Escape from Paris

by Stephen Harding

  After strolling casually along for another half hour to ensure that the brothers were the only ones tailing her, Yvette turned a corner and then hurried to the end of the short block. She dashed across a narrow street, rounded another corner in the opposite direction, and was on her way back to Invalides before the Déridas even realized they’d lost her. When she told her parents that the brothers themselves had been tailing her, they were equally surprised at the men’s incompetence. Georges then decided that they should open the sealed envelope, in order to see just what sort of information the brothers were attempting to pass up the chain.

  The sheet of paper Georges pulled out stunned the Morins, both because it was written in plain text instead of code and because it outlined in detail virtually everything the family did as résistants. It was the sort of document that could put all of them in front of a German firing squad, but even that was not the most shocking thing about it. Georges, Denise, and Yvette all realized that the Déridas had intended the message for someone within Turma-Vengeance or one of its partner networks. That clearly meant that the brothers were not the only ones working for the Germans—somewhere along the chain a spy was collecting information, compiling the names and addresses of people to be arrested.

  And yet, as Georges pointed out, by not delivering the envelope Yvette had likely bought them all some time. It would take a few days for the Déridas to realize that the message hadn’t reached its intended recipient, and as soon as Georges informed others in the network of the brothers’ treachery the traitors would be interrogated and then executed—or perhaps even “turned” against their Germans handlers. News that the damning message was intended for someone else in one of the networks would also spark an intense hunt for the unknown spy who, if found, would face the same fate as the Déridas. With luck, Georges said, the Allied armies advancing out of the Normandy beachheads would reach Paris before the Germans could roll up the capital’s numerous resistance networks.

  Events quickly seemed to prove Georges right, for within days the Dérida brothers had vanished and Turma-Vengeance and the networks with which it closely operated were undergoing intense internal-security reviews.31 The Morins cautiously went back to work, and on Monday, July 3, were told that the following day their home would be the site of an important equipment hand-over. Early on Tuesday morning several members of the firefighters’ network established by Paul Durin appeared at Invalides, their nondescript haversacks stuffed with large flashlights. They left the bags with the Morins, saying that some people would soon be around to pick them up.

  Those people turned out to be Michel Bourgeois and his radio operator, “Jacques,” who arrived late on Tuesday afternoon. The need to mark fields for covert landings by Allied special operations aircraft and parachutists had not ended with the landings in Normandy, the men explained, and the lights provided by the firemen were ideal for the task. Bourgeois, whom the Morins affectionately called “Bébé,” and “Jacques” stayed for an austere dinner and a few glasses of wine, then left for their current safe house before curfew.

  Just after six the next morning, July 5, Yvette and her parents sat down to their usual breakfast of black bread, cheese, and ersatz coffee. They were talking about Joe—and how they hoped he would enjoy his birthday, wherever he was—when their conversation was interrupted by someone pounding on their door and shouting “Open Up!” in German. In an instant the Morins knew that the day they had long dreaded was finally upon them. But even as that realization was sinking in, several strong kicks from outside sent the door crashing open, and in rushed several Gestapo agents waving pistols and yelling “Hands up! Stay where you are!” As two of the men rushed up the stairs to clear the other rooms, the man apparently in charge told Denise and Yvette in passable French to remain seated. When Denise asked if she and her daughter could put on something over their nightgowns the man responded with a gruff “No,” but then allowed them to put their hands down.

  Over the next thirty minutes, as the Morins sat in stunned silence, the Germans tore the house apart searching for any incriminating evidence. They found nothing, and the man in charge ordered Georges, Denise, and Yvette to get dressed—all under the watchful eyes of an armed agent. When the three were ready they were brusquely led out the door and shoved into the windowless back of an unmarked van. Two of the Gestapo men climbed in after them, and as soon as the van’s rear doors were closed the vehicle headed north on the boulevard des Invalides. The journey lasted only minutes, for the Morins were taken not to avenue Foch, but straight across the River Seine to 11 rue des Saussaies. The prewar home of the Sûreté Nationale, France’s national police force, the building was now the headquarters of the Paris Gestapo.32

