The General reminded François and Andrée of their agreement. No one was ever to mention his identity to anyone. ‘I kept my part of the bargain. I hope you will always keep yours.’18 They assured him that this would be the case and the General departed. François left immediately; it was too risky for them all to be seen together.
Still in shock, Martial followed Andrée into the flat. She led him into the bedroom and explained they had little time to waste. She ran a bath, told him to shave, wash and then put on Alain’s clothes. They were to leave shortly for her parents’ flat, where Martial could stay for a little while.
Within the hour, they left the flat. Martial was able to walk to the métro and in total silence the two friends made their way to the Griotterays’ residence. As they walked through the front door, Yvonne came out into the hall; she had been waiting for her daughter to return. As she saw Martial, she gasped, before hushing herself from asking any questions. Instead, she took him into the kitchen, sat him down and prepared an omelette, assuring him that he would be safe with them and could stay as long as he wanted.*
It was an unlikely happy ending, but one that – as with many episodes in François de Rochefort’s complicated life – raised questions that remain unanswered. How did he know the General? Why did this German officer decide to help a Frenchman at great personal risk – and why did he negotiate payment, then refuse it? None of Martial’s colleague’s ever knew exactly what had happened, as François refused to discuss it. Alain simply described it as ‘a miraculous escape organised by de Rochefort and Andrée with the help of a German officer.19 In 2004, Biaggi asked me if I could shed any light on exactly how François had managed to pull off this extraordinary escape. Andrée knew her part of the story but could offer no further explanation in later years; at the time she simply accepted it at face value, feeling it could only be dangerous to think too much about it. Besides, there was no time to waste.
* In late July 1944 it was becoming clear that the Nazis were losing the war; with the American forces almost in Paris, the Gestapo decided that all remaining political prisoners in Parisian gaols would be deported to concentration camps in Germany to prevent them falling into Allied hands. The prisoners at Buchenwald were not liberated until 11 April 1945 by the US Third Army division.
* Andrée told me about the lunch they had together with a general to discuss Martial’s release. She didn’t name the hotel but I have assumed here that it was The Claridge – a small, discreet hotel in the smart part of town. In February 1943, Andrée was invited to the hotel for a sumptuous meal with the hotel manager’s secretary. She didn’t know the hotel management personally, and there was no obvious reason for such an invitation (she doesn’t say why in her diary), so she may well have had some Resistance-related connection to the establishment.
* Although horse racing in France was widely interrupted during the war, some races still took place. Normally held at Longchamps, the prestigious Prix de l’Arc de Triomphe was moved to Le Tremblay – a small racecourse on the outskirts of Paris – in 1943 and 1944. Photographs from the period show attendees enjoying a rare day out in elegant attire. The course at Le Tremblay no longer exists today.
* Much about the General remains unknown, including his name. As Alain said in his memoir, ‘No one has ever been able to explain this extraordinary story. Martial is dead, Rochefort is dead, and my sister remembers nothing about anything.’ He first described it in another book as ‘a miraculous escape organised by François de Rochefort and Andrée’. [Qui étaient les premiers résistants?, page 247.]
* Martial de la Fournière was like the proverbial cat with nine lives. After his escape from the deportation train to Buchenwald, he was the only person to emerge alive from a burning apartment block in Hanoi in 1956. In yet another extraordinary event, he survived a helicopter crash in Vietnam in 1957, where all the other passengers were killed. He became a member of the Orion Resistance Group at the age of twenty-three after he and Alain Griotteray met in Vichy in 1941, and throughout the war he supplied the group with intelligence from the heart of the Vichy government. At the end of the war he received no award or recognition for his wartime services from the French Government. He did not want any. Eventually, twenty years after the end of the Second World War, Pierre Messmer (Prime Minister from July 1972 to May 1974) arranged for him to be awarded the Légion d’honneur for services rendered to his country.
26
Liberation!
On 10 August 1944, many of the railway workers in and around Paris went on strike, followed by many utility workers. When Yvonne returned home on 13 August from a trip to Rochefort in the countryside near Paris, it was to a city with virtually no electricity, fuel or gas, let alone food.
Andrée arrived at work on the morning of 15 August to find the building occupied by the Forces françaises de l’intérieur. To reach her office, she had to walk past a group of Resistance fighters shooting – and being shot at – from the streets. As she tried to take stock of what was happening so that she could report back to Orion she was relieved, although unimpressed, to learn that the Parisian police force – which had openly collaborated with the German occupying forces and the Vichy government for the last four years – had finally decided to change sides and support de Gaulle and the Resistance.*
From mid August, open fighting broke out on the streets of Paris. Alain and his male colleagues were keen to be a part of the action. Andrée, meanwhile, remained focused on her role as the group’s Chef de Liaison, coordinating activities and attempting to continue normal life as far as possible. Despite the events unfolding around her, she recorded in her journal going to an Edith Piaf concert on 18 August with her boyfriend Roger at the Moulin Rouge.
