by Matthew Cobb
Despite having only three days’ notice of the operation, Livchitz was able to persuade two young men to join him: his childhood friend Jean Frankelmon, a Communist actor and musician who had fought in Spain, and Robert Maistriau, four years younger, who had gone to the same school. Neither had previously been involved in any action against the Occupation. Armed only with the revolver, a torch covered with red silk and some bolt-cutters, the three young men rode off on their bicycles to the place Livchitz had decided would be the site of the attack. As Maistriau later recalled: ‘We felt a mixture of adventure, a desire to help and also to cause trouble for the Germans. At that point, nothing could have stopped me. We were full of hope.’622
At ten o’clock on the evening of 19 April, right on schedule, Convoy 20 pulled slowly out of the Mechelen camp on its way to Auschwitz. Thirty wagons long, hauled by a huge Type 44 locomotive, the convoy carried 1,631 people, including 262 children, many of them travelling without their parents. The oldest person, Jacob Blom, was ninety years old; the youngest, Suzanne Kaminski, had been born in the camp less than six weeks before. Her short life would end in the Auschwitz gas chambers. Even before the train arrived at the spot where Livchitz and his comrades were waiting, two young men and a woman had escaped, having broken through the bars of the small windows and jumped to safety. That was just the beginning.
As the train chugged around a curve, the driver saw the red warning lamp Livchitz had placed in the middle of the track. He slammed on the brakes, bringing the convoy to a halt with a terrifying mixture of screaming metal and hissing steam that paralysed Maistriau with fear. He gathered his wits and ran to the last wagon, cut open the lock, slid back the door and called on the prisoners to jump out. There was an argument, as some deportees shouted: ‘It’s forbidden: The Germans will kill us.’ Hena Waysng, a thirty-year-old woman in the wagon, remembered what happened:
All of a sudden, the train stopped. We didn’t know what was happening or where we had stopped. In the wagon, people started shouting, pushing. Then a passenger who was by the narrow window shouted: ‘Over here, over here!’ A young résistant opened the door and gave money to those who were in front and shouted: ‘Get out, get out!’ I was frightened and I didn’t dare jump. But in a flash I realized that my two sons would always be on their own if I didn’t have the courage. So I jumped.623
Meanwhile, Livchitz was firing from the bushes, convincing the German guards at the front of the train that they were being attacked by a large group of partisans. Eventually, the soldiers realized that they were in no real danger and men were sent out to chase Livchitz, who very sensibly fled. Maistriau and Frankelmon freed seventeen deportees, gave each of them fifty francs and showed them how to get to the nearest tram station. Once their charges were safe, the two young men returned to where they had hidden their bicycles and rode off, exhausted. Livchitz, unable to get to his bike because of the Germans searching for him, had a two-hour walk home.
Eventually, the train steamed off, but all along the way, thanks to the work of the Communist partisans, it leaked prisoners as people escaped through doors and windows, using the equipment the partisans had smuggled on board the train. Twenty-three people were killed either when jumping or as the German guards shot at them, but in total two hundred and thirty-one more men, women and children escaped from the convoy. Exactly as the Resistance had feared, many of the escapees had little choice but to throw themselves on the mercy of local people. But the Belgians proved more welcoming than many expected – amazingly, not one of the deportees was denounced.
Things did not go so well for Livchitz and Frankelmon, both of whom were betrayed and arrested later in the year. They were executed in 1944. Before he was finally captured, Livchitz gave another bravura display, managing to escape from Gestapo headquarters after hours of torture – he overpowered his guard, put on the Nazi’s uniform and walked calmly out of the building. Of the three young men, only Maistriau survived the war.
The story of Convoy 20 was unique. The combination of an attack by a handful of brave men, a well-planned escape by the deportees and amazing luck all round was never repeated. But the date of the attack was significant: by coincidence, it also marked another moment in the Jewish fight against Nazi barbarity. On the other side of the Continent the Jews of the Warsaw ghetto began the final phase of their heroic but doomed uprising against the Nazis. Around 13,000 Jewish residents of the ghetto died, while the surviving 50,000 were deported to the camps. The ghetto itself was razed to the ground by the Nazis, and a concentration camp was built on the site.
