The General's Niece

by Paige Bowers

  Simone, the printing machine that had fueled so much defiance in recent months, remained hidden in a location not far from the Sorbonne. As Geneviève was delivered to her new cell, she found the only thing she could do was sing. That’s what her fellow inmates did. Their favorite tune was “La Marseillaise,” especially when inmates were sent off to execution. The Germans ordered their captives to stop singing the anthem but were typically unsuccessful. No matter how much their keepers banged on cells and yelled, prisoners would sing louder and more passionately, even if it meant it would end in a beating.

  “For us,” Geneviève said. “It was just another way of resisting.”

  5

  Voices and Faces

  Situated in the southern outskirts of Paris, Fresnes Prison was the largest prison in France, used by the Nazis to hold resistance members under deplorable conditions. The cells were built to house one person but often held five times that. Large windows with frosted glass offered a hint of the outside world. When they were opened prisoners heard people coming to the facility, excited to visit their loved ones. They also heard the sobs of family members who left the facility after learning that their mother, father, sister, brother, cousin, or child had just been shot for treachery against the Germans. Risking punishment, prisoners cried out to visitors, pleading with them to let their families know where they were.

  The days began at 6:00 AM, when a coffee cart rattled cell to cell to distribute cups of tepid, sugary black liquid. Each room had a small shelf, one proper bed with a pillow that shined with grime, two benches, a few mattresses, and dark-gray blankets to ward off the nighttime chill. One toilet sat in the corner; it had no cover and above it was a faucet that either provided water or aided with the flush. Inmates were permitted a four-minute shower twice a month and twenty minutes outside up to twice a week. These brief moments outside the cell allowed captives to interact with fresh faces and inhale crisp air. In the summer months the cramped cells offered a respite from seasonal heat. But in winter the chambers were glacial, damp, and infested with slugs. Screams occasionally pierced the silence demanded of all prisoners as German officers tortured resisters for information. When the cries ended, prisoners heard the slow, diabolical laughter of the victim’s oppressor. What would they do to make someone talk?

  What wouldn’t they do? One woman said the Gestapo tore off all her fingernails. The terror they heard coming from other parts of the facility seemed to indicate that there were horrors happening that were far worse than that. The mere thought of screams and what provoked them could be enough to convince an inmate to denounce someone or share secrets. Others refused to speak no matter what they suffered and for how long. Those men and women were sentenced to death. The defiant faced their end with their heads held high and their sense of honor intact. Impressed by their bravery, their fellow inmates sang “La Marseillaise” as they were led away to die.

  Although she was never tortured, Geneviève endured more questioning and beatings because “the Germans were always looking for supplementary information.” She worried about how she’d hold up against the blows and whether she’d give in to them to make the punishments stop. She was slapped, thrown on the floor, and beaten, but she found that the bullying made her stronger inside and more defiant. They were trying to intimidate her and she would not give them that satisfaction.

  “I was a young girl,” she said later. “I wasn’t married; I only had children after my return. I am always upset when I think of what mothers and wives lived through. One wonders how they were capable of resisting.”

  In the jail she recalled a certain state of grace because the captives were all surrounded by “exceptionally brave people who set a very good example.” When there were executions she remembered strong emotions and great enthusiasm for the heroes who were being taken away.

  These passions may have strengthened them in a way the meager rations could not. By 10:00 AM another cart rolled past the cells with daily bread and butter rations. Distribution of the day’s main meal—a watery cabbage soup that included a few morsels of potato—followed that. Some prisoners thickened the meal with wheat germ they received in bimonthly Red Cross parcels, which also contained spice bread, jam, and sugar. Others simply couldn’t stomach the broth. Another round of coffee arrived at 4:00 PM, and prisoners who received packages from their families would share the contents with their desperate cellmates. Sometimes they offered each other a bit of chocolate. Other times they passed around candid photos that documented how their children were growing or letters that told how relatives were holding up in their absence.

  One of the first notes Geneviève received at Fresnes was from her aunt Madeleine, informing her that her maternal grandmother had passed away at the age of seventy. Geneviève grew wistful when she heard the news, thinking of the visits she and her siblings had had with their grandmother and how there was a tenderness and ease about her that they could not find with their stepmother, Armelle, no matter how hard they tried. It was easy to ruminate about life outside the prison’s walls, and for many prisoners like Geneviève, mail expanded the prisoners’ universe beyond the overcrowded room where they spent their days.

  Where letters and packages connected detainees to the outside world, cell door grates and water pipes connected prisoners in neighboring cells. Prisoners weren’t permitted to communicate with their neighbors, but they got around it by talking to each other through the facility’s tubes and ducts. Distorted, disembodied voices came from above and below, left and right, offering personal stories, scripture, warnings, and advice. Faceless but full of heart, these voices inspired Geneviève with their stories every day.

  “There was life in that cell,” she recalled. “It was a bit crowded, but I didn’t have any bad memories of my time there.”