On 20, 21 and 22 August 1944, Andrée noted that firecrackers (‘pétarade’) were being set off in the streets. Despite the gunfire and the grenades exploding on the streets around where she lived and worked, she still felt safe enough to cycle to work on 22 August from her flat near the Place de la Madeleine to the Place de la Concorde and along the Seine to Police Headquarters, where Matthew Cobb noted, in his book Eleven Days, that fighting had erupted in certain parts of the building (although Andrée doesn’t mention this in her journal).
Together the US and French armies, which had fought together through northern France, moved into the outskirts of the city, as thousands lined the route to cheer them on. The German forces had been fighting hard to maintain control over Paris, and it was a dangerous time for civilians and soldiers alike. The FFI were armed with guns and grenades and wore armbands to identify themselves as such. They helped the American and French armed forces enter Paris, fighting on street corners in an attempt to take over the capital’s strategic landmarks.
It was feared that the German military governor of Paris, General von Choltitz, was planning, on Hitler’s instruction, to lay waste to Paris before his final surrender. ‘Paris is not to fall into the hands of the enemy except in a heap of rubble,’ the Führer’s order of 23 August instructed. There has been much debate as to the part played by the Swedish Consul, Raoul Nordling, in persuading von Choltitz not to follow Hitler’s orders, but certainly Nordling’s attempt to arrange a peaceful surrender was unsuccessful. As the American and French forces entered the city centre, there was heavy gunfire and shooting around central landmarks including the Invalides, the École Militaire, the Arc de Triomphe, the Jardin du Luxembourg, the rue de Rivoli, the Hôtel de Ville, and the Naval Ministry.
By this point Andrée was no longer writing her journal; instead she kept a simple diary, which noted simply meeting times, places and the odd word to represent what she was doing.
On the afternoon of 25 August 1944, General Billotte of the Deuxieme Division Blindée (the Free French 2nd Armoured Division) took over the Hôtel Meurice, headquarters of General von Choltitz. His troops arrested von Choltitz and took him to Police Headquarters, where he signed the act of surrender. The document described General Leclerc as the Commander of
the French forces in Paris and Leclerc signed it in the name of de Gaulle’s French provisional government. As Cobb put it, ‘This was a Free French triumph’. There was no mention of the role of Resistance fighters in the document, nor would de Gaulle acknowledge their existence in the historic speech he gave later that day. De Gaulle had been fighting with the Allies (and the Americans in particular) over who governed France, and he was determined to resume what he saw as his rightful position, regardless of national politics or the Allies’ views.
The Free French were worried that Roosevelt wanted to install an army of occupation in France until an election had been called, but de Gaulle had other plans. He wanted the world to recognise him as the only leader of the French Republic, and to acknowledge that the Republic had continued to exist in London under his leadership in the name of the Free French. Legally, therefore, Vichy had never represented the French government. It was an argument that resonated with many French citizens, not least the Griotterays, who refused throughout the war to acknowledge Pétain as head of state.
Despite the Germans’ formal surrender, the fighting continued. Andrée described the Wehrmacht’s departure as more frightening and dangerous than its arrival.* Yet the end was in sight.
The streets of Paris throbbed with excitement on 26 August 1944, as hundreds of thousands of people made their way into the city, lining the streets of the capital to celebrate its liberation after four years of Nazi occupation. On that day, General de Gaulle was the first among the Allied generals to march down the Champs-Élysées, with General Leclerc, General Koenig and Georges Bidault (President of the Comité National de la Resistance) at his side. This was a pivotal moment, as both Churchill and de Gaulle were well aware; by walking down that iconic street before the US Army, de Gaulle was sending a clear signal to the world: ‘to demonstrate and cement his importance and to show that French unity and power had been restored.’20
The crowds clapped, laughed, shouted and cried as they watched the parade at street level, from their balconies, windows and from rooftops. At the Place de la Concorde, de Gaulle stopped and got into a waiting car; people climbed up the statues and the lampposts to get a better view of their leader. Andrée and her friends had made their way into the square: they watched in amazement as snipers fired at the vehicle from the rooftops of the Hôtel de Crillon, yet de Gaulle showed no fear.
It was a heady time – watching the Wehrmacht leave the city was exciting. As Andrée later said, ‘It was just so wonderful to see them leave with their musical instruments, with their bikes and on horseback’. But as her diary of the time recorded, it was also an extremely dangerous period. Paris was still effectively a warzone in the days during and after the liberation. After acknowledging the crowds at the Hôtel de Ville, de Gaulle went to Notre Dame for a thanksgiving service; halfway through, gunmen fired within the cathedral, bringing the service to an abrupt end.
There was much anger and resentment aimed not only at the Germans, who were still in Paris, but towards those who collaborated with them. Parisians wanted to settle their grievances. Biaggi later told me: ‘It was those people who during the four years of occupation never did anything to help the Resistance who were the most vindictive.’ Many were anxious to retrospectively join the winning side. As Andrée put it, ‘There were so many people after the war who claimed to have been part of the Resistance, but most of them only joined up after the landings and they therefore ran far fewer risks than those of us who joined up in 1940.’
