Nearing the squat house, whose whitewashed stone walls appeared cracked and ancient, he hunkered down behind dense brush and pondered his next move. He needed food and water as well as shelter, and would have to risk an approach to a local soon, even though he spoke no French.
Freezing and hungry, Arthur rested awhile as a wan sun broke across the snow-cloaked field. Then a woman emerged from the farmhouse. She was alone. Arthur decided he had no choice but to gamble.
He stepped out of the brush and warily approached her. A middle-aged woman in a kerchief, a thin winter coat, and old boots, she spotted Arthur and stiffened for a moment. Then, to his near shock and then relief, she smiled warmly and beckoned him. In broken but easily understandable English, she said, “Please, come in.”
Arthur hesitated, then blurted out, “I’m an American—Jewish. I don’t want to put you in danger . . .”
He unzipped his flight jacket and pulled out his chai.
She smiled again, took his arm, and led him inside. “We will take care of you,” she said.
For all Arthur knew, she would bring him inside and send someone to fetch the Gestapo right away. Still, he had no choice but to trust her and hope for the best.
She brought him into the kitchen, where her husband was sitting at a table sipping weak coffee. As soon as he saw Arthur’s flight uniform, he smiled, stood, and clasped Arthur’s hand. The farmer, also in broken English, told him he was welcome. Then he insisted that Arthur remove his uniform, dog tags, boots, and airman’s watch. Arthur hesitated. Along with the small snapshot of Esther, which he would not hand over, the chai was his only vestige of home, and if the man intended to betray him, Arthur would just as soon hang on to his keepsake. The couple had already seen the necklace, so it wouldn’t matter if the husband turned it in to the Gestapo or not.
The woman disappeared for a minute and returned with a sweater, patched work pants, and battered field boots. She placed them on a chair and nodded at Arthur.
Arthur hesitated again, still worried that the man planned to run to the Gestapo with items proving that a Jewish American airman was at the farmhouse.
The woman reached into a pantry drawer, rummaged around in it for a few moments, and removed a thin chain with a small medal attached. She walked over to Arthur and pressed it into his right palm. “It is a Saint Christopher medal, the patron saint of travelers,” she said. “He will see you home safely.”
Still, Arthur paused. He fingered the chai at first, and then clutched it, unable to let it go. Slowly, as her intense look reassured him, he loosened his grip. He unclasped the chai, handed it to her, and placed the Catholic medal around his neck. Then he removed a small leather pouch from an inside pocket of his flight jacket. The pouch contained the compass, a card inscribed with his name, rank, serial number, and rights as a POW, and several thousand Vichy francs. He removed five hundred francs, which downed airmen were supposed to dole out to anyone who helped them. He reached for her hand and placed the francs in it. At first she shook her head, but when Arthur insisted, she nodded and accepted the money, tucking it into the hip pocket of her drab woolen sweater.
She asked him, through her fractured English and through gestures, if he had any other forms of identification. He shook his head. Before leaving on a mission, all pilots and airmen were required to fill out tags with their name, rank, and unit, and leave their wallet, letters, any jewelry, and any personal belongings with a purser who placed each man’s belongings in a small burlap bag, tied the tag to it, and handed each man a receipt.
After every bombing mission, many never returned to gather their items, which would be mailed home to families after the yellow Killed-in-Action telegrams arrived from Western Union.
As the woman discreetly left the kitchen for a few minutes, Arthur took the hint, undressed, and put on the farm clothes. The man put on a cap, scarf, and coat and said that he would return soon with a friend who could help the American.
After her husband vanished out the back door, the woman returned and assured Arthur that their friend was a leader of the local French Resistance. Arthur sagged into a chair while the woman broke two eggs into a cast-iron pan with sliced onions and tried to explain that she wished she could give him more, but they were subsisting on food rations, and the Germans had seized most of their crops and livestock.
As he gulped down water and then his eggs, the relief that he was warm and fed for the moment dissipated into fear again that the farmer might return with the Gestapo or the police, not with this mysterious man.
