A Train in Winter (23 page)

In the lorry taking them to prison, Mme Valina hugged 13-year-old Lucienne close to her, as if to reassure her. At the same time, she whispered in her ear that she should divulge nothing whatsoever to the police, and particularly not the names of anyone who had visited the family. When they got to Cognac, the police took Lucienne to one side to question her. The girl refused to answer. After a while, one of the policemen lost his temper and began to threaten her: ‘Your mother has already told us everything. Do you want us to kill her?’ Lucienne still said nothing. Later, she and Serge were released and allowed to go to their grandparents. Sixteen-year-old Jean was held, so that he could watch while Poinsot’s men burnt his father’s feet with a candle. The police were remarkably knowledgeable about names, but they lacked some addresses.

The day after the Guillons’ arrest, Pierre, their younger son, arrived in the neighbourhood, having escaped from a prisoner-of-war camp in the Sudetenland. Neighbours warned him that the house was still being watched by the Germans; he left the area and went into hiding in Provence. No one dared go near Les Violettes. Finally the mayor of Sainte-Sévère persuaded a nearby farmer to tend to the animals. From the Fort du Hâ, Jean wrote to his married sister, who lived not far away, asking her to look after the farm until his mother and wife were released; they were confident that it would not be long.

But the arrest of the Cognac farmers was only the beginning. With information provided by Giret and Vincent, Poinsot was able to arrest, over the next few weeks, 138 people, from all over the Gironde, Landes and Charente. Some were farmers, but there were also factory workers, postmen, train drivers and shop assistants; one was a piano teacher. In their houses were found anti-German tracts, ammunition, explosives, small printing presses and revolvers. In some people’s houses was found nothing at all, but they were arrested anyway.

One of these was Annette Epaud, in whose hotel, L’Ancre Colonial, Vincent had often stayed. Her son Claude was away staying with Mme Valina’s sister at the time, and like Tony Renaudin, he came home to find the house empty, his mother gone and the dog barking inside. Just days before, he had seen his mother throw a revolver into the river. Not knowing what to do, Claude went in search of her in the Fort du Hâ. There the guards turned him away. Visiting his father in detention in the internment camp at Mérignac, he found him extremely depressed because his friend, who was Jewish, had just committed suicide, having been told that he was about to be deported to Poland. Claude’s family was large and affectionate; he was taken in by aunts, who treated him as their own.

Into this sweep fell Madeleine Zani, the ebullient, unconventional young woman from the Moselle, who just had time to hand her small son Pierrot, who was not quite three, to her parents; her two friends Aurore and Yolande Pica; and the two Tamisé sisters, Gilberte and Andrée, who had been alerted and should have fled, but worried that there would be no one to take food and clean clothes to their father, who was in an internment camp.

Pierrot Zani with his grandparents, immediately after his mother’s arrest

One of the last women to be caught—almost by accident, for she had only returned to her home in Royan to pick up some clothes—was 18-year-old Hélène Bolleau, the young liaison officer who had assumed some of her father’s responsibilities after his arrest in March.

At six o’clock on the morning of 7 August, the Brigades Spéciales came to her house, having found her name on Giret’s and Vincent’s lists. Hélène was taken to the old lunatic asylum at La Rochelle; now the town prison, it was filthy and full of fleas. As often as she could, her mother Emma came to visit her. But one day, another prisoner, under interrogation, gave away Emma’s name as that of someone who had worked for the Resistance, and, on 15 September, arriving at the prison, Emma was arrested. To the relief and pleasure of mother and daughter, they were put into the same cell. Moved a few days later to Angoulême prison, accompanied by German guards, the two women were jeered at for being prostitutes and collaborators, until they held their hands up above their heads, to show their handcuffs. In Angoulême prison, a German soldier was overheard to ask a superior: ‘Do they shoot women? Because there are two here we would like to shoot.’ No, replied the officer, ‘we have other plans for them’.

