What Klaus didn’t expect was that the leader of the group would start talking almost at once, as soon as Klaus handcuffed him to a chair and sat in front of him, deliberately rolling up his sleeves.
“Did my brother survive?” His voice shook, betraying a slight accent.
“Was that your brother who attempted the ‘jumping-out-of-the-window’ stunt?” Klaus smirked. “Yes, he did. My people will take him to the hospital and take care of his injuries. But it’s not your brother who you should worry about. As of now, the biggest problem you have is me.”
“I’m a downed RAF pilot—”
“Yes, yes, and if my grandmother had wheels, she’d be a bicycle.” Klaus waved him off, switching to English. He spoke it with a harsher accent than French, but he found that this language suited him better for interrogations when it came to the SOE. “I have a general rule to give a pass for the first lie. You just used up yours. After the second one, I’ll hit you in the face. Let’s try this again; your name and title?”
The man opened and closed his mouth, observing the interrogator in front of him with the wide-open, anxious eyes of a frightened hare. He was afraid, and Klaus knew it. Yet, he waited for a response, eyes half closed, arms relaxed, resting on top of his lap.
“I’m a downed RAF—”
Klaus’s eyes snapped open, and he charged at the man before the latter could understand what was going on. The Brit released a startled cry when Klaus grabbed the lapels of his shirt, yanking him upward with such force that only the handcuffs prevented the young spy from lifting off the chair.
“My name is Henry, Henry Newton, an SOE agent!” he shouted, shutting his eyes tightly and screwing up his face in anticipation of the blow, which miraculously didn’t follow.
Klaus released him as suddenly as he grabbed him and the man slumped back into his chair. Klaus meanwhile patted his breast pocket, produced a pack of French cigarettes, lit up one unhurriedly, as though knowing that he wouldn’t need his fists anymore, with this man that is. “Well, go on. I’m listening.”
One of his subordinates was already typing the report as Newton spoke. Klaus seemed to lapse into an abstract half-dream without noticing anyone around him, staring through his prisoner with a strange expression. Suddenly, he made a gesture for his officer to stop typing and pulled closer to the British agent once again.
“I won’t lie, after you sign this confession, you will have two ways out of this interrogation room; you’ll be either shot here or deported to the East. But, as I always say to your French counterparts, fusillé ou deporté, c’est la même chose. However, I’m feeling particularly generous today.” He held a meaningful pause, waiting for his victim to swallow the bait. “If you tell me right now who Rex is, or Max, or Nef, or le Chief, I’ll let you go. I’ll let you go all the way to Spain, or Switzerland – Scheiße, I’ll even stamp the new papers for you myself. Well? Just tell me the names. You must know them.”
Newton appeared to be genuinely confused. “I only know that Max – or Rex – that is how they refer to the man who is supposedly in charge of the whole Resistance,” he started with uncertainty in his voice.
“We know that much. Do you know the actual name? What he looks like? Where does he operate?”
“Everywhere. He travels a lot, they say.”
Klaus sighed irritably and rubbed his temples in a circular motion as though the man’s words were causing him a headache. “What about the others?”
“Never heard of them. I swear.”
“You don’t have to.” Klaus had already risen from his chair and addressed his orderlies in German. “Process him as usual and send him to… I’ll leave it up to you.”
“What of the others, Herr Obersturmführer?”
“He was the leader of the group. They know even less than him. Put them all on the same train for all I care. I don’t want to see them anymore.”
He stormed out of the room, irritable as ever, despite the successful operation. Later in his room downstairs, he sat on top of his bed, pondering his situation. In the eyes of his superiors, he was doing wonderfully; he had managed to infiltrate several Resistance cells, had bribed informants all over the city and its surrounding areas, and installed radio-detection vans which efficiently pinpointed and liquidated careless groups of résistants. In Berlin, his name was now spoken of as an example of exemplary work. Only, for Klaus, it wasn’t enough. He had already let one man, who Müller specifically needed, slip through his fingers back there, in Switzerland. He wouldn’t forgive himself if he let those other criminals outwit him once again. He was Klaus Barbie, after all. And he did not appreciate when people made a fool out of him.
