Voices from the Dark Years (46 page)

A colleague of his in nearby Castelsarrasin, Adrien Favre watched another troop of Waffen-SS arrive and clamber down from their transport. When the inevitable knock came on the door, he was informed by an SS-sergeant in broken French that anyone with a spare room had to accommodate two or more soldiers. The sergeant insisted on inspecting the small schoolhouse, in which there was a spare room, but Favre protested he used it for giving private lessons after school.

‘You are a teacher?’ queried the sergeant.

‘I’m the schoolmaster.’

Demonstrating unexpected Teutonic respect for learning, the sergeant clicked his heels and apologised for bothering the Herr Professor. No question of soldiers being billeted on him. Absolutely not.

Expecting trouble between the local Maquis and the Germans, the Castelsarrassin police were relieved that the civilian population instead withdrew into their shells, paying little attention except when armed soldiers confiscated their radios and bicycles, lacking any transport of their own after the Normandy landings. Adrien Favre was about to hand over his dilapidated bike, vital for weekend forays into the country to buy food, when the same respectful sergeant yelled at his men not to bother the Herr Professor, but to leave his bicycle alone. Favre was so embarrassed that he immediately hid his cycle and did not use it for months, in case his neighbours thought that he had done the Germans some favour.
²

Armistice Day on 11 November sparked widespread demonstrations. At Oyonnax in Rhône-Alpes, white-gloved Maquis forces paraded a flag-bearing honour guard ‘liberating’ the town for twenty-four hours. On the war memorial, they placed a wreath in the form of the Cross of Lorraine bearing the legend, ‘From the Conquerors of Tomorrow to those of 14–18’
.
In Grenoble, 100km to the south, German troops arrested hundreds of demonstrators, deporting 450. After MUR
résistants
blew up a German arms dump, hostages were executed in retaliation. A Polish deserter from the Wehrmacht named Kospiski led a Maquis attack on the Bonne barracks, killing fifty Germans and destroying tons of munitions. An FTP action group placed land mines on the windowsills of de Brinon’s home, causing substantial damage. On 23 November the Resistance claimed twenty-five
miliciens
dead and twenty-seven wounded in a pitched battle, while 30,000 fascists attended the December rally in the Vel d’Hiv to hear Déat, Darnand and Henriot speak under the slogan
Europe United against Bolshevism.
With the arming of the Milice, France was sliding into civil war.

To punish Pétain, on 13 November the Germans banned him from making further broadcasts. Listeners’ reaction to Laval becoming Vichy spokesman can be gauged from the report of Gendarmerie Captain Flouquet in Lyon: ‘The population is more and more fed up, criticising every government measure and listening favourably to English radio. People consider the Germans to be the main enemy.’ Another
chef d’escadron
noted: ‘Among other considerations, the government of Laval is generally detested. People consider it kept in power only thanks to the German occupation.’
³

The shift in public opinion brought a resurgence of hope among those with least expectation of survival. Prisoners in Drancy dug a 40m tunnel from the basement of one of the apartment blocks. Betrayed when it was within 3m of freedom, the fourteen would-be escapers and sixty-five of the ‘trusty’ prisoners were deported on 20 November. Nineteen of them succeeded in hacking their way through the wooden floor of their cattle truck en route and escaping. Among many Germans disturbed by SS treatment of prisoners, a German woman working for a welfare organisation in a Paris railway station asked the American-born wife of Ernst Achenbach whether, as an embassy wife, she could do something to stop the harrowing scenes when mothers were forcibly separated from their children.
⁴

On 16 December, among her other problems Renée de Monbrison had to find yet another home for Baboushka, south-west France being too dangerous thanks to the activities of Papon. In desperation, she contacted the midwife who had delivered her four children, now living in Villiers-Adam north of Paris, to see whether she would accept the old lady as a paying guest. ‘Madame Robert’ had become Baboushka’s official name now, thanks to a false identity card, and it was as such that she travelled north to Villiers-Adam. To her new neighbours’ questions, she avoided an outright lie by replying that she was the widow of a worker in the Renault car factory, justifying this to herself by the fact that her husband had been a director on the board of Renault!

