Avenue of Spies

by Alex Kershaw

  Geissler had led the SS war against the local resistance since the previous fall and employed a band of twenty-two Frenchmen, called the “Batissier Brigade,” who had changed their names to sound more German and were mercilessly violent. He also worked closely with Joseph Darnand, head of the Milice. Geissler left a distinct impression, with his large oval face and a pointy nose, and because he had spent time as an interpreter in a casino in Nice before the war he was fluent in French. That had helped him penetrate several resistance networks in early 1944, but to seize so many terrorists in the operation in Bourboule, in one fell swoop, was good work indeed. A thorough search of the safe house yielded even more bounty: apart from an uncoded list of members of the network, there were several letters to a Madame Jackson. Her address was given as 11, Avenue Foch.

  PART THREE

  NIGHT AND FOG

  It was a world composed of masters and slaves, in which gentleness, kindness, pity, the respect for the law, and a taste for freedom were no longer virtues, but inexplicable crimes. It was a world in which one could only obey by crawling, killing on orders, and dying oneself in silence if one could not howl with the wolves.

  —JACQUES DELARUE, The Gestapo: A History of Horror

  THIRTEEN

  GUESTS OF THE REICH

  AROUND 7:30 A.M. on Thursday, May 25, 1944, there was a knock on the front door at 11, Avenue Foch. Phillip Jackson was getting ready to go to school when Toquette went to the door, opened it, and found three Milice men standing outside in their blue jackets and berets, all of them armed.

  Was a Madame Toquette Jackson at this address?

  Toquette smiled at the men on the doorstep. Behind her, standing in the hallway, was Phillip. The Milice men noticed he was less at ease than Toquette.

  One of the men was clearly the leader, “le chef.” He asked after Dr. Jackson.

  “He’s at the hospital,” said Toquette, “seeing his patients.”

  Two of the men turned and left, headed for the hospital.

  Toquette had hidden some documents under some pharmaceutical products in Sumner’s home laboratory in the next room. Jauntily, she offered the remaining officer something to drink. He accepted and Toquette left him beside the telephone in the hallway, walked into the laboratory, gathered some letters, and carried them into the kitchen, where she found the maid Louise. “Take these,” said Toquette. Louise immediately did so, quickly leaving by the door leading to the Rue de Traktir, then making her way to an address where a Goélette agent, code-named “Mr. Petit,” could be found.

  Meanwhile, at the American Hospital, the Milice arrested Sumner, put him into their car, and drove fast south toward the Seine, finally reaching Avenue Foch. But they did not pull up in front of any of Helmut Knochen’s offices. Instead they parked in front of the black iron railings at number 11, and then decided to place the whole family in the front garden, outside of Phillip’s bedroom window, while they awaited orders from their seniors. They had clearly been told to arrest the family but not what to do with them or where to take them. It was a beautiful day and the lilies of the valley were in full bloom, the sweet-smelling bell-shaped flowers a glorious sight.

  Two of the men went inside and searched the house, but they didn’t find anything as they rifled through cupboards, chests, and wardrobes, leaving clothes and papers strewn in their wake. Then they told the Jacksons to pack a case. Phillip made sure to place his history book in a bag, determined to continue to study wherever he was going, because he was taking his crucial baccalaureate exam in just two weeks’ time.

  It was all rather civilized and polite. Sumner even invited the miliciens to have lunch and one of them assured him as they ate that there must have been some kind of mistake. Things would be worked out. After lunch, perhaps reassured, Sumner smoked cigars with the chief of the miliciens in the front garden. Every so often the telephone in the hallway shrilled. The miliciens were quick to answer it. Someone from the hospital was on the line, asking after Dr. Jackson, and later that afternoon the hospital called several more times, but the miliciens still refused to allow Sumner to talk on the phone, suspecting he might try to trick them or call for help.

  Word spread fast through the Goélette network about the arrests of the Jacksons and the seven agents in Bourboule. Francis Deloche de Noyelle, based in Grenoble, learned immediately from contacts in his organization. He felt terribly guilty and blamed himself for their arrest. It was his fault. After all, he had been the one to recruit Toquette.

