Michael at the Invasion of France, 1943

by Laurie Calkhoven

  I wanted to hear more, but he’d stopped talking. The horror on his face kept me from asking what happened next. Steve took a few minutes to collect himself and then told the rest of the story. He had dangled in the air while his parachute slowly drifted to the ground. Planes shot at him from above and antiaircraft guns from below, but he somehow managed to hit the ground unharmed. He found himself in a farmer’s field. He buried his flight suit and his parachute and spent the next three days on the run, sleeping in hedgerows during the day, eating raw potatoes from farmers’ fields, and traveling at night.

  Germans swarmed all over the area, searching for him and anyone else who managed to survive the jump.

  “That first night I heard trucks on the road and dove into a ditch. One of them stopped and eight or ten Germans got out and started to hunt for me. I pressed myself so far down into that ditch that I ended up with a mouthful of dirt,” he said. “It took every bit of grit I had not to get up and run. I crept forward on my belly like a snake.” He shook his head in amazement. “I still can’t figure how they didn’t catch me, but they didn’t, and I sure am glad.

  “I didn’t know where I was going,” Steve said. “I just knew I had to keep moving. On my third night I snuck up behind a farmhouse. I was going to try and steal something to eat from the garden or the barn, but I could see a family through the window sitting down to supper. I smelled hot food and the people looked nice, so I went ahead and knocked on the door.

  “‘American,’ I said, when the farmer answered. I had a French phrase card in my escape kit, so I knew how to say ‘please help me.’ The old man yelled like crazy, but his wife shushed him and pulled me inside. I spent one night there. They fed me and let me sleep on the kitchen floor. Then the next morning another man showed up. He led me to a depot and someone else took me on a train to Paris. When I got here, your friend Fox led me through the train station and out onto the street. Next thing I knew I was here.”

  Steve was anxious to leave France. He was tired of being cooped up in that small room, not able to walk, not able to talk to his host. He knew he was putting her life in danger. The penalty for men who got caught helping an enemy aviator was death by firing squad. Women were sent to concentration camps, which was only a slower form of death.

  Finally, the doctor brought a cane and said Steve could walk, but he had to build up his muscles and his stamina before he could think about hiking over the Pyrenees into Spain. I took him out for walks—at first just to the corner and back, but soon we were walking around the block and going farther and farther. At first, we both tensed up every time we saw a Nazi soldier, but they weren’t interested in men with canes. Soon we relaxed and even enjoyed our walks together, even though we couldn’t risk speaking out loud. I had to break him of his habit of keeping one hand in his pocket and jingling the coins he carried. That was something Frenchmen never did.

  On his final morning in Paris, I took Steve on a tour of the sights. He tried not to look too much like a tourist when I walked him by the Eiffel Tower and Napoleon’s Tomb. Then I led him to the Gare d’Austerlitz, where someone else would lead him onto a train and into the South of France. From there, he would hike over the Pyrenees mountains into Spain.

  I spotted his contact. A young woman in a red suit—a rare spot of color in what had become a very gray city. I nodded in her direction. Steve looked me in the eye for a moment and walked toward her.

  We had said our good-byes before we left his safe house.

  “I would have gone crazy without your company,” he told me. “And I wouldn’t have gotten strong enough to leave without our long walks.”

  I shrugged off his thanks, but the truth was that I was going to miss Steve Jones. He treated me like an equal, not a boy. He was interested in me and what I had to say, even though I couldn’t tell him very much about myself. “I’m doing my duty,” I told him. “I’m proud to help.”

  “And I’m proud to know you, Wolfie,” Steve said. “Is there anyone you want me to get in touch with when I get back to England? I could get word to your family in the States.”

  My eyes widened. How did he know I had family in the States. Had I slipped up?

  Steve laughed. “Just a guess, Wolfie. Just a guess.”

  I smiled. I wanted him to get word to Papa about the work I was doing. I wanted it desperately. But it was too dangerous. “There’s no one,” I said. “Except Hitler. Drop a bomb on him for me.”

  CHAPTER SIXTEEN

  “Newspaper, Monsieur?”

  May 1943

  After Steve Jones left, François finally put me to work guiding aviators around Paris. Trains from Belgium and northern France arrived at the Gare du Nord. I led the men to safe houses in Paris, or to the Gare d’Austerlitz. From there, another résistant led them on a train south—the jumping-off point for the hike into Spain.

  Jacques led me on my first few missions, as he had before. He carried one newspaper under his arm, a pro-German propaganda rag. When the train pulled into the station, Jacques waited calmly. He elbowed me in the side as two men got off the train. I knew immediately which one was the aviator. He didn’t have the pinched, sullen look of a man who had lived under German occupation for three years. I memorized the contact’s face. I would be seeing it again, and a mistake could be fatal.

  The two men walked down the platform.

  Jacques sauntered toward the guide. “Newspaper, monsieur?” he asked. “It’s my last one.”

  The guide took the paper and handed it to his friend. The exchange had been made.

