In November 1942 the Germans invaded the Zone Sud and at once the stakes rose. Until then students at the Strasbourg university-in-exile could play at resistance, but with the Germans established in Clermont-Ferrand it became a far more dangerous game. In all, one hundred and thirty-nine students and faculty members would die as a result of their involvement in Resistance activities. That November, SS captain Hugo Geissler set up a Gestapo “antenna” in Clermont-Ferrand. Its director was Paul Blumenkampf, who pretended to be a hearty, good-natured fellow. His immensely influential assistant made no such pretense. She was known as the Panther because she wore a coat of panther fur which she never removed, even on the hottest days of the year. Her particular expertise was infiltration, demolition from within; and her prize witness, her quisling, her inside man was none other than George Mathieu. Many Resistance groups—the Mithridate, the ORA—were smashed and their leaders seized thanks to Mathieu’s treason. In a series of raids on these organizations, several university students were arrested, and Reichsführer-SS Himmler was finally able to authorize the attack on the university, against which Danjon’s influence with Vichy, and Foreign Minister Ribbentrop’s reluctance to overrule the puppets he had installed, had protected it for so long.
The assault on the university, which became known as the Great Raid, took place on November 25, 1943. The literature professor Paul Collomp, a good friend of Max Ophuls’s, was shot dead trying to bar the attackers from the secretariat where the teachers’ addresses were kept. A theology professor, Robert Eppel, whom Max had also befriended, was shot in the stomach in his own home. The traitor George Mathieu identified many students holding false identity papers. There were over 1,200 arrests. Max Ophuls escaped because of an instinct for self-preservation that had led him to deal with Mathieu on a strict need-to-know basis. Consequently the names Sebastian Brant and Max Ophuls could not be connected by the traitor to the Resistance operative and master forger Niccolò, and Max was safe for the moment. As a precaution, however, he moved out of Zeller’s cottage, moved in with a pretty young law student named Angélique Strauss, one of the lovestruck young women of whom there would never be a shortage in his life, forged himself yet another new identity (“Jacques Wimpfeling,” after yet another medieval humanist) and took a leave of absence from university duties.
The day after the attack André Danjon wrote a powerful letter of protest to the French prime minister Laval, a tirade in which more or less every sentence was a lie. He lied about the number of Jews at the university, and about the students’ and faculty’s involvement with the Resistance. In those years of eclipse his determination was like earthshine; it provided the only available light. As a result of his well-feigned outrage the university was allowed to remain open. Danjon then telephoned Max personally at Strauss’s apartment. “It’s the last act,” he said. “The curtain has already begun to fall. You need to think about leaving France.” During his sojourn in the cottage at Gergovie, Max Ophuls had passed his time discussing military history with Gaston Zeller and writing papers on international relations, which he himself feared were excessively utopian, and in which he speculated about the construction of a more stable world order in the aftermath of the defeat of Nazism, improbable as that sounded at the time. These papers, in which he foresaw the need for entities similar to those that would afterwards come into being as the Council of Europe, the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank, had been greatly admired by Danjon, who revealed that he had managed to have them smuggled to the Free French headquarters in London, where they had impressed de Gaulle. “You can do more for your country at the Général’s side than you are doing here,” Danjon said. “Get ready and we will prepare the run. I’m afraid you can’t fly this time. Twice would be pushing your luck.”
“Before I go,” Max replied, “there’s something I have to do.”
The second legendary exploit of Max Ophuls during his Resistance years became known as “Biting the Panther.” When people spoke of it their voices fell into the hushed tones reserved for the achievement of the ridiculously, beautifully impossible. Agent Niccolò, by now a senior figure in the unified resistance known as MUR—which had been created by the merging of Combat with the two other large armies of the Resistance, Franc-Tireur and Libération—simply disappeared from view. It was as if he, and Sebastian Brant, and Jacques Wimpfeling, and Maximilian Ophuls had all ceased to exist. In their place arrived a German officer, Sturmbahnführer Pabst, transferred from Strasbourg to assist Ursula Brandt’s team in its investigations, with papers of authorization personally signed by Heinrich Himmler, whose antipathy to the university-in-exile was of long standing. It was a testament to the impostor’s skill that the phony Pabst aroused no suspicion: a tribute to the implacable force of his will, which simply did not permit anyone to entertain the thought that he might not be what he said. He spoke immaculate German, was notable for his utter devotion to the Reich, his papers were perfectly in order, and there could be no questioning the authenticity and force of the Reichsführer-SS’s autograph. He was also, as the Panther noticed when he complimented her on the powerful, feline quality that made her nickname so appropriate, a man of immense personal charm and physical appeal. Ursula Brandt was a short, stocky woman to whom the term pantherlike could not truthfully be said to apply, but she received the compliment without demur. Within the week she and the Sturmbahnführer were lovers.