On 28 August, the US Army marched victoriously down the Champs-Élysées to the applause and cheers of the crowds. That day Yvette, Andrée’s eighteen-year-old sister, met a US army officer whose name was Wally Petterson. She brought him home to meet her parents, and they went on to form a close relationship. Indeed they nearly married but, after a trip to New York, Yvette decided the American way of life was not what she wanted and she returned to Paris.*
Shortly after the liberation, Alain managed to get yet another press card and became part of a group of youngsters who took over the offices of the newspaper Paris Soir, which had been under German control. One day he and François de Rochefort were out driving when they hit an obstacle. Crowds of Parisians surrounded two trucks in which forty German soldiers were holding several Frenchwomen hostage at gunpoint. Alain and François pushed their way to the front, accosting the soldiers and insisting that they release the women immediately. The soldiers refused, saying they were about to be killed by the crowds and the hostages represented their only hope of freedom. Alain found himself negotiating a deal with members of a defeated army in order to save the hostages, and had to agree to give the Germans a safe passage to the north of the capital. The hostages were released safely, but Alain wrestled with the moral dilemma of allowing forty soldiers to go free in order to save several civilians.
On 29 August, Andrée celebrated her twenty-fourth birthday at the Hôtel Scribe. Two days later, on 31 August, disaster struck. Margit Ehrart, one of her closest friends and trusted couriers, was arrested by the French police. Andrée referred briefly to the arrest in her diary but gave no details. That day she went to the Commissariat de Police on the rue Cambaures to see Margit, after which she went to do some shopping on her behalf. The following day she returned to the Commissariat. Her diaries say nothing more about her friend for two weeks, then, on 16 September, she records Margit’s release from Drancy, one of Paris’s largest holding prisons.
Margit’s arrest is difficult to understand, and there are no official records to clarify it. Under what is presumably her married name of Hutton, she is registered in the Ministry of Defence files at Vincennes as having been a P2 agent, which means she was regarded as a full-time agent for Orion from 1941.
Her ‘proper’ job, meanwhile, was at the German administrative headquarters in Paris (the ‘Kommandantur’). As such she may well have had good access to information of use to Orion. She was half-Austrian and spoke perfect German, and – according to Andrée – she dated German soldiers more often than she should have done.
After the liberation of Paris, the backlash against women who had (or were perceived to have had) relationships with Germans was vicious and cruel. It is possible that she could have been wrongly informed upon as a German collaborator or sympathiser, and thus arrested. Sadly she and Andrée lost touch some years after the war.
* When I visited the archives of the Préfecture de Police, I was shown documents testifying that some policemen were part of the Resistance, but they were few and far between.
* As did a friend of mine who lived on the rue Royale at the time, Jeanine Nouveau. Jeanine was about four years younger than Andrée and lived only five minutes away from the Griotterays’ flat, though they never knew each other. Like Andrée, she watched cautiously as the events leading up to Paris’s official liberation unfolded. She saw members of the FFI out on the streets carrying white flags while German soldiers took shots at them, and her family feared that Paris was about to be bombed. She said of de Gaulle’s arrival in Paris: ‘I watched General de Gaulle drive along the rue de Rivoli from the balcony of our flat. He was driving past a group of German prisoners when suddenly snipers started shooting at him. He did not budge an inch.’
* In 1952, Wally rekindled his friendship with Andrée and her husband Frank when he returned to London as a leading cast member in the musical Oklahoma!
27
Life After Liberation
‘I simply cannot take it any more,’ Andrée exclaimed as she walked into the family flat one day in summer 1945, slamming the door behind her. Her parents were in the drawing room discussing France’s recently formed provisional government under Charles de Gaulle. Edmond, not surprised by his elder daughter’s outburst, stood up and gave her a hug, asking whether she had just been out with Karl.
‘Yes, and he has been crying on my shoulder for the last three hours. It is the same every time we meet. It is horrendous for him, and now he has been told he has to return next week as part
of a US military team questioning those inhuman Nazis about what happened at Buchenwald. He tells me every tiny, horrific detail and I know it is very selfish of me but all I can think is that I could have been deported there and I can’t bear it.’
Karl Weyner was Andrée’s boyfriend at the time, and one of the first American GIs to enter Buchenwald. Her parents tried to calm her. ‘Darling, we all need to do our part to support the Allies now. These men have fought so hard on our behalf and the Americans are so far from home.’
‘I cannot sleep, I am having nightmares. I know it must be terribly hard for Karl, and his being Jewish must make it even worse. I want to help him but I don’t know if I can cope much longer.’*
‘There is a letter addressed to you in the hall,’ Yvonne told her daughter, trying to diffuse the conversation.
Andrée picked up the engraved envelope, wondering why they would write to her. It was an invitation to a ball at the British Officers’ Club. She showed her mother, smiling; her troubles temporarily eased. ‘What a lovely invitation and such a perfect opportunity to meet some of the British officers now here in Paris.’
Life was slowly beginning to return to normal for the Griotteray family. Andrée had resigned from Police Headquarters in late 1944; the relief at no longer having to work for an organisation which had effectively collaborated for four long years with the Wehrmacht had been tremendous.* Instead she was now working for the Ford Motor Company, which, following the end of the war, had re-established its presence in France. The energetic, resourceful François Clerc had been appointed head of its operation.
Andrée's War Page 21