12
Berlin, April 1943
“I still can’t believe that you’re leaving.”
Inge held Kamille’s hands as the two women were saying their goodbyes on the railway station. It was grandiose, marble-clad, bloody-red with crimson banners, like everything in this new Berlin. The stoves were lit but worked on minimal power; no one rushed to shed their coats as they would have in the good old times, before the war-imposed coal rationing. Grim-faced policemen measured the floor with deliberate, unhurried steps, hands clasped behind their backs, searching the faces around them, suspicious as always.
The loudspeaker had just announced a train’s arrival, and a flood of passengers poured inside the waiting room. Here and there, a scream of pure delight would burst through the even rumble, and a crying woman would throw herself in the arms of a soldier. Some of them still carried themselves with pride, handsome and smart in their immaculately starched uniforms; the majority that stepped off the train, however, walked with an awkward gait due to their recent injuries. Kamille took great effort at meeting their gaze with a bright, welcoming smile as they trudged past her – a harrowing display of missing limbs, crutches, and walking sticks. Wounds differed, but one attribute they all had in common; a haunted look about them that they had brought, together with Iron Crosses, from the front.
“Soon you’ll hug your Jochen,” Inge commented with her husky voice which Kamille had grown so used to.
Kamille broke into a wide grin but felt ashamed at once for her excited state.
“I’m sorry they canceled Ernst’s leave again.”
“Ach, what can you do?” Inge shrugged with the typical fatalism of a German wife. “He’s in the Luftwaffe, and they’re in dire need of experienced pilots and particularly on the Eastern Front. The young ones barely get any training now and hardly survive their first dogfight; he wrote to me himself. I don’t know how they missed it and didn’t censor it.”
Kamille started saying something but then only hugged Inge tightly, kissing her on both cheeks.
“Still so French.” The blonde rolled her eyes to the ceiling theatrically, snorting with laughter.
“I’ll miss you, Inge.”
“I’ll miss you but not your atrocious accent.”
“Well, I won’t miss your constant smoking!”
Inge burst out laughing. Kamille pressed both of her hands and made her promise to write.
“Of course, I’ll write. We’ll get together after the war is over, you’ll see. This isn’t the last that you’ll see of me; that much I can guarantee you.”
“I would love that.”
A well-dressed man helped Kamille into the train car and tipped his hat before heading into a private compartment. Kamille found a free spot near the window and fell asleep at once. Her exhausted state was only natural; she had chased her husband all over the Great German Reich, following paper trail from one field hospital to another, weeping when yet another response would arrive (with a delay, as it always was now) saying that the area was bombed and all the paperwork destroyed and that they had no idea where Hauptmann Hartmann could have possibly ended up. More taxing trips followed, this time to the Wehrmacht headquarters; more lines in the stuffy anterooms; more annoyed tsking from superior officers who complained that she distracted them from “real” wor
k with her inquiries; more promises to send her an official letter once the information had been mailed from his company on the front. And at last, the final verdict which had arrived a month ago, nearly breaking Kamille’s heart; Hauptmann Hartmann’s former company had been absorbed into three different ones after suffering great losses. It was next to impossible to find him now, if he survived, that is.
As Kamille was weeping openly on the steps of the Wehrmacht headquarters, clutching the now useless paper in her hands, a Major, who was already climbing into his car, happened to notice her devastated state and took pity on her. Despite the late hour, he brought Kamille back into his office which he had just left, offered her coffee with biscuits, listened to her story with genuine sympathy and even studied every single one of her papers, displaying great thoroughness.
“Have you tried writing to his home address?” he asked suddenly, lifting his head from the documents.
