The Cost of Courage (10 page)

Now they are driving through the place de la Concorde, then past Madeleine and Saint-Lazare. They pause for a moment in front of a Métro entrance. The perfect moment to jump out, Postel-Vinay thinks to himself. But his hand never touches the door handle.

A few minutes later they are passing the cemetery in Montmartre. Finally, they arrive at the Terrass Hotel, a venerable institution
with panoramic views of Paris. Paul and Postel-Vinay climb out of the car, leaving the chauffeur behind.

As Paul guides him up to the second floor, Postel-Vinay thinks he sees the hotel clerk giving them an odd look. But then they walk into an empty, ordinary-looking hotel room, and Postel-Vinay decides it’s a good sign that the chauffeur hasn’t accompanied them. When the door is closed behind them, he hands Paul the fat envelope filled with intelligence reports.

The documents include information about German troop movements, detailed blueprints of airports used by the Germans, a plan of the port of Brest, and descriptions of the results of British bombardments of military targets.

He asks Paul about the location of the new radio transmitter, but Paul deflects his question.

Suddenly the door bursts open, and the chauffeur runs in with three accomplices. All four of them are pointing their pistols at Postel-Vinay. Just like André Boulloche, who is carrying a cyanide pill when he is arrested and has always planned to kill himself if the Germans capture him, Postel-Vinay is carrying a revolver for the same purpose. He reaches into his pocket so that he can shoot himself. But first he thinks,
I must shoot Paul!

Before he can fire a single shot, four gun barrels are pressed against his chest. One of the men grabs his Enfield revolver, which is still in his pocket, as another one slams on the handcuffs.

Postel-Vinay feels himself entering a new universe, separated by a vast distance from the world where he lived before — somewhere dangerously close to hell.

He is impressed when one of the men throws Paul on the bed and starts slapping him. These men obviously take pride in their work, because they are trying to make it look as though Paul isn’t the one who has betrayed him. The man attacking Paul seems to be enjoying the violent pantomime, but Postel-Vinay doesn’t think any less of him for that.

PAUL
’
S REAL NAME
is Harold Cole. Trained as an engineer, he was known in England before the war as a con man and a burglar. As a sergeant with the British Expeditionary Force in France, he had absconded with the sergeant’s mess funds. When he turned up in Lille after the armistice, he identified himself as “Captain Harold Cole” of the British Secret Service.

During the fall of 1941, Cole had actually helped thirty-five British airmen escape. But on December 6 — one week before he met Postel-Vinay in Paris — Cole had been arrested by the Germans in Lille. Probably to avoid a threatened execution, it was at this moment that he switched sides to the Nazis.
*

ALTHOUGH HE IS UNABLE
to shoot himself at the moment of his arrest, suicide remains Postel-Vinay’s urgent priority. Three days after entering the Prison de la Santé, he breaks away from the guards and flings himself over a railing, down two stories into the center of the prison courtyard. The violent plunge breaks most of the bones in his body, but he survives his own suicide attempt.

Now he decides to feign madness, and the Germans transfer him to the Quentin Pavilion in l’hôpital de la Pitié.

André Boulloche is tipped off to Postel-Vinay’s new location by André’s cousin, Funck-Brentano, his only relative with a Jewish wife. His cousin also happens to be the chief surgeon at l’hôpital de la Salpêtrière next door to the one where Postel-Vinay is a prisoner. With the help of a young doctor, the surgeon locates an underground passage that connects the two hospitals.

After months of work, which includes help from his brother Robert, Jacques Postel-Vinay (a close cousin of the prisoner),
André’s fellow
Résistants
Bernard Vernier-Palliez and Hubert Rousselier, as well as the fabrication of a number of keys, they finally manage to reach the cellar beneath Postel-Vinay’s cell. There they remove a floorboard above them and try to communicate with Morse code. But Postel-Vinay only remembers enough of the code to respond with a simple SOS.

Postel-Vinay considers this attempt to free him crazier than his own decision to feign madness. Even if his rescuers manage to open a hole for him to escape through, he will never be able to perform the gymnastics required for an escape, since he can barely walk.