  Jacques headed into the station with me on his heels. The guide and the aviator drifted apart as if they didn’t know each other at all. I kept checking to make sure the aviator was following us. We passed through the Nazi checkpoint leading out of the station. My heart fluttered like crazy. What if the Nazi guards asked the aviator a question? I held my breath, waiting. But the guard gave the aviator’s papers only a quick glance and waved him on.

  “Stop looking back,” Jacques muttered. He pointed to a window on the other side of the street. “Look there.”

  I saw my reflection in the window glass. The aviator was coming up behind us.

  Once we were on stairs leading down to the métro, Jacques turned to me and asked, “Have you done your homework?”

  “Homework?” I asked. But Jacques had already turned around again. He was simply checking to make sure the aviator was still there.

  I noticed that the aviator kept his face buried in his newspaper on the métro, peering over the top of it now and then. When we were near our stop, Jacques stood and moved to the door. The aviator did the same. We got off in the Marais neighborhood. Jacques headed across the street, into an apartment building, and up the stairs to an apartment on the fourth floor. A man I had never seen before answered, speaking through a crack in the door. “How’s the newspaper business today?” he asked

  “I sold my last one,” Jacques told him.

  The aviator and I both practically fell into the apartment when the man opened the door all the way. I’m not sure which one of us was more relieved.

  From that day on, I was a guide. Sometimes Jacques and I worked together and sometimes each of us worked alone. My favorite thing to do was lead the men to one of the two safe houses we used. There I could talk to them about what was going on in the rest of the world, and ask when the Allies were going to invade France. The British and the Americans all had the same answer:

  “We’re gearing up for a massive invasion, but we don’t know when or where it will happen.”

  Some of them still had their escape kits. They flew with photographs ready to paste into fake identity cards, tiny compasses and silk maps, tablets to help them stay awake for twenty-four hours, and money for all the countries they flew over. Sometimes they even had chocolate bars. The Americans thought of everything.
r />   The most dangerous missions were the ones in which I had to lead the pilots from one train station to the other without a stop at a safe house. The Nazis watched the train stations more carefully than they did the métro, and there were hours to fill in between trains. Once I led an aviator to a café only to remember that American men ate differently from French men. They held their forks in their right hands and did an awkward dance with the knife whenever they had to cut something. I spent the whole meal worried that a German would wander in.

  One Saturday I had too many hours in between trains—too much time to safely wait at the station. I led my aviator into a movie theater. We sat in the dark, far from the other patrons, whispering in English. Then, suddenly, the movie stopped and the lights went on. Nazis poured into the theater and blocked the exits. They interrogated every man over eighteen. If they didn’t have the proper papers, they were arrested and transported to German war factories.

  My eyes darted around the theater looking for an escape. There was none. My aviator looked young and healthy—exactly the kind of man the Germans wanted. I pulled my ID card out of my pocket and motioned to him to do the same. He had a small pile of papers. I flipped through them quickly. The aviator had French-army discharge papers, one of which said he was disabled. I could only hope it was a good enough forgery.

  I handed the aviator his papers just before the boche got to us. He barely looked at my documents before turning to my new friend.

  “Papers,” the Nazi demanded.

  The aviator turned them over. He kept his eyes trained on the movie screen and not on the Nazi soldier.

  The Nazi stared at them for a long minute. He flipped from the discharge papers to the identity card and read and reread the disability form. Finally, after what felt like an hour, he shoved the papers back into the man’s hands and moved on.

  We dropped into our seats—both of us gulping for air. That was the only time I brought an aviator to the movies. From then on I made sure to stay on the move. I was always relieved when it was time to turn them over to the next guide.

  Maman and I had only one conversation about my work during this time. She knew I had gotten involved in the Resistance again. I was disappearing for longer and longer periods of time. One day, when I got home from dropping off an aviator at the train station, she was waiting at the door.

  “Tell me what you’re up to,” she said.

  “It’s better if you don’t know.”

  She waited for me to say more.

  “It’s important,” I said. “And it’s necessary.”

  “Are you putting yourself in danger?”

  Was I? I shrugged and looked away.

  Maman sighed. “Are you putting Charlotte or me in any danger?”

  “No,” I said. I believed it. With the exception of Jacques and his brother, no one in the Resistance knew my name or where I lived. Even the aviators. So many times I wanted to write a letter to Papa and slip it to one of them, but it was too dangerous. A captured letter would lead the Gestapo right to our door.

  “The real danger comes if the Nazis win,” I told her. “I’m not doing anything risky.”

  Maman brushed my hair out of my eyes. “You’ve turned into a little man. I’m sorry you didn’t get to be a boy for a few years longer. I’m proud of you.”

  Would Papa be proud too? I wondered. I had continued to add rungs to the ladder in my imagination, but I wasn’t sure if it would ever be tall enough. At least he could not say that I had put Maman and Charlotte in danger.

  But then I did. I had no choice.

  CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

  “Bone Joor”

  August 1943

  Every time I saw an Allied plane in the sky, I worried about how we would get the aviators to safety if it crashed. One afternoon I was with Jacques and François in their apartment when the air-raid sirens sounded. Instead of heading for shelter, we went to the roof to see what we could see.