  Two months before Geneviève’s arrival, her aunt Marie-Agnès Cailliau de Gaulle had been booked at Fresnes after she and her husband, Alfred Cailliau, were arrested by the Gestapo for their suspected resistance activities. The couple was separated from each other and questioned, and then Marie-Agnès was taken to Fresnes, where her jailer told her she would remain just for the night. After she was searched and brought to a chamber on the fourth floor, she heard her captor grumble, “You have been caught and will remain here for a very long time” as he locked her up.

  It was difficult for her to be separated from her family, many of whom were active resisters in other parts of France. She worried about their fates, but she especially worried about Alfred, whom she had not seen since the Gestapo had taken him away. In her dismay she poured herself into the lives of those around her. Her new roommates were a thirty-year-old woman who had been funneling weapons to the Secret Army and an elderly female who had been arrested as an agent of the resistance. Marie-Agnès, who listened to their stories with great interest and glee, felt the two were fast becoming part of her family.

  She had no idea that a bona fide family member would soon be in her midst. One day as she was returning from the showers, she heard someone shout, “Where is Geneviève de Gaulle?” Marie-Agnès couldn’t bear to think that her niece had been arrested and detained too. She cried out her name, hoping Geneviève might hear her and respond.

  Two cells away, a familiar voice—Geneviève’s—shouted back to Marie-Agnès that yes, she was there. Geneviève bolted from her cell and threw herself into her aunt’s arms. Guards tore the two women apart before leading Geneviève away and chaining her to the wall as punishment. Despite the reprimand the young woman continued to disobey. When guards asked Geneviève and her cellmates to do some sewing for them, they refused, and their mattresses were removed from their cell in retaliation. Geneviève was not fazed by this. She conducted herself simply and without superiority, cracking jokes when she needed to break the tension.

  “She had a real seriousness of purpose,” one former prisoner said of Geneviève’s refusal to yield to her captors. “But she was always happy, laughing and prone to joke around.”

&
nbsp; When guards weren’t present Geneviève talked to her aunt, usually after the morning coffee cart passed through the corridor and the guards went off to question prisoners. As soon as detainees realized there were no monitors present, they called out to each other: “Good morning, everyone! Good day! Good luck!” One by one the singsong continued as women shouted, “Hello, Marie-Agnès!,” “Hello, Simone,” “Hello, Claire!” until the block descended into laughter. Up and down the corridor, women spent the morning sharing funny memories with their neighbors. It was a welcome distraction.

  Geneviève, for all her bravery, drew comfort from having her aunt so close. In the beginning the young woman did not have the right to receive packages in the prison. Because Marie-Agnès had been there longer, she was able to receive boxes, and she persuaded one of the prison guards to allow her to share what she had been sent with Geneviève. The guard respected Marie-Agnès—in part because she was never afraid to remind him that she was General de Gaulle’s sister—and agreed to bring Geneviève pieces of cheese, sugar, and whatever else her aunt felt she needed in order to supplement the meager prison meals. Other prisoners grew enamored of the older woman too and would call out to her, “Aunt Agnès! Aunt Agnès!”

  In the following weeks the prison regime hardened against its charges. They were no longer allowed to open their cell windows. They were no longer permitted to send laundry out for cleaning; too many secret messages had been passed back and forth. Care packages would also be checked. The inmates had simply been getting a little too brazen for German tastes. A twenty-one-year-old prisoner named Anise Girard had devised a solo escape; her plan was to steal a female guard’s keys before walking out of the prison in her keeper’s uniform. One day she lured the guard into her cell, claiming she had bedbugs in her mattress. Then she jumped on her, shoving a dirty piece of toilet paper in her mouth to keep her quiet. The guard’s dentures fell out, she screamed, and three prison officers came running to break up the scuffle. Anise escaped with a light punishment after saying that the guard hit her first and so she had to fight back. It was a white lie, but from then on Anise was viewed with a mixture of fear and respect. Surely there were others with the same instincts.

  Musée de l’Homme’s Germaine Tillion had proven herself to be just as tough-minded during her incarceration at Fresnes. On October 21, 1943, she found herself standing alongside Anise and eighteen other women on a train platform at the Gare du Nord, where they waiting to be deported on a passenger train bound for an unknown destination.

  “Germaine promised to learn our destination from our S.S. guard,” Anise recalled. “Then, she added: ‘Watch me tame a savage!’”

  Germaine pulled a picture of a small, broad-eared desert fox called a fennec out of the bag that held her dissertation about Algerian tribes. She showed the picture to Anise and told her that the guard would melt at the sight of the animal. How could he not? Germaine walked over to the guard, tugged at his sleeve, and tried to get him to look at the image, but he shrugged her off. She persisted, and when the guard saw the fennec, a slow smile spread across his face.

  Now that Germaine had charmed the guard, she attempted to find out where their group was headed.

  “He went so far as to say ‘Furstenburg,’” Anise said. “But that didn’t tell us much.”

  * * *

  France’s underground drew its power from popular support. The movement had been growing in strength, and its leaders had been so audacious as to come up with a plan for the country’s future. Although many in the country weren’t engaged in active resistance with organized networks, they were quietly doing what they could to circumvent the Nazis. A society of rescue emerged, where everyday people hid aviators, fed combatants, and covered for their neighbors who were suspected of being resisters. Those who had gone underground or into the shadows had earned the nation’s trust.

