Escape From Paris

by Carolyn G. Hart

  Mme. Cottin leaned toward her. “How long has it been since you’ve eaten?”

  Eleanor tried to think. The days slipped in and out of her mind. “Monday,” she said finally. “I ate Monday.”

  Mme. Cottin handed her piece of bread to Eleanor.

  “Oh no,” Eleanor began. “I can’t take your food.” The bread was in her hand and her fingers were closing around it and she was bringing it up to her mouth.

  “Of course you can.” Mme. Cottin laughed and that booming laughter sounded odd but triumphant in the cold filthy cell. “I’ve been trying to lose weight for years. Didn’t think I could do it. And, believe me, I’ve still lots of extra.”

  There was a little burst of animation after breakfast. The basin of water, all they would get for cleaning purposes, was passed from hand to hand. “Goes in order of seniority,” Mme. Cottin explained.

  By the time the bowl reached Eleanor, the water was gray but she splashed her face, washed her hands, then once again joined her cell mates in sitting on the edge of the bed.

  Hungry, hungry, hungry. The foul tasting lukewarm drink had only made her hunger worse. It was a live thing, her hunger, a coil of pain inside her. Time expanded to incredible lengths. Twice Eleanor looked at her wrist before she remembered that her watch and wedding rings and money had been taken from her when she was admitted to prison. What difference did it make? She was no longer Eleanor Masson, free to determine her day, free to choose where to go, how much time to spend. She was Number 1887, sitting on the edge of an iron bed on a dirty ticking mattress covered with soiled coarse linen and one thin wool blanket. The cell was bitterly cold. She wrapped her arms around herself. At least she still had her fur coat. Andre would never have imagined, when he gave it to her, how much it would someday mean. He had been pleased with her pleasure. “Oh Andre, it’s too extravagant,” she had objected. He had smiled. “The coat will keep you warm.” She hugged the coat tighter to her.

  It was only midmorning, but already to Eleanor it seemed as if she had been forever in the ill-lighted cold and airless cell, when the slide scraped open, then a moment later the door swung in.

  “Number 1843.”

  Mme. Leroy looked up, then rose and leisurely moved toward the hallway.

  “Hurry, 1843.”

  When the cell door slammed shut, Mme. Cottin and Mme. Bernard both watched it close with grim silent faces. When a long moment passed, they nodded at each other and both of them moved closer down their beds toward Eleanor.

  Mme. Cottin leaned across the narrow space where the table sat and the sickening canister. She ignored the smell and whispered, “Madame, last night, it was I who grabbed your arm. I was afraid you were going to speak, to say that you were involved in the escape line.”

  “That woman is a plant,” Mme. Bernard hissed. “They move her from cell to cell and she tries to pump new prisoners. We knew we were going to get a new prisoner yesterday when they took two of our cellmates away and sent her in.”

  “Don’t say anything incriminating. Not a word,” Mme. Cottin warned.

  Eleanor looked toward the door. “Where has she gone now?”

  “She’ll pretend she’s been had up for interrogation,” Mme. Bernard said disdainfully. “Instead, she’s in the guard room, eating a good breakfast. It’s warm in there, too. They have a stove and plenty of coal.”

  Eleanor reached out, touched both of them. “Thank you.”

  Mme. Cottin shrugged. Mme. Bernard smiled shyly. The smile transformed her thin ascetic face. She started to speak, hesitated, asked, “Are you English?”

  Eleanor smiled. “No, Madame. I’m American.”

  “American,” Madame Cottin exclaimed, “but Germany isn’t even at war with America. Why are you in France now?”

  Eleanor explained that her husband was French and that she had lived in France since her marriage sixteen years ago. “Andre has been missing since Dunkirk. I stayed in Paris with my son and my sister, who was visiting me. I’ve been working with the Foyer du Soldat and in other ways.”

  Her new friends nodded understandingly.

  “Have you been charged yet?” Mme. Cottin asked.

  Eleanor shook her head.

  The big woman frowned. “That’s too bad. They don’t permit extra food, say from a friend, while you are under examination.”

  “They will call you up for questioning after you’ve been here a while. They like to give you a taste of prison. Some people will confess to anything if they think they can get out,” Mme. Bernard explained.