“I don’t know his home address,” Kamille mumbled in shame, for the first time realizing that she not once even considered such a possibility; the fact that he could have been home on convalescent leave this whole time. But wouldn’t he write to her then? Augustine, who took care of Kamille’s house in Paris, always took whatever correspondence was in her mailbox. Surely, she would tell Kamille if there was something from Jochen. “In any case, I thought he would write to me to my Paris address if he were indeed home.”
“He could have suffered a bad head wound.” The Major smiled and moved a long lock of dark hair away from his temple, revealing an ugly scar that began near his ear and stretched for a good few inches. “I couldn’t remember my own name for a few weeks. It’s this shrapnel wound that put me out of commission and landed me this ‘fascinating’ office job.”
Judging by his sardonic expression, Kamille realized that he fancied his new position as a civilian just as much as Jochen had fancied his when he was still working in the Kommandantur in Paris. Both happened to be soldiers first and foremost.
“My wife found me,” the Major continued, smiling fondly at the memories. “Also pestered every single superior from my company and then the whole Army Group, threatening to go to the Führer himself if they didn’t find me in time. I was riding in a truck along some desert road in Africa; I still can’t quite comprehend where those Spitfires appeared from. The driver was killed instantly; I got away with a few pieces of metal in me. This scar is only one of many. Apparently, my identification tags somehow disappeared; what happened to my papers no one knows. My chest had quite a few holes in it, too. Maybe, they simply got torn to pieces as well. The medics eventually transferred me to a hospital in Poland. My last name is Holstoff, and they thought that’s where I belonged, I suppose.”
Kamille chuckled together with him.
“I’ll find you Hauptmann Hartmann’s address tomorrow. Why don’t you try writing there first—”
“No, I’d better go there at once.” Kamille shook her head in protest. “Mail is so slow nowadays; I won’t be able to stand the wait. I just know that God sent you to help me. Jochen is probably home like you said; I just feel it.”
“I can argue with the best military strategists, but I would never argue with a woman’s intuition.” Holstoff grinned. “Come tomorrow at four. I think I’ll have everything ready for you.”
He did. Inge shook her head and kept repeating that Kamille was mad, taking off like that, but understood it all too well. She would do the same for her Ernst.
As the Reichsbahn train rolled south, Kamille saw dreams about Major Holstoff and Inge, and of Inge’s Ernst flying his Messerschmitt somewhere over the Russian steppes, and of Violette who was a little girl again, and of Jochen driving in a truck somewhere in Africa. She heard loud shouts ordering everyone outside but was so fast asleep, her feet so warm and cozy near the heating panel, that she positively refused to open her eyes, signing the noise off as being a part of her dream. A woman with a stern face, who sat across from her, finally nudged Kamille’s foot and motioned her head to the exit, gathering her suitcases in what seemed to be a great hurry.
“The Gestapo,” an elderly man, who was sitting next to Kamille, grumbled, getting up with the help of his walking stick, sighing in vexation. “They have nothing better to do…”
Kamille stepped down onto the platform, holding her suitcase in one hand, still half-asleep. A uniformed man with a black patch sewn onto his left cuff – SD – barked the usual “Ihre Papiere, bitte” at her and immediately motioned for her to step aside as soon as he saw her foreign worker’s card. Major Decker in the Paris Kommandantur managed to obtain her a new French passport with Jochen’s last name in it, but couldn’t get her any German papers due to the fact that both husband and wife needed to submit those to the office, and it was, of course, the husband that Kamille was currently missing.
Despite Kamille’s pleading, they still put her in one of their dreaded police cars and took her to the local headquarters together with a few other “suspicious” passengers. In the headquarters, in a brightly lit room with a young official scribbling something ferociously in his papers, she was interrogated for a good hour, sometimes having to reply to the same questions more than once.
