Taillandier circled back to the town center, skirting the Gestapo headquarters. He strolled into another medieval-era structure with damp, grimy stone walls—the local police station. There, the Vichy police decided whether to rough up locals before turning them over to the Gestapo, or to simply bring them to the Germans. In Toulouse, the police killed only one member of the Resistance. The Gestapo did the rest, torturing and executing many French men and women first arrested by the police. As far as Taillandier and Morhange were concerned, the police were collaborators and traitors. Scores of policemen were gunned down in Toulouse by Morhange or tried, executed, and buried at the Château de Brax.
Taillandier slipped the desk clerk an envelope with the usual amount of francs and asked him to tell Henri that a friend needed to speak with him immediately in the usual place.
Taillandier walked out of the station and darted through a boulevard teeming with cars, trucks, and military vehicles to a small brasserie. He stepped inside, his eyes adjusting to the low-wattage lamps that did little to illuminate the dark-walled, dark-draped interior. Nodding to the elderly man sipping coffee and reading a paper behind the scarred bar, Taillandier slid into a booth near the rear exit, pulled the threadbare curtains closed, and waited for Henri.
Fifteen minutes later, the curtains parted to reveal a short, wiry middle-aged man in the Legionnaire cap and dark blue uniform of the reviled Vichy police. He sat in the frayed leather seat opposite Taillandier, pulled the curtains shut, and peered through his tight-fitting pince-nez glasses at him. Taillandier took out a gold case and offered the policeman a cigarette, which he accepted and lit.
Henri, a captain in the Vichy police, was one of Taillandier’s most trusted and cunning agents and had met Arthur a number of times at Thoulouse’s house. Taillandier relied on Henri and other Morhange operatives who had infiltrated the Vichy police and even the Gestapo, spying on the enemy’s movements and passing the intelligence quickly and efficiently to Taillandier.
Taillandier lit up a cigarette, took a deep drag, and said in a near whisper that he needed Henri to deliver an order to someone named Jeno about the American immediately and warned the officer that the Gestapo may have “made” Taillandier at the Frascati.
As always, Henri followed Taillandier’s orders to the letter.
||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
Less than an hour later, Jeno, wearing the black Gestapo uniform, embarked upon his mission. Taillandier’s best and most fearsome “inside man,” he terrified even the most vicious Gestapo agents with his huge shoulders and chest, his jutting-jawed, deeply creased visage, and feral amber eyes. No one in Toulouse even knew where he had come from. The simple fact was that people feared him, and that allowed him to convince the Gestapo of his high value.
A trusted Nazi sympathizer, the giant Frenchman had risen to second in command of the Toulouse Gestapo, and none of the Germans questioned his loyalty. No one suspected that Jeno was a Morhange agent who had been passing intelligence to Taillandier for months. Further, no one suspected that Taillandier had five other men working for the Gestapo as clerks with access to sensitive documents.
Time after time, Jeno had helped Taillandier and other Resistance men and women elude capture or betrayal. The task Taillandier had just relayed to the operative, however, was the riskiest that Taillandier had ever given him. Although Jeno knew that one misstep on his part could ruin Taillandier and Morhange, he understood that Taillandier would not relent.
With Taillandier commanding that the matter be resolved immediately, Jeno knew what he had to do, even if it meant blowing his cover.
Jeno took a deep breath, walked up the steps of the Gestapo headquarters, opened the heavy steel doors with little effort, and entered. He glowered at a young Gestapo agent manning the front desk. At the sight of Jeno in his black hat, emblazoned with the skull-and-crossbones emblem, the agent nearly fell as he scrambled from his chair to salute him.
Jeno demanded to know where the prisoner from the Frascati was being held and whether he had confessed to anything or had revealed any names of his associates.
Pale, his mouth quivering, the agent pointed down the corridor and shook his head no. Relieved that the American had said nothing, Jeno stormed past the German and sent him sprawling to the stone floor with a shove.
