The Cost of Courage (2 page)

Jews and Communists are the first victims of the Occupation, but the dangers of resisting the Nazis are escalating for everyone at the beginning of 1944. Huge yellow posters plastered on the walls of the Métro proclaim that members of the Resistance are no longer the only ones facing German firing squads. A new edict ordains that their fathers, cousins, and in-laws will be executed as well.

And yet, in January, there is a new uncertainty bubbling underneath the humid winter air. All across Nazi Europe, the occupied are buoyed, and the occupiers menaced, by the event that everyone knows is coming, but no one knows exactly when or where: the Allied invasion of the Nazi-ruled continent.

Across the English Channel, massive numbers of British, American, Canadian, and French troops are gathering on the southern coast of England, where General Dwight Eisenhower is making the plans for a spectacular invasion of France. Thanks to a huge disinformation campaign, its location remains a secret six months before the assault begins. After four years of war, a cautiously optimistic Churchill believes that the biggest danger now facing the Allies is stalemate rather than defeat.

YESTERDAY
, the young prisoner accompanying his German captors was a proud member of the French Resistance. Today, he is leading the German agents to the secret address he had sworn to conceal, so that they can arrest his boss, André Boulloche — a man he worships. If André is really there, the Germans have promised Jacques that he will be rewarded with his freedom.

But can he believe them?

Jacques is young looking, even for his age; especially today, he looks practically like a little boy. Deeply religious, he has joined the Resistance just three months earlier, after being recruited by his Sorbonne classmate, André’s sister Christiane Boulloche. Christiane has no trouble persuading him to join their cause. When she asks him if he wants to work for her brother, the boy signs up immediately, without hesitation or reflection.

Jacques is the same age as Christiane, who turned twenty at the end of 1943. Christiane is smart, strong, and attractive. She also has a prominent nose that she thinks is unattractive. She worries, perhaps, that it makes her less glamorous looking than her older sister, Jacqueline, who has joined the Resistance with her.

Christiane’s clandestine duties require her to ride her bicycle all over Paris, sometimes as much as sixty miles in a day. She picks up telegrams from secret drop-off points and decodes them, transports forbidden radio equipment, and sometimes smuggles guns through the capital, usually in a basket underneath eggs or vegetables.

All Boulloches share an innate sense of duty. When Christiane returns from the countryside after the armistice to find German soldiers goose-stepping through Paris, she is consumed by a single thought: “This is wrong.” Before the war started, she had been certain: “We wouldn’t just resist them, we would beat them. That’s why the Occupation was a thunderclap.”

Coupled with youthful fearlessness, and hero worship of her brother, that simple notion — “This is wrong” — propels her into
the underground fight against the Germans. She is hypnotized and horrified by the Occupation. It swallows all of her attention.

The Boulloche sisters’ very first act of resistance occurs when they are stopped by two German soldiers on avenue du Président Wilson. When the young Germans ask for directions to Place de la Concorde, the girls cheerfully dispatch them in the opposite direction.

There is no heat at her lycée, and Christiane wears gloves to turn the pages of the classroom dictionary. She is upset when one of her Jewish teachers loses her job, but she does not consider the plight of the Jews to be the most important thing. More than anything else, it is instinctive patriotism that pushes her into battle.

When the Germans are finally driven out of France, everyone’s nightmare will be over.

Or so she believes.

As 1944 begins, her brother André François Roger Jacques Boulloche has been back in France for only four months. He is an engineer, a lawyer, and something of an adventurer. He and his sisters come from many generations of Catholic judges and prominent civil servants.

Iconoclasm is a leitmotiv in their family: Two Boulloche ancestors were members of the Cour de Cassation, the highest court in France, at the turn of the century. Both of them, remarkably, had been pro-Dreyfus: a belief that had made them strangers to their class — because they were partisans of the truth.

FOUR MONTHS EARLIER
, in the second week of September 1943, André has taken off from England under a nearly full moon, with seven other passengers in a single-engine Westland Lysander. Many underground fighters are being parachuted into occupied France, but the plane carrying this group touches down on a secret airstrip in the Loire Valley, near Tours.

These landings are dangerous, because there is always the possibility that the Germans have been tipped off. This one has been organized by Jean-François Clouet des Pesruches, who has arrived the night before from London, and it goes off without a hitch. Resistance members outline the tiny runway with flashlights pointed straight up at the sky. Foil extends over the tops of their torches, to make them invisible to everyone except the airplane circling above them.
*

André is a handsome twenty-eight-year-old with brown hair and thick eyebrows that hover over a permanent glint in his eyes. Nearly six feet tall, he walks with a tempered, youthful swagger. Before the war, he was considered something of a dandy.

André has been ordered back to occupied France by Charles de Gaulle, to be the general’s personal military delegate in Paris. Pseudonym, Armand, code name, Hypotenuse, André’s charge from the renegade general
^†
is to bring some order to the burgeoning Resistance movements now operating in eleven different departments in northern France.

During André’s absence from France in 1943, there has been a dramatic increase in the membership of the Resistance. In the fall of 1942, the collaborationist Vichy government has taken one of its most unpopular steps, shipping off two hundred thousand Frenchmen to work in Germany. But with so many German soldiers fighting on so many different fronts, that isn’t nearly enough slave labor to satisfy the voracious appetite of the Nazi war machine.

In February 1943, Vichy makes an even bigger blunder: It inaugurates the Service du Travail Obligatoire. The STO requires all Frenchmen between the ages of eighteen and twenty to work in Germany for two years. Faced with the prospect of forced deportation, thousands of these young men simply disappear into the mountains, where, by June, they have vastly increased the number of
Résistants.
They and their place of refuge both become known by a Corsican word for mountainous scrubland: Maquis.