  Toquette remained focused. Nothing could be revealed if she was questioned. Two days would be needed for agents in the Goélette network to disperse, change codes and identities or do whatever was needed to avoid being caught in the same trap. To warn off other agents, when the miliciens were distracted, she opened the windows overlooking the Rue de Traktir. It stayed light well into the evening, and when Louise returned she and Phillip were allowed to sit inside, near the open windows. When they saw someone they recognized walking toward the front door, they were able to wave the visitor away.

  That night the miliciens even allowed Toquette and Sumner to stay together, alone in their bedroom. One can only imagine what they discussed. Toquette had been the driving force behind their joining the resistance and had agreed to Francis Deloche de Noyelle’s request, but did she now regret doing so with all three of their lives in danger? They both had heard how brutal other miliciens could be, not to mention the Gestapo headquartered less than a hundred yards away.

  The following morning, the miliciens informed the Jacksons that they were to be taken to Vichy, to their headquarters. Before the family got into a black Citroën under guard, Toquette had time to warn Phillip out of earshot of the miliciens: “If they question you, don’t say a thing.” Then they were leaving. Louise cried as she saw the Citroën head for the Étoile. For some reason the Milice did not think to arrest her, and for several days she would remain in the kitchen, looking onto the Rue de Traktir, and calmly wave away anyone approaching, even though she may have been watched'.

  The Jacksons sat in the back of the Citroën in silence as they made their way south along the upper Loire Valley toward the spa town of Vichy. The Citroën was a favorite with the Milice and Gestapo because it held the road well at high speed, essential for car chases. It stopped a few times for the Milice men to get out and urinate.

  Phillip looked out of the window, recognizing the landscape from almost exactly four years before, when as an innocent twelve-year-old he had left Paris for a summer of fishing with his aunt Tat and mother. They were in the very same kind of car, passing through the same sleepy towns beside the broad, fast-flowing Loire: Nemours…Nevers…Moulins. It felt to him that the journey would last forever, but late that afternoon they arrived at the Château des Brosses, near Vichy.

  The miliciens then split up the family. Phillip’s parents were kept at the Château des Brosses, the Milice’s main prison. Toquette, no doubt traumatized by her forced separation from her son, was placed in a room on the ground floor, while Sumner was escorted to another.

  The next morning a milicien came to Toquette’s cell.

  “Would you like to have breakfast with your husband?” he asked.

  Toquette was taken down to the château’s garden, guarded by miliciens, where she and Sumner spoke in English, which their captors did not understand. They agreed on what they would say when interrogated: it was important to get their stories to match.

  Meanwhile the miliciens had placed Phillip in a large white stucco building in central Vichy that had a prominent sign above the entrance: Le Petit Casino. The former theater was now the Milice’s headquarters. Phillip and three other prisoners were made to sit down in a seat in the stalls, guarded by three miliciens with submachine guns who stood on the stage. Phillip was then taken to a cellar, where he was left alone in the darkness without food or water and soon became delirious, probably through dehydration and delayed shock. He dreamt at one point of the placid lake in Enghien, where he h
ad boated so often with his parents.

  Back at the Château des Brosses, Toquette and Sumner were still being treated extraordinarily well, and even allowed to have dinner one night together alfresco on a terrace. It was too good to last. One morning they were taken in a car to Le Petit Casino, where Sumner was placed in Phillip’s cell. Phillip had been alone, utterly terrified, for more than two days, and it must have been a great relief to see his father, indeed for him to be at his side once more.

  Toquette was put in another cell on a different floor. On May 31, she was able somehow to arrange for a letter to be sent to her sister, Tat, who was living in the Jacksons’ weekend home in Enghien:

  The weather continues to be good here but cooler following a storm. This is the third letter I have written you at intervals of two days. I have nothing new to say as far as we are concerned. Today is the day Pete should have taken his examination for the Baccalaureate and I haven’t seen him since Friday [May 26, 1944]. I am beginning to feel really very dirty. I haven’t undressed since the same day and even if I could undress it would be to put back on the same clothes and I have nothing to clean myself with. Happily, I am wearing practical clothes: my Scots skirt that doesn’t get crumpled and gray sweater, flexible and comfortable.

