The Saboteur

by Paul Kix

  By the summer of 1944, résistants had returned en masse to Bordeaux, some emboldened by D-Day and others by SOE chief Roger Landes, who’d reappeared and built a new Resistance group, Actor, which by June comprised two thousand men: British-trained and Gaullist fighters or people who were otherwise smart and brave and discreet. Dohse wanted to nab Landes, a man as cunning and powerful as he, more than he’d wanted to destroy OCM and Grandclément. He said he would pay any sum for Landes’s capture. But from secret hideouts, Landes avoided Dohse’s detection and approved the mayhem that so infuriated the SD chief. Landes’s people didn’t act alone. Other groups had nearly the size or strength of Actor, still more were Communist outfits, and other cells were so small and secretive that neither London nor de Gaulle’s forces knew of them. Dohse battled in that decisive summer a determined and invisible army.

  Which is another way to say: The arrests and interrogations did not let up. The cells in Fort du Hâ, in fact, had one of three colored cards affixed to each door, to categorize for Dohse and the prison staff the sort of inmates found there: common-law prisoners got the green one, Communists or Gaullists the red, and résistants the yellow. This last group was seen as the most dangerous, and no crime was more serious in Bordeaux in 1944 than sabotage, which didn’t bode well for Robert de La Rochefoucauld.

  After his processing Saturday night, a German guard marched him down a narrow high-ceilinged corridor, which gave way to a small wing and its twelve holding chambers. These were separate from the general prison, with its three floors of cells and up to twelve hundred inmates. The long-incarcerated of Fort du Hâ called the holding rooms the “reception centers,” but there was little to welcome a new inmate. Each was roughly six feet by three, equipped with not so much a bed as “cage-like things,” in the words of one prisoner, made with unfinished wood, “topped with moldy straw sewn into decaying canvas, letting off a vile odor.” In the corner was a rusted, dented, very much used bucket, to relieve oneself. Overhead was an electric lamp and high on the wall a barred window, with a limited view of Fort du Hâ’s courtyard and Bordeaux beyond. The guard shoved La Rochefoucauld into his cell; he would stay here until Dohse interrogated him Monday, after which he would be given an identification number and enter Fort du Hâ’s rolls.

  The guard closed the heavy door and in five minutes the overhead light automatically shut off. On many nights prisoners would sing after lights out, the walls outside the courtyard heightening the acoustics, a full-throated concert rising into the night in French, Czech, Polish, Spanish, Portuguese. But no chorus reached La Rochefoucauld this night, and he sat in the dark with only his anxious monologue as company.

  Could he endure more? That seemed to be the big question. Torture changes everyone, and it had changed La Rochefoucauld. He remained committed to a free France but also knew the fallout of that commitment. “Anyone who has been tortured is incapable of feeling at home in the world afterwards,” wrote the Resistance fighter Jean Améry, who survived Buchenwald. It seemed surreal, or abstract, or at the very least something that no one else could understand, those sessions with Dr. Haas and his men in Auxerre. But La Rochefoucauld understood it even if he couldn’t verbalize it, and that knowledge had led him to plea—to plea with the Germans in Bordeaux that he was an innocent man, a half-maniacal alibi whose stumbling inconsistencies showed he was not innocent, and which might yet tie him to the attempted sabotage at Saint-Médard. What a fool, Robert thought. And then, again: Could he endure more?

  Everything had happened so fast after Auxerre: the escape to Paris, the toasts with family, the return to London, the fight here in the southwest. But now in the hours before dawn it seemed that Auxerre had at last rushed in, its ghosts filling his cell. His thoughts circled around themselves and blackened with each turn. For the first time in his life Robert thought of suicide, and the cyanide pill that SOE staffers had given him, which he had slipped into the false bottom of his shoe. The pill would keep him from seeing Monday, from experiencing a pain sharpened by a new fear: the very real likelihood that Dohse and his men would get to Robert’s family. Bordeaux’s Nazis routinely flipped résistants by finding and then threatening to kill a fighter’s next of kin. If Dohse discovered La Rochefoucauld’s real name, he would not make the mistake Karl Haas had. He would recognize the aristocratic forebears, and he would track Robert’s family down. In chateaux throughout France, they would not be hard to find.

