The General's Niece

by Paige Bowers

  The couple had brought five children—Chantal, Véronique, Olivier, and twins René and Xavier—into the world by the time Geneviève arrived at their door in Paris to continue her history studies at the Sorbonne in October 1941. The young woman was close to her thirty-two-year-old aunt, who handled a house full of children and wartime rations with good humor and the occasional bit of neighborly help.

  Like Madeleine, Geneviève knew what it was like to grow up without one parent and with the distracted affections of the other who had been left behind. Madeleine offered her bookish young niece refuge at her home in the leafy and genteel seventh arrondissement. Pierre had been working in Lyon as the regional director of the Banque de l’Union Parisienne since the occupation began, so his wife enjoyed having some older company around the house. In Lyon Pierre had been checking in on his older brother, Xavier, who recuperated in a Red Cross hospital after Germans released him from a prisoner-of-war camp on February 27, 1941, due to his poor health. Starving and suffering from edema that made it difficult for him to walk, fifty-six-year-old Xavier was forced to start over again once he was discharged from the hospital. After reuniting with Armelle and their two children, he found work as a tax man near Toulouse and then on the Mediterranean coast.

  Meanwhile his oldest daughter was settling into her new life in the French capital and making her first contacts with the Paris-based resistance in her aunt Madeleine’s company. Madeleine was already performing errands for a group, and with her encouragement soon Geneviève was transporting messages to other members working in the capital.

  Although Madeleine and Geneviève didn’t know it at the time, they were working with the Musée de l’Homme network, so called for the members who worked at the anthropology museum of the same name. The group was cofounded by Germaine Tillion, a thirty-six-year-old ethnographer who had studied the lives of seminomadic tribes in Algeria before returning to France in 1940. When the country fell to the Nazis, Germaine was so disgusted by the news that she ran outside to vomit in the street. An armistice would be monstrous, she believed, and she was determined to do something about it.

  Having no faith in the government, Tillion went directly to the Red Cross headquarters, thinking it might be less compromised. She knocked on the door. No one answered. A woman wandered outside the building and Germaine asked her, “What can we do?” The woman replied, “I don’t know.” Incensed, Germaine said, “We have to do something! We can’t let them squash us.” The stranger looked at her warily and gave her the number for a Colonel Paul Hauet, who was helping downed Allied pilots get to safety and collecting information on the German army and its prisoner camps. Germaine called the colonel and they began working together in June 1940. They helped escaped prisoners of war get civilian clothes, new identities, and shelter. They hid Jews and provided them with new identification papers. They countered Vichy and Nazi propaganda with tracts and underground newspapers. And they gathered and transmitted German military intelligence to the Free French in London.

  “We just improvised,” Tillion later said. “Nobody was a specialist.”

  By August Hauet and Tillion had merged with a resistance group that was run out of the museum where Germaine worked. Tillion’s mother, Émilie, a writer and art historian, took part in the group’s myriad activities and sometimes hosted its meetings in her house. A serene figure with snow-white hair, Émilie had nurtured Germaine and her younger sister, Françoise, on her own after her husband, Lucien, died of pneumonia in 1925. They were teenagers then, and they looked to their mother as an example of what an independent, intellectual woman could accomplish. Françoise became one of the few women enrolled in the elite Paris Institute of Political Studies—or Sciences Po—while Germaine gravitated toward the field of ethnology.

  By wartime Germaine felt it was her patriotic duty to shake French men and women out of their slumber so they could see the dangers of supporting Pétain. But the marshal had different views on how women could serve their country best. A woman’s role was at home, making babies who could become future French soldiers:

  Mothers of France, our native land, yours is the most difficult task but also the most gratifying. You are, even before the state, the true educators. You alone know how to inspire in all the inclination for work, the sense of discipline, the modesty, the respect, that give men character and make nations strong.

  At the time French women did not have the right to vote or open their own bank accounts. Many—but not all—didn’t work. But they felt that they could—and should—join the resistance, not just because of the daily realities wrought by food shortages but because resisting was a way to demonstrate just how ready and willing they were to fight for a country they believed in, even if that country didn’t grant them the same rights as men.

  “I had no qualifications to prevent what was happening,” Tillion recalled. “But I told myself at this moment that it was the duty of each individual to monitor and control what their government does . . . even without the right to vote.”

  Some began resistance cells, as Germaine Tillion did, or networked their way into action, as Geneviève did. German authorities had begun paying attention to Musée de l’Homme’s activities and rounding up suspected members for questioning. For months Geneviève and her aunt were active with Tillion’s group without knowing who she was or worrying about being caught.