Before they can proceed to the next step, he is moved again, and the escape effort is abandoned. Postel-Vinay thinks it’s a miracle that his would-be rescuers haven’t themselves been captured during their attempts to free him.

P
OSTEL
-
VINAY
has undergone two surprisingly civil interrogations by his German captors after his attempt to kill himself. He is completely baffled by the gentleness of his interrogators. But he concludes that logic is just as irrelevant as justice in his present circumstances.

Put into multiple casts by the Germans after his misadventure, he endures excruciating pain. But after his second interrogation, Postel-Vinay feels gigantic relief. He deduces from his interrogators’ questions that his parents probably haven’t been arrested, and he concludes that the Germans have failed to find his blue notebook — the one that includes the names of some of his confederates — because he is never asked any questions about it.

His ultimate nightmare — that he might have endangered his family or his comrades — has “miraculously disappeared.” As a result, he regains some of his will to live, even as he remains certain that the Germans will eventually execute him. “The fear of talking stopped haunting me. Now I was sure I would be able to die in peace.”

A month or two after the arrest, his mother makes contact with a German officer who is a chaplain to find out if her son is alive. The next day, the chaplain comes to Postel-Vinay’s cell and extends his hand, covered in a field-gray glove, and declares, “Take this hand. Your mother touched it yesterday. She loves you very much. She is really very courageous.”

Even more remarkably, a month later, one of Postel-Vinay’s interrogators authorizes one package from his parents, every fifteen days, containing food, books, pencils, and paper. He begins to write poems, deep into the night, and goes to sleep with “the joys of an author’s vanity, and duty accomplished.”

Then around April 15, 1942, he receives a visit from a German officer and a white-haired man whom Postel-Vinay at first mistakes for an artist. In fact, his visitor is Clovis Vincent, the prewar head of neurology at the hospital who has retained his post during the German Occupation. Gradually, Postel-Vinay realizes the famous doctor has been sent there by his family to urge him to feign insanity, to avoid a firing squad.

Part of him remains eager to die. But is it fair to spurn his parents’ attempt to save him? He knows their hope isn’t completely far-fetched: Even one of his interrogators has mentioned the possibility that he will be tried by a tribunal rather than face summary execution.

Finally he decides it is too selfish to reject his parents’ plan. He has already made them suffer too much. So he embarks upon “a ship of fools” to try to deceive his captors.

For the first stage of his fake madness, he pretends to suffer from terrible migraines. Then, toward the end of April, the casts are finally removed from his legs. They are skeletal, with no trace of calves, and his ankles are frozen in place. Postel-Vinay is certain he will never again be able to walk more than a few yards.

Realizing that his fake migraines and fraudulent tics will never get the attention of guards already numbed by the genuine traumas of his fellow prisoners, Postel-Vinay decides his only option is to attempt suicide — again.

At the beginning of May, he begins to search for the right instrument of destruction. The only one he can find is a short nail at the end of his bed. Blunt, rusty, and slightly twisted, it is hardly ideal, but it’s all he has.

His first thought is to plunge the nail into his right eye (which doesn’t see very well anyway), but he quickly realizes that he lacks the resolve to mutilate himself that way.

Once a week he is given a Gillette razor for ten minutes so that he can shave himself. On June 20, he shoves the handle of the razor into a bar of soap, then plunges the naked edge of the blade into his left forearm. He means only to cut some veins, but instead he hits an artery and severs some tendons.

When his captors return to his room a few minutes later, they instantly take him away to the operating room. There the surgeon spends an hour and a half repairing the artery and the surrounding tendons — without offering any anesthetic.

On August 1, he is ordered to get dressed. Then he is removed from his cell and taken outside. Waiting for him in the street is the familiar Citroën Traction Avant used by the Gestapo. Postel-Vinay is pushed into the backseat. Then he watches the streets go by — boulevard de l’Hôpital, boulevard Saint-Marcel, boulevard Arago, rue de la Santé. Now he knows he is being sent back to the place where his misfortune began — the Prison de la Santé.

