The Cost of Courage

by Charles Kaiser

  The ranks of the Maquis jump sharply after the forced deportation of French workers to Germany. The poster says “French and German workers unite!”(photo credit 1.3)

  Because their junior aide, Jacques, has been absent for only a day, neither Boulloche nor Gimpel suspects that he has been arrested.

  They certainly haven’t imagined that Jacques has violated the cardinal principle of the Resistance. No matter how badly you are tortured, you must try with all your might not to divulge anything important for forty-eight hours after your arrest.

  After you have been missing for two days, your comrades are supposed to assume that you have been arrested, and relocate immediately to a new clandestine location. Only then, after the captured agent has endured two days of unimaginable affliction, is he authorized to tell everything he knows.

  If the system works the way it’s supposed to, by then his information should be largely worthless anyway.

  Jacques adores his boss, André. But almost immediately after he is grabbed by the Germans, the young agent realizes that he will never be able to remain silent after his captors begin to beat him, or semidrown him, since a form of waterboarding is one of the Gestapo’s favorite methods of torture.

  He sees only one way out. In a small cell with another Frenchman, he whispers, “Strangle me so I won’t talk! If you don’t, I will tell them everything.”

  But the boy’s cell mate is incapable of providing such grisly mercy.

  Soon after that, the young Sorbonne student begins to give up all of his secrets, including the location of André’s secret apartment.

  Barely an hour later, Jacques is squeezing into the narrow elevator in the apartment house on rue de la Santé on the Left Bank with two Gestapo agents. When it reaches the fifth floor, the three men exit silently onto the landing.

  Jacques has been brought here to perform the secret knock. The young Frenchman points at the door of the doomed apartment, then walks toward it to carry out the sordid duty: one sharp rap of his fist, a beat, then two softer knocks on the door.

  Inside the apartment, André recognizes the cloak-and-dagger sequence and stands up from his desk to acknowledge it. When he opens the door, he sees two Germans in black leather raincoats pointing identical Walther PPK pistols at his heart.

  “HANDS UP!” they shout.

  “WHAT’S GOING ON?” André screams back.

  Instinct propels the Frenchman toward the staircase as the Germans open fire. Two bullets strike the Resistance fighter just below the chest. One agent rushes toward him to check for a weapon as the other one storms the apartment to capture his confederates.

  If he hadn’t been wounded, André thinks, this part would have been easy: He would have swallowed the fatal pill right away. But now he is writhing on the floor, with blood spurting out of his stomach — and the cyanide never leaves his pocket.

  For a very long time, he will wonder whether this has been the right decision.

  BACK ON THE SIDEWALK in front of the apartment building, the German agents shove André into the backseat of the black Citroën, next to Jacques. Then they speed away through the darkening streets of the Paris dusk.

  Jacques is in a state of total collapse; he is weeping and howling and begging his boss for forgiveness. For the rest of his life, André will carry a hideous memory of these moments.

  This part of André’s trauma ends a few minutes later, when he is dumped off at La Salpêtrière, which the Germans have taken over as a prison hospital, where his wounds will be operated on.

  For the moment, the Gestapo men prefer to keep André alive because they won’t be able to torture him unless they first make an effort to nurse him back to some semblance of health.

  Despite his promised reward, Jacques is soon shipped off to Germany, where he will die in a concentration camp.

  FOR JUST ONE HOUR, the Gestapo leaves the secret apartment unoccupied and unwatched.

  Forty-five minutes have passed since the first German team has departed with André and his betrayer. Now Jacqueline, André’s sister and confederate, is at the apartment’s front door. She is there to make dinner for everyone, because — naturally — the women are expected to cook. (In prewar France women don’t even have the right to vote — a privilege de Gaulle will finally bestow upon them after the Liberation.)