  Could Robert withstand that? And if not, did La Rochefoucauld have the separate sort of courage necessary to swallow the pill? “I felt lost, totally lost,” he wrote. The ghosts of Auxerre pranced around the room now, taunting him.

  At dawn on Sunday a haggard La Rochefoucauld peeked out his window into the courtyard below and saw a few guards mingling. Whatever Robert decided, he needed to do it before tomorrow morning, when the weekday shift began and Dohse sat before him, opening the interrogation.

  He did not want to die. He now knew that much. “I was strongly resolved to leave that pill in its hiding place,” he wrote. But he also didn’t want to see another room with a rack or leaded bat.

  As the sun rose, he thought about something else in Auxerre. He had escaped death there, after all. Would it be too much to expect to do it again? He began to devise a plan as the day warmed his cell, one that seemed simple to execute but carried very little chance of success. He would walk right out of Fort du Hâ.

  He remembered his cellmate in Auxerre, the epileptic who once had such a bad seizure that guards rushed in and escorted him out. Whether out of a sense of compassion or an obligation to keep prisoners alive and talking, the Auxerre staffers had momentarily seemed unguarded. For a few fleeting seconds the Germans had been as vulnerable as the man writhing in the cell. Robert could take advantage of that.

  What if he waited until tonight and faked his own seizure? With any luck, a guard would run into his room alone, and Robert could surprise the Nazi, maiming or killing him, and taking his guns and prison keys. La Rochefoucauld could then break for it, sneaking his way through the grounds on the one night a week that Fort du Hâ wasn’t properly staffed, rushing to the front gate, and turning the key into the lock that gave him passage to freedom.

  It really was so simple. And yet—and yet if two guards came to his cell, well, could he expect to surprise and overpower them in a six-by-three room? Even if he did, wouldn’t the noise attract whatever other guards worked the Sunday night shift? Or, what if he made it past one staffer in his cell, but then was chased down corridors by a few other men, their guns drawn? Or, to consider still another scenario, what if he faked a seizure and no one answered his door? That would be as bad as any outcome. He would be interrogated tomorrow, likely carded as a terrorist, and if he kept his silence through the torture sessions, either sent to the camps or the firing squad. Everything, then, had to happen tonight and everything had to break his way.

  But as the day progressed, he settled on this plan. Just as he had done in Auxerre, he would make one more attempt at life. If he failed, if the guards threw him back into his cell, then he still had his little pill and he could swallow it satisfied that he had tried to live.

  He broke off a large piece of wood from the cage-like bedding and hid it for the evening, the rest of his day passing in a stoic loop of what he planned to do that night. In a few hours he might be free, or he might be dead.

  Around 2 a.m. he stretched out on the ground. He put the piece of wood behind his back, looked to the heavens one last time, and started to twist and shake and let loose a tirade of beastly screams. He contorted his body and kicked and moaned. He shouted, he writhed, he thrashed. Amid all that flailing, he saw the peephole on the door flip open. La Rochefoucauld increased his spasms. He heard a key in the lock, and then the creak of the opened cell. And then he saw the guard—just one guard.

  He sprang to his feet and rushed him, not even registering if the man looked as confused as La Rochefoucauld had hoped. Robert pulled his piece of wood from his back poc
ket and clubbed the guard over the head with it. The blow startled the man and knocked him from his feet, and in that instant, La Rochefoucauld grabbed him, placed one of his palms over the Nazi’s chin, the other around the back side of his head, and twisted violently, just as the Brits had taught him. He broke the German’s neck.

  La Rochefoucauld stood over the collapsed, suddenly formless body. Had he just killed a man? Paralyzed him? He didn’t have time to think about it. He had to move. He searched for prison keys on the body, but couldn’t find them. Shit. He ran his eyes over the guard but knew immediately what he had to do.

  He had to find the prison keys. He had to find them whether they were on the door of the staff’s quarters or in the pocket of another guard.

  He looked again at the man on the floor. He stripped off the guard’s jacket and shrugged it over his shoulders. If he were to escape, he would have to surprise the remaining staffers as much as he’d surprised this one. He looped the man’s belt around his waist, and took the man’s gun, cocking it.

  Then La Rochefoucauld started walking.

