Voices from the Dark Years

by Douglas Boyd

  For whatever reason, on this day I came home and did not go into my bedroom, but sat down near the piano. Hélène noticed me come in, but continued to play. It was not very long since I had learned that my father had died and, as I listened, it was as though Hélène and Schubert between them were attacking the wall I had built around myself with blow after blow of a huge axe, until I was weeping – not the tears of a frightened child, but of a girl on the threshold of womanhood mourning all the grief in the world.

  Hélène stopped playing to embrace me, but did not try to halt the sobs that wracked my still thin body. After a while, she said, ‘Let it out, girl. Cry all you want. We were beginning to despair of you and wonder whether there was anybody left there behind all your polite silences.’ Then she resumed playing the sonata and I realised that if you build a wall to protect yourself from pain, there is also a wall between you and love, so that you too are dead.11

  On the same day Eugène Deloncle got his comeuppance on returning from Spain, where he had been seeking a bolt-hole for the time when his life would be forfeit in France – and possibly depositing in a safe place some of the funds received during his years of right-wing militancy from Eugène Shueller, president of the L’Oréal perfume empire. Arrested by the SD, who suspected him of having contacted Gaullist or Allied agents in Spain, Deloncle was interrogated and released so that a carlingue gang working for the SD could eliminate him with plausible denial for all his followers of the MSR. Their modus operandi was simply to break down the door of his Paris apartment and shoot dead Deloncle and his son in the guise of a gangland settlement of accounts.

  On 21 January the Journal Officiel published a decree disbanding the Compagnons de France, which came as no surprise to the leadership after miliciens had occupied their HQ at the château of Crépieux-la-Pape near Lyon, as well as some regional centres. That evening a message from Guillaume de Tournemire was read out in every Compagnon camp:

  The government has decreed the dissolution of our movement, but the struggle of the Compagnons will continue. Continue your service to your commune, your trade and your families. The day will come when the call of the Compagnons rings out again in our country. Then, the flag that I lowered to half-mast on 26 July 1942 will be raised again to the mast-head. I am counting on all of you. Have courage! Work hard for France! A moi, compagnons!

  That month in Paris electricity was cut off for the night at 10.30 p.m. Gas of varying pressure was available for cooking only at meal times. People hesitated to take a train because rolling stock was a target of opportunity for patrolling RAF Mosquitoes. Others arrived in Paris exhausted after spending their whole journeys standing on the running board of a coach, so they could jump off and seek shelter quickly in the event of an air raid.

  On 17 February twenty-two members of a PCF action group were executed by firing squad at the Parisian fortress of Mont Valérien after allegedly being betrayed by an attractive red-haired Jewess called Lucienne Goldfarb. Recruited into the Communist Youth aged 18, Lucienne turned informer after losing her parents in the Rafle du Vel d’Hiv. Whether or not she was working for Darnand on the Manouchian operation or for some PCF faction that wanted the independent Armenian activist out of the way, is unknown. What is certain is that she was luckier than fellow-conspirator Joseph Davidowicz, who was slowly strangled to death by party comrades whose friends had been betrayed. The crime for which Manouchian’s group were shot was the assassination on 28 September 1943 of SS-Standartenführer Julius Ritter, Sauckel’s deputy for the STO in France. They were tracked down not by the Gestapo, but by the Renseignements Généraux, who arrested Manouchian at a meeting on 16 November 1943 with his FTP boss Joseph Epstein.

  Seeing everywhere in Paris the black and red posters announcing death sentences, Simone de Beauvoir wrote, ‘I looked for a long time at the young faces on the poster under the arches of the Metro, thinking with sadness that they would soon be forgotten.’12

  Headed ‘Liberation? Are these liberators or an army of criminals?’13 the posters made much of the fact that Manouchian and his immigrant comrades boasted hardly a single French surname between them. The twenty-third member of the group, Olga Bancic was beheaded in Stuttgart prison on 10 May 1944.

