The Cost of Courage

by Charles Kaiser

  This is the baffling part of his story.

  André and his chief aide, Charles Gimpel, have been arrested together on January 12, 1944.

  Gimpel is brutally tortured by the Germans, but he survives the torture — and never talks.

  Unlike Gimpel, André is shot at the time of his arrest, and that may explain why he never suffered the same way his deputy did — if André has told the truth about the way he was treated.

  It is possible that by the time he had recovered enough from his gunshot wounds to be interrogated, whatever information he had was no longer worth much, because by then his unarrested comrades had all moved on to new secret locations.

  Or else the Germans felt they had already learned whatever they needed to know from Jacques, the Sorbonne student who had betrayed him and brought the Gestapo to his door.

  Later, André tells his sister that his interrogators read him excerpts of their interview with Jacques, including this passage: “I was recruited by Christiane Boulloche. She lives with her parents and her sister Jacqueline at 28, avenue d’Eylau, third floor on the right. Her brother is my boss. He is living in a clandestine apartment on rue de la Santé in the Thirteenth.”

  When his German interrogators demanded confirmation of Jacques’s words, André said that he used a formula that failed for scores of others but somehow worked for him: He identified himself as a French officer on a military mission. Therefore, under the rules of war, he cannot speak.

  “If you found yourself in the same circumstances,” he tells the German officers standing over him, “you would certainly do the same, and remain silent.”

  After that, André always said, the Germans stopped trying to interrogate him that day.‡

  The strongest counterevidence to this claim appears in the secret British file about André’s wartime activities, which was declassified almost six decades later, at my request. There was only one item in the file that contradicted anything that he had told his family.

  It is this entry from 1946: “in spite of [his wounds] and of cruel tortures [emphasis supplied], he gave away no compromising information.” (Later, for his valor he was awarded the King’s Medal for Courage.)

  In February, André is moved to Fresnes, one of the largest prisons in France, in the town of Fresnes, Val-de-Marne, just outside Paris. Most of the other prisoners are fellow Resistance members, and many of them have already been tortured. On February 15, he undergoes his second interrogation. By then he has been a prisoner for just over a month. The Germans read him a list of names and ask him to identify the ones he knows. Once again he refuses to cooperate.

  By now his information is so old, most of it is probably worthless anyway. That could be why he again avoids being tortured.

  “The Gestapo wasn’t always logical.” That is his sister Christiane’s only explanation for the way her brother says he was treated. Or, as Postel-Vinay put it, pondering his own survival without ever being tortured, “Perhaps I was wrong to look for logic in an organization in which ability, incoherence, chance, barbarism and political rivalries were constantly warring for the upper hand.”

  TIPPED OFF that her brother has been moved to Fresnes, Christiane tries to deliver packages to him there. Occasionally they are accepted, but usually they are rejected.

  One night in March, André reconnects with fellow prisoner Gilbert Farges, a former rugby player whom he had met a few times before. They stay up all night talking about their families, their arrests, and the “loving attention” they have both received from the Gestapo. Despite their circumstances, they also talk about the future, and their determination to escape. About this André is “inflexible, inexhaustible — and full of imagination.”

  By dawn, Farges and Boulloche have become good friends. For André, this will quickly become a lifesaving friendship.

  On April 7, André is moved to the transit camp of Royallieu, in Compiègne, fifty miles north of Paris. Compiègne has been the hunting grounds of the kings of France since the eighth century. In 1944, it becomes the final stop for thousands of French patriots hunted down by the enemy, before they are deported to Germany.

  Despite his badly tended wound, André is already becoming a leader of his fellow prisoners, through his dignity, his serenity, and his intellectual strength. In Fresnes, he had been kept in an underground cell. Now, for the first time in months, he can occasionally see the sun.

  To Gilbert Farges, Compiègne feels like “semiliberty” compared to Fresnes: “The simple fact of seeing the sky and the sun, of being able to walk around and talk, feel like precious gifts. But we were barely nourished and many of us were already in terrible health.”

