The suitcases on their way to Lyon, Marseilles, Toulouse and Bordeaux were already loaded with an explosive which, as soon as it was discovered, would lead our friends straight to the firing squad. It was the simplest matter to add a few arms to the papers the next time around. The matter was hardly discussed at the Executive Committee. As for Simone and Catherine, they closed their eyes to it.
Toward the end of March there was an accident. One of the Paris shops where DF was being printed must have been under suspicion by the Gestapo. For three days, every time one of our comrades came out, he was followed. Of course there were techniques for shaking off such spies, and the boys in the print shops knew every trick of the game: how to enter a familiar bakery by the street door, leaving it by the service entrance on the next street; how to climb aboard a subway train and then, at the first station, just when the automatic doors were closing, hurl oneself out onto the empty platform, take one’s shoes in one’s hand and run away silently through the night. But this time every device had been blocked, because they followed us right from the door of the print shop, and that called for a move out in less than twelve hours.
At the very least this emergency involved three steps: finding a new shop, finding a vehicle to carry the machines away, and managing it without being seen. The last point was simpler than you might think. Since the informers were ambushed on the job and were limited in number, it was enough to find out that there were five of them, and then choose five of our comrades who would arrange to be followed at a given hour in five different directions without being caught. We had five men at the print shop, and they would do the job themselves since the informers were accustomed to them.
As soon as the spies had scattered on the false trails, five other comrades would roll the press and all the other equipment onto open lorries covered with tarpaulins which had conspicuous signs glued to them: Fragile. Optical instruments. National Meteorological Observatory. As for the shop, we were already holding one in reserve against bad times.
The operation succeeded, and immediately became legend in our large family. The moral Philippe drew from it was this: “Children, if we are still around to tell the tale, the day will come when we shall say that the Resistance was the easiest time in our lives. Just think of it! Not a single moral problem to cope with, only material ones!”
WE NO LONGER HAD ONE POLICE to cope with, but two. For some months now a corps of French spies and torturers had been working along with the Gestapo and its agents. Organized at Vichy, if not at the explicit order of the government, at least in the muddy waters around it, this Political Brigade had the task of covering the whole of France with its net, and killing the Resistance. The people in it were French Nazis, fanatics of the most aggressive kind, or more often just bums disguised as gentlemen, on the track of German bribes, altogether a treacherous and sadistic lot.
These bands were more dangerous to us than all the SS put together. We knew their tactics were to infiltrate the Resistance movements. My instinct for traitors was to be put to even greater tests. Still, in the Executive Committee of DF, we were not exactly elated. We knew our intuition was not infallible. “It is inevitable that we make mistakes,” Philippe said, “each of us at least once. We must expect trouble.”
In the first days of April, a scrawled message came to us, we could recognize Robert’s signature: “Caught at the Gare du Nord with three birds. Pray for me,” ran the message …“Three birds.” It was all too clear — three airmen. We never expected to see Robert again in this world. A great man.… How had he managed to write the note and get it through to us? That was something else we should never know.
Less than a week later, four members of the Lyon group disappeared. They had gone together to a meeting place in the forest. They had not come back. In May the family of one of them had a telephone call from the Brigade Politique, telling them that their son, brother and husband, refusing to confess his crimes, had been killed.
As the size of DF grew from one day to the next, the risks of being caught mounted at the same pace. We used to call it a biological phenomenon. No way of escaping it, it was the law for us and all organizations like ours.
On April 15 we were delegated by the Executive Committee to set up communications with the Movement called “Résistance” — which had lost its head as you may remember in August 1941, but had later come to life again — and with the Movement “Combat.” The government of Free France, established by now in Algiers, was asking the Resistance organizations to coordinate their activities as much as they could.
No doubt the order was justified, but the job to be done was almost superhuman. Each movement in itself was a pyramid in precarious balance. If you pulled out one stone, the whole structure threatened to fall in ruins.
Combat, started in the Southern Zone, published a newspaper, like DF. So did Résistance in the Northern Zone, and also Franc Tireur. Besides the underground press, there were activist groups of the Secret Army, usually under the command of professional officers, which were building stores of arms and ammunition, and laying the cornerstone of the first Maquis. The networks of information and repatriation of flyers were in between the two.
We were all working side by side, sometimes on the same sidewalk in Paris, without knowing it. The only channel to our neighbors in the Resistance was the government of Free France. Our meetings with the people from Combat or the Secret Army would be arranged from London or Algiers, and from there passed on to us in code or over the radio.
In this way I came to have several meetings with the editor-in-chief of the newspaper Résistance. I was struck by the identity of their hopes and ours, and by the similarity of our difficulties. It strengthened our morale immensely to learn that we were not alone. At about the same time I was in touch with the delegates of Combat. They did not tell me that a young man named Albert Camus was working with them.
The Communist Party was a thorn in the flesh of the Resistance. We had all kinds of proof that the Communists were hard at work. Several hundred thousand copies of L’Humanité were being distributed underground. The Communists were way ahead of us in techniques of sabotage and terrorism. Only in Résistance, Combat and DF there were no Communists. The origin of all these movements was humanist, even Christian.
