A Train in Winter (22 page)

Not far away, in her cafe in La Rochelle, opened after the Germans curtailed the movements of French trawlers and her fisherman husband lost his job, Annette Epaud acted as another point of contact for the Resistance. Annette was an old friend of the Valinas, a vigorous, energetic woman who came from a large family of metalworkers and seamen. She had one child, Claude, who was 12, and to whom she was very close. Annette called her cafe L’Ancre Colonial, and served German soldiers in the front rooms while hiding resisters at the back, along with weapons. In the cellar, she kept a printing press and roneo machine. Annette was the kind of woman who could never say no to anyone; she needed to help people. Everyone loved her, even the Germans who came to drink in L’Ancre Colonial. One of Claude’s earliest memories was of standing in the damp cellar while his mother showed him how to use the roneo machine. After her husband was picked up and interned in the camp at Mérignac, Annette also liaised with the Underground printers, collecting and distributing tracts around La Rochelle.

Annette Epaud, proprietor of a cafe in La Rochelle, who sheltered resisters

The great exodus from the north at the time of the German advance had brought other young men and women resisters to the south, to Charente and the Gironde. These were families who in the 1930s had supported Léon Blum and the Front Populaire, and who now carried their own seeds of resistance with them to their enforced exile. Forbidden to return to their homes, now occupied by the Germans, they set about planning their own acts of resistance in the south and south-west.

Germaine Renaudin, with her three children

One of these was a determined young woman with exceptionally blue eyes, called Germaine Renaudin. Germaine was a practising Catholic. Evacuated, together with her whole village, from her home on the Maginot line and resettled in L’Espar, not far from Bordeaux, she was outraged by the way the evacuees were treated. She went to see the mayor to demand better conditions. She then turned her attention to Resistance work, taking in people who needed a safe house. Fearing for the safety of her three children, she sent her two daughters to live with a childhood friend near Libourne; Tony, her only son, she kept at home and all his life he would remember the day the police came to search the house, looking for weapons. The guns were hidden in the fireplace and were not found. But Germaine had the pockets of her apron stuffed with Resistance tracts. Calmly taking it off, she handed it to a neighbour, saying, ‘I’m so sorry, I forgot to give you back your apron’. This time, Germaine was left alone; but in the report they filed to headquarters, the police noted that she should be watched for there was no doubt at all that Mme Renaudin was a ‘militant and convinced propagandist for the communist party’.

Madeleine Zani, with her son Pierrot

And there was another refugee from the north, Madeleine Zani, one of the first to be evacuated from her house near Metz as the Germans approached, since she was the mother of a new baby, Pierrot. Her husband, like Germaine’s, was a prisoner of war in Germany. The house they abandoned was looted and stripped bare by the soldiers. Madeleine and Pierrot settled for a while in Libourne, but then moved into Bordeaux, where she was soon hiding members of the Resistance, to the fury of her sisters, who had been evacuated south with her and were terrified that she would put them all in prison. Madeleine was not particularly interested in politics but she was bold and she hated the Germans. She had always disdained conventions. As a young bride, to the immense disapproval of her neighbours, Madeleine had often gone swimming in the river near her house, at a time when few young women did such things.

Two of her friends from the Moselle, Yolande and Aurore Pica, were sent south at much the same time, and in their exile in Bordeaux the three young women continued to meet. Yolande had a baby a bit younger than Pierrot. Like Madeleine, the Pica sisters had Italian immigrant grandparents. At 19, Aurore looked like a Fra Angelico madonna. She joined the Resistance and got herself hired as a cook by the Germans; she was then able to provide the partisans not only with food and information about caches of weapons and movements of troops, but later, by having herself transferred to an office, with stamped passes to enable resisters to cross unchallenged between the occupied and free zones of France.

Some time after her arrival in Bordeaux, Madeleine was befriended by a young man who called himself Armand. Barely more than a boy, Armand was a liaison officer between the Communist Party in Paris and a number of towns in the south-west. What neither Madeleine and her friends, nor Armand himself, knew was that he had already been spotted in conversation with known communists in the area, and been marked down for surveillance. Poinsot and his men, assembling an album of photographs of suspicious people, had circulated a detailed description of the appearance of this stocky 20-year-old ‘with a long face and light brown hair, parted to the side and badly cut’. He was to be watched; not apprehended. Had the Valinas and the Guillons, Germaine Renaudin and the young women from the Moselle had any notion of the sophistication and tenacity of the police operation building up in and around Bordeaux, they would indeed have been acutely anxious.

In April 1942, Pierre Laval decided to purge those of France’s préfectures and sous-préfectures he considered too lax towards the communists and the Resistance. Bordeaux and the Gironde were among the first places to be cleansed. The incoming civil servants, the ‘able and zealous’ Maurice Papon, general secretary of the Préfecture of Bordeaux and in charge of Jewish Affairs, and Maurice Sabatier, Prefect of Aquitaine, agreed that strong measures would be taken to ‘dismantle terrorism’ in the area. Though Hagen, promoted major, had gone off to join Oberg in Paris, one of the twelve new regional merged security services in charge of the security of German personnel and the repression of all anti-German acts, was set up in Bordeaux. The brutal and ambitious Poinsot, now head of the Section des Affaires Politiques (SAP), was eager to demonstrate his own zeal and ability in flushing out resisters.

