Escape from Paris

by Stephen Harding

  The change in jobs was likely the result of Denise’s failing health, which was itself largely the consequence of the malnutrition that affected all the prisoners at Markkleeberg. In keeping with the Vernichtung durch Arbeit policy the women were fed just once a day, at the midpoint of their work shift, and the fare consisted only of a cup of thin soup and a few ounces of stale and moldy bread. The starvation-level rations affected all the inmates, but older women like Denise tended to be far more likely to exhibit the physical manifestations associated with malnourishment—among which were the sort of hand tremors that would hinder the fine detail work the Junkers technicians demanded in the engine plant. But the transfer to the “coal commando” had one small benefit—the women delivering the coal among the camp’s various buildings had the opportunity to dig up edible bulbs or tubers. They had to be careful though; one woman was poisoned when she ate what she thought was a radish, but was actually a belladonna root.21

  Hunger was not the only thing that caused pain for Markkleeberg’s slave laborers. Though the fenced camp’s main gate and guard towers were manned by a score of Wehrmacht troops, the barracks and work areas were the domain of brutal, whip-wielding female overseers collectively known as Aufseherinnen. As one prisoner later remembered, the uniformed, booted women “hit us for the slightest cause—or even without any cause. They beat us even for looking at them or for not looking at them. They always found an unfortunate woman who attracted their attention. She might have been too pretty or too ugly, too tall or too short, or just something about her look made the girl the target of their rage and torment. For any little thing they did not like, they slapped us or copied down the numbers on our overalls to call us later for further punishment.”22

  In addition to backbreaking labor, starvation, physical abuse, exposure to the elements, and the constant threat of execution, Markkleeberg’s female prisoners also had to confront the panoply of diseases that ravaged the Nazi concentration camps. Typhus, typhoid, and dysentery were endemic, and tuberculosis, malaria, and meningitis were common. Prisoners were also prey to pneumonia and other infections, and it was one of the latter that would have taken Denise’s life had it not been for help she received from an unexpected quarter.

  In mid-March 1945 Yvette noticed that her mother’s throat was swelling, and that the older woman was having trouble swallowing. The symptoms quickly worsened, with Denise developing a wracking cough and raging fever and having increasing difficulty breathing. While Markkleeberg had a small camp infirmary it was for the staff, not the prisoners, and the Germans executed any slave laborer incapable of working. Fortunately, one of the other members of the “coal commando,” a Hungarian Jewish woman who had been a nurse before the war, was able to diagnose Denise’s malady as a severe case of diphtheria.23 The bacterial infection was widespread in the camp, and without treatment was often fatal. Understandably concerned about her mother, Yvette hatched a bold but extremely dangerous plan. While ostensibly delivering coal to the infirmary—and obviously at the risk of their lives—she and the Jewish woman stole several vials of sulfonamide antibiotics and a syringe. Given by injection over the course of several days, the drugs brought about a significant improvement in Denise’s condition. She had not completely recovered, however, when Germany’s worsening military situation forced her, Yvette, and the other female prisoners to confront one last great threat.

  By early April 1945 the Third Reich was in its death throes. Advancing from the east, Soviet forces had taken most of Poland and were moving farther into Austria, eastern Czechoslovakia, and East Prussia. In the west, the British, American, and French armies were driving ever deeper into Germany’s heartland, with the leading U.S. 12th Army Group making a determined push for the Elbe River. In response to the two-front Allied offensive the Nazi hierarchy had begun closing and in many cases attempting to dismantle hundreds of concentration camps and their satellite facilities as part of a larger effort to destroy the evidence of the Reich’s heinous crimes against humanity. Not wanting prisoners to be liberated by the Allies—and still needing slave laborers—the Germans executed those people deemed too debilitated to be of further use and evacuated the others to camps deeper within the Reich. Though some evacuations were conducted by rail or ship, most were death marches in which prisoners were forced to walk vast distances under unbelievably harsh conditions. Tens of thousands died of starvation, exposure, and exhaustion, and anyone who attempted to escape or lagged behind was murdered by the accompanying SS or Wehrmacht guards.24

