by Paul Kix
The one kind gesture the Germans extended to those in their care were the packages. The prisoners, even political prisoners, could receive small parcels at the administrative office, provided they were censored and from a source the Nazis knew. A battered La Rochefoucauld would periodically be escorted to the front desk and there see, standing alongside a German guard, a small, black-haired Frenchman, whom the Nazis said was the proprietor of Auxerre’s Hôtel de la Fontaine, a restaurant they liked. The owner would bunch his round cheeks into a warm smile and give Robert a wrapped present. Sometimes it would be toiletries, sometimes chocolates. Always, the Nazis opened the package, studied it, and then slid it across the table to La Rochefoucauld, satisfied that it contained nothing of consequence. A guard would then walk the hotelier back out the front door and Robert would return to his cell, wondering why this man sent him anything at all. The owner gave packages to many inmates in the prison and the Nazis thought he was simply a soft-hearted collaborator with too much time on his hands. But La Rochefoucauld wondered if that were a cover. Could this man be a member of the Resistance? It was such a bold act, to hand a rebel a care package in the presence of Nazis. Even the Germans didn’t take it at face value. But wasn’t that the brilliance of it too? La Rochefoucauld tried to dwell on the hotelier in the long black hours in his cell as he awaited the next round of questioning.
December turned to January, and January to February, and still the sessions continued. Where did you get those arms? Who are you working for? Some Nazis favored slashing the soles of a prisoner’s feet and forcing the man to walk on salt. Others liked to dab wool in gasoline and place portions of the soaking fabric between a prisoner’s fingers and toes, and then light each piece. Punches to the face and body never seemed to end, and when a prisoner fell to his knees, the Nazis kicked him in the stomach and testicles. Hemorrhages and hernias and cracked ribs went untreated. Many times the Germans threatened a prisoner’s family with similar methods; in this way Robert was lucky. He had been naive enough to give his real name to the Auxerre staff, but it had been dumb enough to not find any La Rochefoucaulds. Some Nazis filed down prisoners’ teeth. One SD agent grew so mad with a résistant from the Alliance that he gouged out his eyes. One Milice leader carried a star of David in his wallet made from the skin of a Jewish man.
“No one can foresee or protect oneself from the possible revolt of one’s body under torture,” Semprun wrote, “blandly and bestially demanding of one’s soul . . . to surrender unconditionally: a shameful, yet human, so very human surrender.”
And that’s all the Germans wanted of La Rochefoucauld: Tell us. Tell us what you know and this—all of this—stops.
“[One] needed a fantastic morale and a superhuman will not to yield during the interrogations and to reveal the names of friends who were still at large,” wrote Jacques Delarue, a Resistance fighter and author of a history on the Gestapo. “Some, broken morally and physically, collapsed. Who would dare to judge them?”
La Rochefoucauld, in session after session, told Haas nothing.
Many résistants who did not want to expose their comrades saw one other way to end the suffering. There was a reason the Auxerre staff confiscated belts and shoelaces as soon as prisoners were registered. Many Resistance fighters, wary of their weakened bodies, committed suicide to fend off betrayal. Jean Moulin, before he became the most effective Resistance organizer in France, was beaten so severely by the Germans that he took a shard of glass on the ground and cut his throat. His life was likely saved by the return of a German soldier who wanted to keep him talking. Pierre Brossolette, a journalist and Paris Resistance leader, regained consciousness after one interrogation and found himself still in the room, alone. He jumped out the window, five stories up, rather than endure more.
In Robert’s cell, minutes felt like hours and hours like days. His strength, his very sense of self, collapsed and that alarmed him. He looked and felt like some sort of disfigured beast. His Catholic faith would not allow him to go the way of Brossolette, but Robert knew that with a few words he could earn a smile from the Germans and maybe walk out of here. He could then regain his strength and perhaps in time return to the frivolity of his old life, before a warm fireplace at Villeneuve, staring at the embers and above it the family crest, which the generations of La Rochefoucaulds had interpreted as an allowance to live indulgently, to explore all of life’s delights, a sentiment echoed in the family creed: “It’s my pleasure.” In this almost libertine environment, no one would need to know, or perhaps even care, about his secret.
