The last part of the pretravel briefing would likely have been the most chilling for the individual evaders. Though delivered in various ways, the meaning was always essentially the same: The escorts on the train and the guides in the stations would do what they could to ensure the airman’s journey went according to plan, but there was always the possibility that bad luck, carelessness, or betrayal might lead to disaster. If the escort were compromised before reaching the destination the evader should remain aloof and not attempt to intervene. And likewise, the airman was told, if he were to be taken by the police or soldiers, either on the train or at a station, he would be entirely on his own.
THE TRAIN BEARING JOE CORNWALL AND HIS COMPANIONS ENTERED THE GRIMY outskirts of Paris just before noon on July 22, and as it slowly made its way toward the Gare Saint-Lazare Joe peered out the window with a mix of excitement and anxiety. The trip from Évreux had gone well, and only once had the gunner needed to pretend deafness—in response to the conversational overtures of an elderly and rather odiferous French woman. He was looking forward to getting out of the crowded, close atmosphere of the third-class carriage and into the city, but he realized that he, Davitt, Eastman, and Turner were about to embark on what was likely the most dangerous part of their journey thus far.
In a hurried, whispered conversation before leaving Évreux, Hubert Renaudin had told the Americans that upon arrival in Paris he and his wife would leave the carriage after the majority of the other passengers had disembarked. Joe and the three other aviators were to follow individually, and when they saw Reneé Renaudin stop at a kiosk inside the station’s main hall they were to wait until the couple had left, then gather within a few feet of the kiosk. Someone—Hubert only knew that it would be a tall, slender man wearing a dark hat—would approach the kiosk and make a show of lighting a pipe. The three gunners were to follow the man at a distance, and he would guide them on the next leg of their journey.
All went according to plan when the train rolled into Gare Saint-Lazare. The Renaudins walked slowly to the first kiosk inside the main station, stopped briefly, then faded into the crowd. The Americans ambled to the kiosk with as much nonchalance as they could muster, though Joe was startled by the number of German military personnel milling about. There hadn’t been any soldiers in the third-class carriage from Évreux, and the sheer number and proximity of uniformed troops in the station made Joe slightly queasy. He recovered quickly, though, when he realized that the majority of the Boche on duty—Joe had picked up the word from Hubert—were simply waiting for trains or on hand to meet someone.
Joe had just tapped the last French cigarette out of a pack Elie Rebours had given him and was about to light it with a wooden match when, true to Hubert Renaudin’s briefing, a tall man casually walked up. He said something in French and gestured with his pipe, obviously asking for a light. When Joe handed him the lit match the man subtly tilted his head toward the station’s main entrance, and when he walked casually away the trio of aviators followed, careful to keep their distance from him and each other.
Joe had not been in a major city since his last weekend pass in London several weeks earlier, and as he emerged from the station into dazzling summer sunlight he was almost overwhelmed by the sights, sounds, and smells that bombarded his senses. While the streets were relatively devoid of cars and trucks, scores of what appeared to be bicycle-powered rickshaws zipped by, most carrying people who seemed far better dressed than Joe would have expected. While the crowded streets pulsed with life, Joe thought he could detect an undercurrent of, not anger perhaps, but unease, or something akin to sullen resignation. Indeed, the only smiles he saw were on the faces of the uniformed Germans who dotted the moving masses of people like drops of dark paint on an otherwise bright and colorful canvas.
So engrossed was Joe in absorbing the hustle and bustle around him that he momentarily lost sight of the tall man with the pipe. His rising panic subsided quickly when he saw the lanky guide, striding purposefully across the large street in front of the station and about to round a corner. Davitt, Eastman, and Turner were a few paces behind, almost like Fortresses in a V-formation behind the lead ship, Joe thought, and as he hurried to catch up he had to remind himself to be on his guard. He was not on vacation, and this city, no matter how fascinating, was filled with enemies.