  From his cell a few hours before being led out to execution, Manouchian wrote to his wife:

  We are going to be shot at 3 p.m. I don’t really believe it, but I know I shall never see you again. I should so like to have had a child by you, as you always wanted. So please get married after the war without any guilt and have a child in my memory. My last wish is that you marry someone who can make you happy. I have no hatred for the German people or anyone else – except for whoever betrayed us and those who sold us. Everyone will have his due reward or punishment.14

  Marcel Rayman, who died with Manouchian and for the same crime, wrote to his son: ‘Be happy and make Mummy happy as I should have wanted to do, had I lived.’15

  German posters had long since attracted adolescent graffiti, despite the risks. For example, BOLCHEVISME was altered to BOCHE so that SI TU VEUX QUE LA FRANCE VIVE, TU COMBATTRAS LE BOLCHEVISME was changed from ‘If you want France to live, you will fight Bolshevism’, to ‘… you will fight the Germans’. The previous year a group of pupil-teachers at the Le Braz lycée in St-Brieuc had encouraged their students to tear down German posters, paint V-signs and distribute Resistance literature. After a German soldier was killed in the course of one of these teenage pranks, twenty of the pupils and pupil-teachers were arrested and interrogated by the Gestapo. Some were released, others deported, but three unlucky ones lost their lives at Mont Valérien, shot six minutes before Manouchian and his comrades.16

  Tortured at several interrogations before his condemnation on 20 January for ‘intelligence with the enemy’, Maurice Pomponeau was executed on 21 February at Montluc prison in Lyon for the unusual crime of encouraging desertion by offering false papers, civilian clothes and shelter to malgré-nous conscripts from Alsace and Lorraine. By profession an accounts officer in the French air force, his last letter to his family was a list of his insurance policies and included the advice that his salary should continue to be paid ‘until the end of the war, I think’.17

  Violent death was not reserved for captured résistants. In the late evening of 3 March 1944 RAF bombs aimed at the Renault factory in Boulogne-Billancourt killed 500 civilians living in this densely populated area and injured three times as many. The following day an impromptu cenotaph was erected in the Place de la Concorde, past which a queue of 300,000 people slowly filed. Another huge demonstration took place at the enormous mass grave in which the hundreds of simple coffins were tightly packed in rows side-by-side.

  Murder also throve. On 11 March Paris firemen were called by neighbours to a chimney fire at the unoccupied apartment of Dr Marcel Petiot in the very respectable rue Lesueur near the Arc de Triomphe. After breaking in, they recognised the smell of burning flesh and found in the stove the remains of human bodies. After police telephoned Petiot at his surgery near the Opéra, he arrived on a bicycle, claiming to be ‘a brother of the occupier’ and that he was in the Resistance. The bodies, he said, were of executed traitors. Pretending there were secret files in the apartment, he told the police it was vital the whole affair be hushed up.18 Only in Occupied Paris could anyone telling such a story be allowed to leave after promising to return – and then disappear!

  A further step in the moral decline of France’s government came on 16 March, when fascist theoretician Marcel Déat joined the cabinet. After five weeks of stubborn resistance, the marshal had given in to German pressure, ceded all executive power to Laval and been obliged to accept Hitler’s spy Cecil von Renthe-Fink into his immediate entourage. The Hero of Verdun was effectively under house arrest by this time, going outside only for exercise in his garden, accompanied by Ménétrel.

  By the end of the month, according to a cable from Abetz to Ribbentrop, the Paris police alone had carried out 4,745 arrests – many for sabota
ge in factories working for the Germans. This compared with approximately 40,000 French citizens arrested all over France in the whole of the previous year. Of the 670,000 workers drafted to work in the Reich, only 400,000 now remained there, the missing quarter-million having failed to return from home leave. Those enlisted in recognised Maquis units numbered at most 40,000,19 so where were the others?

  Some lived at home with false papers, operating in informal groups, distributing tracts or collecting intelligence to be passed on to London; others again lived rough in remote areas, but did not put their lives at risk because they had no weapons anyway. In Pellegrue, a small village in Gironde, Robert Hestin spent four months hiding in his bedroom after deserting from the STO, fearful that neighbours would denounce him if he went outdoors. Eventually unable to stand the inaction and because his political views were that way, he joined a communist Maquis unit passing through the area and travelled with them as far as la Souterraine, north of Limoges. There, he fell out with the self-appointed officers, who tried to win him over with a soft job as their mess servant in a requisitioned chateau. After giving them a lecture on the inequity of PCF members enjoying the services of a cook, pastrycook and baker in the chateau while their men slept in barns and lived on soup, Hestin left in disgust and walked the 200km home.20