At the same time, the trappings of Villeneuve and in particular the “It’s my pleasure” motto carried a second meaning. The La Rochefoucaulds had split generations ago into four branches, and Robert was of the oldest line, the one descended from dukes. The dukes served in France’s royal court and C’est mon plaisir also meant, “It is my pleasure . . . to serve the king.” To give of oneself and to do what was best for France.
This commitment to honor the family by serving La France explained why Robert had joined the Resistance. But he realized he could honor it again by remaining a silent man, here in Auxerre.
February turned to March and the smell of roses from the adjacent garden wafted through the prison windows. He had been imprisoned for four months; most inmates didn’t make it half that long. His bushy beard indicated the passing time, and he resolved to defy the Germans until the end. They acted more feverishly with La Rochefoucauld now, looked more confused around him. He began to see that, even as the Germans tried to break him, he was in fact breaking them. “Every hour of silence I won from Dr. Haas’s henchmen,” Semprun wrote, “made me realize with ever greater certainty that I was at home in the world.” La Rochefoucauld showed Haas that oldest of truths: Freedom is an idea that torturers cannot mangle, and a faith in it can help one stare through death. It took a certain type of person to believe in this freedom in early 1944, and La Rochefoucauld was not about to betray others who felt as he did. “The experience of being tortured does not imply just the abominable solitude of suffering,” Semprun wrote. “It is also an experience of brotherhood. The silence that we hang on to, against which we brace ourselves with clenched teeth, trying to escape by imagining or remembering our own body, our wretched body, this silence is filled with all the voices, all the lives it protects, and allows one to continue to exist . . . It is a co-existence, whose individual, possible, probable death nourishes life.”
The Nazis had to make a choice about La Rochefoucauld. One day he and some of the prison’s guards took a three-minute drive to Auxerre’s Palais de Justice. It was a former abbey transformed in the nineteenth century into a proper house of law, with rising Greek columns and rows of windows on either side carved in half circles. The Germans pushed Robert inside, where, in a stately room with high ceilings, crown molding, and gold walls a Nazi military tribunal sat beneath a chandelier that glimmered in the daylight. Here La Rochefoucauld would learn his fate. One judge was a German officer, the second a noncommissioned officer, and the president of the tribunal in 1944, Dr. Karl Haas himself, showing his gold teeth through a smile. A man named Ribain, the president of the Auxerre bar, was to defend La Rochefoucauld before the tribunal, but the Germans didn’t give Ribain a chance. In a matter of a few minutes—the amount of time in which the judges resolved most cases—La Rochefoucauld was tried for sabotage and hiding arms and sentenced to death. He was to be executed by firing squad.
Word spread quickly in the B wing when a man departed for the tribunal. The prisoner Jean Léger wrote about how the wing was seldom quiet; throughout the day there were conversations between cellmates and at night speeches to continue the fight. The exception was when a man returned from his trial. Léger said two brothers, in the time before La Rochefoucauld’s sentencing, came back from their own case and everyone in the wing waited for them to say something. At last, another prisoner shouted, “Well?”
One of the brothers said, “Death for us both.”
/> No one spoke until the evening.
The prisoners no doubt honored La Rochefoucauld upon his return with the same silence.
He moved to another cell, one reserved for death penalty cases. His execution was set for March 20 at 8 a.m. A German priest early on the assigned morning gave La Rochefoucauld his last rites.
All that time in Salzburg learning German, Robert thought wryly, and still he didn’t understand a word the priest said.
CHAPTER 11
Just before 8 a.m., two guards escorted La Rochefoucauld out of the B wing and to the bed of a waiting truck. They told him to sit on a coffin lying there. Robert saw another coffin next to him, and here came a second prisoner pushed along by guards, onto the box that he, too, would soon fill. Robert did not know this man, and as the guards hopped in the back, high-powered rifles in their arms, he didn’t see the point in introductions. The truck belched into low gear, and the red doors that had closed behind La Rochefoucauld four months earlier parted to let him out.
