Spy Princess (28 page)

On 30 October Charles Vaudevire, Paul Arrighi and their associate Emmanuel de Sieyes were also arrested, but Vogt and Kieffer had no idea that Noor knew them and had worked with them, because she had said nothing to give anyone away. Now 84 Avenue Foch housed several agents who had worked together. Noor had met Norman on the first day. Henri Garry was also there. She was to establish contact with two others.

One night, Noor tapped out a message in Morse on her wall to the prisoner next door. She got a reply almost immediately. The prisoner identified himself as a Frenchman, Colonel Léon Faye, former head of the Alliance circuit which worked with MI6. She told him she was a British agent and that they should help each other and try to escape.

The second agent she established contact with was Captain John A.R. Starr (code name Bob), an F-section agent of the Acrobat circuit active in the Dijon area, who was arrested on 18 July after being betrayed by a double agent. Starr was sent to prison in Dijon, then Fresnes and finally to Avenue Foch. The three of them now made a bold plan to escape, which if it had succeeded would have gone down in the history books as one of the most daring and dramatic escapes of the Second World War.

Starr was a poster artist by profession. Kieffer recognised that he was a good draughtsman and had an excellent talent for drawing, and gave him quite a lot of work to do.
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Starr’s experience at Dijon and Fresnes prisons had been dreadful and he found Avenue Foch far more congenial. He decided to cooperate with the Germans and do what they asked: copy maps and even produce portraits and greeting cards. He was in a cell directly next to the guards’ room where a four-man guard was permanently present. Soon Kieffer was asking Starr to do drawings of subjects that had to be kept secret. If he escaped, Kieffer’s office could be compromised so he asked the guards to be extra vigilant in guarding Starr.

Starr was also used by the Germans in their radio games. He would be taken down to the room where Placke played the captured wireless sets back to London and asked to check that the wording of the false messages being sent by the Germans was in the typical English style. Starr cooperated and soon got to know a great deal about German counter-espionage work, their wireless operators, arrested agents and organisers of hostile intelligence services. It was at this time that Noor was arrested and brought to Avenue Foch.

Starr had heard about Noor from the German officers, who had told him she had fought fiercely and been very difficult to arrest. One of them had even shown Starr a bite on his finger which Noor had inflicted. Starr was told that she had made an attempt to escape within minutes of being brought into Avenue Foch.

Since Starr was usually taken to the guard room to do his map work and drawing, he could see Noor being taken down to Kieffer’s office. She usually wore a light grey polo-necked jumper, navy-blue slacks and plimsolls – the clothes she had been arrested in. Once she had ordered fresh clothes from Solange, she had other things to change into. Prisoners at Avenue Foch were allowed to choose a book from the library in the guards’ room and Starr had seen Noor at close quarters when she had come in to select one. Noor had already asked the guards for writing paper and spent her time writing in her cell when she was not being interrogated.

At night Starr heard her crying in her room. Her cell was opposite his. He wanted to console her but could not think how he could do this. The only common place they used was the lavatory. One day he pretended to drop a pencil and while bending to pick it up managed to slip a note under Noor’s door. It told her to cheer up as she was not alone, and maybe they could find a way to escape. He told her to check under the basin in the lavatory for further notes.

The next day there was a reply from Noor. She said she had already established contact with another prisoner who shared the adjoining cell, Colonel Faye. He would now join them and an escape plan could be hatched. On tiny notes that went back and forth between the three prisoners, a daring plan was worked out. Starr reported that his room had a small window in the ceiling with three iron bars. These were fixed to the window on a wooden frame. A simple screwdriver would be enough to unscrew the frame. He would need a screwdriver and a stool to stand on.

The others told him that their skylight windows had the iron bars screwed into the wall so they would be a little more difficult to remove. The problem now was getting a screwdriver. This problem was solved unexpectedly. One day the cleaning woman entered the guard room complaining that the carpet sweeper was not working. Starr jumped up and volunteered to help, saying he knew all about carpet sweepers. He asked for tools to repair the sweeper. But the Germans were watching him closely and he could not conceal a screwdriver under their noses. So he mended the carpet sweeper badly, knowing it would break down again soon.

