A Train in Winter (14 page)

In 1940 Paul was taken prisoner on the Maginot line and sent to a Stalag in Germany. Raymonde joined the Resistance and became a
passeur
. There was an internment camp not far from Saint-Martin-le-Beau at Amboise and some of the prisoners who were able to escape made their way to the Café de l’Union, where she hid them in the cellar or sent them to sleep in the stables of one of her sisters’ farms, while she arranged for them to cross the demarcation line. Although Saint-Martin-le-Beau lay in the occupied zone, Athée-sur-Cher, just across the river, was in Vichy France. The curé of Athée, the abbé Marcel Lacour, was also a
résistant
, and between them, using the services of a man called Pelé, who owned an illicit boat, they spirited countless numbers of people from the occupied to the free zone all through 1940 and 1941.

Raymonde had a
nom de guerre
, Denise, and a password— ‘Bonjour, ma cousine’ —known up and down the line by the
passeurs
. A warning— ‘Le temps est bouché à l’horizon’ (the weather is overcast on the horizon)—meant that police patrols were out on the banks of the Cher, or that there was no one available to guide people over the water. No boats were permitted to circulate on the rivers, but Pelé and his three young sons took it in turns to ferry people over the water. When news came that Germans were in the area, Raymonde led those trying to escape out of the cafe by a back entrance and down the passage to her neighbour, who hid them in his cellar behind bags of cement.

While waiting, her guests lived much as her lodgers had lived in the 1930s, sharing meals around a big communal table. A bookseller called André Wahl, having killed a guard and escaped from a prisoner of war camp in Germany, arrived in Saint-Martin-le-Beau early in 1941 with his wife, desperate to reach the south. Later he would say that Raymonde treated them as friends, comforting and calming his very anxious wife, and that she refused to take any money until he convinced her that it would not leave them short. Wahl’s last sight of Raymonde, as he and his wife were rowed across the river, was of her standing on the path, her arm raised in a fraternal salute. She told him that she dreamt of finding a way to help Paul escape from his prison camp in Germany.

The abbé Lacour, a genial man who spoke good German and was careful to keep on friendly terms with the soldiers stationed in the nearby Château de la Chesnaye, was often so busy that he did not have time to change his boots to say mass. He had his own method for helping people cross the line. A funeral would leave the occupied zone, followed by grieving mourners, cross a bridge over the Cher with passes issued by the Germans and process to his church in Athée. There the coffin would be opened, a living person released, while some of the mourners quickly faded away into the countryside. The remaining mourners, setting off back into occupied France, were a much diminished group.

After the Gestapo descended unexpectedly one night on the Café de l’Union, where two exhausted North African soldiers were snoring loudly in the attic, and Raymonde only managed by great good fortune and quick thinking to conceal their presence, she decided that it was no longer safe for Gisèle to live at home. She sent her as a weekly boarder to a school in Tours, the little girl cycling home every weekend along the river to see her mother. If anyone asks you anything about us, Raymonde said to her, ‘say that you know nothing and have seen nothing’.

Gisèle was home with her mother in the cafe when the French police came to arrest her on 6 June 1941. ‘Don’t cry,’ Raymonde told her. ‘Be brave. I’ll be back.’ She was taken to Paris, to the prison of the Cherche-Midi, used by both the French and the Germans to house resisters. From here she wrote long letters to Gisèle, in a tiny, neat hand. ‘Little Gisèle, you who I love best of all… Papa told me to watch over you and to make you good and brave. Because I can’t be there, be grown up and obedient… I will be home soon to cherish you as you deserve.’ Not wanting Paul to discover what had happened to her, she got one of her sisters to let him know that she had bruised her hand badly, and so could not write to him for a while.

