by Leo Maxim
He wonders why the albino didn’t try to force the names of his comrades from him. He must have known that the first hours after arrest are the most important for getting confessions, because lots of clues could have disappeared the next day. Perhaps it’s enough for the albino to have resolved the issue of the flyers. Perhaps he isn’t going to torture him or hand him over to the Gestapo, who are said to be much more violent than the Wehrmacht. Gerhard reflects that he actually knows far too much about the work of the Resistance. He knows so many names and addresses. He would really like to be able to forget about them all. Again he starts having doubts about whether his work has had any value at all, whether he has actually achieved anything worth mentioning. He knows he’s made mistakes, he knows he’s acted too quickly again. Was Wegener a counter-intelligence spy who’d been set on him? And what would Eugen think about his arrest? The bell in the nearby church tower strikes midnight, the full moon illuminates the dark walls of the cell, which are covered with inscriptions. He makes out some Cyrillic letters. One of his predecessors in the cell has carved a Russian farmhouse surrounded by trees into the wall. Gerhard doesn’t fall asleep until the small hours. But the albino pursues him even in his dreams. He is sitting on his desk, staring at him with his red eyes, pulling on his tongue with some strange piece of equipment. Little pieces of paper covered with all his secrets fly from Gerhard’s mouth. The albino laughs and tugs harder and harder until the whole room is filled with the pieces of paper.
Gerhard spends the next day in his cell. A few Russian prisoners sing melancholy songs. A corporal opens the cell door and throws in a piece of bread. The following day he has to pay another visit to the albino, who knows by now that Gerhard worked for almost a year at transport headquarters in Toulouse. On the desk in front of the albino is a record of the first interrogation. Gerhard can read a few sentences. The last paragraph says: “Two intensified interrogations have produced no new information.”
Intensified interrogation means torture. Why is the albino lying to his superiors, why is he sparing him? The albino flicks silently through Gerhard’s papers, sometimes shaking his head, once even smiling. He says the matter will be heard before a court martial in Toulouse, he has a friend there, and he will inform him about it. Gerhard is led away, the albino nods encouragingly at him
It is only years later that Gerhard thinks he understands the counter-intelligence officer’s behaviour. The Wehrmacht Secret Service was about to be dissolved at the time. The head of counter-intelligence, Admiral Canaris, was one of the conspirators who carried out the attempt on Hitler’s life on 20 July 1944. For the SS this was a welcome opportunity to get rid of the service, which had been seen as a millstone for a long time. It could be that the albino has more important things to do in his last few days on duty than force confessions from partisans.
At dawn the next day, Gerhard is fetched by a sergeant and a private. The sergeant cuffs Gerhard’s hands behind his back. “Do anything at all and I’ll shoot you,” he says. Then Gerhard is shoved into a Wehrmacht limousine and the drive to Toulouse begins. On the country road they are overtaken by a motorcycle with a sidecar. The sergeant draws a gun and winds down the window. He doesn’t relax again until the motorcycle has passed. In Toulouse the streets are full of people. In the distance Gerhard sees the red-brick building of the St Michel prison. When they reach the big portal, the sergeant passes the duty soldier a piece of paper through the window, and the car drives into the yard. Gerhard thinks of his first walk in Toulouse with Eugen, when they passed the prison on the tram. How optimistic and naive he had been back then.
His days in prison are all the same. At six o’clock in the morning a corporal in the hall shouts, “Get up.” There is a piece of army bread and a cup of ersatz coffee. After breakfast every prisoner is allowed to walk in the courtyard for twenty-five minutes, and wash at one of the taps. At midday a bowl of turnip soup is pushed through the hatch in the cell door, in the evening there’s a piece of margarine or cheese substitute. On the fifth day Gerhard is fetched from his cell. “Interrogation,” says the warder. Gerhard is led to a room where Captain Wächtler, the head of security of transport headquarters in Toulouse, is sitting at a table. Two SS men stand on either side of him. Gerhard’s heart pounds with fear. “Who would have thought we would meet again so soon?” Wächtler says quietly. One of the SS men takes a pair of black leather gloves from his pocket and pulls them slowly over his hands.
