A Train in Winter (9 page)

Throughout the cold winter of 1940 and early spring of 1941, more and more women of all ages were drawn into the Resistance, swelling ranks decimated by the early arrests of men, taking on tasks for which they found themselves admirably suited. There was as yet no very clear goal to their activities, beyond the constant harassment of the Germans, whose forces they hoped to keep in a state of perpetual uneasy alert. They also wanted to send a message to Vichy that collaboration was an odious affair, unacceptable to decent people, and that it would, when sanity and victory returned to France, be severely punished.

These schoolgirls, mothers, grandmothers, housewives and professional women were joining the Resistance because of their fathers and brothers who were already part of it; or because they had heard their grandfathers talking about the Dreyfus affair and Verdun; or because they had watched the Spanish refugee children struggle over the Pyrenees; or because, like Cécile, they did not want their children to grow up in a world run by Nazis; or, quite simply, because they were
frondeuses
—rebels against authority and dogmatism, true daughters of the French Enlightenment. As the Serre women saw it, they really had no choice.

What none of them knew, as they hurried around the streets of their villages and towns, carrying messages and tracts, feeling oddly safe in a country in which women were still not perceived to be active in the Resistance, was how lethal it was about to become.

The late spring of 1941 was marked throughout the German occupied zone of France by sporadic acts of sabotage, a continuing war of posters, and the arrests and internment of ever more ‘enemies of the Reich’. A number of clandestine printing presses were discovered, and their operators tried and sent to prison. In May, hundreds of French policemen were dispatched into the traditionally Jewish quarters of Paris to ‘invite’ the residents to present themselves for an ‘examination of their status’. Disoriented, stupefied to find that French laws would not protect them, 3,710 foreign-born Jews were subsequently interned. Posters offering rewards of 1,000 francs for information leading to the arrest of a militant communist went up on the walls of the capital. By June, 2,325 communists were in prisons or internment camps all over France. On the fête de Jeanne d’Arc, thousands of students gathered to sing patriotic songs and shout: ‘Joan of Arc, deliver us from the barbarians!’

Since it had quickly become clear that the communists were not alone in backing the Resistance, but that all over France acts of rebellion were also being carried out by Catholics, Jews and Gaullists, it was decided, early in May, to try to co-ordinate their forces. On the 15th, a joint communiqué was issued to the entire Resistance, both in the occupied and in the free zones. All French men and women, regardless of their political affiliations, who ‘thought French and wished to act French’, were invited to unite under a National Front for the Independence of France. The idea was to set up little National Fronts all over the country, in factories, in mining areas, in villages. ‘To live under defeat,’ read one pamphlet, quoting Napoleon, ‘is to die every day.’ Even so, Otto von Stülpnagel and the occupying German forces continued to maintain that the state of France caused little alarm. The Communists, at this stage still the strongest element in the Resistance, continued to be regarded as pariahs by much of the public on account of the Nazi–Soviet pact.

Then, early on the morning of 22 June 1941, everything changed.

As dawn broke, two million German soldiers, 3,200 planes and 10,000 tanks invaded the Soviet Union along a 300-kilometre front. Overnight, among the worldwide opponents of Hitler, the Communists ceased to be perceived as in league with the enemy. Stalin redefined the war, from being one of imperialism to being a ‘great anti-Fascist and patriotic war of liberation’. The Soviets—and the Communists—were now the allies. The message that went out to the communist parties across occupied Europe was clear: the German invaders were to be resisted, partisan groups were to be set up behind enemy lines, and acts of sabotage, the destruction of railway lines and telephone wires were to be carried out. The German occupiers, henceforth, were to be ‘terrorised’. Resistance was to be racheted up to another, far more perilous, level.

The troubled PCF in France greeted the news of the invasion with immense relief. The months of ambiguity and doubt were over. Maï Politzer, her husband Georges and lover Decour, Hélène and Jacques Solomon, Danielle, Cécile and Betty were in from the cold. The clandestine
L’Humanité
responded with a call for armed combat.