Having caught up with his three companions, and with the tall man loping about thirty feet ahead, Joe settled into what the Army called “route step”—an easy, unhurried pace that allowed him to cover ground relatively quickly but without exhausting himself or aggravating the nagging pain in his back and shoulders. By the angle of the sun he judged that they were moving almost directly south, and after a brisk five-minute walk the Americans and their guide passed a large and ornate church that reminded Joe of pictures he’d seen of the Acropolis in Athens. A few minutes more and the narrow, building-lined street the guide had been following opened out into a large, open plaza, in the center of which was a tall, needle-like column. Joe slowed to admire the structure, but then a structure rising into the sky off to the right attracted his attention. With a jolt, Joe realized he was seeing the upper part of the Eiffel Tower, and a broad smile broke out across his face. Damn, he thought to himself, I really am in Paris.22
He didn’t realize it yet, but Joe would soon catch sight of another famous Parisian landmark—one that would have a far more profound effect on him than even Mr. Eiffel’s majestic creation.
Chapter 5
HELPERS, GUESTS, AND LOVERS
THE TALL, SLENDER MAN LEADING JOE CORNWALL AND THE THREE other evaders through the streets of Paris that sunny July 22 had gone by many names in the years since his nation’s surrender to the Germans. His false papers had at various times identified him as Dubois, a wine merchant; Mazier, a bookseller; and Pichot, a minor functionary in an obscure branch of the Paris city government. The other members of the Turma-Vengeance network with whom he worked called the quiet forty-one-year-old by the nom de guerre “Petrel,” and only a handful of people in the French capital knew his true identity. He was André Auguste Schoegel, and despite having a German family name—his forebears originally hailed from Alsace—he was a passionate and dedicated résistant.1
An army reservist whose unit was disbanded soon after the fall of France, Schoegel had resumed his work as a building contractor upon returning to his home in Nantes. In September 1940 he was recruited into a resistance group known as Jade-Fitzroy, and for the following year he gathered intelligence on German installations and troop movements. In September 1941 Gestapo agents tried to arrest Schoegel at his home. He escaped, but his wife, Suzanne, was seized and ultimately deported to Ravensbrück concentration camp in Germany.2 Schoegel went to Vichy seeking to avoid further attention from the Gestapo, but soon after arriving in the “unoccupied zone” he was arrested on the grounds that he was a danger to the state. Following his release in May 1942 he moved to Paris, and in early 1943 he was recruited into Turma-Vengeance. His primary task was to travel throughout northern France to collect weapons and equipment dropped by the Allies and smuggle the items back to the capital. Early on, however, he also started escorting downed aviators to Paris, and also meeting incoming evaders and their guides at various train stations in the capital. Schoegel hid the airmen at his own modest home in the southern suburb of Orly or lodged them elsewhere in Paris with members of Turma-Vengeance. And among those members were the Morins of Invalides.
LIKE MANY PEOPLE IN FRANCE, GEORGES, DENISE, AND YVETTE MORIN HAD spent the first year of the occupation simply trying to deal with the increasingly harsh realities of life. Thanks to the ever-growing number of rabbits filling the hutches in the workshops and garages a few steps from their apartment, their food situation wasn’t quite as dire as it was for most people. But that was the only bright spot, for like everyone else in Paris—and indeed, most people in France—the Morins had to contend with shortages of virtually every basic commodity. The Germans’ widespread expropriation of Fr
ench coal and heating oil stocks made the already harsh winter of 1940–1941 all the more brutal—a tragic reality underlined for the Morins when the infant child of one of Yvette’s friends froze to death.3
The coming of spring eased the effects of the coal and heating oil shortages, but did nothing to alleviate the increasingly onerous weight of the Boche presence in the City of Light. By June 1941 there were some forty thousand German military personnel in the capital and its environs, and it was impossible to ignore them. Giant swastika banners hung from many of the city’s most famous buildings, and parades by military bands frequently shut down pedestrian traffic on major thoroughfares. Armed soldiers stood guard outside the dozens of hotels and office buildings the Germans had requisitioned as headquarters for various military and civilian agencies, and the tall, multibranched signs that in cryptic German gave directions to those locations seemed to dominate every street corner. Cafés, restaurants, and theaters all over the city had been reserved exclusively for use by German service members, and movie houses ran only those French- and German-language films that had been deemed “appropriate” by the first German military governor of France, General Otto von Stülpnagel.
