Churchill's Secret Agent

by Max Ciampoli

  Early the next morning, while it was still dark, an ambulance came to pick me up. The partisans had arranged everything. I was a very sick patient who had to go see a specialist in Geneva. All the papers were excellent forgeries, and they expected to have an uneventful trip. Once in Geneva, I was sent first class on a commercial flight to London via Morocco. At the airport, I was picked up by the military police and brought to the prime minister’s country residence. Mr. Churchill was in the midst of a small dinner party when I arrived. The valet escorted me to my room. Soon afterward, Mr. Churchill came to welcome me back with a heartfelt hug to remember. Then he said, “Well done, mon petit.”

  Acquiring the Enigma machine was a great victory for the Allies. From that time forward, they would know much of what the Germans were planning. This information would determine where they would send their troops and where they would concentrate their greatest efforts. German messages could now be quickly decoded.

  Years later, in the summer of 1958, I, now a citizen of the United States, was able to locate the barber. I invited him and his wife to stay with me at my horse property in Harrisonville, south of Kansas City, Missouri. To my great joy, they accepted. I sent them round-trip tickets along with my address and directions, though I had no intention of having them take a taxi the almost forty miles to my house from the airport. I just wanted to set them up for a surprise. I owned, among other classic cars, a 1937 Rolls-Royce limousine. I hired a chauffeur to drive and a valet to open the doors and dressed them elegantly in riding breeches, jackets, tall boots, and white gloves. I wanted to do something out of the ordinary for this couple. When I spotted them coming out of the terminal, I told the valet to go greet them and tell them that the limousine was there to pick them up.

  “There must be some mistake,” the barber responded.

  “No, sir, there is no mistake. Monsieur Marc sent me and the chauffeur to pick you up.”

  When he heard my name mentioned, he realized that it must be true. I had fun watching the entire scenario. As they made their way toward the car, I got out to welcome them. The barber took off his glasses, and his eyes filled with tears. I was thrilled to see him, but at this stage of my life I still had my feelings well under control. I wasn’t aware of the emotion hidden deep within me.

  The gentle man took me in his arms. He was just over five feet tall. He introduced me to his wife, whom I belatedly thanked for the scarf she had knitted for me, and we all got into the Rolls. I could see that they were amazed by their reception. When we arrived at my fifty-nine-acre property, I was tickled by the look of astonishment in their eyes. I was excited about giving them a memorable experience and took them to all the best restaurants in Kansas City. At that time, I was treated especially well because I was a prominent executive chef and business owner in the community.

  I took the two of them sightseeing to some of my favorite places. The barber loved to ride horses, and I gave him my favorite saddlebred to ride every day. I enjoyed watching this wisp of a man riding next to me on the tall, elegant high-stepping horse.

  I really respect and admire this man, even if he did eat a lot of my olives, I thought, chuckling to myself. “He had so much courage working for the Resistance out of his little German-infested barbershop in Vienna.”

  A few years later, during the Christmas holidays, I received a card from the barber’s wife saying that her husband had passed away and that he had never forgotten his extraordinary trip to the United States.

  As I pondered the painful news, I remembered the sudden change of plans announced to me after I parachuted into that field near Lyon and the struggle I had endured to get to this fine man’s shop.

  SEVENTEEN

  Saving Thousands of Jewish Children

  “I am horrified, Marc!” Mr. Churchill paced as he spoke. “The situation is beyond belief. The French Militia is treating its own people worse than the Nazis are.” He was as furious as an angry mother bear protecting her young. “We must find a way to save as many Jewish children as we can. It’s just too painful to talk about. My secretary will fill you in on the deplorable situation. I’m sending you to Die to talk to the commander, whom you already know, to see if the youth camps can take some of the children. This is assuming that you can find a way to get them out of Paris. See what you can do. May God be with you.” He stomped out of the office. He was too upset to waste time on pleasantries.

