“The plane must have left late,” Boulloche’s aide in Montbéliard told her. The aide seemed unperturbed, but Vauban was immediately suspicious. Her next call was to Christian Pierret, the candidate in Saint-Dié-des-Vosges for whom Boulloche had been campaigning earlier that afternoon. Pierret told her that Boulloche had taken off on time. Then his secretary made another call to Montbéliard to inquire about the weather there.
“Snow! Terrible wind! Hail!”
Andrée Vauban immediately sensed that her boss was in danger. Something is happening, she said to herself. He should have arrived by now. Her next call was to the Ministry of the Interior. Then she contacted Odile. Mme. Boulloche rushed off to Le Bourget to catch the last plane of the night to Belfort-Fontaine, one of the airports where André’s plane had been unable to land a few hours earlier. As soon as she arrived, this formidable spouse started phoning civil and military officials to get them to expand the search.
André’s younger son, Jacques, was now a twenty-four-year-old medical student in Paris. He was driving across the city when he heard a radio report that his father’s airplane had disappeared. His first thought was that his father might have been the victim of some kind of attack.
When André’s sister Christiane returned home to her Paris apartment on square Alboni, in the 16th arrondissement, it was her husband, Jean, who greeted her with the disquieting news: “André’s plane hasn’t arrived back in Montbéliard.”
That was all they knew.
That night, François Mitterrand, the leader of the Socialist Party, issued a statement:
This is a very remarkable man — remarkable among the remark-ables — greatly loved by all who know him. I feel great pain and great concern. When one says those two words, “André Boulloche,” they are a salute to someone quite exceptional, on every level. He is an exemplary man.
German and French helicopters swarmed above the Black Forest in search of the plane on Thursday night, but darkness and the snowstorm prevented them from finding anything. It was the following afternoon when a search party found the bodies of André and Renaud Mary, a hundred yards apart, down the hill from their fallen plane. Apparently the young pilot had kept searching for help after André could go no farther.
Their bodies were found by French troops of the 12th Regiment stationed in Mulheim, Germany. Years later, Jacqueline’s daughter, Claudine Lefer, had a clear memory of her mother’s reaction to the news: “And on top of everything else, the plane crashed in Germany.”
FOUR DAYS AFER HIS DEATH, André’s body lay in state in the Montbéliard City Hall, surrounded by a silent honor guard of local council members and city officials. “Men and women of every class and every age passed his coffin, sometimes depositing a small bouquet of flowers,” the local newspaper, L’Est Républicain, reported. “One had the impression of the entire city parading by, like a river flowing slowly and majestically. There was an extraordinary impression of grave sadness, but above all, of dignity, which was symbolic of the particular influence of André Boulloche, who had attracted such affection and respect.” Seven special airplanes were flying dignitaries in for the funeral on March 21, plus an eighth for François Mitterrand.
At 9 o’clock in the morning, André’s wooden coffin was taken from City Hall by six white-gloved firemen, followed by an army officer holding a pillow displaying the dead man’s four most important decorations — Commandeur de la Légion d’Honneur, Compagnon de la Libération, Croix de Guerre, and Médaille de la Résistance. Outside, the firemen wrapped the coffin in the French Tricolor, then placed it in the center of a fire truck and covered it with a glass enclosure. As rain began to drench the slow procession, umbrellas of every color bobbed up and down above the huge crowd that followed the peculiar red funeral coach. The mourners included four delegations of deportees who had survived the German camps.
The funeral itself took place at the Fairgrounds Hall of Montbéliard. Because it could accommodate only three thousand people, an outdoor sound system was installed for thousands more who wanted to listen outside.
There were half a dozen speakers, including Mitterrand, André Postel-Vinay and, remarkably, two Germans: Volker Hauff, a prominent Social Democrat who was minister of science and technology, and Otfried Ulshöfer, the mayor of Ludwigsburg, the German twin city of Montbéliard.