  “Are you still under examination?” Eleanor asked.

  Both of them shook their heads.

  “Two years sentence,” Mme. Bernard said.

  “Six months,” Mme. Cottin replied.

  Eleanor hesitated, asked, “Why are you here?”

  Simone Bernard told her story first. She was the wife of a banker. He was really too old to go to the front, but he had rejoined his unit when the fighting began. He was wounded at Lille and taken prisoner. Mme. Bernard had attempted to bribe a guard at the military hospital to gain his release. She had been betrayed by a second guard who was jealous of the money received by his co-worker.

  Mme. Cottin smiled hugely. “My big mouth cost me six months in prison, but I’ve never regretted it once.”

  Eleanor couldn’t help but smile in anticipation. “What did you do?”

  “They made me take a sergeant major as a lodger. I have a boarding house, a nice little house, in the Porte d’Orleans quarter. Well, I took him in. I had to. But I kept having a little trouble with his name.”

  “You did?”

  She nodded her head emphatically. “It always seemed to slip out when I saw him. Good morning, Sgt. Maj. Polydore. Good afternoon, Sgt. Maj. Polydore. Good night, Sgt. Maj. Polydore.”

  Eleanor was still laughing when they heard the peephole scrape open.

  The cell was silent when Mme. Leroy returned. No one spoke. She tried twice more to pump Eleanor. Each time, Eleanor responded volubly, complaining about the damned Boche, how a woman’s own money could be held against her. Her eyes wide, she demanded, “I don’t trust the banks. How can anyone trust the banks? Do you trust the banks?”

  Mme. Leroy tried one more time, the next day. “It must have been very exciting, to be part of an escape line.”

  Eleanor was sharp. “I wouldn’t know. I’ve heard about things like that. Actually, I think it would be pretty foolish, don’t you? I mean, with the death penalty and all that?”

  When Mme. Leroy was called up for examination that day, she didn’t return.

  They had a new cellmate that afternoon. They heard soft stricken moans before they saw her. The three women sat on their beds, turned toward the door as it opened. The guard shoved a young girl inside. As the cell door shut, she wavered unsteadily on her feet then began to fall forward.

  Mme. Cottin, moving quickly for a woman of her bulk, caught the girl before she reached the floor. When her hands touched her, the girl writhed in agony.

  “Don’t touch me, oh God, no, don’t touch me.”

  Mme. Cottin lowered her slowly, carefully toward the cot. She didn’t lay the girl down. Blood seeped through the girl’s blouse from her back. The soft material was torn, ripped, some of it embedded in puffy bloody welts.

  They used what was left of the morning wash water to clean her back as well as they could. She lay on her side, hands clenched, face rigid as Mme. Cottin worked.

  Eleanor took off her coat, her thick wool sweater, and then the soft cotton blouse she had been wearing when she was arrested. Her nose wrinkled a little in disgust. She had worn these clothes, the long days sitting on the edge of the cot, the interminable nights, lying wrapped up in the filthy blanket, ever since her arrest. The cloth must smell hideous, but it was a blouse, something to cover that lacerated back and thin bruised shoulders.

  The girl didn’t complain. Later that day, after she had managed to eat lunch, the whale bone soup, a gray jellied ma
ss that tasted like Vaseline, and two slices of fake salami, she lifted up on one elbow and told her story, her tear-streaked face pinched with pain. Her name was Angelique Fornier and she was seventeen years old. “It wasn’t organized, nothing like that. It was just the spur of the minute thing. Jean—”

  Mme. Bernard interrupted, “Don’t tell us anyone’s real name, my dear. It isn’t wise.”

  Angelique nodded. “A boy I know. We were taking a walk. You know that’s almost all we can do anymore. The movies are all German films and who wants to see them? My brother was killed at Houthen. I didn’t want to see a German movie about how wonderful they are and how they’ve come to save us. Save us from what? Being happy and free? So we take—took walks and sometimes there were more of us, a group. Lots of kids.” She paused and gave them names and they all knew these weren’t really their names, “Claude and Henri and Jacques and Paulette and Marie and me. There is an overpass on the boulevard in our neighborhood and sometimes we stop there and look down and watch the cars.”