  André reconnects with another important person here: Charles Gimpel, his deputy in Paris before their arrest, now a fellow prisoner. As Gimpel’s British handlers noted before his return to France, Gimpel is “an excellent man,” “physically well above average,” with “an excellent brain,” an “outstanding” personality and a “keenness on the job” that is “infectious.” (After the war, the British also award Gimpel the King’s Medal for Courage.)

  During their walks outside in the prison courtyard, the men are buoyed by glimpses of squadrons of American B-17 Flying Fortresses and B-24 Liberators filling the sky on their way to Germany.

  Another fellow prisoner, Michel Bommelaer, finds it incredibly moving “to watch these heads from a mortuary … following the planes as they flew east, where a promised land of unimaginable cruelty awaits us.”

  In the third week of April, Christiane gets a tip that André is about to be shipped off to Germany. Hoping to catch a final glimpse of him, Christiane and Jacqueline travel with their parents to Compiègne, where they spend the night in a squalid hotel. The next morning, they spot André in the courtyard, hunched over because of his badly tended wound. When André sees them, Christiane tries to throw him a loaf of bread with a file hidden in the middle of it, but the Gestapo shout at her and push her away.

  At this moment it occurs to André that this may be the last time that he will ever see his family. But despite his family’s horror over his departure, there is also an element of hope: “When we learned one of our comrades would be deported, we were relieved,” Christiane remembered. “Because it meant that they hadn’t been tortured to death.”

  André boards the deportation train on April 27, 1944 — forty days before the Allied invasion at Normandy. Gilbert Farges pushes him into a corner of the car to make it easier to protect him. Then Farges asks Rémy, a beefy man from the Basque region, to stand next to both of them. From then on, André leans on one of these two men, concentrating all the time to conserve his energy.

  Seventeen hundred prisoners are put in seventeen cattle cars: one hundred crammed into each car. Their destination is Auschwitz. Among them are thirty-nine employees of the French national railroad, two poets, twenty priests, and members of sixty-four different Resistance organizations.

  Most of them are younger than thirty-five. The youngest prisoner is fifteen, the oldest, seventy-one. They range from laborers and journalists to businessmen, politicians, and policemen.

  Among the more famous are Pierre Johnson, inspector general of Compagnie Transatlantique shipping company, who is a great-great-nephew of the nineteenth-century American president Andrew Johnson, and Count Paul Chandon-Möet, a champagne magnate, who will die a few days before his prison camp is liberated by the Allies.

  Also on board is Charles Porte. Porte was the police commissioner of Chartres when Jean Moulin, the head of the Resistance, was prefect of Eure-et-Loir. Porte had been responsible for security for the inaugural meeting of the Conseil national de la Résistance, which Moulin presided over on May 27, 1943. Porte will survive deportation and return to France after the war.

  During four horrific days and three terrible nights, the prisoners struggle to survive without food or water. Dozens of them succumb before the train reaches the death camp. The cars are so crammed with humanity, no one ever has enough room
to sit down. André is guarded the whole time by Gilbert Farges and Rémy, both of whom are big enough to protect him; fortunately, Farges is as wide as he is tall. André’s organs are kept inside by a very thin layer of skin, and a blow to his stomach would surely be fatal.

  When thirst and hunger take hold, many of the prisoners become delirious, touching off terrifying scenes of madness. “As time passed, the temperature mounted, asphyxiation was winning, and a devouring thirst installed itself with dementia and violence,” Farges remembered.

  As one prisoner after another dies, their corpses are piled on top of one another in a corner to make more room for the survivors. “The crazy people become dangerous to the point where they try to open their own veins or those of others to drink their blood.”

  Rémy tells Farges, “We will not let your friend André die because of these maniacs.” Somehow, through it all, André retains a strong spirit. “That was essential,” said Farges. Occasionally, André is able to snatch a breath of fresh air from the cracks in the car. Just once, the Germans offer a bucket of water, but the prisoners are so frantic that it gets turned over before anyone can take a drink.

