Arthur bore his isolation stoically, keeping all anxieties and fear hidden from his helpers. The relative comfort of the annex, which was a finished bedroom and large enough for a chair, a dresser, and mirror, made his situation a little easier to bear. He was also allowed to use the second-floor bathroom to bathe each day. As had been the case in the other homes where he had stayed—with the exception of those two special dinners at the Chauvins’ and Pierre Auriac’s—the food was sparse, mainly the familiar coarse bread, the occasional egg, some vegetables and fruits, and gruel-like soups. Occasionally, there was a bit of chicken or beef.
Once again, the worst part of hiding was listening to the passage of every car, truck, or military vehicle in the street below; he prayed silently that they would not stop outside Mimi’s home. He tensed every time he heard unfamiliar voices downstairs. At night, he could sleep a little better, having become accustomed to the bombing raids in the distance, but a little better still meant fitful rest when he was alone with his thoughts in the darkness of the annex.
During the day, both Mimi and Madame Rigal visited him and talked for hours. Rigal was especially interested in hearing about his mother, his father, and his brother. At first, he was reluctant to speak much about them because it intensified his loneliness, but the woman’s maternal manner won him over. He found himself comforted by talking with her, her warmth conjuring images of his own mother. Rigal even understood his life as an airman, as her late husband had served in the French Air Force in World War I.
In a letter to Rose Meyerowitz after the war, Rigal would recall: “Poor dear [Arthur], we were obliged to hide him and I did my best so he could have the most comfort we could offer him. It has been a great trial for him but he was so courageous and a real soldier. I admired him so much . . .”
She later confided that she “considered him as my son.” 1
Madame Rigal certainly did watch out for Arthur as if he were her own child. Several times, when Mimi planned to have over guests whose loyalties lay with the Vichy regime, Madame Rigal insisted that Arthur be sneaked over to the nearby house of another Brutus supporter, whom Arthur later identified only as “Dr. Rey.” She had no qualms about Arthur’s treatment in the Dumas home. Mimi took good care of him. Still, as Arthur’s stay in Beaumont lengthened and no word to move him arrived from Dr. Auriac, Madame Rigal began to suspect that Mimi, though not a collaborator, had a loose tongue and could inadvertently tip off a Vichy or Nazi sympathizer about the Allied airman in her home.
By mid-February, Madame Rigal refused to take any more chances that Mimi might compromise Arthur, as well as herself and Dr. Rey. The older woman decided to send a message for help—not to Dr. Auriac in Moissac, but to Toulouse. This urgent request demanded not the measured attention of the genteel doctor, but the intervention of a different sort of man—Marcel Taillandier.
Madame Rigal, Taillandier, and anyone even remotely associated with helping Arthur understood that, through no fault of his own, he had parachuted into Occupied France at the worst moment for an Allied airman, between late December 1943 and June 1944. This was especially true for a Jewish airman.
Most of the time, the German Army treated Jewish prisoners of war according to the rules laid down by the Geneva Conventions. Such notable historians as Joseph Robert White, however, have chronicled how the Nazis decided for those six to seven months to “make an example of Terrorflieger (‘terrorist aviators’), pilots and crewmen whom the Gestapo classified as spies, because they had been disguised as civilians or enemy soldiers when they were apprehended.” 2 With his forged identification card and papers, Arthur was likely marked for the horrors of Fresnes Prison if captured.
Built in the 1890s just south of Paris, Fresnes Prison, a grim, six-story gray edifice, was the nation’s second largest jail and was generally used by the Nazis to incarcerate British spies and captured men and women of the Resistance. The jail posed a special problem for Allied airmen.
In the first six months of 1944, the Nazis imprisoned 168 Allied pilots and airmen whom they had captured, with members of the Resistance in Fresnes. The Gestapo tortured many of these captives in order to obtain information about the French men and women who had aided them. Those who survived the brutal interrogations were shipped to Buchenwald Concentration Camp near Weimar, Germany. A number of Jewish airmen who survived Fresnes would never make it out of Buchenwald alive.