  Decapitating the many-headed Maquis was impossible because there was no command structure. So, the Germans and Milice dealt with each band piecemeal, usually by infiltrating informers, so each new recruit had to be carefully vetted. When a Belgian walked into a camp near Thônes in Rhône-Alpes full of plausible details of his family being massacred by the SS, a search of his belongings revealed a hidden SS identity card. Since the Belgian would not talk, there was no alternative but to kill him. All maquisards had noms de guerre, to protect their families if caught. The one called ‘Blanc-Blanc’ was elected to do the deed because he had already ‘killed his first German’ as the saying went. He picked up the group’s single Sten gun and begged the victim to pardon him. They embraced, after which ‘Blanc-Blanc’ could not press the trigger. Everyone looked embarrassed, until the Belgian said, ‘You can’t expect me to give you the balls to do it, so please get a move on.’ The leader took the Sten from ‘Blanc-Blanc’ and fired a single shot at close range, his hands shaking so much that the Belgian was only wounded in the shoulder. Staunching the blood with his handkerchief, he begged them to send it back to his mother unwashed. The next bullet pierced his heart.21

  With Maquis sabotage and armed attacks growing daily more numerous in the area, the Moissac gendarmerie began fortifying its HQ. They also alerted the Maquis to German ambushes, but by no means all the civilian population supported the sabotage, as when the Toulouse-Bordeaux line was blown up in the early hours of 20 March, angering many Moissagais who could have been killed taking produce to market in Bordeaux on the 5 a.m. red-eye special.

  NOTES

  1. Letters 000094, 000096, 000097 and 000102 in archives of Ste-Foy.

  2. Interview with the author.

  3. Quoted by L. Chabrun et al., L’Express, 10 October 2005.

  4. Interview in Pryce-Jones, Paris in the Third Reich, p. 215.

  5. J. Duquesne, in L’Express, 14 June 2004, pp. 40–2.

  6. Photostat of Gestapo file in family archives at Château La Roque: ‘Ein besonders gefährlicher Agent, mit allen Mitteln kaltzustellen. Wenn möglich lebend herzubringen. 1.000.000 Fcs. Belohnung wem derjenigen verhaftet oder ausliefert.’

  7. Amouroux La Vie, Vol. 2, pp. 53–5.

  8. Ibid., Vol. 2, pp. 71–2.

  9. For full details see www.farac.org, the website of FARAC (La Fédération des Amicales Régimentaires et des Anciens Combattants).

  10. T. Todorov, Une tragédie française (Paris: Éditions du Seuil, 2004), pp. 64–5.

  11. Schindler-Levine, L’Impossible Au Revoir, pp. 148–53.

  12. Quoted in Webster, Pétain’s Crime, p. 210.

  13. Des libérateurs? La Libération! Par l’armée du crime.

  14. Krivopissko (ed.), La Vie à en Mourir, pp. 287–9.

  15. Ibid., p. 294.

  16. Ibid., pp. 284–6.

  17. Ibid., pp. 283–4.

  18. Thornton, The Liberation of Paris, p. 63.

  19. Amouroux, La Vie, Vol. 2, pp. 47–8.

  20. Personal communication with the author.

  21. Amouroux, La Vie, pp. 49–50.

  20

  DANCING IN THE DARK

  Two days later, with Hubert de Monbrison absent en mission she knew not where, and her daughters Françoise and Manon safe with the Giraud family in Moissac, Renée went to visit her aunt Loulou, staying at a small hotel in La Roque-Gageac, a picturesque village on the banks of the Dordogne. It was an inspired choice of date, for at 6.30 the following morning a party of Germans blew in the kitchen door of Château St-Roch, hoping to find Hubert there.