  On April 6 the approach of U.S. forces prompted the Germans to begin the evacuation of the vast Buchenwald camp system. On Friday the thirteenth Markkleeberg’s commandant, SS-Lieutenant Colonel Wiegand, was ordered to empty the facility immediately and march the prisoners to the still-operating camp at Theresienstadt in occupied Czechoslovakia, a little over one hundred miles to the southeast.25 The women were hastily called together and told they would be leaving in twenty minutes, that no one would be left behind, and that anyone who attempted to hide would be shot. The guards then organized those prisoners who could walk into a long column and put the sick aboard small wagons, and when the sad procession wound its way out of the camp and through the streets of Markkleeberg, Yvette was pulling the cart bearing Denise and four others.

  Over the following days the German guards accompanying the column harried and threatened the emaciated women, forcing them to keep up a brutal pace with only a few minutes’ rest every four hours. The still-frigid weather and lack of food and water quickly began taking a grim toll, with dozens of the prisoners simply dropping to the ground either dead or too exhausted to continue. The guards shot those stragglers who were still breathing, then tossed their bodies into the underbrush. Several women who attempted to escape were also killed, though others managed to slip away unseen during the frequent rainstorms that engulfed the column.

  It was one such cloudburst that allowed Yvette, Denise, and the others aboard the cart to make good their escape. As the column was approaching the Elbe River near the town of Meissen, twelve miles northwest of Dresden, the skies opened and torrents of rain cut visibility to only a few feet. With an almost superhuman effort given her poor health, Yvette pulled the cart off the road and onto a narrow dirt track that led off to the south, into thick, fog-shrouded woods. Pulling the small vehicle as quickly as possible, she followed the track for what she estimated to be several kilometers, only slowing down when the shape of a single person materialized out of the fog ahead. With nowhere to go—the forest on either side of the track was too dense to pull the cart through—Yvette and the others could only wait to see if the apparition was friend or foe. As the wraith slowly resolved into a slender, dark-haired man, the women were stunned to hear him speaking softly in their language. He was a Frenchman who had escaped from a German POW camp, he said, and he was on his way to help liberate his comrades. When the women explained that they too were escapees, the man gave them directions to the abandoned barn where he had been staying since gaining his freedom. They should remain there, he said, because the Russians would soon arrive and liberate them.

  The man’s forecast about the Russians’ imminent arrival was somewhat optimistic, as it turned out. The women spent more than a week in the abandoned barn, an interlude during which they rested as much as possible between forays into the woods in search of food and potable water. The pickings were slim, however, and by the time they were discovered by members of a Soviet patrol the women were in decidedly poor condition. Yvette and the others were taken to a Russian field hospital in Tharandt, where on admittance all were found to be suffering from exposure and extreme malnutrition. Denise weighed barely eighty pounds, while the otherwise gaunt Yvette had an abdomen swollen with more than twenty pounds of edema.

  After nearly a month in the Russians’ care—during which time Adolf Hitler committed suicide and Nazi Germany surrendered unconditionally—Yvette and Denise were judged stable enough to be sent home. The first part of that jou
rney took place aboard a flatbed railcar, on which the two women and a score of other concentration camp survivors were transported west to the “Line of Contact”—the demarcation between the areas then occupied by Russia and those held by American, British, and French forces.26 Transferred to the care of U.S. Army medics, Yvette and Denise were given another thorough physical examination before being transported to the French border and turned over to their country’s Red Cross. That organization aided the women in their homeward journey, and on June 6, 1945, mother and daughter returned to Paris.

  Their homecoming was understandably bittersweet. The city had survived the war essentially unscathed and now, ten months after its liberation, the streets were once again bustling with raucous life undimmed by the shadow of the swastika banners that had once adorned Paris’s grandest buildings. The French tricolor was everywhere, and the crowds of soldiers touring the museums and packing the sidewalk cafés and climbing the Eiffel Tower—and, yes, scuffing the marble floors of the viewing platform encircling Napoléon’s Tomb—now wore Allied uniforms.

