When we speak of the Resistance, we are not just speaking of those men in the Maquis who lived a troglodyte existence and whose heroic deeds–often carried out with the most primitive materials, even with their bare hands–are worthy to live on in posterity. We are not just speaking of the partisans, maquisards, both foreign and French, who hid in thick woodlands, in caves, in mountain gullies, in forests and who, with for the most part only very basic equipment, carried out incredible feats against a mighty oppressor–against heavy weaponry, tanks and bombs. Nor just the réfractaires who, in their various hiding places in the town and in the country, exposed themselves to the most terrible dangers and deprivations rather than be compelled to do the Germans’ slave labour.
We are speaking also of that other guerrilla organisation: a secret army, without distinction of age or sex, without weapons or badges of rank, which covered the entire land–almost infinite in their variety–like an invisible, unbreakable net of resistance. An army of millions, men and women who opposed the oppressor at every level of society, in every position and profession.
It was this army, too, that daily left its dead–and its missing–on the field of battle. They left them in the places of execution and in the torture chambers of the Gestapo, both the German Gestapo and the French one that had been provided by Vichy.
It should be mentioned purely in passing, and without the slightest sense of irony: the fact that it was possible for the Resistance to develop into such a tremendous organisation under the Germans’ very nose; the fact that the German terror machine, with all its appalling techniques of repression, was not able to stamp it out; the fact that the Resistance often managed to spring up where one would least have expected it–all these facts are less astonishing than the fact that the Resistance flourished alongside a culture of thoughtless, carefree openness in conversation.
In one sense, discretion is a French national virtue. You could hardly find a country as tactful, as free of inquisitive, intrusive questioning as France. On the other hand, you could also hardly find another country where the ‘seal of silence’ is so casually broken–or, if not broken, at least loosened a little. The usual way of keeping a secret is to communicate it to someone else in the strictest confidence–or at least to allow it to become clear by unambiguous hints, nudges and winks. This is not done out of any sense of malice, but simply from a desire to appear interesting or important; to create an effect; to amaze–to appear better informed than ordinary mortals.
The Resistance could devote a whole volume to the dreadful consequences that often came from indiscretions of that sort.
The great beast that was the French Resistance took on countless different forms, countless faces. Within the modest scope of this book I must limit myself to mentioning a few small examples that I was able to observe from my peephole at Labarde. Here I will not even mention the clandestine activities of people like Jean Cassou or Pierre Vorms, which I was able to follow. The actions and initiatives of men of this sort may be regarded as part of what one might call the ‘brains-trust’, the spiritual backbone, of the Resistance. Here let us just look at a few episodes–a few snapshots.
In a girls’ school the teacher explained to her charges how they could observe the movements of German troops in the town without being noticed, so that they might then communicate them to her. These observations were then passed on to a maquis that was encamped near Bergerac. The teacher concluded her exposition with the remark: ‘Do you know that, purely because of the things that I have explained to you, I could go to prison today?’ A voice from the back replied immediately: ‘You can trust us, Miss. And if you did go to prison today, we would get you out, by tomorrow at the latest.’
The teacher in question was Madame Rousset, René Mathieu’s sister-in-law.
A group of railwaymen overseeing a stretch of track near Belvès. They come to an agreement with the maquisards, who want to destroy the same stretch of track, that the latter will bind and gag them. They remain in this state for many hours before they are found. But they have their alibi for the Germans.
Official doctors who produce false X-rays showing stomach disorders, bone problems and so on, for young men who had been ordered to Germany for front-line service.
The curé in St-Cernin-de-l’Herm, who kept réfractaires hidden in the rectory, and weapons under the altar.
The postmaster at Belvès, Despont, who had installed a whole secret telephone exchange in his apartment.
In a village not far from Belvès the Germans drove up to a farm one night and dragged out two maquisards who had been hidden there for a short time. The two young men were taken to Périgueux, tortured and, finally, after every form of torture had failed to make them speak, executed. The owner of the farm was deported.
They had been victims of a denunciation. Suspicion fell upon the secretary of the borough council.
One day two men appeared at his door, introducing themselves as members of the Gestapo.
‘The service you performed was such a valuable one,’ said the first, ‘that we have come to thank you in person.’ A gratified bow from the secretary.
‘One other thing,’ continued the second. ‘Have you already received the reward for the two bandits that you located for us?’
‘Oh, yes–the money was paid immediately.’
‘And were you happy with the amount?’
‘Oh, absolutely–thank you very much. Always glad to help.’
‘Then please be so good as to stand by the wall over there,’–at this point two revolvers appeared–‘now it is the turn of the Resistance to pay you out.’
Two shots rang out.
Jacquot Rispal was the first réfractaire from Belvès. Before he could reach a maquis, he was hidden by farmers in an abandoned farm building. One day a man whom he did not know arrived at the farm and said to him: ‘You are Jacques Rispal from Belvès. I have been sent by the Resistance. I have to tell you that you must leave this place immediately; otherwise you will be arrested tomorrow.’
