A Train in Winter (21 page)

What Poinsot instinctively grasped was that he would need a team of loyal supporters, men who obeyed his orders without question because they too were ambitious and brutal. Two inspectors, Laffargue and Langlade, joined him, followed by two of his own brothers, Jean and Henri. Carrying out widespread house to house searches, following up every lead, threatening and bullying everyone they stopped, Poinsot and his men soon built up a dossier of suspects, recruited a large band of informers and set about turning resisters held in custody.

The shooting of Reimers in October 1941 proved very helpful to Poinsot, who was one of the French officials who made certain that the requisite number of hostages was handed over to the Germans to be shot at Souge.
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His willing collaboration over these killings enabled him to position himself ever closer to the Gestapo in Bordeaux, now under the leadership of a tall, meticulous, blue-eyed disciplinarian, Hans Luther; though, as Poinsot soon discovered, the real power lay with the 29-year-old son of a professor of French in Hamburg, Friedrich Dohse, a protégé of Knochen in Paris. Dohse and Poinsot made a formidable partnership.

In his offices in the Prefecture of Police, Poinsot conducted his interrogations. He backed them up with torture. Men were hung from their thumbs, burnt with cigarettes and had their heads plunged into baths of water; women were stripped naked, made to kneel, and forced to listen to the screams of their husbands, being tortured in the next room. Those who refused to speak, to give names and betray colleagues, were held and tortured until they did so; or they died. Poinsot’s team was soon known as the
brigade des tueurs
, the brigade of killers, and his
interrogatoire prolongée
became an experience known and dreaded by the Underground. Poinsot, said a Bordeaux policeman, ‘massacred’ suspects.

The Gestapo—who gave him his own number, 192, in their ranks—took to warning recalcitrant prisoners that unless they co-operated they would be turned over to Poinsot and his men. Along with torture, the French inspectors went in for looting and extortion. Bordeaux, after Paris, was the place in which repression would become the most brutal in the whole of France, and the city itself, as Ouzoulias of the Bataillons de la Jeunesse would later say, turned into ‘a cemetery of the finest fighters’.

In the late summer of 1941 a friend of Danielle Casanova’s, Charles Tillon, arrived in Bordeaux to co-ordinate Resistance activities in the south-west. Tillon was one of the founders of the armed wing of the Front National. Calling himself Covelet and posing as an amateur artist in the Gironde on a painting holiday, he visited old friends and contacts, set up a Resistance structure of three-person cells, impressed on everyone the need for caution, and set out to find recruits. Many of them were young women, soon to become as skilled and intrepid as Betty and Cécile.

With Tillon’s help, and an ever closer co-operation between the various groups and networks, the battle in the south-west between occupiers and occupied, Germans and resisters, was about to move into a new, more lethal phase.

Tillon had a friend called André Souques, who ran a laundry and hid Resistance newspapers under the piles of dirty washing collected from Bordeaux’s hotels; together, they set up a printer in Bastide. Two sisters, Gilberte and Andrée Tamisé, offered to recruit Bordeaux students and young people from the youth hostels, and Gilberte, the elder by ten years, agreed to act as a liaison officer between Tillon and Bordeaux, Bayonne and Tarbes. She was a highly competent young woman in her late twenties, who had looked after her father and the household since her mother’s death when Andrée was just seven months old. Gilberte felt very protective towards her younger sister, who had just turned 18.

Nearby Bègles, long a bastion of trade union activities, soon provided Tillon with new volunteers. Souques’s friends included Bonnafon, who ran a furniture shop in the rue des Anguillons, and the two men exchanged information on Mondays, when Souques did his laundry rounds, his wife Jeanne concealing the false papers and a printing machine under the dirty sheets. Bonnafon’s daughter Germaine proved naturally talented at the Underground life. One day she boldly asked a locksmith to open an apartment where there was rumoured to be a case of weapons. She told him that it was hers, and that she had lost her keys. Suspecting nothing, the locksmith picked the lock, and Germaine came away with a valuable hoard of guns.

Guns, by the late autumn of 1941, had become more important than tracts. Tillon and his contacts decided that a special group in Charente and the Gironde would be responsible for acquiring and hiding weapons. There was an old quarry called Heurtebise in Jonzac, a series of deep underground caves once used to grow mushrooms, and here the Germans had set up a weapons depot—the second largest in France—to supply the Normandy front and the Atlantic coast. The depot had been successfully infiltrated by the local Resistance, which had around two hundred young men working with the Germans, and a steady supply of weapons and ammunition was being smuggled out of Jonzac each week. The question was where to hide them.

Aminthe and Prosper Guillon kept a small farm in the hamlet of Sainte-Sévère, which lay near Cognac, about 40 kilometres from Jonzac. It was known as Les Violettes for its tranquil, wooded position; the countryside around was sparsely inhabited, flat and often flooded in the winter, and the farm was hidden from the road by fields and hedgerows. Aminthe had inherited Les Violettes from her father. She and Prosper had a single horse, a few vines and five hectares of land, put to pasture and wheat. In exchange for flour, the local baker provided them with bread.

