by Tania Szabô
She had fought first for her family then her hometown of Morlaix, Brittany and finally for France in the Résistance as a ‘caporal des FFI du Finistère’ – a corporal in the FFI in Finistère, the region on the very tip of Brittany. She was of tenacious and fiercely independent Breton stock. It may have taken her many months to garner the courage to keep on living. It was very painful for her but she wrote so she could keep the promise she had made in hell.
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When Violette recognised Harry Peulevé, down in the yard below, she could see that he was limping badly and his face was ashen. Lines of pain streaked his face and his eyes were sunken into deep grey hollows.
In Fresnes, some of the women – Violette among them – did much to enliven things, constantly planning escapes and finding ways of communicating from cell to cell and across the distances, even with the men. Companionship came from the raised voices of women singing the songs of France, Spain, Poland, England, and other countries. It was moving and joyful and brought tears of consolation to many eyes. Women shouted out, ‘Vive la France!’ ‘Courage ma fille!’ ‘Bas les Boches!’ Veritable conversations took place through the walls, especially cursing Laval and Pétain and hailing de Gaulle. Violette was soon part of this. She joined in the old French standards and sang some of the English ones like ‘Run Rabbit Run’, with the ‘Rabbit’ often replaced with ‘Hitler’. It was not many months later that Pétain and Laval were imprisoned in this same building. How those women would have rejoiced!
Food came on trolleys trundling exasperatingly slowly along the corridors. They each received 100 grams of bread a day – a chunk of about two inches. Very occasionally, they got a small piece of mouldy cheese, or a thin slice of margarine, perhaps two ounces, would come through the hatch. On rare occasions they had a sausage of meat and bread, apparently salvaged from bombsites as they contained dust and bits of brick or concrete.
Nothing more than slops accompanied the bread. It was called ‘cabbage soup’ and contained a few beans. It was poured through the peephole from into the rusty bowl placed by the prisoner on the inside ledge. This bowl would have held perhaps as much as a large mug would today. Everyone was very, very hungry.
Violette was no longer in isolation. Within a few days of incarceration the elderly artist joined her, as the prison became ever more crowded, then Marie Lecomte. Violette kept doing her exercises to keep fit, always hoping for a chance to escape. She did not understand why she had been put in Fresnes prison. Why had she not been deported or executed? On the third day, she understood.
She was taken into the forecourt, put into a prison van and realised she was going back to Avenue Foch. The van was windowless and hot, with only a small grille on the door to see through. She caught fleeting glimpses of Parisians seated around tables on sunny café terraces enjoying coffee. The van smoothly pulled up at the gates of 84 Avenue Foch. The gates swung open and armed guards waved them through. At the dark gaping hole of the entrance, Violette got out and was led back into this forbidding building, arms manacled behind her back, flanked by guards.
Unlike the grey, awful prison of Limoges, this house had been a palatial and beautiful private residence. Strange, Violette thought, how the Gestapo turned things of light and laughter into things as sombre and grim as this. Her heart beat quicker from the trickle of fear of the unknown hours ahead.
SS-Sturmbannführer Kieffer was the commander of 84 Avenue Foch. He sent a young, good-looking and very smartly dressed man as inquisitor – Herr Vogt. After selection for this type of work, his training had been rigorous. He was, supposedly, an interpreter. Vogt spoke French, German and Italian with a smattering of English. Polite and calm and with great assurance, he began to question her. He truly did offer her tea and ‘English’ cake, as he did to each of his British victims. Violette laughed bitterly in amazement and sardonically accepted.
After a long day spent patiently questioning Violette, Vogt, Kieffer and August Sherer, a civil auxiliary to the SS and a schoolmaster by profession, were tired. They found the girl too stubborn. Hatred blazed from her eyes, sarcasm dripped from her lips. She needed a lesson. She would get one on the morrow, they resolved. For now she could damn well go back to Fresnes and in the morning before coming back she would hear the firing squad outside her window.
The following day, his expression bleak and determined, Sherer looked across the desk and noticed her sullen expression. Maybe at last she was cracking. Another man was standing in the corner of the large ornate office, ready to provide a little extra persuasion. He had put on his desk an array of devices, his preferred instruments to help encourage an informative chat with his prisoners. This one proved decidedly recalcitrant with her ‘I won’t!’‘I won’t!’ each time he said, ‘You’ll talk to me now, won’t you? Your silence isn’t doing you or anyone else any good, you know,’ with Vogt interpreting and therefore doing much of the interrogating.
After some hours, face contorted from pain, eyes glazed, voice no more than a murmur, her frequent childhood defiance of her father sustained her. ‘I won’t!’ she whispered. Violette eventually staggered from the room, refusing any help, brushing aside an extended hand. How dare they, after what they had done!
Back in Fresnes, she lay in great agony on the dirty mattress. She forced herself to drink her broth with an occasional bite of bread. ‘I must. I must sustain my strength.’ She ate every morsel, drank every drop, lying there thinking, singing songs until she felt a little better. One or two days later, she started her exercises, three times a day. She even persuaded her cellmates to join in. The elderly artist was very solicitous but Violette was careful in what she said, just in case. But with Marie Lecomte there was an instant rapport, recognising in one another the same stout fighting spirit and the same scars from the treatment that had been meted out.
