ANDRÉE’S WAR
How One Young Woman
Outwitted the Nazis
FRANCELLE BRADFORD WHITE
For Andrée
A NOTE ON THE TEXT
The majority of the material in this book is drawn from a variety of sources, including Andrée’s diaries and notebooks, a recorded interview from 1996, written sources such as memoirs and a history of the Orion Group, and other published works. Some is based on conversations the author had with her mother, Andrée Griotteray, and with other members of Orion, including her uncle, Alain Griotteray. Occasionally, to fill an unavoidable gap in the narrative, the author has had to rely on supposition, supported by the evidence gleaned elsewhere.
Contents
Introduction
1. An Acknowledgement
2. The Making of a Resistance Fighter
3. War!
4. The Evacuation of Paris
5. Life Under Occupation
6. A First Rebellion
7. A Life Lived Well
8. Fighting Back
9. Working Amidst the Enemy
10. Taking Risks
11. A Dangerous Affair
12. The Birth of Orion
13. Courage
14. Imperilled
15. The Allied Landings in North Africa
16. Arrest
17. Escape
18. Illness
19. Betrayal
20. Secret Agent
21. Gold
22. The Cyanide Option
23. The Brothel
24. The Arrest
25. The Cat with Nine Lives
26. Liberation!
27. Life After Liberation
28. A Just Reward
Epilogue
Intelligence Gathering in France
A Note on the French Resistance
Bibliography and Sources
Notes
Acknowledgements
Plates
Index
Copyright
Introduction
When my mother, Andrée, began to show the initial signs of the disease generally known as Alzheimer’s, I was not sure how to cope with my emotions. At some stage in the past I had been told that when you are upset it can help to express your feelings on paper, so I decided to write about her. Andrée has done many interesting, wonderful things throughout her lifetime but it was what she did during the Second World War that had always caught my imagination.
In 1945 Andrée was given the Médaille de la Résistance. She was also awarded the Croix de guerre, with a citation personally made out in the name of ‘le Général’ (Head of the Provisional French Government) – an honour not given to all recipients. How could a woman who had shown such courage, intuition and energy (and who remained, into her seventies, so attractive, beautifully dressed and resourceful) fall prey to such a devastating and cruel disease? When she first became ill she was still at the helm of a family business with headquarters in London and subsidiaries in Paris and New York.
As my brother and I fought to cope with her prognosis, I filed my writing away and moved on to deal with the consequences of an illness we still know so little about.
In 2008, Andrée’s brother and my uncle, Alain Griotteray, died aged eighty-five. In 2001 Alain had been made a Grand Officier de la Légion d’honneur by the then president, Jacques Chirac – an award held only by a limited number of Frenchmen and women at any one time. The address at his funeral, which was attended by several members of the French government, described Alain’s contribution to French politics during the twentieth century before focusing on his role, at eighteen years of age, as one of the youngest leaders of a French Resistance group. As we returned to London after the funeral, I thought to myself that their story deserved a wider audience. Much has been written in French about Alain and Andrée and their Resistance colleagues, but I knew only too well that most of Andrée’s six grandchildren and their descendants were unlikely to read anything about their grandmother unless it was in English. Besides, Andrée herself loved Britain and the English language from a young age, as did her mother before her: the strong links that Yvonne established in England are still evident one hundred years later. Andrée ultimately married an Englishman and raised her own family in England (always speaking English with them); it was right that her adoptive country should know a little more about her. Nine months later, I returned to Paris to begin to research the story you are about to read.
But where to start? I am not a writer nor a historian, let alone an academic. I began by walking the streets of Paris, following in Andrée’s footsteps when she lived and worked there during the war. I took the métro, the bus and cycled, as Andrée did to her job at the Préfecture de Police (Police Headquarters), where she worked under the supervision of members of the Wehrmacht. I visited the police archives and discovered Les policiers français sous l’Occupation, a book by Professor Jean-Marc Berlière, who was, I believe, the first person to write in detail about the involvement of the Parisian police in the pogrom of approximately 13,000 Jews on 16/17 July 1942, and about which I knew very little. Jean-Marc had worked obstinately for several years to force the police and the Ministry of the Interior to open their archives. I visited the Musée Jean Moulin, the Musée des Invalides and the Jewish Museum; with my son I searched the archives of the Ministry of Defence at the Château de Vincennes to find the files held on the Orion Resistance Group, as Alain named his Resistance network. My story – their story – was beginning to take shape. I wrote down everything I could remember my mother telling me about what she did during the war. I spoke to relatives, including my uncle, Bernard Leclair. I had a long interview with François Clerc, deputy leader of the Orion Group and one of Alain’s closest friends (and who had known me since I was a baby), and I continued to walk, passing the landmarks Andrée would have passed – the Hôtel Meurice (headquarters of the military during the war); the Palais du Luxembourg, where the Luftwaffe were based; the Champs-Élysées, down which the Wehrmacht marched every day for four years. These landmarks were all within a few minutes’ walk from where Andrée and her entire family had lived. I thought about what had happened on the streets of Paris during those dark years and then, to cheer myself up, I imagined the city on the day of its liberation, which Andrée had so often described and about which I was also able to talk with my eighty-seven-year-old friend, Jeanine Louveau.