For many months, talks had been going on about the need for fighters for an
Organisation Spéciale
, a group of armed men to protect militants and to punish traitors and informers, and also to collect weapons and plan acts of sabotage. These men were to be, said the resisters, the shock troops of the movement. But there had been considerable misgivings about progressing to armed attacks and the assassination of individual German soldiers, not least because so much of the French population, committed to
attentisme
, was anxious not to promote further repression and reprisals by the Germans. What was more, the guns that were available were antique and highly unreliable.

Now, in the wake of the invasion of the Soviet Union, a meeting was called in the Closerie des Lilas on the Boulevard Saint-Germain. To it came Danielle Casanova and a young man called Albert Ouzoulias, who had recently escaped from a prisoner of war camp in Austria. By the time they parted, Ouzoulias, who went by the Underground name of Zouzou, had agreed to set up what would be known as ‘les Battalions de la Jeunesse’, an armed youth wing. To help him there was a 22-year-old veteran of the Spanish Civil War, Georges Pierre, who took the
nom de guerre
of Fabien or Fredo and was alone in having some combat experience. The two young men, who were inseparable friends, set out to find recruits; before long, they were a band of fifty-six. Not many were older than 20. They regarded Danielle, who was 31, as their big sister.

Among the first to come forward were 18-year-old Georges Tondelier, who had been running the Jeunesse Communiste in the 19th arrondissement, Isidore Grünenberger, who was Polish, and his school friend, a young cobbler called André Biver. Biver had a girlfriend, Simone Sampaix, an open-faced girl of 16 with a sweet smile and rosy cheeks. Her father, Lucien, was a former managing editor of
L’Humanité
, a distinguished looking man with thick grey hair cropped severely short. He was much admired within the Communist Party for writing a series of articles before the war linking the anti-Semitic Cagoule movement to French industrialists and the German secret services, for which he had been tried but acquitted. The Sampaix were friends of the Politzers and of Danielle, who was the family dentist, and as a young girl, Simone had attended the ‘vin d’honneur’ held for Fabien’s wedding. Yvonne, Lucien’s wife, worked in a textile factory and the family lived in a little house in the 19th, in the heartlands of the communist working class.

By the summer of 1941, Lucien was in prison, having been picked up by the French police during a crackdown on the Underground press. ‘To think our grandfathers took the Bastille,’ he wrote to his wife. ‘How many Bastilles are still to be taken!’ Simone visited him in prison, to tell him that she had joined the Bataillons de la Jeunesse and was already transporting material for them under her school books. With her innocent, childish looks, she was an improbable suspect. Lucien told her how proud he was of her, but warned her to be careful. The police were getting more resourceful, and the number of informers was growing. Women and girls would not be safe for long. Yvonne, only now learning of her daughter’s activities, and both admiring of her and extremely fearful, sent her two younger children, Pierre and Jacques, to stay with friends in the country. The new young recruits to the Bataillons, some no more than 16 or 17, were often penniless, hungry, without money for the métro, and with nowhere to sleep. Their shoes leaked. In the little house in the 19th that looked more like a cottage than a city home, Yvonne often cooked for them.

All gatherings of more than half a dozen people were prohibited by the Germans, but Ouzoulias and Fabien, under the pretence of participating in one of Vichy’s approved camping holidays, arranged to take twenty of the new recruits to the Bois de Lardy, in Seine-et-Oise. They left from the Gare d’Austerlitz, carrying knapsacks and wearing shorts. The youngest was André Kirschen, who had recently turned 15. In the woods they set up tents, cooked over open fires and discussed tactics. The boys were taught how to fire revolvers, throw grenades and make bombs out of empty tins, packed with dynamite, nails and little bits of wire; the girls did the cooking and washed the plates in the river. As Maroussia Naitchenko had rightly observed, there was a strong element of daredevil and bravura among the young resisters.