  As their journey approaches the end, the survivors are nearly naked after stripping themselves because of the scorching heat. As the train reaches Silesia, the temperature drops, and the fetid air inside becomes slightly fresher. By the time they reach Auschwitz, it is freezing, and the ground is covered with snow.

  When the doors of the cars are finally flung open, the prisoners are greeted by Gestapo men armed with revolvers and machine guns, others with vicious dogs pulling at their leashes, and the notorious capos, prisoners who are violent criminals used by the Germans to assist them with their punishments.

  As he climbs out of the train, one of the Frenchmen jumps on a guard, causing his gun to misfire; the man is immediately shot dead by another German.

  The prisoners are put in two separate barracks in Birkenau, the main extermination camp at Auschwitz. There each one is tattooed with a number on his forearm. Finally, the day after their arrival, they are given their first drink of water in five days.

  After that, under the watchful eyes of the capos — “precarious survivors, brutal, hostile thieves who also know fear in this atmosphere of death” — all of the hair on their bodies is shaved.

  Auschwitz is an unusual destination for these political prisoners: The convoy of April 27 is one of only three trains of non-Jews to be sent there from France during the entire war. André believed that these seventeen hundred prisoners were brought to Auschwitz to be exterminated in retaliation for the death of Pierre Pucheu. A former minister of the interior in the collaborationist Vichy government, he had been executed by the Free French in Algiers one month earlier.

  The personal intervention of Marshal Pétain may be the only reason that everyone on the train isn’t executed immediately.

  DETERMINATION, DIGNITY, AND LUCK are the three requirements for survival. Remarkably, those are the attributes André still has in abundance. “After three weeks of murderous drills, the survivors still hadn’t given up,” Gilbert Farges recalled. The fearful scene reminded him of a saying of Montaigne: “They bent their knees, but held their souls high.”

  The prisoners watch the smoke spewing from the chimneys of the crematoria of Auschwitz all day and all night. After a few weeks, the survivors of the first convoy are put onto a new train of cattle cars, this one destined for Buchenwald. The transfer means a tiny improvement in André’s chances for survival. Ninety-five percent of the deportees to Auschwitz died at that camp, compared to 85 percent of the inmates at Buchenwald.

  The capos at Auschwitz tell them their new home will be practically a “sanitarium” compared to their present one.

  * An ironic choice for Vernier-Palliez: Four decades later he will become France’s ambassador to the United States.

  † Neither man can imagine that one year from now, Rondenay will succeed André as de Gaulle’s military delegate in Paris, after André is arrested.

  ‡ André’s brother-in-law, Alex Katlama, told his son, Michel, that André hadn’t been tortured because he had been wounded: “My father told me that they didn’t torture him because they were worried he would die, or he wouldn’t be able to take it.” (author’s interview with Michel Katlama, March 14, 1999)

  Twelve

  Of course the two years through which Free France had endured had also been filled with reversals and disappointments, but then we had to stake everything to win everything; we had felt ourselves surrounded by a heroic atmosphere, sustained by the necessity of gaining our ends at any price.

  — Charles de Gaulle

  BACK IN PARIS, Christiane and Jacqueline have finally moved out of their parents’ home into a new secret apartment. Apparently, it doesn’t occur to anyone that Jacques, or André, might have been tortured into giving up their parents’ address. In any case, their father never considers resigning his job as the director of the bureau of highways or going into hiding with his wife. His main concern, Christiane believes, is to keep his country working, “for the French.”

  As James L. Stokesbury observed, men like Christiane’s father “were servants of the state, sworn to defend it; the accidents of war had made the legitimate French government a tool of the conqueror, yet it was still the official French government. It took a special kind of person to throw aside the norms of a lifetime, to make the lonely decision that there was a higher loyalty, a higher duty, than that he had always acknowledged, and in the name of some abstract moral principle to work against his own government.”