  Jack [Sumner] is still here but on the first floor whereas I am housed on the second floor, better off than him, the poor fellow. If you get my letters you could telephone to…Miss Comte, the director of the hospital, to give her news of us.

  My courage is being tested to the extreme not so much for me as for Pete and also for Jack; if I knew that he was free my particular fate would be less painful.

  My sister, I hug you.

  Your Sister

  In his cell, Phillip pulled a ticket from his trouser pocket. It was for entry to his baccalaureate exam that day. He had studied hard for it, knowing his parents wanted him to excel. It was a tough exam, with only around fifty percent of students passing. That’s why he had reviewed a great deal, wanting to make his father proud.

  At least he no longer had to study. He tore up the ticket, thinking, Good riddance.

  Several days later, on June 6, the Allies finally landed in France. D-Day, the greatest amphibious operation in history, had arrived. What the Jacksons had waited so long for had finally happened, just two weeks after their arrest. The Atlantic Wall had been breached and troops were streaming across the very beach, code-named Juno, where Phillip had played as a child. It was time, finally, for the French to take sides. From Vichy, Marshal Pétain called for all patriotic Frenchmen to remain neutral. French blood, he stressed, was too precious to be wasted in this fight. For Pierre Laval and other high-profile collaborators, the D-Day landings were an unmitigated disaster. He had already declared that an “American victory would mean victory for the Jews and the communists.” In a speech broadcast on June 6, he went even further, imploring the French people to do nothing as hundreds of thousands of Allied soldiers fought an increasingly bloody battle to liberate them.

  “You are not in the war,” Laval emphasized. “You must not take part in the fighting.”

  The French were to play no part in liberating themselves.

  “At this moment fraught with drama,” Laval exhorted his listeners, “when the war has been carried on to our territory, show by your worthy and disciplined attitude that you are thinking of France and only of her.”

  —

  THE NEXT day, June 7, 1944, the Jacksons were finally handed over to Helmut Knochen’s colleagues in Vichy: the Gestapo. D-Day was of scant comfort now to Sumner and Toquette. What they had feared most was happening and there was no telling what the Gestapo might resort to, but surely they would try to play mind games, the kind they used with other families they arrested. A good start would be convincing one of the three Jacksons that another of them had talked.

  Sumner and Toquette must also have asked themselves why the Gestapo had decided to get involved. Indeed, why had the Milice handed them over? Perhaps the Milice no longer wanted to be responsible for the Jacksons given that the Americans were fighting on French soil. Or maybe the Gestapo believed they had a potentially important source of information in the Jacksons.

  Only one thing was certain; they could be executed at any time. The SS were increasingly trigger-happy and nervous as France spiraled downward into civil war, with the resistance fighting actual battles with the Milice in the mountainous regions of central and southern France. The German army was, meanwhile, rushing all available forces from the south to the Normandy front. But the pace of reinforcement was infuriatingly slow, because the resistance had blown bridges and rail lines. Atrocity followed atrocity as the SS struck back indiscriminately at any community thought to have harbored “terrorists.” On June 10, men belonging to the SS Der Führer regiment entered the small town of Oradour-sur-Glane, 160 miles due west, and killed 642 people in the most notorious atrocity committed in France; 207 of the victims were children.

  Around the same time, the Jacksons were moved to the Hôtel du Portugal, the Gestapo’s torture house in Vichy, on a road somewhat ironically named Boulevard des États-Unis (United States Boulevard). It was not far from the shuttered American embassy in Vichy. Phillip and his father were put in separate cells, and Toquette was placed in a different building. The Gestapo officers in the prison were all French, and one of them tried to reassure Phillip that he and his father would soon be freed. He made no mention of Toquette.