  I went into the secretary’s office. She was a little woman, on the plump side, an older, motherly type, very kind and extremely bright. She always hugged me. This time she said, “You are the only ray of sunshine in England.”

  “That’s easy. There isn’t any sunshine in England,” I retorted. She laughed. I knew she liked me a lot because I always made her laugh. That was something Mr. Churchill had always done for me, from my earliest memories of him.

  When I was a child, my tutor would take me for a few days at a time to visit my godfather, Monsieur Duvernay, who lived only a few houses from where Mr. Churchill vacationed in Cap d’Antibes. This is how I originally came to know Mr. Churchill. I was a very shy child and had very little access to playmates in Monaco. So, when staying in Cap d’Antibes away from the eyes of my father, my tutor found families with children in the neighborhood and got them together with me so that I had someone my own age to play with. At home in Monte Carlo, my father would not allow me to play with other children.

  Regularly, I would see Mr. Churchill sitting in front of his easel, painting in his garden. He would call us kids over to him. “Wait right here,” he would say. Then he would call a servant to bring us some Petits Beurres LU, cookies that we all loved. Often, I would see him drive off with his chauffeur, cigar protruding from his lips, his car filled with canvases in search of new landscapes to paint. I thought that he always looked so serious unless he was talking to us. When he did, his whole demeanor changed.

  One time when I was with him at the estate in England, he reminisced about his life while staying on the Côte d’Azur, the sunny French Riviera. “I loved painting the scenery, especially on the Mediterranean coast. Sometimes I painted on the coast of Italy as well, where I would paint all day and go to the casino of San Remo at night. I also enjoyed taking the train bleu to Biarritz, where I could paint during the day and enjoy their casino in the evening. When I went to Monaco, I’d frequent the casino and the clubs. That’s where I met your father, Franck, at his nightclub. You are not like him at all, thank God. There, I saw such entertainers as our dear Josephine, Mistinguett, and Yolanda. When I stayed in Monte Carlo at the Hermitage, I didn’t need a car. I would take a horse-drawn carriage to get around. If I decided to go to Nice or Cannes, I would take a limousine and driver. The casino in Nice was fantastic, the Casino de la Jetée. There is a pier that extends out into the water, but what am I saying! You know that. Your godfather was the architect.” He chuckled at this bit of absurdity on his part, then went right on with his reminiscence.

  “When I had time, I loved to take a limo up the Grande Corniche to have dinner at the Château de Madrid. It was an excellent restaurant, even though it was under your father’s direction. But enough of that. I don’t want to remind you of unpleasant memories. Below, I would sometimes stop at the Réserve de Beaulieu sur Mer where the maître d’ spoiled me. I would call him a few hours in advance, and he would prepare an exquisite bouillabaisse for me with langoustes, sea snake, various Mediterranean fish, rainbow wrasse, mollusks, shrimp, and mussels. My dinners would last delicious hours. It was a beautiful life in France before the war, and it will be again,” he said with determination, concluding his pleasant reverie.

  But now he was infuriated about the fate of the Jewish children in Paris and Drancy. The secretary told me, confidentially, that the prime minister had sent his son, Randolph, on the very same mission on which he was now sending me. He had become frustrated and angry when his son had come back with a shocking report about Jewish children but no solution as to what could be done.

 
His son’s report had also included information about Joseph Kennedy, who was at that time the American ambassador to England. Randolph had put him under surveillance by Scotland Yard. It was discovered that messages were being sent from the American Embassy indirectly to Berlin, so Randolph planted a false message with Joe Kennedy that Churchill and Roosevelt were going to meet in Bermuda. Scotland Yard was able to determine that the message was put into code and sent from London to the American Embassy in Madrid, then on to Ankara, Turkey, and finally to Berlin.

  The secretary went into further detail about Kennedy. “Why is she so free with this information?” I asked myself. “Maybe I’m privy to a lot of information because of the precarious nature of my missions. Who knows? Or maybe it’s because they trust I’ll say nothing.”