  As Charles de Gaulle’s popularity grew, French men and women—especially young ones—began scribbling his name on walls along with his signature Cross of Lorraine. One resister, Agnès Humbert, typed VIVE LE GÉNÉRAL DE GAULLE onto five-franc notes in red ink, knowing that no one could afford to destroy paper money, even if it came with a subversive message. De Gaulle was becoming the symbol of a France that wanted to fight back, and people began wondering what he looked like. Geneviève and Madeleine worked in secrecy to send photos of him to admirers throughout the country. Geneviève enlisted one of her friends to print pictures of the general on the sly. Then she purchased stacks of cheap paperbacks from bouquiniste stands along the Seine. She walked back to Madeleine’s apartment with her purchases and then went to work slipping the pictures of her uncle into the books. Shipping the books in small batches, Geneviève evaded Nazi censors at the post office and continued her activities without giving anyone any inkling of what she was doing.

  For a time the plan worked well. One night Geneviève was stuffing paperbacks when the doorbell rang. Her cousins played in a nearby room while an elderly neighbor woman looked after them. One of the cousins opened the door and found three French police officers who wanted to speak with Madeleine.

  “Geneviève,” her cousin cried. “There’s a man here who wants to see Maman.”

  Geneviève was speechless as she looked around the room at the books and illegal photos of her uncle. A gentle fire crackled in the fireplace as she considered the seeming catastrophe that was unfolding, but she collected herself and then invited the officers in to wait in the salon, politely telling them that her aunt should not be much longer.

  “One of my young cousins is sick today,” she told them. “I need to go check his temperature. Would you like something to drink while you wait?”

  The officers thanked her for the offer and resumed the conversation they had been having before she entered the room. Geneviève smiled at them as she left, hoping not to arouse their suspicion. Then she scurried into the room where the elderly woman was watching her cousins and asked for her help burning all the photographs of her uncle in the fireplace. As the fire began to weaken, she sent her other cousin to wait at the bottom of the steps so he could warn his mother about what was going on. The boy passed back through the salon and grabbed a ball before shouting, “I’m going to play with the neighbors.”

  “See you soon,” Geneviève replied.

  The three officers waited patiently for Madeleine to return so that they could search the house. Geneviève tried to keep them company, forcing conversation in an effort to distract them from t
he elderly sitter’s efforts in the other room. When Madeleine arrived she told the men to carry on with their work. The men looked all over the apartment but found nothing.

  The fireplace sat full of smoking ashes.

  Eight days later the Gestapo came to the apartment at 7:00 AM. They entered, placed their hats on a bulky package resting on the portmanteau, then rummaged through each room quickly and violently as the children looked on and cried. They found nothing except for nine-year-old Chantal’s collection of Métro tickets. Exasperated, they ordered Madeleine to grab her coat and come with them. The children cried harder.

  Madeleine stared at the officers and calmly told them that she would have to serve her children breakfast before she left because they had just gotten up and were hungry. Geneviève hurried into the kitchen to set the table with preserves and chocolate that they had set aside to celebrate a happy occasion. The Germans were furious that Madeleine was stalling, but she sat at the table with her children so that she could eat breakfast with them and reassure them. Geneviève wasn’t nervous until her aunt got up from the table and followed the Gestapo out the door. Geneviève was twenty years old, and she wasn’t sure how she could manage five children on her own. The eldest of the children, Chantal, also worried about their fate but knew it was best to remain calm.

  One of the Gestapo officers assured them Madeleine would be back. Then he grabbed his hat on the way out the door and slammed it shut. Geneviève breathed a sigh of relief. All that time the hat had been sitting on a hunting rifle they had been trying to conceal.

  Madeleine returned late that evening. Although she was placed under house arrest, she continued her resistance activities. Other Musée de l’Homme members were not as fortunate and were deported or shot. One of them was them was André Taurin, a friend of Pierre’s who had a ten-year-old girl named Babeth. Taurin’s wife had already been deported, so Babeth asked to see her father before he was to be executed. Madeleine and Geneviève accompanied the young girl to Fresnes Prison, where he was being held. Babeth bid her father farewell, and Madeleine took the girl in and cared for her as one of her own. For Geneviève it was one of her first reminders of the risk she had taken to resist.

  * * *

  For at least twenty years, Adolf Hitler had believed that the presence of the Jewish people was akin to a disease and that the ultimate goal of the German government must be the removal of the Jews. Geneviève had been disturbed by the führer’s viewpoint since she had read Mein Kampf in her family’s living room some eight years before, and now his anti-Semitic policies were taking hold in France.

  On September 27, 1940, Germans required Jewish people in the occupied zone to register at police stations or subprefectures. Within a week Jews were prohibited from owning and managing businesses, restricted to shopping at certain hours of the day, banned from public parks and cinemas, and held to a strict curfew. Little by little they watched as their rights and livelihoods were stripped away. Certain professions became off-limits. Universities barred them at the door. Their bank accounts were seized. There was no running from this, no hiding. Occupation authorities forbade Jews from changing residences and required all of them to have “Jewish” stamped on their identity cards in red ink. In late March 1941 the Vichy government created a General Commission for Jewish Affairs to oversee how anti-Semitic policies were administered throughout the country.