  Jacqueline performs the secret knock. Hearing no answer, she lets herself in with her own key. At first, the empty apartment doesn’t make her anxious. Gradually, she senses a certain disarray, but if there is blood on the floor of the hallway outside, she hasn’t noticed it. She walks into the kitchen and begins to peel some potatoes. Then she strikes a match to light a fire beneath them.

  Suddenly, she realizes she is missing a vital part of the meal. One immutable fact of Parisian life has not been altered by the Nazi Occupation: Frenchmen still require wine with their dinner. So Jacqueline leaves the potatoes simmering on the stove and walks out the front door.

  She skips the elevator and bounces down five flights of stairs to the street. Then she walks around the corner to the neighborhood épicerie. There she buys a few more groceries and the vital bottle of vin rouge.

  She will always remember this as the best-timed shopping trip of her life. When she returns to the apartment house, she notices something out front that had not been there four minutes earlier: another black Citroën Traction Avant.

  Jacqueline tiptoes into the apartment house. The passengers from the car out front have just closed the door of the elevator behind them. Now it is only one floor above her. Her body stiffens as she watches the wooden cabin rise slowly through the narrow open shaft. Second, third, fourth … finally, it stops at the fifth floor.

  Where her potatoes are cooking.

  Later, she will wonder what the Gestapo men think when they discover her potatoes on top of the kitchen stove.

  But right now, she is already sprinting toward the Métro.

  I have to save my sister. That is her only thought.

  Most of the time, Jacqueline and Christiane don’t tell each other where they will be during the day. But today Jacqueline happens to know that her little sister has taken the afternoon off to listen to some Bach at the Palais de Chaillot.

  But the concert hall is on the Right Bank, at Trocadéro — fourteen Métro stops away.

  Jacqueline sprints eight hundred yards to the Métro Glacière. She is pretty enough to turn heads anytime, but the sight of her racing through the Métro, her arms full of groceries, makes her uncomfortably conspicuous.

  She is out of breath when she reaches the platform — just as the train DIRECTION ÉTOILE pulls into the station.

  The train’s doors close behind her; then the trip seems to take forever: Denfert-Rochereau, Raspail, Montparnasse, Pasteur — still seven more stops to go.

  Jacqueline is hardly religious, but she is praying anyway — praying that she will somehow be able to intercept her sister before she returns to the secret apartment, where the second wave of the Gestapo is now waiting to capture both of them.

  But can she possibly get there before the concert ends?

  And even if she arrives before the final notes, how will she ever be able to pick her sister out of the crowd? She has no idea where Christiane is sitting, and the Palais de Chaillot is one of the largest concert halls in Paris.

  Now the train is rumbling out of its underground tunnel to travel over the Seine, to Passy. Just one more stop to go. Then it dives back underground to pull into Trocadéro.

  Jacqueline knows every inch of this station: It is the one she grew up with, the one closest to her parents’ apartment.

  She runs toward the exit for Palais de Chaillot. Now she is dashing past the statues of Apollo and Hercules, still carrying her groceries. As she enters the lobby, she can just make out the sounds of Bach still seeping out of the hall.

  I haven’t missed the end of the performance!

  But how will she ever be able to snatch Christiane out of the crowd?


  Happy accident? Or intuition?

  To the end of her life, Christiane will never be able to answer that question. Before today, she has never left a concert early. But this afternoon, something suddenly makes her stand up to leave the hall — ten minutes before the concert has ended!

  When she reaches the empty lobby, she walks straight into the arms of her frantic sister.

  “We can’t leave by the front door!”

  That is Jacqueline’s only greeting: She thinks that the Gestapo may have followed her here.

  Deciding that they have nothing left to lose, they approach the box office.

  Jacqueline tells the ticket seller that she needs to speak to the manager. He may betray them, but they see no other choice.

  When the manager appears, Jacqueline exclaims, “We can’t leave by the front door.” Nothing more.

  The manager looks at her silently, his face revealing nothing.

  Now he will save them … or turn them over to the Germans.

  He turns around and walks out of the box office.