French Jews may not have launched an uprising like their comrades in Warsaw, or even carried out an attack like that on Convoy 20 from Mechelen, but they were intensively active in the Resistance, both as individuals and as an organized force.624 Several Resistance leaders were Jews – for example, Jean-Pierre Levy, Raymond Aubrac and Daniel Mayer – while most of those in the MOI were Jews, as the Nazis did not fail to point out during the ‘Affiche rouge’ trial of the Manouchian MOI group at the beginning of 1944.
Jews also carried out their own specific forms of resistance. One of the most important was related to the first of the seven instructions published by Notre parole in March 1943: ‘hide the children’. Some infants, like Peter Feigl in Figeac, were hidden by refugee charities. Up until 1941 the Oeuvre de Secours aux Enfants (OSE – Charity for Children’s Aid – the French branch of a Jewish organization that traced its origins back to the pogroms of tsarist Russia) looked after 850 children in its centres. But then, under new legislation, its work was entirely taken over by the tame Jewish Council set up by Vichy (the Union Générale des Israélites de France – UGIF). What should have been havens for needy children had turned into traps.
The Nazis and their Vichy collaborators knew where the homes were and had lists of all the children, while the UGIF lulled the children into a false sense of security, urging them not to run away.625 On 20 October 1943 the children’s home at La Verdière, near Marseilles, was raided by the Gestapo; the director, Alice Salomon, and the forty children in her charge were all deported to Drancy. Finally realizing the danger, the OSE began to empty the homes, dispatching children to stay with sympathetic French people, or smuggling them over the border into Switzerland. In Limoges the homes were requisitioned by the prefecture, thereby taking them out of the UGIF circuit that was being preyed on by the Gestapo.
After the Nazi invasion of the southern zone in November 1942, the French départements to the south-east of the Rhône river were occupied by the Italians. Until late 1943, when the Nazis took over following the Italian capitulation, conditions for Jews in these regions were less dangerous than elsewhere in France.626 Among those who fled there was Sabine Zlatin, a Polish Jew who worked at a children’s home in Vichy France, and who took the forty-two children in her charge to the relative safety of the Italian-occupied zone. At the beginning of summer 1943 they arrived in Izieu, a tiny village fifty kilometres due south of Oyonnax. The site was idyllic – high on the hillside overlooking the Rhône Valley, there was not only sufficient accommodation for the children but also a farm that could provide food. Then, on 6 April 1944, all hope was extinguished. The Gestapo arrived, sent from Lyons by Klaus Barbie. Forty-four children and seven staff members were arrested. All of them, except for one classroom assistant, were killed by the Nazis.627
There were other organizations that helped Jewish children hide from the glare of Nazi eyes – the MOI group Union des Femmes Juives (Union of Jewish Women) hid a hundred children in the Parisian suburbs or in the countryside, while an informal body called Entraide Temporaire (Temporary Welfare), a product of Parisian high society, helped save dozens of children.628 There were also hundreds of spontaneous acts of generosity as ordinary people looked after children threatened with death simply because they were Jewish.629 The precise number of Jewish children saved is unknown, but the figure ran into the tens of thousands.630
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It may be difficult to a
ccept, but the raid on Izieu and the massacre at Ascq, indeed all the appallingly brutal acts of the Nazis, were often carried out by normal people. While the Nazi leaders were crazed anti-Semites, motivated by fear, lurid fantasies and hatred, many of the rank-and-file soldiers who did the dirty work were ‘only following orders’. This classic defence has been repeatedly used to try and avoid personal responsibility in terrible events, from Nazi Germany to Abu Ghraib. As a legal and moral defence it is risible, but it is based upon an element of truth: armies – and especially conscript armies – are not homogeneous blocks. They are composed of men and women who may not always agree with the instructions they are given; the best of the soldiers may refuse to carry out morally indefensible orders, even at the risk of their own lives. Under such circumstances, armies can split. This was the hope behind one of the boldest pieces of Resistance action, which occurred when left-wing groups attacked German soldiers not with bullets but with ideas.
