World War II Love Stories

by Gill Paul

  The Great Escape

  On June 9, 1943, General Delestraint, then head of the Conseil National de la Résistance, was arrested in Paris along with several members of his top team. De Gaulle’s representative, Jean Moulin, who had been instrumental in unifying the Resistance countrywide, quickly began work on restructuring its upper echelons to re-establish a functioning command structure. On June 20th, Lucie and Raymond brought little Jean-Pierre along as cover when they met him in a Lyons park. Moulin asked Raymond if he would relocate to Paris and Lucie immediately volunteered to go with him, despite misgivings. The following afternoon Raymond left to attend a meeting in a doctor’s surgery with Jean Moulin and six other senior figures in the Resistance. He arranged to meet Lucie later, down by the river, but he never turned up. The meeting had been stormed by Gestapo officers and all present had been arrested—someone had betrayed them.

  A train derailed by the Resistance at Vassieux-en-Vercors in southeastern France. A campaign of derailments and destruction of track was conducted in June 1944 to hinder German troops as they tried to get to Normandy after D-Day.

  Two days later Lucie summoned up her courage and visited the prison, asking to see the officer in charge. She was taken to Klaus Barbie himself, and she stammered out the following story: she was an aristocrat named Ghislaine de Barbentane and her fiancé, Claude Ermelin, had been accidentally caught up in the arrests while visiting the doctor with a chest complaint; it was imperative that he was released, as she was pregnant and they must marry before her parents realized and her good name was ruined.

  Jean Moulin, 1942. He always wore a scarf around his neck to hide the scar from a suicide attempt he had made after being captured by the Germans in 1940.

  Barbie opened a drawer and threw a pile of papers onto the desk between them. Among them was a photograph of her on a beach with a baby by her side. She had to think fast but managed to convince him that this was a friend’s child.

  “How long have you known the prisoner?” Barbie demanded.

  “Six weeks,” she replied nervously.

  “His name is not Ermelin, but Vallet,” Barbie told her. “It’s out of the question that we release him—he’s a terrorist.”

  Lucie sobbed and begged but to no avail. Barbie wasn’t going to change his mind. Over the following weeks, she did everything she could to make contact with Raymond or any of the others who had been arrested, but there was no word until late August when she was devastated to hear that he had been sentenced to death. Some of the people arrested with him in June had already been killed. She had to work fast.

  On September 6th, she acted as a scout on a mission to free four injured agents who lay in the hospital in Lyons. Two of her comrades disguised themselves as Gestapo agents and in that way they managed to get the injured men released into their custody.

  Meanwhile, Lucie approached an old German colonel and begged that she be allowed to marry her fiancé before his execution so that her baby would not be born illegitimate. She had to repeat her story to many different people, and several expensive bribes were exchanged, before it was finally agreed that the marriage could take place on October 21st.

  The day came, the fake marriage took place and, while Raymond was being transported back to prison, armed members of the Resistance attacked the van and freed him along with 13 other prisoners. He suffered a bullet wound in the cheek, he was much thinner, and he bore the scars of his interrogation by the Gestapo—but he was alive.

  Jean Moulin had not been so fortunate. He died on July 8th, soon after his arrest. Some reports claim that Klaus Barbie tortured him to death.

  Escape to London

  The Gestapo quickly worked out where Lucie and Raymond lived and visited the house on avenue Esquirol, where they interviewed the maid, Maria. Word was sent to Raymond’s parents to move to a different address, and little Jean-Pierre was whisked away from the school in the hills where Lucie had placed him for safekeeping. Lucie and Raymond hid for a month in Lyons, then were driven to a safehouse in Pont-de-Vaux in eastern France, from which they moved from place to place over the next few months, looked after by members of the local Resistance. On December 4th, they were distraught to hear the news that Raymond’s parents had been arrested; he tried to find out where they were so as to organize an escape, but without success.

  Messages transmitted by radio were crucial in the unification of disparate Resistance groups, helping them to establish joint strategies and receive messages from London.

  THE BUTCHER OF LYON

  Klaus Barbie was brought up by an abusive, alcoholic father who had been captured by the French during World War I and had a violent hatred for the nation. He died when Klaus was 18, and the young man joined the Hitler Youth and worked his way up through the ranks of the army. In November 1942, Hauptsturmführer Barbie was appointed head of the Gestapo for the Lyons area and quickly established a reputation as a brutal man lacking any human empathy. He personally tortured prisoners—including women and children—using extreme methods such as electric shocks, water torture, sexual abuse, and even skinning alive. After the war, he was recruited by American counter-intelligence to report on communist activity in Europe and managed to sneak off to South America and establish a new life. Nazi hunter Beate Klarsfeld tracked him down in Bolivia in 1972, and Barbie finally stood trial in France in 1987, charged with 41 separate crimes against humanity. He showed no remorse for his actions, was found guilty, and died in prison four years later.