  Robert Paxton, the preeminent American historian of Vichy France, points out that “as the state came under challenge by Resistance vigilantism, a commitment to the ongoing functioning of the state reinforced the weight of routine … Resistance was not merely personally perilous. It was also a step toward social revolution.”

  After André Boulloche’s arrest in January 1944, de Gaulle replaces him as military delegate in Paris with André Rondenay, André’s college classmate, whom he had run into in Spain a year earlier, when Boulloche was on his way to London.

  Rondenay is a man of parts. His thick brown hair and horn-rim glasses give him the look of an intellectual, and he favors three-piece suits with double-breasted vests.

  Three and a half years into the war, Rondenay is a famous escape artist. First taken prisoner in the Vosges region of France near the German border in June 1940, he spends time as a prisoner in Saarburg and Westphalia before being transferred to Mainz in October.

  After escaping and being recaptured several times, he is taken to Colditz Castle, a prisoner-of-war camp for officers, in January 1942. In May, he is moved again, this time to Lübeck.* There he manages to manufacture the perfect papers of a German officer. On December 19, 1942, he and a comrade walk out unchallenged through the front gate of the camp.

  His fake identity continues to protect him during an incredible journey through Hamburg, Frankfurt, Mayence, Ludwigshafen, and Strasbourg. After a brief stay in France, he crosses the Spanish frontier on January 23, 1943.

  André Rondenay was a master forger and a famous escape artist. When he became Christiane’s boss in the Resistance in 1944, she was mesmerized by him.(photo credit 1.12)

  Arrested by the Spanish police, he is interned at Pamplona, where he runs into his old classmate André Boulloche, who had arrived in Spain four weeks before him.

  Managing to fabricate the fake papers of a German officer for himself and a comrade named Noël Palaud, Rondenay escapes yet again with Palaud and a third conspirator. Within a few weeks, they reach Portugal, and Rondenay finally makes it to England on April 4, 1943.

  IN THE FACE of mounting danger in the spring of 1944, Rondenay remains surprisingly cheerful. His fearlessness is lightened by an infectious sense of humor and a beguiling ability to make fun of himself. To boost Christiane’s spirits, he writes a song that makes fun of her youth and the fact that she has never told her parents ex
actly what she is doing. And he continues to concoct everything from a train ticket to a German officer’s identity card at a moment’s notice. His wife, Solange, is one of his deputies.

  Christiane knows Rondenay as “Jarry” — the latest of his many wartime aliases. The others are Lemniscate, Sapeur, Jean-Louis Lebel, and Francis Courtois. He gives Christiane “very large sums” of money, which arrive from London, and she distributes it to their confederates. “I was twenty,” she said. “It was completely crazy. He had total confidence in me. I think he had more confidence in me than he did in himself.”

  Now Monsieur and Madame Rondenay are living with the Boulloche girls, plus Georges, another force of nature, who has escaped Germany three times. This motley crew is rounded out by their radio operator, Riquet, and his wife, Gaby. All of them live together in the same apartment, in total secrecy.

  CHRISTIANE had become a student at Sciences Po in the fall of 1941, and André told her to continue to show up there occasionally, after she went to work for him in the fall of 1943. She also continued to live with her parents. Only after André’s arrest does she stop going to school and move out of her parents’ apartment, to begin a completely clandestine life.

  One part of Christiane’s job is to take care of Riquet’s radio equipment. His transmissions are in constant danger of being discovered by the Gestapo, which deploys “gonios” — trucks equipped with homing devices to locate the secret transmitters.

  To reduce the chances of being discovered, they never transmit from the same location for very long. At one point, Christiane’s aunt, Françoise Farcot, allows her niece to use her modest country house to make a few broadcasts. One day, when Christiane isn’t there, the Gestapo arrives at her aunt’s house.

  Seeing them at the front door, one of Christiane’s cousins snatches the radio and manages to hide it in the attic. If he hadn’t been so quick, everyone in the house would have been arrested.