Jacquot followed the instruction. Going by secret pathways on a pitch-black night, he managed to reach Labarde, where he knocked on our window. We hid him in our room for three days, until his parents were able find a new hiding place for him. And from there he was able to attach himself to a maquis.
The unknown messenger had spoken the truth: next day, at first light, the brigadier of Le Bugue, a man named Faure, had arrived with three gendarmes. They searched the farm and subjected the inhabitants to interrogation. No sign of the réfractaire. There must have been a mistake. The brigadier made a report and drove off again with his men.
It was the brigadier himself who later told Jacquot’s father what had actually happened. The gendarmerie of Le Bugue had received a tip-off which said: ‘There is a réfractaire hidden in the farm of Lebos. If he is not arrested within twenty-four hours, we will get you gendarmes a rap on the knuckles from the Germans.’ Brigadier Faure could not simply ignore the tip-off. He had no option but to set off with his men. Before he did so, however, he made sure that Jacquot was informed in good time by a messenger.
Perhaps it will one day be possible to trace the anonymous informer.
When we speak of the Resistance, we should remember also the women who, in spite of all the Germans’ prohibitions and threats, kept laying wreaths on the graves of executed maquisards–wreaths whose blue-and-white bows bore the inscription, ‘Mort pour la Liberté’. He died for Freedom.
32
They’re coming–they’re not coming–they’re coming!
IN OUR ROMAN LAW CLASSES we learned the following formula: ‘Dies certa, sed incerta quando.’ A day which is certain to come, although it is uncertain when it will come. Such a day, such a ‘dies certa, sed incerta quando’ was the date of the ‘débarquements’, the Allied landings in France.
We waited for this day, in an anxiety of anticipation, for an appallingly long time. We pinned our hopes on it; it represented our only chance of survival.
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That they would come–the Allies, the liberators–we were absolutely certain. Out of survival instinct, if nothing else, we could not afford to doubt it, however disheartened, and at times even embittered, we might sometimes feel. Because, to be very honest, something a little like bitterness was a possible emotional response, when we kept hearing the same words of advice and encouragement again and again from the French channel of the BBC in London: ‘Hold out! Keep your spirits up!’
How we were to do that–to hold out, to keep our spirits up–these counsellors prudently failed to tell us; and there were sometimes moments when we felt like shouting back at them: ‘It’s easy for you to talk! Just change places with us; just try our existence for a bit; then you will know what those words mean: hold out, keep your spirits up!’
No reasonable person would have denied the force of the argument that the Allies needed time–a long time–to plan their landings down to the last detail. What we might sometimes criticise the propaganda machine for, however, was the sort of ‘Scottish shower’ that we would be subjected to–hot, then cold, then hot, then cold–which would leave us nervous wrecks.
There were so many times when the landings were mentioned as absolutely imminent, only for nothing to come of it. The effect on our nerves was as though they were a rubber band that someone had stretched almost to breaking-point, before suddenly releasing it again. ‘We’re coming, we’re coming’, was the slogan one day. ‘Have patience: we shall be there some time soon’, was the message the next day. And the whole game would start again. Again and again.
Even in our darkest hours we did not doubt that ‘they’ would come. Dies certa. But when–when? Incerta quando. And in the meantime the days became weeks, and the weeks months. So many months–months without end.
And with every day that passed, it became harder to hold out–to keep our spirits up. The terror operation of the Germans and of their French partners in crime became constantly more ferocious, more terrible. Roundups, lootings, executions, murder, arson: ‘reprisals’. And add to that everything that went on behind closed doors–in the torture chambers, within prison walls, behind the barbed-wire fences of the concentration camps. How many atrocities there must be which one will never even hear of…
When it comes to cruelty–devilish cruelty, cruelty that knows no limit in its frenzied sadism–the Germans have no equal in the history of the world. No one can contest this title of honour; no one can remove it from their ‘culture’. At the same time, however, they are poor psychologists. Otherwise they would have realised long ago that every one of their ‘reprisals’ led only to a strengthening of the Resistance. It would be truer to see the Resistance as a response to the reprisals than the reprisals as a response to the Resistance.
In the last months before the débarquement, however, and in the period immediately following it, the Germans did not even attempt to mask their brutality under the pretext of ‘reprisals’. It was clear that their aim was no longer to destroy the Resistance, to conquer the maquis, nor yet to capture more slaves for the front line in Germany; to plunder the land; to rob it of its men; to reduce it to a condition of fatal weakness. Their aim now was rather to give free rein to their dehumanised instincts–for one last time, and right up to the last possible minute.
In Frayssinet, a hamlet not far from Belvès, a captain of the Wehrmacht hammers with his revolver on the locked door of a cottage where an extremely aged woman lives on her own. The revolver happens to go off, without, however, causing anyone the slightest harm. As a result the door is broken down, and the old woman dragged out and hanged. The brave officer shoots twelve of the male inhabitants for good measure. Finally–but only after careful, meticulous looting–the whole place is torched.
‘Reprisal.’