A few months later her new hideaway became a hive of military activity. A good night’s sleep had become impossible due to RAF bomber fleets passing overhead at night in the pre-Invasion strategic bombing campaign. Among their targets was the V-weapons factory near Arras, after which the war caught up with ‘Madame Robert’ when German engineers and French labourers were billeted in neighbouring houses while converting caves near Villers-Adam into underground assembly plants for the rockets.

An unsung financial coup of the Resistance was the brainchild of Pierre Mendès-France. After escaping from prison in Clermont-Ferrand, he had made his way to London and served briefly in the RAF before being interviewed by de Gaulle. Appreciating the intelligence of this would-be recruit, who at 18 had been the youngest practising lawyer in the Third Republic, de Gaulle made him Finance Minister of the French government-in-exile, and his confidence was rewarded by a simple but brilliant idea from the new minister. An appeal was launched for contributions
inside
Occupied France and the money poured in, especially from
collabos
seeking a receipt as an insurance policy against the now inevitable Allied victory.
⁵
As Mendès-France foresaw, repayment was not an issue, with the value of the franc dropping by more than 50 per cent between 1940 and the Liberation.

By late 1943 Louis de la Bardonnie’s clandestine activities in both zones disguised as a railway inspector and under other aliases were attracting increasing attention. On one mission, in the guise of a priest, he used a Minox miniature camnera supplied by London to take 1,250 photographs of documents and scenes in the port of Cherbourg. Happily for him, the many divisions of German counter-intelligence competed more often than they co-operated. His Gestapo Paris file, AT/87.878/FR 1943/44, recorded him as an exceptionally dangerous agent, ‘to be eliminated at all costs – if possible, to be taken alive, with a 1,000,000 francs reward for his arrest or betrayal’.
⁶

At 11 p.m. on 20 November Château La Roque was surrounded by 110 SS troopers with a monocled Gestapo officer from Castillon and a
milicien
to act as interpreter. After a hail of blows on the closed shutters, 15-year-old Guy – the oldest son – retuned the two radios to French stations and called out to ask who was there. Opening a shutter, he had a Schmeisser machine-pistol jammed into his belly, as did his older sister. For three hours the house was searched from cellar to attics, the noise being such as to wake all except the two youngest children. The governess and nanny were also woken up and questioned at gun point.

When the Germans left, the night’s work was not over for Guy. The
milicien
had prised from the local postman an address to which mail was being forwarded, so Guy had to walk several kilometres in the dark to find a telephone that might not be tapped and pass a message to his parents in Charente before dawn telling them to leave their hideout immediately. Armbruster rightly predicted that there was no immediate danger because a joint Gestapo/SS operation on that scale would require a report to Paris before any action was taken. It was, however, officers of the Abwehr from Bergerac who arrived at the chateau in January, three weeks after Denyse had given birth again. When asked about him at school, all except the youngest children had been told to pour abuse on their absent father as an unprincipled swine who had abandoned them. Shown the spurious divorce papers by Denyse, the Abwehr men politely demanded who was the father of her new baby, obliging her to pretend she had a lover. Once again, Armbuster’s advice and their Nordic looks protected Denyse and the children.

Most French people were unaware that on 29 December 1943 the southern and northern zone organisations united, on paper at least, as the Mouvement de Libération Nationale (MLN). At this point, total strength in the southern zone was 30,000 and in the northern zone 15,000 – still an infinitesimally small percentage of the population. What’s in a name? On 1 February 1944 all Resistance movements were finally amalgamated on paper as Les Forces Françaises de l’Intérieur (FFI), or Home Forces, yet the old rivalries simmered beneath the surface. It was considered fair game by FTP to hi-jack an arms drop intended for Combat or Armée Secrète – and vice versa. Worse, on occasions, one faction would ‘forget’ to warn another of a Milice ambush or the approach of a German column.

