Andrée's War (25 page)

Now, let me describe my travelling companions. There was Michèle, a strange girl who I suspect has no morals. She is obviously someone's mistress and runs an American bar – La Racasse – in Montmartre. She has invited us all to join her for dinner if we ever get back to Paris. She has short hair, dresses in a very masculine way, and although she says she is 25 years old, she looks much older. Next, D'Artagnan – a rather stylish insurance salesman, and a perfume salesman who is seriously charming!

She was in trouble at work due to the delays on the trains, which led to an extraordinary diary entry dated 15 June – the only time she comes close to explicitly recording her Resistance activities:

Little diary, you will not believe the trouble I got into when I finally made it to the Préfecture. Monsieur Leclercq was absolutely furious and made me do all the filing. He wanted to send me to the rue des Ursins
[where the police archives were kept]
but there was absolutely no way I was going there because it is essential that I can be contacted and important that I am near a phone.
[I assume this refers to Resistance colleagues who may have needed to reach her.]
What is more I am being watched very carefully and apart from the filing do not dare to do anything else. Michel wants me to leave and I would really like to leave this disgusting place. I had dinner with Michel on Tuesday night and he wanted me to say ‘Merde' to Monsieur Leclercq … he has made it clear that if I want to resign I can …'

The only consolation was that she had a new boyfriend, Roger, with whom she was due to go out later that week, and who she thought was ‘just great'. Was the Michel she mentions above her Resistance colleague Michel Alliot
or someone else? She doesn't say, but there is no mention of a Michel in any other context so I have assumed so.

On 16 July, Andrée left Paris early to travel to Bordeaux, where she was to meet Guy Mangenot to collect some reports for onward delivery to Marseilles. Unusually for her, she was carrying no documents from Paris. The train was held up just before Poitiers due to sabotage on some of the tracks around the city, and passengers had to spend several hours walking to the next point from where they could resume their journey. In the end, they arrived too late in Angoulême to continue, so Andrée found a hotel for the night and returned to the station the following morning, to continue her journey.

She knew there was a problem almost as soon as she stepped off the train at Bordeaux. A Wehrmacht officer and two soldiers were carefully scanning the passengers as they made their way into the station's terminal. Something felt wrong. As she walked towards them as coolly as possible, the officer approached her and addressed her by name, asking for her papers. Showing her surprise at having been singled out, she did her best to stay calm and handed over her ID card. The officer looked at it carefully, then informed Andrée that he had been awaiting her arrival and that she was to follow him to the stationmaster's office.

Andrée remained seemingly composed, well aware how important it was for her to appear guiltless. But inwardly she was in turmoil. She had no idea why she had been stopped or why the officer knew her name. Nothing had been done differently on this particular trip, yet they knew she was coming. Someone must have said something.

Once in the small office she looked around the room, conscious that she had little time in which to assess the situation and therefore deal with what might lie ahead. Distrustfulness was not a typical trait for her, but this was no time to be naive. She thought about Guy Mangenot, and whether he or any of his agents had been picked up. In accordance with Alain's strict rules, she knew nothing about Guy's own operation, but it was clearly important or else she wouldn't have been sent to Bordeaux so frequently to meet his
agents. She considered the possibility that she could have been followed to Orion, and if so whether Madame Labbé and her family and friends could be at risk. It was impossible to know anything for certain at that point.

Andrée's suitcase sat open on the table in front of her as the officer searched through its contents carefully, examining each item meticulously. At least he would not find anything; that was a relief. As his search came to an unfruitful end, his irritation began to show. He looked up at last and asked her what she was doing in Bordeaux.

Andrée was used to dealing regularly with officers of the Wehrmacht and was therefore not discomposed by his questioning. She responded calmly to his questions, which unsettled him further. He told her sharply that she was to be moved to the police station for further questioning. With a display of sangfroid that belied her years, Andrée demanded to know on whose authority she was being detained. He ignored her, and instead she was escorted out of the station and into a waiting car.

By this point Andrée was feeling rattled but tried to hold on to her belief that the officer had no evidence to suspect her of anything. This was probably just a fishing expedition; if he knew something about her, wouldn't he have tackled her with it already?

She was led into Bordeaux police station by two soldiers, and followed by the captain. Standing before the duty sergeant, she was informed that she was being charged with the crime of working as an agent for the Allied intelligence services. It was a brutal shock, but she was determined not to reveal anything. She was taken into a formal interview room, and told to sit down in front of a table in the middle of the room. A young woman in the corner looked ready to take notes.

As the questioning began, Andrée tried to stay calm and respond as briefly as possible, to avoid giving anything away inadvertently. Clearly, the captain was annoyed that she was not carrying the compromising material he had expected to find on her. But where had his intelligence come from? She needed to find out who or what had led to her being identified as a suspect, and how much of what she was doing was known to them.

She answered the questions politely and slowly, working hard to appear both surprised and a little naive. She explained that she was travelling
through Bordeaux to Orthez, to visit her aunt who was not well, and that she had been given permission to do so by her employers at Police Headquarters in Paris. She addressed the officer as ‘Captain'
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throughout, careful to emphasise his rank. He was not diverted, however, and asked her why in that case did she stop off in Bordeaux and take the bus into town? Andrée was horrified. Someone had observed her going into the centre of Bordeaux? How could she explain that?

She smiled at the officer, doing her best to work her charm on him. She told him that she had not told her employer the exact truth; that she travelled regularly to Orthez because she loved the Basque countryside and wanted to enjoy it. She had told a fib about an ill aunt, so that her manager would feel sorry for her and give her permission to travel. Sometimes she had to wait at Bordeaux for a connecting train and so, to kill time, she went into town.

