Escape From Paris

Published 2013 by Seventh Street Books™, an imprint of Prometheus Books

Escape from Paris
. Copyright © 1986 by Carolyn Hart. Introduction, copyright © 2013 by Carolyn Hart. All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, digital, electronic, mechanical, photocopy­ing, re­cord­ing, or otherwise, or conveyed via the Internet or a website without prior written permission of the publisher, ex­cept in the case of brief quotations em­bodied in critical articles and reviews.

The characters and events portrayed in this book are fictitious. Any similarity to real persons, living or dead, is coincidental and not intended by the author.

Cover image © Lori Seidemann/Media Bakery

Cover design by Jacqueline Nasso Cooke

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

 

Hart, Carolyn G.

Escape from Paris / by Carolyn Hart.

pages cm.

ISBN 978-1-61614-793-8 (pbk.)

ISBN 978-1-61614-794-5 (ebook)

I. Title.

PS3558.A676E8 2013

813'.54­—dc23

2013002604

Printed in the United States of America

I was a child during WWII and the war dominated our lives. Family members served in the Army or Navy. We followed the faraway course of the fighting in huge black newspaper headlines. Food and gasoline were rationed. We bought war bonds and grew Victory gardens and collected scrap iron. Everything was spoken of in terms of the duration. To a child, the duration was all we knew. We grieved when the lights went out in Paris and when the Luftwaffe bombed England.

The war remained vivid in my memory and, as an adult, I wrote several WWII suspense novels including
Escape from Paris
, the story of two American sisters who risk their lives to rescue British airmen, and
Brave Hearts
, which chronicles the courageous efforts of Americans trapped in the Philippines after the Japanese invasion. Both novels are forthcoming from Seventh Street Books in Summer 2013.

Escape from Paris
was originally published in a much shorter version in 1982 and 1983. To sell the book, I had to cut forty thousand words. To my great delight, Seventh Street Books is publishing the original uncut manuscript, which has a newly amended 2013 copyright. It has been thirty years in coming, but now
Escape from Paris
is available as it was written.

I hope readers will share the struggles of brave men and women who defied the Gestapo during the bitter winter of 1940. They knew fear, found love, grieved loss. Their lives and deaths remind us that freedom survives only when the free are brave.

Carolyn Hart

Thursday morning
March 7

He sat alone in his office, his massive shoulders leaning forward, his withered legs covered by an afghan. Slowly, mechanically, he fit a cigarette into the holder, lifted it to his mouth. As he drew the silvery trail of smoke into his lungs, he coughed, the persistent cough of the bronchitic. His pale blue eyes moved from the papers in his hand to the map spread out on his desk. The map was blue, too, the awesome immense blue of the Pacific Ocean. A cluster of silver markers represented the American Western Fleet at its home base of San Diego, Calif. His gaze moved across the map. Other occasional markers represented American ships now at Wake, Guam or Midway, but, in the vastness of the mid-pacific, there was nothing to meet the Japanese immediately should they dare to attack Manila or Hong Kong or the Dutch East Indies as many Far Eastern experts feared.

Roosevelt looked again at San Diego harbor. Taking a red pencil in hand, he scored a direct line from San Diego to Pearl Harbor, Oahu, Hawaii.

Saturday afternoon
April 20

“Oh, Harry, the war's just a joke! Hitler's got what he wanted. Nothing else is going to happen. Why don't you stop taking that gas mask with you? No one else carries them now and you look such a fool.”

He moved heavily for he was past his youth, a middle-aged plumpish bank clerk who had waited late to marry and chosen a coquettish ill-tempered girl twenty years his junior. She had snatched him up for he was a social cut above her, but now she was bored and the tight sharp lines beside her mouth grooved deeper every year.

Harry Carlisle stolidly buckled on his gas mask. It was regulations to wear it and it would be a fine thing if the block warden didn't set the example.

Her voice, higher, shriller, followed him down the spotless walk, past the rosebushes he treasured. Time now to spray or the aphids would be doing their work. The aphids were mixed up in his mind with the Germans and the sound of Janet's voice. If there had been children . . .

He opened the gate. She followed him down the walk.

“. . . bunch of doddering old men . . .”

He clenched his jaw and kept on walking.

