The Monuments Men (26 page)

“You could be shot for any indiscretion,” he told her, looking her straight in the eye.

“No one here is stupid enough to ignore the risk,” she replied calmly, without backing down from his stare.
4

That was the way to handle Lohse. Never show fear; never back down. If the Nazis discovered they could push you, they would push you to your death. You had to be too much trouble to make it easy, but not so much they grew tired of you. A delicate balance, but one she had perfected. She had been thrown out of the museum many times on charges of spying, stealing, sabotage, or informing the enemy. She always vehemently denied involvement, and recriminations would fly for days. In the end, they always took her back. The more “suspicious” she became, in fact, the more valuable she was to her Nazi overlords because they could use her as an excuse for every problem. Especially Lohse, whom everyone suspected of stealing items for his personal use and as gifts—for friends, for his mother. Valland knew he was stealing; she had seen him hiding four paintings in his car trunk as early as October 1942. She never said anything. Partly it was the bitter irony of the thieves stealing from the thieves. Partly it was that Lohse valued her silence and assertiveness. She was a great distraction. Her worst enemy, she suspected, was also her secret protector.

But that was when it was convenient to keep her; with the looting operation winding down and the Allies on their way to Paris, she was an inconvenience. In June, a French secretary working for the ERR had disappeared, and the Nazis were convinced she was a spy. Shortly after, a German secretary married to a Frenchman was arrested on charges of espionage. The Nazis weren’t just clearing out the artwork; they were clearing out the staff. Rose Valland was fairly certain, ironically, that she was one of the few French workers above suspicion. But that didn’t mean they wouldn’t kill her. If the Nazis felt the cause was lost, they wouldn’t be eliminating spies; they would be eliminating witnesses.

By August 1, the endgame had begun. The Germans were clearing the museum, rushing to get everything out before the Allies arrived. Rose Valland stayed to watch and to listen. Lohse was nowhere to be found; Bunjes was sulking the corridors in a bad mood. But in the middle of the mad rush of activity stood the Jeu de Paume commandant, Colonel Kurt von Behr. She remembered the first time she had seen him, in October 1940. He was in his full uniform then, standing straight and stern with his arms behind him, like the well-known prints of a German warlord in a triumphant pose. Tall, handsome, a cap shading his eyes, which she would learn had the advantage of hiding his glass eye. He was quite charming, a worldly German baron, and spoke French well. Still celebrating his victory, the conqueror was friendly and clearly eager to persuade her that the Nazis were not total savages. In this magnanimous spirit, the warlord granted her permission to remain in her former museum, now his kingdom.

Four years later, he looked quite different: harried, stooped, lined, and balding. It didn’t help his image that in the intervening years she had discovered he hailed from a broken, impoverished baronial line, and that in his youth he had been a dissipated failure. He wasn’t even a soldier. He was, of all ironies, the Nazi-appointed head of the French Red Cross. He had no official rank, even though he called himself colonel. And he had his own Red Cross uniform: black, decorated with swastikas, and suspiciously similar to the original uniforms of the Waffen-SS.

He was pathetic, but also dangerous. For if there was one thing striking about him, as he watched his kingdom being hastily disassembled, it was the look in his eyes. Four years before, he had seemed worldly and relaxed, the perfect conqueror. Now there was anger there, an anger at the realization that everything would soon be lost.

“Careful,” he hissed at the hapless German soldiers who were banging paintings together and shoving them into crates without packing material. There was panic in their eyes, their desire to flee. What had become of the vaunted German discipline?

Rose Valland remembered wanting to approach him, to say something to break him down. But the colonel was heavily guarded by men with machine guns. “
Dommage
,” she had thought.
5
A pity. Then he had glanced at her, and she had seen anger edged with menace. A thought echoed in her head:
Liquidate the witness
.

“Colonel von Behr,” a soldier had said, breaking his gaze. von Behr had turned with a glare. “The trucks are almost full, sir.”

“Get more, fool,” he growled.

Before he could turn back to her, Rose Valland had slipped away. It wasn’t her place to taunt von Behr, and she was certainly no assassin. Her role was to spy, to be the quiet mouse that slowly but surely chewed a whole in the foundation of the house. Four years of occupation was ending in a matter of days, if not hours. If ever there was a time to lie low, this was it.

But her persistence, as usual, had paid off. The trucks leaving the museum with the last of the looted French artwork weren’t heading straight for Germany. In her trek through the museum, Valland had learned they were going to the Aubervilliers train station on the outskirts of Paris to be loaded onto railcars. Trucks would have been nearly impossible to track; a train was easier. Especially since she had discovered the railcar numbers.

The next day, August 2, 1944, five railcars containing 148 crates of stolen paintings were sealed at Aubervilliers. The ERR had rushed to pack the final shipment from the Jeu de Paume, but a few days later the railcars still hadn’t left the station. The art train was scheduled to contain forty-six additional cars of looted objects obtained by another Nazi looting organization controlled by von Behr, “M-Aktion” (M stood for
Möbel
, German for furniture). Much to von Behr’s disgust, those cars weren’t yet loaded.

Train no. 40044 was still parked at the rail station a few days later when Rose Valland paid a visit to her boss, Monsieur Jaujard. She had copied the Nazi shipment order which contained the train and railcar numbers, destinations of the crates (Kogl castle, near Vöcklabruck, Austria, and Nikolsburg depository in Moravia), and their contents. Wouldn’t it be wise to try and delay the train, she suggested. The Allies could arrive any day.

“Agreed,” Jaujard said.

