the flat of two astonished neighbours. The five inspectors from the Brigades Spéciales who forced their way into the Dudachs’ flat were apparently surprised to find Charlotte there as well, but told her that she too was to go with them to the police station. She asked whether she might put on something warmer and went into the bathroom to change. There she caught sight of a bit of paper with a list of names, that had clearly been dropped by Villon as he escaped; she quickly scrunched it up and swallowed it. She and Georges were now taken to the Prefecture. In Villon’s overcoat, abandoned as he fled from the Dudachs’ flat, was discovered the entire manuscript of a forthcoming edition of
Lettres Françaises
.

After Charlotte and Georges, it was Hélène Solomon’s turn to fall. She was picked up while collecting a suitcase with a Remington typewriter from a locker at the Gare Saint-Lazare. On her was found a manuscript with the words ‘France must liberate herself!’

By 25 March 1942, the operation that the Brigades Spéciales would call one of the most successful ever mounted against the ‘terrorists’ was over. One hundred and thirteen people, from all over occupied France, were in custody, thirty-five of them women. Among them were members of the central committee of the Communist Party, liaison officers, regional leaders and enough evidence to link them to Resistance movements all the way from north of Paris to the Pyrenees. As the documents found on them made clear, ‘total war’ was to have been waged against the French police, who were to be regarded as ‘enemy number one’.

What made the police operation so rewarding to David and his men was the fact that, along with the vast haul of documents, names and addresses and false papers was found evidence that the Resistance itself was no longer simply inspired by small groups of communists, but had been put into the hands of the FTP and guerrilla fighters. In their searches, the officers of the Brigades Spéciales had been extremely thorough, digging up gardens, stripping off wallpaper, ransacking outhouses, garages and cellars. Reporting, with some pride, that ‘France and Paris could count on them’, the Brigades Spéciales announced that they were fully aware of the
grandeur
, the importance of the task with which they had been entrusted.

Most of those captured were taken to the depot under the Prefecture. Here they were interrogated. Most gave vague answers or said nothing at all, at which they were slapped and kicked. They pretended not to know one another. Danielle, who was beaten and badly bruised, managed to smuggle out a letter to her mother. ‘My heart is full of sunshine,’ she wrote with the determination and optimism that marked all her actions, ‘I am calm and resolved.’ She sang to her friends and told them that she felt proud to be in prison. Taken one by one into the vast hall of the depot, the women were appalled to see what was happening to their male companions.

Arthur Dallidet was so badly tortured that his whole face was disfigured and he went totally deaf. He was chained in such a way that he had to drink his soup from a dish on the floor, like a dog. Georges Politzer, also kept chained and manacled, developed sores which became infected, and his wrist was broken by the police. It was said later that Pucheu, Vichy’s Minister of the Interior, was present when Politzer, the 40-year-old distinguished Hungarian philosopher, was stripped naked and whipped. Maï, who was not tortured, knew precisely what was happening both to her husband Georges and to her lover Decour. Félix Cadras was tortured first by the French, then by the Gestapo; but he gave nothing away.

The women, meanwhile, put up a struggle of their own. Realising that they were fortunate to be together, they protested as a group about the extreme cold, the filth and the fleas and they clamoured for warm blankets. On the night of 11 March, they demanded to be moved from the vast draughty semi-underground hall under the Prefecture, from whose windows they could just see the feet of the soldiers patrolling outside, into the smaller, warmer cells. Guarded by an order of nuns in small blue veils, they gave all possible trouble, loudly imitating the noises of wild animals, until policemen were summoned and they were subdued. The older women among them—Charlotte, Germaine Pican and Marie-Claude—did what they could to comfort the younger. Claudine Guérin was miserable with acute earache. What tormented Charlotte was thirst, and the fact that for many hundreds of people there was only one tap to which each prisoner had to be taken separately, in handcuffs.

On 20 March, seven of these women, and five of the men, were moved to the prison of La Santé. Among them were André and Germaine Pican, Maï and Georges Politzer, Madeleine Dissoubray and Marie-Claude. They had been given an escort of armed police and they travelled in police vans. As he was climbing in, André Pican managed to slip free and run off, pursued by four policemen. Realising that he was not going to be able to get away, he climbed a wall and jumped over the parapet into the Seine, where he swam for 150 metres against the current, struggling with the weight of his heavy coat. Too exhausted to continue, he made for the bank, and before the police reached him, he called out to the gathering crowd: ‘Look what French police are doing to Frenchmen!’ In the police vans, his wife Germaine, unable to see what was happening but hearing the shouts of the onlookers, began to sing the Marseillaise. Then, all together, at the top of their voices, the prisoners shouted ‘Vive la France!’