Jeno turned a corner, glanced back to where the agent was still lying on the floor, and leaned against the cold, wet granite wall. Closing his eyes for a moment, he inhaled deeply and slowly exhaled. Step one was complete.
He walked up to Arthur’s cell and reached into his pocket for his keys. With a metallic rasp, the heavy, scarred steel door opened. Arthur was crumpled on the bare stone floor in the fetal position, his clothes tattered and his swollen face streaked with blood. For a moment, Jeno feared that the American was dead, but then Arthur groaned.
Jeno moved with a speed unusual for a man of his size. The crunch of boots against stone signaled that other Gestapo agents were rushing down the corridor to assist him with the prisoner. As soon as they arrived at the open cell, Jeno kicked the prone American in the back and ordered him to his feet. Behind him, several officers stared and inched back a few steps—Jeno intimidated even the most sadistic of his fellow Gestapo agents.
He reached down, grabbed Arthur’s collar, and hauled him to his feet as if the prisoner weighed merely a few pounds. As the other Gestapo agents scattered, he dragged the groaning Arthur out of the cell and down the hall. Without looking back, Jeno informed anyone within earshot that he was transferring the prisoner to solitary in a smaller Gestapo building reserved for captives about to disappear.
No one followed him. None of the Gestapo men believed that the prisoner would even make it to solitary. Jeno’s special interest in him meant that the massive French collaborator had likely decided to take the man somewhere, torture and kill him, and then dump the body. Jeno was counting on that belief. Several times before, he had removed prisoners, and they had “disappeared.” His Gestapo colleagues never suspected that each of those prisoners had been a Morhange operative whom Taillandier could not afford to lose or to have reveal secrets under torture. Arthur was the first American Taillandier had ever ordered Jeno to remove.
Jeno yanked the barely conscious Arthur out the front door of the headquarters and tossed him into the backseat of a dark sedan. Groggy, but certain he was about to be killed, Arthur lifted his blackened, bloody eyes and suddenly realized that the Gestapo agent was Jeno. For a moment, he thought that he was hallucinating, that the man could not possibly be who he thought he was. Then the man behind the wheel inclined his head slightly back toward Arthur and nodded. Arthur recognized Robert, Taillandier’s “chauffeur.”
Then, from the front passenger seat, another man leaned over toward Arthur and smiled. Marcel Taillandier’s face was the last thing Arthur saw before he passed out.
||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
At that moment, Arthur was far more fortunate than Gisèle Chauvin and Pierre Dupin. Dupin was languishing in solitary confinement at Fresnes Prison, left naked, battered, and unfed for days at a time until the next round of torture began. He had not given up anyone’s name.
The Gestapo had whisked Gisèle from Lesparre to the Villa Calypso for her first round of questioning, and as Arthur was being arrested and subsequently rescued from the Gestapo, she was being held at Fort du Ha, an ancient stone prison in Bordeaux. Her cell was one of those reserved for “select prisoners”: “The bars were flat and held together by a traversed pair palming the vertical ones. There was also a wooden box, trapped in front of it, preventing the prisoners from looking down [i.e., outside] as well as drawing attention to a little light coming in from the sky.” 1
She and the other select prisoners, most of them captured Resistance members, had no toilet, no cot, no blanket, and were denied the once-a-week communal showers that other prisoners were allowed to take in the
bastion’s oldest tower, where the Germans forced prisoners to walk in a circle as ice-cold water cascaded down on them.
Around the dank, tiny cells where Gisèle and other special prisoners were suffering “were lots of guards, a small army around [them] and within the fort itself.” 2 Much worse was in store for Gisèle Chauvin, who had not surrendered one name or any other information about the Resistance to her Nazi torturers.
Another Fort du Ha inmate, a Jewish man slated for transportation to the concentration camp at Buchenwald, wrote, “Sometimes, we could hear prisoners being taken away early in the morning. We often heard brave women patriots singing the ‘Marseillaise’ [the French national anthem]. These women helped to boost our morale and pride in the cause, which was all we had left!” 3
Battered, deprived of sleep, and poorly fed, Gisèle heard those voices one morning. Through her cracked, swollen lips, she mouthed the words of her anguished nation’s anthem.