Their younger son, Pierre, was a prisoner of war, but the elder, Jean, and his new wife Yvette, a neighbour’s daughter, had taken over one of the outbuildings and the two families farmed the land together. They were poor, but not destitute. Before the war, Prosper had supported the Communist Party. The family were well liked locally, though neighbours worried about Aminthe’s loose tongue, and the way that she kept telling anyone who would listen how she loathed and despised Pétain and the German occupiers. Aminthe was a strong-natured woman, not easily cowed; she was 56 and had already lived through one war with the Germans.

To the Guillons’ modest farm often came their friends Marguerite and Lucien Valina: Lucien was a Spaniard who had come to France at the age of 15, gone back to serve as a pilot for the republicans in the civil war and returned to the area to work as a truck driver. Marguerite sheltered resisters, scouted out safe houses for saboteurs and transmitted instructions. The Valinas had a teenage boy and girl, and a six-year-old son.

Aminthe Guillon, the outspoken farmer’s wife from Sainte-Sévère

Yvette, newly married to Aminthe’s son Jean

It was Lucien Valina who suggested to the others that they help get hold of weapons for the Resistance by collecting those stolen from Jonzac, and by asking their neighbours for any hunting rifles and ammunition not handed in to the Germans. The Guillons, for their part, agreed to hide the guns under the hay in their derelict outbuildings, to be collected periodically by Tillon’s men. All around Jonzac, other farmers agreed to do the same, and there was a constant traffic of weapons along the lanes and across the fields of Charente and Charente-Maritime, often transported by night in horse-drawn carts or in the saddlebags of bicycles. It was not unusual for one of the farmers to do the 40-kilometre journey to Jonzac on foot, carrying the weapons in a backpack.

The farmers and the Resistance across this vast area needed points of contact and above all liaison officers, and one of these was 16-year-old Hélène Bolleau, whose father ran the local post office. Even before the arrival of the Germans, Roger Bolleau had been stockpiling weapons, while his Underground news-sheet,
La Voix des Charentes
, printed on a mimeograph with the help of his wife Emma, had been given out surreptitiously from under the counter of the post office. Emma had established a local branch of Danielle Casanova’s Union des Femmes Françaises, and she took Hélène with her when she went to help out at a camp for Spanish refugee children nearby. At home, the talk was all of politics, injustice and the eventual defeat of the Germans. One of Hélène’s clearest memories was of seeing a film about the Ku Klux Klan in a travelling cinema that came to their home town, Royan.

Hélène was an only child, quick, bold and apparently fearless, and she was studying for a commercial certificate at school when the Germans reached the area in the summer of 1940. Soon she took over the typing of texts for the Resistance, on a machine hidden in her grandmother’s house; when that was judged too risky, she moved it from hiding place to hiding place. One of her first jobs was to conceal herself in a haystack on a farm near Bordeaux, watching and noting down German movements in a nearby airfield.

Once the theft of weapons from Jonzac got under way, the Resistance needed messengers. A transport group was set up, and Hélène, as she would later say, ‘drifted’ into it. Ferrying orders and information around the countryside on her bicycle, she also collected ink and paper. ‘It happened,’ she explained. ‘We did it because we had to.’ At home, the Bolleaus took in resisters on the run from the Germans, and Jews trying to make their way south.

Hélène Bolleau, the school girl from Royan

Her mother, Emma, who took over her husband’s resistance work after his arrest

In the early spring of 1942 the police were tipped off by informers, and Hélène and her father were arrested. To her great surprise, Hélène was released five days later, but Roger was taken to the prison in Royan and so badly beaten that his throat was crushed. It was many days before he could eat again. When Emma went to collect her husband’s laundry, she found his clothes caked in blood. Like Aminthe Guillon, Emma was not easily silenced: she went around loudly denouncing the brutality of the Germans and the collaborating French.

Hélène had no intention of giving up her Resistance activities—indeed, her father’s arrest and treatment had made her all the more determined—but it was not easy. Royan was patrolled night and day by mounted police, and after a German guard was killed a curfew was set at 5 p.m. But she continued to liaise with the farmers hiding weapons, kept in touch with the Valinas, and when the Germans stopped her as she bicycled around the countryside, she said that she was out collecting food for her rabbits. She looked too young and too innocent to be capable of subterfuge. At times the roads were simply too dangerous; then she pushed her bicycle across the fields. She also took the little train along the coast to Saintes to meet her contact, with whom she exchanged her half of a picture of a statue and the password: ‘Do you know the Place Louis XVI?’ To which the correct answer was: ‘You mean the Place Louis XIV?’