  He guessed he needed to move toward the center of the grounds, where the staff likely had its offices. The labyrinth was divided into five sectors that led to the infirmary, but La Rochefoucauld was able to navigate down empty corridors to what he thought was the middle of the complex, passing cell doors with peepholes that gave out a partial view of what passed. What any inmate saw looked only like a German on patrol, a gun in his hand.

  La Rochefoucauld moved down one corridor and noticed, up ahead, a wan light seeping out from beneath a closed door. The guards’ quarters?

  He walked slowly toward it, and when he got there prepared himself for whatever was on the other side. Freedom, or death, mere moments away.

  He pushed the door open and saw two Germans slumped down in chairs, half asleep, neither paying much mind in the dimmed light of the room to the man in the jacket of a Fort du Hâ staffer. La Rochefoucauld walked quickly into the space and at point-blank range fired at one guard. He turned to the other, who struggled to stand up and take hold of his gun. La Rochefoucauld shot him dead, too.

  The room fell silent.

  He looked around him, for the second time that night surprised at all he was capable of. Two more men, just like that. He scanned his surroundings, looking for a key chain. He found it and walked out of the staff quarters, down hallways he’d just passed and into the empty prison courtyard.

  He ran to the main gate and began jamming in keys. At last, one turned over, and with that, just as he’d hoped, Robert de La Rochefoucauld walked right out of Fort du Hâ.

  CHAPTER 19

  No sirens sounded and no guard shouted for him to halt, but he took off at a dead sprint, in the jacket of the German he had likely killed, carrying the man’s gun. He ran because his instincts told him to and because it felt good, given the dread of the last twenty-four hours. He needed to find the fighter with the code-name Jean, the one he was to have met two nights ago. La Rochefoucauld had memorized some of Bordeaux’s maps, and the city remained still and silent, and soon he stopped running, catching his breath among the darkened shadows of the deserted streets. Walking would be less conspicuous, he realized, and so he set out on a long jaunt through the shuttered Bordeaux, which exhausted and began to relax him. The few people he encountered thought nothing of this patrolling guard. On a modest side street in Bordeaux’s outer reaches, he found the address he had been given by his Saint-Médard coconspirators: a small house with a little garden, surrounded by a metal gate. He hopped over it and knocked on the front door.

  A second-story window opened and a man in pajamas leaned out. He asked La Rochefoucauld what he wanted. Robert told him he was the résistant the man had anticipated Saturday night. “I got a little held up,” La Rochefoucauld said.

  “Oh my God!” he exclaimed. “I’ll be right there.”

  This was Jean, and when he opened the door and introduced himself he took in La Rochefoucauld’s outfit. Jean quickly pulled him inside. He was bewildered, staring at La Rochefoucauld, so Robert thought it best to start at the beginning.

  When he finished, Jean shook his head, stunned, and then asked for Robert’s jacket and bunched it into a ball and threw it in the fire.

  A short while later he returned with snacks and a bottle of wine. “To refresh us,” he said. Jean wanted to celebrate what might be the greatest escape story of the war, he said. La Rochefoucauld appreciated the gesture but was bone tired. So Jean placed his drink down and led Robert to a guest bedroom, where his longest day ended.

  When he awoke he found himself in the same position as Auxerre: He had escaped prison but not danger. Dohse would surely be looking for his convict. La Rochefoucauld and Jean thought the best thing to do was to get in touch with a man by the code-name Aristide, who was SOE heavy Roger Landes himself. Landes had worked with Groupe Georges and likely knew of the Saint-Médard job.

  “First, I’ll go see him,” Jean said to La Rochefoucauld. “Rest while you wait. You’ll find all sorts of police novels in the library. They tell stories much less incredible than yours, but they’ll entertain you.”

  In Jean’s day job he sold kitchen supplies door to door, which gave him an entrée into any home, and an alibi afterward. That would come in handy today, if Dohse had his men on high alert. Jean jammed catalogues into his briefcase, told La Rochefoucauld not to expect him until evening, and walked out.

  He returned that night with news that he’d shown his papers twice. “Hard day,” he said. Still, he’d met with Landes at his safe house. Landes had instructed Jean to wait a bit, just to be cautious. After a few days, if the German paranoia died down, La Rochefoucauld could meet with Landes, and Aristide would find a passage for him out of the city.