  The van carrying Yvette and her parents drove in through the building’s central street entrance, then halted abruptly. When the rear doors slammed open the Morins were hustled down a flight of stairs into the building’s basement, where Yvette and Denise were led off in one direction and Georges in the other. The women were placed in separate cells, and over the following seventeen hours were individually questioned several times about their resistance activities. Their interrogators already knew many details about Turma-Vengeance’s operations and members, and about the Morins’ activities, and though the women were screamed at, threatened, and slapped around they were not tortured. Sadly, the same was not true for Georges. The disabled World War I veteran was subjected to electric shocks, submersion in a bathtub full of ice, suspension from the ceiling by his wrists while Gestapo men beat him with metal rods, and a variety of other brutal techniques. Despite it all he told his captors nothing, enduring the torture in silence.

  The following morning Yvette and her parents were transported from the rue des Saussaies to the capital’s military prison. Known by Parisians as Centre pénitentiaire de Fresnes, the facility was some six miles south of Invalides and was used to house captured résistants and Allied POWs awaiting transfer to other facilities. Georges was confined in the men’s wing, and Yvette and Denise in the women’s block. Conditions were horrific throughout the former civilian prison, with severe overcrowding, appalling sanitation, rampant disease, starvation-level rations, and frequent violence against prisoners by the guards. Executions were a daily occurrence, as was torture during interrogations.

  Even as the Morins were struggling to survive at Fresnes, their friends and fellow résistants were also falling prey to the Gestapo.33 Michel Bourgeois was arrested not long after the family, followed by Mme. de Larminat on July 13. Gustave Salomon was seized the next day, and Joseph and Yvonne Gorjux—an older couple who had aided Larry Templeton and Roscoe Greene—were taken into custody on August 3. While Mme. de Larminat was ultimately released, the others followed the Morins into captivity.34

  As bad as conditions were at Fresnes, things were destined to get far worse for Yvette and her parents. On August 7 each of the Morins was sentenced to death, but before their executions could be carried out they were instead designated for slave labor and ordered deported to concentration camps in Germany—Georges to Buchenwald, near Weimar, and Yvette and Denise to the all-female camp at Ravensbrück, north of Berlin. Early on August 15 they and several hundred other prisoners from Fresnes and Fort de Romainville—another prison on the outskirts of Paris—were put aboard requisitioned civilian buses and driven to the Gare de Pantin. The station in the capital’s northeast suburbs had been the site of many deportations during the German occupation of France, and by the summer of 1944 was one of the few rail hubs in the capital region that had not yet been obliterated by Allied bombs. On a siding sat a train comprising a locomotive, a tender, and twenty-eight closed freight cars. German troops wielding truncheons forced 543 female prisoners aboard the eleven carriages at the forward end of the train, while 1,654 male captives were packed into the seventeen cars that brought up the rear. Just before noon the locomotive belched smoke and steam and slowly moved away from the station. It was the last deportation train to leave greater Paris befo
re the city fell to the Allies just ten days later.35

  The journey from Paris to the train’s first destination, the station at Weimar (for Buchenwald), took four terrible days. The prisoners were not fed, and were given little water. Each freight car held between fifty and one hundred people, with just a single ten-gallon can in each carriage to serve as a communal latrine. The only ventilation came from four small, barred, ceiling-level windows—two on each side of the car, front and back—and the summer heat and closely packed occupants ensured that the atmosphere in the carriages remained stifling. The train stopped briefly each morning and evening, when those prisoners who had died were offloaded and the living were allowed to empty the latrine cans. Several individuals who attempted to escape during the halts were shot by the guards, and on the second day of the journey the prisoners were told that any further escape attempts would result in the immediate execution of ten people from the escaper’s freight car.