CHAPTER 18
||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
THE MAQUIS
Taillandier’s driver, Robert, navigated the black Citroën through Toulouse’s late-afternoon traffic, darting past buses, German Army trucks and troop carriers, and other cars. As Taillandier and his eighty-two Morhange operatives knew and used to their advantage, few people other than officials, police, or Gestapo could drive automobiles because of the severe shortages of gas. Even the authorities assumed that any large Citroëns or Mercedes sedans on the road belonged to them, not French civilians. Taillandier’s deft use of the black market ensured that he always had enough gasoline hidden away for ambushes and essential “errands.” He had long ago decided that Arthur’s safety and eventual escape were essential, and no one thought to stop Taillandier’s car as it headed toward the outskirts of the city, whose pink-tinged bricks almost seemed to glow in the oncoming twilight.
Arthur’s quick thinking at the Frascati—dropping his photo identification card and papers to the floor and under the table—ensured that the Gestapo agent who had recognized him was the only one who could actually identify him as Georges Lambert. Jeno would solve that problem quickly and mercilessly. The Gestapo man would simply disappear or turn up as one more bullet-riddled Morhange target dumped lifeless into a ditch or even cut down in broad daylight on the streets of Toulouse. Before exiting the city, Robert pulled over and let Jeno out to take care of the matter. Once again, Taillandier’s judgment that the American airman could think fast on his feet had proven correct.
Arthur, slumped in the backseat and sliding in and out of consciousness, sensed little except the car’s motion. Robert drove out of the city and followed a series of back roads that he knew with a native’s familiarity. He sped past vineyards and pastures framed by tree-lined ridges and hills.
Some fifteen miles from Toulouse, he darted onto a road that was little more than a cow path and stopped in a small clearing nearly surrounded by trees. He and Taillandier got out of the car, opened one of the passenger doors, and quickly but carefully slid Arthur out of the backseat and half carried him to a long, low-slung structure with gray, battered walls and a partially collapsed roof. They had brought Arthur to a maquis, a remote hideout used by Resistance groups to elude capture and lie low when things were getting too hot. Throughout southern France, Resistance groups would cleverly conceal maquis in the woods and hills.
The word maquis refers to a thicket, bush, or scrub growth and was originally a Corsican term that had made its way to mainland France. Resistance historian François Marcot, a professor of history at the Sorbonne, writes: “The term maquis signified both the bands of fighters and their rural location. The term established the image of a ‘maquisard’ as a ‘committed and voluntary fighter,’ a combatant . . . Members of those bands were called maquisards. The term meant ‘armed resistance fighter.’ The Maquis have come to symbolize the French Resistance.” 1
Inside the maquis, Arthur was greeted by twenty or so men hiding from the Gestapo and the Vichy police. He was able to open his swollen eyes just enough to find a familiar and welcome face smiling at him. Far from Lesparre, Pierre Delude had fled to the Morhange refuge out of fear that the Gestapo would be at his door following the arrest of the Chauvins and the destruction of Brutus.
Taillandier and Robert left the hideout as quickly as they had arrived, planning to bring Arthur back to Toulouse once he was recovered and once they were sure that the Gestapo agent had been “removed.” He would be safer in the city because German foot and air patrols constantly combed the countryside for any sign of the maquis. As Arthur would soon learn, the hideout’s inhabitants were armed with rifles, pistols, and even a few submachine guns to mount a fight if the Nazis discovered them. Shortly before Taillandier departed, he had slipped a small pistol into one of Arthur’s pockets.
Marcel left Arthur in good hands with the other men of the maquis. They were a colorful group of Frenchmen ranging from sophisticated urban physicians, lawyers, and businessmen to waterfront toughs and roughhewn farmers. Within a few days, with the doctors in the band tending to Arthur, he regained his strength, and the other men embraced the American as one of their own.
