A Train in Winter (2 page)
Authors: Caroline Moorehead
When, towards the end of March, what was now known as
l’affaire Pican
was closed down, Rottée announced that the French police had dealt a ‘decisive’ blow to the Resistance. Their haul included three million anti-German and anti-Vichy tracts, three tons of paper, two typewriters, eight roneo machines, 1,000 stencils, 100 kilos of ink and 300,000 francs. One hundred and thirteen people were in detention, thirty-five of them women. The youngest of these was a 16-year-old schoolgirl called Rosa Floch, who was picked up as she was writing ‘Vive les Anglais!’ on the walls of her
lycée
. The eldest was a 44-year-old farmer’s wife, Madeleine Normand, who told the police that the 39,500 francs in her handbag were there because she had recently sold a horse.
Nine months later on the snowy morning of 24 January 1943, thirty of these women joined two hundred others, arrested like them from all parts of occupied France, on the only train, during the entire four years of German occupation, to take women from the French Resistance to the Nazi death camps.
In the early 1960s, Charlotte Delbo, who had been one of the women on the train, sat down to write a play. She thought of herself as a messenger, bearing the story of her former companions. Twenty-three women, dressed in identical striped dresses, are talking about life in a Nazi camp. They are barely distinguishable one from another, all equally grey in their ragged and shapeless clothes, their hair and features purposefully unmemorable. ‘The faces,’ Delbo wrote in her stage instructions, ‘do not count’; what counted was their common experience. As in a Greek tragedy, the violence is reported but not seen.
‘There must be one of us who returns,’ says one of the women. ‘You or another, it doesn’t matter. We have to fight, to stay alive, because we are fighters… Those who return will have won.’ A second woman speaks up. ‘What of those we’ll leave behind?’ Another replies: ‘We won’t leave them. We’ll take them away with us.’ And then someone asks: ‘Why should you believe these stories of ghosts, ghosts who come back and who are not able to explain how?’
In 2008, I decide to go in search of the women who had left Paris, that freezing January dawn sixty-five years earlier. I wonder if any are still alive, to tell the story of what drew them into the Resistance, of how they came to fall into the hands of Rottée’s men, and what battles they and their companions fought to survive, then and later.
Charlotte Delbo, I discover, died of cancer in 1985. But seven of the women are still alive. I find Betty Langlois, at 95 an emaciated but steely woman of immense charm, with the same sharp shining brown eyes that look quizzically out of her early photographs, living in a darkened flat in the centre of Paris, full of potted plants and mahogany furniture. She gives me brightly coloured macaroons to eat and a present of a small stuffed tortoiseshell toy cat, curled up in a brown cardboard box. Though she does not have a cat herself, she loves the way this one looks so lifelike and she gives them as presents to all her friends.
Betty sends me to Cécile Charua, in Guingamp in Brittany, who laughs at my formal French, and teaches me many words of bawdy slang. At 93, Cécile is sturdy, humorous and uncomplaining. I visit them both several times, and on each occasion they talk and talk, recounting scenes and episodes that seem too fresh and real in their minds to have taken place over half a century before. Neither one of them, in all this time, has spoken much about what happened to them. It is Cécile who tells me about Madeleine Dissoubray, 91 and a retired teacher of mathematics, living on her own in a little flat on the edge of Paris, surrounded by books; and later, at the annual gathering of survivors held every 24 January, I hear Madeleine, an angular, upright woman, with a firm, carrying voice, describe to a crowd of onlookers what surviving has meant. She is unsmiling and totally contained.
I have trouble finding Poupette Alizon, who has drifted away from the others and is estranged from her daughters. But then a lucky turn takes me to Rennes, where I trace her to a silent, elegant, impeccably furnished flat, full of paintings, overlooking a deserted park and some gardens. Poupette, at 83 somewhat younger than the others and in her long flowing lilac coat as elegant as her surroundings, seems troubled and a bit defiant. Poupette, too, talks and talks. She is lonely and life has not worked out well for her.
Lulu Thévenin, Gilberte Tamisé and Geneviève Pakula, all three alive in 2008, I cannot see: they are too frail to welcome visitors. But I meet Lulu’s son Paul and her younger sister Christiane.
Betty dies, soon after my third visit, in the summer of 2009. She has had pancreatic cancer for seven years, and no one survives this kind of cancer for so long. The last time I see her, she tells me, in tones of pleasure and pride, that she has mystified all her doctors. Surviving, she says, is something that she is very good at.
Having spent many hours talking to the four surviving women, I decide to go in search of the families of those who did not return from the Nazi camps or who have since died. I find Madeleine Zani’s son Pierre in a village near Metz; Germaine Renaudin’s son Tony in a comfortable and pretty house in Termes d’Armagnac, not far from Bordeaux; Annette Epaud’s son Claude convalescing from an operation in a nursing home in Charente; Raymonde Sergent’s daughter Gisèle in Saint-Martin-le-Beau, the village near Tours in which her mother grew up. I meet Aminthe Guillon’s grandson in a cafe in Paris. Each tells me their family stories and introduces me to other families. I travel up and down France, to remote farmhouses, retirement homes and apartment blocks, to villages and to the suburbs of France’s principal cities. The children, some now in their seventies, produce letters, photographs, diaries. They talk about their mothers with admiration and a slight air of puzzlement, that they had been so brave and so little vainglorious about their own achievements. It makes these now elderly sons and daughters miss them all the more. When we talk about the past, their eyes sometimes fill with tears.