The truck stopped before Route Nationale, the city’s major thoroughfare just beyond the prison, whose northbound lane directed one to Paris. The truck, however, turned right, south, toward the Yonne’s rural countryside. They were headed for a series of dirt paths off Route Nationale, each narrower and bumpier than the last, the terrain moving from uninterrupted wheat fields to groves of trees to a fork in the road, where the rightward path drove one ever deeper into woods, until a clearing came into view, where the road ended. There, against three trees pockmarked with bullet holes, La Rochefoucauld would be told to stand, and he would look out on the distant brush and listen to the birdsong, while the Nazi guards took their aim. Forty-three people would be executed here during the war.
As the truck started out on this path, passing the brown-stone chapel on the grounds of the psychiatric hospital, La Rochefoucauld had a thought. Why give in to the Nazis now? He had spent the last four months ignoring the basest screams of his body because he could not fathom giving the Germans anything they wanted. Now they wanted him dead. But he did not wish to die.
He looked at the road beneath him, rushing past—and noticed the Nazis’ one mistake. The Germans had never learned much about him, which meant they never understood the extent to which he’d been trained to maim and kill. Robert kept his eyes on his wrists. There were no handcuffs on them.
He glanced at the guards and saw their guns resting on their laps. If he couldn’t succeed, he thought, he wanted to die as he’d lived: fighting. He looked at the other inmate, who sensed Robert calculating something. “Even if it means being shot,” Robert said to the other Frenchman, “I’d rather be shot right away. I’m getting out!”
The prisoner stared at him, astounded. Traffic was light and the truck moved at a brisk pace. The guards didn’t speak French, or at least didn’t hear La Rochefoucauld over the wind in the open-air bed. Neither Nazi stirred himself to attention.
The other inmate said: “You’re crazy. It won’t work!”
In a moment, La Rochefoucauld sprang himself on the nearer guard, plowing into him and then jumping from the truck, rolling and somersaulting just as he had been trained in England. When his momentum stopped he shot to his feet and broke into a sprint. He heard angry shouts behind him, and then the even louder reports of rifles. The first bullets missed and he looked behind his shoulder to see the truck’s driver, startled by the firing, slam on the brakes. The sudden stop threw the guards headfirst over the truck’s hood.
Robert sprinted down one street, then turned onto a second, then onto a third. He did not know Auxerre; he had spent the last four months in his B-wing cell. So he just ran, mindlessly, and as fast as he could. He ran until his weakened legs burned and he gulped at the air, and then kept running. He ran onto one street, Avenue Victor Hugo, and came upon a guarded villa of sorts, bedecked in swastika flags and banners: the SD’s headquarters.
La Rochefoucauld stopped cold. Should he turn and run the other way? If he did, would that be more suspicious than just trying to walk past the enemy HQ? Had someone inside the building already seen him? And where was the truck?
La Rochefoucauld decided to continue down the street, despite his heart’s drumming in his rib cage. He walked as casually as a man trying to escape his execution could walk. As he approached the building, he saw a Citroën sedan, with swastika pennants on the fender, parked nearby. He stole a glance inside the car—keys in the ignition. He looked around and saw a driver, maybe thirty feet away, pacing back and forth, waiting for someone to emerge from the building. Just then La Rochefoucauld heard distant shouting. The truck!
Now—he had to decide now. He moved closer to the car and swung the door wide and threw himself in. He started the engine and peeled out before the chauffeur realized what was happening. La Rochefoucauld looked quickly in the rearview mirror and saw the man draw a pistol from his coat pocket and fire twice, but it was too late: Robert had escaped, the Nazi pennants whipping in the wind.
Back through the streets of Auxerre now, down one street, then another, looking for something to direct him out of here . . . and then—there!—a sign: Paris, this way. The road was none other than Route Nationale, and in a moment he saw the Auxerre prison itself—and sped right past it.