Arthur scanned the kitchen for any weapon he could grab if the Germans burst into the house, and found a cutting knife in a half-open drawer beneath the tabletop. He quickly removed it and slid it beneath the napkin the woman had given him.
She asked Arthur if he would like to lie down and rest, but he shook his head. He remained at the kitchen table, staring at a small windup clock on the counter.
After a few of the longest hours of his life, Arthur was startled by the sudden growl of a motorcycle engine outside. As the engine slid into idle, the back door was flung open and the farmer rushed in with a second man. Arthur’s fingers tightened around the concealed cutting knife.
Standing mere feet from him was a compact, dapper man with a thin, dark mustache and slicked-back black hair. He had the bearing of a military officer; the farmer might have betrayed Arthur to a Vichy policeman or a Gestapo collaborator.
The man looked directly at Arthur, and in accented but polished English assured the anxious American that he had no reason to be afraid. The Frenchman’s eyes moved to the knife Arthur was gripping. Slowly, Arthur’s fingers unclenched.
“I am Marcel,” the man said in flawless English. “That is all you need to know for now. Come with me.” Arthur would not learn Marcel’s last name—Taillandier—for several weeks, and just how important a figure in the Resistance he was.
Arthur balked, still seated. It was full daylight now, and the roads would be filled with Germans and police.
Taillandier added, “It is not safe for you here. We must go at once.” 1
Instinctively, Arthur rose from his chair as quickly as he would have for an officer at Seething. The farmer’s wife hugged him and kissed both his cheeks, and her husband shook Arthur’s hand again.
Arthur followed Taillandier, who wore an elegantly cut black overcoat, white silk scarf, and black fedora. Outside, Taillandier suddenly stopped and turned to him with a speed that surprised him. In one hand the Frenchman held a gold cigarette lighter, and in the other, two American cigarettes. Arthur had not even seen Taillandier’s arms or hands stir—he was that fast and agile.
Taillandier radiated a quiet menace. He was just the sort of man Arthur needed if he had any hope of seeing his family again.
CHAPTER 6
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THE SHED IN THE WOODS
In his ill-fitting farm boots, Arthur slipped several times as he trailed Taillandier across a snowy back pasture toward an opening in a chest-high hedgerow. A motorcycle with a sidecar was parked near the gap.
Taillandier strode up to the motorcycle, a French Army Gnome-Rhône, and turned to Arthur. With a tight smile, Taillandier pointed at the sidecar. The Frenchman’s narrowed eyes made him appear nothing less than sinister. The American had encountered countless tough guys from the Bronx to Seething, but something about Taillandier unnerved him. Beneath the beret the farmer’s wife had given him, Arthur shivered and lowered his eyes for a moment. He nodded.
Taillandier nodded back, his smile vanishing as quickly as it had flared. He picked up a leather helmet and goggles from atop a canvas tarpaulin that shrouded the sidecar’s opening. As he put them on with one hand, his other pulled the tarp halfway off the sidecar.
Arthur did not need to ask what Taillandier wanted. The airman immediately crawled into the opening and wedged himself into a
near-fetal position on the floor beneath the sidecar’s seat. A few seconds later he lay in darkness inside his musty cocoon while Taillandier fastened the tarp’s snaps to bolts on the sidecar’s exterior.
The Gnome’s 500-cc engine sputtered and caught, the cylinders emitting a reddish light that had earned the motorcycle its nickname—“the glow worm.” The motorcycle shot forward, pain slashing through Arthur’s lower back as he bounced against the sidecar’s shaking walls and floor and tried futilely to brace himself with his hands. Disoriented, fighting nausea, he was certain of only one thing: the motorcycle was racing along at high speed.
With no wristwatch, Arthur lost all sense of time. The unmistakable clank and vibration of steel treads from passing German tanks and armored personnel carriers eclipsed the roar of the Gnome’s engine several times. Each time, Arthur prayed that the motorcycle would not be stopped and the sidecar searched by German soldiers or even worse, Gestapo.