Perhaps most infuriating for many Parisians were the hordes of German military “tourists” that inundated the city’s famous landmarks. Their presence was the work of Jeder Einmal in Paris (Everyone in Paris Once), an arm of Germany’s official tourist office tasked with ensuring that as many German service members as possible were able to tour the City of Light. Headquartered in the Palais Bourbon, the organization managed the rotational visits to Paris by members of all the German armed services, and provided helpful guides to the capital’s many attractions. Composed both of personnel stationed in the capital and troops brought in from other regions, the masses of uniformed men (and occasional women) swarmed the same sites—the Eiffel Tower, Montmartre, the Île de la Cité, the museums, and the rest—that had long attracted less aggressive visitors. Invalides seemed to be particularly popular, the Morins noticed, though it was unclear whether the uniformed “tourists” came out of genuine interest in the complex’s history or because they wanted their pictures taken where their Führer had stood. Whatever the reason, so many hobnailed boots were treading the delicate stone of the rotunda overlooking Napoléon’s Tomb that the architect of Invalides ordered wooden planking laid over the floor to protect it.
As irritated as the people of Paris were by the sheer numbers of Germans in the capital, it was the occupiers’ far less benign activities that prompted many Parisians to abandon their attempts to live “normal” lives and instead engage in active resistance. For some it was the increasingly harsh restrictions placed on French Jews, for others it was the frequent roundups of communists, trade unionists, and outspoken intellectuals and clergymen. For the Morins, the decision to take action came in the late summer of 1941, when France was swept by rumors that the Germans were about to start dragooning young Frenchmen and women for mandatory work in Germany. Though a compulsory work program would not become official until the fall of 1942, the mere idea that French civilians would be used as slave labor in German factories and mines convinced many people to go underground. Among those “refractors” attempting to elude involuntary labor service was a twenty-one-year-old named René-Guy Salomon.
The young man was the son of Gustave Salomon, a disabled World War I veteran Georges Morin knew through his work. When the elder Salomon approached the Morins about hiding René-Guy they readily agreed, and the young man spent several weeks tucked away in various locations around Invalides, including the Morins’ apartment. By the time he moved on in the fall of 1941, Georges, Denise, and Yvette had shown themselves willing to risk arrest and imprisonment in order to thwart the intentions of the Germans and their collaborators.4 And the man to whom they’d proven their patriotism, Gustave Salomon, was in a unique position to help them actively resist the Germans in a much broader and more useful way.
Though the Morins hadn’t known it when they agreed to shelter René-Guy, the elder Salomon was a key member of the Turma-Vengeance network. He had joined the organization not long after its founding in late 1940 by three physicians—Victor Dupont, Raymond Chanel, and François Wetterwald.5 By November 1941, the forty-four-year-old Salomon was the network’s chief recruiter in Paris, working under the nom de guerre “Antheaume.” Impressed by the Morins—and no doubt thinking of how useful Invalides could be to the Resistance—Salomon invited all three members of the family to formally join Turma-Vengeance. They accepted without hesitation, and from then on were referred to within the network by their noms de guerre—Georges as “Napoléon”; Denise, for obvious reasons, as “Madame Lapin” (Mrs. Rabbit); and Yvette as “Mickey,” a name she chose for herself because it sounded American.6
Having proven their willingness to shelter people on the run, the Morins’ initial task within the network was to do just that—but on a larger scale. During the winter of 1941–1942 they offered refuge to an ever-changing cast of refractors and other young men who were being sought by the Germans for various reasons. At any one time there might be two or three discreet and not-very-talkative “cousins from out of town” visiting the Morins, who normally put the guests up in the attic of the architect’s office. In bad weather the visitors would pass the time reading or playing cards there or in the Morins’ home, and on warmer days they would lounge in the large ornamental garden a few yards from the apartment or on the broad lawns in front of the entrance to the Dôme church. This was not as risky as it might seem, given that Invalides remained a popular attraction for the hard-pressed people of Paris. On most days the grounds teemed with individuals and families seeking to escape the drabness of their own homes, or to spend time with friends, or to simply recharge themselves emotionally by taking in the grandeur and beauty of the church and its surroundings.