Simone Sampaix, on a camping holiday before the war, with her brothers

Simone and the few other girls were told that, as women, their roles would lie in ‘logistics’. At night, they debated what they felt about shooting someone in cold blood, and Simone, far from certain that she would have the courage ever to do so, was relieved that she was not going to receive a gun. Fabien recounted the story of a hero of the First World War, an elderly peasant who, with only a pitchfork, attacked a platoon of heavily armed German soldiers. Like the Serre sisters, Carmen and Lulu, Simone would later remember thinking that there was nothing very heroic in what she was doing. What seemed to her strange was that others were not doing the same. From their exile in their farmhouse in the countryside, her younger brothers were envious of her good fortune.

Simone’s father’s fears, however, had been well placed. Confrontations between resisters and Germans were becoming daily more explosive. Among the first young people to join the Bataillons had been a number of Jews drawn from the large populations of Russians, Poles and Armenians who had settled in France in the 1920s and 1930s and set up their own association, the Main-d’Oeuvre Immigrée. Many spoke Yiddish at home. Early in August, three friends, all under 20—Samuel Tyszelman, Charles Wolmark and Elie Walach—raided a quarry in the Seine-et-Oise and came away with 25 kilos of dynamite. On 13 August, Tyszelman and another friend, Henri Gautherot, led a demonstration protesting against German restrictions. Thousands of people gathered, shouting ‘Vive la France!’ and ‘à bas l’Occupant!’ German soldiers opened fire. Tyszelman was hit in the leg, and he and Gautherot were arrested.

Simone and her young friends were appalled by this sudden violent turn of affairs and even more upset when they learnt that Tyszelman and Gautherot had been condemned to death by a German military tribunal. On the 19th, posters went up, in the usual bold red and black lettering, announcing that the two young men had been executed that morning by firing squad. As if to underline Vichy’s attitude towards France’s foreign Jews, a simultaneous round-up in the 11th arrondissement took 4,232 into custody, to join the other 30,000 Jews already held in French internment camps.

Two days later, early on the morning of 21 August, André Biver asked Simone to accompany him to the
grands boulevards
. He did not explain why. They had only just reached the Barbès métro stop when they heard shouts and Fabien and several members of the Bataillons raced up the stairs from the métro and scattered into the crowds. As he ran past them, Fabien called out, ‘Titi and Henri have been avenged.’ The killing that Simone had so feared to be part of had begun.

The attack had been minutely planned. Fabien had chosen the Barbès métro station, on line 4, because its platform curved in such a way that the controller could not see the entire train, while the first-class carriage, in which the Germans invariably travelled, stopped immediately by the stairs leading up to the Boulevard Rochechouart. Reconnoitring, Fabien had observed that between eight and 8.30 each morning a number of German officers caught the number 4 line.

That morning, there were some thirty people waiting for the train. One of them was a newly arrived officer of the Kriegsmarine, Alfons Moser, on his way to a depot at Montrouge. As he stepped on to the train, Fabien fired two bullets into his back. Moser died instantly. Isidore Grünenberger, who had been acting as lookout in the street, thanked Simone for transporting the gun that had made the attack possible. The play-acting was over; it had all become terrifyingly real.

The German response was instant. Hitler, hearing of Moser’s death, demanded the immediate execution of one hundred hostages. All Frenchmen under arrest, it was announced, whether in French or German hands, were henceforth to be considered hostages, to be shot in response to any attack on the Germans. But von Stülpnagel was not yet prepared to abandon his satisfactory collaboration with the Vichy government, and so he informed Pétain, through his liaison officer Major Boemelberg, that the Kriegsmarine were asking for only ten hostages. Pierre Pucheu, newly elected Minister of the Interior, meanwhile ordered that the streets of Paris be combed for the assassins. A curfew was set for nine o’clock in the evening; restaurants and theatres had to close by eight. Within three hours, eight thousand IDs had been checked, but not one of the members of the Bataillons had been found.