By the end of October, Poinsot and the Brigades Spéciales in Bordeaux were able to report, with considerable satisfaction, that the ‘terrorist’ groups of south-west France were totally ‘disorganised’ and unlikely to rally. In the wake of their success, the museum attached to the Mairie of Bordeaux put on an exhibition that had already proved popular in Lille and Paris. Called Bolshevism against Europe and showing scenes of the destructiveness of the Soviets, the exhibition was, noted the editor of the local
La Petite Gironde
, extremely timely, for it was essential that the ‘plague’ of communism be known and understood by all, the better to fight it. So many visitors turned up that the exhibition’s closing date had to be postponed several times.

Efforts were made to free Elisabeth Dupeyron, whose children were aged eight and four; but they failed. Over the summer of 1942, in groups or on their own, most of the women arrested by Poinsot were moved from local prisons to the Boudet barracks in Bordeaux or to join the men in the Fort du Hâ. It was from here that, in October, they would be sent to the military fort of Romainville on the northern outskirts of Paris, to join the other women being collected from all over occupied France for possible deportation to the east.

CHAPTER NINE

Frontstalag 122

The fort at Romainville was a heavy, grey stone building originally put up as part of the ring of fortifications ordered by Adolphe Thiers in the 1830s to protect Paris. Its outer walls were 10 metres high, its buttresses 17 metres wide. Constructed in the shape of a giant star, with a courtyard in the middle, its walls made it look a little like the forts built for the Foreign Legion in France’s nineteenth-century outposts.

Romainville was first occupied by the Wehrmacht in June 1940 but it soon become a place of detention for the ‘enemies of the Reich’; by the summer of 1942, it was the main holding depot for hostages from the Paris area. By now, the word
Sühnepersonen
, expiatory victims, had largely replaced
Geisel
, hostage, in the vocabulary of repression, and
Sühnepersonen
were seen as collectively responsible for acts committed against the occupying army. ‘Mortal enemies’ and ‘Judaeo-Bolsheviks’ held in Romainville’s cells could be shot at any moment, whenever an attack on German soldiers demanded reprisals. The Germans did not shoot women, or at least not as hostages, and Romainville had also become a prison for women in the Resistance, the severity of whose crimes made harsh punishment necessary; though just what that might involve was not yet entirely clear. In four years of occupation, almost four thousand women would pass through Romainville. The commandant, Sonderführer Trappe, ran a regime of callousness and fear. Romainville was known as Frontstalag 122.

The first of the 230 Resistance women who would eventually set out for German-occupied Poland arrived in Romainville on 1 August 1942. She was a 32-year-old Spanish nurse called Maria Alonso, known to her friends as Josée, and she had looked after injured and sick members of the Resistance and assisted a woman doctor in a hospital to perform small operations in secret. Arrested for providing a network of post office workers with a mimeograph that had belonged to her brother, and given away by another member of the Resistance who had been severely tortured, Josée was acquitted at a trial that saw the men in her group sentenced to death. She could have fled, but that was not in her nature and in any case she had two small sons who lived with her since she was separated from her husband. She was a cheerful, good-hearted woman and was soon made head of the women’s section of the fort, which was separated from the men’s quarters by a fence of barbed wire running down the middle of the courtyard. Josée possessed great natural dignity and it was said that when she did her rounds, distributing parcels and letters and transmitting orders from Trappe, the German soldier who accompanied her appeared as if under her command.

On 10 August Josée was joined by the group of seventeen women printers and
techniciennes
of the Tintelin
affaire
; this brought to Romainville the young Mado, her friend Jacqueline, Lulu and her sister Carmen, and Viva Nenni. Viva could still have escaped. Summoned to Trappe’s office, she was told that if she was prepared to renounce her French citizenship, acquired when she married her French husband Henri, she would be sent to Italy to serve out the war, like her father, in an Italian jail. She did not hesitate. Just as she had once convinced Henri to take on printing for the Resistance, on the grounds that her father would have done so, now she turned down the German offer, saying it was not something her father would have accepted. Viva was sent back to join the others.

