by Paul Kix
The high plateau of the southern Yonne is a cold place to spend a winter. The protection the forests offered from German eyes also served as a threat to one’s existence. It was difficult to walk amid that much snow, and the steep incline of the terrain was not only treacherous but made it difficult to hunt. Resistance groups shared what stores they had—often slaughtered cattle from sympathetic farmers—but food grew scarce. Men developed the rashes and skin diseases that came from too much time in the same clothes and too few baths. Sleep was fleeting, either because of the fear of nighttime capture or the impossibility of staying warm. A campfire was risky because its smoke could be seen by Germans or their French collaborators. La Rochefoucauld needed cover from the elements and found a deserted barn on an acreage outside Quarréles-Tombes. He snuck there each night and moved his remaining stores of weapons to the site, too, so that none of his war materiel could be captured by the Germans who, with increasing efficiency, discovered the Alliance’s forested hideouts. When he needed to go into Quarré-les-Tombes for everyday provisions, he wore the outfit of a laborer and tried to act like one. He could not shake the suspicion that each of the village’s thousand people stared at him as he passed, especially as the arrests climbed. Torturous interrogations led to the betrayal of seven more résistants in the Yonne in November. Fourcade literally lost count of the Alliance members captured nationwide—was it four hundred? five hundred?—and took to calling 1943 “the terrible year.”
One day, La Rochefoucauld walked into Quarré-les-Tombes and broke SOE protocol by phoning his mother. The agency strictly forbade its fighters from contacting their families. Doing so increased the likelihood of the Germans discovering these ties, and if that happened the Nazis grew monstrous, threatening the lives of loved ones who sometimes stood before the captured agents, unless those agents talked. People died and missions were exposed when résistants contacted their families, but Robert did it anyway—only to tell his family nothing remarkable. Just that he was doing well. He didn’t tell them where he was and kept the call to a few minutes. But it was the first conversation he’d had with his family in nearly a year.
He surely missed them, but he never said why he phoned; the omissions from that period are their own revelations. He was scared, as résistant after résistant disappeared, never to be seen again, and maybe he wanted to hear his mother’s voice before he too was captured. In that winter without end, still hoping for spring and a London-bound plane, he felt many conflicting emotions. Fourcade, even from the remove of England, complained of going a week without sleep as the arrest tally climbed and thought she was going mad. The anxiety, the tipping mental imbalance for agents in country, was far worse. The cold forced La Rochefoucauld more than he liked from the woods into a rural society where every glance, every smile, carried possible malevolence. Who would help him? Who would betray him? The questions were infinite and without answer, and so he spent what time he could in the barn, trusting only himself. But seclusion invited contemplation, and that was no better than strolling through Quarré-les-Tombes in a worker’s costume. Alone, fighters dealt not only with the paranoia of Am I next? but with the guilt of Why have I been spared? The Resistance leader Henri Frenay put it best: “I felt overcome with fatigue. Crushed, oh, I was utterly crushed! . . . One by one the faces of all those dear comrades rose up to haunt me . . . I felt ashamed to be free . . . Should not I too be among them? It would have been so simple for me to surrender to the police, and I would have found such peace.”
It seemed it would be December forever.
One night in the barn, fast asleep on a bed of hay, something jostled La Rochefoucauld awake. He blinked and saw a half circle of uniformed Milice men and the overcoats and felt hats of SD officers. For a moment, no one moved. Robert tried to hide the fear already warming his cheeks. The Nazis looked at him, curious. Then the blows fell. After a stretch, “They tied me up like a sausage,” Robert said, and then began searching the barn. They seemed to know what they were looking for, and in a moment they found the arms.
“I had nothing to do with that,” La Rochefoucauld said. “I was sleeping here because I was tired.”
The Nazis didn’t buy it. They put him in the back of a vehicle idling outside and headed out.
His mind raced: How did they know where to find the arms? Who had given him up? Someone in the village who’d tracked him? Another résistant? But soon those thoughts gave way to darker ones: Where were they taking him? And what would they do to him when they got there?