She was elated she had given the bastards not a word to help them. Oh, yes, Violette had continued to tell them stories, wilder as the pain got more intense. Often she thought of Étienne, dying for freedom, and knew she had to endure as much as he. She fought for her daughter, for her father who had done his best in the Great War, her mother, her brothers and Tante Marguerite; and her King and Queen and their children.
Yes, Violette was glad she had given nothing away, except fantasies. It was all so worthwhile. She knew that victory was theirs, maybe not today or tomorrow – but soon enough. She hoped she would be there to enjoy the celebrations and parties, and then to watch her daughter grow and to take part in normal everyday life. Good thoughts, they were. Good dreams, as she drifted in a peaceful sleep far away from the pain that had racked her body.
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Philippe and the remaining team could not get the loss of Violette out of their minds. It added anger and strengthened their resolve to move the Maquis to ever more actions against the enemy.
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* * *
158 Déricourt told Jean Overton Fuller in interview for her book Double Agent that SOE top brass were fully aware the organisation had been penetrated by the Gestapo and that men and women were deliberately sacrificed in order to distract attention from other activities.
159 75386 was the number Marie Lecomte bore from the time it was tattooed on her arm in Ravensbrück until she died. The high number is a silent testimony of the number women who had gone before her. I wonder what Violette’s was and which arm?
160 Violette stayed at a farm with Philippe on the first mission, not the second, but this could be to protect the Ribiéras family in the grocery shop at Sussac. Violette needed to talk but she could still talk with inaccuracies where necessary.
161 Unsurprisingly, Madame Lecomte has not quite remembered what happened. Or, perhaps Violette deliberately misled her, planning what she would say if interrogated further. Or maybe there was truth in the SS-Das Reich assertions that the man was arrested as well.
162 This was Harry Peulevé.
Part VII
35
Fresnes Prison to Saarbrücken<
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Wednesday 13 August 1944, Charlie Bushell’s birthday
‘A word to young historians – when we read your studies about our underground world, they appear a bit cold. Without wishing to be pretentious, you should not be afraid of dipping your pens in blood: behind each set of initials you describe with such academic precision, there are comrades who died.’
Pascal Copeau
By early August 1944, the Résistance throughout France was creating ever more havoc to German plans and movements, with weaponry and agent assistance from the American OSS and the British SOE; General Patton, commanding the Third United States Army, and General Leclerc leading the Free French forces were almost upon the capital, where the Germans were panicking more as each day passed. By 19 August, Patton had reached the Seine.
The Germans were having great difficulty acquiring sufficient fuel as the battle for Normandy ended and the US 21st Army Group advanced. In September, Limoges, Paris, Brussels and Antwerp were liberated. Good Allied planning had been an absolute catastrophe for the German fuel supplies.
Hitler and his High Command could not accept that defeat was rushing towards them. They continued their frenzied fight. The Nazi High Command ordered that all foreign and some French agents should be moved out of Paris and into Germany so that they would not ‘become available’ to the Allies. They could be used as slave labour if they were sufficiently alive to be active. Those Nazis responsible for ‘crimes against humanity’ would be in fear of their own lives now. These Nazis and their creatures knew that the foreign agents and Résistants who had seen and been subjected to inhumane horrors would readily give evidence against them. It was time for their potential accusers to disappear one way or another.
The Résistance was now focused on blowing up railway lines. Trains to and from Germany were held up, even blown up, all over France. German troops were killed or wounded and supplies destroyed. The roads remained the least difficult means of transport for the Germans, but they too were dangerous, with many ambushes set up.
Over Le Clos, where Violette and the team had landed, 864 containers packed with hand grenades, machine guns, rifles and revolvers, ammunition, explosives, other stores and money filled the summer air on 25 June, dropping by parachute from a force of eighty-six US B-17 and B-24 Flying Fortresses. On this same day, Violette was surviving the SD cells of Avenue Foch under intense interrogation, just fourteen days after her gunfight and capture. The next day, 26 June, would be her twenty-third birthday.
At Le Clos, 300 Maquis and thirty trucks were required to haul all the equipment off to designated areas, with every road used blocked and guarded by Maquis. Wave after wave of parachutes descended onto the high plateau with the countryside alive with the sound of cheers and song from the country people in the area. Three hundred Maquis became 3,000 overnight.
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On 19 June, Denise Bloch, Benoist’s163 wireless operator, was arrested. She was a Frenchwoman and, like Jacques Poirier and other French agents trained by SOE, had been sent into France by SOE as an English agent, carrying a uniform so that in the event of her capture she would come under the international laws covering prisoners of war.
