The Cost of Courage

by Charles Kaiser

  Etienne Audibert’s remembrance continued:

  It is something entirely different to die in a concentration camp. Death from action or during combat, consensual death accepted with one’s full strength, has nothing in common with gradual physical and moral erosion, a progressive degradation, when the victim sees his faculties slowly disappear, his personality silently breaking up. Those who knew Jacques Boulloche, his wife, and their children could not fail to appreciate the extreme refinement of their milieu. Everything breathed elegance; everything carried the luster of high culture and good taste. Could they recognize these tattered people when they were dressed in rags, deprived of everything, famished, shivering from the cold, treated worse than any beast has ever been, struck by blows for no reason, weakened daily by humiliations that could only be conceived by the deranged imaginations of monstrous perverts? Can others imagine their agony, alone, far from the sky of France and everyone they loved, these spectral beings with a feverish glow, their eyes like concave sockets, with protruding ears and parched skin ready to crack, living their final weeks in a ghastly atmosphere polluted by the foul smell of the smoke of the crematorium? And added to their own pain, the desperate anxiety each of them felt about the other three? When they are finally dead, no friendly hand comes to close their eyes. And then the cinders of their flesh are dispersed to the wind.

  AT THE BEGINNING OF 1945, the sisters still don’t know any of this. Jacqueline decides to go to Switzerland, to see if there might be a way to ransom the freedom of the rest of the family. Her trip is a failure: She learns nothing about her parents or her brothers. When she returns to Paris, she tells her sister there is only an infinitesimal chance that any of them will survive.

  Christiane briefly gets a job as the secretary for the Canadian ambassador to Paris, but the position is a poor fit. Christiane doesn’t even know how to type, and she doesn’t last there very long. Jacqueline goes to work for the Bureau Central de Renseignements et d’Action, the same organization André had been assigned to when he was de Gaulle’s military delegate in occupied Paris.

  The sisters enjoy going out with the American and Canadian troops who are now crowding the city. They take them to dinner at their mess, which has much better food than what is available to most Parisian civilians. The Occupation is over, but most store shelves remain empty.

  At the same time, the sisters are very much aware of the Battle of the Bulge, the last major German counteroffensive, and the greatest surprise attack on American forces after Pearl Harbor. It begins in the middle of December 1944 in the Ardennes region of Belgium, France, and Luxembourg.

  On December 16, two hundred thousand soldiers from three German armies suddenly launch themselves against the Allies. There has been a serious Allied intelligence failure — the day before the attack, British field marshal Montgomery promised Eisenhower that the Germans cannot “stage major offensive operations.” Just as the Germans had partly ignored the explicit BBC warning of the impending invasion at Normandy, Allied intelligence officers had discounted the information from four captured German POWs, who had warned of a pre-Christmas offensive.

  The German thrust is forty miles wide and fifty-five miles deep into the Allied line, creating a shape on the map that gave the battle its enduring name. On December 19, the 5th Panzer Army surrounds the American 106th Division in the center of the offensive at St. Vith, and forces eight thousand American soldiers to surrender — the largest defeat of American troops since the Civil War.

  As the weather slowly improves, the Allies’ overwhelming air superiority gradually reasserts itself, the Germans begin to run out of gasoline, and the systematic destruction of railroad lines makes it impossible to bring a single German train across the Rhine. When the battle finally ends in the fourth week of January, the Germans have lost 120,000 men killed, wounded, captured, or missing, while the Americans have suffered 19,000 killed, 48,000 wounded, and 21,000 captured or missing. “The great difference,” wrote Andrew Roberts, “was that in material the Allies could make up these large losses, whereas the Germans no longer could.”

  In the end, the Ardennes offensive weakens the remaining German troops so much that its biggest effect is to hasten the progress of the Russian advance from the east.