  On the afternoon of the third day the train entered a tunnel, but about halfway through suddenly screeched to a halt. The exit was blocked by rubble from an Allied air raid, and for the next three hours the train sat in the dark—the engine still belching smoke and steam—as the Germans tried to decide what to do. By the time the train backed out of the tunnel more than a dozen prisoners had died of asphyxiation, and their bodies were unceremoniously dumped along the tracks. The remaining captives were forced to disembark from their cars, and were then marched almost five miles through heavy woods until reaching the other side of the mountain. A second train was waiting, and after the prisoners boarded their hellish journey continued.36

  When the train rolled to a stop in the small station at Buchenwald on the morning of August 20 the cars bearing the male prisoners were uncoupled and shunted to a siding. As the locomotive pulled the remaining carriages back onto the main line and set off on the 170-mile journey to Ravensbrück, Georges Morin and his fellow captives were marched at gunpoint to a huge shed-like structure. The men were made to strip and hand over their wedding rings, after which their heads were shaved and they were herded into group showers. Upon emerging each man was handed his striped prisoner’s uniform, the rough woolen shirt bearing a triangular piece of fabric color-coded to denote the individual’s status. For Georges and most of the other new arrivals the symbol was red and carried a large letter “F”—the combination indicating French political prisoners. The triangle also bore each man’s prisoner number—Georges’s was 77549—which was repeated on the inmate record that identified his pre-arrest profession as “beamter schriftsleiter,” or official clerk.37

  That document and a few other surviving German records are the only account we have of Georges Morin’s sojourn in the nightmare world that was the Nazi concentration-camp system. At the time of his arrival at Buchenwald, many of the camp’s prisoners were being used as slave labor in the armaments factories that dotted the surrounding area, and we may assume that Georges was so employed. We know that on September 3 Georges was transferred to the nearby camp known as Mittelbau-Dora, whose inmates were used to dig tunnels in which V-1 flying bombs and V-2 ballistic missiles were manufactured.38 Prisoners also assembled components for the so-called “vengeance weapons,” and it is possible that Georges was involved in that effort. For reasons that remain unclear, on November 1 he was transferred to another Mittelbau subcamp, Ellrich-Juliushütte.

  While we don’t know what sort of labor Georges was forced to do at Ellrich, we can be certain that the working conditions sapped his already greatly diminished health. Malnourished, abused, and likely suffering from a host of maladies, he was sent to the camp’s woefully inadequate “hospital,” which consisted of little more than lice-infested straw pallets on a cold, wet floor. At thirty minutes after midnight on December 23, 1944, Georges Jules Morin—war hero, husband, father, résistant, and proud son of France—died of what his SS-issued death certificate listed as enterocolitis. Two days later he was one of fifty deceased prisoners cremated in Mittelbau’s ovens.39

  By that point his wife and daughter were well and truly immersed in their own living hell.

  Chapter 8

  LIBERATION, LOVE, AND LOSS

  AFTER LEAVING THE STATION AT BUCHENWALD THE TRAIN BEARING Yvette, her mother, and the other surviving female prisoners rolled on for another 195 miles through central Germany, working its way steadily northeastward toward Ravensbrück. At noon on August 21 the train groaned to a halt at the small station in Fürstenberg, some forty-five miles north of Berlin. When the doors of the freight cars were unlocked and jerked open from the outside, the women were greeted by the barking and growling of leashed guard dogs and the bellowing of truncheon-wielding SS troops. Yvette, Denise, and the others were ordered out of the cars and made to form up five abreast in a single long column. The hundreds of thirsty, weakened women were then marched down a long, dusty road, through the village of Fürstenberg, around a lake known as the Schwedtsee and into the camp that only a few would be lucky enough to survive.

  The sight that greeted them was a true vision of hell. As Virginia d’Albert-Lake, one of the new arrivals, later described it:

  As we entered the camp, we saw long, bottle-green barracks, with window facings painted white; narrow plots of grass surrounding the buildings with, here and there, a few bushes or scraggly trees.… Then we saw some of the inmates, strange, gnome-like looking women, with shaved heads, dressed in blue and grey-striped skirts and jackets, with heavy wooden-soled galoshes on their feet. Some were struggling under the weight of huge soup kettles; others went by pushing a cart piled high with long, narrow wooden boxes, followed by eight or ten others pulling and pushing an immense wagon full to overflowing with garbage. Then, a detachment of others dragged by, horrible-looking creatures, thin and haggard, with huge open, festering sores on their stocking-less legs.… We were made to stand in the broad main street, awaiting we didn’t know what.… We were so exhausted after a week of sleepless nights. We stared at each other in dull incomprehension. A woman SS [guard] kept parading back and forth. We cried out to her for water.… But no water was brought.1

  Yvette and the others were forced to stand at attention in the glaring sun for hours as their captors counted and recounted them, trying to square the numbers of prisoners before them with the figures on the manifests that had accompanied the women on the hellish trip from Paris. As night fell and the counting continued, dozens of women dropped to the ground, unconscious or dead.

