Voices from the Dark Years (48 page)

Decapitating the many-headed Maquis was impossible because there was no command structure. So, the Germans and Milice dealt with each band piecemeal, usually by infiltrating informers, so each new recruit had to be carefully vetted. When a Belgian walked into a camp near Thônes in Rhône-Alpes full of plausible details of his family being massacred by the SS, a search of his belongings revealed a hidden SS identity card. Since the Belgian would not talk, there was no alternative but to kill him. All
maquisards
had
noms de guerre
, to protect their families if caught. The one called ‘Blanc-Blanc’ was elected to do the deed because he had already ‘killed his first German’ as the saying went. He picked up the group’s single Sten gun and begged the victim to pardon him. They embraced, after which ‘Blanc-Blanc’ could not press the trigger. Everyone looked embarrassed, until the Belgian said, ‘You can’t expect me to give you the balls to do it, so please get a move on.’ The leader took the Sten from ‘Blanc-Blanc’ and fired a single shot at close range, his hands shaking so much that the Belgian was only wounded in the shoulder. Staunching the blood with his handkerchief, he begged them to send it back to his mother unwashed. The next bullet pierced his heart.
²¹

With Maquis sabotage and armed attacks growing daily more numerous in the area, the Moissac gendarmerie began fortifying its HQ. They also alerted the Maquis to German ambushes, but by no means all the civilian population supported the sabotage, as when the Toulouse-Bordeaux line was blown up in the early hours of 20 March, angering many Moissagais who could have been killed taking produce to market in Bordeaux on the 5 a.m. red-eye special.

N
OTES

  
1.
  Letters 000094, 000096, 000097 and 000102 in archives of Ste-Foy.

  
2.
  Interview with the author.

  
3.
  Quoted by L. Chabrun et al.,
L’Express
, 10 October 2005.

  
4.
  Interview in Pryce-Jones,
Paris in the Third Reich
, p. 215.

  
5.
  J. Duquesne, in
L’Express
, 14 June 2004, pp. 40–2.

  
6.
  Photostat of Gestapo file in family archives at Château La Roque: ‘
Ein besonders gefährlicher Agent, mit allen Mitteln kaltzustellen.
Wenn möglich lebend herzubringen. 1.000.000 Fcs. Belohnung wem derjenigen verhaftet oder ausliefert.
’

  
7.
  Amouroux
La Vie
, Vol. 2, pp. 53–5.

  
8.
  Ibid., Vol. 2, pp. 71–2.

  
9.
  For full details see
www.farac.org
, the website of FARAC (La Fédération des Amicales Régimentaires et des Anciens Combattants).

10.
  T. Todorov,
Une tragédie française
(Paris: Éditions du Seuil, 2004), pp. 64–5.

11.
  Schindler-Levine,
L’Impossible Au Revoir
, pp. 148–53.

12.
  Quoted in Webster,
Pétain’s Crime
, p. 210.

13.
  
Des libérateurs? La Libération! Par l’armée du crime
.

14.
  Krivopissko (ed.),
La Vie à en Mourir
, pp. 287–9.

15.
  Ibid., p. 294.

16.
  Ibid., pp. 284–6.

17.
  Ibid., pp. 283–4.

18.
  Thornton,
The Liberation of Paris
, p. 63.

19.
  Amouroux,
La Vie
, Vol. 2, pp. 47–8.

20.
  Personal communication with the author.

21.
  Amouroux,
La Vie
, pp. 49–50.

20

D
ANCING
IN
THE
D
ARK

Two days later, with Hubert de Monbrison absent
en mission
she knew not where, and her daughters Françoise and Manon safe with the Giraud family in Moissac, Renée went to visit her aunt Loulou, staying at a small hotel in La Roque-Gageac, a picturesque village on the banks of the Dordogne. It was an inspired choice of date, for at 6.30 the following morning a party of Germans blew in the kitchen door of Château St-Roch, hoping to find Hubert there.

Renée’s two sons looked out of their bedroom window to see another soldier prone beside a machine gun under the great cedar tree in the garden, a server kneeling beside him to feed the belt of ammunition, ready to shoot down anyone fleeing the house. Booted feet ran up the grand stone staircase and two soldiers burst into the boys’ bedroom, hauling them bodily down to the main hall decorated with the armour, swords and halberds of their father’s Huguenot ancestors. There, they were lined up at gunpoint in their pyjamas with the valet Pierre, plus his wife and frightened children, and a recently arrived refugee boy of 17, who the boys pretended was a visiting cousin. Young Jean de Monbrison urgently needed to empty his bladder after the night’s sleep. Christian warned him that he would be shot for trying to escape if he so much as moved but, when the attention of the Germans relaxed, 10-year-old Jean slipped into a toilet. He was hauled out before he had finished and booted back into line with the others while the building was searched.

The ancient uncle, who was now quite gaga, appeared and told them blithely, ‘These gentlemen have invited me to go and take breakfast with them in Toulouse’. After his valet had made the Germans understand that his master was no longer able to look after himself, the officer commanding laughingly arrested him also, so he could continue his customary duties inside the St-Michel prison in Toulouse!

