Brave Genius Page 19

  After the meeting, the men were to go back over the border in pairs. Jacques made it safely, but Degliame and Dejussieu did not. Two Swiss officers, who had accompanied the two Frenchmen to the border and shown them through a passage in the barbed wire, reported that they had been picked up by a German patrol on the other side. De Bénouville sent out the alert through his network, as the two men carried vital knowledge of the whole picture of the Resistance, and no one could predict what they might divulge under torture. Action teams began plotting how to free them from the Germans—risky missions that were certain to incur casualties and retributions. Fortunately, because the prisoners were carrying large amounts of money, their captors took them at first as merely smugglers and did not realize they had two major leaders of the Resistance in their hands. Quick-thinking French customs agents persuaded the Germans to hand the criminals over to French police for prosecution. After paying a heavy fine, Degliame and Dejussieu were released and took the next train to Paris.

  “BAUCHARD” THE JOURNALIST

  With a little inspiration from his friends, Camus was also moving into action. During his stay at Le Panelier, he visited nearby Lyon to see Pascal Pia, who was deputy to Marcel Peck, chief of the Lyon region for Combat. Pia introduced Camus to his friend Francis Ponge, a Resistance poet who stayed at an apartment belonging to the sister of René Leynaud, another poet, who was one of Combat’s leaders within Lyon. Camus struck up friendships with both men, exchanging books and writings. When Camus went into Saint-Étienne for his pneumothorax treatments, he arranged to meet Leynaud there and to wander the grim little city with him for hours. Leynaud told Camus that he had stopped writing, that he would do that “afterward”—meaning after the war. In the little apartment in Lyon, they often talked about literature, right up until curfew time, when Leynaud would excuse himself to go sleep in a safe house.

  Through Ponge and Leynaud, Camus met René Tavernier, who ran a literary review out of his home in a suburb of Lyon, which also served as a clandestine meeting spot for a group of Resistance writers called the Comité National des Écrivains (CNE; the National Writers’ Committee). Camus joined such notable fellow members as Jean Paulhan, François Mauriac, and the poet Louis Aragon; the latter even lived at the house for more than a year during the Occupation. While Camus was too sick to participate in the field, his contact with so many resistants and fellow writers inspired him to compose an article in July 1943 for La Revue Libre, a periodical published by the Franc-Tireur resistance movement. In his anonymously published “Letter to a German Friend,” Camus addressed a fictional former comrade from whom he had been separated for the previous five years. He spoke of their respective love of country and foretold the defeat of Germany:

  We shall meet soon again—if possible. But our friendship will be over. You will be full of your defeat. You will not be ashamed of your former victory. Rather, you will longingly remember it with all your crushed might. Today I am still close to you in spirit—your enemy, to be sure, but still a little your friend because I am withholding nothing from you here. Tomorrow all will be over … I want to leave you a clear idea of what neither peace nor war has taught you to see in the destiny of your country.

  After recounting all that France had to suffer up till that time—“humiliations and silences, with bitter experiences, with prison sentences, with executions at dawn, with desertions and separations, with daily pangs of hunger, with emaciated children, and, above all, the humiliation of our human dignity”—Camus asserted that France, not Germany, would prevail. He wrote:

  I belong to an admirable and persevering nation which, admitting her errors and weaknesses, has not lost the idea that constitutes her whole greatness … I belong to a nation which for the past four years has begun to relive the course of her entire history and to take her chance in a game where she holds no trumps. This country is worthy of the difficult and demanding love that is mine. And I believe that she is decidedly worth fighting for since she is worthy of a higher love. And I say that your nation, on the other hand, has received from its sons only the love it deserved, which was blind. A nation is not justified by such love. That will be your undoing. And you who were already conquered in your greatest victories, what will you be in the approaching defeat?