Unable to tell how long he and Taillandier had been on the road, Arthur clutched the shaft of the small, padded-leather seat with one hand and braced himself with the other against the wall as the sidecar rocked and bounced. His ears throbbing from the engine’s clamor, he could barely sense anything except pain and swelling and the dizzying twists and turns that flashed him back to the mechanized tiltboard tests in flight training.
The motorcycle swerved suddenly to the left and came to a sharp stop. Arthur’s head slammed against the sidecar’s steel wall. As a new flash of pain surged through him, light flooded the sidecar, blinding him for a few moments. He blinked and squinted blurrily up at Taillandier, who had removed the tarp halfway.
“Out,” the Frenchman said calmly.
Grasping the sidecar wall, Arthur pulled himself out only to slip and crumple to the snow-slicked ground. His legs had gone numb in the cramped confines.
Taillandier helped the American to his feet and held his right arm as he steadied himself. They were standing by a dense hedgerow, the motorcycle concealed from the road by the brush.
Taillandier pointed across a long, open yard in the direction of another farmhouse, stone-walled and low-roofed like the one Arthur had approached earlier that day.
“Can you walk?” Taillandier asked.
Arthur nodded. At the distant door stoop, a man and a woman waved their hands frantically.
The man shouted, “Vite! Vite!” Quickly.
Down the road a rumble grew steadily louder and closer.
“Troop carriers,” Taillandier hissed.
His arm still locked around Arthur’s, Taillandier dragged him to the farmhouse. They lurched into the house scant seconds before the first truck crammed with Wehrmacht—German Army—infantry rolled past and kept going, followed by at least ten more.
The farmer helped Arthur to a battered sofa and introduced himself as “Jean Barbot.” As his wife brought Arthur and Taillandier a pitcher of water, a small wedge of cheese, a few bread crusts, and a cold compress for Arthur to press against the “goose egg” that had arisen on his head when it struck the sidecar wall, Taillandier snapped off several rapid bursts of French that sounded like orders.
Barbot nodded deferentially.
Turning to the American, Taillandier said, “I must leave immediately, but will return for you in several days after I’ve made arrangements. Monsieur and Madame Barbot will look after you.”
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Over the next four days, the Barbots and their large family tended to Arthur. Food was in short supply because of Nazi rationing, but the Barbots made sure that he received the same share as everyone else. As he had done for the couple at the first farmhouse, he gave Jean Barbot a few hundred francs.
The Barbot children smiled at Arthur or ignored him, seemingly accustomed to strangers suddenly showing up in their midst. Because no one in the family spoke much English, Arthur could do little except hide out in a ramshackle woodcutter’s shed in the nearby woods. He understood that the Barbots could not risk the Nazis or the police discovering an American airman in the farmhouse. If he was captured in the woods, the family could deny any knowledge of a stranger in a woodland shed.
For Arthur, the wait for Taillandier’s return proved to be composed of equal parts of boredom and fear. Shivering beneath several blankets that did little to ward off the winter gusts whistling through the shed’s two broken windows, he tensed every time footsteps sounded in the snow and brush outside. Relief spread through him every time those footsteps turned out to belong to one of the Barbots, but he lay awake much of the nights listening for the heavy, hobnailed crunch of German or Vichy police boots.
Arthur had two visitors on his third day in the woods. Along with a tureen of hot soup and bread and a change of shirt, sweater, trousers, and socks, Jean Barbot showed up with a middle-aged woman and a pretty teenage girl. He introduced them as “Madame Michel and her daughter Christiane.” The sight of the mother and daughter, who smiled shyly at him, reassured Arthur.
Arthur figured that the clothes meant he would be on the move again soon. In halting English, Madame Michel, whose careworn features still hinted at past beauty, explained to him that she was from the town of Lesparre and that he would be staying there with friends of hers and Taillandier. They were all members of the French Resistance.
As Arthur, sitting on the earth floor with his shrieking back against a wall, gulped down the soup and devoured the bread, he strained to follow her heavily accented English. When she leaned down and patted his shoulder, however, he smiled up at both the mother and the daughter.