  IT IS APRIL 1945 before Jacqueline and Christiane receive confirmation of the first of three catastrophes. They are at lunch at the home of their aunt Ginette — the same aunt who had sent her maid into the street to intercept Christiane and save her life, hours after her parents had been arrested. The telephone rings, and they learn officially that their mother is dead. A short time later, they are notified of their father’s death. But they still have no news of either of their brothers.

  Two weeks later, Adolf Hitler, the father of all of Europe’s agony, summons his longtime mistress, Eva Braun, to his underground bunker in Berlin. He marries her on April 29. At three thirty the following afternoon, Hitler shoots himself in the mouth with a revolver, and Braun — his wife of forty hours — swallows poison. Hitler’s propaganda minister, Joseph Goebbels, is the last of his top collaborators to remain in the bunker with the Führer as the Russians swarm over Berlin. The day after Hitler dies, Goebbels and his wife poison their six children inside the bunker. Then they both commit suicide.

  Mussolini and his mistress are caught by Italian partisans on April 26 while trying to escape into Switzerland. They are executed two days later and then strung up by their feet from lampposts in Milan. On April 29, the Germans sign an unconditional surrender of Italy and southern Austria; it takes effect on May 2, removing one million German troops from the conflict.

  In Nuremberg, the site of gigantic Nazi rallies in the 1930s, American troops replace “Adolf-Hitler-Str.” signs with new ones reading “Roosevelt Blvd.” Then they blow up the huge stone swastika atop the Nuremberg stadium.

  On May 5, Admiral Hans-Georg von Friedeburg, the new commander in chief of the German Navy, arrives in Reims, in northeastern France, where Eisenhower has established his headquarters. Two days later, at three forty-one in the morning, Germany surrenders unconditionally. At midnight on May 8, the guns stop firing and the bombs stop falling all across Europe. The “Thousand-Year Reich” is finally extinguished, after twelve years, four months, and eight days of mayhem, perversity, destruction, and death.

  A FEW DAYS BEFORE the surrender is signed ending the war in Europe, Christiane and Jacqueline get a terrible scare. The doorbell rings at their parents’ apartment. It is Gilbert Farges, one of the men who had shielded André on the train when he was deported to Auschwitz. When he introduces himself — “I was deported with your brother André” — the sisters are sure he is there to announce André’s death. But Farges immediately adds that their brother is still alive — the first genuinely good news they have had in 1945.

  Unlike the other members of his family sent to the camps, André has a vital cadre of friends at Flossenbürg. Somehow, everyone who survives with him is equipped with “the intimate conviction that we would still be alive after the war,” remembered his friend Michel Bommelaer. “Among us, there was always a faithfully burning pocket of joy and hope.”

  André’s most extraordinary morale booster for Michel, his fellow piano player, is to teach him “the Schumann piano concerto, certain Beethoven sonatas, and the Brandenburg Concertos” — all without a piano, of course. “In this way he shared a small piece of his very tender heart, his determination to fight,” and his belief — remarkable, under the circumstances — in the “intellectual quest of a humanity that, no matter what, had a chance to better itself.”

  Gilbert Farges said, “Survival was a constant act of will and dignity. André applied himself with discipline, determination, and a ferocious courage at all moments. The influence of his example surely saved the lives of a number of his companions. This period of his existence tempered his character — tempered it the way one used to temper a sword in an earlier era.”

  A postcard Jacqueline wrote to André in
German at the beginning of 1945, when he was still a prisoner at Flossenbürg.(photo credit 1.16)

  André Boulloche in the summer of 1945, immediately after his return to Paris from three German concentration camps.(photo credit 1.17)

  IT WILL REQUIRE one more miracle for André to return to his sisters’ arms alive. At dawn on April 16, 1945, at an altitude of twenty-five hundred feet, the camp at Flossenbürg is bathed in “a pure and wonderfully soft light,” Georges d’Argenlieu remembered. The sounds of American guns can be heard in the distance. And suddenly all the SS guards leave the camp.