“No, I’m not Jewish. Yes, my husband is considered missing in action since March of ’42. No, his company doesn’t have any information concerning his whereabouts. Yes, I worked at the Red Cross in Berlin. No, I rented a room from a friend. No, I didn’t know her before that, we met in the hospital and she kindly offered… Inge Rossmann. Yes. Married to, I don’t remember his rank, I’m sorry. Ernst Rossmann, Luftwaffe. Fighter ace, I think. Eastern Front. Just like my husband, yes. No, we met in Paris. Yes, my current address is in Paris. No, I’m not going back to France, I’m going to Austria. Because the address that Major Holstoff gave me is in Salzburg. No, I didn’t know my husband’s address prior to that. Because he lived together with me in Paris, why would I need his home address in Salzburg?! No, I’m not a spy…”
They took her down to the cellar and left her in an ice-cold solitary cell until they “verified all the information.” The next morning one of the uniformed men opened the door. She met him in the same position he had left her the night previously; sitting on the cot, trembling with cold and nerves.
“You’re free to go, Frau Hartmann. You will, however, have to check with our office in Salzburg as soon as you arrive there. If you don’t, we’ll warn our people on the border, and they’ll put you on their wanted list.”
“Why would I go to the border? I’m only trying to get to my husband,” Kamille muttered, trailing meekly after him.
The Gestapo officer had already motioned her to the exit, having seemingly lost all interest in her.
Lyon, May 1943
Philippe nudged Marcel slightly with his elbow when their new “superior,” René Hardy, who everyone knew under the name of Didot, a gaunt red-haired man of about thirty years old, demonstrated to the group to which they now belonged how to derail a train without using explosives.
“Now, just like you, comrades, I’m an ordinary working man, and I don’t care for all that British fancy-pancy work with bombs and detonators. We don’t have access to them most of the time anyway. But what we can do is derail a few trains and kill a few Boches just with a few skillful movements of our own two hands, and I say, it’s the best way to do it.”
He proceeded to quickly sketch something right on the wall with chalk, as the men peered at his sketch eagerly. They were gathered in a small repair shop near the Perrache railway station – not too far from the local Gestapo headquarters, and such blatant insolence seemed to fill every single member of the group with gleeful joy. They were all ordinary cheminots – railway workers, with a few résistants on the run – communists like Philippe and Marcel mostly, for Hardy didn’t trust anyone who didn’t belong to the working class.
Hardy was a true patriot and a Resistance hero, according to their comrade Patrice at least, who vouched for the couple before Hardy. Hardy ha
d built the entire network of “railway résistants” and soon became a veritable thorn in the side of the Germans, who kept losing their men to stupid accidents, and their freight trains in the wrong direction.
“All you have to do is switch labels on them,” Hardy explained with a canny grin. Philippe took an instant liking to the man.
Hardy also took an instant liking to Philippe after he learned that Philippe’s cell was behind quite a few train sabotages in Dijon a year ago, even though he did scoff at their affiliation with the SOE.
Marcel and Hardy also got along rather well after Marcel commented that the sabotage in the form that Hardy had proposed would be much more beneficial for the French people than bombing, which the allies had seemed to adopt lately. Hardy nodded several times with great enthusiasm and thoroughly shook Marcel’s hand.
“I was just speaking with General Delestraint about this,” Hardy started in an impassionate voice. Philippe scowled slightly, revealing his disbelief. He had already realized that Hardy was a bit of a fabulist and had a habit of prescribing himself qualities and attributes which he didn’t always possess. For instance, not only did Hardy proclaim himself the leading saboteur of the whole of France but claimed that he had graduated from the Saint-Cyr top of his class and that he had engineered railroads, no less. For some reason, all these tall tales made Philippe seriously doubt that Hardy had access to anyone remotely as important as General Delestraint who, he knew from Etienne, had been recently put in charge of the whole Secret Army. “General asked me to draw him a plan of the sabotage which we would use in case of allied landings. I told him the same thing; more sabotage and fewer bombings would only benefit all of us. I have already started working on it. Soon, he’ll have the most detailed map of France with every single German division, active and reserved, and all of their strongholds pinpointed by yours truly.”
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