A Train in Winter (17 page)

The FTP, as
L’Humanité
described them, were to be an amalgamated force of armed fighters, whether Communist, Jewish, Italian, Polish or Catholic, waging a common
lutte armée
, armed struggle, against the German occupiers and their Vichy collaborators, under a united political front. Though there was little to encourage the French resisters in the news of the war between the Allies and the Axis—Rommel was advancing across the western desert, Singapore had fallen to the Japanese, and the Americans were stalled in the Philippines—the moment was fast approaching when de Gaulle’s
France combattante
would be a rallying call for most of the French Resistance.

The resisters themselves, however, were not alone in seeing the need to unite and regroup. Faced by the incessant round of attacks on their men, the Germans too were rethinking their strategy of repression.

Otto von Stulpnägel, military commander of France, a man described as being at once graceful and like a wooden puppet, both melancholy and maniacal, had never liked the policy of mass execution in reprisal for attacks on German soldiers. He considered the tactic counter-productive, more liable to inflame hostility towards the occupiers than to quell the resisters. Despite the several hundred hostages executed during the autumn and winter of 1941, armed attacks were not just continuing but multiplying, while those shot in reprisal were seen as martyrs, their graves turned into shrines, their photographs passed from hand to hand. Lucien Sampaix, Simone’s father, widely known for the courage with which he had confronted the occupiers, had become a hero.

In February 1942, von Stülpnagel went to Berlin to argue for a more subtle response to the Resistance: punishing only those proven guilty and their accomplices, not the entire population, deporting more people, and having longer curfews. Hitler refused to see him. Von Stülpnagel returned to Paris and resigned his post. When it came to mass executions, he said, ‘I no longer can—at least for the moment and in the current circumstances—in all conscience accept responsibility before history.’ His place was taken by his cousin, Karl Heinrich, a man made of sterner stuff. Before he left Paris, von Stülpnagel spoke of the
tourbillon
, the whirlwind, of hatred unleashed in France by the mass executions.

More significantly perhaps, power in France was shifting away from the Wehrmacht and towards the Gestapo. In the wake of further armed attacks by the French Resistance, Himmler persuaded Hitler that the German army of occupation was not acting toughly enough and, early in May, General Karl Oberg, keen exterminator of the Jews in Poland, was named supreme chief of the SS and the German police in occupied France. He spoke almost no French and knew virtually nothing about France. In a great ceremony held at the Ritz, Oberg was officially installed in his office by Heydrich, just a few days before Heydrich was ambushed by Czech patriots in Prague. Oberg’s assistant was Helmut Knochen, the young philosophy graduate and keen anti-Semite who had reached Paris in 1940 as the spearhead of the SS. Knochen was made a full colonel; and now that Otto von Stülpnagel had gone, he was able to unleash his men to act with all the brutality of which they were capable.

Oberg was also to draw on the services of a team of jurists, who were to help him determine who was to appear before a tribunal, who would be deported, and who shot. In practice, however, all semblance of legality and German attention to correctness and bureaucracy was soon abandoned in favour of speed and expediency. Gone were the days when sympathetic French judges could hurry through the cases against members of the Resistance in such a way as to make them incomprehensible to German observers, or maintain that those arrested for listening to the BBC had in fact pushed the wrong button on their radio sets.

Oberg was 45 and wore his fair hair shaved to the skin; he had a pink face, a beer belly and protruding blue-grey eyes. Known to his colleagues as a genial family man, a meticulous and level-headed bureaucrat who carried out his orders with Nazi punctiliousness, Oberg soon became the most hated man in France. As the spring wore on, he announced measures that would not only hit hard the perpetrators of attacks, but their families as well, proposing to send women into forced labour camps and their children into care. In six months, he increased Knochen’s forces from six hundred to two thousand. Torture, sanctioned by Heydrich and Göring, was to be used to force people to give away the names of fellow resisters and to confess to their own crimes. In the case of communists, ‘terrorists’, resisters, ‘Polish or Soviet vagabonds’, Jehovah’s Witnesses and ‘antisocial elements’, the third degree—bread and water, dark cell, prevention of sleep, exhausting exercises and ‘flagellation’ —was permissible with no prior authorisation. Some of Oberg’s men attended special classes in Germany to study the theory and practice of torture. When suspects refused to talk, torture became frenzied.