  Phillip shared his small, dark cell with three other men. The air was rancid. Prisoners had scrawled defiant messages on the walls. For a bed, Phillip had a bunk the size of a door that was attached to a wall. One of the men in the cell belonged to the resistance and Phillip saw him taken away one day for interrogation. He was brought back two hours later, utterly traumatized, with all his nails pulled out, a bloody mess. Phillip looked at the man’s disfigured hands in terror. Next time they would come for him. He would be tortured. But when? Tomorrow? Late at night? Not knowing was agony. Then Phillip witnessed true brutality for the first time when a guard whipped one of the other inmates twenty-five times just a few feet from Phillip. Neighbors were said to complain that the Gestapo played the radio too loud, day and night. No wonder. It was to drown out the screams.

  One day, a guard entered Phillip’s cell. Without warning, he struck out and hit Phillip with his whip. Phillip had apparently not stood quickly enough to attention. His jailers were clearly sadists looking for any excuse to lash out and vent their rage. One prisoner in his cell, a forlorn young man who came from Clermont-Ferrand, was also beaten savagely and later showed Phillip his back, which was covered in purple and yellow bruises and bleeding badly. Phillip did his best to care for him but there was not much he could practically do, and he had little strength anyway, feeling ever weaker through hunger because his rations were now just three small pieces of black bread per day and a bowl of so-called soup. He was always afraid, worried that something terrible had happened to his parents. One day he was taken from his cell to wash himself but given only a minute to get clean. No towel or soap was provided and he was allowed just thirty seconds to urinate in a bucket while a guard stood nearby with a whip in his hand.

  Finally, the interrogations began. Phillip found himself standing facing a man called Nerou, a Gestapo interrogator—a man of average height, with black hair, maybe twenty-five years old at most. What had Phillip been involved with and what had his parents done? Phillip said he knew nothing about their activities, and to a great extent this was the truth. To his surprise, Nerou did not beat him and sent Phillip back to his cell after a short while. Both Toquette and Sumner were questioned extensively. Neither proved cooperative and, surprisingly, neither was mistreated. They were to be broken some other way, perhaps, but not now by Nerou. In the chaos and confusion following the Allied invasion, some Gestapo offices were stretched thin, overwhelmed by the sheer number of suspected resistance members who needed to be interrogated.

  The Jacksons were then sent
forty miles north of Vichy to a German prison based in an old castle in Moulins, where Sumner and Phillip were led down stone steps toward a dungeon. Phillip began to count the steps. He liked counting, had a way with numbers, and by focusing on the count he didn’t have to think about what might happen next. He was glad he was still with his father. That was consolation. In all, he counted 118 steps, and then he and his father were placed in the same cell. Phillip grew even weaker from hunger until Sumner pleaded with one of the guards, an old German, stressing that Phillip was sixteen, growing fast, and needed extra food. The guard took pity, managed to get Phillip a double ration, and even allowed Phillip and his father to each send a letter to someone. Phillip wrote to his aunt Tat in Enghien, wondering if his friends had passed their exams.

  Toquette also sent news to Tat in Enghien. She had lost her suitcase and had not been able to clean herself properly for six days, but she had not yet started to starve. She had been lucky enough to be given a food package from the Red Cross. Often, the Gestapo did not allow political prisoners like her to receive any packages whatsoever. They were instead to disappear into what the Gestapo called “Nacht und Nebel” (“night and fog”), becoming nonexistent victims, phantoms in the Nazi gulag to be shot and killed when deemed appropriate—certainly before the end of the war, when they could possibly be liberated and then testify at war crimes trials against Helmut Knochen and his kind.

  Phillip spent the next three weeks in the same cell as his father, terribly worried about his mother. Father and son talked little but did share snippets of news about the invasion. Whenever new prisoners arrived, Phillip and others gathered around to hear what they knew about the Allies’ advance. One day Phillip watched as his father was taken away for more questioning. Again Sumner said nothing of use and finally looked his interrogator in the eye and brazenly asked: “How are things in Normandy?”