  Camus’s opportunity to fight for the country he loved arrived later that fall, after he moved to Paris. While he had hoped to find a way to Algeria, it was a job as a reader at his publisher Gallimard that brought him back to the capital. And it was his old friend Pia who made the key introductions that brought Camus officially into the Resistance. Hunted by both the Gestapo and by Vichy, Pia (aka “Renoir”) had moved to Paris in August. At the time, Combat was looking for an editor to ramp up publication of its namesake newspaper. With his experience, Pia was a natural choice, but he had been given new duties as secretary-general of the MUR. Pia thought right away of Camus and decided to introduce him to Jacqueline Bernard, who was the executive secretary of the section of Combat involved in publishing and circulating the newspaper. Bernard was an early adherent of Combat, having been recruited in 1941 to type some of its early bulletins. She was the daughter of well-off Jewish parents who lived in Lyon (in the former unoccupied zone); her whole family was committed to the cause. Within a few days of her joining, her father, Colonel Bernard, had given 50,000 francs to the movement. Her brother Jean-Guy joined Combat as well.

  Camus’s first meeting with Bernard was a typical clandestine rendezvous. Bernard’s parents’ former maid was the concierge of a building on the rue de Lisbonne. She allowed the group to use the back room of her small ground-floor apartment. In addition to Bernard (“Auger” or “Oger”), Combat’s printer André Bollier (“Vélin”) was present. Pia brought Camus, who introduced himself as “Bauchard.” Bernard noticed how undernourished the pale man in the worn-out suit looked, but that was not exceptional in food-rationed Paris. Sitting at the end of a narrow table, “Bauchard” explained that he “had already done a little journalism” but that he would be happy to do page layouts, write articles, or whatever would make him useful. He listened carefully to Bernard’s and Bollier’s explanations of how the paper was produced. Neither Bernard nor Bollier had any idea that they were speaking to a writer whose recent books had been widely discussed in literary circles, nor did Camus know whom he was addressing. And just as well, for the Gestapo was crawling all over Paris, constantly arresting resistants, often by following people to or from meetings just like the one in the concierge’s apartment and then extracting the names and addresses of their companions under torture. Camus and his new associates left the meeting without incident, and “Bauchard” would indeed prove to be a useful addition to Combat’s staff.

  CHAPTER 13

  DOUBLE LIVES

  Whatever there be of progress in life comes not through adaptation but through daring.

  —HENRY MILLER, “Reflections on Writing”

  THE ATMOSPHERE IN AND AROUND PARIS HAD GROWN INCREASINGLY bleak and tense toward the end of 1943. For Parisians, the winter would be the most miserable of the Occupation, as supplies of food and coal dwindled to their lowest of the war. For the Germans, the reversal of their momentum had erased their once smiling and courteous demeanor. The Allies’ advances in North Africa, Italy, and the USSR meant that the second battle of France was just a matter of time—but when? “When are they landing?” was the question on everyone’s mind, and even lips.

  The waiting was agony. For those trying to stay out of sight of the Germans, like Odette Monod and Lise Teissier, living in a strange town among strangers, there was the constant fear of being denounced. For members of the Resistance, it was a matter of holding on against the unrelenting efforts of the Gestapo as their comrades were arrested, deported, or executed. Just a month after the summit in Geneva, Pierre Arrighi (“Charpentier”) was arrested at the Café Le Triadou on the boulevard Haussmann and sent to Buchenwald concentration camp. Marcel Peck, Pia’s Combat chief, who had escaped the Nazis three
times previously, was also snatched in November and disappeared without a trace. In December, the pressure was further intensified when the Germans insisted that Pétain revamp his government with stronger men who were willing to do whatever was necessary to crush the Resistance. He appointed Joseph Darnand, the head of Vichy’s paramilitary force (the Milice), as secretary-general of the forces for the maintenance of order. A ruthless, dedicated anti-Semite, Darnand had even joined the Waffen SS a few months earlier. Special courts-martial were set up under Darnand’s authority to try resistants. The penalty for being caught with arms was immediate execution. In an interview with Paris-Soir, Darnand declared an all-out war on the rural guerrilla groups of the Resistance known as the maquis: “The bands of maquis will be attacked everywhere, with sufficient numbers of forces and the means necessary.” Since his agents spoke French, they were feared perhaps even more than the Gestapo.