As von Behr huffed on the train station platform, berating the armed guards and the privates trying desperately to load the other cars, Jaujard’s contacts in the French Resistance set out to stop the train using the information Rose Valland had obtained, and subsequently relayed to them by Jaujard. By August 10, the art train was packed, but by then a thousand French railroadmen had gone on strike, and there was no way to depart Aubervilliers. By August 12, the tracks were again open, but instead of departing for Germany the art train was shunted to a side track to make way for other trains carrying personal possessions and terrified German citizens. The German guards, exhausted after ten days, walked nervously back and forth, wishing they were already home. The French army, it was being whispered, was hours away. And yet small technical problems kept cropping up, pushing the train to the end of the priority line. The French army never showed. The young men sighed with relief. After almost three weeks, the train finally began its journey home to Germany.

But it only got to Le Bourget, a few miles down the track. The train, fifty-one cars packed full of loot, was so heavy that it caused a mechanical breakdown (or so went the excuse), necessitating a forty-eight-hour delay. By the time that problem was solved, it was too late. The French Resistance had derailed two engines at an important bottleneck in the rail system. The art train was trapped in Paris. “The freight cars with their 148 crates of art,” Valland wrote to Jaujard, “are ours.”
6

But it hadn’t been so simple. When the Second Armored Division of the Free French army arrived a few days later, the Resistance alerted them to the importance of the train. The detachment sent by General Leclerc found several crates broken open, two crates pillaged, and an entire collection of silver missing. They decided to send thirty-six of the 148 crates filled with important works by Renoir, Degas, Picasso, Gauguin, and other masters to the Louvre. It was the bulk of the collection of Paul Rosenberg, the famous Parisian art dealer, whose son by coincidence was the division commander of the Free French troops who inspected the train. But much to Rose Valland’s regret and frustration, almost two more months would pass before the rest of the crates were removed from the train and returned to the museum. Even in the cold snow of December, waiting for the stationmaster to show her the last contents of the train, it was an oversight that gnawed at the corner of her mind.

“We’d like to see the stationmaster, please,” James Rorimer told the attendant at the Gare de Pantin, blowing on his hands against the winter chill. Behind him, Rose Valland took a long drag on her cigarette, deep in her own thoughts. “I know it’s a vice,” she had told him during one of their first conversations, “but if I can smoke, nothing else but my work matters.”
7

She was mysterious like that, always saying sly, inscrutable things. He could never, for the life of him, understand exactly where he stood with her. They had a good relationship, he was confident of that. It wasn’t just that Henraux, who like Jaujard had urged Rorimer to learn what he could from Valland, agreed that she had been watching and admiring him. It was what Valland said to him the week before, on December 16, when he turned over to the commission several minor paintings and engravings found in an American military installation. “Thank you,” she had said. “Too often, your fellow liberators give us the painful impression they have landed in a country whose inhabitants no longer matter.”
8
It was about as personal as Rose Valland ever got.

But how good was their relationship? And how much did Valland really trust him? He thought of the story Jaujard had told him: Rose Valland alone, holding her ground against the French crowds that stormed the Jeu de Paume in celebration on the day General Leclerc liberated Paris. She wouldn’t allow the mob into the basement, where the museum’s collections had been stored during the occupation.

“She’s sheltering Germans!” someone shouted.

“
Collaborateur
!” The cry rang through the building. “
Collaborateur
!”

Calmly, despite the gun at her back, Valland had showed her fellow Frenchmen that the basement was indeed empty of everything but boilers, pipes, and artwork. And then, despite their protests, she kicked them out. She was no pushover, that was for sure. She was strong, opinionated, easy to underestimate and misunderstand. She had her own ideas about duty and honor, and she kept to her principles even with a gun in her back. Rorimer wasn’t sure if Jaujard had told him the story to explain her secretiveness and determination, or to draw a subtle line between the two of them. Jaujard, after all, had been threatened by his own countrymen, too.

But he had made progress. While he was delivering the recovered objects to Valland at the Jeu de Paume on December 16, Rorimer had visited Albert Henraux, director of the Commission de Récupération Artistique. He informed Rorimer of the locations of nine ERR storehouses and also told him about the unopened traincars. Henraux encouraged him to work with Valland to investigate the locations. “She knows more than she has revealed to us, James. Perhaps you can find out what it is.”

Rorimer had heard the story of the nine locations from Rose Valland as they traveled together to inspect them. While working as a spy at the Jeu de Paume, she had compiled the addresses of all the important Nazi storehouses in Paris, as well as the home addresses of all the important Nazi looters. She had provided the information to Jaujard in early August. He, in turn, had given the addresses to the new French government to investigate. Although a few objects had been returned to the Louvre, nothing further had been heard. This was her first visit to the Nazi storehouses she had worked so hard to uncover.

They didn’t find much. One site contained thousands of rare books; a few others held minor pieces of art left behind during the French government sweep of the building. In some ways, it was simply another dead end, another setback. And while he still professed in his letters home to love his job, Rorimer’s satisfaction was being undercut by crosscurrents of doubt and frustration.

For one thing, he was homesick. In England, he had agreed not to send sentimental letters home because they would “only cause the writer and the recipients unnecessary emotional disturbances.”
9
For six months he had dutifully obeyed this rule. But in late October, he had broken down, writing his wife that “I think of your problems often, perhaps even constantly. It is not that I do not want to help you lead your life with you these days, but rather that I know how foolish it would be to do anything but plan for our happy future years together. I do not ask about our child, nor tell you how I long to see Anne. That would not be fair. It’s for this same reason as I have told you before that I do not write very personal, sloppy letters about wasted emotions. When I see the concierge’s child at our apartment I realize how deprived I am of these moments which we should be having together.”
10
Anne was eight months old, and her father had never seen her. And he had no hope of doing so anytime in the near future.