A Train in Winter (13 page)
Authors: Caroline Moorehead
The winter of 1941 was again unbearably cold. In Paris, it snowed thirty-one times, the temperature dropped to minus 20 and the Seine froze over. ‘Paris a froid, Paris a faim,’ wrote Paul Éluard in a poem called ‘Courage’. ‘Paris ne mange plus de marrons dans la rue…/ Paris tremblant comme une étoile’.
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Factories were taking all the coal. An attempt to produce charcoal from leaves and pine needles failed.
Everything seemed to be rationed, even milk for children. Mothers longed for their babies to walk late, because there were no rations for shoes for children under the age of one. Well over half of all factories in the occupied zone were working for Germany, and it was said that what had been made and delivered to the occupiers during 1941 had enabled the Germans to assemble and maintain eighteen armoured divisions and forty divisions of infantry, as well as to produce 2,500 planes and two-thirds of the winter equipment used by the Wehrmacht on the eastern front that winter. The black market was thriving, for those who had the money, like the informers, who were paid well and given a free hand to plunder in return for increasingly dirty work. As for Paris, the very fabric of the city was crumbling, its tramlines torn up for iron, its wooden paving stones taken for fuel, its sewers no longer properly maintained. Because there was no petrol for the lorries, rubbish piled up.
By the end of the year, 11,000 communists were in custody, in prisons and internment camps, of which there were over a thousand scattered around the country. They lived in constant fear of execution as hostages. And the mass executions continued, no culprit for the attacks on Nantes, Rouen and Bordeaux having come forward.
In December, a final group of hostages went before the firing squad in reprisal for the shooting of Holtz at Nantes. One of them was Lucien Sampaix, Simone’s father. Sampaix, with his unshakeable courage and moral clarity, was something of a hero to the young resisters and plans had been under way for an operation to free him from his prison in Caen. It was to take place on 16 December and Simone and her young friends had been working feverishly to bribe guards and secure the escape route.
But on the 15th, Sampaix and twelve other men were taken to a nearby barracks and shot. Before he died, he told his friends that he was deeply relieved that he was not going to be guillotined. As a young journalist he had been forced to attend a guillotining, and the sight had always haunted him. Those who were about to be shot saw themselves as going on ahead, wrote one of Sampaix’s friends, Gabriel Petri, who was executed with him. He used a phrase that quickly spread round France: they were going to prepare ‘les lendemains qui chantent’.
No one had been warned. Simone heard of her father’s death only some hours later, through the Underground networks. She tried to prepare her mother, but Yvonne was feeling happy, having just received a letter from Sampaix telling her that he would be spared. It was only when Fabien arrived with the official news of his execution that Yvonne took in what had happened. Saying nothing, she went to the cupboard, removed all her husband’s clothes and handed them to Fabien for the young resisters; from this day on, Yvonne collected and concealed weapons for the Resistance in her shopping basket, hidden under the vegetables.
In his last letter to his children, written when he knew he was about to die, Sampaix urged Simone to work hard for ‘the universal happiness that I so longed to see’. ‘You are already grown up,’ he told her. ‘Cry, but be strong and resolute… Life is still ahead of you, it’s yours, work for what it has to offer.’ In Caen, his grave was soon covered in flowers. The Germans ordered them to be removed; more kept coming.
Simone had been devoted to her father; she was appalled and shocked by his death. Next day she decided to denounce his executioners, as publicly as she could. With the help of her friends in the Bataillons, she had printed black-edged posters and flyers accusing the Germans of murder, which she distributed throughout the whole neighbourhood. Assuming she was behind them, the police searched the Sampaix house, but found nothing. Simone would later say that her father’s death had made her more resolute than ever to fight Vichy and the Germans; and that from that day her ties to her friends in the Resistance grew stronger. She was just seventeen and a half; but it was a very long time since she had been a child.