  Then he leads the terrified (but still very attractive) young women to the stage door.

  Jacqueline repays his kindness by thrusting the groceries and the bottle of wine she has carried halfway across Paris into his hands. They will only slow them down now anyway. Outside, they scour the street for Gestapo men, but no one looks particularly menacing.

  BACK ON THE MÉTRO PLATFORM at Trocadéro, Christiane tells her sister she has another problem: She is carrying dozens of coded telegrams in her purse, having spent most of the day retrieving them from secret drop-off points all across Paris. Just three days earlier, André had finally managed to open a direct communications link to his handlers in London.

  Christiane never considers throwing away the incriminating cables; she must find somewhere to hide them. She settles on the apartment building of a sympathetic cousin, who lives on avenue Marceau. When they get there, Christiane runs inside and shoves the telegrams under the carpet in the elevator cabin. Without telling her cousin, of course. Later, she will retrieve them, after the immediate danger has passed.

  By now it is after eight o’clock, and the sisters have no idea whether André, or anyone else, has been arrested. They decide to return to the Glacière Métro stop. They think they might still catch their brother before he returns to the secret apartment, so they plant themselves at the station’s two exits.

  Then they stay there until the last Métro.

  Exhausted and depressed, they finally return to their parents’ apartment across the Seine, which is where they are still living, right next to the Palais de Chaillot. Fortunately, their parents are asleep, so they don’t have to decide whether they should tell them anything right away about what has happened.

  * Of the seven other men on the plane, one would be arrested eight days later, another was shot, and a third would die in a German concentration camp.

  † A renegade is certainly what de Gaulle was considered when he left France in 1940, “when Vichy dominated the climate of opinion” and Germany’s collaborators argued that to “remain in France was itself proof of honor,” as Ian Ousby put it. “To go to Britain and accept British favors made the desertion far worse.” (Occupation, p. 234) In 1942, the Institut d’étude des Questions Juives published posters depicting the general as a puppet of the Jews — “The Real Face of Free France.” (Peschanski, Collaboration and Resistance, p. 173)

  Two

  Dignity is incompatible with submission … I am a man who feels the necessity of engagement.

  — André Boulloche

  THE NEXT DAY, the Boulloche sisters are in shock. They still don’t know the fate of their brother and the rest of their confederates. They don’t even know if any of them was in the secret apartment when the Gestapo arrived, but they do know that André, his right-hand man, Charles Gimpel, his assistant, Geneviève, and Jacques may now be under arrest.

  And if the Germans have taken them, today they are almost certainly being tortured.

  In any case, the sisters must assume the worst and immediately evacuate all the clandestine locations known to their brother and his assistants. After two days, their co-conspirators are supposed to have found new hiding places, and the knowledge of the prisoners should be useless to their captors.

  In the afternoon, the sisters finally learn the dreadful news from Marie-Hélène Lefaucheux, a friend who is on good terms with the chaplain at La Salpêtrière. Marie-Hélène suspects that the chaplain is playing a double game with the Germans, but his information is usually reliable.

  The chaplain tells Marie-Hélène that André, Gimpel, and Geneviève have all been arrested, and that André has been shot. Marie-Hélène immediately relays the terrible news to André’s sisters.

  In a family full of secrets since the war began, the biggest secret of all is the fact that André has been back in Paris since September. For four months, the two girls have been spending their days with André, and sleeping at their parents’ home at night, without ever telling their mother and father that their youngest son has returned — because that is what André has ordered them to do.

  But their brother has also said that if he is arrested, they must tell their parents immediately, because his capture could jeopardize their safety.

  So now they finally reveal that André has been in Paris for four months, working for the Resistance. And today he is in a prison hospital, with a gunshot wound in his stomach.

  Their parents are horrified.

  But their mother also says this about her children’s decision to fight the Germans: “That’s what I would have done.”

  Perhaps she means that is how she would have acted if she had been sixteen or twenty when the war began, instead of fifty-one.