This is a book about friendship between women, and the importance that they attach to intimacy and to looking after each other, and about how, under conditions of acute hardship and danger, such mutual dependency can make the difference between living and dying. It is about courage, facing and surviving the worst that life can offer, with dignity and an unassailable determination not to be destroyed. Those who came back to France in 1945 owed their lives principally to chance, but they owed it too in no small measure to the tenacity with which they clung to one another, though separated by every division of class, age, religion, occupation, politics and education. They did not all, of course, like each other equally: some were far closer friends than others. But each watched out for the others with the same degree of attention and concern and minded every death with anguish. And what they all went through, month after month, lay at the very outer limits of human endurance.
This is their story, that of Cécile, Betty, Poupette, Madeleine and the 226 other women who were with them on what became known as
Le Convoi des 31000
.
An enormous toy full of subtleties
What surprised the Parisians, standing in little groups along the Champs-Elysées to watch the German soldiers take over their city in the early hours of 14 June 1940, was how youthful and healthy they looked. Tall, fair, clean shaven, the young men marching to the sounds of a military band to the Arc de Triomphe were observed to be wearing uniforms of good cloth and gleaming boots made of real leather. The coats of the horses pulling the cannons glowed. It seemed not an invasion but a spectacle. Paris itself was calm and almost totally silent. Other than the steady waves of tanks, motorised infantry and troops, nothing moved. Though it had rained hard on the 13th, the unseasonal great heat of early June had returned.
And when they had stopped staring, the Parisians returned to their homes and waited to see what would happen. A spirit of
attentisme
, of holding on, doing nothing, watching, settled over the city.
The speed of the German victory—the Panzers into Luxembourg on 10 May, the Dutch forces annihilated, the Meuse crossed on 13 May, the French army and airforce proved obsolete, ill-equipped, badly led and fossilised by tradition, the British Expeditionary Force obliged to fall back at Dunkirk, Paris bombed on 3 June—had been shocking. Few had been able to take in the fact that a nation whose military valour was epitomised by the battle of Verdun in the First World War and whose defences had been guaranteed by the supposedly impregnable Maginot line, had been reduced, in just six weeks, to a stage of vassalage. Just what the consequences would be were impossible to see; but they were not long in coming.
By midday on the 14th, General Sturnitz, military commandant of Paris, had set up his headquarters in the Hotel Crillon. Since Paris had been declared an open city there was no destruction. A German flag was hoisted over the Arc de Triomphe, and swastikas raised over the Hôtel de Ville, the Chamber of Deputies, the Senate and the various ministries. Edith Thomas, a young Marxist historian and novelist, said they made her think of ‘huge spiders, glutted with blood’. The Grand Palais was turned into a garage for German lorries, the École Polytechnique into a barracks. The Luftwaffe took over the Grand Hotel in the Place de l’Opéra. French signposts came down; German ones went up. French time was advanced by one hour, to bring it into line with Berlin. The German mark was fixed at almost twice its pre-war level. In the hours after the arrival of the occupiers, sixteen people committed suicide, the best known of them Thierry de Martel, inventor in France of neurosurgery, who had fought at Gallipoli.
The first signs of German behaviour were, however, reassuring. All property was to be respected, providing people were obedient to German demands for law and order. Germans were to take control of the telephone exchange and, in due course, of the railways, but the utilities would remain in French hands. The burning of sackfuls of state archives and papers in the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, carried out as the Germans arrived, was inconvenient, but not excessively so, as much had been salvaged. General von Brauchtisch, commander-in-chief of the German troops, ordered his men to behave with ‘perfect correctness’. When it became apparent that the Parisians were planning no revolt, the curfew, originally set for forty-eight hours, was lifted. The French, who had feared the savagery that had accompanied the invasion of Poland, were relieved. They handed in their weapons, as instructed, accepted that they would henceforth only be able to hunt rabbits with terriers or stoats, and registered their much-loved carrier pigeons. The Germans, for their part, were astonished by the French passivity.
When, over the next days and weeks, those who had fled south in a river of cars, bicycles, hay wagons, furniture vans, ice-cream carts, hearses and horse-drawn drays, dragging behind them prams, wheelbarrows and herds of animals, returned, they were amazed by how civilised the conquerors seemed to be. There was something a little shaming about this chain reaction of terror, so reminiscent of the
Grand Peur
that had driven the French from their homes in the early days of the revolution of 1797. In 1940 it was not, after all, so very terrible. The French were accustomed to occupation; they had endured it, after all, in 1814, 1870 and 1914, and then there had been chaos and looting. Now they found German soldiers in the newly reopened Galeries Lafayette, buying stockings and shoes and scent for which they scrupulously paid, sightseeing in Notre Dame, giving chocolates to small children and offering their seats to elderly women on the métro.
Soup kitchens had been set up by the Germans in various parts of Paris, and under the flowering chestnut trees in the Jardin des Tuileries, military bands played Beethoven. Paris remained eerily silent, not least because the oily black cloud that had enveloped the city after the bombing of the huge petrol dumps in the Seine estuary had wiped out most of the bird population. Hitler, who paid a lightning visit on 28 June, was photographed slapping his knee in delight under the Eiffel Tower. As the painter and photographer Jacques Henri Lartigue remarked, the German conquerors were behaving as if they had just been presented with a wonderful new toy, ‘an enormous toy full of subtleties which they do not suspect’.
On 16 June, Paul Reynaud, the Prime Minister who had presided over the French government’s flight from Paris to Tours and then to Bordeaux, resigned, handing power to the much-loved hero of Verdun, Marshal Pétain. At 12.30 on the 17th, Pétain, his thin, crackling voice reminding Arthur Koestler of a ‘skeleton with a chill’, announced over the radio that he had agreed to head a new government and that he was asking Germany for an armistice. The French people, he said, were to ‘cease fighting’ and to co-operate with the German authorities. ‘Have confidence in the German soldier!’ read posters that soon appeared on every wall.