Between August and the end of 1941, there were sixty-eight serious attacks on the Germans in and around Paris. The brutality with which they were met, the mass executions of hostages, the growing shortages of food, were all at last combining to turn the French against their occupiers. Even von Stülpnagel and Abetz had begun to argue that the mass executions were becoming counterproductive. The days of almost universal
attentisme
were over. If in the early days, ordinary people, disapproving of the violence, had been willing to help catch the perpetrators, now witnesses turned their backs, walked away, said nothing, even sheltered those escaping into the crowds. The famous spirit of the seventeenth-century Fronde, rebellion, was revealing itself in go-slows, useless delays and the mislaying of documents. The most minor acts of disobedience restored a sense of dignity, lost with the collapse of France. Betty, Danielle, Charlotte and the other young women resisters felt the difference in the air, and worked harder than ever. And resistance was spreading and intensifying, among other women, in other parts of occupied France.
Never had so many false papers and forged stamps been so available:
Défense de France
, which would become France’s largest Underground newspaper, was said to be turning out two thousand separate false stamps and seals—from birth certificates to marriage licences, permits to ration books—in its workshops, and local grocers were distributing them hidden in empty packets of macaroni. The prefects, reporting from the provinces on the mood of the country, spoke of a ‘veiled hatred’ of the Germans, of growing resentment and pessimism. The people of France, they warned, were becoming anxious and ‘unstable’.
Under Article 2 of the Franco-German Armistice, fifty-three of France’s eighty-seven departments were occupied by the Germans, forty-one of them in their entirety. The demarcation line divided the ostensibly free zone in the south from the occupied zone in the north and along the coastal areas. The line itself, however, was not nearly as neat as it sounded. In practice, it wiggled across the countryside and along the rivers, splitting in two farms, villages and even towns. Children were separated from their schools, doctors from their patients, farmers from their crops. At Clemenceau, it cut straight through the middle of the château: one half was occupied by German soldiers, the other by French nuns. At a certain spot on the Cher, a German patrol, perceiving what looked like an agreeable sandy beach on the other side of the river, shifted the line to take it in. There were occasional stretches of barbed wire, and even mines. All along the line, at the edge of forests, through fields and along roads, at crossroads and on bridges, were planted 1.5-metre-high poles, painted in the red, white and black of the German flag.
Immediately after the armistice all communication and movement between the two zones—whether of post, telegraph, trains, traffic or people—was halted. But soon Abetz agreed to special
laissez-passers
, ‘for grave family matters’, and, bit by bit, the demarcation line was breached. An inter-zone postal service of special pre-printed cards was set up; the telephone was restored; trains began to run. For the
frontaliers
, people living within five kilometres of the line on either side, it was possible to request a daily pass, provided that you crossed at prearranged times and visited the address listed on your pass. Children under 15 crossing to go to school did not need passes.
But for those coming from further afield it was considerably harder. A special central bureau opened in Paris to issue passes to those who had convincing business in the south; smaller offices followed in Vierzon and Bourges and later in Tours and Angoulême. For Jews, fleeing arrest in the occupied zone, for members of the Resistance liaising with contacts in the south, for Allied soldiers, shot down in the north and trying to regain their countries, crossing the demarcation line became a terrifying business. As the Resistance leader Rémy would later say, the line became a place of heroism, but also one of shame.
For the first eight months of occupation, German soldiers and German military police—known as
vaches de choix
, prize-winning cows, after the medallions they wore around their necks—supervised the occupied side of the line. But after Hitler’s invasion of the USSR and the need for more troops for the war in the east, their places were taken by German frontier guards. Patrolling in groups of four, either on horseback or with motorcycles and sidecars, often with dogs, they had no hesitation in scouring the countryside far back from the line for would-be illegal crossers, nor in raiding houses where they suspected there might be people hiding. On the French side, it was left to the ill-equipped French
armée d’armistice
and the police to patrol. Vichy was constantly trying to make of the demarcation line a buffer zone, the better to protect its supposed sovereignty.