“What’s your real name?” asks Wächtler. “Gérard Laban, Jean-Pierre Ariège, Gérard Lebert, quite a lot of names.” Gerhard says nothing and receives his first blow to the head. Everything goes black, and he falls off his chair. When he gets back up he gets a second blow to the stomach, then both SS men lay into him. Gerhard feels kicks in his belly and his ribs. Blood flows from his mouth. He can barely breathe. The SS men stop beating him up, Gerhard looks up at Wächtler, who is bright red with fury and shouting at him to tell him everything because there’s no point denying it. Wächtler wants to know who warned the waiter Gaillard from the officers’ mess about his forthcoming arrest. Gerhard says he doesn’t know anyone called Gaillard. Wächtler gives the SS men a sign, and they tear into him again. At that moment a young lieutenant comes into the room. He tells Wächtler that intensified interrogations are not allowed in prison. He insists that the prisoner be brought back to his cell immediately. Wächtler is furious, but the prison officer sticks to his ruling. He has Gerhard brought to a one-man cell in the basement, and calls a paramedic. The warder, a grey-haired corporal, takes Gerhard’s arm and lays him carefully on the pallet. “Have yourself examined,” he says. “It doesn’t look good, but I’ve seen worse, much worse. I’ll get you your plate and your blanket.” The paramedic establishes that his upper incisors have been broken, his lung is burst and five of his ribs are broken. “It’ll all be OK,” he says.
Gerhard never told either me or my mother anything about this interrogation in St Michel prison. He wrote about it in his memoirs, but none of us dared to talk to him about it. Perhaps we wanted to spare his feelings, which might have turned a strict grandfather into a weeping man. I was fourteen when I first read his book about his time in France, and I couldn’t believe that he had had to endure all that. That he was the man who had doubled up, bloody and fearful, under the boots of the SS men. And who still didn’t say anything. I only understood how brave he had been when I was arrested myself. That was on the evening of 8 October 1989, a day after the fortieth anniversary of the GDR. Along with my friend Christine I was arrested by two Stasi in Alexanderplatz. We were carrying flyers for the “New Forum”, and were put on a truck that brought us to a police barracks. There we had to spend all night standing in a cold garage. The next morning we were questioned separately. I was very frightened, because I really had no idea what was going to happen to us. The interrogator just had to raise his voice once and I told him everything I knew. Gerhard didn’t say anything, even though his life was in danger. I gave in, even though there wasn’t actually anything much to be afraid of.
11
Hostilities
AFTER GERHARD’S MISTREATMENT by the SS men the warder brings double portions of food to Gerhard’s cell, and suddenly there are even a few bits of meat in the turnip soup. Gerhard can’t yet walk, and spends hours dozing on his pallet. He imagines the Allies have landed and are on their way to Toulouse right now. The first thing they will do after their arrival, of course, is liberate the prison. They take him from his cell, and everyone cheers and dances, and in the evening they drink wine, and there is bread, as much as you can eat. Soon Gerhard is taken to a cell already occupied by three young Frenchmen who give him suspicious looks because he speaks German to the warden. In the evening they lie in silence on their beds, and one of the three Frenchmen starts whistling a tune. Gerhard recognizes the song of the Red Falcons. When the other man’s whistling falls silent, Gerhard whistles the tune to the end. The Frenchman asks how Gerhard knows the song, and eventually they
work out that they were both at the Red Falcons’ camp in Villeneuve in 1936. The suspicion vanishes, and Gerhard is welcomed with open arms by the Frenchmen. They have been developing escape plans for weeks. They have woven a rope from bed sheets and smuggled a knife into the cell, so now all they need is a hook with which they can fasten the rope to the prison wall. They tell Gerhard of their plans. It sounds dangerous, but Gerhard would do anything to get out of this prison now. He thinks of the Count of Monte Cristo, who also escaped from a fortress. It used to be his favourite book. But he’s not sure if real life works like that.