Furthermore, if the French Communists were resisting, it was not in defense of their country. They had proved the point by not opposing Nazism between the Russo-German Pact of August 1939 and the invasion of the U.S.S.R. by Hitler’s armies in June 1941. For them the fight was strictly ideological and partisan. Should we try working with them? A grave question, raised in the Executive Committee, where it was decided to make contact as soon as possible, despite all the evidence. We were in touch in June, but our contacts were cool. It was clear that the Communists looked upon us as outsiders.
Each day now, twenty times a day, we had to face the likelihood of imminent arrest. Georges and I had built the entire system of our work in the expectation of this event. If one of us should be captured, the other must continue, taking all the reins into his hands within a few days. In this way we were setting the example for the whole Movement. From now on, all of us would be operating in units of two, with the partners interchangeable.
A hundred thousand copies of the May 15 issue had been printed. Mad as it might be, we were determined to distribute it. The number of workers in the provinces had grown so fast that we had had to give carte blanche to the regional heads. The complexity of local operations was such that something like the administration of a flourishing factory would have been needed to direct them from Paris. Yet the rule about committing nothing to paper was more rigorously observed than ever.
Particularly in the Nord, DF was on the crest of the wave, but our agents there were swamped. What we needed was a chief on the ground, and the kind of dependable friends who had covered a good piece of the road with us were all engaged elsewhere. So this time we had to make an exception. We had to confide the work to a new man, one we
hardly knew. He had come to see us only recently. He was called Elio.
He was twenty-five, a medical student in Paris, with black hair and a handshake that was too heavy. He had been sent to Georges by a group leader in the College of Medicine, in itself the best recommendation. Only at the start he had made one mistake. He had appeared on his own at my apartment without being summoned.
At once all my senses were on the alert. Then something unusual took place. This man threw my mechanism out of gear; my inner needle kept oscillating, not settling either on the “yes” or the “no.” Elio spoke in a low voice, too low. His voice was like his handshake. It lacked clarity and straightforwardness.
I had a long argument with Georges, who had been present at the interview. Did we have the right to trust this man? Georges hesitated, as I did too for the first time. Something like a black bar had slipped between Elio and me. I could see it distinctly, but I didn’t know how to account for it.
Elio had been in the Resistance for a year. He was well informed and definite. He had undeniable influence over his fellow students in medicine. Besides, as a native of the Nord, he knew the industrial and mining country as though it were his own village. He volunteered to give up his studies on the spot and go to Lille the next day. He was really the perfect answer to our problem in that quarter. He seemed to radiate courage and wisdom from head to foot.
Still, because of our doubts, we couldn’t make the decision on our own. Philippe himself and François, as he was passing through Paris, would have to investigate Elio in their turn. The investigation over, Philippe grumbled that we had no right to be too cautious, and François thought we should give it a try. But I could see that none of the four of us felt the familiar and heartening satisfaction of finding the right man.
Elio took off for Lille and did extraordinary work there. Within a fortnight on the ground he had mastered the network. His reports were more detailed than all the others, adroit and discreet at the same time. I tried to convince myself that in future it would be better to beware of these manifestations of vision without eyes. There too, optical illusions were to be feared.
To transport the quantity of paper Elio was demanding for Saint-Quentin, Valenciennes and Lille, we had found the ideal carrier in Daniel, a blind man who had only recently lost his sight in the explosion of a grenade in 1940, and, like me, was entirely without vision. He was twenty-three years old, very strong and determined — a real bulldozer.
In other ways he was not at all like me, not having a head overburdened with thoughts. A coach in a lycée at the time of the accident, he was the outdoor type. Thanks to him I made the discovery that all kinds of people can be blind. He was not one to make guesses, and did not seem to be aware of human beings. But he had physical powers which filled the void magnificently. He went all over Paris by himself, regardless of conditions, traveled alone on the trains, made his way through police blockades with his suitcase in his hand, groping awkwardly with the end of his white cane. He was a real hero without knowing it.
In May, June and July things happened so fast that I can’t describe them, only list them. Denis, our devout and easily blushing friend, had planned and directed a new method for circulating the paper. Now it was a question of making it a public instead of a private affair. Slipping copies of the paper under doors, passing them hand-to-hand to people one could trust was not enough. It was necessary to work in the light of day.
In Paris and around it, Denis organized teams for distribution in the open. He placed picked squads of men and women on the squares in front of the big churches in Paris, after High Mass on Sundays. The member of the squad forced himself on the faithful, waved front-page headlines before their eyes, slipped the papers into their pockets or their handbags. While this was going on, a cover guard watched all the approaches to the church. Denis got bolder and bolder. Our slim romantic friend was turning into a professional soldier, the kind of knight the Middle Ages must have produced in the age of chivalry.