  The roundups and deportations of Jews living in France began in May 1941. Some thirty-seven hundred Jewish men were arrested on May 14, 1941, and sent by train to camps in the Loiret department just south of Paris. A little more than five thousand Jews met the same fate between August and December of that year. Drancy, a northeastern suburb of the capital, had become the site of an internment camp where prisoners were held until they could be deported by train to German death camps. The Nazis were eyeing something bigger, swifter, colder for 1942: hunting and capturing twenty-seven thousand Jews before sending them off to Germany. More than forty-five hundred French police would be ordered to conduct the raids on their own neighbors, who by now were required to wear a gold Star of David in public.

  On the evening of July 16, 1942, Madeleine invited several of her friends to dinner. One of the guests, a Red Cross ambulance driver, arrived late. She had been at the Vélodrome d’Hiver, an indoor cycling track not far from the Eiffel Tower, where some seventy-five hundred Jewish men, women, and children were being detained in the heat. More than fifty-six hundred more were being held at another internment camp north of the city, the dinner guest said. Because she was allowed to bring the captives food, she shared what she had seen with the table: the families who waited for uncertain fates, the distressed children who cried as they were separated from their parents, the desperate people who took their own lives. There were no uniformed Germans to be seen, but there was also no way of arguing that the Vichy government and French police weren’t complicit in Nazi affairs.

  The room grew still, weighed down by the gravity of all they had heard. One woman broke the silence with a deep sigh. “Yes, it’s very sad,” she said. “But they are Jews.” Geneviève looked at the woman, who was a mother of four and devout Catholic. She thought to herself that the woman’s resignation about the roundup was just as much of a crime as the act itself.

  “At that moment I realized that some people felt it didn’t matter what you did,” she recalled. “It was all a question of degree.”

  British intelligence officers had been receiving information that this sort of apathy was on the wane in France, however. The Vichy regime began considering General de Gaulle’s support a serious threat. It did not help matters that Pétain had brought back Pierre Laval as prime minister and that Laval began publicly rooting for a German victory that could save Europe from Bolshevism. People were growing anxious and fearful, and some local authorities began to sense that the indifference to Vichy wouldn’t last.

  “A lot of people were afraid, but many others began to say to themselves, ‘I can’t do this anymore. I just can’t,’” Geneviève said, confirming that there were French citizens who no longer wanted to look the other way.

  That same summer the Vichy government, at Germany’s urging, sought French volunteers to work in Nazi factories. For every three workers who volunteered, the Germans would release one prisoner of war. Offering one’s services to the Reich was a way to ensure Nazi victory against the Soviet Union and prevent the spread of Communism throughout Europe, or so the propaganda claimed.

  Lured by the promises of comfort and compensation, some able young men did volunteer. But overall the response was feeble, and the occupiers encouraged the French state to obligate more young men to come forward. These men were given a choice: work for Germany or head to the camps. This conscription of French workers for Reich interests turned many in France against the Pétain government and into resisters of some sort. Those who refused to become a part of the Nazi war machine were hidden and fed by farmers in exchange for labor and encouraged by their bosses to leave town. Neighbors pled ignorance about missing recruits to the gendarmes, saying it had been some time since they had seen them. The deserters fled to the mountains and forests, banding together to make small armed groups.

  By August Geneviève hungered to take on riskier resistance activities and trudged over the Pyrenees into Spain to deliver her first satchel of secret papers to contacts there. She made the trip a second time and decided to go into clandestine work. When she crossed back over the mountains into France, she adopted a new identity: Geneviève Lecomte. Identity changes were common among resisters tackling secret missions, as were switching networks and changing residences. Otherwise Geneviève strove to keep things simple and not make too many waves, working with local guides and showing up on time for meetings so she could escape detection.

  “Some days you felt sure they’d get you,” she recalled. “But then nothing happened.”

  The hardest part for her was staying out of touch with her family. She moved out of Madeleine
’s apartment and into a simple, one-room apartment called a maid’s chamber that bore the minimal signs of her existence: there were just enough clothes and books to suggest that a student lived there. She didn’t want to blow her cover, but she didn’t want to endanger her nearest relatives either if her real identity became known.

  One of her great-aunts allowed her to work from an office in her Left Bank apartment, allowing Geneviève to receive other undercover resisters there and quietly come and go as she pleased. She was grateful for the elderly woman’s support and for the help and protection she received from strangers all across the country. One night she sneaked into the western town of Lussac-les-Châteaux, where she had to deliver false identity cards, ration cards, and other documents to resistance members there. It wasn’t the first time she had gone into the town, but it was a route that was becoming increasingly tricky to navigate. She found a milk truck driver who agreed to drive her to the train station the next day so she could return to Paris. Then as curfew neared she began looking for a hotel room. She couldn’t find any, and as German troops began their patrols, Geneviève wondered what to do. She entered a small café that seemed to be open.

  “Is there any chance you would have a room for me?” Geneviève asked the owner, who was behind the counter washing glasses.

  The woman surveyed the room to see if there was anyone else there before quickly telling her, “Listen, I’m not a hotel, but I have a small room that belongs to my daughter. Until she comes back, you can sleep there. But I’m warning you, there’s no heat and you will only have a coverlet.”