My brother was vaguely aware of what I was doing and, on my return, he said, ‘You had better have these.’ In a paper bag were ten journals written by Andrée between 1934 and 1947. In them Andrée had described her thoughts about the invasion and the occupation of Paris, along with a record of daily life, her work at Police Headquarters, her friends and boyfriends. There were also several little black notebooks containing notes of appointments, reservations, train times and destinations; these were a vital source of information about Andrée’s travels around France on behalf of the Resistance, especially after the Normandy landings in June 1944 when she seemed to be constantly on the move. Despite the brevity of the information, it was surprising to find she had put so much on record, given the dangers implicit in doing so.
Much of the information in the diaries, by contrast, was written in code – nothing that a professional code breaker could not have translated, but indicative that Andrée was conscious of the need for caution. As the diaries went on, and especially after the landings, the entries became increasingly emotionally charged and harder to follow, with dates jumping around and entries appearing out of order. Some pages had been torn out. Andrée was working extremely hard at this time, travelling frequently on a rail network that was being bombed regularly. She was under pressure to get the material she carried safely to its desti
nation before travelling back to work in Paris, but the trains were hugely unreliable, not to mention dangerous.
Despite being bilingual, translating her diaries and notebooks has not been easy. Andrée spoke very good English but she always wrote in French, and I have found that often she would describe or talk about something in a way in which a native English speaker would never have done, which has been a challenge. I wanted to capture her voice, including the phrases and idioms I remember her using. My brother also gave me the letters our father wrote to Andrée between 1945 and 1947, and while I am confident these were kept for us to see, I have tried to ensure that the more personal entries will be kept within our family.
On my next research trip to France I flew to Biarritz, hired a car and drove to Orion, where I stayed at the Château d’Orion, which had been the headquarters of the Orion Group. I was warmly welcomed by the château’s present owner, Frau Elke Jeanrond-Premauer from Munich, and I met Marguerite Labbé, widow of Jean Labbé and daughter-in-law of Madame Labbé, the châtelaine during the war years. She told me many stories about what happened during the 1940s and I also spent some time with the mayor of the tiny hamlet, who had helped to arrange a large memorial service and commemoration for the members of the Orion Group in September 1985. More than 1,000 people attended, including Jacques Chaban-Delmas, a former prime minister of France, and Jacques Soustelle, head of the French intelligence services in Algeria during part of the Second World War, plus several leading members of the French Resistance movement. All were there to pay tribute to the importance of the château to the Orion Group and France’s wider Resistance story.
I learnt about the ‘routes d’évasion’, the escape routes through the Pyrenees for Frenchmen wanting to fight against the Nazis, and about the inhumane holding camps on both the French and Spanish sides of the mountains. On one side the French held Spaniards escaping Franco’s Spain, while on the other the Spaniards held Frenchmen escaping Hitler’s occupation. It was a beautiful place, despite the horrors of the past, and as I soaked up the stunning Basque countryside I thought about what it must have been like, back then.
To help fill the many gaps in my growing knowledge of the period, I turned to Alain Gandy’s book, La jeunesse et la Résistance: réseau Orion, 1940– 1944, published in 1992 and written with the help of several Orion members. It has been my ‘bible’; without it I would not have been able to piece the whole story together and I am very grateful to the author. Similarly, two of Alain Griotteray’s books, Mémoires and Qui étaient les premiers résistants?, gave me a huge amount of information about the period.
Further gaps were filled by Yves de Kermoal, an Orion member who, along with his wife Patricia, invited my husband and me to stay with them at the Domaine de Rateau, from where we visited the station in Bordeaux where Andrée had been arrested.
To the best of my knowledge and my ability, everything in this book is based on fact, although when dealing with wartime intelligence one can never be entirely certain of everything, nor always understand the way in which something has been recorded. The events described took place over seventy years ago (and several of the key accounts I’ve relied on were only recorded many years after the fact); they have been described in different ways by different authors, sometimes with different dates recorded. In a book recently published by the Service Historique de la Défense, Les réseaux de résistance de la France combattante (The Resistance Groups of the Free French), Andrée is described in the Ministry of Defence records as having been a P2 agent; an agent working solely for the Free French and in no paid employment between 1942 and 1944. Her title was recorded as Chef de Liaison (chief liaison officer). Yet she was clearly also working at Police Headquarters from October 1940 until December 1944, according to both their official records and her diaries. Why the discrepancy? There may not be an explanation for everything.
At times I have had to step away from a factual account to fill in gaps in my narrative. I have based all such accounts on conversations with my mother over the years. She told me about the time she stayed in a brothel following a trip I made to Mexico when I was twenty-two years old, and returned home shocked by the conditions of the accommodation I stayed in. On my twenty-fourth birthday she gave me a Swiss gold coin; at the time charm bracelets were in fashion and it was common to add coins to one’s bracelet. This led to the story of how she came to be responsible for smuggling a number of gold coins into Paris to fund Resistance work. And then there was the day she took a German general out to lunch. I remember her telling me about it in her kitchen in London. I was in my late twenties, we were discussing a war film and I casually said it must have been impossible to bribe German soldiers. She contradicted me.
