The Cost of Courage (20 page)

FOR THE NEXT WEEK
, the Germans, and then the Milice, the Vichy paramilitary force, terrorize her parents’ apartment building. An elderly woman who tries to visit Hélène Boulloche is detained for three hours; a young girl who comes to visit someone else in the building is stripped and searched.

As soon as Odette tells Christiane about the arrests, her only concern is to alert the rest of her unit, and then to disappear as quickly as she can. Alone in Paris, without Jacqueline, or any other member of her immediate family, this twenty-one-year-old secret agent must summon all of her inner strength to escape confusion and despair.

Later that morning, Christiane runs into a close family friend, Dr. René Cler. When she tells him she is on the run from the Gestapo, the thirty-four-year-old doctor immediately invites her back to his apartment on avenue Sully-Prud’homme. What strikes him most about this brave young woman is her “sense of immediate spontaneity.”
^‡

Eight months earlier, Cler had already collaborated with the movement, after Jacqueline Boulloche had arrived “very agitated” at his house for lunch.

“Our unit has just been arrested,” she declared. “Can we hide our radio transmitter with you?”

“I had no choice,” the doctor remembered. “So then I passed several unpleasant nights.” He recognized “a remarkable simplicity” in the Boulloche sisters: “For us, it is our duty.”

A year earlier, the doctor had had his own close call, when he answered a summons from the Gestapo, after they became suspicious of the activities at his apartment. “It was not pleasant. An
attractive French girl interrogated me for two or three hours. And there was a sexual current between us. When she went next door to make her report in German, she said, ‘This man came voluntarily to see us, and we should let him go.’ ” And they did.

Cler decides that it’s too dangerous to lodge Christiane in his fourth-floor apartment. But there is an empty apartment on the sixth floor that belongs to an absent Swedish diplomat, and the concierge allows him to put Christiane in there. Now, not even the members of her own unit know where she is living.

The apartment building next door is filled with Germans. During the final days before the Liberation, there are German snipers on the roof — and a Senegalese sniper fighting with the Free French in an apartment across the way. Christiane spends most of her days in the doctor’s apartment and her nights in the apartment of the Swedish diplomat. One night when she goes back upstairs, she discovers bullet holes from stray shots lodged in the wall exactly where she had been sleeping.

The next eighteen days will determine the fate of the City of Light. But Christiane will never leave her secret hiding place — until de Gaulle finally makes his triumphant return to the capital.

O
NE DAY AFTER
Jacques, Hélène, and Robert Boulloche are arrested, Adolf Hitler summons General Dietrich von Choltitz to meet with him at Wolfsschanze. At the first of the three security rings, all of the general’s luggage is removed from his car — a new precaution inaugurated after Stauffenberg’s failed assassination attempt.

A fourth-generation Prussian soldier, Choltitz had led the Nazi assault on Rotterdam in 1939. Three years later, he captured Sebastopol in the Russian Ukraine. When the siege there began, Choltitz was leading a regiment of 4,800 men. When it ended, only 347 of his soldiers were still alive. But the Germans had won the battle.

Shortly, Choltitz will tell a Swedish diplomat, “Since Sebastopol, it has been my fate to cover the retreat of our armies and to destroy the cities behind them.”

His flair for destruction and his fierce loyalty to the Führer are the reasons he is meeting with Hitler on August 7. Hitler has been told Choltitz is a man who never wavers in the execution of an order. Coming from France, where his corps has failed to halt
the breakout of American forces into Brittany, the general hopes to be rejuvenated by his leader after his recent setback on the battlefield.

But when the general reaches Hitler’s lair, he finds the same hollow man Erwin Rommel and Field Marshal Gerd von Rundstedt had encountered in France a few weeks earlier. “I went into the room and there he stood, a fat, broken-down old man with festering hands,” Choltitz remembered two months later. “I was really almost sorry for him because he looked horrible.”

Then Hitler “began reeling off a gramophone record like a man stung by a tarantula and spoke for three-quarters of an hour!” The Führer told him that “dozens of generals” had already “bounced at the end of a rope” since the assassination attempt, because they had tried to prevent him from fulfilling his destiny of leading the German people.
*

Today Hitler is making Choltitz his new commander in Paris. The Führer has chosen the Prussian to make sure that he has someone who will leave Paris in ashes if the Germans are forced to abandon their greatest prize. He is making Choltitz a Befehlshaber, a title that gives him the widest possible powers for a commander of a German garrison. Hitler orders him to “stamp out without pity” any act of terrorism against the German armed forces in Paris.

But Choltitz leaves the meeting more pessimistic than ever
about the future of the Third Reich. When the Allies reach the outskirts of Paris, he knows what the next order will be from the mad dictator:
Blow it all up.

THE URGENCY
to liberate Paris felt by the Resistance fighters in Paris and the Free French Forces under de Gaulle is not shared at all by Eisenhower and the rest of the generals leading the Allied invasion. While they obviously understand the power of the capital’s symbolism, they don’t think it has much importance as a military objective.

De Gaulle is worried that Communists will try to seize control of the capital if there is a premature insurrection there. But the Allies believe that the liberation of the French capital will require the diversion of tremendous resources from the effort to defeat the Germans. Right now they are determined to save every ounce of fuel and food and ammunition for combat operations that will “carry our lines forward the maximum distance” to wipe out the Nazi armies.

A planning document that lands on Eisenhower’s desk after the Normandy invasion warns that “Paris food and medical requirements alone are 75,000 tons for the first two months, and an additional 1,500 tons of coal daily are likely to be needed for the public utilities.”