In the early days of divided France, the
frontaliers
, like the French generally, pursued a policy of
attentisme
, while grumbling about the inconvenience posed by checkpoints and passes. But as the occupation moved into its second year and the German soldiers proved cavalier and destructive of the countryside, holding their military exercises in the middle of newly planted fields, requisitioning the dwindling number of horses, and helping themselves to ever scarcer supplies of animal feed and fresh vegetables, so a spirit of rebellion developed along the demarcation line. Like pasting the anti-German posters on the walls of Paris, helping people cross clandestinely became an act of defiance against the occupier. And, as with the couriers in Paris and the liaison officers in the Charente, the role of
passeur
was one often taken by women.
It began slowly, individual farmers smuggling travellers across by night. But then it built up in response to a growing desperation among people in the occupied zone, whether because they were Jewish, or because they were involved in Resistance activities, or because they had become suspect in the eyes of the occupiers. The first
passeurs
, smugglers across the line, were often doctors, or priests, or peasants who knew the tracks through the wooded countryside, or train drivers, who hid people in their cabs or behind coal supplies then dropped them off once they had reached the free zone, by slowing down the trains and letting out belches of steam to conceal those climbing down.
Later grew up networks of
passeurs
, handing on people from safe house to safe house, often knowing nothing of the men and women they were helping. For the most part, the
passeurs
were both brave and generous, refusing all payment for their services. But, as Rémy noted, there were also unscrupulous traffickers, who made fortunes out of the money they extorted from terrified people, sometimes blackmailing them for more at the last minute. And it was not just the actual clandestine crossing—usually at night, on foot through the countryside or by boat across the river—that had to be negotiated, but stays in safe houses near the line, while waiting for a
passeur
or a night without a moon. In December 1941, the Vichy government instructed police in both zones to pay particular attention to trains, hotels and railway stations, after which it was essential not to be seen wandering uncertainly around the streets of any of the towns near the line.
Punishment for those caught trying to cross illegally started with a fine, or short spells in prison, but could in theory include permanent detention. For the
passeur
, as time went by and the Germans became conscious of the thousands of people crossing clandestinely every day, arrest meant prison, torture, possible deportation, or incarceration in the pool of hostages held to be shot in eventual reprisals.
Along the river Loire and its tributaries, the Lot, Cher, Greuse and Vienne, where the demarcation line fell sometimes on one side, sometimes on the other, and often down the middle of the water, the countryside was wooded, hilly and for long stretches sparsely populated. The riverbanks were sandy, the rivers themselves often broad, dotted with islands and planted with overhanging poplars and willow trees. Vineyards stretched away into the distance. The famous châteaux were surrounded by forests, once the hunting grounds of the nobility. These valleys were perfect
passeur
country.
It was early in July 1940 that the Germans reached Saint-Martin-le-Beau, a small village on the Cher, not far from Tours. Gisèle Sergent was then 10, and she and her mother and grandfather were hiding in the cellar. Hearing shouts and banging above, they emerged to find soldiers demanding beer and wine.
Raymonde, Gisèle’s mother, ran a cafe in the village. One of five daughters in a family of Catholic farmers, she had grown up optimistic and strong minded, refusing to accompany her sisters to church on Sundays and choosing for herself as husband a woodcutter called Paul Sergent from nearby Bléré. During the 1930s, the couple moved politically to the left. They went to Paris to earn enough money washing up and serving in restaurants to buy a place of their own, and when they heard that the old Café de l’Union in Saint-Martin-le-Beau was for sale, they pooled all they had saved and came home to buy it.
It was a good life. Paul played football for a local team. The village had an active communist group and Gisèle would always remember the day when they marched from the station to the cafe, with everyone singing the Internationale at the top of their voices. The Front Populaire’s provision of paid holidays for workers brought families from Paris to stay in the rooms above the cafe, arriving on the tram from Amboise, or cycling along the banks of the Cher. At night, the guests ate together at a big table, helping themselves from dishes laid out in the middle. There was singing, and often dancing, after dinner. Gisèle and her many cousins played together. Raymonde was strict with her only child, and Gisèle was painfully conscious that her mother longed for a son; but she was also very loving.