  “The prime minister feels that it is his duty to inform Mr. Roosevelt of the suspicious nature of Kennedy’s dealings,” she told me. “It has been discovered that Kennedy has been in touch with several American industrialists asking them to manufacture arms, ammunition, and airplanes for Germany. They will be paid in gold and jewels gathered from the pillage of Europe. This wealth is being held in safety in South America and elsewhere. The suspicions are becoming more and more serious owing to the tracing of the transmission planted by Randolph,” she said.

  “After being so informed, President Roosevelt ordered that all messages of a sensitive nature should not be sent to the embassy in London. Only normal day-to-day business is to be conducted through the London office,” she told me.

  “Here is the situation that you will confront, Monsieur Marc. Hundreds and hundreds of Jewish children are being pulled from their parents’ arms and taken to a transit camp called Drancy on the outskirts of Paris. The report that Randolph gave his father described the sordid conditions and deplorable disorganization of the camp. The only food that he identified was cold cabbage soup. It was winter, and many of the children had no shoes and were dressed in ragged clothes. Most of them had dysentery and had to wash their dirtied undergarments in cold water with no soap, then try to let them dry a little in the cold, wet weather, only to have to put them on again still damp, dirty them again, and then repeat the endless process. The mattresses on which they spent their nights and most of their days were never cleaned.”

  She continued, “Randolph reported that many of the youngsters knew their first names only and didn’t know what ‘Jewish’ meant, as many Jews were totally integrated into the milieu in which they lived. From the children’s barracks every night came cries of desperation, voices of anguish calling for their mothers and fathers. Many were in a state of shock, bewildered and lost. Each of the barracks contained about forty children and a French woman guard. The guards tried to appease the children by telling them that they would rejoin their parents soon.

  “And it gets worse,” she said. “Two days a week the children, aged from about six to seventeen, would take cold showers outside with no privacy whatever. There was no soap or hot water. For each one hundred children, there were about four towels. Every four days, trucks would come to pick up a load of children and bring them to the train, where they were packed into cattle cars, forty to sixty per car. Minimal ventilation came from the top of the cars. Many children suffocated if they sat or lay down. Once a day, the sealed cars were unlocked, and the children were given soup to eat and water to drink. There was no place to wash, and there was no bathroom. The children would try to get to a corner to defecate or urinate, but that was not always possible.

  “Randolph said that this was their world as they traveled toward the camps in Poland, a trip that lasted five to seven days. Many died on the way. Even the German population who came into contact with the reality of this situation was horrified by the manner in which the French were treating the children. It was the French Militia who took the initiative to round up the Jewish children in this manner, store them in the camps, and send them in boxcars to Poland.”

  The secretary told me that the proof was irrefutable. This situation was described in a letter written by the chief of police, Jean Leguay, of occupied France to the commissaire général aux Questions juives of the Vichy government, Darquier de Pellepoix. Minister Laval, who was in charge of the Vichy government under the president, the maréchal Pétain (maréchal is a higher rank than general), was quoted in the letter to have said, “Purge France of all undesirables.”

  Now, as I recount this story, I cannot help but wonder how these people could have lived with themselves. After the war, it was estimated that between 1942 and 1944, almost two thousand children under six years of age, and six thousand between the ages of six and thirteen, were deported from France. The French Militia received one hundred francs per child. As far as can be determined, not one of these children survived. I am still furious about what happened. I should have done more. Somehow, I could have saved more of them, I tell myself, but how? I still don’t know.

  The secretary and I were fighting tears when she finished telling me the story.

  “I understand why Mr. Churchill didn’t want to go into detail. He didn’t want to struggle to maintain his composure as I just did in front of you,” I said to her. “How could they do such things?” I asked. Visions of vengeance filled my mind, but I would not subject this kind woman to my visions of retribution.

