In stark contrast to her former gusto, however, by 3 February 1941 she was beginning to feel very low:
The first day in my new job here was a nightmare, the second was like being in hell. I have never been so depressed in my life. I am alone in my new office. Monsieur Redon has moved Madmoiselle Laederich to another department, which means I am totally alone preparing passports. Luckily there are two or three really charming women I can call on if I need some help.
Not even her then-boyfriend Raymond could cheer her up:
Raymond wants to go to Tilleuls for the weekend, an auberge in Bourgurail. I am not sure how I could explain this to Maman, so I had better forget about going away with him.
Still, the weather had its upsides:
Monsieur Leclercq is not coming in to work today. There is too much snow and he cannot get beyond St Cloud. I am delighted as I will be able to leave my office and move around the building.
Andrée herself had not had much trouble getting to work that morning, despite the heavy snowfall during the night. In central Paris the roads and pavements had been cleared and the métro was running. Knowing that Monsieur Leclercq would not be at work, Andrée took the chance to return to the different departments she had worked in and talk to her former colleagues. On a sudden whim, she went into the ‘Foreigners Department’ and started to look through the files she had made on some of the Jews who had had to register their presence at Police Headquarters. She took out the files of three Jewish families, made a note of their names and addresses and then replaced the files in the drawers. Without quite knowing why, she had a feeling she might be able to help them one day.
One of her former colleagues, Clotilde, was sitting working at her desk but appeared to take no notice of what she was doing. Had Andrée been asked any questions, she might have backtracked quickly, but fortunately no one did. Andrée was well aware there was a difference between people who were actively prepared to work for the Resistance and those who were part of the passive resistance, who chose to ignore what was going on around them. Andrée decided to stop and chat to Clotilde and started talking about a Charles Trenet concert she had been to a couple of days previously at l’Olympia. Trenet had just released a new record and one of its songs, ‘La Mer’, based on a Debussy piece, was proving highly popular. Clotilde was also a fan and they had a friendly conversation about Trenet while Andrée wondered whether she could trust her.
Before leaving the office, Andrée took a calculated risk. She moved towards the ID card cupboard and took out a couple of blank cards. Calmly she said to Clotilde, ‘Au revoir, à bientôt.’ Then she walked out of the room and back to her office.
4 February 1941
I am so bored. I have some work to do but there is not very much. This morning I prepared a passport and a visa which was checked by Monsieur Leclercq who made sure I had not made any mistakes. He congratulated me and said I had done everything without a single mistake. But for how long are things going to be all right? He is always so very bad tempered.
6 February 1941
It is 11.00 and Monsieur Leclercq is not here. He has a meeting with the Germans. I have some time to myself. He won’t be back until lunchtime.
As Monsieur Leclercq was not around once again and Andrée had time on her hands, she thought she would return to the Foreigners’ Department to see if she could get some more cards.
Clotilde was at her desk again and, as Andrée walked in, she stood up and formally shook her by the hand. Clotilde then began to talk about a play she had seen the previous evening at the Théâtre de Montparnasse – a new production of Marie Stuart. While showing her interest in the play, Andrée moved towards the cupboard again. This time Clotilde didn’t ignore it. Instead, she warned Andrée to be careful, telling her that if the odd card disappeared no one would notice, but if she continued helping herself to them on such a regular basis someone might become suspicious and that she, Clotilde, might be in trouble. It was the first time any of her colleagues had openly acknowledged what was going on.
8 February 1941
I never have a minute to myself. Today I finished four passports and four visas. I have my own office, which is lucky, as no one quite knows what I get up to. Yesterday Jacqueline and I went to the officers’ mess for lunch. It was full of police officers but it was good value.
10 February 1941
There are times when I find working here so unbearable. I know what is going on around me and yet I just do not know what more I can do to fight it all. There are so many things worrying me and Alain keeps asking me to do more and more and I know I must do as much as I possibly can but I really need to unwind. I do prefer my new job and I do find the people I deal with are more sophisticated. Yesterday an unbelievably good-looking German officer came into my office. He did not take his eyes off me. He was with a French chap I did not know.
11 February 1941
Tomorrow I am in sole charge of the Passport Office. ‘Je fais la permanence.’ I wonder if it will all go smoothly. I am a little frightened.
Andrée was feeling rather daunted by this point – both her work and personal responsibilities seemed to be piling up and at times she doubted her ability to manage. But she did her best to soldier on.
The behaviour of the Wehrmacht in central Paris in the early days of the war was considered acceptable by many. Yes, they were the occupying forces but their behaviour towards the civilian population attracted little criticism and at Police Headquarters, where they were ultimately responsible for the policing of Paris, they moved among the staff with respect. As the Germans had become more confident in their handling of the occupation, the atmosphere had begun to feel a little more relaxed and some of the officers were in the habit of asking the French girls working there out on dates. Andrée had already received several invitations to dinner, but had always refused them. Her diaries show that she had a casual boyfriend at this point, Raymond (but she certainly didn’t talk to him about what she was doing with the Orion group), and in any case, for her, dating a German would have been out of the question. Yet she realised that if she got into trouble, a German friend could prove extremely useful.