  Most resisters agreed that Charles de Gaulle was the symbol of their liberation and could deliver on his promises of a free France. But they had had time to think about their homeland’s weaknesses since the war’s outset and envisioned a new and stronger country.

  “Any leader who does not listen to [the resistance’s] demands in the reconstruction of France is doomed to defeat,” one reporter wrote.

  Resistance leaders believed that the France of the future should be based on four main principles. First, it should have no dictatorship or authoritarian government. Second, no outside power should have a say in how the new government would be formed. Third, there should be an election of a new National Assembly, chosen by universal suffrage. Finally, political parties should not be influenced by any foreign nations. Resistance heads believed that General de Gaulle was receptive to their ideas, as evidenced in a recent speech he gave about the need for a Fourth French Republic.

  If the Germans could be thanked for anything, it was uniting the country behind a common cause, one officer said. It was a cause that transcended class and political beliefs; even French Communists, who some feared would deliver the country to Russia, had been embraced by priests, rich manufacturers, royalists, naval captains, and police sergeants. The new France would be above partisan bickering, or so it was believed.

  “The impression gained in talks with this man and dozens of others . . . is that the Frenchmen of the underground have been doing a lot of thinking,” the correspondent added. As they struggled to survive and defend their country, combatants looked ahead to what they could do to make it a better place to live.

  The only thing that remained was for de Gaulle to convince the Allies that he should be officially recognized by them as the head of France’s provisional government once Allied forces arrived on its shores. The British were willing to cede that to him, but the Americans were not ready yet. The general’s haughty temperament and the fashion in which he had dominated the government-in-exile fed his critics’ fears that his real aim was an authoritarian regime. It did not help that Charles de Gaulle believed that the next republic should be led by a stronger presidential figure who had the authority to act and make decisions that were in France’s best interests. In the past French presidents had been more ceremonial figures, and the French parliament, which was composed of the Senate and National Assembly, was the real political force. For a man like Charles de Gaulle, who had seen partisan bickering take down the Third Republic, this new leader, who would be above party politics, was the way to take France forward in the postwar years. And although he never said it explicitly, it is very likely that he believed he was the very embodiment of the strong executive he described.

  His countrymen became convinced that Allied forces would run the Germans out by the end of 1943. Some twenty-five hundred forced laborers on leave from Germany were so confident of the Reich’s weakening grip that they refused to return to work. Although the workers were ordered to return for duty before Nazis harmed French prisoners, occupation forces realized such threats could inspire unrest among locals.

  Posters began covering French buildings in an attempt to encourage workers to work in Germany under “unequaled conditions of comfort, friendliness and pay.” The men on leave from Nazi factories denounced the propaganda, citing the enormous toll the obligatory work took on their health. In late September Julius Ritter, the Paris-based director of labor recruitment for the Reich, was assassinated as he was leaving his house. Several unidentified young men on bicycles fired at Ritter as he crossed the street to his car. Germany and the Vichy government realized that the resistance had become bigger than one man—de Gaulle. “It has but one slogan,” a source told the New York Times. “Down with the Germans and their French supporters.”

  Meanwhile at Fresnes Prison, female internees were doing what they could to keep each other’s spirits up.

  “Violaine is calling Geneviève!” a familiar voice cried out down the corridor. “Violaine is calling Geneviève!”

  “Geneviève!” the voice cried.

  Geneviève hurried toward the door of her cell. She knew that
Violaine was Jacqueline d’Alincourt’s nom de guerre. Geneviève shouted back down the corridor at her friend, who had been recently arrested for her work in Jean Moulin’s inner circle. Jacqueline had returned home after an appointment and found five Gestapo agents standing in front of her bedroom door. She ran for the stairs to escape, but they grabbed her. She began shaking from head to toe as they questioned her but wouldn’t talk despite their threats. She was slapped and taken away. After five days of interrogation, she was sent to Fresnes, where she heard that her friend Geneviève was being held.

  “Geneviève! Your uncle wants you to know that he prefers solution number one,” Jacqueline shouted again. “I said, he prefers solution number one!”

  Geneviève smiled when she realized that her friend was referring to the letter she had sent her uncle in May seeking his advice on what to do next. He had received it after all, and he believed that staying in France was the best option. Now as she sat in a jail cell south of Paris, Geneviève knew she had no other choice but to stay put.

  Like her aunt Marie-Agnès, Geneviève amused herself by getting to know her cellmates. One was a young Belgian woman named Mariette who specialized in dance marathons with her husband. Mariette was arrested in the free zone and incarcerated, but then she escaped to Lyon, where she joined the resistance. After another arrest in Lyon, Mariette was transferred to Fresnes. Their third cellmate was a Parisian who was arrested for stealing from a German equipment center where she was employed. One day they were joined by a fourth woman: Thérèse, who was tossed in their cell after sixteen days in solitary confinement. Overcome with shyness, Thérèse looked around the small room to see two women sitting on benches and a third sitting on the chamber’s lone bed.