Agreeing with Heydrich that the French would be far more zealous in their repression of the Resistance if they were allowed a certain latitude, Oberg favoured ‘true collaboration’ with the French police, co-operation at every level, with generous funds provided by the Germans and ever more strenuous efforts on the part of the French. This was even more necessary now that so many German troops were needed for the eastern front. The French collaborators were happy to accept, even if, in the months to come, the Germans would pay very little heed to the accords drawn up between them.

Under Oberg and Knochen, and with French connivance, suspects picked up by the French police were handed over to the Germans on demand. They were often passed from interrogator to interrogator. Held manacled in the underground cells of the Gestapo offices in the rue des Saussaies, or in any one of the other elegant eighteenth-century town houses commandeered by the Germans, they waited to be tortured in sadistic and imaginative ways. Politzer, Decour, Dallidet, Cadras and Solomon all passed through the hands of the Gestapo. And when the German interrogators had had enough, or felt that their knowledge of French was not up to the task, or simply wanted their dirty work done for them, they turned to Commissioner David and his French colleagues for help. The Brigades Spéciales became a parallel Gestapo. A manual was issued, in French, about what forms of torture to use, and for how long. French police assistants became renowned for the money they made out of ransoms and extortions, and for the relish with which they plunged the heads of their prisoners into baths of cold water. Rottée, as head of the office of Renseignements Généraux in charge of the Brigades Spéciales, let it be known that he would make certain that there would be no investigations into brutality once the war was over.

One of the measures advocated by Otto von Stülpnagel had been the deportation of far greater numbers of suspects to Germany. A policy of
Nacht und Nebel
, sending enemies of the Reich into ‘night and fog, beyond the frontier … totally isolated from the outside world’, had already been used to some effect inside Germany itself. The idea was that these ‘disappeared’ people would have no rights and receive no letters; nothing at all would be known about them, neither their whereabouts nor whether they were even still alive. Such uncertainty, it was argued, would serve to terrorise and deter their families and comrades from further activities. In France, the new measure began with
Schutzhaft
, protective custody, which meant arbitrary arrest and detention without charge or trial: the detainee would be handed over to the Gestapo before being ‘disappeared’ in the east.

At first opposed by the Wehrmacht,
Schutzhaft
and
Nacht und Nebel
would in the coming months be used against countless French men and women suspected of espionage, treason, aiding the enemies of the Reich or the illegal possession of weapons, all crimes which might otherwise have resulted in the death penalty.

The winter and early spring of 1941 and 1942 had not been very productive or successful for the Bataillons de la Jeunesse. After their three dramatic attacks in October, in Rouen, Nantes and Bordeaux, a series of sabotages had caused little damage and a number of train derailments had failed altogether. As achievements, they could list only one German soldier killed and two wounded. But they were about to pay a heavy price for their activities.

The first arrests came about because of lack of prudence. It was sometimes as if the young resisters could not quite comprehend their vulnerability, or the fact that so many of the French police had gone over to the occupiers. One young man showed his girlfriend his revolver; she told her father; he informed the police. His comrades were not hard to find, since most were still in their teens and living at home with their parents.

The Gestapo had decided that a series of highly publicised trials might act as a form of deterrence. The first, of seven young resisters, resulted in seven death penalties; Karl Heinrich von Stülpnagel was present at their execution on 9 March. Soon after, a second, larger trial opened in the hall of the Maison de la Chimie, which had been decked out in swastikas. Twenty-five of the twenty-seven in the dock had been tortured and were brought into the room in shackles. One boy of 15 and one of the two girls were given long prison sentences. The rest were condemned to death. The writer Jean Guéhenno, hearing about the sentences, wrote sadly in his diary: ‘Hunger, cold, misery, terror. The country is in a state of prostration.’