Raymonde was released in August. She resumed her work as
passeur
. She abandoned the name Denise and become Rossignol, nightingale. She remained just as bold, planning, with the abbé Lacour and the Pelé family, the best escape routes. To Gisèle’s terror, when, one day, a Frenchman they all knew came into the café dressed in a German uniform, her mother slapped him in the face and told him to leave. ‘You’ll hear more of this,’ the man shouted.

The Café de l’Union was always full. Raymonde took to holding dances to raise money for the families of prisoners of war. But some of the villagers were envious, and when the police came to arrest Raymonde for a second time, she knew that she had been denounced by the proprietor of a less successful café. Once again, Gisèle was at home and stood watching as her mother was led away.

Raymonde Sergent, a
passeur
across the demarcation line, and her daughter Gisèle

This time, Raymonde was taken to the prison of La Santé in Paris, like the Cherche-Midi a jail where the resisters were held while the Germans worked out what to do with them. ‘Don’t leave school,’ she wrote to Gisèle, ‘work hard, go to your music lesson and to the dentist.’ She said that she had been put into a cell on her own, and that she needed a needle and some cotton. What she did not say was that solitary confinement in La Santé was a grim and desolate experience. ‘Look after your grandfather. All my love to you, whom I love so dearly.’ Gisèle made up parcels of jam and tinned meat and sent them to Paris. To her father, who was a heavy drinker, Raymonde wrote sternly that he should eat properly, and ‘above all, don’t drink’. Three months later, Raymonde was released.

Even now, she refused to turn away people who came to her for help in crossing to the free zone. As ever increasing numbers of Jews were rounded up in fresh
rafles
in Paris, so ever greater numbers of frantic Jewish families arrived in Saint-Martin-le-Beau, begging for assistance in getting away. The German patrols intensified. Now, Raymonde kept a suitcase packed by the front door. The danger to known
passeurs
like her was now so great that a sympathetic member of the French secret services came to Saint-Martin-le-Beau to warn her that she was under constant surveillance by the Germans and their French colleagues. Gisèle lived in a permanent state of anguish; nothing that her mother could do or say reassured her. But still Raymonde and abbé Lacour went on with their work. Who was to run the cafe, Raymonde would say, if she went underground? Who hide the Jews? Who help the desperate people to escape? To anyone who asked whether she was frightened, she would reply: ‘I feel like a goat, attached to a stake. I am waiting for the wolf to come and get me.’

The wolf came. One day, Raymonde’s luck ran out. Together with the abbé Lacour, she was denounced by two other
passeurs
on the demarcation line. By then, most of the people she had been helping to cross clandestinely were Jews, fleeing the round-ups in the occupied zone. ‘Be brave,’ she told 11-year-old Gisèle, who watched silently as her mother was led away. ‘It will be all right.’

The first escape lines out of France for Allied soldiers had been set up in 1940 to save the survivors of Dunkirk from being taken prisoner by the Germans. But in their wake came volunteers trying to join de Gaulle and the Free French, and then Allied airmen shot down over occupied Europe and who were hoping to make it home across the Channel. All along the western coast of France networks of resisters had come together, at first to provide safe houses and false identification papers, but soon also to gather information on German military installations, camps and weapons depots, to transmit to London and the Allies.

SOE, the Special Operations Executive, inspired by Churchill’s enthusiasm for guerrilla warfare, but opposed by those who doubted that guerrilla tactics could achieve very much, was created in July 1940, when Hitler’s march across Europe appeared unstoppable. The idea was to organise armies of resisters throughout the occupied countries. But there was another rival Resistance project, masterminded in London and run by a top secret section of M19 in the War Office. Section 1.S.9 (d) dealt with France, Belgium and Holland. Its function was to supply money and radios, to drop supplies and to arrange for pickups by air or sea from the coast of France.