In mid-May Gerhard is taken away by two military policemen, who are to bring him to the court martial. They drive through the dense Toulouse traffic. The weather is fine, the women are wearing thin dresses, people sit chatting on the café terraces. Gerhard is disappointed, life just goes on as if nothing had happened. He knows that in a few hours he will probably be sentenced to death, and then the only question will be when he faces the firing squad. Gerhard has heard of a prisoner who was sentenced to death in January and is still alive. He thinks of the execution, of what it will be like when the bullets pierce his body. The thought makes him shiver on that warm day.
They drive to the Capitole, the city hall, a magnificent eighteenth-century building, with a massive keep on its southern side. The court martial is in one wing of the city hall which is guarded by soldiers. When Gerhard gets out of the car in the courtyard, he is approached by a young lieutenant who introduces himself as his counsel. The lawyer has an open, likeable face. He has read Gerhard’s files and he has a few ideas about how to delay the trial. The lieutenant advises Gerhard to claim he was expatriated by the Germans in 1935. In that case the trial would not be brought against a Reich German, but against a stateless man. And he should remember whether Corporal Wegener, who betrayed him in Castres, didn’t mention his connections with the Resistance several times. “The trial papers would have to be rewritten, investigations would have to be carried out, and that could take months,” says the lieutenant.
Gerhard asks why he’s doing all this for him, and the lieutenant says he has a friend in Castres who sends his greetings. “The albino?” asks Gerhard. “Yes, that’s what they call him,” the lieutenant says with a laugh. Gerhard is confused by the German officer’s kindness. He thinks about how many members of the Wehrmacht have helped him over the past few months, and he thinks about Eugen’s words, that you shouldn’t just condemn all these men in uniform out of hand.
The courtroom is panelled with dark wood, and huge chandeliers hang from the opulent stuccoed ceilings. Shortly after Gerhard has sat down on the defendant’s bench the judges appear, and everyone has to rise. The presiding judge is a general with a gaunt face, a thin hooked nose and a monocle that makes him look like a caricature from the days of the Kaiser. The charges are: deliberate subversion of the German armed forces, evading military service and high treason. The prosecutor, a colonel, delivers a long speech about Gerhard’s activity in treasonous organizations, about the huge damage that he has done to the German armed forces with his actions. All of a sudden Gerhard has the feeling that he hasn’t been all that unimportant after all. His defending counsel takes the floor and speaks of Gerhard’s supposed expatriation, and he also requests that Corporal Wegener be brought in for questioning because there is a suspicion that Wegener could also be a traitor. The presiding judge is impatient, but he adjourns the case. Not least because he considers the charges so serious that a higher court should actually be ruling on them. When Gerhard hears of the adjournment the tension leaves his body, and he smiles at his counsel. The presiding judge sees that and roars at him, “Be under no illusions, the only possible punishment for what you’ve done is the death sentence.”
A Belgian officer is brought to the cell next to Gerhard’s in St Michel prison, on charges of spying in France for the British. Gerhard is able to talk to him through the open windows. The Belgian talks about the state of the war. The Allies are already close to Rome, he says, and a new offensive by the Red Army is under way on the Eastern Front. The Allied landing in France was planned for the first week of June in Normandy, the Belgian says. Gerhard looks at the calendar that he has scratched in the cell wall. There are another three weeks until the beginning of June. On the morning of 1 June Gerhard tips his bed against the window and climbs up on it. The piece of sky that he can see is blue. But what is the weather like at the coast almost 900 kilometres further north? The Belgian says it all depends on the sea crossing: if the waves are too high the boats won’t be able to land.
The weather stays good in Toulouse, but there is no news of the landing. By now Gerhard knows that he could be shot even without a new trial. That recently happened to a prisoner on his corridor. His trial had also been adjourned, and the firing squad still came to get him at night. “They’re going to shoot me,” he yelled when the military police dragged him down the corridor. Since then Gerhard has slept uneasily, the slightest noise wakes him up. When he hears footsteps in the corridor he lies there drenched in sweat. He stays awake until the pale moonlight shimmers through the window. It’s only when the metal cans of ersatz coffee rattle down the corridor that he calms down again. He’s made it through another night.