  Once the male and female guards were satisfied with their counts, the women were marched by groups into a warehouse-like processing building. There Denise, Yvette, and the other new arrivals were forced to turn over any valuables they might still be carrying, including watches, wedding rings, and other jewelry. After having their heads shaved, the women were subjected to a humiliating “physical examination.” Forced to strip naked, they were led one by one before a panel of SS doctors. After a cursory look down each woman’s throat the men examined their teeth—not to ascertain the state of the individual’s oral health, but to note whether there were any gold fillings that could be harvested after death. Sadistically painful vaginal and anal examinations followed—again, not to detect signs of ill health, but to ascertain whether the prisoners were trying to hide any valuables.

  Following the “examination” the women lined up to receive the thin woolen skirts and jackets and rough wooden clogs that would be their only clothing for the remainder of their time in the camp. Sewn to the sleeve of each striped jacket was the same sort of colored fabric triangle that had adorned Georges Morin’s uniform at Buchenwald: red for political prisoner, an “F” for French, and the prisoner’s individual number—50515 for Denise and 50516 for Yvette.2 After the women had dressed, all of them were herded down the narrow, coal-dust-covered “streets” to an empty barracks building. Female SS guards used whips and clubs to force the new arrivals into the structure, which had originally been constructed to house one hundred prisoners but within moments was crowded wit
h more than five hundred. Rows of crude wooden, shelf-like bunks were stacked floor to ceiling, each four-foot-wide space intended for three or four women. Yvette and Denise managed to claim a spot on a lower tier, and as they settled in they wondered aloud about what had become of the barrack’s previous inhabitants.

  Mother and daughter spent their first night in Ravensbrück huddled together for warmth and mutual reassurance on the rough planks of their lice-infested bunk, listening as the other two occupants of the cramped space cried, coughed, and prayed. Those noises were intermittently drowned out by the sudden, wolf-like baying of guard dogs set free to roam the camp, and, more ominously, by the occasional loud crack of a pistol or rifle shot. At 3:30 A.M. a far more terrifying sound jerked all the women in the barracks from their fitful sleep—the loud, discordant shrieking of a high-pitched siren announced the start of the camp-wide morning roll call. The new arrivals from France did not have to rush from the barracks—they were all quarantined for ten days—but they would soon come to know only too well the special horrors of standing at attention for two or three hours while the guards undertook their seemingly endless count.

  At the end of the quarantine period the recently arrived French prisoners were introduced to the grueling routine that was daily life at Ravensbrück. Following the morning roll call and a hurried “breakfast” of ersatz coffee and a single piece of moldy black bread, the women were assigned to duties that ranged from kitchen work to construction to assembling field radios and other military equipment at the nearby Siemens factory. While the labor varied day to day, the length of the workday did not—eleven backbreaking hours was the norm, with the only interruption a fifteen-minute break for a meager “lunch” of thin soup and another slice of moldy bread. Though the newly arrived French women began their stay at Ravensbrück in relatively good health, within weeks the punishing conditions—hard labor exacerbated by malnutrition, dehydration, and the prevalence of such diseases as typhus, typhoid, and diphtheria—began taking a toll. And then there was the physical abuse meted out by the Germans. Prisoners who were slow in responding to a guard’s order would be horsewhipped or beaten with a cudgel. More severe instances of noncooperation would see the woman being set on by the guard dogs, or being tied to a wooden frame and lashed repeatedly across the back and buttocks with a stick. In the tremendously unsanitary conditions that prevailed in the camp the wounds from such a whipping quickly became infected, inevitably leading to septic shock.3