La Santé, in the 14th arrondissement, was one of a number of prisons shared by the French and the Germans, each occupying their own section, and staffing it with their own men. Over time, these prisons would become known as the
châteaux de la mort lente
, the castles of slow death. There were separate blocks for men and women, for civilians and political prisoners; and there were punishment cells, to which detainees were sent for the slightest misdemeanour, tight, black holes without mattresses where prisoners could only crouch, in complete darkness. Though in theory the Germans had jurisdiction over only their own section, in practice they poached at will from the French detainees. In La Santé, there was very little food, no heating, and condensation trickled down the stone walls. Fleas and lice were endemic. The chance of release was virtually non-existent. At night, prisoners in the German wing or those awaiting execution could be heard singing revolutionary songs. A man in one of the upper cells, night after night, whistled Mozart’s
Eine kleine Nachtmusik
.

Danielle, Maï, Marie-Claude, Charlotte and the other women from the Politzer, Pican and Dallidet groups were put into cells in twos and threes, though a few, such as Madeleine Dissoubray, judged troublemakers, were placed in solitary confinement. Madeleine spent five months on her own, all contact with other prisoners forbidden the entire time; she left her cell only twice, once for a shower and once for exercise. Marie-Claude, Betty and Charlotte also spent many weeks in solitary confinement. Even for independent-minded women, accustomed to spending periods of time on their own, the solitariness of being totally alone, day after day, never knowing what would become of them, was terrifying. Chasing their anxious thoughts round and round in their minds, holding on for the moment when they would hear some sign of human life outside their cells, they lived in a silent, empty world. It took all their reserves of courage not to sink into apathy and despair.

Those deemed less culpable were allowed to receive a parcel of clean clothes and food every two weeks, and, very occasionally, a book. Exceptionally, no more than once a week, they were taken into the small central courtyard for ten minutes’ exercise. For the rest of the long, cold, anxious days there was nothing to do but think, talk, plan for a better future. Claudine, once she had recovered from her earache, sang. Not many of this first group of women prisoners had children. But for those who did, like Maï, thinking about their children but never being allowed to see them or know what would become of them, was a form of torture. The absence of the familiar smell and physical presence of the children was like a constant pain.

Charlotte, struggling not to lose all sense of reality when locked away on her own, tried to conjure up characters from Louis Jouvet’s productions, but they refused to appear, remaining firmly in ‘the shadows’. She spent the solitary hours watching the light form patterns on the walls of her cell. But one day she made contact through the pipes with the woman in the cell below her, and discovered that she had a book, Stendhal’s
Chartreuse de Parme
. Weaving a rope from threads pulled out of her blanket, she drew it up into her cell, terrified that at any moment she might be discovered. After that, she said, ‘my cell was inhabited’.

From the beginning, as soon as they had settled into La Santé, Danielle took it upon herself to become their leader. Just as she had once masterminded the activities of the young women in the Union des Jeunes Filles de France, so she now tried to keep her friends’ spirits buoyant. She soon mastered the prison system of communicating by means of the rusty old pipes that ran up the walls, along which, using a form of Morse or carefully articulated sentences, it was possible to be in touch with other cells and other floors. The women were able to tell each other stories. And they sang. Describing life in La Santé later to her parents, she wrote ‘We sang every night. If walking past those filthy walls, you heard singing, it was us. By “us” I mean the “dangerous elements”.’

Every evening, Danielle put together a news bulletin of information gleaned from the guards or from other prisoners, and it was conveyed from cell to cell by prisoners lying on the floor, near the door, and shouting through the crack at the bottom. For a while, the guards were tolerant. But one day they arrived in the cell Danielle shared with Germaine Pican to find her writing and when she stuffed the bit of paper into her mouth and tried to swallow it, they shook her hard and took her away to the punishment cell. For the next ten days she had no bed, no blanket, no light and was given only bread and water. She emerged pale and emaciated but defiant.

As spring came, and the prison warmed up, she arranged for all the prisoners to break one pane of their windows, and from her own, shouted out news, encouragement and plans. No one could see her, but, standing by their own broken windows, they could hear her words. Again she was punished, by four days without food, but the guards did not bother to replace the window-panes. All over La Santé, the prisoners felt in touch with one another. On Claudine’s 17th birthday, the entire prison sang to her through the air vents. ‘We didn’t feel alone,’ Germaine would later say.

Commissioner David and the Brigades Spéciales had been right to remark on the content of the documents found in the possession of the now broken Dallidet and Pican networks. The nature of the Resistance was indeed changing. It was no longer a question of small bands of individual resisters, on their own or in little groups, often bound by sectarian beliefs and acting out of a sense of personal outrage and distaste for the occupiers; but of a larger, united, infinitely more powerful and threatening entity. The armed wings of the various parts of the early Resistance, such as the Bataillons de la Jeunesse, had been carrying out joint actions for many months now, but on 3 April 1942, an article appeared in the clandestine edition of
L’Humanité
formally drawing attention to the Francs-Tireurs et Partisans—
francs-tireurs
after Victor Hugo’s description of the fighters of 1870,
partisans
from the Soviet use of the word to describe guerrillas.