  “We had been saved!” d’Argenlieu exulted. “There will be no evacuation! Fourteen thousand deportees with no strength lay extended, offering their bodies to the rays of this first sun of resurrection.” The sounds of American guns grow closer: ten miles, then seven miles away. But when the sun goes down that night, the SS returns, heaving everyone “back into the void.”

  “On April 20th, the sinister evacuation — the one we had so rejoiced at escaping — begins,” d’Argenlieu continued. “Fourteen thousand leave the camp in five hours. Their rescue by the Americans is three days and eighty miles away. The six thousand who succumb on the road will never know that minute.”

  Through a final stroke of good fortune, André Boulloche, Charles Gimpel, Henri Lerognon, another alumnus of the Ecole polytechnique, and Georges d’Argenlieu manage to slip into the typhoid ward of the camp at the moment of the evacuation. That is the only way they can avoid the death march. Three days later, on April 23, a unit of George Patton’s army finally arrives to liberate the camp.

  IN THE CHAOS following the liberation, it takes André nearly four weeks to make his way back to Paris, a fearfully gaunt figure with the bulging eyes of a camp survivor. On May 19, he finally enters the lobby of his parents’ apartment building on avenue d’Eylau. The concierge recognizes the ravaged twenty-nine-year-old as he walks in the front door. As André gets on the elevator, the concierge sprints up the stairs to warn his sisters that their brother has come home.

  “Of course he was extremely thin,” Christiane remembered. “But what was worse was the horrible look in his eyes.” The sisters have agreed that Christiane will deliver the terrible news about their parents when André gets there. “But, when he was finally standing there before us,” Christiane remembered, “with that ghastly appearance that all the deportees had, I could not utter a word.”

  When she finally gathers her strength to tell him what has happened, this is his immediate reply: “If I’d known that, I would not have come back. I would have died in the camps.” When they tell him which camp Robert has been sent to, André says there is very little chance that he has survived there.

  A couple of weeks after André’s return, they are officially notified that Robert died at Ellrich, on January 20, 1945.

  * During the time General Choltitz was a prisoner of the Allies, he declared, “I’m saying that we steal! We collect the stuff up into stores, like proper robbers … that’s the frightful part of it. This revolting business of engaging in organized robbery of private property … Throughout the whole of France … Whole train-loads of the most beautiful antique furniture from private houses! It’s frightful; it’s an indescribable disgrace!” (Neitzel, Tapping Hitler’s Generals)

  Part II

  Nineteen

  My deportation to the camps is very largely what made me what I am today. And it was the war that led me to socialism. I am a man who engages in life — who feels the necessity to engage.

  — André Boulloche

  André Boulloche had the longest service in the Resistance, the most audacious, the most important and the most challenging.

  — André Postel-Vinay

  “Did your father André ever talk about the war?”

  “Once, perhaps. But he didn’t have to talk about it. It was always there. It’s as if you said we’re going to talk about the fact that the walls are white. Obviously they’re white! You’re not going to talk about them, because they’re there, all the time.”

  — Agnès Boulloche

  THE THREE SURVIVORS chose very different paths to salvation when the war was over. Christiane and Jacqueline “turned the page” by getting married* and having children — and by never discussing the war with each other, or almost anyone else, for fifty years. Jacqueline and Alex Katlama were the first to marry, in the summer of 1945, shortly after André’s return from the camps.

  Jacqueline and Alex Katlama. They became wife and husband shortly after André Boulloche returned to Paris in 1945.(photo credit 1.18)

  André took a very different approach. Although he also married quite quickly and started a family, unlike his sisters he blamed himself explicitly for everything that had happened. Beyond his austere personality — a mournful contrast to the cheerful young man he had been before the war — two things made his attitude clear to everyone: For the rest of his life, he kept his hair shorn to a crew cut, and he wore a black tie every day, in memory of the dead.