Soon after came Cécile, the
Cygne d’Enghien
. Then, on 24 August, thirty-seven members of the Politzer–Pican–Dallidet
affaire
arrived at the fort, with Madeleine Dissoubray, Marie-Claude, Danielle Casanova, Charlotte Delbo and Betty,
Ongles Rouges
. Rosa Floch, the 16-year-old schoolgirl who had written
Vive les Anglais
on her
lycée
walls came a little later. She was put into Josée’s room and shown the barred windows at the far end of the courtyard, from where the men were taken out to be shot. Once emptied for a mass execution, the holding cells would be filled by those brought from other prisons around Paris to await a call for new hostages. Rosa seemed like a little girl. At night she woke up sobbing, calling for her mother, and in nightmares she saw her father chased by the Germans. Josée used her influence to have her moved into a room with Simone Sampaix, who was just nine months older than Rosa. The two girls clung together, both missing their mothers. Simone was still almost speechless with horror and sadness at the death of her boyfriend André and her other young companions.

The women settled into a routine. After months of living in small, dark cells in La Santé, with very little exercise and nothing to do, the light and companionship of Romainville seemed to some of them almost like freedom. For those who had spent many months in solitary confinement the sense of relief was overwhelming. The women were divided up into dormitories of either eight or twenty-four bunks on the second floor of the main building; the men were housed on the first floor. The blockhouses used for the pool of men held as hostages also served as punishment cells. Exercise was taken in the large central courtyard, and although for much of the time the women were confined to their dormitories, they were able to meet their friends and exchange news in the corridors and on the stairs. Each room had a long central table, with benches and a stove. The
non-isolées
, those not in solitary confinement, which included most of the newcomers, were allowed to wear and wash their own clothes, and to receive parcels left by families at the fort on Mondays and Thursdays.

No visits were permitted, but friends and families discovered that from a hill by the fort it was just possible to glimpse the prisoners at their windows. Many families came to stand on the hill and wave, hoping for an answering sign. One day, the parents of a woman who had given birth in another prison not long before, and had then been transferred to Romainville without her baby, brought the child and held him up for his mother to see.

Marie-Elisa Nordmann, arriving at the end of August with the others from the Pican
affaire
, discovered that her mother had been in Romainville not long before, but had since been transferred, as a Jew, to Drancy. She had missed her by just a few weeks. Where she was now, it was impossible to discover. Nor could Marie-Elisa learn what the Gestapo had done with France Bloch, her good friend and companion explosives-maker. The Germans had not found out that she was Jewish and her friends took care that they should not do so.

Food at Romainville was better and slightly more plentiful than at La Santé, but even so, the women were hungry. There was only one meal each day, consisting of a great vat of soup collected at lunchtime from the Breton cooks in the kitchens and brought back to be shared out in the dormitories. As the days passed, and more women arrived at the fort, the amount of meat in the soup diminished. More than once, a mouse was found floating on the top. Families sent in whatever they could spare, and the American Red Cross managed to deliver an occasional parcel, but much of it was pilfered by the guards. The women soon decided that all food packets would be pooled in order to make an extra morning soup, brewed on the stoves in the dormitories in large saucepans. Sharing quickly became central to their lives.

For the most part, it was a generous and fair system, with each woman allocated a slightly larger portion of her own contribution, and an extra amount ladled into the bowls of the new arrivals from La Santé, who were often so weak they had trouble climbing down off their bunks. Cécile, whose mother was very poor, was seldom able to provide more than a few carrots or potatoes, but Viva, whose well-connected sister continued to make frenzied efforts to get her released, often received whole chickens. Many years later, Cécile would remember how ungenerous Viva had been with her chickens, minutely picking the carcasses for every last shred of good meat, before handing over the bones for the pot.