A Train in Winter (10 page)

There were already plans afoot for a special French tribunal to try resisters, with a tacit understanding that death penalties would be handed down. On 27 August, the hastily convened new body sentenced three communists to die, the fourth, Simone’s father Lucien, having his sentence commuted to hard labour in perpetuity, after delivering a particularly eloquent and impassioned speech. He was sent to Caen prison, his hands and feet in manacles.

It was Vichy that now proposed to carry out the executions by guillotine, in public; the German military, fearing repercussions from the French public, agreed to the guillotine but insisted that it be used in private. On 28 August, the three communists went to the scaffold. For good measure, over the next few days, the Germans shot five other communists—for participating in Samuel Tyszelman’s demonstration—and then three Gaullists. French judges were now sending to their deaths Frenchmen, completely innocent of the crimes for which they were being punished, simply because they were assumed to be close in ideals to those presumed—but not proved—to be guilty.

Simone, training with the other teenagers under the beeches and oaks in the Bois de Lardy, had been right to question the implications of moving into armed attacks on German soldiers. The attack in the Barbès métro, the first public assassination of one of the German officers, marked a turning point. Ouzoulias would later say that this single act was the most important contribution made by the Bataillons, that of moving the Resistance into a higher gear. But, as the resisters turned to killing, so too would the penalties become more lethal.

No longer would it be possible for any member of the Resistance—even the women and girls, who had until now felt relatively secure in the shadows—to feel safe. Betty, Danielle, Cécile and the others, who were beginning to meet and forge links, were now living in a state of constant wariness. From now on, in an endlessly repeated cycle of attacks, reprisals, more attacks, more executions, it would be all-out war between occupiers and a growing number of the occupied, who, revolted by German brutality, would become gradually more sympathetic to the Resistance. As Pétain remarked, ‘From various parts of France, I begin to feel an unpleasant wind getting up’.

CHAPTER FOUR

The hunt for resisters

Until the summer of 1941, the German soldiers stationed in France had felt relatively safe. The country they had overrun with such ease seemed to them for the most part to tolerate their presence, even to enjoy profiting from the occupation, though many ordinary people were increasingly looking away when walking past in the streets. But now, in the wake of the attack at the Barbès métro station, soldiers were advised not to go out after dark alone and never to leave their vehicles unattended. Von Stülpnagel, while continuing to argue that repression of all resistance should be left chiefly in the hands of the remarkably co-operative French police, at the same time sent out a secret communiqué to the German military commanders of the different occupied regions of France.

The war against the communists was reaching a critical stage, he said, and the job of the Germans was to make certain that the French operated against them with the utmost severity. ‘Judge quickly, harshly and surely,’ he instructed the Wehrmacht military tribunals. On 13 September, an old friend of Charlotte Delbo and Georges Dudach, the architect André Woog, was guillotined in the courtyard of the prison of La Santé, along with two other ‘militant communists’. He had been picked up for distributing anti-German tracts. There had, to date, been thirty-three executions of communists and ‘enemies of the Reich’; the youngest was a boy of 19, the eldest a man in his seventies.

From Berlin, Hitler continued to urge more frequent and tougher reprisals, not only in France but throughout the whole of occupied Europe, especially against the Communists, who continued to be widely blamed for the rising number of armed attacks. Though Germany had eight and a half million men under arms, more soldiers were needed to control France, Holland, Belgium, Denmark and the Balkans; there was heavy fighting in the western desert and along the eastern front. Acts of resistance could not be allowed to distract German soldiers who might otherwise be engaged in active service. On 28 September, in clear violation of Article 19 of the Third Tokyo Convention of 1934, which had spelt out without ambiguity that hostages should never, under any circumstances, be either physically punished or put to death, a Code of Hostages was issued to the French people. It breached both clauses.

‘Pools’ of Frenchmen, whether detained by the Germans or by the French for supposed communist or anarchist actions—espionage, treason, sabotage, armed attacks, assistance to foreign enemies, illegal possession of weapons—were to be held in readiness as hostages against attacks on German soldiers. In numbers proportionate to the crime, these hostages would be executed. Fifty to a hundred Frenchmen would be shot for every German killed. Since very few of these men were tried before a court, there could be no knowing whether they were guilty or not. Military commanders in the various regions were instructed to keep up-to-date lists of the names of those available. Where there were not enough, more were to be sought among university teachers and students, as well as among Gaullists, now also recognised as threats to the security of the German occupiers.
Notables
, prominent people, briefly regarded as suitable hostages, were discarded in favour of ‘anti-Germans’, principally communists, who remained the people most loathed by Vichy, and ‘intellectuals’, those who had used their pens to diffuse communist ideas. Fathers of large families were ‘generally’ to be spared.

Some members of the early Resistance had been troubled by the ferocity with which the Germans responded to their attacks, fearing that, by resorting to arms and assassinations, they would alienate the French public. But Danielle, Cécile and Maï were among those who argued passionately in favour of a ‘national war of independence and liberation’, with all the armed violence that the words implied. On the walls of Paris appeared posters with the words: ‘For every one patriot shot, 10 Germans will be killed’. To back away from the tactic of armed attack launched at the Barbès métro, argued Ouzoulias, would spell ‘capitulation and dishonour’ and only lead to further and more terrible repression. Simone Sampaix and the young boys and girls of the Bataillons de la Jeunesse remained at home, waiting for further instructions. Simone’s repugnance at the idea of shooting in cold blood had not altogether gone away, but she had no intention of abandoning the fight now.