The Communist Party, which had substantial contacts with conscript German soldiers who had once been in the German Communist Party (KPD), set up a special section, the Travail Allemand (TA – German Work), with Czech Communist Artur London at its head. The TA produced a German-language bulletin, Soldat im Westen (‘Soldier in the West’),631 which called on soldiers to support the Resistance, emphasized the successes of the Red Army on the Eastern Front and reported protests by Wehrmacht troops. To get the newspaper into the hands of ordinary soldiers, Soldat im Westen was thrown over barrack walls, or left in cinemas, cafés and restaurants. As a result of this work, small groups of anti-fascist soldiers were set up in the Navy Ministry, in the St-Germain-en-Laye barracks to the west of Paris and in the Bordeaux submarine base.
As the fighting grew worse on the Eastern Front, some German soldiers serving in France but due to be redeployed to fight the Russians, preferred to desert rather than go to their death, and were welcomed into the maquis or the FTP. Others did their duty, but went east armed with passes from the TA, which gave them free passage through the Russian lines.632 Realizing the potential threat to the stability of their army of occupation, the Nazis were desperate to smash the TA, and in 1942 they arrested Artur London and deported him to Mauthausen concentration camp. His place was taken by Otto Niebergall, an exiled KPD member who in September 1943 set up the Comité Allemagne Libre pour l’Ouest (CALPO – Free Germany Committee for the West) in Paris. Many CALPO members went on to play a courageous role after parachuting into Germany with the American OSS. Most of them were killed while carrying out their mission of trying to undermine the Reich from within.633
The Communists were not the only ones to try and influence German soldiers. In 1943 Martin Monat, a thirty-year-old German Trotskyist living in Paris, produced a bulletin called Arbeiter und Soldat (‘Worker and Soldier’),634 and his comrades in Brest organized a group of German soldiers around Zeitung für Soldat und Arbeiter im Westen (‘Newspaper for the Soldier and Worker in the West’).635 This was laboriously typed on to stencils by the young André Calvès, who later recalled:
I haven’t forgotten the tiresome chore of typing a stencil in a language you don’t understand. Furthermore, I typed in an underground hiding place in the garden, near to the house. It wasn’t very comfortable, but it was pretty well fitted out . . . You got in by a small hole that led into the bottom of a pit. This entrance was hidden by a piece of wood covered with mud. If someone thought of snooping about and lifted the lid that covered the pit, all they would have seen would have been a few old tins. Of course, you had to be young to get into the hiding place. But it was good, and it was never discovered.636
Tragically, Calvès’ hiding place was safer than the meetings with the Germans, and in October 1943 twenty-seven soldiers and sailors were arrested. One of them had talked to the Gestapo and the group was smashed. Ten soldiers were shot, Robert Cruau, the twenty-two-year-old leader of the Brest group, was executed by the Gestapo and sixteen Trotskyists were deported, several of them never to return.637
In September 1943 the idea that sections of the German army could fracture along class or national lines turned from hope into reality. At the time, the 13th Waffen SS Battalion was billeted in Villefranche-de-Rouergue, forty kilometres south of Figeac. The battalion was composed of over 1,000 young Bosnian Muslim and Croatian conscripts, but was led by German SS officers. On the night of 17 September some of the conscripts mutinied and shot several of their officers, but instead of immediately joining the maquis (they were in contact with local FTP members) they first attempted to rally the rest of their comrades. With the help of the battalion imam, the remaining SS officers were able to turn the tables on the mutineers, who had neither the guns nor the numbers necessary for victory. There was a bloodbath that lasted several days, and around 150 mutineers were killed. Desperate to avoid the mutiny spreading to other SS battalions, the Nazis immediately transferred the remaining soldiers first to Germany and then back to Yugoslavia, where they were used against Tito’s partisans.638
Although none of the anti-fascist mutineers of Villefranche-de-Rouergue escaped to join the maquis, this did happen in the Cévennes. A number of anti-fascist Germans – some of them deserters, others exiled KPD members who had fought in the Spanish Civil War and had sought refuge in France after the triumph of Franco – had taken to the hills in November 1942, when the Nazis swept aside the demarcation line and invaded the southern zone. Towards the end of 1943 they joined the small maquis created by François Rouan (code-name ‘Montaigne’) in Jalcreste, a remote, heavily wooded area sixty kilometres north of Montpellier. Rouan, a twenty-nine-year-old civil engineer who had fought in the Spanish Civil War, had been expelled from the PCF in 1934 for being a Trotskyist. Despite this potential political flashpoint, one of the anti-fascist Germans – Otto Kühne, who had been a KPD Reichstag deputy before Hitler came to power – became Rouan’s second-in-command.