  Listening to the BBC was their only source of news of the outside world, and sometimes transmission was jammed, but they were greatly encouraged when they heard that many of their old Resistance colleagues had been able to join General de Gaulle at his recently established headquarters in Algiers. It was not until the night of February 8, 1944, that they were finally able to flee to England. Lucie’s baby was due between the 10th and the 15th, so it was with some relief that she learned there would be a doctor on the flight with them from the little airfield in Villevieux. They traveled through the night and landed at 7a.m. the following morning at an airfield outside London. Three days later, on February 12th, their baby was born—a daughter they called Catherine, Lucie’s codename in the Resistance. They had already decided to use the surname Aubrac, one of the names Raymond had used in Lyons.

  Vietnamese leader Ho Chi Minh was godfather to Lucie and Raymond’s daughter, Elisabeth.

  As soon as they could, Lucie and Raymond traveled to Algiers to join the government in exile. General de Gaulle announced that once France was liberated, women would be given the vote, and Lucie was invited to join a consultative body, making her the first-ever Frenchwoman to sit in a parliamentary assembly. In August 1944, Raymond was made commissaire de la république in Marseilles, and the couple returned to France. His role was to establish authority in areas that had been liberated, but like many other commissaires, Raymond saw it as a chance to purge the police forces of collaborators.

  He also did his best to track down his parents, only to discover that they had been taken to Auschwitz and had not survived.

  After the War

  Raymond and Lucie testified at some of the war crimes trials and were involved in reconstruction committees, but their communist beliefs made De Gaulle wary of giving them too much responsibility. They became so friendly with Ho Chi Minh, the communist leader of Vietnam, that he agreed to be godfather to their third child, a daughter born in 1946.

  Lucie became a teacher while Raymond worked as a civil engineer. Then, in 1972, Klaus Barbie was arrested in Bolivia and brought back to be tried in 1987. As part of his testimony, he claimed that it was Raymond who had betrayed Jean Moulin by passing on details of the meeting in the doctor’s surgery to the Germans. Lucie and Raymond were outraged, and when the allegations were repeated in a book published in 1997, they sued for libel and won. Some historians found inconsistencies in a memoir Lucie had written about their wartime experiences, but she argued that it was produced 40 years after the
events in question and thus she could be forgiven for getting a few dates wrong. It seems clear that Barbie was lying and that he accused Raymond Aubrac because of the contempt he had for his communist beliefs. There is no doubt at all about the value of the work Lucie and Raymond did for the Resistance. When Raymond died in 2012, French president François Hollande said, “In our darkest times, he was, with Lucie Aubrac, among the righteous, who found, in themselves and in the universal values of our Republic, the strength to resist Nazi barbarism.”

  “In life, there are only three or four fundamental decisions to make. The rest is just luck.”

  Raymond always said the decision he was most proud of was when he chose Lucie as his partner. They were in it together all the way. “In life,” he said, “there are only three or four fundamental decisions to make. The rest is just luck.”

  Lucie and Raymond’s long and happy marriage was founded on the bedrock of their shared beliefs and values.

  Hedley & Dorrit Nash

  Hedley volunteered for the Canadian Army in 1942, not because of a patriotic spirit, but simply in order to put food on the table…

  Hedley in London, 1944. According to his captain, he was considered a “cheerful, friendly man.”

  Hedley and Dorrit had the odds stacked against them, with different skin colors, religions, nationalities, and backgrounds, but it seemed auspicious that they won a dance contest on their very first date and before long they both knew they were falling for each other.

  Hedley’s family was dirt poor. He grew up in Lakeville Corner, about 20 miles east of Fredericton, New Brunswick, one of ten brothers and two sisters all living in a tiny shack in the midst of a farming community. The family was descended from Black Loyalists, who had fought with the British during the American Revolutionary War (1775–83). Hedley also had some Maliseet Indian ancestors on his mother’s side. At the age of 11, Hedley left school to work on a farm and earn money to help support the family, so he was only able to complete the fifth grade. Over the next 19 years, he took seasonal farm work, labored as a coal miner, and helped out as a mechanic in his uncle’s garage, but had no further education. Hedley volunteered for the Canadian Army in 1942, not because of a patriotic spirit, but simply in order to put food on the table and perhaps raise his standard of living.

  Dorrit and her mother in Vienna, c.1933, before their world fell apart.

  By contrast, Dorrit Hacker grew up in a comfortable house in Vienna with her upper-middle-class Jewish parents. She was an only child, raised on Mozart, who often attended the opera and wanted for nothing. She was doing well at school when suddenly, at the age of nine, she was told Jewish children were no longer welcome and instantly the girls who had been her closest friends stopped talking to her. Dorrit was distressed and had no idea what was going on, because her parents did their best to protect her from the growing anti-Semitism in Austria. Further misfortune struck at the age of ten when she succumbed to encephalitis, which caused a permanent droop on one side of her face. After German troops marched into the country in the 1938 Anschluss (union), Dorrit’s parents realized that their lives could be in danger and her father Alfons, an accountant, sailed to Palestine to try to establish a home for them there. Dorrit and her mother waited for him to send for them, but he found it difficult to get a work permit because, despite all his lofty qualifications, he didn’t speak Hebrew.

  Jewish businesses in Magdeburg, Germany, after Kristallnacht (the Night of Broken Glass), November 9–10, 1938.