The open highway, with the pedal to the floor, and seconds becoming minutes and still no one trailing him. He might actually make it! He had never felt so alive! More time passed and Robert even began to relax behind the wheel.
But soon he noticed traffic ahead of him slow and saw in the distance a roadblock, a wooden beam stretching across the highway. The Germans must have put all neighboring jurisdictions on high alert, and now they planned to stop each vehicle that passed until they had their man.
Robert edged closer and saw two heavily armed soldiers manning the blockade, asking every driver for identification. Robert was in the garb he’d worn for the last four months. He stank. He had a full beard and cuts and bruises across his face and body. There was little hope of him fooling the soldiers, even in his Nazi sedan, maybe especially in his Nazi sedan, if word of the vehicle being commandeered had spread.
He couldn’t turn around; turning around would draw too much attention. So he inched closer, shifting the car down into second, the soldiers’ faces visible now, seemingly inquisitive, asking him to stop.
That’s when he gunned the engine, smashing into the blockade and one of the soldiers, who flipped over the hood. The second opened fire and La Rochefoucauld ducked, the bullets ripping into the car’s frame; Robert kept his head low and his foot on the pedal. The rat-a-tat-tat of more angry shots followed the initial volley, but the car sped ahead. When Robert at last sat up, the car was not smoking, was still on the road—and, just as important, was beyond the reach of the Germans’ guns.
He checked himself. Somehow, he was unharmed. For the third time that morning he had avoided German fire at something close to point-blank range.
He saw a gravel road ahead and took the turn as fast as he could, plumes of dirt kicking up behind him. He had to put distance between himself and the Nazis. The road soon rose and fell beneath him and La Rochefoucauld hummed over it. He noticed smoke billowing from the hood, but he kept on until the smoke grew coarser and blacker and he had no choice but to slow the car. He saw a quarry up ahead, a mineral excavation site, just off the road. He stopped before it and got out. He listened. Nothing. Yet. The best thing to do was to crash the Citroën in such a way that the Germans might overlook it as they drove past. So he put the car in neutral, got behind it, and pushed it into the quarry. The car fell, falling into one of the deepest voids and crashing in blooms of dust and smoke. When it cleared, he saw the outline of a crumpled, charred mess. They’ll never get this one, he thought. He ran off into a nearby line of woods, his new plan to hide and await a nightfall that could not come fast enough.
He spent the next hours in anxious solitude, and when stars at last filled the sky he made his way again, a strong moon guiding him but once
more aimless. He did not know where he was. He walked under branches and through thickets and among groves of trees; he walked for what seemed like hours, with the idea that he might find a résistant in a small town or a sympathetic family in the countryside or even another abandoned barn. Something that would serve as a temporary base where he could get a few hours’ sleep and perhaps a meal before sneaking his way—by who knew what means—out of the Yonne.
At last, in the distance, he saw lights. They multiplied as he walked toward them and became the nighttime view of a city. Maybe he knew someone here, he thought. La Rochefoucauld approached with caution and saw a sign at the town’s edge:
Auxerre.
He was back where he started.
CHAPTER 12
The longer he stood there, in the glow of the city, the more he realized the situation wasn’t as bad as it seemed. If the Nazis hadn’t seen the crashed remnants of the car in the quarry, they were likely to think La Rochefoucauld was hundreds of miles away by now. The Germans would have broadened their search, perhaps even leaving Auxerre understaffed. What’s more, the one person who might feed and hide La Rochefoucauld was here, in town: the owner of the Hôtel de la Fontaine, who had given him those care packages. Robert had no proof that the man was a résistant, but he knew no one else close by who could be. He could either walk through the night and gamble that an unknown farmer might be brave enough to shelter him, or he could walk into Auxerre, as crazy as that sounded, and test his luck by finding the owner of the hotel.
He walked into Auxerre.
For the second time that day, he tried to move about its streets with insouciance, as if he were something other than an escaped “terrorist.” Few people were out, and so he didn’t feel as frightened as he had that morning—of course, he didn’t see any German soldiers this time either.