On the afternoon of 3 June 1944 they come to get him. The soldier who cuffs Gerhard’s hands behind his back says he’s going to be taken to Fresnes near Paris. To the Supreme Court Martial. Gerhard reflects that Paris is at least closer to the north coast than Toulouse. They drive to the station in a black Citroën with SS runes on the number plate. Gerhard is surprised to note that they do not use the entrance for military trains, but the one for normal passengers. His escorts guide him through the crowd waiting for the express train to Paris, which has just pulled in. In the middle of the train there is a carriage with the inscription “Wehrmacht only”. Gerhard remembers a report he read at transport headquarters, which said that military carriages should be included in normal trains to reduce the risk of violent attack. The front compartment of the carriage is occupied by five military police, who take charge of Gerhard.
Gerhard sits wedged between two military policemen. The train rarely travels at normal speed, it rattles along at a leisurely pace. Just before Montauban, about sixty kilometres from Toulouse, the train stops in the open countryside. The military police ask a blue-uniformed German railwayman the cause of the stop. “Terrorist activity,” says the railwayman. The military police take turns to sleep, and at least two of them always keep their eye on Gerhard. In the afternoon they pass Cahors. The sun shines, Gerhard sees fields and stretches of forest, the mountains become steeper, and soon they are in the Massif Central. The train stops at a little station. A voice calls out, “Allassac, would all passengers please disembark, the train ends here.” The doors of the other carriages open, the passengers stream out and pass through the barriers. Soon the platform is deserted again. The military police become nervous. “Shit,” says one of them. “Right in the middle of bandit country.” Two men are sent off to ask what happens next. Soon after that shots ring out, and they both run breathlessly back. They are talking about men with machine guns standing in the station building. Gerhard is electrified. The partisans are there! The sergeant major in command of the troop looks at him and says, “Don’t get your hopes up. Before we have to get out of here we’ll put a bullet in your head.” He is interrupted by a violent explosion. One of the military policemen has to go out onto the platform and find out what’s happened. The locomotive boiler has been blown up, he breathlessly reports a few moments later. There is the sound of fighting from the town. Machine-gun fire, long salvoes, followed by a huge explosion. “An anti-tank grenade,” says one of the policemen. “But not one of ours,” says the sergeant major. Two military police guard the window overlooking the tracks, two others the side towards the platform. A few moments later the first bullet flies into the compartment. The military policemen shoot back. But outside it’s got dark in the meantime, and they can’t s
ee anything. “Stop shooting,” yells the sergeant major. But the shooting outside has stopped. All of a sudden it’s so quiet that they can hear the crickets chirping, through the shattered window there comes the smell of new-mown hay. All of a sudden something happens on the platform. The sergeant major tells Gerhard to shout in French, “This is the German Wehrmacht, who is there?” Gerhard shouts. In reply a salvo of machine-gun fire hits the roof of the carriage. A clear voice calls back in French. “We’ll show you who we are, you bastard.” Gerhard is happy to translate.
As soon as it is light, a new attack begins. Shots from sub-machine guns, carbines and a light machine gun ricochet around the compartment. Gerhard is told to lie on the floor. One military policeman is injured in his left hand, another has a graze on his head, blood seeps through the bandage. Gerhard creeps slowly along the floor of the corridor. Suddenly the whole carriage is shaken by an explosion. “Let’s get out of here!” yells the sergeant major. “Not onto the platform, the other side!” He pulls the door open and jumps out, and the others follow. Gerhard raises his head and looks towards the open door. He sees the military police running along the tracks. Suddenly the sergeant major appears in the doorway. He aims his pistol at Gerhard’s head. Gerhard sees it all happening as if in slow motion. The pale, distorted face of the sergeant major with his finer on the trigger. Gerhard turns his head to the side so as not to see the muzzle flash. He hears the shot and feels a blow. Warm blood runs over his face. He wonders if he’s dead, but soon realizes that dead people don’t ask questions. His ear hurts, he lies there frozen, not moving a muscle. Minutes pass. Then a voice calls from the platform: “Come out, one by one, with your hands in the air!” Gerhard gets to his feet. “Hands up!” the voice outside calls again. Gerhard turns round and shows his handcuffs. One of the partisans comes in and helps him get out. He is free.