The Cost of Courage (28 page)

A
FTER THE SHOCK
of his death, Christiane and Odile went to work right away to assure André’s legacy. Odile drew on her experience as a book publisher to produce two beautiful volumes, one illustrated, one not, with extraordinary stories from André’s closest friends about every phase of his remarkable life, from his time at the lycée, to his life as de Gaulle’s secret agent in Paris, to his survival at three concentration camps. Then there were his three interlocking postwar careers: the brilliant mayor of a provincial town on France’s eastern border, a force to be reckoned with for more than four decades in the capital’s corridors of power, and an indefatigable advocate of reconciliation between France and Germany, and the unity of Europe. One book was privately published; the other was a special issue of the municipal review of Montbéliard.

This book would not have been possible without dozens of contributions from those two volumes. André Postel-Vinay’s memoir,
Un fou s’évade
(A Fool Escapes), published in 1996, was another crucial resource for me. But I still needed one more actor’s full cooperation before I could write my own account.

Ever since I became a reporter for the
New York Times
at the age of twenty-four, and probably even before that, I knew that the Boulloche saga could be the most extraordinary story I would ever tell. I had been mesmerized at eleven when I first heard it recounted by my uncle Henry, and I have never been less than mesmerized ever since. Meeting the main actors when I was eleven — and falling in love with one of them — only made me more eager to write about them.

During many visits to France over the next three decades, I often shared my ambition to write this book with Christiane’s children, especially François and Noëlle. But we agreed it would be impossible for me to do so as long as Jacqueline and Christiane maintained their silence.

Two more tragedies were necessary before the floodgates could open, even a little bit. In 1989, Jean Audibert, an exceptionally vigorous sixty-eight-year-old, died suddenly of a massive stroke, making Christiane a widow. Four years later, Jacqueline received a fatal diagnosis, and this time it was not a false alarm. She had leukemia, she was too old for a bone-marrow transplant, and she died one year later at the age of seventy-six.

Now Christiane was the unmistakable head of her family, the indomitable matriarch. The death of her sister acted as a release mechanism for her. For fifty years, she had considered her secrets too fraught to share with her children, because of the horrors suffered by her parents and her brothers.

Suddenly, she felt just as compelled to tell the story as she had felt required to remain silent about it. Realizing that it would disappear if she failed to record it, she forced herself to write a forty-five-page memoir — “for my grandchildren.” Once again, Christiane acted out of a sense of obligation.

“It was obvious,” she told me, using the same words she had used to describe her decision to join the Resistance. She had never wanted to write this book, but, at the age of seventy-one, she had to. “It was extremely painful for me to relive these black years. But it was also my duty.”

With the help of Mathilde Damoisel, a brilliant young history student at the Sorbonne whose specialty was women in the Resistance, Christiane produced an amazing narrative. Mathilde described it as an “homage to the spirit of her family.”

When Christiane was writing her book, her older daughter, Catherine, visited her every Monday evening. “She would read me what she had written the previous week,” Catherine remembered. “And she cried, and she cried and she cried.”

At the end there was still a great deal missing: Christiane’s emotions were almost completely absent from her pages. The essential facts were all that she could manage. But when Catherine told her it was “too dry,” Christiane refused to change her approach. “No,” Christiane told her daughter. “I don’t want to. It’s enough this way. And there are things that I won’t say. That I don’t want to say and that I will not say. So I’m putting in what I want to put in, and that’s all.”

When I visited Paris again at the end of the 1990s, Christiane’s younger son, François Audibert, met me at the Gare du Nord. He greeted me with the startling news of Christiane’s book. When I reached his house, I devoured it all in a single sitting. Then I embarked upon my own, relying heavily on Christiane’s for guidance.

I SPENT TWO AND HALF YEARS
living in France, interviewing all of the surviving Boulloches, as well as many others who had worked with them or hidden them during the Occupation. An oral history of the Resistance in the French National Archives included the accounts of many others who had known the Boulloches
during the war. At my request, the Public Record Office in London declassified all the files MI5 had compiled on André Boulloche, Alex Katlama, and Charles Gimpel when they were in Britain during the war.

Remarkably, everything I learned in the British and French archives confirmed and elaborated upon everything Christiane had told me.

Neither Christiane nor I enjoyed my efforts to force her to reveal as much as possible. But she never refused any request. She also urged everyone in her family to cooperate with me, and everyone did. One thing in particular surprised me. I hadn’t expected to share any of Christiane’s ambivalence about unearthing her secrets. But very gradually, I realized that it was also painful for me to part with the black-and-white version of her family’s heroism that I had grown up with.

ALTHOUGH THE COST
of their courage was gigantic, there are more triumphs than tragedies in this story. It is true that the
Résistants
in the family conveyed a certain malaise to many of their children by never talking about war. But I don’t believe they could have made any better choices about how to deal with their history. And despite their private agony, they managed to transmit all of the finest values of the Boulloches, the Audiberts, and the Katlamas.

Christiane had four fabulous children, twelve grandchildren, and seven great-grandchildren. All of them became righteous, rigorously informed, and deeply committed citizens of France, as did their cousins, and their offspring.