Madame Michel said, “We will take care of you. Marcel will be here soon.” 1
While Arthur had guessed that Taillandier was an important figure, he did not know Taillandier was a key Resistance leader in the run-up to the looming Allied invasion of Fortress Europe. General Charles de Gaulle, leader of the Free French forces, in Great Britain, had issued a direct order to Taillandier not to risk his cover by aiding downed Allied airmen unless absolutely necessary. Even in that case, Taillandier was to hand them off to Resistance groups whose chief mission was to help Allied airmen escape the Nazis.
Alone most of the time for four pain-racked days and nights in the woods, Arthur sensed that his best chance to see his family and Esther again rested somehow with the enigmatic Taillandier.
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As Arthur hid and waited for Taillandier’s return in the first week of January 1944, uneasiness about her son filled the thoughts of Rose Meyerowitz. She wondered where he was, if he was safe, when the war might finally end and he could return home. Each week, she went to the movies with David, Seymour, and Esther, who worked during the week as a secretary, hoping for a fleeting glimpse of Arthur in the newsreel footage from the war fronts.
The last they had heard from him was a military postcard with a brief message that he was stationed “somewhere in England.” The airmailed card had arrived in early December, nearly a month ago.
A brown car slid up to the curb directly beneath 1205 Findlay Avenue. An elderly man in a brown cap and a drab overcoat emerged from the vehicle, lugging a weather-beaten satchel with a strap. Rubbing frost from the living room windows, Rose saw him, dropped her cloth, and clutched the windowsill with both hands. The satchel and cap were those of a Western Union courier.
He dug into his bag, removed a yellow envelope, scanned it, and looked directly up at 1205 Findlay Avenue. Swooning for a moment, Rose blinked and steadied herself as the courier headed toward the building’s front steps. Her heart throbbing, she walked to the door and waited as the footsteps on the staircase thudded louder and closer.
For a few seconds she tried to remember who else in the building had someone in uniform.
But her mind went numb.
“It’s Arthur . . .” she murmured.
There were two firm raps on the door. She opened it to fa
ce the courier, whose rheumy eyes met hers beneath his snow-sodden cap. He handed her the damp envelope and averted his gaze, knowing all too well that the message was either an MIA (missing in action) or a KIA (killed in action) War Department telegram. “I’m sorry,” he said, his shoulders slouching.
He wheeled around and headed back toward the stairs.
Rose remained in the doorway, her hands shaking. She labored to get her breath back. Then she closed the door, staggered over to her chair, and tumbled into it. She sat there for over an hour, fighting to summon the strength to open the envelope. Finally, she willed her fingers to move. She opened it slowly and began to read:
Casualty Message
MR & MRS DAVID MEYEROWITZ
1205 FINDLAY AVE NYC
THE SECRETARY OF WAR DESIRES ME TO EXPRESS HIS DEEP REGRET THAT YOUR SON STAFF SERGEANT ARTHUR S MEYEROWITZ HAS BEEN REPORTED MISSING IN ACTION SINCE THIRTY ONE DECEMBER OVER FRANCE PERIOD IF FURTHER DETAILS OR OTHER INFORMATION ARE RECEIVED YOU WILL BE PROMPTLY NOTIFIED OFFICE OF THE ADJUTANT GENERAL 2
The words seemed to swirl in front of her, making her dizzy. There was not even an official’s name at the bottom of the message.
Stifling a shriek, she quivered and cried quietly. If she dissolved emotionally, her husband and Seymour might do the same. Then, slowly, a glint of hope pierced her fear. How could she grieve when Arthur was still missing? The War Department had not sent a Killed-in-Action telegram, so there was no evidence, none whatsoever, that Staff Sergeant Arthur Meyerowitz was dead.
When David and Seymour returned late in the afternoon, Rose showed them the telegram. Father and son stared at the note for a minute before sobs began to rack Seymour and David tried to fight back his tears. They all knew that this moment might come, but had blocked it out as best they could.
Rose reminded them that Arthur was missing in action and that they still had to tell Esther. Planning to write a letter to the War Department the following day and every few weeks until she had an answer, Rose refused to give up hope.
The Lost Airman Page 6