According to a report written by Vera Atkins when she was seconded on 13 March 1946 to the Judge Advocate General’s Branch Headquarters BAOR (the British Army of the Rhine), Denise was seen not only at 84 Avenue Foch, the SD headquarters, but also at another interrogation centre at 3 Place des Etats-Unis in Paris, where a number of the women were taken, perhaps including Violette. Denise Bloch also spent time in Fresnes, as did Christiane Wimille. When Christiane was about to be deported to Germany, she had the great good fortune at Gare de l’Est to see one of her cousins driving a Red Cross van. She managed to slip over there unseen by her captors, put on a white coat and served sandwiches. In this way, she evaded recapture. It is quite possible Christiane, Denise Bloch and Violette made contact in Fresnes prison, as Morse code and singing in English and French were common. Prisoners could also get messages to each other just by shouting. Lilian Rolfe, who had been George Wilkinson’s wireless operator for the Historian circuit, was caught in July and also ended up at Fresnes Prison, as did Yvonne Basedon, who early in the year had been wireless operator to Bondages de St Geniès, a determined and very patriotic French nobleman.
Vera Atkins clearly and publicly stated that there had been a betrayal, although this was quickly quashed. However, it seems that from 1 January 1946, SOE had been terminated, with records and people certainly expunged with great rapidity. There was also a now-infamous fire that destroyed so many records. It appears that it is only by delving deeply into German, French or American archives that one might find any kind of answer to the betrayal question. Nevertheless, while the other secret services continued quietly in the background of British post-war international activities, SOE was a constantly newsworthy subject, in the face of perhaps less-than-vigorous remonstrations from Buckmaster, Vera Atkins and others.
It was clearly strongly felt that no good would come in seeking and punishing the traitors. Europe and the United Kingdom were in great turmoil, so these matters were not investigated with all due vigour, if at all, and, to all intents and purposes, remain unresolved. Maybe there is merit in the argument that there is no point pursuing this, but for the survivors and those left behind it is extremely unsatisfactory. It also creates fertile ground for any kind of conspiracy theory and unfair aspersions to be cast on the wrong people. In addition, it should be remembered that betrayal after torture is one thing, and can be absolved: everyone has a breaking point. Violette withstood all that was meted out to her, but not everyone could.
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Most sources have it that Violette was moved on 8 August. Marie Lecomte, though, is sure that 13 August is the date of Violette’s departure from Fresnes prison. It was two days before her own birthday, on Assumption Day, 15 August. The difference is easy to understand as incarceration confuses the comprehension of the passage of time.
A number of records, including notes from Madame Rossier,164 state the date was 8 August. The following extract is from a document she wrote, which is in my archives; I first received it from the SOE advisor at the Foreign and Commonwealth Office, Sir Duncan Stuart.
At least four other women were moved from Fresnes on 8 August 1944, including Diane Rowden, all marked for execution, not at Ravensbrück, but at Natzweiler concentration camp where two men, Dr Guérisse, a French Résister, and Brian Stonehouse, both witnessed the arrival of the three young women and, later, their execution. These women did not include Diane Rowden who was killed later at Natzweiler.
Madame Rossier wrote:
… on 8 August 1944, seven girls left Fresnes chained together. They passed through Neurenn [sic]165 near Saarbrücken, and arrived at Ravensbrück on 25 August 1944. One of the three English girls was described as Corinne or Violette, small, dark, large eyes, said to have been arrested in a Maquis at Limoges.
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So, some eight and a half weeks after arriving in Paris, incarcerated in Avenue Foch and Fresnes, Violette, along with Denise Bloch and Lilian Rolphe, was brought down from the cells. They were each told their suitcases or bundles with their small collection of personal possessions (but no papers, no jewellery, watches and no money) were being loaded into one of the vehicles from a trolley just outside the prison doors while the prisoners were led into the prison’s great hall.
Cuffed at the ankles, Violette was shackled to Denise by a chain running from her ankle to Denise’s. All the women were joined in pairs in this way. A group of men were similarly chained. The prisoners were crowded into the front hall and then out into the waiting covered lorries for the journey to Gare de l’Est.
Violette and Harry Peulevé saw one another across the hall as they were all pushed into the yard to waiting vehicles. They had spent two months in different sections of Fresnes. This was their third sighting of each other: there had been their first recognition from the cell, followed by another wher
e shouts were exchanged and heard. They could see one another clearly now, and each was surprised by the sorry state of the other. They had both suffered extensively from battle injury, torture and incarceration. Wing Commander Yeo-Thomas was also among the male prisoners.
As the prisoners were being assembled, every so often a voice would ring out in patriotic verse momentarily picked up by other male and female voices. Angry and nervous, the German guards indiscriminately shot a few prisoners but the spirit of hope and resistance could not be so easily exterminated.
As the vehicles were about to leave, every prisoner was handed two days’ rations from the Red Cross. When they reached the railway station they were given their belongings. Violette received her bundle – her suitcase had been destroyed while the Gestapo were trying to find secret compartments with incriminating evidence. She had her silk flower dress, white blouse and blue linen suit plus one pair of wedge shoes and a little underwear.
They were entrained into two third-class carriages by mid-morning. The prisoners had sufficient water for about one day. The train was not long but was heavily guarded, including an anti-aircraft gun mounted on the roof. Three hundred or so wounded German soldiers were in the other carriages. The train did not leave until late afternoon, by which time they were very hot and weary sitting in the fug of the over-crowded carriage. Optimism about the course of the war was very high and this helped them all through those hours of waiting.