Sure enough the cleaner soon brought the faulty machine to him again, helpfully supplying the tool box once more. This time the Germans weren’t watching so closely and Starr managed to retain a screwdriver. He left it at the lavatory for Noor and Faye. They were to keep it on alternate nights, passing it between them until they had managed to loosen the bars on their windows. As Starr’s window bars were much easier to remove, he would be given the screwdriver when they had nearly finished.

Starr had to devise a way of reaching his skylight. If he moved the bed to the centre of the room, the guard would immediately be suspicious. So one day he moved the bed to the other side of the room. When the guard asked him why, he said he wanted to change the view. Though they were not pleased with this explanation, they did not take the matter any further. Starr next moved the bed to a new side of the room every few days till the guard lost interest in him. He then moved the bed to the centre of the room. He still needed a chair to reach the skylight, so he brought one from the guard room. Again a round of questions followed, but Starr said he needed to put his clothes on something and so had borrowed a chair. Once again the guards let this pass.

Meanwhile Noor was also having problems reaching the window in her room. Her bed was a pull-out iron bed which folded back into the wall. There was no way she could move it at all. She had to stand on the iron cot and lean over to reach the skylight. She was small in build, which didn’t help either. One night Starr heard a loud thud. Noor had simply fallen over while leaning from the edge of the bed and trying to work the iron bars in her skylight. The guards rushed into the room, but a flustered Noor told them that she had been trying to commit suicide by hanging herself from the bars. They did not suspect her and soon she managed to get rid of them. They had not noticed the window bars half hanging out, or the screwdriver.

As Faye and Noor continued to work at their iron bars, the holes were getting conspicuous. Noor asked Starr whether he could get something to fill the holes. He suggested face powder. So Noor sent out for one more of her famous parcels from Solange, asking for face powder, eau de cologne and scent. When this arrived she shared it with Faye, passing it to him through their postbox in the lavatory. Solange still had no idea that Noor was in prison and presented the items to Cartaud, who was pretending to be a friend of Noor’s.

Noor had also asked for more clothes. She had some Metro tickets in her pocket which the guards had not discovered. These she shared with the others as they would help them make a quick getaway. Faye was the first to loosen his bars. The screwdriver was then passed to Starr and he unscrewed his. Noor’s was going to take some more time. Finally she gave the signal that she was ready.

They decided that they would hang their shoes around their necks before climbing out of the window, and they would take blankets with them so that once on the roof they could knot the blankets together and let themselves down to the ground with them.

On the night of 25 November, Starr sat up late in the guard room finishing Kieffer’s portrait. At about midnight the guards went to the other rooms and switched off the lights. Starr knew there would be some noise from Noor and Faye’s rooms as they scraped their bars. He went noisily to the bathroom whistling loudly to distract the guards. Finally he told them he was going to bed, so a guard came and locked him in. He let himself out from the window and stood on the roof. Faye was already there, but Noor was missing. She was still struggling with the last bit of her bar. They tried to help her but it was difficult. They were painfully aware that time was passing and that the scraping noise could be heard by the guards. Finally Faye was able to remove the bar. He pulled Noor out, kissing her in sheer delight.

Slowly they started to walk across the length of the rooftop. It was a cold night and they could feel the biting wind. They had to try to reach a neighbouring house with a flat roof to the rear of no. 84. This house was slightly lower down. They started walking precariously, carrying their blankets, Noor the most sure-footed of the three. Finally they reached the house on the other side and started tearing their blankets to make a rope for the first jump. But luck was against them. They had barely managed to make one jump when the air-raid siren went off. The RAF were attacking!

Stuck on the roof, the three prisoners were desperate. They knew that their absence would be discovered immediately as the guards came to check the cells whenever there was an air-raid warning. Their only hope was to try to move quickly. But already anti-aircraft fire was going up and the searchlights were sweeping the roofs. They lay flat on the roof trying to blend into the shadows.