As one historian put it, “The concept did not exist in January 1943; it was everywhere by June.”

In September 1943, after a nine-month absence, André has returned to France on that Lysander. He is carrying 500,000 French francs in cash. Like everyone in the Resistance arriving from England, he also carries a cyanide pill in his pants pocket. It will stay there, always, unless he is arrested. When he touches it with his index finger, it feels like his insurance against torture. Or, perhaps, like his destiny. Either way, he knows he will swallow it if he is captured by the Germans. In this period, the average life of an agent is just four months before he is arrested.

A certain fatalism fuels André’s fearlessness. “I never felt the slightest hesitation on his part,” said his sister Christiane. But there is one irony that probably escapes him: The only thing that could impinge on his heroism might be his own survival.

NOW
,
IN JANUARY
1944, André is inside his secret headquarters on the top floor of an apartment building on the Left Bank. With him are his “right hand,” Charles Gimpel, and his assistant, Geneviève.

Gimpel has arrived one month earlier, carrying another 100,000 francs from England. During his brief time in Paris, Gimpel has already set up an excellent liaison organization with the southern zone, and he has arranged for a large number of radios to be brought up from the south to transmit messages from Paris to London.

The ranks of the Maquis jump sharply after the forced deportation of French workers to Germany. The poster says “French and German workers unite!”(
photo credit 1.3
)

Because their junior aide, Jacques, has been absent for only a day, neither Boulloche nor Gimpel suspects that he has been arrested.

They certainly haven’t imagined that Jacques has violated the cardinal principle of the Resistance. No matter how badly you are tortured, you must try with all your might not to divulge anything important for forty-eight hours after your arrest.

After you have been missing for two days, your comrades are supposed to assume that you have been arrested, and relocate immediately to a new clandestine location. Only then, after the captured agent has endured two days of unimaginable affliction, is he authorized to tell everything he knows.

If the system works the way it’s supposed to, by then his information should be largely worthless anyway.

Jacques adores his boss, André. But almost immediately after he is grabbed by the Germans, the young agent realizes that he will never be able to remain silent after his captors begin to beat him, or semidrown him, since a form of waterboarding is one of the Gestapo’s favorite methods of torture.

He sees only one way out. In a small cell with another Frenchman, he whispers, “Strangle me so I won’t talk! If you don’t, I will tell them everything.”

But the boy’s cell mate is incapable of providing such grisly mercy.

Soon after that, the young Sorbonne student begins to give up all of his secrets, including the location of André’s secret apartment.

Barely an hour later, Jacques is squeezing into the narrow elevator in the apartment house on rue de la Santé on the Left Bank with two Gestapo agents. When it reaches the fifth floor, the three men exit silently onto the landing.

Jacques has been brought here to perform the secret knock. The young Frenchman points at the door of the doomed apartment, then walks toward it to carry out the sordid duty: one sharp rap of his fist, a beat, then two softer knocks on the door.

Inside the apartment, André recognizes the cloak-and-dagger sequence and stands up from his desk to acknowledge it. When he opens the door, he sees two Germans in black leather raincoats pointing identical Walther PPK pistols at his heart.

“HANDS UP!” they shout.

“WHAT’S GOING ON?” André screams back.

Instinct propels the Frenchman toward the staircase as the Germans open fire. Two bullets strike the Resistance fighter just below the chest. One agent rushes toward him to check for a weapon as the other one storms the apartment to capture his confederates.

If he hadn’t been wounded, André thinks, this part would have been easy: He would have swallowed the fatal pill right away. But now he is writhing on the floor, with blood spurting out of his stomach — and the cyanide never leaves his pocket.

For a very long time, he will wonder whether this has been the right decision.

BACK ON THE SIDEWALK
in front of the apartment building, the German agents shove André into the backseat of the black Citroën, next to Jacques. Then they speed away through the darkening streets of the Paris dusk.

Jacques is in a state of total collapse; he is weeping and howling and begging his boss for forgiveness. For the rest of his life, André will carry a hideous memory of these moments.

This part of André’s trauma ends a few minutes later, when he is dumped off at La Salpêtrière, which the Germans have taken over as a prison hospital, where his wounds will be operated on.

For the moment, the Gestapo men prefer to keep André alive because they won’t be able to torture him unless they first make an effort to nurse him back to some semblance of health.

Despite his promised reward, Jacques is soon shipped off to Germany, where he will die in a concentration camp.

FOR JUST ONE HOUR
, the Gestapo leaves the secret apartment unoccupied and unwatched.

Forty-five minutes have passed since the first German team has departed with André and his betrayer. Now Jacqueline, André’s sister and confederate, is at the apartment’s front door. She is there to make dinner for everyone, because — naturally — the women are expected to cook. (In prewar France women don’t even have the right to vote — a privilege de Gaulle will finally bestow upon them after the Liberation.)

Jacqueline performs the secret knock. Hearing no answer, she lets herself in with her own key. At first, the empty apartment doesn’t make her anxious. Gradually, she senses a certain disarray, but if there is blood on the floor of the hallway outside, she hasn’t noticed it. She walks into the kitchen and begins to peel some potatoes. Then she strikes a match to light a fire beneath them.

Suddenly, she realizes she is missing a vital part of the meal. One immutable fact of Parisian life has not been altered by the Nazi Occupation: Frenchmen still require wine with their dinner. So Jacqueline leaves the potatoes simmering on the stove and walks out the front door.