For all of these reasons, Eisenhower hopes to put off the “actual capture of the city” as long as possible — unless he receives “evidence of starvation or distress among its citizens.”
^†

ALTHOUGH CHRISTIANE
is confined to Dr. Cler’s apartment building, she still manages to learn the fate of her newly arrested family members, because the doctor is in touch with some of her comrades. Her parents and Robert are going to be shipped off to Germany on a train that is scheduled to leave the Gare de l’Est in Paris on August 12.

But with the Allies pushing steadily forward, and the Liberation achingly near, the Resistance redoubles its efforts to prevent any more deportations. On August 10, national railroad workers in the Paris region declare a general strike. Their leaflet exhorts, “To make the Hun retreat, strike! For the complete and definitive liberation of our country, strike!” Within two days, half of the eighty thousand railroad workers have walked off the job, and the train that is supposed to deport Christiane’s parents and brother is stranded at the station.

On the night of August 12, the Resistance launches another sabotage mission, which cripples the Gare de l’Est. But nothing will halt the demonic momentum of the Nazis.

Instead of bringing them to the Gare de l’Est, on August 15, General Choltitz orders more than two thousand prisoners assembled on the
“quai au bestiaux”
(the animal platform) of the Pantin station.

Among those boarding the train are Jacques, Hélène, and Robert Boulloche, André Rondenay, and Alain de Beaufort — while Christiane remains cut off from all of them in her secret hiding place.

This will be the final train of French prisoners to depart Paris for Germany, the infamous
dernier convoi.
^‡

Unusually, the train carries 168 Allied airmen — Americans, Britons, and Canadians — who have been rescued by the Resistance only to be captured by the Nazis afterward.

The Red Cross arrives at the station before the train leaves and manages to distribute some food rations to the prisoners. Somehow, the Red Cross agents also convince the Germans to release thirty-six prisoners who are sick or pregnant. Then the train rumbles out of the station.

Half an hour after it leaves Paris, the long line of wooden cattle cars suddenly shudders to a halt. At the last minute, the Nazis have figured out the identity of two of their most important prisoners. A Gestapo officer gives the order to unlock the doors on one of the cars, and Rondenay and de Beaufort tumble off the train, along with a handful of others. Minutes later, they are driven to the Domont forest, where they are executed by a German firing squad. Christiane imagined the horror of their final moments: “They must have thought they were being taken off the train so that they could return to Paris.”

The three Boulloches remain in their fetid cars to continue their wretched journey.

A survivor of the convoy remembered hearing railroad workers yelling at the train, “You won’t go any further, the war is over! The Allies have landed at Saint-Tropez” — as indeed they had. But despite more attempts by the Resistance to halt the convoy — several prisoners try to escape and are immediately shot, and another insurrection forces the Germans to transfer all the prisoners to a new train at Nanteuil-Saâcy — the convoy continues its relentless progress.

On August 19, the train arrives at Weimar, Germany. The following day, the men are dispatched to Buchenwald and the women to Ravensbrück.

Much later, Christiane learns that her mother has been waterboarded by the Gestapo after her arrest and before her final train ride. But Hélène Boulloche never tells the Germans anything.

BACK IN PARIS
, German demolition teams are planting the charges necessary to blow up every bridge, every factory, and every telephone exchange, as well as every famous Paris landmark, from the Palais du Luxembourg to Napoleon’s tomb and the Quai d’Orsay, home of the French Foreign Ministry. The chief German engineer promises General Choltitz that the Allies won’t find a single working factory when they reach the capital — the industry of Paris will be paralyzed for at least six months.

Since Allied bombers are continuing their obliteration of German cities every day, German generals see nothing unusual about their plan to level Paris. They have just finished demolishing Warsaw, after the uprising there.

After receiving an anonymous phone call, warning of the Germans’ plans to blow up every bridge crossing the Seine, the capital’s Vichy mayor, Pierre-Charles Taittinger, decides to pay a call on the German commander. Choltitz recites his plan to blow the whole city up “as indifferently as if it were a crossroads village in the Ukraine.”

Taittinger decides there is nothing he can do except to try to convey his love for the city. “Often it is given to a general to destroy, rarely to preserve,” Taittinger begins. “Imagine that one day it may be given to you to stand on this balcony as a tourist, to look once more on these monuments to our joys, our sufferings, and to be able to say, ‘One day I could have destroyed all this, and I preserved it as a gift for humanity.’ General, is not that worth all a conqueror’s glory?”

“You are a good advocate for Paris,” Choltitz replied. “You have done your duty well. And likewise I, as a German general, must do mine.”

The general’s response is disheartening. But the Frenchman has planted a powerful seed.

WHEN DE GAULLE
returns to France from his headquarters in Algiers, he reaches General Eisenhower’s headquarters on August 20. Once again, Eisenhower declares his intention to bypass Paris when his troops cross the Seine. De Gaulle says this strategy might be acceptable, if the Resistance had not already begun an uprising there.
^§
Eisenhower replies that the uprising has begun too soon, and against the Allies’ wishes.

“Why too soon?” the French general replies. “Since at this very moment your forces are on the Seine?” Ultimately, Eisenhower commits himself to liberating the capital with General Leclerc’s French troops, but he still refuses to specify a date. De Gaulle believes it is “intolerable that the enemy should occupy Paris even a day longer than it was necessary, from the moment we had the means to drive him out of it.”

De Gaulle also suggests to Ike that if the Allied command delays too long, he will ignore the Allied chain of command and give the order to General Leclerc’s armored division to take Paris himself.

The next day, Roger Gallois, an emissary of the Resistance in Paris, sneaks through German lines to make another appeal to the Americans to get to Paris as soon as possible. When he reaches the tent of George S. Patton, the famously gruff general tells the Frenchman that the Americans are in the business of “destroying Germans, not capturing capitals.” The insurrection in the city has begun without permission from the Allies, and now the Resistance will have to accept the consequences; the Allies cannot accept “the moral responsibility of feeding the city.”