White points out that prisoners were sent to concentration camps “for a variety of reasons, including being Jewish.” He goes on to mention what he calls a “sub-camp for U.S. POWs at Berga an der Elster, officially called Arbeitskommando 625” and also known as Stalag IX-B. Berga, he writes, “was the deadliest work detachment for American captives in Germany. 73 men who participated, or 21 percent of the detachment, perished in two months. 80 of the 350 POWs were Jews.” 3
Madame Rigal was determined to spare Arthur that terrifying fate. In contacting Taillandier, she was guessing that the ruthless leader of Morhange would feel the same and would also ensure that Mimi would control her mouth or face the consequences.
Madame Rigal could not have picked a more fortuitous moment to contact Taillandier rather than Pierre Auriac or another Brutus leader about her concerns over Mimi. In early February 1944, Dr. Auriac, Jean-Pierre Dupin, and other Brutus operatives began to worry, with good reason. Since the arrest of the network’s chief, Andre Boyer, in December 1943, the Germans had been arresting rising numbers of the group’s operatives.
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On the afternoon of February 12, 1944, two and a half weeks since his arrival at the house, Arthur was sitting in the annex’s worn but comfortable reading chair, leafing through old French magazines whose articles he could not understand but whose photos, illustrations, and ads provided a little diversion, when several voices—men’s voices—suddenly drifted upstairs. Then he recognized Mimi’s voice, but could not make out what she was saying. His fingers clenching the magazine, he strained to listen, a coldness creeping through him at the low, deep tone of the male voices, but he did not move.
Although the voices were muted, the words simmered with some sort of tension. His breath quickening, Arthur moved softly and slowly the few feet from his chair to the closed door in hopes he might hear a little bit more. The people downstairs were speaking French, but that meant little—the police would certainly speak that language, and he had learned firsthand that Gestapo agents also spoke it. Although the annex was chilly, a few beads of sweat dripped down his brow.
As footsteps echoed up the first flight of stairs and grew louder, Arthur backed away from the door toward the sole, shuttered window. He started to open the shutters when he recognized the click of Madame Rigal’s thick-heeled shoes. She knocked gently, opened the door, and saw Arthur at the window. She assured him he was safe and asked her “darling boy” to close the shutters and come downstairs with her. 4 Then she paused, blinking back tears, and told him to bring his suitcase.
He grabbed his bag, his overcoat, and his beret and followed her down the three flights of stairs without a word or a look back.
When they stepped into the dining room, Mimi was slumped in a chair at the table, her head in her hands, her elbows resting on a tablecloth soiled by smoke from one of the house’s two wood stoves.
There were several other people in the dining room, and Arthur’s eyes widened at the sight of one, Marcel Taillandier, whose dark, unsettling eyes, beneath the same fedora he had worn at their first meeting, seemed to bore into him.
Glancing from Taillandier and the disconsolate Mimi to the five other men, Arthur found three of the scarred faces sullen, with eyes that seemed cold and cruel. The trio, who wore workers’ caps and belted leather jackets over thick sweaters, resembled the menacing types who used to shake down Bronx store owners. Madame Rigal, who had nothing but praise for Taillandier, once said, “You know that he [Taillandier] had always with h
im several men he had been obliged to take [by order of Colonel Paillole] . . . because he wanted men able to kill. Well, they were gangsters.” 5
One of the men held Arthur’s attention longer than the others. This Frenchman appeared even more sinister than his comrades, but there was still something about his demeanor that was more refined than that of a common thug or gangster. Square-jawed and tall, the broad-shouldered man fixed his narrowed, dusky eyes on Arthur. Deep, almost black hollows framed his eyes, and his shock of black hair rose up and back from a pronounced widow’s peak. Arthur forced himself not to lower his gaze.
The man’s lips curled back slightly toward his large nose, which had obviously been broken more than once. It was impossible to tell if the man’s expression was a sneer or some semblance of a smile.