CHAPTER 10
Already they were beyond the forest, and in the moonlit view that blurred past him he saw a flattening of the terrain, with trees huddled together at the horizon, as if sheltering from the cold. The car appeared to be heading northward, through the Yonne’s farm country, whose barren fields in this season were as uninviting as the men driving him. They moved past more groves of trees, the road undulating slightly, the plots of land shrinking, more houses appearing, and then more houses than land, and then more factories than houses, the commercial and residential districts blending, in a town of some sort now, down streets where rooftops peeked out over ancient walls that had once protected the city from invaders, but not anymore. And then they were on a major thoroughfare, and then they were slowing before some sort of compound—it took up half a block. A mighty stone and brick barricade rose at the perimeter to guard what was inside. Two red doors opened to let the German vehicles through. La Rochefoucauld saw rings of barbed wire and a two-story building, with three lower-slung ones connected to it, and beyond that the lookout tower of the prison in Auxerre.
They hauled him out of the vehicle and down a wide hallway, into the stale administrative office. They took his shoelaces and his belt, but otherwise kept him in his clothes. The night clerk made a note that it was December 7, 1943, and La Rochefoucauld did something curious: He told the truth. Not the whole truth. But the prison registry showed that this new inmate said his name was de La Rochefoucauld; no first name entered the rolls. La Rochefoucauld would never say why he did this—he could have used one of his aliases—but perhaps it was because it allowed him to lie about other things, most notably that he was a simple woodcutter from Quarré-les-Tombes. The clerk bought the story and noted his occupation as a lumberjack.
Still, the guns in the barn suggested he was more than he appeared, and so the lumberjack La Rochefoucauld was not led to the wing that housed common criminals, but escorted to his right, toward the B wing, the building reserved for political prisoners and terrorists, where the Germans paid very close attention to each inmate in their care. La Rochefoucauld most likely spent that first night in Auxerre as many political prisoners did: in solitary confinement, without pen or book, little food or water, with no contact from the outside save the howling, sometimes unending screams from a nearby “interrogation” room.
Auxerre was some fifty miles from Quarré-les-Tombes, a town of 21,000 that predated Julius Caesar and was now the Nazi’s local headquarters. The prison was constructed in 1853—with turreted roofs and a promise to reform criminals. The Nazis called it by their own name, Stalag 150, and made no attempt at progressivism.
One day soon after Robert’s imprisonment, a guard opened the door to what was likely the holding cell, and La Rochefoucauld squinted at the flood of light filling the room. Such confinement tended to soften inmates, suddenly desperate for human interaction, a return to how things had been on the outside. The wails coming from nearby heightened a prisoner’s despair. The Auxerre rolls were full of inmates who had short prison stays, presumably because they said what the Germans wanted to hear. But La Rochefoucauld said nothing. So a guard ordered him to his feet and led him out, where Robert saw the prison’s interior: an open floor plan, two stories high, with narrow metal walkways at each level, snug against cell doors. The doors themselves were wooden, with a peephole at eye level and three metal locks running down the left-hand side: the middle one requiring a massive key and the outer two fastened by imp
ressive cylindrical bolts. There was a low buzz of noise, as the people behind those doors talked to each other, or to themselves, or shifted about in their rooms. Even the airy interior stank of unwashed humanity. Roughly two thousand people cycled through the B wing during the war—the prisoners leaving for the concentration camps or firing squads or, if their information helped the Nazis, to a shameful kind of freedom. At any one time the Germans held between two and three hundred people in the B wing, the men and women doubling and sometimes tripling up in its seventy-two cells. The guards stopped La Rochefoucauld before one of the doors and did the extensive work of opening it, swinging it wide to reveal a thirteen-by-six-foot room. It was wanly lit by a skylight, with metal beds on either side and a slop bucket in between. The room was unheated, and La Rochefoucauld must have been glad he’d been arrested in his winter jacket.