From Pierre Delude, Arthur learned the horrifying details of what had happened in Lesparre a few weeks after he had been removed. He was devastated at the news that the Gestapo had taken Gisèle prisoner and that no one knew where she was or if she was still alive. Arthur was unable to close his eyes that night, staring at the walls and ceiling of the maquis, shaking his head from time to time.
Over the next two weeks, until the end of March 1944, Morhange agents stealthily brought supplies and scraps of information to the maquis. As his strength slowly returned, Arthur, like the others, tensed every time he heard a car or truck outside the hiding place. They always feared the Nazis would burst in after being tipped off by a local collaborator.
The isolation and apprehension permeating the maquis made Arthur and the others crave a return to the city. The camaraderie helped quell some nerves, but being stuck in the hideout was an ordeal, the very minutes, let alone hours and days, interminable. Several of the men spoke excellent English, but there were long stretches when the only sounds inside the damp, dark lair were coughs and snores. Whenever anyone left to relieve himself outside, he made certain that he found a spot completely concealed by woods and brush. Several times a day, the drone of small Henschel scout planes low in the sky above the tree line provided a stark reminder that they were all wanted men. No one left the maquis during the day except for a few armed men posted as sentries concealed outside. At night, a fresh set of guards kept up the vigil. Arthur was relieved that if the Germans showed up, he had a weapon.
Whenever it rained, water pounded against the hideout’s roof, and Arthur and the others were grateful that the rain did not leak through it. Still, dampness permeated the shelter. They could not even start a small fire to dry out their clothes, out of fear that the glow might reveal their location. The one indulgence they allowed themselves was a smoke, but only one man at a time and only in the one corner of the building, where neither rain nor light penetrated. The only way the burning ash or whiffs of smoke could be seen there was if someone was literally looking inside the maquis.
A few farmers sympathetic to the Resistance sneaked in cooked but cold pails of potatoes, radishes, and carrots for the men, as well as an occasional skinned and boiled rabbit or quail that the locals trapped in the woods. Several times, the locals brought eggs and bread. The men’s stomachs were constantly growling, the meager portions barely enough to subsist on.
Fortunately, farmers scrounged enough bottles of wine hidden from the Germans to allow Arthur and the others to ward off the chill from gusts that found their way into the windowless hiding place. Locals even furnished the occasional bottle of cognac on the chilliest evenings as the men huddled beneath soggy woolen blankets against the bare stone walls.
On those walls, men had defiantly scrat
ched patriotic messages: Victoire! and Vive de Gaulle!
Over and over, several men assured Arthur that he would soon be out of France and safe. He wanted to believe them, but as days went by without word from Toulouse, doubt seeped into him. Still, he believed that Taillandier would come for him. The Morhange leader had always kept his word.
Eventually, Pierre Delude decided he needed to be closer to his family in Lesparre, and decided to take the risk. Arthur was deeply saddened to see him go, but the urge to return to loved ones was one that he shared with Pierre. In the maquis, his own thoughts were always less about himself than about how his parents, Seymour, and especially Esther were holding up. It helped when he and his new comrades spoke in low, hushed tones about their families, but those moments were few compared to the long hours each man was alone with his fears. No matter how deep the camaraderie of the maquis, in those awful, endless moments, each man was utterly alone.
||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
In the apartment house on Findlay Avenue in the Bronx, Rose Meyerowitz refused to abandon her conviction that her son Arthur was still alive. She simply felt that he was too intelligent and street-savvy not to have survived.
She continued to write letters to the War Department, imploring officials for any scrap of information about Arthur. The replies were always the same. He was “missing in action.” Each day that passed without the most feared Western Union telegram of all—the Killed-in-Action notification—allowed Rose to hope for another day.
The noncommittal replies from the War Department, signed by or for Adjutant General Robert H. Dunlap, were discouragingly similar to his response of April 21, 1944:
The Lost Airman Page 17