The day will come, dies certa, when the master race–the masters of lying and killing–will whiningly attempt to deny their crimes. The day will come when, with abject, crawling hypocrisy, and at the same time with a brazen face, they will trundle out the myth of the ‘other Germany’, of the true-hearted, pure Germany, that knew nothing. Knew nothing of their ‘Führer’, nothing of Himmler, of Goebbels, of Goering, of the concentration hells.
The day will come when no one will have been a Nazi.
Can anyone even now imagine what the existence of Jews was like, in this year, 1944–Jews, that is, who had somehow against all the odds managed to avoid deportation to a death camp in Germany or Poland?
As for those who did not avoid it… Even during the transport, in sealed goods trains, before they even got out of France, men, women and children, heaped together, choked to death slowly from the gases produced by the urine and faeces laid down on floors that had been lined with lime.
Wherever the Germans arrived, their first priority was always the hunt for Jews, led by the merry ‘Hoyotoho!’ of the Gestapo. They no longer contented themselves, by the end, with tips, official lists or other forms of information that had been given to them by spies or informers. Anyone whose nose looked suspicious to them might have his trousers pulled down, even if his papers were in completely ‘Aryan’ good order. If he had the misfortune to be circumcised, his fate was sealed. In the case of women the outrage was, if anything, even greater: their lives depended on a ‘blood test’!
As time passed we began to feel less secure–I could say, more insecure–in Labarde.
Convent… hospital–if the Germans came, they would have no regard to either of those institutions. We knew that all too well. And if we were found, it would not just mean the end for us; the whole house would be subject to ‘reprisals’. To the growing sense of our personal insecurity was added also the pressing awareness of our responsibility towards those who had taken it upon themselves to offer us asylum.
One day in the middle of May 1944 Gabriel Rispal arrived at our place. This time, though, he was not his usual, cheerful, confident self. He was bathed in sweat and exhausted. This time he too was a fugitive at Labarde: the Germans had raided Belvès.
After so many other places in the Dordogne, then, it was now the turn of Belvès. A special Gestapo car had stopped outside the Rispals’ house. Hélène Rispal had saved her husband just in the nick of time, pushing him out of the house by a back door. She herself stayed behind; while Rispal had finally reached Labarde via the most roundabout route.
Now we sat with him in our room and waited. He had been saved in time. But Hélène Rispal–what would they do to her? She had promised to come as soon as possible. As soon as possible… But what if the Germans arrested her in lieu of her husband? That sort of thing was not uncommon. Outside, in the courtyard, our enfants went about their usual jobs and pastimes, knowing nothing, caring nothing. Mémé was carrying on one of her endless imaginary telephone conversations. She was enjoying it enormously–blessed are the poor in spirit.
Finally, at about eight in the evening, Hélène Rispal arrived. We breathed again.
The Germans had come with a list of twenty-seven people whom they wanted to arrest. Gabriel Rispal was the second on the list. When they failed to find him, and his brave wife firmly insisted, in spite of all threats, that he had gone away on business, they undertook a search of the premises, in the course of which they pilfered money, jewellery and clothes. But Gabriel had got away safely. Belvès as a whole had been fortunate, too: the Germans had ‘only’ set fire to two houses before finally driving off with ten of the twenty-seven. The others had managed to get away in time.
At the end of it the leader of the contingent, a captain, had declared: ‘We may not be locals, but we are just as well informed about everything as if we were locals. We’ll be back.’
The Germans’ implication that there were informers even in Belvès doubtless reflected the truth–as did their promise to return. Gabriel Rispal would remain with us until further notice.
And the Germans did indeed return, more than once. Each time they covered a wider area outside Belvès, overrunning a number of villages and farms in close
proximity to Labarde. On one occasion they were below us in the valley, less than 300 metres away. I am jumping ahead, and it would not be of interest to go into details; but with each day and night that passed we were forced to take more and more seriously the probability that they would come to Labarde.
We considered what was to be done. We certainly could not remain in our room, detached as it was from any link to the main building. There we would be caught as in a mousetrap. Thinking of the women of the convent, we also had to get rid of any trace of ourselves; our room would have to look as though it were uninhabited.
And so, once more, we gathered up all our worldly possessions and put everything in the loft. Letters and photographs were burnt. The pages of my manuscript I buried.
But what next? What were we to do with ourselves? The Mother Superior had given us use of an empty bedroom on the second floor of the main building. From the window we could see quite a distance down the road. At night we organised a sort of sentry duty: we did not undress, and took turns to do three-hour stints at our lookout post by the window. If the Germans did come, we would still have time to get out of the bedroom.
To get out… but where to? Into the open air–perhaps into the forest? Or could we find a hiding place in the house itself–in other words a hiding place within the hiding place? We racked our brains, but could not find the answer. This failure to reach a decision was a greater strain on the nerves even than anything else.
One evening we were discussing the matter again. We were whispering–going over the possibilities, back and forth, back and forth. It was already after the Angelus, and the whole house seemed as though it were submerged in the gentle peace of the May night. But a fire on the horizon provided us with a reminder of the presence of the Germans.
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