  In the face of such increasing pressure, Jacques Monod tried to juggle his double life. He continued his laboratory work, but not at the Sorbonne. A colleague who knew of his Resistance activities and who was a member of the Réseau Vélites, a Resistance group operating out of the nearby École Normale Supérieure, was arrested in November. Fearing that his identity might be disclosed, and knowing that the authorities were aware because of the Nordmann affair in late 1940 that Monod worked at the Sorbonne and lived nearby, it was too risky for him to frequent the university. André Lwoff, who knew of Monod’s clandestine activities (because Monod had connected him with the Resistance), offered Monod space in his laboratory in the attic of the Pasteur Institute. Monod shifted his experiments to the more esteemed institution and even managed to give a seminar there in December. The Institute also provided some presents with which Monod surprised the twins. Always happy to see their father on his overnight visits to Saint-Leu-la-Forêt, they were delighted when he arrived home, put his arms on the table, and shook out a white laboratory mouse from each sleeve of his overcoat.

  Monod did decide, however, that his conducting job was too much, and stepped down, much to his and Dufourcq’s disappointment. He reported to his parents, “I am living a terribly austere and absorbed life, with, thank God, the joy of being able to be very often with Odette and the little ones.”

  ENTRER DANS LE BAIN

  Monod did not lose contact with his entire chorus, however. Geneviève Noufflard tracked him down in January with a bold request—she wanted to join the FTP and to work with him. The young flutist and singer was unwilling merely to wait for liberation; she thought that it was very important to get ready for the battle ahead. She wanted to join a group that was committed to “immediate action” against the Germans—including sabotage and combat. Ever since the episode with Monod’s briefcase, she knew that he was involved in serious work.

  Monod tried to dissuade her, telling her of the terrible risks involved—of arrest, torture, deportation, and death. But Noufflard was very well aware of the dangers, for what Monod did not know was that the music student had long been supporting the Resistance and had many friends and acquaintances who were involved. Right after the fall of France, she and her parents retreated to Toulouse, in the nonoccupied zone, where they hid escaped prisoners and men wanting to go fight with de Gaulle. Noufflard snuck back and forth across the demarcation line several times, sometimes while smuggling documents. René Parodi, a founder of the movement Libération-Nord, was a family friend who was subsequently arrested and died after being tortured at Fresnes Prison. After returning to Paris to resume her studies, Noufflard visited regularly with Franz Stock, the German chaplain of the notorious prison, posing as the fiancée of one prisoner in order to try to learn the fate of a friend’s brother. Her parents’ home in Paris—which she shared in late 1943 with her sister Henriette, a medical intern, as well as her father, a painter (her Jewish grandmother and mother were living in Normandy under false names)—had served as a safe house for all sorts of characters on the run from the authorities. Despite being just half a block away from the Hôtel Matignon, the headquarters of the collaborationist government and Laval’s residence, the grand eighteenth-century maison on the elegant rue de Varennes was a haven for Jewish refugees, réfractaires, Resistance members, and downed Allied airmen.

  The arrival of the first aviator, a member of a B-17 crew named John Spence, caused a great deal of excitement in the household. Among the first American fliers to be hidden by the Resistance and escorted out of France, Spence’s experience was typical of the more than 1,500 Allied airmen who evaded capture by the Germans and escaped from France to freedom. His journey required the assistance of a large number of French people: ordinary citizens whom he just happened to encounter; committed members of Resistance networks; and unaffiliated sympathizers, such as the Noufflard sisters. And because of the large number of people involved, many of whom knew one another barely if at all, evasion work was one of the most dangerous kinds of Resistance activity. Harboring or aiding the escape of an enemy soldier was cause for deportation or execution.

  On the morning of January 23, 1943, Second Lt. Spence’s plane, the Green Hornet, was one of twenty-one B-17s of the 303rd Bomber Group that took off from Molesworth, England, to bomb the Lorient port area and the Brest U-boat pens in Brittany. After dropping their bombs, they were hit by flak, lost two engines, and fell behind the formation. They were quickly pounced on by about a dozen enemy Focke-Wulf Fw 190 fighters. Spence, who was the navigator, fired away until his gun went out. His pilot tried to take evasive action, but the plane lost another engine, so he rang the bailout alarm. Spence jumped out at about 4,500 feet and parachuted into a soft mud field. He injured his ankle but was able to walk, so he rolled up his chute and started running east. He soon encountered a handful of peasants, as well as his engineer, Sidney Devers.