Every speaker described the main postwar preoccupation of this survivor of three German concentration camps: André’s unstinting efforts to foster friendship and reconciliation between France and Germany. In a remarkable act of intellectual jiu-jitsu, André took all of the ghastly energy from his wartime incarceration and turned it around to make sure that nothing like what had happened to him would ever happen to another Frenchman or German again.
In his funeral oration, Mitterrand, the future president of France, declared that André had wanted to “sublimate his sufferings, to give them meaning beyond this moment in history. It was as if he had found the capacity within Europe to construct peace and harmony among all peoples … He considered reconciliation with Germany a necessity. When he turned toward the Germans, he was the first among us who knew how to say, ‘My friends.’ ”
Otfried Ulshöfer quoted André’s speech from three years earlier, when the two mayors had celebrated the twenty-fifth anniversary of the twinning of their two cities. “Today the two of us maintain the flame of friendship between us. Tomorrow, others will have this duty, and I am convinced that they shall not fail.”
Then the German mayor spoke for himself: “Today we consider that sentence as the duty he has left us. Now we must endeavor to carry it out.”
* My uncle gave Jacqueline a bottle of expensive perfume as a wedding present, probably from the Army PX. It was dropped, and shattered — a small tragedy he still remembered decades later.
† André’s second wife, Odile, added another reason for his conversion to socialism: “It was the feeling that if there is no solidarity, life is absolutely not possible.” (author’s interview with Odile Boulloche, March 20, 1999)
‡ Jacqueline’s older son, Eric Katlama, felt the same way as Ophuls: “I think what de Gaulle did is fairly unforgivable, having sustained this kind of myth about a France united against its invaders, without really wanting to make the necessary effort of memory.”
§ It was brought to America by Woody Allen and shown at the New York Film Festival in September 1971. It opened at the Beekman Theatre in Manhattan the following March.
ǁ Pierret was elected to the National Assembly that year and remained there for fifteen years.
a Although he was only twenty-three, the pilot had been flying since he was sixteen.
Twenty
Courage is more exhilarating than fear and in the long run it is easier. We do not have to become heroes overnight. Just a step at a time.
— Eleanor Roosevelt
Don’t make it too sad.
— parting words from André’s son Jacques, after I interviewed him about his father
AFTER THE SHOCK of his death, Christiane and Odile went to work right away to assure André’s legacy. Odile drew on her experience as a book publisher to produce two beautiful volumes, one illustrated, one not, with extraordinary stories from André’s closest friends about every phase of his remarkable life, from his time at the lycée, to his life as de Gaulle’s secret agent in Paris, to his survival at three concentration camps. Then there were his three interlocking postwar careers: the brilliant mayor of a provincial town on France’s eastern border, a force to be reckoned with for more than four decades in the capital’s corridors of power, and an indefatigable advocate of reconciliation between France and Germany, and the unity of Europe. One book was privately published; the other was a special issue of the municipal review of Montbéliard.
This book would not have been possible without dozens of contributions from those two volumes. André Postel-Vinay’s memoir, Un fou s’évade (A Fool Escapes), published in 1996, was another crucial resource for me. But I still
needed one more actor’s full cooperation before I could write my own account.
Ever since I became a reporter for the New York Times at the age of twenty-four, and probably even before that, I knew that the Boulloche saga could be the most extraordinary story I would ever tell. I had been mesmerized at eleven when I first heard it recounted by my uncle Henry, and I have never been less than mesmerized ever since. Meeting the main actors when I was eleven — and falling in love with one of them — only made me more eager to write about them.
During many visits to France over the next three decades, I often shared my ambition to write this book with Christiane’s children, especially François and Noëlle. But we agreed it would be impossible for me to do so as long as Jacqueline and Christiane maintained their silence.
Two more tragedies were necessary before the floodgates could open, even a little bit. In 1989, Jean Audibert, an exceptionally vigorous sixty-eight-year-old, died suddenly of a massive stroke, making Christiane a widow. Four years later, Jacqueline received a fatal diagnosis, and this time it was not a false alarm. She had leukemia, she was too old for a bone-marrow transplant, and she died one year later at the age of seventy-six.