The captain watched her broodingly. He did not appear to be won over. Abruptly, he changed tack. He warned her that if she did not comply with him and answer his questions truthfully, he would have no choice but to bring in the Gestapo. Andrée fought to hide her fear, protesting that she was not hiding anything. She had now been detained for almost three hours. The captain stood and told her she would be placed in a cell to reconsider her story.

Alone in her tiny cell, Andrée focused on remaining positive. She knew that she could not afford to give her interlocutor any room for doubt; she had to convince him that they had the wrong person. She would not allow herself to even think about the possibility that they might round up the rest of the team. If all else failed, she still had her cyanide pill, safely stitched into her bra. But she was not ready to accept defeat just yet.

The hours went by slowly. She had nothing to do; they had not given back her handbag or her book. She knew she was being watched at regular intervals through the hole in the cell door. She could hear crying coming from somewhere, and the smell of sewage was strong. She focused on what she was going to say next; her colleagues' lives might depend on it.

Eventually, the cell door was unlocked, and she was led out. The captain was waiting for her. The Gestapo had arrived to question her, he said. Andrée's ability to block out the negative was a huge strength; she would not allow herself to imagine what terrors might await her. She was taken to a different room and left there to await the SS officer. Mentally and physically, she braced herself for the encounter.

She was expecting a tall, physically intimidating officer and was somewhat surprised to be faced with a tired-looking, overweight man well into his late thirties. It was, she felt, to her advantage. Again, her questioner did not expect her to maintain her composure in the light of forceful and direct interrogation. She remained composed, answering only when she had something to say and otherwise remaining silent. After a while he stopped and looked at her. She seized the moment.

Imitating her mother's authoritative manner, she stood up and looked at him directly. She informed him that if he had been professional in his questioning of her, he would have contacted one of the Wehrmacht officers at Police Headquarters in Paris to confirm her respect of the Wehrmacht, her total lack of interest in politics and her non-involvement in any Resistance activities. The officer was noticeably taken aback, and she felt confident she had the upper hand. She suggested he contact Captain Rohrbach to corroborate her claims.

There was a somewhat startled silence, then the captain stood up and indicated that the interview was over. She was taken back to her cell to wait, desperately hoping that they would follow her suggestion.

Years later, Andrée told me what she thought had happened next.

It took several hours but they finally got a call placed through to Paris and Rohrbach told them there was absolutely no way he could possibly imagine I was involved in the French Resistance, little did he know. He told them I had worked solidly at Police Headquarters for four years and that I had always gone out of my way to help them out with any administrative or language difficulty they had. I was never unpleasant to any of them. They always treated all of us politely and with respect. There was never any animosity among us. Rohrbach was always chasing me. I flirted with him
and he often bought me chocolates. Your grandmother would have been furious had she known where the Marquise de Sevigné chocolates I gave her came from. He helped me sell the presents I had been given by my clients. It was all very innocent. He was not a Nazi. I never knew what happened to him after the war, but he saved my life.

Eventually, Andrée was returned to the interview room, where the Wehrmacht captain informed her she was free to resume her journey. He gave no explanation for their change of heart. Inwardly, she was jubilant, but conscious that she was still no wiser as to who had informed against her. Without a name, Orion would remain vulnerable. It was worth a try, at least.

As she walked with the captain to the duty sergeant's desk to retrieve her possessions, she asked him for the name of the person who had caused so much trouble, explaining that she intended to report him or her to her superior at Police Headquarters. To her surprise, the captain told her the name of the informant.
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His name meant nothing to Andrée, but at least they would now have something to go on.

It always remained a mystery to Andrée's Orion colleagues that the SS officer did not pursue his questioning further, and did not torture his prisoner. For her part, Andrée suspected that this particular officer had other pressing matters to deal with and decided to leave the case to the Wehrmacht officer who had originally brought her in. By this point, in July 1944, France was in upheaval five weeks after the Normandy landings. There was fierce fighting throughout the country and the liberation of Paris was only a few weeks away. In that sense, she could not have chosen a better time to be arrested.

Andrée wrote nothing of her arrest in her journal but she did mention meeting François de Rochefort in Paris at 18.15 the following day, making
it unlikely that she went on to Marseilles as planned. The details of what happened are recorded in her Croix de guerre citation, as well as extensive conversations with me and some of her English friends. Yet it is not mentioned in Alain Gandy's history of the Orion Group,
La jeunesse et la Résistance
. Why? She was always modest about her own achievements, but surely this would have been worth talking about when she was interviewed – certainly other colleagues went to great length to describe their exploits. Over lunch, in April 2010, I talked to François Clerc about the omission. He responded by urging me to understand the very different position of women in French society at that time: ‘Andrée simply accepted and agreed unquestioningly to do anything and everything Alain or any of the team asked of her... She would not have wanted or expected any acknowledgement because she knew she was only a woman and therefore would not have thought she had achieved anything or deserved any recognition.' In his own memoir, her brother described how he thought Andrée was more frightened of what he might say to her if she failed in something he had asked her to do than of being caught or interrogated by the Wehrmacht.

 

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‘Captain' was the rank Andrée used when telling me the story – I assume she identified his rank from his uniform.

*
Andrée didn't recognise the name the captain gave her, and she never wrote it down anywhere, but she told me years later that she passed it on to Alain and the others as soon as she got back to Paris. When I asked what happened to the informant, she told me that her Orion colleagues had arranged for someone to ‘slit his throat'. I can't find any corroborating evidence for this, however.