  Renée’s two sons looked out of their bedroom window to see another soldier prone beside a machine gun under the great cedar tree in the garden, a server kneeling beside him to feed the belt of ammunition, ready to shoot down anyone fleeing the house. Booted feet ran up the grand stone staircase and two soldiers burst into the boys’ bedroom, hauling them bodily down to the main hall decorated with the armour, swords and halberds of their father’s Huguenot ancestors. There, they were lined up at gunpoint in their pyjamas with the valet Pierre, plus his wife and frightened children, and a recently arrived refugee boy of 17, who the boys pretended was a visiting cousin. Young Jean de Monbrison urgently needed to empty his bladder after the night’s sleep. Christian warned him that he would be shot for trying to escape if he so much as moved but, when the attention of the Germans relaxed, 10-year-old Jean slipped into a toilet. He was hauled out before he had finished and booted back into line with the others while the building was searched.

  The ancient uncle, who was now quite gaga, appeared and told them blithely, ‘These gentlemen have invited me to go and take breakfast with them in Toulouse’. After his valet had made the Germans understand that his master was no longer able to look after himself, the officer commanding laughingly arrested him also, so he could continue his customary duties inside the St-Michel prison in Toulouse!

  The soldiers now conducted a more thorough search for Hubert, using 15-year-old Christian as a human shield as they burst into each room. The nightmare probably lasted no more than twenty minutes, but seemed an eternity to the boy. As they shoved him ahead of them through each doorway, he was more frightened that his father might have returned in the night without waking them than of the loaded rifles prodding his back. Released to rejoin his younger brother, he saw the nephew of the estate steward who had betrayed them all being taken away by the Germans, together with the Spanish workers and the youths with false papers for whom Renée had found jobs on the estate.

  After the Germans’ departure, with the usual threats to return, the only people left in the main house were the two brothers, the false cousin and a hysterical Jewish girl from Alsace. She had been working in the kitchen when the Germans arrived and had the presence of mind to make coffee for the officers. Thanking her politely, they had taken no more notice of her, but her nerve cracked when she understood them discussing in German whether to shoot one of the brothers and leave his dead body on the steps of the château as bait to bring his father back in the hope of saving his other son. The terrified girl hid in the garden while the three youths ran upstairs to grab sunglasses, old hats and coats as disguise for themselves and her before jogging for 14km through the woods and fields to reach Françoise in Moissac.

  She was in her bedroom doing some maths homework that had to be handed in the next day when called downstairs by Madame Giraud after her brothers and the two other terrified young people arrived, exhausted and covered in mud. Since there was no way of contacting their father, Françoise decided to set out with Christian by train to Sarlat, the nearest railway station to La Roque-Gageac, and warn their mother not to return. They arrived at
Sarlat five minutes before curfew. Warned to stay in the station until dawn, or risk being shot on sight by a German patrol, they slipped out and walked 12km through totally unknown country in pitch darkness, hiding in ditches each time they met a German patrol. Luckily none had dogs. Well after 1 a.m., they arrived exhausted at the hotel, to wake their mother with the news of what had happened that morning. Rénée wept, relieved that Hubert had not been captured or killed, and Christian fell asleep, leaving his mother and sister to worry about what to do next.1

  Taking refuge in the house of an old friend of her husband, Renée and the children were awoken early one morning by the noise of doors being broken down. Opening the bedroom shutters to escape through the garden, they found their way blocked by a civilian in a black leather coat, who pointed a revolver at them and shouted, ‘Police spéciale allemande!’ Lined up awaiting interrogation, Renée briefed her children in whispers about her current false identity, while fully expecting to be taken away in handcuffs or even shot on the spot. However, the Geheime Feldgendarmerie men showed no interest in her or the children, having come for the daughter-in-law of the owner of the house, whose letters in a personal code to her husband serving in the French army in Algieria had been intercepted by the censors. Assuming her a spy, they ignored pleas from her father-in-law to take him instead because she had two little children to look after, and hustled the terrified woman off to the Fort Montluc in Lyon, leaving her 7-month-old baby and 2-year-old son to be looked after by Renée and her daughters.

  After Françoise had returned to Moissac, her younger sister Manon volunteered to accompany her back to the chateau, without the steward seeing them, to recover some of Renée’s jewellery, which could be sold for food. Thrusting the jewels into the saddlebag of one bicycle, they headed for Moissac, with a borrowed poodle sitting in the basket on the handlebars of the other bike. At two checkpoints on the road they stopped and chatted to the German soldiers, letting them fondle the dog, before riding off high on adrenalin at the risk they had taken and holding their breath for a shouted ‘Halt!’ and the click of a rifle bolt behind them.