After a month back in his old prison, on August 31, a guard opens his cell and tells him to gather all of his belongings, which at this moment consist of a single toothbrush. Is he being sent to a concentration camp? Or to the “next world”? He has no idea where he is going, but — to his own surprise — Postel-Vinay feels no fear.

This time, a windowless gray van awaits to take him to his next destination. Ten minutes later, he knows there will be no deportation or execution today. He has been returned to the Quentin Pavilion in the l’hôpital de la Pitié — to a cell just down the hall from the one he left four weeks earlier.

The following afternoon, on September 1, he is moved again. This time there is an ambulance downstairs, attended by a male nurse and a German soldier. Postel-Vinay lies down on the ambulance bed and the soldier closes the door. Ten minutes later, he has
arrived at a new, unfamiliar building. He is led to something that looks like a shower room, and the nurse locks the door behind him.

Through the window he peers into a garden, where he sees other inmates walking around, who are obviously crazy. He doesn’t know it yet, but he is actually in a psychiatric institution: l’hôpital Sainte-Anne, in the 14th arrondissement of Paris.

Nothing happens for two more days, and Postel-Vinay becomes increasingly nervous about the performance he has planned. He must convince his captors that he is truly crazy. Meanwhile, he is praying with all his might: “Here I am at the end of my strength. Help me God!”

Finally, on the afternoon of his third day at Sainte-Anne, a nurse leads him into the office of a German psychiatrist.

“So,” the doctor asks, “what’s wrong?”

“What’s wrong?” he replies. “I know where I am. I’m in an insane asylum! My parents always thought I belonged here, but they are the ones who are crazy!”

Postel-Vinay continues his charade for several minutes, but to no avail. Finally, his German interrogator speaks again. “Monsieur Postel-Vinay, now I’m going to tell you what I think. You have played your role very well. But you are not crazy.”

“Of course I’m not crazy,” Postel-Vinay replies. “It’s only my parents …” But suddenly the doctor’s face darkens, and he stands up. Postel-Vinay stands up with him. At last the prisoner lets down his guard: “Whatever I did, I did for my country.”

“Ah, yes,” the German replies. “That is exactly the way I understand things.”

The doctor walks him back out into the hallway, noticing that he is still suffering tremendously because of his barely healed ankles. “You really walk as badly as that?” he asks. “I will order an ambulance to take you back to Quentin.”

The doctor deposits him on a bench and returns to his office. Postel-Vinay looks around him. He is in a narrow hallway, surrounded
by other patients, all wearing the blue uniforms provided by the hospital. One door off the hall leads to a room where he can hear German being spoken — that must be a guard post. At the far end, another door leads to the garden — and possible freedom? But a soldier is guarding that exit.

After all he has been through, the odds against an escape seem overwhelming. But a primal instinct propels Postel-Vinay off the bench, toward the door to the garden. He pauses at the exit for a couple of seconds, like a man looking to see if his car has arrived.

Then the miracles begin: The guard makes no attempt to bar his way.

Why not? The soldier is only supposed to stop the patients in blue uniforms, and no one else? Postel-Vinay is very disheveled, but he
is
dressed like a civilian.
Oh, saintly German discipline!
he thinks silently to himself.

As he continues down the steps into the garden, he thinks he hears the soldier being called back into the guard room. But he does not turn around. He spots an archway in front of him and a workman — a Frenchman — coming toward him from that direction.

“Where’s the exit?” Postel-Vinay asks, as casually as possible.

“Take your first left and follow the long alley to the end.”

Surely there will be another guard at the end of the alley, but Postel-Vinay isn’t about to stop now. And when he reaches the street, there is no soldier.

He listens for someone running behind him and watches for the ambulance that has been dispatched to return him to his cell. But there is no one and nothing, except for two small children walking toward him on rue Cabanis, to his right.

Now seconds matter.

“Listen, kids, I’ve just escaped. The Germans will shoot me if they catch me. Give me enough money for the Métro. I’m wounded, without a cent, and I can barely walk.”