Brandt in bed revealed that she was pantherlike in one respect at least: she was fond of using her teeth and claws. Her lover stoically professed to enjoy this, and encouraged her not to restrain herself, but rather to give free rein to all her sexual proclivities, no matter how extreme. After their lovemaking the bedsheets would often be bloodstained, and Brandt would be afflicted by a strangled, stiff-backed contrition that made her unusually malleable. Thus in return for the shared secret of his nocturnal scars the nonexistent Sturmbahnführer gained almost unlimited access to the secrets of her office by day. During the month of their liaison the false Pabst was able to transmit a torrent of priceless intelligence information to the MUR. Then, when the agreed warning sign from the maquis—a small chalk circle with a dot in the center, meaning “they’re beginning to suspect you—get lost”—appeared one morning on the door of his lodgings, he quietly disappeared again.
This was the only known instance in the whole of World War II of a successful “reverse sting” on a Gestapo infiltration operation, and once the deception became known Ursula Brandt’s position became untenable, and she, like her imaginary lover, disappeared from view. Reichsführer-SS Himmler was an unforgiving man.
In his memoir, Maximilian Ophuls reflected on the events of the Great Raid and his own revenge on one of its architects in a somber passage. “Every moment of joy in the Resistance, every triumph, was marred by our knowledge of other tragedies. We were fortunate to be successful in the Panther operation, but as I look back on those days I think not of victory but of fallen comrades. I think, for example, of Jean-Paul Cauchi, our founder, our leader, who was arrested in Paris just two months before the D-Day landings and sent to Buchenwald. On April 18, 1945, at the very moment at which American troops were closing in on Buchenwald, he was vindictively killed by the camp’s soulless German personnel. And I think with a little more satisfaction of the trial of George Mathieu, who was arrested in September 1944, claimed that he had turned traitor because Ursula Brandt had threatened to kill his pregnant girlfriend if he didn’t, was found guilty, and was executed by firing squad on December 12. I have been an opponent of the death penalty all my life, but in the case of Mathieu I must confess that my heart rules my head.”
And he also wrote, “Entering the Resistance was, for me, a kind of flying. . . . One took leave of one’s name, one’s past, one’s future, one lifted oneself away from one’s life and existed only in the continuum of the work, borne aloft by necessity and fatalism. Yes, a sort of soaring feeling possessed me at times, tempered by the perpetual knowledge that one could crash
or be shot down at any moment, without warning, and die in the dirt like a dog.”
It was only after his safe arrival in London that Max Ophuls understood how privileged he had been to be given access to the so-called Pat Line, the escape system based in Marseille, created by Captain Ian Garrow and controlled, after Garrow’s betrayal and capture, by the pseudonymous “Commander Pat O’Leary,” a Belgian doctor whose real name was Albert-Marie Guérisse. This line, operated by the DF Section of the British Special Operations Executive, was primarily set up and maintained for the rescue of British airmen and intelligence personnel marooned behind enemy lines, and in spite of the constant dangers of treachery and capture it had a spectacular record, smuggling over six hundred fighters back to safety. However, in the light of the growing tensions between Général de Gaulle and both Churchill and Roosevelt, it was most unusual for the services of the Line to be made available to a nonmilitary individual just because de Gaulle wanted him to join the Forces Françaises Libres at their Carlton Gardens headquarters. The reason for so exceptional an arrangement was the recent arrival at the FFL HQ of the wife of the général’s new aide-de-camp, Mme. François Charles-Roux, née Fanny Zarifi, whose namesake and aunt Fanny Vlasto Rodocanachi and her husband Dr. George Rodocanachi had allowed their Marseille apartment to be used as the Pat Line’s headquarters and local safe house. Max Ophuls, traveling down bumpy minor roads in the back of a produce truck under a mountain of beets, knew nothing of such arcana. He was wondering whether the rat-run would fail because the bumping and banging and the weight of the beet sacks broke his goddamn back. The one thing that never crossed his mind was that he was about to meet the extraordinary woman who would become his only wife.