14 February 1941
I have just had two dreadful days at work. My feelings towards the Germans are exactly as they were when I first started writing these diaries. Oh, I hope we can win the war and get rid of this despicable lot. I had better be careful what I say, I could be shot for writing what I think of them.
15 February 1941
Monsieur Mignonnet has a meeting planned with the Germans today. I will have some time to myself.
On 21 February 1941, Andrée wrote rather cryptically: ‘I got into trouble yesterday morning and again this morning. I am sick to death of it all.’ She doesn’t refer anywhere to what happened, though possibly the ongoing smuggling of ID cards was taking its toll on her performance at work. Not long after that, on 7 March 1941, she made a similar comment: ‘I feel ill every time I walk through the gates. This morning, as I arrived at work at 9.00 a.m., I got into trouble again.’
There were still occasions to be enjoyed, however, amidst her work troubles, as her diary entry from 6 March showed:
Alain and I went to the theatre last night with Steve’s brother and his wife. It was great fun; they are both so charming. They invited us to join them for dinner at Graff’s.
This was also the first entry in which Andrée mentioned a name that was to crop up in future diary references:
There is a Monsieur Tevel who is always hanging around at Police Headquarters for some reason or another. He told me that he works at the Belgian Embassy and so we started to talk about Belgium. About a week ago he invited me out to lunch to a restaurant called Le Cabaret. It is not often I go to a restaurant for lunch. We had a really good meal and in the evening I told Raymond all about it. He looked rather surprised and could not quite work out why I had gone out with him. The next day Tevel invited me to the Carnival and I was able to order a Camembert.
Over the following months Andrée described the various meals she had with the mysterious Thévelle (as she later spelt his name). She never talked about him in more detail, though in February of the following year she referred to having sent Yvonne to the Belgium embassy to pick up some lard. The Griotterays may well have been hungry at that time, but there must have been more to a trip to the embassy than collecting lard. Given the family’s Belgian intelligence connection, it seems likely that there was something more to this relationship than purely food.
17 March 1941
I am so very busy at the moment and I am a little frightened. I wish the war would come to an end and that the Germans would leave France. If only life could be what it was in 1939.
On 16 March, Andrée noted that she was now working with a new, senior colleague, a Madame Bacquias. On the 17th, she wrote:
Madame Bacquias went off for lunch at 11.15 and did not return until 2.15 at which time she was quite happy for us to take the rest of the afternoon off.
21 March 1941
Monsieur Langeron, who was arrested a month ago, has just been released from prison and has resigned. Monsieur Marchenaud is to take over as Head of Police. Renée is beside herself worrying about it all. She talks about nothing else.
On 22 March, Andrée managed to articulate in a little more detail her feelings of ill-ease:
I am frightened. I really do not know why. At work, apart from a few small things, I do not think I am in any danger. I do, however, argue a lot with Monsieur Leclercq.
No, it is a very strange feeling. I am frightened, but I am not quite sure why. It must be because Monsieur Langeron is no longer here. If I do something really stupid there will be no way out.
Several days later, on 25 March, she mentioned a meal that one of her clients had invited her to:
Last Thursday Madame Bacquias and I were invited out to dinner. I do like her; she is absolutely charming. Our host was one of our clients, who I had looked after really well. His name is Franck, spelt with a ‘c’, which means he is an Israelite, a Jew. He certainly needed looking after. He is very nice and invited us both to a restaurant called Magdalen.
Her rather cryptic reference to his needing to be looked after may suggest that she helped him out somehow or simply that she went out of her way to be kind to him. During the following months of April and May, Andrée noted (in her appointments book, not her journal) ten meetings with a Madame Franck in various bars and restaurants in central Paris. There is no other reference to this woman, nor is it mentioned whether she was a relative of Andrée’s client. Given Andrée’s clandestine smuggling of blank ID cards, the most likely explanation is that Madame Franck was a contact to whom she passed on the cards for distribution.
While Andrée was working, Alain had not been idle either. At the start of 1941 he prepared to leave Paris and move to Marseilles, in the Free Zone. Given his known association with the Étoile demonstration in November, it was agreed that he would be safer away from Paris and that he would be better placed in Marseilles to build up his intelligence network and recruit people to join his group. François Clerc, meanwhile, would run the group in Paris. Alain’s priority before leaving was to find couriers to carry the gathered intelligence between Brussels, Nice, Paris and Marseilles, and he was quick to realise that Andrée might be able to obtain ausweiss to facilitate this (ausweiss were permits issued by the police, awarding the bearer permission to travel around occupied France during wartime).
Following the fall of France and the formation in October 1940, by Maréchal Philippe Pétain, of the collaborating Vichy government, it had been agreed to divide the country into two zones, the Free Zone and the Occupied Zone. The Free Zone was administered by the Vichy/Pétain Government and allowed the French to move around the zone with a degree of freedom until early 1943, when the Germans invaded the Free Zone and division between the two was abolished. The Occupied Zone was administered by the Wehrmacht, with strict controls over the movement and lives of the population. Travelling between the two zones was hugely difficult and to do so an ausweiss was required.