  “Fate was thus offering me three days of relaxation,” La Rochefoucauld wrote, “three days to sleep, read, eat my fill.” Jean was gone from morning to night, and each evening the two discussed the streets, the city’s milieu, and how to avoid German suspicion. It still seemed dangerous out there, menacing. Too many unhappy guards patrolling a town that remained firmly occupied. If he were to make it to Landes’s, the men decided, La Rochefoucauld would need a disguise. They talked about what might work, but nothing seemed sufficient. Nothing hid the man fully enough to also mask his fear of being detected.

  And then Jean had a “genius idea,” as La Rochefoucauld later said. Jean’s sister wanted to be a nun and was going through the rites of ordination. She had left a habit—in her rather large size—in Jean’s house. What if La Rochefoucauld wore that?

  Jean tracked down the habit and Robert tried it on. It fell a touch short, but the black wimple and white coif fit perfectly, and even accentuated and softened La Rochefoucauld’s eyes. Jean found black stockings; Robert rolled them on. The two men sniggered at his transformation. With a rosary in his hand and powder on his cheeks, La Rochefoucauld would look every bit the sister Mary.

  He disrobed and they hashed out the remaining details. They decided Jean should lead them to Landes’s, walking ahead of Robert, maybe fifty yards, so no one would think the two together. They had faith in their bride of Christ, Jean said, but wanted to minimize the need for divine intervention. When Jean reached Landes’s safe house, he would turn and subtly acknowledge it, then continue walking. That was the cue for La Rochefoucauld, who would enter the home alone.

  At the end of the appointed day, the two set out, Jean in front, the nun trailing him, in her coif and wimple, and falling farther behind now. It was harder to walk in a woman’s dress, even a flowing robe like this one, than La Rochefoucauld imagined. “I was getting somewhat tangled up in my habit,” he wrote. The distance between them kept growing until Jean was roughly a hundred yards ahead. No one thought they were a pair now, which was perhaps for the best: The city was teeming with guards and soldiers and police. La Rochefoucauld decided to continue in the role of the slow-moving sister. The walk took much longer than either he or Jean anticipat
ed. But the glances La Rochefoucauld got from passersby seemed blank, and he felt as if, despite its restrictions, he was pulling the ensemble off.

  After an hour on the streets, Jean stopped to admire a house, and then walked on. Moments later La Rochefoucauld arrived at the front door.

  A woman answered the bell. Robert, improvising, and in his best approximation of a female voice, said he wanted to speak to Aristide—figuring that the code-name would reveal the intent of the visit.

  The woman sized up the nun.

  “Come in,” she said.

  This was likely Ginette Corbin, a courier in the Resistance and the daughter of the police inspector Charles Corbin, who had fled to Spain with Roger Landes after André Grandclément’s betrayal the previous year. Charles was a secret member of Landes’s Resistance group, and his daughter Ginette was Landes’s not-so-secret love interest, whom many assumed to be his fiancée. The two married at war’s end.

  To La Rochefoucauld, the woman coyly said she was the lady of the house. She handled Aristide’s charitable groups. Robert realized he had fooled her; she thought he really was a nun.

  “But I would like to speak personally with Monsieur Aristide,” La Rochefoucauld insisted.

  She gave him a puzzled glance. “I’ll go look for him,” she said. “Please wait.”

  She walked out and closed the door behind her. La Rochefoucauld, impish, played up the sister act. He sat down gently, crossed his legs and joined his hands in his sleeves, and assumed a “meditative air,” he said.

  A few minutes later the door opened and Landes appeared, a thin man, five foot four, only twenty-seven that summer, who passed most days in his Basque beret. His eyes were alive to the world, taking everything in, and he often wore a sardonic half smile. He otherwise looked so unassuming—his diminutive stature, his olive complexion—that even the Germans who’d hunted him had repeatedly failed to recognize him. He once accidentally dropped a suitcase that contained a wireless set, and the man to pick it up was, to Landes’s shock, a German agent. The Nazi simply handed the case back, unaware. Landes had made it to 1944 alive—escaping the dissolution of his Scientist network and the creation, that spring, of Actor—because his air of anonymity matched his discretion. He chose to lead résistants in Bordeaux on the rationale that he had too many loose-lipped friends in Paris, where he’d grown up. He never contacted fighters whom the Germans had freed, even if they’d been of great value to the Resistance. His parents, for the whole of the war, thought he was stationed in the Middle East.