Her name was the Grey Rat. Her real name was Margaret “Peggy” Rhodes but when she was introduced to Max in George and Fanny Rodocanachi’s sitting room by her fellow Englishwoman Elisabeth Haden-Guest, it was her celebrated nickname that was used—a name the Germans had given her on account of her elusiveness. “Niccolò the master forger,” Haden-Guest said playfully, “meet the rat the ratcatchers can’t catch.” Max Ophuls was astonished by the air of relaxation and enjoyment, even of hilarity, that prevailed in the Rodocanachis’ embattled apartment, and quickly saw that the orchestrator of the evening’s good time was the Grey Rat herself. That the Rat was beautiful was obvious enough, even though she did her best to hide it. Her shock of fair hair looked like it hadn’t been washed for a month and stuck out behind her head like a bottle brush. She wore a loose-fitting man’s checked shirt which hadn’t seen an iron in days and which she buttoned all the way up to the neck. The cuffs, too, were buttoned. Below the shirt were baggy corduroy pants and canvas shoes. She looked like a vagrant, Max thought, a buttoned-up hobo who had somehow strayed into the secret passages of the war. And yet her eyes were immense dark lakes and her body, furtively perceptible under all that camouflage, was long and lean. Above all she possessed so much exuberant energy that the room seemed too small to hold her.
“You are lucky you are going with her,” Fanny Rodocanachi told Max. “When the fighting starts she’s like five men.” The Grey Rat roared with laughter. “God, Fanny darling, you really know how to recommend a girl to a fellow,” she guffawed. “What do you say, Niccolò? Are you ready to crawl through the Spanish border thornbushes all alone with a girl who has killed a man with her bare hands?”
She was twenty-four years old, almost ten years younger than Max, and had already been married once, to a Marseillais businessman named Maurice Liota, who was tortured and killed by the Gestapo a year after their wedding for refusing to reveal her whereabouts, and whom she described to Max Ophuls before, during and after their own marriage as “the love of my life.” She had escaped capture on skis, and by driving a car so fast and skillfully that the airplane chasing her couldn’t stop her. Once she jumped from a moving train. Once in Toulouse she was detained in prison but she impersonated an innocent Provençal housewife so convincingly that after four days the Germans set her free and never knew that they had actually had the Grey Rat in their hands. “I hate war,” she said to Max at that first meeting in the Marseille safe apartment, “but here it is, eh? So I’m not bally well planning to wave my hanky at the departing men and then stay home and knit them balaclavas.”
The run was successful: terrifying, with close shaves so bizarre as to feel almost fictional, but they made it. Barcelona, Madrid, London. In the eyes of the passeurs on both sides of the border, beneath their studied neutrality of expression, Max sometimes thought he detected a strange combination of resentment and contempt. You’re going and we can’t alternated with You’re running and we’re not. He was too distracted to mind; because by the time they arrived at RAF Northolt in a British military aircraft, Maximilian Ophuls had fallen in love. Northolt was wrapped as always in the icy wind of the London winter; nor did it avoid the cliché of sleety rain. François Charles-Roux had been sent to meet hobbling Max, and a nameless intelligence officer was waiting for the Grey Rat. The two refugees stood bundled up on the tarmac in the frozen drizzle and the Grey Rat tried to say good-bye, but before they went their separate ways Max asked if he could see her again. This reduced her to confusion, and unleashed an astonishing routine of foot shuffling and deep blushing and hand-wringing and small sharp manic laughs punctuating bursts of staccato speech. “Ha! Ha! Well, I’ve absolutely no idea! Why you’d ever want to! But, ahem! Aha! If that is you’re really, I mean! Serious, you know? One doesn’t wish to! Hahaha! Impose! Not that it would be a bally imposition I suppose? Eh, eh, haha? Since you’re doing the asking in the first place! Since you’re, ah, kindly enough, oh blow I’m so pathetic at this! Oh, help, mother, all right.” Then, moving toward him to peck him awkwardly on the cheek, she stepped hard on his foot.