  The two airmen gave away their chutes and kept walking. They were given a drink of cider at a farmhouse before reaching the town of Paule. Another Frenchman gave them food and clothing before they continued farther, and they were fed again by another farmer in Glomel, eventually sleeping in a haystack on the outskirts of Bonen. They walked for three more days, bypassing a German garrison of 1,000 men, and getting fed in turn by several families. Finally, they met an English-speaking Catholic nun who gave them a note to present at the Château de Quellenec near the village of Saint-Gilles-Vieux-Marché. They were received at the eighteenth-century castle by a sixty-seven-year-old woman, Simone de Boisbossel, the countess of Keranflec’h, who gave them a hot bath, food, and a warm bed before taking them the next day by car to a train station, where they used money in their escape kits to buy train tickets to Paris. The ticket agent ignored Spence’s Tennessee accent and gave them their tickets without saying a word. Then, as the men were boarding, he whispered to Spence: “Bon voyage.” The countess guided the men to her daughter’s home just outside Paris.

  Spence and Devers were handed over to the care of Robert Ayle, who was a “helper” with the “Comet Line,” one of the Resistance networks that escorted soldiers, aviators, and others sought by the Germans out of France to neutral Spain by various routes. Once in Spain, British officials would get them to Gibraltar and then to England. Ayle was to make the arrangements for Spence’s and Devers’s passage. It was, however, a dangerous journey on foot through the Pyrenees. Only two weeks earlier, Andrée de Jongh, the Belgian woman who cofounded the Comet Line in 1941, was arrested near the Spanish border with three evaders in the course of attempting her thirty-third crossing. A new route had to be scouted before Devers and Spence could make their attempt. In the meantime, for security reasons, the fliers were given false identity papers and moved around to different houses in Paris. In order to strengthen his ankle for the rigorous midwinter hike, Spence was taken on walks around the city and looked after by reliable friends of the organization.

  A colleague of Henriette Noufflard brought Spence to spend the day on the rue de Varenne. The sisters were very excited to actually see an American, in the flesh, in their house!
Americans had joined the Allied bombing effort only a few months earlier. In the anguish of the Occupation, Spence represented the status of the airmen who were risking their lives to strike back at Germany. The sisters made sandwiches with everything they had in their bare pantry, and managed to find some cream for their last box of tea. Both Henriette and Geneviève spoke excellent English, so Spence was able to entertain them with stories of his prior bombing missions, his bailout, and his evasion. After a long afternoon of conversation, it was Geneviève’s responsibility to walk Spence back that evening to the home of Dr. Jules Tinel on the boulevard Saint-Germain. Tinel had sheltered a succession of evaders, and his son Jacques was also one of Comet’s agents. Noufflard led Spence through mostly empty back streets while they spoke quietly in English. She shifted to French when they approached other pedestrians, to which Spence replied by smiling and chuckling.

  Two weeks after arriving in Paris, Spence, Devers, and three other evaders were escorted south by train by Jean-François Nothomb, who had scouted the new route through the Pyrenees. While such a large group would appear to increase the risk, the strategy was to fill a six-person compartment on the train so that no other passengers were present. After some snags in Spain, Spence made it safely back to England on March 15, 1943.

  Within less than a year, however—by the time of Geneviève and Monod’s conversation about her joining the FTP, Robert Ayle had been arrested by the Gestapo, along with de Jongh’s father (both would face the firing squad in March 1944); Jules Tinel had been arrested and imprisoned; his son Jacques had died at Mittelbau-Dora prison camp; and Spence’s escort Nothomb was arrested that January, tortured, and imprisoned—just a few of the hundreds of Comet members who were arrested or the more than 150 who perished for aiding complete strangers in the Allied cause.