Now Christiane was the unmistakable head of her family, the indomitable matriarch. The death of her sister acted as a release mechanism for her. For fifty years, she had considered her secrets too fraught to share with her children, because of the horrors suffered by her parents and her brothers.
Suddenly, she felt just as compelled to tell the story as she had felt required to remain silent about it. Realizing that it would disappear if she failed to record it, she forced herself to write a forty-five-page memoir — “for my grandchildren.” Once again, Christiane acted out of a sense of obligation.
“It was obvious,” she told me, using the same words she had used to describe her decision to join the Resistance. She had never wanted to write this book, but, at the age of seventy-one, she had to. “It was extremely painful for me to relive these black years. But it was also my duty.”
With the help of Mathilde Damoisel, a brilliant young history student at the Sorbonne whose specialty was women in the Resistance, Christiane produced an amazing narrative. Mathilde described it as an “homage to the spirit of her family.”
When Christiane was writing her book, her older daughter, Catherine, visited her every Monday evening. “She would read me what she had written the previous week,” Catherine remembered. “And she cried, and she cried and she cried.”
At the end there was still a great deal missing: Christiane’s emotions were almost completely absent from her pages. The essential facts were all that she could manage. But when Catherine told her it was “too dry,” Christiane refused to change her approach. “No,” Christiane told her daughter. “I don’t want to. It’s enough this way. And there are things that I won’t say. That I don’t want to say and that I will not say. So I’m putting in what I want to put in, and that’s all.”
When I visited Paris again at the end of the 1990s, Christiane’s younger son, François Audibert, met me at the Gare du Nord. He greeted me with the startling news of Christiane’s book. When I reached his house, I devoured it all in a single sitting. Then I embarked upon my own, relying heavily on Christiane’s for guidance.
I SPENT TWO AND HALF YEARS living in France, interviewing all of the surviving Boulloches, as well as many others who had worked with them or hidden them during the Occupation. An oral history of the Resistance in the French National Archives included the accounts of many others who had known the Boulloches during the war. At my request, the Public Record Office in London declassified all the files MI5 had compiled on André Boulloche, Alex Katlama, and Charles Gimpel when they were in Britain during the war.
Remarkably, everything I learned in the British and French archives confirmed and elaborated upon everything Christiane had told me.
Neither Christiane nor I enjoyed my efforts to force her to reveal as much as possible. But she never refused any request. She also urged everyone in her family to cooperate with me, and everyone did. One thing in particular surprised me. I hadn’t expected to share any of Christiane’s ambivalence about unearthing her secrets. But very gradually, I realized that it was also painful for me to part with the black-and-white version of her family’s heroism that I had grown up with.
ALTHOUGH THE COST of their courage was gigantic, there are more triumphs than tragedies in this story. It is true that the Résistants in the family conveyed a certain malaise to many of their children by never talking about war. But I don’t believe they could have made any better choices about how to deal with their history. And despite their private agony, they managed to transmit all of the finest values of the Boulloches, the Audiberts, and the Katlamas.
Christiane had four fabulous children, twelve grandchildren, and seven great-grandchildren. All of them became righteous, rigorously informed, and deeply committed citizens of France, as did their cousins, and their offspring.
“We did not talk about the Resistance in terms of what each of them had done,” said Michel Katlama, Alex and Jacqueline’s younger son. “But I think the whole generation that followed was enormously marked by that. The whole family was extremely conscious of its political choices. Never Communist. But it was a family that always voted for the left. Almost everyone. The Audiberts and the Katlamas all voted for the left. And it wasn’t just an accident. I can’t imagine any member of our generation being anti-Semitic. Or a Fascist. Or not a democrat — and very attached to democracy.”
WHEN CHRISTIANE had finished her book, she summoned all her children and grandchildren and nephews and nieces to her grand apartment in Passy.