Their first date, at the Lyons Corner House in Piccadilly, was a catastrophe. Margaret was a mess, red-eyed, runny-nosed and unable to restrain her tears. The Pat Line had been betrayed. A man they had trusted, Paul Cole, whose real name was Sergeant Harold Cole, and who used the alias of Delobel, turned out to be a fraudster and double agent and pointed the finger at everyone in the Marseille group. Fanny Vlasto and Elisabeth Haden-Guest escaped, but “Pat O’Leary”—Guérisse—was seized by the Gestapo and sent to Dachau. Astonishingly, he would survive torture and live to see a better day and to grow old in the new Europe which he had done so much to free. Dr. George Rodocanachi was not so fortunate. He died in Buchenwald a few months after his capture. “I’m going back in, you know,” the Grey Rat said, blowing her nose fiercely. “I’m going back in just as soon as I can force them to let me.” Max wanted to beg her to stay, but remained silent, and held her hands instead. Three months later she was allowed to return. The tide of the war had turned, and Maximilian Ophuls’s life had changed direction, too, flowing powerfully toward this beautiful, gawky, fearless, sexually unawakened woman—and, in addition, away from France and toward America, because of the unexpected but powerful dislike, bordering on hostility, shown toward him by Général Charles de Gaulle.
London that winter was a cratered heart. The gashes of the Blitz were everywhere, the severed streets, the halved houses, the gaps, the lack, the lack. There weren’t many cars on the road. Yet people went about their business matter-of-factly, as if nothing had happened, as if they weren’t going to be spending the night on a tube station platform without so much as a change of clothes, as if their evacuated children’s welfare wasn’t preying on their minds. Carlton Gardens was relatively unscathed. Charles-Roux brought Max to meet the général. De Gaulle stood at a window in a wood-paneled office, in profile, like a cartoon of himself, and greeted Max without turning. “So: Danjon’s young genius,” he said. “Let me tell you this, monsieur. I do not question the judgment of my friend the vice-chancellor. Your accomplishments and talents are no doubt remarkable. However the propositions in your theses are for the most part untenable. Some sort of European association, very well. It will be necessary to forget what has h
appened and make friends with Germany. That, yes. Everything else you propose is barbaric rubbish which will deliver us, bound and gagged, into the power of the Americans, which is to say a new captivity following immediately upon an old one. This I shall never permit.” Max remained silent. De Gaulle also ceased to speak. After a moment Charles-Roux touched Max’s elbow and steered him from the room. As they left, de Gaulle, still positioned at the window with his hands clasped behind his back, was heard to remark, “Ah, when they know what broken bits of matchsticks I had to use to make France free!”
“You must understand that Roosevelt has been treating him like dirt,” Charles-Roux said outside the général’s door. “And Churchill also, he shows insufficient respect. There are many, even in the French diplomatic corps, who have advised against becoming too close to the FFL. Roosevelt would get rid of the général if he could. He favors, for example, Giraud.” Max had few dealings with de Gaulle after that day. He was put to work in the propaganda section, writing messages to be dropped into France, translating German texts, marking time, waiting for the evenings, and the Rat.
Porchester Terrace, Bayswater, stripped by the requirements of the weapons industry of its traditional gates and railings, like all the denuded streets of London, hid its nakedness in the winter fog. Max was living in the basement of a house owned by Fanny Rodocanachi’s brother Michel Vlasto. A large segment of the staircase had been destroyed by a phosphorus bomb and the house smelled strongly of burning. To go up and down it was necessary to hug the wall. Life everywhere had holes in it, was a book with pages ripped out, crumpled up, tossed away. “Newer min’, eh,” said Vlasto’s Indian housekeeper, Mrs. Shanti Dickens, an ample woman who affected a huge beret, baggy green overcoat and lacy boots. Mrs. Dickens was a person of such great appetite that she chewed up the language itself. “Nobody being ’urt, ’at is the mai’ thing, hisn’t it.” She pointed at a bucket of sand. “One isstanding on ewery flower. Bay-cement, ground flower, first flower, all. Case ow need.” Mrs. Dickens was able to recite from memory the crime reports in the Sunday rags. “’E chopp’ ’er up, sir, just to ’magine,” she’d say with relish. “Wery wery hawful, sir, hisn’t it. Maybe ’e is heatin’ ’er for ’is tea.”
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