When, earlier in the year, the united Front National of the Resistance had been set up, it was clear that some kind of military wing would follow. Around the time of the Barbès shooting, the Main-d’Oeuvre Immigrée, the Opérations Spéciales of the PCF and the Batallions de le Jeunesse merged as the Francs-Tireurs et Partisans (FTP) under a former editor of
L’Humanité
called Pierre Villon. It was given four goals: to hit railway lines carrying men and materiel to the eastern front; to punish traitors and collaborators; to sabotage factories working for the Germans; and to excecute soldiers of the occupying forces, all actions whose symbolic value would go far beyond the actual damage caused.

A silent, dour, pipe-smoking former boilermaker at the Renault car factories, Arthur Dallidet, who was ferocious about discipline and prudence, and fanatical in his hatred of renegades and traitors, was put in charge of security. A librarian called Michel Bernstein became the master forger of false documents. And France Bloch, a young chemist with two science degrees, who as a Jew had lost her job in the Musée d’Histoire Naturelle, was given the task of making explosives. France was the daughter of the distinguished critic and historian, Jean-Richard Bloch, now in exile in Moscow. She was married to a metalworker, Frédo Sérazin, and had an 18-month-old son.

Ever since the mid-1930s, when they had attended anti-fascist rallies together, France had been close friends with a chemical engineer, Marie-Elisa Nordmann, a round-faced, somewhat plump young woman with a gentle manner. As a promising young researcher, she had spent a year in Germany and returned shocked by the spectacle of Hitler’s rallies. She married young, and had a son, whom she doted on. But the marriage did not last and Marie-Elisa and the baby moved in with her widowed mother. In the evenings, she and France attended meetings of the newly founded Vigilance Committee of Intellectual Anti-fascists, of which Marie-Elisa became treasurer in the 5th arrondissement of Paris. Hélène and Jacques Solomon and the Politzers became good friends of hers. Like France, Marie-Elisa was Jewish.

During the summer of 1940, having joined the exodus south, the two women and their sons briefly shared a house near Bordeaux. Now, they made bombs and grenades together, Marie-Elisa stealing mercury from her research institute, others providing metal tubes from car factories. In her laboratory at number 5 avenue Debidour in the 19th, France also kept medicines and vaccines for the Resistance. At night, Marie-Elisa and her mother sheltered resisters who, discovering that their houses were being watched, had nowhere to sleep. Not far away, in boulevard de la Villette, another young woman and her husband had a bicycle shop; here, in the evenings, they cleaned revolvers and made explosives.

To Danielle as to the other leading figures in the new merged Resistance, the moment seemed right to take the armed struggle to the other occupied areas of France, the better to tie down more German soldiers, and to lighten the burden of repression in and around Paris. As the Parisian resisters, changing house every few nights, living away from their families under assumed names, saw it, they had lost all sense of peace ‘either by day, or by night’. Three simultaneous attacks were planned, in Rouen, Nantes and Bordeaux. The idea was to use fighters from the new Francs-Tireurs et Partisans, who, as outsiders coming in just for the attack and then disappearing, would be harder to trace. They were to be helped by local people who were familiar with the movements of the German occupiers.

Rouen, the first city to be targeted, was already relatively well provided with potential fighters. It was in and around Rouen that André Pican and his wife Germaine, teachers in local
lycées
, had been writing, printing and distributing clandestine anti-German newsletters. André was a founding member of the united Front National of resisters. He was an energetic, wiry, good-looking man in his early forties, an excellent speaker, who had drawn his initially reluctant wife into the battle with him. For André there had never been a moment of choice. As Germaine would say about him, he had to act. As soon as the Germans arrived, he set out to visit factories, to spread a spirit of resistance and to recruit fighters. ‘A great revolution has begun,’ he told them. ‘We workers of France will not fail at this task.’ The French, he said, could not, would not, be beaten. Germaine agreed. Ever since the Spanish Civil War, she had felt that it was impossible to sit by and accept the Fascists. She had heard de Gaulle’s appeal over the radio and she was happy to bicycle around the countryside, her saddlebags full of anti-German leaflets to distribute in villages and hamlets.

André Pican, a teacher and founding member of the Front National of the Resistance

Germaine Pican, his wife, a teacher and also active in the Resistance

The Picans had two young daughters, who were the centre of their lives. They were a close and extremely happy family, and Germaine would say that she herself had learnt about happiness as a girl, one of three sisters in a gregarious and loving family. When André was arrested and sent to an internment camp in the summer of 1940, Germaine took over the job of liaising with the Francs-Tireurs et Partisans in Paris. She also knew all about printing, as her father had specialised in engraving the rollers used to print the calico for which Rouen was famous. She found a helper in Claudine Guérin, who at sixteen and a half was not much older than her own daughters. Claudine’s mother Lucie, a fellow teacher and a good friend, had been sentenced to eight years’ hard labour in Rennes prison for distributing tracts, and Germaine felt protective towards the young girl. Claudine was much liked; she was a pretty, talkative girl, always cheerful and uncomplaining, and she made people laugh. Together, Germaine and Claudine, and André before he was arrested, cycled out into the countryside to find chickens and butter to bring back to their comrades in the city.