  But for Denise and Yvette, a pall hung over the slowly re-illuminating City of Light. Still in poor physical health and grappling with the severe psychological trauma inflicted by their time in the camps, they were also confronted by other challenges. Where would they live? How would they earn a living? And, most importantly, what had happened to Georges, and to Joe?

  TO THEIR GREAT RELIEF, WITHIN DAYS OF THEIR ARRIVAL IN PARIS YVETTE and Denise were able to return to their home at Invalides. The directors of the Invalides-based veterans’ organization decreed that out of respect for the still-absent Georges and in recognition of the family’s resistance work the women could stay in the apartment for the foreseeable future. Old friends also provided aid, bringing food parcels and helping mother and daughter get to their appointments at the clinics offering free care to concentration-camp returnees. One former résistant proved especially helpful, both in easing Yvette and Denise into a semblance of normal life and in helping to alleviate their financial worries.

  André Schoegel had avoided arrest by the Germans, and after the liberation of Paris he made contact with the British and American military agencies seeking to identify and reward those French civilians who had helped Allied personnel either evade capture or reach safety after escaping from captivity. Those organizations—the IS9 section of Britain’s MI9 and the Awards Branch of MIS-X—had both opened offices in Paris almost as soon as the Germans had pulled out of the capital. The two groups worked closely together, using names and addresses culled from evaders’ and escapees’ reports to locate and interview helpers. Those civilians whose assistance could be verified were eligible to receive both awards and cash payments from the American and British governments, and it was with the latter in mind that on June 14 Schoegel escorted Denise and Yvette to the MIS-X office in Room 504 of the Hotel Majestic.27

  That first meeting was relatively brief, with the officer conducting the interview spending most of the time reading to the women from the E&E reports of the various aviators the Morins had helped. Denise and Yvette promised to write a full account of the assistance the family had provided, and asked if there were any way to determine whether Georges was still alive. The MIS-X officer vowed to do what he could to find out, and then gave mother and daughter a food parcel for which, he noted, “they seemed most appreciative.”28

  Over the following days Denise and Yvette worked to produce the “full account” of the family’s wartime activities the MIS-X officer had requested. The result was a highly detailed, two-page document listing the various réseaux for which they worked or which they assisted; the other résistants with whom they interacted, by name and nom de guerre; the names, ranks, and nationalities of all the evaders they aided, either directly or indirectly; and the names or aliases of anyone they believed to have been in the service of the enemy. Denise delivered the account to the MIS-X office on June 20, and the officer who interviewed her about its contents observed that while still physically frail, she was “an admirable woman, having done a considerable work.” The man added that Denise was “very proud of having done her duty as a Frenchwoman,” and noted that while “she desires nothing” in return for her service, she “would be very happy to see General De Gaulle.”29

  Over the following weeks MIS-X and IS9 evaluated Denise and Yvette’s accounts, the information contained in relevant American and British evasion reports, and the statements of other helpers. On July 11 Major John F. White Jr., deputy head of the Paris MIS-X office, wrote to his IS9 counterpart, Donald Darling, confirming that the women would each receive 22,000 French francs as initial recompense for their arrest and deportation—with both payments shared between the two organizations. The type of awards and amount of possible cash payments to be made in recognition of their service as helpers was still being determined, he wrote.30

  WHILE THE INITIAL “DEPORTATION AWARD” FROM MIS-X AND IS9 CERTAINLY helped ease Denise and Yvette’s financial situation, it did nothing to calm their fears regarding the whereabouts and well-being of Georges and Joe.

  Though the women had been told upon their return to Paris that men who had spent time in Buchenwald believed Georges had died or been executed the previous December, neither mother nor daughter was willing to accept that he was dead until they were provided with some sort of official, tangible proof. After all, they reasoned, many people believed to have died in the camps had returned. Until someone could convince them otherwise, they would assume that “Papa” was alive and trying to find his way back to them.