Down below the guards had raised the alarm. At 3 a.m., just after the air-raid warning signal, Kieffer was woken up with the news that the prisoners had escaped. He immediately ordered a cordon to be placed around the area.

The three fugitives now had to climb down on to a roof one storey below them. But the roof below was slanting with no flat space on which to stand. They used another blanket to make a rope and decided to take their chances. They swung down, broke the window of the house below and clambered in. They crept down the stairs to the front door, opened it and looked out. To their dismay it was a close and one side of the road was blocked. The side that opened up to the road already had a cordon around it. They could see the Gestapo walking around. They were trapped.

Faye decided they should make a dash for it. The alternative, in any case, was recapture. Noor agreed. When they reached the corner, Faye ran. Immediately, there was a volley of gunfire and the guards fell on him and seized him.

Starr pulled Noor back towards the house. They went in almost aimlessly, walked up the stairs and into the living room. They noticed a woman looking down at them from an upper landing. But before any of them could react, the Gestapo burst in and captured Noor and Starr. Both were kicked and beaten and marched back to no. 84.

Kieffer was livid. He threatened to shoot all three of them and lined them up against a wall. But something cracked in him as he looked at their faces and he ordered them to be taken up.

Later that night Kieffer went to Noor’s cell upstairs. In her room, Noor had drawn a V sign on the wall and an RAF symbol. He chose to ignore it. Kieffer told Noor to sign a declaration that she would not try to escape again. Only then would he be able to keep her in Avenue Foch under the same conditions. But she refused, saying it was her bounden duty to try to escape if she could. Once again, Noor could not tell a lie. Faye refused to sign either. Only Starr signed the declaration and was permitted to stay.

Kieffer now hammered off a telegram to Berlin saying he could not take responsibility for these dangerous prisoners in Avenue Foch since it did not have the regular security of a prison. He wanted them transferred to Germany.

The authorisation came immediately by return telegram from Horst Kopkow, the head of the Berlin Gestapo. Kieffer was a Karlsruhe man and his mother and brother still lived there. He decided to send Noor to Karlsruhe, hoping that his brother would be able to keep him updated on news about her and he himself would have an excuse to travel to Karlsruhe if he ever wanted to reinterrogate her. But the prison at Karlsruhe was overcrowded and Noor was sent to Pforzheim prison, about 20 miles away.

Noor and Faye were transferred from Avenue Foch on the day they were recaptured, 26 November 1943. Noor became the first British woman agent to be sent to Germany. Jean Overton Fuller thinks she may have attempted another escape while being taken to the station en route to Pforzheim prison, because her friend Raymonde Prénat claimed she saw her again in November, breathless and harassed, and asking if she could come in at night to transmit. Noor never returned and was obviously recaptured. Later Noor told the governor of Pforzheim prison that she had nearly managed to escape the Gestapo a third time but had been caught. Possibly the Gestapo did not report this escape attempt out of embarrassment, as they had seized her swiftly and were soon on their way to Germany as planned.
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Faye was sent to Bruchsal prison (he was executed on 30 January 1945 at Sonnenburg). In Kieffer’s sworn testimony after the war he said that it was very difficult for Starr to re-establish the trust he had developed with the Germans. Kieffer declined to use Starr’s help for some time because he had disappointed him. Kieffer asked him why he had tried to escape and Starr replied that Noor had approached him with an escape plan and that if, as a woman, she had the courage to escape and had succeeded in doing so, she would have made life impossible for him in England had he not displayed the same courage.
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After signing his declaration not to escape, Kieffer said Starr behaved in an exceptionally correct manner and was called upon again to monitor wireless messages. This monitoring was less dangerous than his previous assignments and he was watched constantly. He did not deceive the Germans again and was one of the last prisoners to be kept at 84 Avenue Foch, where he remained till July 1944. Shortly before the German withdrawal from Paris, he was sent to Sachsenhausen concentration camp and then to Mauthausen extermination camp, where he was rescued when the camp was overrun by the advancing Allies.