While entry to the western part of the Invalides complex—which housed German military offices and barracks—was tightly controlled around the clock, the arrival and departure of the Morins’ “cousins” was facilitated by the laxness of the German sentries posted at the northern, eastern, and southern entrances to Invalides during daylight hours. The sheer number of people flowing into and out of the eastern side of the complex—military “tourists” as well as French civilian visitors and workmen—made it difficult to do more than a cursory check of identity cards. Nor were the sentries able to record the names of everyone entering or leaving the grounds. This laxity, coupled with the special passes the Germans had provided to the Morins to facilitate their official duties, made it relatively easy for the family to move themselves and their “relatives” into and out of the complex during the day. It was more difficult at night, though the Morins also had official documents that allowed them to be out after curfew under certain circumstances.
The visiting “cousins” had to be fed, and the most frequent cuisine served to them, of course, was rabbit. That staple was supplemented by whatever edible scraps could be scrounged from the Germans’ trash bins, and by items such as the green tops of carrots for which Denise often had to stand in line for hours. Every few weeks she would go farther afield, traveling by rail out to the suburbs—often as far as Chartres—in search of potatoes and other vegetables. Because bringing foodstuffs into the city was prohibited by the Germans and the discovery of contraband could result in severe punishment for the carrier, Denise had to be extremely inventive in how she transported whatever provisions she had been able to obtain. Her favorite method for bulkier items such as potatoes was to carry them in a large fabric carryall worn strapped to her midsection beneath a larger-than-necessary dress topped with a long, worn coat. She counted on the fact that elderly French women were less likely to be spot-searched during the document checks carried out in the railway stations, and occasionally used a cane to appear older and frailer than she actually was.
During the day the responsibility for keeping an eye on the “cousins” most often fell on the elder Morins.
In the months following the Germans’ arrival in Paris the veteran-service bureaucracy at Invalides had been all but dismantled, leaving Georges free to aid his wife both in the “concierge” role and in caring for the “relatives.” While Yvette helped with both tasks when she could, her days were largely devoted to the job she had gotten in the fall of 1941 in order to bolster the family’s finances. She had been hired as a secretary at the Crédit National, the quasi-governmental investment bank located just a few blocks from Invalides on rue Saint-Dominique.7
By the summer of 1942 the Morins’ role in Turma-Vengeance had begun to expand beyond the sheltering of refractors. Their apartment, for example, became a regular venue for meetings between senior members of their network and the leaders of such other Paris-based resistance organizations as Défense de la France and Ceux de la Libération. Both of those organizations produced underground newspapers, and Invalides quickly became a storage and distribution site for the publications. Other documents distributed with help from the Morins included German General Staff identification cards stolen by a young network member from the Wehrmacht’s cartography and map-making office at 35 rue des Invalides. Already bearing the necessary authentication stamps but devoid of names or photographs, the cards were distributed to résistants whose ability to speak German would allow them to impersonate military personnel.
The Morins also stored far more lethal items for the network. These initially consisted of shotguns, hunting rifles, and the occasional target pistol that members of Turma-Vengeance and other networks chose not to turn in as required by German regulations. Later, as André Schoegel and other couriers began bringing air-dropped weapons into Paris from the countryside, the armory stored in various out-of-the-way places around Invalides grew to include military rifles, handguns, Sten submachine guns, Bren machine guns, hand grenades, and plastic explosives and the time pencils used to detonate them.
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