Raids on the factories at Renault and Gnome-et-Rhône followed the raids at the churches. Danger was growing by leaps and bounds. But it was as if Denis had taken the cross. No one could stop him. He had organized the first workers’ cells of DF, among the mechanics at Renault and the men working on the Métro.
And then came July 14. This date may be nothing more than a symbol, but it is the symbol of liberty, and in days of misery symbols are the bread of life. DF was determined to have its July 14, the first anniversary of the underground press.
The special issue of the paper, and the one just preceding it, had reached the two-hundred-and-fifty-thousand mark. We had kept the promise made in February, 250 percent of it. François came back from Nantes for the occasion, Frédéric from Belfort, and Elio from Lille. Even Georges left me for forty-eight hours. The shop where type was set and all the print shops had beaten their own records. The entire Executive Committee had been writing for the paper, and had set the wheels of the operation turning with its own hands. Finally, just to show that life never ceases, the night before the fourteenth Hélène had given Philippe a son.
Operation Denis, Operation July 14, would continue from morning until night on the Paris Métro. It all came true. Forty squads of ten members each passed out seventy thousand copies of the paper between eight in the morning and five o’clock in the afternoon on the subway cars, publicly, calmly, from one passenger to the next, and smiling as though it were the most natural thing in the world. Soldiers and officers of the German army, not to mention spies in plain clothes who could not be identified, turned astonished eyes on the object that had just been handed to them.
Reports crowded in that night at the Executive Committee: not one paper left in a corner in a hurry, not one squad broken up, not a single arrest. It was a perfect performance. We had given public opinion the shock it needed so badly — the proof that the Resistance was there and could strike.
All the same, the thing that made Denis proudest was that no one had used his tear gas pens. Recently we had had to arm our squads, and London had dropped in whole cases of these pens. There was nothing about the little objects to distinguish them from the usual instrument by the same name, nothing but a safety catch which, when pressed, released enough tear gas to put an enemy out of operation for three or four minutes. Though he knew it was impossible, Denis’s great dream had always been to make war without killing or wounding.
STILL, ALL THIS TIME I was a student, and perhaps you should be reminded of it. Since the passion for living cannot be divided, I devoted the same ardor to my studies as I did to the distribution of Défense de la France. I shifted from one kind of activity to another ten times a day, without any more circumstance than there is in flicking a switch. In the end I had acquired such flexibility in changing over that I could even dispense with the switch. The two parts of my brain were working at the same time. One recorded the latest information, supplied by François on his return from Brittany, about the crews for distribution and intelligence at Rennes, Saint Brieuc, Brest, Quimper, Lorient and Nantes. In the forest of local names and happenings it tried to uncover some unsuspected relationship which could lead to an alliance, to some consistency in the work. This part of my brain was on the scent of friend and enemy or planning a campaign. Meantime, the other part reviewed the financial disasters brought on by nine successive ministers of Louis XVI in the fifteen years before July 14, 1789 — disasters they pronounced essential to success in the competition for entrance into the Ecole Normale Supérieure.
These parallel mental processes, so hard to maintain when one is older, I could manage because I was eighteen years old. Memory was a factor — my mind then was like a photographic plate — but so was intensity. I had two equal passions at the time: to suppress Nazism and to be admitted to the Normale Supérieure.
In my studies, as well as in the Resistance, I was living under a threat. The year before — it was in July 1942 — the Vichy government had issued a decree. It was a strange document, lik
e some others which this diseased age unfortunately produced. It listed the physical qualifications required of candidates for public employment in the magistracy, in diplomacy, in government finance and last of all in teaching.
Thus far, one must admit, the state had relied on only one criterion for the recruitment of its civil servants — common sense. The government was satisfied not to appoint a deaf teacher of music, or a blind teacher of drawing. But aside from these clear cases, everyone suited to a profession by ability or character could enter it without difficulty.
In this way, before the war, some twenty blind people had taught in the French lycées and universities. At Louis-le-Grand there was Fournery, an English teacher who was more respected and beloved by his students than most of his colleagues — everyone was agreed on that. Or on a still higher level, there was Pierre Villey, undisputed master among the blind in the generation before mine, Pierre Villey who was appointed professor of French literature at the University of Caen, and who had published authoritative scholarly works on Montaigne. He was killed in 1935, at fifty-four, in a railway accident. But all that was in time past — in the age of reason.
Stunned by the Vichy decree, I had consulted my teachers and some of the officials in the Ministry of Public Instruction. I was one of the first to be affected. Normale Supérieure was a state school, putting students on their way to a state competition, the Agrégation, which was designed to recruit candidates for posts in the universities. Under the new law the Agrégation was closed to me. What is more, I would not have the right to take the examinations for admission to the Normale Supérieure.
If I have not said that blindness was treated by the new decree as one of the conditions most likely to exclude an applicant from public employment, that is because blindness was only one of the clauses in a long list. My history teacher, an old hand at interpreting official texts, explained this one to me: we were dealing with a racist document, fascist to the core.
And There Was Light Page 19