  Soon they began to notice that prisoners being taken to a Gestapo headquarters on the Avenue Foch were driven beneath the overpass. They just noticed that. Talked of it some. Didn’t really make much of it. “Until Paul was arrested. Paul is the older brother of . . . of my friend. They found Paul passing out copies of the new underground newspaper.”

  All of them came alive at that. What newspaper? When had it begun? What did it have in it?

  Angelique had not seen a copy of the paper. She had just heard about it. The Resistance, it was called. Anyway, the Gestapo arrested Paul. His brother and Angelique and their friends made a plan. Paul was being transferred to the downtown Gestapo quarters that morning. They had taken turns on the overpass. When Claude spotted the Gestapo car coming, he had motioned to the others, waiting in the nearby alleyway with bricks and two musket balls they had wrenched from a statue.

  They waited until the Citroen was just nosing beneath the underpass. At Claude’s signal, they dropped their weights. The windshield shattered, the car swerved out of control and slammed into the brick center span.

  Two others waiting below had dashed to the car and smashed the rear door window. One of them slammed the plain-clothes man then reached inside to try and pull Paul out.

  Everything went wrong. The driver was unconscious but the Gestapo agent on the far side wasn’t hurt and he had a Schmeisser pistol. When the shooting was over, the two who had tried to get Paul were dead. Those on the overpass started to run.

  “I twisted my ankle.”

  They looked down. Her ankle was swollen twice its size and was a darkening purple over the instep. “I couldn’t run. I had gone the opposite direction from the others. It was getting dark when it all happened so I don’t think they realized I was caught.” She began to tremble. “Now they want the names of the others.” She looked up at the three older women fearfully. “I didn’t tell them. I didn’t.” Tears began to trickle down her smeared and dirty face. “But it hurts so much. It hurts so much.”

  The next morning when the peephole slid open, Eleanor was sure it would be her turn.

  “Number 1889.”

  Angelique didn’t move.

  The guard jerked his head at the pale girl. “You. 1889.”

  When they brought her back, late in the afternoon, she was unconscious. They dumped her on her bed. She moaned all night.

  Eleanor pulled her coat up over her head, squeezed her eyes shut. They were going to call her one of these days. One of these days, it was going to be her turn. But Robert was safe. Andre was safe. For the first time, she thought it in her mind. Andre is dead. No one can hurt him now and Robert is safe. It doesn’t matter anymore what happens to me. I must fool them, lie, never give the others away so that Father Laurent can keep on saving lives, just as he saved Robert and Linda and Jonathan and all those soldiers. Seventy-three soldiers, the last time she had added up. That was a fair exchange. More than fair. Seventy-three men and those she loved, all safe, so somehow, she would manage not to tell them. They weren’t sure about her anyway. If she could not be afraid, if she could keep them from sensing her fear, they might not torture her. Weakness drew them, as a carcass draws flies.

  The days passed, day after day after day, the foul smell, the cold, the debilitating unending gnawing hunger, the fear, the tedium, the dreadful mind-numbing fatigue, day after day.

  The posters were put up all over Paris on Saturday, November 23, black letters stark against white cardboard. They were signed by the Kommandant of Paris, Otto von Stulpnagel.

  10,000 FRANCS REWARD FOLLOWING THE DECREE ESTABLISHING THE DEATH PENALTY FOR ALL THOSE WHO HIDE ENGLISH SOLDIERS OR AID THEM TO ESCAPE, THE GERMAN HIGH COMMAND ANNOUNCES THAT IT WILL PAY 10.000 FRANCS REWARD TO ANY PERSON PROVIDING NAMES AND ADDRESSES OF THOSE ENGAGED IN THIS CRIMINAL ACTIVITY.

  Yvette Bizien saw three of the posters on the short walk between the apartment and her husband’s tobacco shop. Ten thousand francs. If they had 10,000 francs, they would be able to buy a used truck. If they had a truck, there was a fortune to be made in the black market.