“We did not talk about the Resistance in terms of what each of them had done,” said Michel Katlama, Alex and Jacqueline’s younger son. “But I think the whole generation that followed was enormously marked by that. The whole family was extremely conscious
of its political choices. Never Communist. But it was a family that always voted for the left. Almost everyone. The Audiberts and the Katlamas all voted for the left. And it wasn’t just an accident. I can’t imagine any member of our generation being anti-Semitic. Or a Fascist. Or not a democrat — and very attached to democracy.”

WHEN CHRISTIANE
had finished her book, she summoned all her children and grandchildren and nephews and nieces to her grand apartment in Passy.

“Christiane said she had done what she had to do,” her niece, Claudine Lefer, remembered. “Because she was the last person who could tell this story. She didn’t give a speech, she said it in tête-à-têtes with small groups of us.”

Christiane’s granddaughter, Hélène Dujardin, believed that “she had done her duty. And in the end — I’m going to say something terrible — she could leave now, knowing that she had done what she had to do. That touched me enormously.”

I repeated those words to Christiane.

“Yes,” she said. “That’s true. Absolutely true.”

From time to time, I suggested that Christiane’s survival had been her destiny, rather than just the product of good fortune. A woman with no taste for superstition, she mostly turned away the idea that fate had played any role in her longevity. But in our final interview before I moved back to New York, she hedged a bit. “I was born on November 11, 1923, in Paris in the seventh arrondissement, during the minute of silence — at 11 a.m. on November 11th. That’s what they always told me.”

Then she laughed at the idea, but warmly: “So perhaps I was a little predestined.”
*

Christiane receives the galley of this book from the author. Square Alboni, December 23, 2014.(
photo credit 1.27
)

As I write these words, she is still flourishing in the elegant apartment she moved into with Jean Audibert and their children in 1958, the one where I first met her in 1962. She is on her own, but a steady stream of children, grandchildren, and great-grandchildren come to bask in her warmth and her wisdom. She and I remain in constant touch, by e-mail and on the telephone.

She still remembers everything.

MOST AMERICANS
are smugly dismissive of the way the French behaved during the Nazi Occupation. “Was there one?” That was the question I was asked most often — even by intelligent people — whenever I mentioned that I was writing about the French Resistance.

That reflexive condescension is coupled with a popular amnesia about the German sympathies of famous American appeasers, from Charles Lindbergh to Joseph P. Kennedy. Equally forgotten are the anti-Semitic organizations that flourished in the United States in the 1930s. The pro-Nazi German-American Bund counted eight thousand storm troopers among its members, and filled New York City’s Madison Square Garden at the beginning of 1939 with twenty thousand supporters shouting,
“Heil Hitler.”

The bund worked closely with the Reverend Charles Coughlin’s Christian Front. In the 1930s, Coughlin was one of the nation’s most influential broadcasters, and his supporters organized Buy Christian rallies across the country. After the Nazis looted Jewish stores and burned down synagogues all across Germany in November 1938, Coughlin even defended the horrors of Kristallnacht on his national radio show, describing them as appropriate retaliation for Jewish persecution of Christians.

THE TRUTH
is, there were hundreds of thousands of French men and women like the Boulloches who risked everything to liberate their country from the Nazis, while Americans at home never had to risk anything the way the French did during World War II. American servicemen and women made gigantic sacrifices, from Normandy to Iwo Jima, to free the world from the tyranny of Germany and Japan. But American civilians, living thousands of miles from the battlefields, never faced anything remotely resembling the choices that confronted everyone who lived in Nazi-occupied Europe.

However, these facts are not the main reason I cannot judge France harshly for its behavior during World War II. To me what is most persuasive is the attitude of the two men who did more than anyone else in the 1960s and the 1970s to bring about a more balanced view of France’s record: Robert Paxton and Marcel Ophuls.

Both men understood that if you have never actually faced life-and-death decisions, it is easy to assume that you would have done the right thing if the Nazis had occupied your country. It is also a great mistake to do so.

In his brilliant book
Vichy France,
Paxton wrote that “an American reader who honestly recreates the way the world looked from France [in 1940] cannot assume that he or she would easily have found the path to a 1944 hero’s role.” And Ophuls told me that former British prime minister Anthony Eden was also speaking for the filmmaker when the statesman made this crucial observation at the end of
The Sorrow and the Pity
: “If one hasn’t been through — as our people mercifully did not go through — the horror of an occupation by a foreign power, you have no right to pronounce upon what a country does which has been through all that.”

That is one of the most important and least understood lessons of World War II.

THE COST OF COURAGE
would never have been written without the help of dozens of enthusiastic collaborators.

Although she was extremely reluctant at the beginning, Christiane has been unfailingly helpful at every stage of my research, and my life. Her children, grandchildren, nephews, and nieces all followed her lead. François Audibert, Noëlle Audibert, Catherine Dujardin, Pierre Audibert, Eric Katlama, Michel Katlama, Claudine Lerer, Robert Boulloche, Jacques Boulloche, Hélène Katlama, Hélène Dujardin, Laurence Dujardin, and Stephane Dujardin all shared their knowledge and their memories. Catherine Dujardin also provided dozens of news stories about her uncle André’s untimely death.

Agnès Boulloche and Odile Boulloche shared hundreds of photographs, news clippings, and diary entries, some of them more than a hundred years old. Like Christiane, Odile offered her friendship, her affection, and her intelligence, and she did everything she could to make sure I got the story right. But any errors that crept into the manuscript are mine alone.