At the beginning of February 1944 the ‘Montaigne’ maquis was joined by six German Communists who had been staying in Séderon, a village about a hundred kilometres away. One of the six, Max Dankner, aged thirty-two at the time, later recalled a conversation on their train journey towards the maquis:
There were some railway workers in the carriage; they were eating and chatting, without seeming to pay any attention to us. They complained about the war, about Hitler . . . then they began to talk to us, at first prudently, then more and more openly. There was a good contact between us and when they heard that we were joining the maquis and that we had fought in Spain, they were very supportive. Having invited us to share their food, they then offered us some wine and we drank to the end of the war. When the train came to our stop, we said our goodbyes and parted good friends. They wished us success in our fight against fascism and promised to do their duty, too.639
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Some résistants refused to let hope die, even when those they loved most were in the hands of the Gestapo. In June 1943 Raymond Aubrac was arrested at Caluire, along with Jean Moulin. Only six weeks earlier, his wife, Lucie, had bluffed the Lyons prosecutor into freeing him following an earlier arrest, and shortly afterwards she had spirited a group of résistants from a guarded hospital by posing as a nurse.640 Raymond was again in severe danger, so once again Lucie used her audacity and guile. This time, she walked right into the lair of the beast, knocking on the door of Klaus Barbie’s office at Gestapo headquarters in Lyons. She asked for her husband under his cover name, ‘Ermelin’, describing him as her fiancé, and played innocent when Barbie told her that he was a ‘terrorist’. Explaining that she was pregnant (which was true) and that ‘Ermelin’ had promised to marry her, she asked Barbie to let the two get married, as a way of maintaining contact with Raymond. Heartless, suspicious, or both, Barbie refused point-blank and Lucie, her eyes streaming with real tears, staggered out of the building.
Seven weeks later Lucie’s luck changed. In mid-July Barbie left Lyons and did not return until December. As a result, Raymond Aubrac was kept in Lyons rather tha
n being transferred to Paris like the rest of the Caluire detainees. Lucie repeated her ‘abandoned fiancée’ routine, this time with a Wehrmacht colonel, whom she courted with gifts of Lyons silk. This ruse enabled Lucie to see ‘Ermelin’ on a number of occasions, and, by her mere presence, reassure him that the Resistance was trying to free him. After one of these meetings, on 21 October, a group of résistants led by Serge Ravanel, which included Lucie (by now six months pregnant), attacked the truck carrying Raymond and other résistants back to prison. In the ensuing firefight, Raymond and one of the attackers were wounded, but all fourteen prisoners were able to escape.641
On the night of 8 February 1944 the Aubracs, together with their first child, Jean-Pierre, were due to fly to London. They had been waiting for a plane for months – bad weather had repeatedly delayed them – and Lucie was by now only days away from giving birth. But when the twin-engined Hudson aircraft touched down near Bletterans in the Jura mountains, it got bogged down in the wet ground. The pilot, Flying Officer Affleck, realized that it would not be possible to take back all the passengers – who included a stranded British airman and Claude Serreulles, de Gaulle’s delegate to the CNR – and several sacks of vital messages. There were discussions as to who should fly back, or even if the plane should be destroyed, before a solution was found:
. . . everyone from the neighbouring village came out and got busy round the plane. But neither the horses nor the bulls that were brought on to the field by the locals could get the plane free. On the advice of the pilot and Paul Rivière [the ground-side head of the operation], we dug two trenches and inserted sloping planks which would enable the plane to get free. We were worried that it would get stuck again after a few metres. Day was going to break soon and Affleck, moved by the stoicism of the Aubracs – including their little boy, wrapped in his blankets – finally agreed to take them back if the plane was freed. We had been there since 23.45 . . . At 2.00 in the morning the engines roared again . . . the plane hopped over the hedges and flew off; everyone hugged and congratulated each other.642