Appalled by the sentences, but more resolute than ever, the surviving young members of the Bataillons continued to meet, to exchange information, pass on weapons and plan future actions. Having carried out the first real armed attacks on the Germans, they regarded themselves as something of an elite, a first united band of fighters. Ouzoulias, who with Fabien had been the author of the first attacks on the German soldiers, would say proudly that he estimated the active life of one of his young fighters to be no more than six months.

Simone Sampaix’s boyfriend André Biver—known as Dédé—had moved into a small room in the rue Rafaelli, but when he got pleurisy and went to the countryside to recuperate, Simone spent much of her time with her friends the Grünenbergers in the rue de la Goutte d’Or, where Isidore’s mother-in-law gave her lessons in French and German. Grünenberger, an active member of the Bataillons, was a shy, serious young man who had once worked with Lucien Sampaix at
L’Humanité
. Since Simone’s mother worried about her coming home late, Simone sometimes spent the night in the rue de la Goutte d’Or. Two or three times each week, she went to meetings with another Isidore, Isidore Grindberg— ‘Robert’ —the third member, together with Biver, in her cell of the Resistance. To and from these meetings she transported news-sheets, ammunition and, occasionally, revolvers. Grindberg called her his
petite soeur
, his little sister. For all their bravado, there was something curiously innocent, even childlike, about them all.

On 10 May, Simone received word that she was to meet the others at their usual spot among the cypresses in the cemetery of the Père Lachaise. She waited, but no one showed up. Obedient to orders, she returned twice more, to the same place, at the same time of day. No one came. On the 13th, she decided that she would go to the Grünenbergers’. The door of their house was opened by inspectors from the Brigades Spéciales. Simone told them that she was Lucien Sampaix’s daughter, that she was still at school and that she had come to the rue de la Goutte d’Or for her usual French lesson. She was made to accompany the police to her mother’s house, so that it could be searched. The police found nothing, but told Simone that they were taking her to their headquarters for further questioning. She whispered to her mother that she would soon be home, ‘because they have nothing on me’.

Later, Simone was taken to the depot and interrogated for most of the night; she was threatened, but not tortured. A revolutionary song that she had been learning was found in her bag, and the policeman kept shouting at her to tell them who had given it to her. In the end she gave then the name of her grandmother, who had been dead many years. Shown photographs of a series of young people, all of them members of the Bataillons, she said she had never seen any of them before, except for André Biver, who had been a neighbour, and to whom she said she was now engaged. Another girl, called Simone Eiffes, a seamstress with a six-month-old baby, had also turned up at the rue de la Goutte d’Or, and was brought into custody. Eiffes, an excitable, indiscreet young woman, had been mistrusted by the group. She had come bearing an enormous strawberry tart, to ingratiate herself with her more disciplined companions.

What Simone Sampaix did not know was that one of the young men in their group, Georges Tondelier, picked up on 25 April, had, under torture, given the Brigades Spéciales enough information to lead them to the rue de la Goutte d’Or. Here, one evening when the family was out, the inspectors had found lists of names and addresses, notebooks, maps and manuals about weapons. Grünenberger had managed to flee, but had since been captured on the demarcation line and shot in the foot and shoulder as he tried to escape. Handed over to the Germans, he had tried to take sole responsibility for a number of the acts of sabotage. Nor did Simone know that André Biver had also been caught, in an earlier trap laid at the rue de la Goutte d’Or.

By now, ten young men and women of the Bataillons had been arrested. Two of the men were Moijase Feld and Mordka Feferman, inseparable friends since early childhood; Feferman had studied under Politzer and Decour. They had been caught in an exchange of gunfire with the police, during which Feferman, though wounded, had tried to escape on a bicycle, been cornered against a wall, shot himself in the face and swallowed a cyanide pill. He had since died. Feld was in police custody. Fabien, the member of the International Brigades who had trained the young people in the forests around Paris, had been warned in time and got away. The days of innocence were over.

As she was taken into the big hall of the depot, Simone noticed that at one end there were people lying on the floor. These were the young men who had been tortured. She recognised André Biver among them and for much of the night she lay listening to his groans. She begged to be allowed to go to him, but her jailers refused.