Having very few operatives of their own, M19 relied on local Resistance groups, formed in 1940 and 1941 throughout the rural parts of Brittany. One of these was called Johnny, started by an archivist from Quimper called Alaterre, whose
nom de guerre
was André. Johnny specialised in information, though it also protected those trying to escape by hiding them in châteaux, farmhouses and cafes. It was the first such network to transmit regular military information about Brittany to British intelligence. Johnny, like all similar groups, was extremely vulnerable to infiltration and betrayal; and both the Gestapo and the Brigades Spéciales were determined to break it.

As a child, Simone Alizon, always known as Poupette, was sickly and fragile. Her parents owned a hotel, the Arvor, an old
relai de poste
opposite the main railway station in Rennes. It had eighteen guest rooms above, a cafe below and a garage and workshops behind, converted from the stables once filled with the horses kept for France’s travellers. Until she was six, Poupette spent much of her life with a farmer’s family, out in the countryside, where good air and healthy food were thought to strengthen her. Though she missed her sister Marie, older by four years, she was not unhappy. Her mother, mourning a son lost at the age of two, had become morose and pious, and the atmosphere at home was often bleak. Life on the farm, Poupette would later say, gave her a taste for solitude and a certain independence of spirit.

It was in 1938, when Poupette was 13, that Spanish refugees first arrived in Rennes, and both she and Marie were struck by their misery. Poupette loved and idolised her sister, an affectionate, good-tempered and very pretty girl, with strong views about right and wrong. ‘It was,’ she would later say, ‘a pleasure just to see her live.’ During the great French exodus south in June 1940, when Rennes had been overwhelmed by terrified families fleeing the advancing Germans, the town was bombed and a train carrying munitions blown up. For Poupette, these were days of political awakening, made sharper by observing the shame and fury of the inhabitants of Rennes when they learnt of the terms of Pétain’s armistice. Seeing the first German poster, of a smiling soldier with a small French child in his arms, and its caption, ‘Have confidence in German soldiers’, she and Marie felt outraged. Wondering what they could do to protest, they collected the postage-stamp sized pictures of de Gaulle, printed and distributed by his niece, Geneviève.

Not long after, a group of German airmen, attached to a nearby military aerodrome, was billeted on a hotel opposite the Arvor. They were bomber pilots and in the evenings they came to drink in the bar of the hotel, their aviator’s furry boots folded down over their ankles. Poupette thought they looked magnificent, with their healthy, blond good looks. The Alizons successfully fought off an attempt by the German authorities to requisition the Arvor as a brothel, but there was no avoiding the nightly visits of the German troops who came to drink there. Mme Alizon, ill with what would become stomach cancer, did not bother to conceal her distaste for them.

One evening, as Mme Alizon was complaining about the Germans to a friend in the cafe, there happened to be sitting at one of the tables a young man who was the local head of the Johnny network. He was in Rennes to find a safe house for his radio operators. Next day, he sent back two colleagues to observe the hotel more closely. Talking to Marie and Poupette, they decided that the attics of the Arvor would be the perfect place to instal transmitters. The sisters agreed; Monsieur and Madame Alizon talked it over and said that although they personally wanted no part in it, they would not oppose the idea. The war was no longer their war, they said, but something fought by others far away; but as Poupette saw it, you could not ignore the bad things that happened around you.

Anchored in Brest harbour not far away were three German boats. The young resisters came back often to the Arvor, to receive and transmit messages about their movements. One of them fell in love with Marie, and she began to talk of getting married. Poupette thought that her sister had never looked more beautiful or happier. This was in the early winter of 1941. Life in the
réseau Johnny
was becoming precarious. Often, now, German cars with monitoring receivers patrolled the streets of Rennes, hoping to pick up signals from clandestine radio transmitters. A young Bavarian pilot, who had become attached to the girls, took Marie aside one evening and warned her that he had heard rumours that there were about to be a number of arrests. ‘You don’t know what the Nazis are capable of,’ he said to her. Not long afterwards, Marie suddenly said to Poupette that they should have their photograph taken, ‘because you never know what might happen to us’. The picture showed two smiling, pretty, bold young girls.