  Maj. Krause put half the sandwich down, uneaten. He’d scarcely had any time for lunch the past two weeks. The fox had found the chicken coop. Escape lines were cracking under Gestapo pressure everywhere, from Rouen to Toulouse. More than forty people had been rounded up in the last few days alone. The arrests were all due to Maj. Erich Krause and his English speaking agents in their tattered RAF uniforms. That would show Knocken that he, Erich Krause, was succeeding. Knocken was having his own troubles with the Army but no one could complain about Maj. Krause’s efforts. He had a good relationship with the military police. They were only too happy to raid when he ordered it. Krause smiled. This would show Knocken.

  Slowly his smile eroded. It might be better to be tactful. He could see Knocken suddenly, trim athletic figure, mop of auburn hair over a high, domed, intellectual forehead, emaciated unpleasant face, and gray blue eyes that never changed expression. Or perhaps it was his mouth, with its noticeable twist to the left that gave him such an intimidating expression. Or perhaps it was the knowledge, throughout the SS, that those whom Knocken favored prospered, and those whom Knocken opposed, disappeared.

  But it wouldn’t hurt to make a good report. He could put it tactfully.

  “Sgt. Schmidt, take a letter to Obertruppfuehrer Knocken. ‘In accordance with your previous instructions to pursue with vigor the criminals who have persisted in hiding and passing fugitive Englishmen, I am happy to report . . .’”

  It was the loneliness that hurt. As much as anything, Linda hated the apartment when it was empty. The silent rooms were dull and dead and gray. Even the yellow walls seemed dingy in the thin winter sunlight. There hadn’t been much sunlight. The days when the soldiers arrived were tense and busy and that day and night and the next day when they left always flew by.

  The days in between were hard. She stayed in the apartment and there was nothing to do, nothing at all. She wrote one letter to Frank and had one of the soldiers carry it with him with a promise to mail it from England. In it, she told Frank that Robert and Franz were coming, that Eleanor was in prison and that she, Linda, would come when she knew Eleanor’s fate.

  She lay curled up in bed. She must get up soon. Soldiers would arrive today. That was something. Their accents reminded her, achingly, of Jonathan. Was Jonathan safe? Had they crossed the Pyrenees, reached sanctuary in Spain? Or had they been gunned down along the frontier or captured by the Spanish and thrown into prison?

  Jonathan had promised to try and get word on the nightly BBC program if they made it. They had planned the sentence that would signal the safe arrival of their group. “Robert is halfway to Pasadena.” If she heard it, she would know. Father Laurent had found a radio for her. Theirs, of course, was still in their apartment.

  Did the Gestapo agent find the apartment to his liking? Had they already stolen Eleanor’s antiques? Or was the apartment empty now, dusty, unlit, a ghostly
place that once had been a cheerful home. How long would the concierge keep it for Eleanor? She would have to clear out their things, rent it eventually.

  There was something about today. Something she had forgotten. Wearily, she pushed back the covers. She wore her clothes to bed now. She had one change of clothing, again, the gift of Father Laurent. She was always cold with only her pale blue spring coat and no coal for heat. It had been so long since she had been really warm. What was it about today?

  She shuffled around the kitchen, boiling water to make a cup of the odd-tasting coffee substitute, halving one roll and cutting a small piece of cheese. Like an old woman, she thought, moving so heavily. She sat down at the table which seemed large with only her there to eat. She was hungry but food had no savor. She chewed halfheartedly on the roll. If Jonathan were here, she wouldn’t shuffle. She would have brushed her hair and straightened her clothes. She would smile and the hard roll would taste delicious. Loneliness makes you old, she thought, even if you’re young. Loneliness takes all the light and color out of life, reduces every day to mechanical, spiritless, dull drudgery. Oh Jonathan, would she ever see him again, ever touch him, hold him?

  She cupped her hands around the mug, teasing a little warmth through the pottery. That was what it was about. Today was December 13. Friday the 13th. This was the day she would have left Paris on her ausweis.

  Linda stared somberly at the mug. She wouldn’t leave Paris today. Not today. It was time now to leave for the train station and the new batch of airmen. But she wouldn’t be leaving Paris.

  Father Laurent greeted her openly, at the station. At Linda’s frown, he had chided gently. “A priest can still say hello to his parishioner. Even in Nazi Paris.”

  “You take too many chances,” she replied, unsmiling. “You should have just sent me a message.”