“Fontes,” the Frenchman said in a strangely even tone. 6
From a brutal and murky upbringing in Toulouse, Andrés Fontes had earned a reputation as a ferocious fighter. He had also paid attention in school and won a spot among some of France’s sons of privilege at Saint-Cyr, the nation’s equivalent of West Point or Sandhurst. Now thirty-two, Fontes had served as an infantry lieutenant until the fall of France, in 1940. Like Taillandier, he seethed with hatred for the Nazis and French collaborators. Also like Taillandier, Fontes had caught the attention of Colonel Paillole and proved himself in several counterintelligence missions in northern France as a man with no qualms about killing Germans and traitors face-to-face. Paillole described Fontes as a “smart and perceptive officer” and as the perfect top aide to Marcel Taillandier. 7
Madame Rigal walked over to Arthur and clutched him tightly. She told him that she and Taillandier believed that “Mimi Dumas talked too much.” 8
Taillandier leaned down to Mimi and whispered. She lifted her head from her hands, her face pallid. Then Taillandier nodded at Arthur and led him, Fontes, and the four other men out the door. Arthur glanced back at the house. Through the window, Madame Rigal stood above the still-seated Mimi Dumas, shaking her finger at the younger woman.
Outside, no motorcycles or cars waited. As Fontes and two comrades walked down the street and turned a corner, Taillandier, Arthur, and the other two men waited. After five minutes passed, the two men headed in the same direction as Fontes’s group. Only Taillandier and Arthur remained.
Checking his watch several times, Taillandier scanned the street in both directions. Then he tapped Arthur’s shoulder and began to stride down the street. Arthur caught up to him, and as they rounded the corner onto a winding cobblestoned road in the shadow of a well-preserved thirteenth-century defense wall and roofed tower, a train whistle shrieked somewhere behind them; Taillandier quickened the pace.
Although traveling by train was risky for the Resistance, Taillandier knew that he could use the local railways for a few more weeks without worries of Allied planes attacking the tracks. Coded radio transmissions from London had alerted Resistance leaders to the fact that in March 1944, the Allies would put the long-debated and controversial “Transportation Plan” into effect. The purpose of this plan was to conduct large-scale bombings to destroy any French rail centers and lines that the Germans could use to send reinforcements from anywhere in France when Operation Overlord, D-Day, began.
Arthur followed Taillandier to a wider street named rue Fermat-Maison. At the far end, perhaps a hundred yards away, an elevated concrete platform rose from the street covered by a hulking, sharply sloped red-tiled roof. A sign hanging above the platform read Matabiau-Toulouse. The waiting area was not enclosed, and as they neared the steps to the platform, Taillandier’s comrades separated and spread out among a dozen or so people awaiting the midafternoon train to Toulouse. Smoking cigarettes, the Morhange men all appeared to be alone and have no connection to each other.
Taillandier and Arthur, holding his suitcase, climbed onto the platform just as the train pulled up. The passengers lined up in front of the second car and waited. A police officer in a dark blue greatcoat and képi stepped from the train. Neither a uniformed nor a plainclothes Gestapo agent appeared behind him. As the official began to check identification cards, Taillandier pressed something into Arthur’s free hand. It was a one-way ticket to Toulouse.
Four of Taillandier’s men stood in the line ahead of Arthur. Turning his head almost imperceptibly, Arthur spotted Fontes near the group’s rear. Fontes’s right hand was buried in his coat pocket.
When Taillandier reached the police officer and carefully produced the identification card, the man did not even view it. Arthur was next, again staring woodenly at the officer’s request and then acting in sudden understanding. “Georges” handed over his card and papers. As with Taillandier, the policeman did not even look at them or at Arthur, gave them back, and waved him onto the train. The gendarme must have been paid off by Taillandier or been one of his operatives.
Arthur was now traveling with a far different type of Resistance group than those he had met while in the care of Dr. Pierre Auriac, Dr. Pierre Chauvin, and pharmacist Gisèle Chauvin. While all of them were valiant and could certainly kill if they had to, Taillandier’s men looked as though they liked to kill.
Colonel Paillole’s orders to Taillandier were brutally simple: “Paralyze the enemy and destroy the traitors.” 9 Men such as the late Alphonse Alsfasser were necessary for that mission. Throughout southern France, a half-dozen “repentant gangsters” who, despite their crimes, loved their nation and despised the Nazis and collaborators, had been recruited by Paillole’s agents and assigned to Morhange for one simple reason. 10 They had no qualms about killing any German or any man or woman who was a traitor to France. They would shoot, stab, strangle, run over, or blow up anyone on Taillandier’s command.