For young
maquisards
living in woodsmen’s huts and charcoal burners’ shelters deep in the forests, life that winter was hard. Harder still was the life in upland units, where the guide was an eight-page booklet full of counsel such as: ‘Experience in 1914-18 shows that men are not cold in a dug-out shelter occupied by a dozen or so comrades.’ Some advice was straight out of Baden-Powell’s
Scouting for Boys
: cooks should use only dry wood on their fires, to reduce tell-tale smoke against a blue sky; converging tracks in the snow were to be avoided, because they gave the location of camps to spotter planes. Losses were inevitable, but to keep them to a minimum each unit was to number not more than fifteen men, who must always camp where they could see without being seen. The moment a man deserted or there was any other reason to feel insecure, the group was to move within the hour.

The indiscipline and sometimes criminal activities of Maquis groups resulted in a circular dated 20 January 1944 warning: ‘No raids should take place without prior approval of the
département
organisation. It is not our job to punish the black marketers. We are not vigilantes. That will be the job of purge committees after the Liberation.’

Other rules were: to steal ration tickets each month from only one village; tobacco was to be paid for and not smoked locally but sent to a central point for general distribution; teams sent on raids should behave correctly towards the population
⁷
– which implies that things sometimes happened otherwise. In one four-week period an FTP unit in central France executed one of its own men, killed a German prisoner and nineteen alleged
collabos
and
miliciens
, as well as carrying out six separate sabotage operations inviting reprisals on local inhabitants.
⁸
A number of Maquis chiefs were simply local warlords, like self-styled ‘Captain’ Le Coz in Valençay, an illiterate veteran of the Bataillons d’Afrique punishment corps with thirty-six previous convictions, who used his Maquis underlings to assassinate nineteen innocent people.

The year ended with pressure from Berlin, bringing pro-German broadcaster Philippe Henriot and Milice boss Joseph Darnand into the ghost of Pétain’s Cabinet at its meeting on 1 January. Darnand, with the title Secretary-General for Maintenance of Order, had recently taken the oath to Hitler as a Waffen-SS Obersturmführer, and was thus that least trustworthy creature – a member of one government who had sworn allegiance to the head of another state. Having, like Darquier, been sacked because the Germans judged him ‘too liberal’, Bousquet was forcibly removed to Germany – luckily for him in the long run, for this enabled the architect of the greatest
rafle
of all to clear his name after the war. As a last desperate gesture, Pétain tried to halt Laval’s complete takeover of power by calling a National Assembly to restore some kind of parliamentary government. When prevented by German pressure from exercising this presidential prerogative, he refused to perform any further functions as head of state.

By now the government of France was a rubber stamp for German use. Among the casualties was General de la Porte du Theil, arrested by the Germans on 28 December and deported to Austria, where he would remain hostage until liberated by troops of French 1st Army on 5 May 1945. His Vichy-appointed replacement could make little headway against the concerted obstruction of the officers and NCOs of the Chantiers. Those who did not resign stayed at their posts in the same spirit that the general had returned from Algeria in 1942 – to protect the conscripts in their care, whose rate of desertion to the Maquis rose steadily, with some
groupes
deserting en masse with their instructors.
⁹

On 4 January 1944, Darnand’s men knocked on the door of the humble home of Pauline Gochperg in Soissons. She was the aunt of Charles Wajsfelner, who had written from Drancy to the local baker asking her to look after his younger brother Maurice, living with Pauline and her two children. Now, the men at the door informed her that her 8-year-old son Albert and 3-year-old daughter Nelly were being arrested for deportation, as their father had been. So was 10-year-old nephew Maurice. Although not herself Jewish, Pauline chose to go with the children. What mother could not? On arrival at Drancy, she was relieved of her precious savings, recorded in
Carnet de Fouille
No. 63 as amounting to 330 francs. The last evidence of her life is on the list of
Abtransporte 67
, which left Drancy on 3 February. There she is, carefully listed with her children: ‘389 GOCHPERG, Albert; 390 GOCHPERG Nelly; 391 GOCHPERG, Pauline
.
’ Several pages later we find ‘1117 WAJSFELNER, Maurice’. On 6 February, the doors of the cattle trucks were opened in the siding at Auschwitz and they were gassed shortly afterwards with 982 others from Drancy.