  The night of November 9, 1938, has gone down in infamy as the Kristallnacht, when Jewish businesses were smashed and burned, and thousands of Jews were rounded up and taken to camps. On November 10th, Dorrit and her mother went to the market; upon returning, some 15 or 20 minutes later, they found that all the people in their entirely Jewish neighborhood had vanished. It was now all too clear that they could no longer wait for word from Palestine, but it was hard to get permits to live anywhere outside of Germany. Nevertheless, Dorrit’s mother, Irma, managed to obtain permission to work as a domestic in London and applied to get Dorrit a place on the newly formed Kindertransport, established to rescue unaccompanied Jewish children from Central Europe. Irma then traveled ahead to London, leaving Dorrit in Vienna with her paternal grandmother.

  THE KINDERTRANSPORT

  On November 15, 1938, five days after the mass arrests of Kristallnacht, British Jewish leaders urged the prime minister Neville Chamberlain to do something to save Jewish children on the Continent. A bill was quickly passed waiving entry requirements for children under the age of 17 who were thought to be in danger at home, and making arrangements for them to cross to Britain. The first party of 200 children from Berlin and Hamburg arrived on December 2nd. Each child was allowed just one small suitcase and less than ten marks in cash, and upon arrival they were put into children’s homes or foster placements. The last Kindertransport set sail from Holland on May 14, 1940, as Nazi troops marched into the country. Over a period of 17 months, nearly 10,000 children were brought to Britain from Germany, Austria, Czechoslovakia, and Poland; many of them would be the only members of their families to survive the war.

  Dorrit’s identification card. Each child transported required one.

  Scared, missing their families, and with no idea what to expect, refugee children traveled to London by train and boat on the Kindertransport.

  Before leaving Austria, Dorrit had to fill out this form listing all of her belongings. At the bottom is the signature of her grandmother, Sabine Hacker, whom Dorrit would never see or hear from again.

  It must have been terrifying for 15-year-old Dorrit to take the train and the boat across to London, particularly as she spoke no English. On arrival she was placed in a Jewish children’s refugee home, where she stayed until her mother managed to track her down. Irma had found work as a live-in servant in a wealthy household and also persuaded them to employ Dorrit, claiming they were sisters. Back home in Vienna, they’d employed a domestic themselves and knew very little about cleaning, but somehow they coped with the work. Dorrit briefly attended school in London in order to learn some English, but her mother withdrew her as soon as she heard that students were caned by the headmaster for minor offenses. Instead, Dorrit had to learn English on the job, but she was bright and she picked it up quickly.

  Still, Dorrit and her mother were anxious. They had received no word from Dorrit’s father since he had left for Palestine. They were worried about relatives back home in Austria. Although they spoke English, their heavy Austrian accents sounded German to the British, and thus they were forever having to explain their situation. They also worried that the anti-Jewish sentiment sweeping the continent would follow them to London and nowhere would be safe. It was a nerve-racking time all around.

  London in Wartime

  Hedley did his basic army training in New Brunswick and worked as a truck driver for the Army Service Corps. In September 1943, he was brought to London to work in an engineering workshop, where he trained to be an electric-light plant operator. Perhaps because he was already 30 years old, he wasn’t sent out to take part in the action, but was lucky enough to get the jobs he did, having joined up so late as an unskilled recruit.

  “I had to lay on my back with a burning hot blowtorch, tacking together large pieces of metal while outside…bombs were being dropped all around.”

  When war was declared, Dorrit was determined to do her part for the war effort and she tried to volunteer for the Auxiliary Territorial Service (the Women’s Army). But at only 15 and a half years old, she was 18 months too young, and was referred instead to a war training center in Hounslow, on the outskirts of London, where she spent six months being trained in sheet-metal work and gas welding. Her first job was welding tailpipes for fighter planes, and she wrote in her diary, “I had to lay on my back with a burning hot blowtorch, tacking together large pieces of metal while outside the air raid sirens were howling and bombs were being dropped all around.”

  She and her
mother were terrified of the bombs. Once they saw a plane crash into a building, and Dorrit vowed never to fly for as long as she lived. She made the same resolution about elevators after getting stuck in one during an air raid when the power was cut, and she was powerless as she watched another passenger suffer a heart attack and die in front of her.

  Dorrit and her mother were devastated when word reached them that both of Dorrit’s grandmothers had been rounded up and taken to camps, along with all the other Jews who had stayed behind in Austria. An uncle was taken as well, and yet another uncle hanged himself to avoid the same fate. Irma wept over the family photographs she had managed to bring with her. They still had no idea where Dorrit’s father was, and they feared the worst.

  No matter how bad the news, however, Dorrit was a teenager during the war and wanted to enjoy herself, so in her time off work she went with her girlfriends to dance halls or to see films. She changed jobs and got work as a cashier in a servicemen’s canteen, and it was there that a Canadian serviceman began to flirt with her one Friday night. He told her there was a dance contest at the nearby Club Trocadero, with a chicken as the prize for the winning couple, and he asked if she would be his partner. At first Dorrit refused because she didn’t know him, but Hedley was a handsome, charming man and the thought of a chicken to supplement her meager wartime rations was irresistible.