Poinsot was thorough and tenacious. By carrying out meticulous house-to-house searches, drawing on an invaluable set of pre-war dossiers on known communists, anarchists and members of the International Brigades, and coercing and bullying all those he questioned, he was soon able to put together a map of Resistance activities in the south-west of France. The Bordelais helped. Neighbours reported confidentially on one another. People were denounced for anti-German sentiments and for listening to foreign news broadcasts. However, until the late spring of 1942, the map remained frustratingly indistinct. It was only with the help of two turned former members of the Resistance, a schoolmaster called Pierre-Louis Giret, whose
nom de guerre
was Albert, and Ferdinand Vincent, known as Georges, that matters took on a clearer light. The story of the collapse of the early networks in the Gironde, Landes and Charente is one of betrayal.

Ferdinand Vincent, the former head of a shipyard, had once studied public works in the Vendée. He was invaluable to Poinsot because, having served in Spain with the International Brigades he was known and trusted by the Bordeaux Resistance. At the beginning of the war, Vincent had been friendly towards the communists, though reluctant to be drawn into any of the networks. But after his brother-in-law was arrested by the Germans, Vincent left his job and was recruited into the Resistance. His first mission was to liaise with a number of old comrades from the International Brigades in order to prepare for a parachute drop of weapons. Soon after this, he fell into a trap set by Poinsot. This time he escaped, lay low and grew a thick moustache. However, he was soon tracked down by Poinsot and arrested, though this was not known by the Resistance. Poinsot offered him a deal: he could collaborate, betray members of the Resistance, or be deported, as would be his wife and children. Should he try to escape, the whole family would be shot. Vincent accepted the deal.

Giret was recruited soon after. Picked up for ‘communist attitudes’ while working in a youth camp, his name having been found on a prisoner, both he and his wife ranked high in the Resistance in the south-west. In their house were discovered two typewriters and a revolver. Giret was tortured; he agreed to work for Poinsot. A few days later, a woman who had once given the couple a safe house was arrested. Soon after, André Souques, the laundry owner and one of the organisers for the Gironde, was arrested and appallingly tortured; names found on him led back to a man known as ‘Raoul’. A trap was laid. One of the first to fall into it was Germaine Renaudin, the Catholic, communist mother of three who had been rehoused in the south-west after the fall of France and who had, despite warnings, stubbornly refused to give up her Resistance activities.

Germaine’s son, Tony, was working in the woods when police came to get his mother. Finding the house empty that evening, he learnt that she had been taken to Bordeaux’s notorious Fort du Hâ, a medieval fortress that had changed little since the days when it had housed the enemies of the
Ancien Régime
. When he got there, a policeman at the gate said to him, ‘Push off, lad. Or we’ll take you too.’ Tony was 15. His father was in a prisoner of war camp, his sisters living with friends. He was placed, by an uncle unsympathetic to his sister’s Resistance activities, on a farm in the Marne.

No one knew that Giret had been turned. He told his comrades that he had escaped from the Brigades Spéciales and that he was on the run. With his wife held hostage, Giret set about infiltrating the networks of the south-west, posing either as an escaped member of the Resistance or as an insurance salesman; he sent daily reports back to Poinsot and the KDS. Seeing the excellence of his information, the KDS appointed him agent 155 and gave him 5,000 francs a month, plus travel expenses. Poinsot issued careful instructions to the police throughout the region that, should he be spotted, he was on no account to be stopped.

Vincent, meanwhile, was doing the rounds of the resisters, posing as someone in search of a safe house. From the Landes to Charente and Charente-Maritime, people were happy to take him in. Staying with Annette Epaud in her cafe in La Rochelle, he spent hours playing with her son Claude. And it was Vincent who led Poinsot and the Germans to the farmers in and around Cognac, who had been storing the weapons stolen from the German depot at Jonzac.

Late in the afternoon of 24 July 1942, two men, saying that they were pork butchers in search of animals to buy, arrived in Sainte-Sévère, asking for directions to Les Violettes, the farm belonging to the Guillon family. Having located the property, the two men, joined by some others, hid out behind a tall hedge 200 metres from the farmhouse, and watched. Not long after four o’clock next morning, a farmer, rising early to milk his cows, saw a convoy of lorries drive through the village before taking the road leading to Les Violettes. He had no time to warn the Guillons.

The farm was surrounded. Inside, the police found not only Prosper and Aminthe, as well as their son Jean and his wife Yvette, but Albert and Elisabeth Dupeyron, who had arrived the night before to collect a consignment of weapons. Dupeyron was an important figure in the local Resistance. All six were put on to the lorries; the men were taken directly to the Fort du Hâ, the women to the small prison in Cognac. They were soon joined by the Guillons’ neighbours and friends, the Valinas, and their three children, Jean, Lucienne, and Serge who was just seven.