“. . . making themselves out to be soldiers and wardens and all those fancy titles and you won't even take time to get out now for a bit of cards. And this silly stupid phony war, that's what they're calling it, I read it in the Daily News, the phony war, it's closed everything down and there never was any fun in this town anyway! I wish we'd never come here.”

He lowered his head and walked up the lane, the sweet chill rush of an April breeze cooling the flush in his cheeks. He could still hear Janet.

“Even if there is war, it won't come here. Nothing ever happens in Coventry. And nothing ever will happen in Coventry.”

Tuesday morning
May 14

“Boys, I want you to promise that you won't go outside!”

They stared at their grandfather. Jan was blond and blunt-faced like his father. Dirk was small and slight and dark, like his mother.

“Promise me now, boys!” His voice was high with strain. He had huddled near the stairwell with his grandsons since the bombing began shortly after dawn. Radio Rotterdam announced that German warplanes were attacking. All civilians were warned to take cover and all soldiers ordered to join their units.

Jan kept darting to an upstairs window, wriggling away from his grandfather's staying hand.

“Oh, Dirk, the sky is full of them, black planes and silver ones and you can see the bombs falling like black fish.”

“Jan, come back down those stairs immediately!”

Just before noon, a piercing shrill whistle shocked them into stiff silence, then Grandfather Groeneveld pulled both boys to him and pressed them against the stairwell wall, shielding them with his body. The explosion rocked their house. Glass splintered and tables shook. A thick grayish dust sifted through the rooms.

The three of them edged to the front window, its glass shattered now and the white lace curtains shredded. Oh, Dirk thought, wouldn't his mother be mad! They looked across the street.

The chimney of the Veelen house stood in a shallow crater. A tongue of fire flickered then whooshed into a fan of flame as a gas line ignited.

Dirk stared at the crater solemnly. Mrs. Veelen always gave him a pastry when he went to play with Conrad. If she and Conrad and Corrie were in the house when the bomb struck . . . His face furrowed.

“Come back now boys, away from the window.”

It was one o'clock when the radio announced that the main hospital had been struck. The extent of damage and the number injured were unknown.

It was then that their grandfather, gray faced, his hands trembling, had warned them to stay in the house. He had to go. Their mother, his daughter, was a nurse at the hospital.

Wave after wave of bombers swept over Rotterdam, the bombs falling so fast, the explosions coming so thickly that thunder merged into thunder. Once again, the shrill high piercing whistle warned them a bomb was coming near.

The house shook again. A picture of the Maas River that hung against the wainscoting in the hall tipped suddenly sideways then fell, crashing heavily against the floor.

Jan jumped up. “Dirk, you stay here. I'm going to go down to the fire station. I can help.”

Dirk tried to grab his older brother's hand. He did slow him, but Jan was almost fifteen and big for his age, broad-shouldered, strong. He shook Dirk off. “I tell you, Dirk, you stay here. I've got to go and help.”

Dirk stood in the empty hallway. He almost darted out the door after his brother, then, again, he heard the pulsating roar of planes, hundreds and hundreds of planes. He turned around, ran frantically upstairs to the window of his room that overlooked the street.

Jan was almost at the end of the block.

“Jan! Jan, come back!”

The roar of the planes drowned his voice. Above the rumble of engines and crump, crump, crump of faraway bombs, Dirk heard a rattling pinging metallic clatter. Little puffs of dust rose in a line down the street. Jan stumbled. The dusty line of the machine gun bullets picked up beyond him. He lay face down, unmoving. Even from where Dirk clung to the second-story window ledge, he could see the stitching of blood across his brother's back.

The Germans. That was what the radio had said. Why did the Germans want to shoot Jan?

Friday evening
June 14

It was a small collection of vehicles. Not nearly large enough to be called a convoy, about twenty men in five light vehicles with only machine guns for armaments. The dusty cars reached Paris in the early evening and drove directly to the Hotel du Louvre. The officers had maps. They knew their way. There was no hesitation. The officer in charge, Helmuth Knocken, was a thirty-year-old athletic university graduate who had gotten into police work almost by accident. He had dabbled in journalism first. He ordered the files carried in, oversaw the setting up of a makeshift office. It was a small group of men, wearing the uniforms of the Geheime Feld Polizei, the secret military police, instead of their regular black SS uniforms, which would have revealed them as members of the Geheime Staats Polizei, the state secret police. Or, as it was usually called, the Gestapo.