  The secretary then gave me the new password: “The Moulin Rouge is open at night.” The response was to be, “The Moulin Rouge is always closed during the day.”

  So my mission was to find a solution to this travesty. There was a small group of good French people who were trying to save Jewish children. They belonged to no formal organization. They were just people who had hearts. Their headquarters was in a bar/restaurant, predominantly lesbian, across from the Moulin Rouge on the place Pigalle. They had gathered well over three thousand children and were hiding them in people’s homes and cellars all over Paris. There was great difficulty in feeding and taking care of them all. Food was so scarce. What was to be done?

  I was parachuted in near Die, where I was met by the maquisards, the partisans belonging to the group Combat . A colonel of the group was disguised as a member of the French Militia. He told me that he would handcuff me and that I would pose as his prisoner. We drove to the train station in Die, and the colonel requisitioned an entire compartment for the two of us. He was extraordinarily bold and sure of himself.

  “I am not to be disturbed during the voyage under any circumstances,” the colonel told the man who took our tickets. With that, he shut the compartment door and pulled the curtains. We changed trains in Grenoble for one to Paris. Once again, the colonel demanded a private compartment. When we passed into the German zone, papers were checked by the German military. The colonel showed his Ausweis, which was not questioned.

  Once we arrived in Paris and exited the train station, the colonel removed the handcuffs. He hailed a bicycle taxi and gave the driver the address of a home near the opera house. A middle-aged woman opened the door and asked us to come in.

  “Madame, this is Michel Carbonell, the man I told you about who wants to rent a furnished room.”

  “So nice to meet you, monsieur,” she said warmly. The colonel said good-bye and left.

  As she walked me upstairs to my room, she told me that her husband was a prisoner of war in Germany. “I haven’t seen him for more than a year, monsieur. He was a tenor in the opera before the war. I pray continuously for his safe return.”

  We came to a closed door on the second floor. “This is the bathroom and shower, monsieur, and your bedroom is here right next to it. The colonel had me put your belongings in the armoire and the chest of drawers.”

  I looked in the armoire and drawers. I found six suits, twelve shirts, an overcoat, a jacket, hats, shoes, underwear, and socks. Everything was the correct size and of good quality. All these clothes! They must have expected me to be there a long time.

  “Here are the keys to your car that is parked in front and some coupons for gasoline,” sh
e said before leaving my room. Later that day, I took the Peugeot that had been left for me to the bar/restaurant on the place Pigalle. I approached the woman at the bar and quietly said, “The Moulin Rouge is open at night.” She responded appropriately and called a young woman over to escort me to the meeting place. Her friend was about twenty years old, blond, pleasant looking, and likable. She took me behind the Moulin Rouge, down into a cellar where there were five men and women. We talked for hours. I mostly listened, asking a question here and there. They filled me in on the wretched situation.

  All of a sudden, I started feeling hot and sweaty, like I was coming down with a cold. I drove back to the house and went straight to bed. I had a fever and soon developed a cough. Looking on the bright side, I figured this gave me a lot of time to think. Madame brought me tilleul , an herb tea, dry toast, and a syrup that her husband often used before he would sing. Many singers used it because it soothed the vocal chords. I stayed in bed and utilized my time well, reflecting and planning. In two days, not only was I well, but I had a plan of action, too.

  I telephoned the office of the ministre des Invalides, the minister in charge of military veterans who had lost limbs in World War I. The ministre, Monsieur Paget, was the father of a boy who had been educated with me when I was locked up with the Jesuits at the Athenium in Nice from the age of seven to fourteen.

  The person who answered the phone said, “He is not available, monsieur. Would you care to leave a message?”

  “Yes, I would. My name is Michel Carbonell. Have him call me back at this number.” I left the telephone number of the house where I was staying. Of course, he wouldn’t know who I was by that name, but I hoped he would call back anyway. If not, I would go to Nice to visit him personally at his home.