  Jacqueline and Christiane after the war. By the middle of 1947 both of them had gotten married.(photo credit 1.19)

  In the months after the Liberation, there was an orgy of retribution against those who had collaborated with the Nazis. Women who had slept with the Germans had their heads shaved in the streets, while ten thousand Frenchmen were the victims of summary executions. Another one hundred thousand were tried in civilian and military courts, and about fifteen hundred of them were executed.

  When he got back to Paris, André had an operation to repair the badly tended gunshot wound to his stomach. But he quickly discovered that nearly giving his life for the liberty of France was not enough to guarantee him a warm welcome when he returned. Several of his relatives made it clear that they blamed him and his sisters for the deaths of their parents and their brother. That was something I learned from two of his nephews. Christiane never mentioned it to me. This was another taboo subject, within the larger taboo of silence the three of them embraced.

  The hostility they faced from their family was probably one of the reasons he and Christiane decided to go to America for a year. André returned to his roots as a highway engineer and proposed a study of American traffic lights. He arranged for Christiane to accompany him as part of his team. “Being former Résistants opened a lot of doors” in 1946, Christiane explained.

  Before they left on their trip, they organized a funeral mass for their parents and Robert at Saint-Honoré d’Eylau, a church eight hundred yards from their parents’ apartment. It was rare for half of a non-Jewish French family to have died in the German camps. Christiane remembered the service as a horrible event, an overflowing church with an endless parade of hands to shake afterward.

  Because of heavy winter seas in the North Atlantic, their trip to America on a cargo ship took twenty-two days and came with plenty of seasickness. When they arrived in New York in December, they were astonished by the vitality of the city, especially after the drab postwar Paris they had left behind. But New York was freezing and covered in snow, and Christiane did not have anything to wear to cope with the weather.

  “I went to Macy’s to buy a coat, and I couldn’t buy anything. Because there was too much! I was used to the stores in France, where there was three times nothing. So going to Macy’s was horrible! My head was spinning. It really had a strange effect on me. The next day was better. I had to buy something, because I was cold!”

  Their American base was Washington, D.C. Their apartment was in a black neighborhood, which shocked their American friends. Christiane was oblivious of her neighbors, except for the annoying owner of the liquor store below them, who seemed determined to sleep with her. They reconnected with Henry Kaiser in Washington, and met his wife, Paula. They also met my parents there for the first time. Christiane thought New York was much more interesting than Washington, and whenever she had a little money, she would take the train up to Manhattan.

  The invitation for the memorial service for
the family members who died in Germany. Christiane remembered it as a horrible event. Soon afterward she and her brother left for a trip to America.(photo credit 1.20)

  When she got to the United States, Christiane realized she had a new duty: to educate Americans about what the Resistance had done in France. She traveled across the country, from New York to San Francisco, giving lectures about the Resistance to American college students.

  Once again Christiane felt she was performing her duty. When she spoke about her experiences at a club in Washington, she got her picture in the Washington Post. “Fear of the Gestapo was transmitted to the children,” the Post reported her saying. “Nevertheless, the young people are eager to shake off that haunting fear, and eager to rebuild their lives.” One of the young people she was talking about, of course, was herself.

  Christiane also learned that Americans generally knew absolutely nothing about how the Resistance had operated in France during the war — something that has barely changed seventy years later.

  The brother-and-sister team stayed in America through the summer. André continued to suffer terrible guilt about the fate of half his family. On August 5, 1946, he revealed his feelings in his diary:

  Why did my life have to be spared, when I was offering it so willingly, even cheerfully? And why did those three who wanted to live, and who loved life so passionately — why were their lives taken from them in the vilest, most brutal way imaginable? Why did I have to be left behind, I who had pushed the barge so far from the shore? Left behind without faith, without hope, but chained to life by my passionate love for my two sisters.…

  When this unlikely and idiotic thing happened, my nature was awakened beneath a kind of false shell of wisdom. When the war came, I had, with great effort, offered the complete sacrifice of my life — mine and mine alone. When I left France [at the end of 1942], I was the only one in danger. With the near certainty of my imminent death, I felt the compensations that only a profound determination can provide.