“Christiane said she had done what she had to do,” her niece, Claudine Lefer, remembered. “Because she was the last person who could tell this story. She didn’t give a speech, she said it in tête-à-têtes with small groups of us.”
Christiane’s granddaughter, Hélène Dujardin, believed that “she had done her duty. And in the end — I’m going to say something terrible — she could leave now, knowing that she had done what she had to do. That touched me enormously.”
I repeated those words to Christiane.
“Yes,” she said. “That’s true. Absolutely true.”
From time to time, I suggested that Christiane’s survival had been her destiny, rather than just the product of good fortune. A woman with no taste for superstition, she mostly turned away the idea that fate had played any role in her longevity. But in our final interview before I moved back to New York, she hedged a bit. “I was born on November 11, 1923, in Paris in the seventh arrondissement, during the minute of silence — at 11 a.m. on November 11th. That’s what they always told me.”
Then she laughed at the idea, but warmly: “So perhaps I was a little predestined.”*
Christiane receives the galley of this book from the author. Square Alboni, December 23, 2014.(photo credit 1.27)
As I write these words, she is still flourishing in the elegant apartment she moved into with Jean Audibert and their children in 1958, the one where I first met her in 1962. She is on her own, but a steady stream of children, grandchildren, and great-grandchildren come to bask in her warmth and her wisdom. She and I remain in constant touch, by e-mail and on the telephone.
She still remembers everything.
* World War I had ended at the 11th hour of the 11th day of the 11th month of 1918; the minute of silence is in memory of its dead.
Afterword
MOST AMERICANS are smugly dismissive of the way the French behaved during the Nazi Occupation. “Was there one?” That was the question I was asked most often — even by intelligent people — whenever I mentioned that I was writing about the French Resistance.
That reflexive condescension is coupled with a popular amnesia about the German sympathies of famous American appeasers, from Charles Lindbergh to Joseph P. Kennedy. Equally forgotten are the anti-Semitic organizations that flourished in the United S
tates in the 1930s. The pro-Nazi German-American Bund counted eight thousand storm troopers among its members, and filled New York City’s Madison Square Garden at the beginning of 1939 with twenty thousand supporters shouting, “Heil Hitler.”
The bund worked closely with the Reverend Charles Coughlin’s Christian Front. In the 1930s, Coughlin was one of the nation’s most influential broadcasters, and his supporters organized Buy Christian rallies across the country. After the Nazis looted Jewish stores and burned down synagogues all across Germany in November 1938, Coughlin even defended the horrors of Kristallnacht on his national radio show, describing them as appropriate retaliation for Jewish persecution of Christians.
THE TRUTH is, there were hundreds of thousands of French men and women like the Boulloches who risked everything to liberate their country from the Nazis, while Americans at home never had to risk anything the way the French did during World War II. American servicemen and women made gigantic sacrifices, from Normandy to Iwo Jima, to free the world from the tyranny of Germany and Japan. But American civilians, living thousands of miles from the battlefields, never faced anything remotely resembling the choices that confronted everyone who lived in Nazi-occupied Europe.
However, these facts are not the main reason I cannot judge France harshly for its behavior during World War II. To me what is most persuasive is the attitude of the two men who did more than anyone else in the 1960s and the 1970s to bring about a more balanced view of France’s record: Robert Paxton and Marcel Ophuls.
Both men understood that if you have never actually faced life-and-death decisions, it is easy to assume that you would have done the right thing if the Nazis had occupied your country. It is also a great mistake to do so.
In his brilliant book Vichy France, Paxton wrote that “an American reader who honestly recreates the way the world looked from France [in 1940] cannot assume that he or she would easily have found the path to a 1944 hero’s role.” And Ophuls told me that former British prime minister Anthony Eden was also speaking for the filmmaker when the statesman made this crucial observation at the end of The Sorrow and the Pity: “If one hasn’t been through — as our people mercifully did not go through — the horror of an occupation by a foreign power, you have no right to pronounce upon what a country does which has been through all that.”
The Cost of Courage Page 20