  Yvette’s longing for news of her father was matched by her intense desire to have word of Joe. Before leaving Paris the final time to return to England he’d confided to her that he would likely be sent to the Pacific to fight the Japanese, and she was haunted by the thought that while she and her mother had been in the camps the man she loved, the man she hoped to spend her life with, had died in combat above some nameless island on the other side of the world. Two pieces of information she’d received just after she and her mother returned to Paris had stoked Yvette’s fears regarding Joe.

  First, Germaine Mercier told her that soon after the Allies arrived in the capital someone—she could not recall who—had told her with absolute certainty that Yvette and her parents had died and Germaine had passed the sad news around among their acquaintances. The second piece of information came from Madame de Larminat. The older woman told Yvette that after the liberation of Paris several of the friends Joe had made during his time in the city had written to him care of the 94th Bomb Group at Rougham, and the letters might have included the report of Yvette’s death. In a way, Madame de Larminat reasoned, the fact that Joe had not responded to any of the letters was good news—if the missives hadn’t reached him, he would not have heard of his beloved’s “death.” On the other hand, the woman said, if the letters were reaching Joe he would know that she and her mother were alive. Indeed, on June 4, just two days before Yvette and Denise returned to Paris, an English-speaking Frenchwoman named Gladys Oriot had written to Joe at the behest of Germaine Mercier and Madame de Larminat herself, telling the airman that his fiancée and prospective mother-in-law were on their way home, but that Georges Morin “died last December in captivity.”31

  Yvette’s desire for information about Joe only increased as the weeks went by, and on July 9 she opened another avenue of inquiry. She and her mother had been asked to visit the IS9 Awards Branch at 4 rue de Valois in the 1st arrondissement as part of the agency’s effort to further explore the extent of the aid the Morins had provided to Commonwealth evaders. The interview was to help determine what level of formal recognition the women—and the still missing Georges—would receive from the British government, as well as the amount of any cash payment coming to them in thanks for their evasion work. In his postmeeting report the IS9 representative, RAF Flight Lieutenant Howard, noted that mother and daughter had “had no word” about Georges. He then added that Yvette was “anxiou
s to have news of airman Joseph Cornwall.”32

  Over the following weeks Yvette and Denise got on with life the best they could, trying to regain a sense of normalcy and using the “deportee” payments they’d received to support themselves. Despite their continued requests for information through French, British, and American channels they learned nothing more about Georges’s fate, nor was Yvette able to find out whether Joe was alive. Indeed, the young woman had begun to believe that her fiancé had likely perished in the Pacific, and in her growing grief found solace in remembering the short but intense time they had spent together. If indeed Joe was gone, she swore, she would dedicate herself to caring for her mother until—God willing—her father came home.

  Then, a few days after Japan’s September 2, 1945, surrender in Tokyo Bay formally ended World War II, Joe came back into Yvette’s life—by mail.

  THE LETTER FROM YVETTE THAT FINALLY REACHED JOE AT MARCH FIELD in July 1944 had done wonders for the airman’s morale, and the fact that no others followed did not particularly concern him. He understood how difficult it must have been for her to get even that one short note out of occupied Paris, and with the Allied armies closing in on the French capital he knew it would only be a matter of weeks before Yvette and her parents—and indeed, all the friends Joe had made in France—would be free once more. Then, he vowed to himself, he could contact the woman he loved, and they would begin the next phase of their life together.

  But things did not turn out as Joe had hoped. In the weeks following the August 25 liberation of Paris he had written repeatedly to Yvette at the avenue de Tourville address, but had gotten no response. He’d then reached out to Germaine Mercier, but had not heard from her either. Joe’s worst nightmare—that something terrible must have happened to the Morins—seemed to come all too horribly true when in late December 1944 he received a much-forwarded and redirected letter from Paris informing him that Yvette and her parents had been arrested by the Gestapo and subsequently executed.33