Paillole did not condone unwarranted executions, ordering that “the use of ‘D’ [the death lists] measures was to be systematic but in accordance with our rules.” 11 For Taillandier, the phrase “in accordance with our rules” was key. It gave him latitude to “remove” any Nazi or collaborator whom he believed it necessary to kill on his own initiative. In short, Paillole gave Taillandier close to a free hand in deciding who was to die anywhere in the region. The men escorting Arthur to Toulouse served as Morhange’s hit team—and they did their jobs with savage efficiency.
Arthur was seated beside Taillandier and next to a window from which he could watch the wooded foothills and ridges and ancient, walled market towns of the Midi-Pyrénées quickly slide by; the American shifted his position to find Fontes glancing at him across the aisle, measuring him, probing for any hint of fear or weakness. Arthur did not look away.
Once again, Fontes’s lips curled up in that unreadable expression. He leaned back in his seat and closed his eyes. His right hand was still thrust deep into his coat pocket. Next to Arthur, Taillandier, who had obviously caught the silent exchange between his lieutenant and the airman, was wearing a hint of an approving smile. Most men averted their eyes instantly if Fontes looked at them. Staff Sergeant Meyerowitz had not lowered his gaze—even if he had wanted to do so.
As the train steamed along the tracks, the Gestapo was poised to unleash a catastrophe for the Resistance from Toulouse and Bordeaux to Lesparre.
CHAPTER 14
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DEATH IN THE PINK CITY
When the train chugged into Toulouse about an hour and a half after departing Beaumont-de-Lomagne, the sprawling city was bathed in the day’s last shreds of twilight. Countless brick buildings gave off a pale, roseate glow that over the centuries had earned Toulouse the nickname “the pink city.”
The train slowed and inched its way into the giant station of Matabiau among dozens of other trains from which passengers streamed onto broad platforms. Pairs of Nazi soldiers patrolled everywhere, many of them with German shepherds or Dobermans ready to chase and pounce and tear apart anyone on their masters’ command. As soon as Taillandier stepped into the aisle,
Arthur followed. They stepped off the train and into the crowd filing into the station’s concourse and forming lines in front of Gestapo agents.
Arthur had caught a break on the platform at Beaumont-de-Lomagne, thanks to Taillandier; however, the two Nazis checking the papers of the people ahead of him were taking their time with each passenger.
Shouts suddenly erupted at the front of an identification-inspection line. Taillandier and everyone around Arthur instantly flung themselves onto the floor as the concourse rang with commands of “Halt! Halt!” The Morhange men hugged the tiles, and Arthur did the same.
A young man in a tan coat desperately raced for the row of exit doors, a German shepherd closing fast behind him. He slipped on the tiles and crashed to the floor beneath one of the many bloodred, white, and black swastika banners hanging from the steel ceiling beams. An instant later the dog leaped onto him and began to tear at his face and neck.
As he screamed and tried to cover his face, Gestapo agents stood by and watched, grinning and pointing, and let the dog rip away part of an ear and the man’s nose. Several soldiers ran up, and one called off the dog, who immediately stopped biting but stood growling over the shrieking man. One of the agents then slammed his jackbooted foot several times into the man’s face.
As the Germans dragged the unconscious man away, people pushed themselves off the floor and re-formed their lines, no one uttering a word. The concourse stayed eerily quiet for a minute. Then commands of “I have papieren” (your papers) filled the terminal again. Several pools of blood seeped across the tiles where the man had fallen. 1
Now, as Taillandier and Arthur reached the head of the line, Arthur’s first personal encounter with the Toulouse Gestapo was at hand. The routine at the station always began the same way. At the agents’ order, Taillandier reached into his coat and presented his identification card and papers. The Germans examined them and returned them promptly. He moved out of the line and kept walking. Once again, the Nazis had no idea that “Ricardo” had walked right past them.
The Lost Airman Page 14