A man on the bed propped himself up to study Robert. People were detained for making bombs or running guns or cutting power lines, but La Rochefoucauld only wrote one thing of his own cellmate: He was an epileptic. One day, perhaps not long after Robert’s arrival, he had a violent seizure. “So I yelled to alert the watchman,” La Rochefoucauld wrote. “He came to help me put my poor cellmate on his pallet, then went to find a doctor.” It’s unclear if the cellmate continued to share the room with Robert.
Other people occupied his mind anyway. Soon, La Rochefoucauld endured a session of German “questioning,” no doubt led by Dr. Karl Haas, the local SD head. He was a forty-six-year-old with the blunt, too-large features of a man not aging well. With skin bloated and mottled, Haas had taken to sweeping his hair straight back and parting it down the middle, as if to center his disproportionate, rotund appearance. He smiled maniacally and had a mouth full of gold teeth. He liked his colleagues to refer to him as “Doctor” even though nothing in his personal file suggested he’d earned the title. The German high command didn’t trust him. Major developments in the Yonne weren’t adjudicated by Haas but by the aforementioned Abwehr head in Dijon, Kurt Merck, who in launching Operation Gibet and the double agent Lien had done far more to fill Haas’s Auxerre prison than had Haas himself. That was fine with Dr. Haas. He was a man who took extreme delight in driving the couple of miles from the SD’s local headquarters to the prison, so he might torture inmates like La Rochefoucauld, even though he had five or six capable noncommissioned officers beneath him.
But Haas was not simply a brute. He did study the monthly terrorist reports he received and he did build his network of informants inside and outside the prison. He and the German staff joked that their French informers were “Gestapistes,” and he even tried to launch a Resistance group composed of double agents. Depending on Haas’s whim, an inmate’s first interrogation might be just that, Haas feeling out his combatant, and the fighter returning afterward to his cell, unbloodied and still silent, awaiting the fetid soup from the prisoner who pushed the hospitality cart door to door. But ultimately the most that could be said of Haas’s network of French sources was that he tried but could not eliminate the bad intel. When he was reminded of that, when the evidence rebuked him and affronted him, he turned violent.
La Rochefoucauld witnessed this firsthand. In his interrogation, in a small room on the first floor near the entrance, Robert watched a proud and haughty Haas in one session reveal that he knew La Rochefoucauld to be a Communist. This baffled Robert. A Communist? He countered that the Germans had the wrong guy. And soon the assault began.
Haas wanted information. He kept shouting, “You Communist thug!” So Robert turned to his countervailing training in England. “Not all Communists are thugs but all thugs are Communist! And I am neither!” he yelled back amid the blows. It was at once an accurate and brilliant play: Denying his role in thuggery or Communism would only push Haas to prove La Rochefoucauld’s involvement in both, and leading Haas down those avenues would keep him a great distance from the truth.
Pain, of course, was the currency paid for Robert’s tactic. These interrogations could last up to ten hours, and Haas didn’t carry them out alone. As the blows fell on La Rochefoucauld, from Haas or a second, third, or fourth man, as they jarred Robert’s teeth loose and he spit out the shards or whole molars in streams of blood, and then even later, as he faded in and out of consciousness, La Rochefoucauld took what pride he could in saying nothing of value. His body, however, resembled a carcass.
This was not his last trip to the torture room. The Germans held weekly interrogations of their prisoners. It is likely a reflection of La Rochefoucauld’s upbringing, and his parents’ dictum to never cry, complain, or even discuss one’s suffering, that Robert said little of what happened in those sessions with Haas and his staff. To do so would have awakened “the brutal return of past despair,” as a survivor of Haas put it. La Rochefoucauld, like other inmates, was called repeatedly to the interrogation rooms, one in the prison, the other across the street, in the basement of a psychiatric hospital the Germans had commandeered for their purposes. The French prisoners liked to joke, Would you rather be in this prison, or that hospital? In other words: Would you rather be beaten here or go mad over there? For any résistant who stayed in Auxerre long, the question was hard to answer.