  I recognized the planes as the kind Steve Jones had flown—Flying Fortresses. They were heading to the suburbs west of Paris.

  “They’re going to bomb the factories,” François said. “The Germans turned them into war plants.”

  We were close enough to watch bombs drop from the bellies of the planes and black smoke rise from the ground. Puffs from German antiaircraft guns spiraled up. I cringed each time one of the Allied planes got hit. Some came down in flames. We could see aviators jumping like dots in the sky. Some of the parachutes were on fire. Bodies hurtled toward the earth. Other airmen dangled from their floating clouds, helpless to protect themselves while guns shot at them from below.

  I took comfort that at least some of the men would make it into the hands of the Resistance instead of the Nazis’.

  That night we were able to tune into the BBC for the French news. The announcer was cool and impersonal. “American bombers attacked targets in the western suburbs of Paris today. Sixteen bombers are missing.”

  I tried to remember what Steve had told me about the crew on those planes. There were eight or nine men on every single one of them. “Sixteen planes,” I said to Jacques. “That’s more than a hundred and twenty-five men.”

  “Where will we find food, clothes, and safe houses for that many?” Jacques asked.

  The Resistance was struggling to take care of the aviators who wanted to escape to Spain, but Jacques and I only had to worry about one man at a time. The next afternoon, we headed to the Gare du Nord to pick up an aviator. This one wouldn’t spend the night in a safe house, but head directly to the Gare d’Austerlitz.

  Our man got off the last car, along with his guide. The aviator carried a small suitcase. Sometimes they posed as Frenchmen on a business trip. This one was older than most—old enough to pull that off. I approached the two of them with my newspaper. “Newspaper, monsieur?” I asked. “It’s my last copy.”

  The guide handed me a coin. The aviator took the newspaper.

  “Bonne chance,” the guide whispered. “Good luck.” He kissed the aviator on both cheeks and disappeared into the crowd.

  I followed Jacques through the busy train station and into the café, trusting the man to stay behind us. We had learned that we could avoid the Nazi checkpoints by going through the restaurant. We would pretend to look for a table, and then change our minds.

  “Let’s go home,” Jacques said. “My maman made rabbit stew.”

  I nodded and followed him through the café’s street door and onto the avenue. No Nazi checkpoint in sight.

  Jacques and I crossed the busy street, weaving in and out of bicycles and pedestrians. I checked our reflections in the windows on the other side of the street as Jacques had showed me. The American appeared to be struggling.

  “Slow down,” I said to Jacques. “We have plenty of time.”

  He slowed a bit, but when I looked over my shoulder, I saw that the pilot had stopped. He was clutching his suitcase in one hand and using the other to hold on to the side of a building. I could see his chest rising and falling, as if he couldn’t get enough air. Was he too frightened to continue? His knees buckled and he crumpled to the sidewalk.

  “Jacques, wait!” I said.

  Jacques turned. His eyes widened and then he shook his head. He was right, of course. One English word out of the man’s mouth and we would all get arrested—and shot by a firing squad.

  I looked back. A man was kneeling over the aviator, fanning his face.

  Jacques grabbed my arm and tried to drag me to the métro. “It’s too dangerous,” he hissed.

  “I can’t,” I said. “I can’t leave him.”

  “Fine,” Jacques said. “I’m going.”

  For a minute I stood between the two of them. Going with Jacques was the safe thing to do, but I couldn’t leave an American lying on the sidewalk for the Naz
is. I watched Jacques get swallowed up by the people hurrying to the métro and rushed back to the man.

  A small crowd had gathered. I pushed through them to kneel by the aviator’s side. I made sure to put a hand on his suitcase. I didn’t know what was in it, but I was afraid there was something that would give him away.

  He was lying on his back. It wasn’t fear that had made him collapse. He was burning up with fever.

  The crowd was getting bigger. Any one of them could turn us in to the Gestapo for some coal or a couple of eggs. The boches didn’t like crowds—they saw every gathering of French people as a possible plot against them. It was seconds before one of them pushed his way into the center of this one to see what was happening.

  “Was ist los?” he demanded in German.

  The man who had first come to the aviator’s aide murmured to the soldier in German. Then he pointed to me. I think he said the German word for son. That gave me an idea.

  “Papa, Papa, you fainted,” I said quickly in French. “Ne parles pas,” I hoped the aviator would understand French for “don’t talk.” I didn’t dare say the words in English.

  The Nazi asked me a question in German I did not understand. “He’s sick. I must get him home,” I said.

  The man who said the aviator was my father hailed a bicycle taxi. “I’ll help you,” he said, positioning himself between the aviator and the Nazi. “Américain?” he whispered.

  I panicked. How did he know?

  “Your papa will be fine,” he said, more loudly. “He needs to rest.” The man said something in German to the Nazi, and helped me walk my “papa” to the taxi. The aviator slumped into the seat and I climbed in next to him with the suitcase.

  The man slipped a few francs into my hand.