Before he left for Marseilles, Alain asked Andrée to make friends with the police running the Ausweiss Department. Andrée responded that she would carry on stealing and making up false ID cards, but she was not prepared to fraternise with the Germans. Alain tried to persuade her by explaining that without access to the ausweiss, they wouldn’t be able to get their intelligence out of Paris. If Andrée was prepared to do it, she might be able to get a pass for herself. It was the start of a new career – as an intelligence courier.
10
Taking Risks
There were many reasons d’Astier had encouraged Alain to run his new Resistance group in Marseilles in the Free Zone, one of which was because he felt sure that there would be opportunities to transfer the material his agents were collecting to Algeria via the regular ships sailing from Marseilles to North Africa. They were already building up a dossier of information on the movement of German airforce and army troops, the location of German arms production and the presence of the Gestapo around France. There would be more to come as Alain grew his network.
Alain left Paris on a very cold January morning in 1941. He was travelling without an ausweiss and so was even more concerned than usual about the ad hoc controls by the Wehrmacht on the roads, in the towns and villages and at bus and train stations. He had to find a way of crossing the demarcation line into the Free Zone without being stopped or questioned. He decided to cross the border in the Bigorre area of south-west France, in the Pyrenees, and where he knew he would find a local who would help him reach the Free Zone.
He got off the train one station early, thinking that as he was still some distance from the demarcation line, there would be fewer police controls. He slipped into the crowds, trying to mingle unobtrusively. He was heading to a safe house where the owners had connections to help him cross.
In early 1941, the borders between the Occupied and Free Zones were carefully controlled. Crossing a demarcation line from one zone to the other was very difficult and there could be serious consequences if one was caught without an ausweiss, though people did still risk it and occasionally managed to get through. As the war progressed and especially after the German occupation of the Free Zone and the creation of the milice française (Vichy’s infamous paramilitary force), it became ever more dangerous.
Alain’s ability to find friends wherever he went did not let him down. He reached the auberge he was looking for and the owner found someone who would smuggle him over the demarcation line. They refused payment for their help, insisting that he was ‘too sweet’ and would need the money later. A week after leaving Paris, Alain arrived safely in Marseilles, impatient to start building up his group. Thanks once again to assistance from his brother-in-law, he managed to get a job at the Ministry of Meat Distribution. He knew virtually no one in the area, but one of his first tasks was to find a way to relay his group’s gathered intelligence from France to North Africa.
Life in the Free Zone was more relaxed than in the Occupied Zone; few checks were made on people’s movements and the police force were primarily concerned with maintaining public order. Alain began to frequent the bars of Marseilles, seeking out like-minded young men. People were on the whole much more relaxed about talking to strangers than they would have been in Paris. Along the way he managed to acquire a press card for a southern regional newspaper called Le Phare, which gave him entry to a large number of civic events taking place in the city.
Drinking late one night among a group of friends in La Cintra, a popular Marseilles bar, Alain fell into conversation with a portly, dark-haired, suntanned Corsican named Jean-Baptiste Biaggi. Born into an old Corsican family and graduating from officer training in Saumur in 1938, Biaggi (as he was affectionately known among his friends) had had to give up law school to enlist in 1939. One of Alain’s most daring and intelligent recruits, they would remain close friends until the end of Alain�
��s life.
Biaggi thought through everything he worked on in great detail. Despite his huge energy, he was quiet, had a calming personality and spoke in a very clear voice. During the four years of occupation he never stopped telling his Resistance colleagues about how careful and cautious they needed to be about everything and anything going on around them. He had been shot both in the stomach and in the back in 1939 and was given up for dead on the battlefield when an army doctor friend recognised him lying among a group of wounded soldiers. ‘This one we have to sort out,’ his friend was quoted as saying. Somewhat prematurely, Biaggi was awarded the Légion d’honneur ‘posthumously’, having been understood to have died in combat. As Yves de Kermoal wrote to me in 2012: ‘Because he was expected to die from his wounds, he was given the Légion d’honneur, but once he recovered, the authorities asked him to return it to them!’
After receiving medical care from the French army medical services, Biaggi was transferred to a German military hospital. The Wehrmacht medical corps nursed him back to health before releasing him, as his German doctors believed the wounds inflicted on him were so great that he would be unable to do anything further to help the French war effort. He left hospital with two walking sticks and moved to Clermont-Ferrand in central France where, for a whole year, doctors worked to rebuild his shattered body.
As their friendship developed, Biaggi invited Alain to Vichy, promising to introduce him to some of his friends working at the heart of the Vichy government. Alain’s government job meant he could now get the ausweiss required to move freely around the country and he jumped at the chance, playing up his relaxed ‘Grand Bourgeois’ manner to endear himself to Vichy society. The approach bore fruit – both young men managed to recruit a number of people on the inside who were willing to keep them informed on the inner workings and personalities of the Vichy government; material that Alain could then feed back to d’Astier.
Andrée's War Page 9