The Nazis in their interrogations routinely forced a prisoner to kneel on a bench while a German climbed his shoulders, sending extreme pain shooting through his joints. Or they suspended the man from the ceiling, his arms tied behind his back, until “you feel like you are being dismembered and torn apart for good,” as one inmate in Auxerre put it. In those or other susceptible positions, Haas accentuated the suffering: He brought out the wooden bludgeon he favored. The people who received its blows describe a dry, flashing, almost electric pain that was distinct from that of the rubber bludgeon Haas also used. The rubber bludgeon’s blows were muted, but one felt them much longer, especially if Haas had ballasted the bat with lead.
The prisoner who stumbled to his cell after a session in the interrogation room often needed guards to support him. The other inmates peered out from their peepholes, the halls suddenly silent, as if members of a requiem Mass were parading by.
The weeks passed, and Robert’s questioning continued. The techniques to extract information likely grew more grotesque. Haas enjoyed waterboarding inmates, a singularly terrifying experience where the Nazis pushed a man’s head backward into a tub of water. “I was helpless,” wrote one prisoner who endured it. “I panicked and tried to kick but the vise-like grip was such that I could hardly move. My eyes were open. I could see shapes distorted by the water, wavering above me, my lungs were bursting; my mouth opened and I swallowed water. Now I was drowning. I put every ounce of my energy into a vain effort to kick myself out of the bath, but I was completely helpless and swallowing water. I felt that I must burst. I was dying, this was the end.”
It was not. The inmate was then pulled above water, allowed to gasp for air, and plunged back under. Haas added a note of shame by filling his tub with trash and feces. “I told myself that this was surely the kind of torture it would be the hardest for me to endure,” wrote Jorge Semprun, a novelist and résistant who was held in Auxerre at the same time as La Rochefoucauld. “And indeed it was. There is nothing more to say.”
Throughout his lengthy stay in the prison, La Rochefoucauld maintained a stubborn silence, but Haas was a patient man. He liked to brandish a pliers-like tool and hold down a prisoner’s hand, pulling out one nail, and then another, and then a third. Haas’s outside intel did improve during La Rochefoucauld’s imprisonment, and soon he was asking about the Resistance captain Pius VII, and if Robert received his arms from the British. But La Rochefoucauld just yelled back—he had been taught, after all, that anger lessened pain. He said that the man they called Pius was actually named Pope, which he knew the Germans wouldn’t believe. The penalty for such defiance was still-harsher treatment. Haas often attached an electric wire to the ankle of a stubbornly silent inmate, and then a live wire to the man’s testicles and turned up the vol
tage. One survivor of Auxerre said Haas and his men even sat some inmates bare-assed on toilets, beneath which starving rats swam. The screams were worse than those that had come from the most deranged invalids at the hospital. “Those who are overwhelmed by the pain of torture,” wrote the Resistance fighter Jean Améry, “feel their bodies as they have never felt them before.” Or, as Semprun put it: “My body . . . asked—demanded—that I give in to torture. To win this contest with my body I had to subdue it, master it . . . But it was a pain that had to be won over and over again, minute by minute, and a victory that mutilated me by making me hate an essential part of myself that I had experienced until then in a carefree, physical happiness.” When a session concluded, no one else could enter the interrogation room until it had been scrubbed clean of blood.
Meanwhile, for the prisoner, the depravity continued. In the basement of the psychiatric hospital, the Nazis often permitted an inmate to rinse himself off, at a basin near a stairwell. At the top of the stairs, the collaborating nurses took the opportunity to ridicule the wounded man.
It was little better when a prisoner returned to his cell. Many inmates had no change of clothes and lice scurried over their bodies. The filth of the prison, in contrast to the cleanliness of the torture chambers, did not allow open wounds to heal properly. Medical attention was as thin as the nightly soup. The smell of pus and drying blood and sickness never left the wing, in fact it became as much a part of it as the bolts on the door.