  The last time the whole family had been together was a dinner at the parents’ apartment in the spring of 1942. That evening, twenty months earlier, Christiane had felt terrible anxiety when she said goodbye to her two brothers.

  When will I see them again? she wondered.

  And even earlier, during the German invasion of France in 1940, her father had thought that his whole family would never be reunited in the same room again.

  For the next three weeks, Christiane and Jacqueline decamp to the apartment of a sympathetic woman friend who lives on boulevard Saint Michel. Her husband is a mining engineer who is away, working in the north most of the time. When he returns home one weekend, he makes it clear that he completely disapproves of what the two sisters are doing, because he’s not in the Resistance himself. But he also does not betray them.

  After three weeks at their friend’s house, they briefly return home to their parents’ sprawling apartment, because they think the danger has disappeared. “In general,” Christiane recalled, “things happened very quickly.” Then they decamp permanently to a series of secret apartments on rue de Lille and avenue Mozart.

  Her parents don’t feel that they are in danger, partly because they assume the Gestapo has been unable to learn their son’s real identity.

  Three

  I think I was marked by the debacle of 1940 for my whole life. I saw all the egotism and all the cowardice. I had an unreasoning patriotism. For me war is fought to the end — to the death.

  — André Boulloche

  WHEN WORLD WAR II BEGINS with Hitler’s invasion of Poland, on September 1, 1939, André and his older brother, Robert, have already been mobilized to serve in the French Army. Christiane is just fifteen years old. She has spent the summer across the channel in Kent, living with an English family so that she can learn the language. Before she leaves France, her father warns her that she may have to come home early. A couple of days before the war begins, he telephones her in England to summon her back to Paris.

  Remembering how the capital was bombarded during World War I, Jacques Boulloche decides to move his wife and daughters to their country house in Fontainebleau, forty-five miles south of Paris. The fifty-one-year-old father is still in his gover
nment job in the capital, which puts him in charge of all French highways. Since 1937 he has been inspecteur général des ponts et chaussées and directeur des routes du ministère des travaux publics.

  IN 1939, the catastrophe of the First World War is still a scorching memory for every French person over twenty-five. More than 1,357,000 French soldiers died in the “Great War” — and a staggering 76 percent of the 8,410,000 Frenchmen who fought it were killed, wounded, taken prisoner, or missing in action.

  That was more than one-fifth of the population of France.

  Those casualties transform postwar France into a nation of old people and cripples and women without men in the 1920s. Every surviving municipality has a monument commemorating its losses in the Great War, but scores of villages are wiped out altogether, after a whole generation of their young men has been annihilated.

  The worst legacy of World War I is the obsequious approach Britain and France adopt toward Hitler’s Germany. Between 1935 and 1939, British and French leaders bungle every opportunity to rein in the Nazi leader before another all-out war becomes inevitable.

  In 1935, a year after promoting himself to the new office of Führer, Hitler abrogates the military provisions of the Treaty of Versailles and begins Germany’s massive rearmament program. In March 1936, he violates the treaty again, by reoccupying the Rhineland on France’s border.

  At that moment, Britain and France could easily have rolled over Hitler’s troops, but both countries are paralyzed — still reeling from the Great Depression, and their losses in World War I.

  The depth of antiwar feeling in France and Britain is suggested by the reaction of a clergyman in Liverpool after Germany reoccupies the Rhineland. When the British government declares that the Rhineland should be occupied by an international force until the dispute with Hitler can be resolved, the canon gives orders that no more prayers are to be offered up for the British government. “To continue an enforcement of the spirit of inequality upon Germany is a proposal unworthy of our creed and of our country,” the canon thunders. “To renew an occupation of their homeland is a proposal monstrous and unjustifiable; it is an unnecessary degradation of the soul of a great people. To add to it that we shall do it again at the dictation of France is to lend aid to malice and to surrender right to vengeance. We cannot pray a blessing upon such proposals.”*