Many people who lived through the difficult years of the Second World War had no wish to talk about it afterwards. This was not the case for my mother. She often talked about their exploits, always modestly dismissing her own achievements (she told me more than once ‘I was only a postman!’) but emphasising her delight at any humiliation bestowed upon the Wehrmacht. Both Andrée and her mother, Yvonne (my grandmother), often spoke of the difficulties of living under the occupation: Andrée described the bombing that Paris suffered in her diary and described herself and her fellow citizens as ‘prisonniers civils’, though she was always insistent that it was nothing compared to what the British had to endure, especially in London and Coventry.
Yet some wounds remained raw many years after: I have no memory of either my mother or grandmother ever referring to Pétain or Vichy, or talking about what happened to the thirteen thousand Jews during the shocking Vel’ d’Hiv pogrom of 1942. Andrée did, however, speak about a Jewish girl who stayed with them, described later in this book. Were there others? There is little specific in writing, though instinct tells me Yvonne was involved in helping other Jewish emigrés. Several notes in one of Andrée’s black diaries show that she met up over a dozen times in 1941 with a Jewish woman who was not a known friend. And as my uncle, Bernard Leclair, pertinently said: ‘Surely you don’t think they recorded everything they were doing back then?’
Much of what the Orion Group did, for security reasons, went unrecorded, although official Ministry of Defence records in Vincennes show that thirty-one separate pieces of intelligence were passed on to British Intelligence by members of the group between April 1941 and October 1942. After the group began to supply the US Office of Strategic Services (OSS) with intelligence, there is no record of the number of pieces of intelligence passed on, so there is no way to be sure of how much they did ultimately, but what is certain is that, through her work as a courier, Andrée was responsible for a significant amount of documentation reaching the British and American intelligence services.
Inevitably, in an account like this there will be omissions and differing viewpoints and interpretations of history. To the best of my ability I have tried to produce an accurate record of ‘Andrée’s war’, but I apologise in advance for any errors. I am particularly conscious that I may have made mistakes in the physical description of some members of the Orion Group; some I met only as a child and so have had to rely on those memories, while others I met when they were in their sixties or seventies and therefore trying to describe them as they would have been in the 1940s was not always easy.
1
An Acknowledgement
It is 8 May 1995. Fifty years have passed since the end of the Second World War. Andrée White stands in the main square of Charenton-le-Pont in Paris by the memorial to the dead of the First and Second World Wars, the town church in the background. The ‘Marseillaise’ is playing. Some of the ‘Anciens Combattants’ are bearing the French flag, the Tricolore. The flags are slowly lifted. The music stops. Alain Griotteray, Mayor and Member of Parliament (and, coincidentally, Andrée’s brother), moves forward. From a velvet cushion he slowly lifts the medal of the Légion d’honneur, the highest award given by the French Republic.
‘In the name of the President of France, François Mitte
rrand, I award you the Légion d’honneur a titre de résistants particulièrement valeureux [for your exceptionally brave actions during the Second World War].’
He pins the medal onto Andrée White’s jacket, smiles and kisses her on both cheeks. Her daughter and son are there to witness the event, along with three of her grandchildren and her son-in-law. The square is full of people watching this special and unusual event; many of whom have known Andrée for many years. It is not the first such award she has received, however.
Ten soldiers salute the new Légionnaire. Andrée stands to attention. She wears a midnight-blue wool suit with gold buttons that shine in the sunlight. Her blond hair is cut short. On her suit the ribbons of her other medals have already been sewn onto her jacket, as is the custom in Europe. Her new medal sits on the blue background. Shaped like a five-sided double-pointed star, it is made of white enamel. It is encircled by a green wreath of oak and laurel leaves and surmounted by a smaller similar wreath. The head of Marianne, the symbolic figure of the Republic, appears on the front of the medal, the tri-coloured flags on the back. The inscription on the front reads: ‘République Française’ (French Republic) and on the back: ‘Honneur et Patrie’ (Honour and Motherland). The Légion d’honneur was created in 1802 by Napoleon Bonaparte. It is the highest award given by the French Republic for outstanding service to France and is given regardless of the social status or the nationality of the recipient.
The ‘Marseillaise’ is played again. The band stops. Andrée and her family leave the square. The soldiers and war veterans march away. The crowd disperses. That night there will be fireworks in Charenton-le-Pont. France is celebrating fifty years since the end of the war. She is also celebrating the victory of a new Gaullist president, Jacques Chirac. It is a warm evening and the streets of Paris are alive with people. The Champs-Élysées had been brought to a standstill that afternoon. Just before the fireworks begin, a special speech is to be made before a crowd of more than a thousand people.
Andrée's War Page 1