The soldiers now conducted a more thorough search for Hubert, using 15-year-old Christian as a human shield as they burst into each room. The nightmare probably lasted no more than twenty minutes, but seemed an eternity to the boy. As they shoved him ahead of them through each doorway, he was more frightened that his father might have returned in the night without waking them than of the loaded rifles prodding his back. Released to rejoin his younger brother, he saw the nephew of the estate steward who had betrayed them all being taken away by the Germans, together with the Spanish workers and the youths with false papers for whom Renée had found jobs on the estate.

After the Germans’ departure, with the usual threats to return, the only people left in the main house were the two brothers, the false cousin and a hysterical Jewish girl from Alsace. She had been working in the kitchen when the Germans arrived and had the presence of mind to make coffee for the officers. Thanking her politely, they had taken no more notice of her, but her nerve cracked when she understood them discussing in German whether to shoot one of the brothers and leave his dead body on the steps of the château as bait to bring his father back in the hope of saving his other son. The terrified girl hid in the garden while the three youths ran upstairs to grab sunglasses, old hats and coats as disguise for themselves and her before jogging for 14km through the woods and fields to reach Françoise in Moissac.

She was in her bedroom doing some maths homework that had to be handed in the next day when called downstairs by Madame Giraud after her brothers and the two other terrified young people arrived, exhausted and covered in mud. Since there was no way of contacting their father, Françoise decided to set out with Christian by train to Sarlat, the nearest railway station to La Roque-Gageac, and warn their mother not to return. They arrived at Sarlat five minutes before curfew. Warned to stay in the station until dawn, or risk being shot on sight by a German patrol, they slipped out and walked 12km through totally unknown country in pitch darkness, hiding in ditches each time they met a German patrol. Luckily none had dogs. Well after 1 a.m., they arrived exhausted at the hotel, to wake their mother with the news of what had happened that morning. Rénée wept, relieved that Hubert had not been captured or killed, and Christian fell asleep, leaving his mother and sister to worry about what to do next.
¹

Taking refuge in the house of an old friend of her husband, Renée and the children were awoken early one morning by the noise of doors being broken down. Opening the bedroom shutters to escape through the garden, they found their way blocked by a civilian in a black leather coat, who pointed a revolver at them and shouted, ‘
Police spéciale allemande!
’ Lined up awaiting interrogation, Renée briefed her children in whispers about her current false identity, while fully expecting to be taken away in handcuffs or even shot on the spot. However, the Geheime Feldgendarmerie men showed no interest in her or the children, having come for the daughter-in-law of the owner of the house, whose letters in a personal code to her husband serving in the French army in Algieria had been intercepted by the censors. Assuming her a spy, they ignored pleas from her father-in-law to take him instead because she had two little children to look after, and hustled the terrified woman off to the Fort Montluc in Lyon, leaving her 7-month-old baby and 2-year-old son to be looked after by Renée and her daughters.

After Françoise had returned to Moissac, her younger sister Manon volunteered to accompany her back to the chateau, without the steward seeing them, to recover some of Renée’s jewellery, which could be sold for food. Thrusting the jewels into the saddlebag of one bicycle, they headed for Moissac, with a borrowed poodle sitting in the basket on the handlebars of the other bike. At two checkpoints on the road they stopped and chatted to the German soldiers, letting them fondle the dog, before riding off high on adrenalin at the risk they had taken and holding their breath for a shouted ‘Halt!’ and the click of a rifle bolt behind them.

Shortly afterwards, Françoise was woken up one morning by the sound of a
gazogène
truck pulling up outside yet another temporary home. Fearing the worst, she was delighted to see her father climb down from the cab – until she heard that he was on his way to give himself up in Toulouse so that his uncle could be released. Realising that he would be shot or deported, Françoise tried to dissuade him and was left in tears as he drove off, her anguish turning to joy when he returned after a woman recognised him at Valence station waiting for the Toulouse train and whispered the news that the ancient uncle had been released that morning.
²

In March, critic and poet Max Jacob died in Drancy of sickness and ill-treatment after several great names of the French cultural scene had done their best to have him released. As it became more dangerous to plead for exemptions, among those who refused to lend their signatures to a petition was Pablo Picasso, who lived and painted undisturbed throughout the occupation. As though excusing himself for abandoning his friend of nearly half a century, Picasso said, ‘Max was always an angel. Now he will be one.’

Old and young were grist alike to Hitler’s mill. Barbie chalked up another great victory on 6 April with a raid on the Maison des Roches at Izieu, isolated in the Rhône-Alpes, although only 20km from Chambéry as the crow flies. Since May 1943 French Red Cross worker Sabina Zlatin and her husband Miron had sheltered a community of 100-plus Jewish children in the neighbourhood with the co-operation of local residents. Forty-five children were having lessons in the house from five adult helpers on that sunny morning while she was out seeking more hideouts, unaware that a denunciation had brought Barbie’s convoy of cars and soft-top trucks to Izieu.