A Train in Winter (26 page)

Oberg had counted on the fact that the savagery of the reprisals would deter further attacks. He was soon proved wrong. Within a couple of weeks, sixty-four more Germans were dead and prefects were reporting from around France that ‘anti-German feelings are growing more and more violent’. Orders went out for another mass execution. But the
politique des otages
was clearly not working and the shootings were postponed while a new policy, that of deportation into
Nacht und Nebel
, was discussed.

Betty was living in the same dormitory as Madeleine Dissoubray and, as they did their morning exercises, they discussed plans to escape from the fort. Exploring the courtyard during their exercise periods, they decided that the only possible way would be to follow the drains into the sewers, hoping to emerge well beyond the fort’s outer walls. The first part of the plan went well: they escaped below unnoticed. But before long they reached an iron grille barring the way out, and no amount of heaving or pushing would move it. Extremely downcast, they were forced to crawl back the way they had come. No one had noticed their absence. Keeping alive a spirit of resistance, even in the face of impossible odds, seemed to them essential. On the anniversary of the October revolution, they helped some of the men prisoners in the courtyard make a hammer and sickle, fashioned out of boxes and paper and stones; they considered the thirty days’ punishment in the humid and dark cellars, without a mattress or blanket, well worth it.

Christmas was approaching. Charlotte and the women involved in the theatrical afternoons, thinking it important to divert and involve those grieving for their husbands, redoubled their activities. Plans were made to put on a sketch about Joan of Arc, with Danielle as Joan and Marie-Claude as a German sentinel. Cécile began scrounging material for costumes; she could never act, she would later say, because sooner or later she always started to laugh. Poupette was learning her lines; she was not unhappy, listening to the older women as they talked about literature and politics. Once the older communist women realised that neither she nor her sister Marie had much interest in politics, despite their work for the Gaullist Johnny network, they made much fuss of them. Political differences no longer divided the women, for whom friendship and solidarity had become a way of warding off fear and hunger. There was talk about pooling food for a special Christmas lunch and getting hold of nuts, apples and
pain d’épice
(gingerbread) to celebrate the New Year. The women were busy knitting and making little presents for each other. But it was getting cold, and the mood in Romainville was sombre.

It was not much lighter in France as a whole. At 7a.m. on 11 November, in spite of Laval’s frantic diplomatic attempts to prevent them, the Germans crossed the demarcation line and occupied the whole of France. Oberg and Knochen’s men followed closely behind and soon the Gestapo were at work throughout the entire country. Vichy lost its zone of independence, its army, its fleet and its empire, though Pétain remained head of state. An earlier call for volunteers to go to work in German factories—with the promise that for every one volunteer, three prisoners of war would be released—had met with such little enthusiasm that a compulsory work scheme was being set up. Any Frenchman between the ages of 18 and 50 not in a job essential to the state would now become liable for the draft. All over France, resisters began to put up posters: ‘Do not go to Germany!’ Among the young men who had become rootless during the years of occupation, and to whom Vichy’s views on collaboration and anti-Semitism seemed attractive, a militia was, however, taking shape. It would soon prove efficient in the capture and torture of resisters.

The one note of hope was to be found in a surge of young men, drawn into the Underground by the prospect of compulsory labour in Germany, who began to make their way into the forests and hills of rural France, to join the Maquis, which took its name from the Corsican for scrubland. All over the now wholly occupied regions of France, many of the small networks and larger Resistance movements were joining forces, brought together by shared political victimisation, by the persecution of the Jews and by such figures as Jean Moulin, bringing supplies, weapons and money from the Allies.

Although some of these networks were mistrustful of the Gaullists and communists alike, and the Resistance movements had periods when they were riven by animosities and rivalries, most subscribed to the idea of a vast assembly of resisters from which no faction should be excluded, and most professed at least a measure of confidence in de Gaulle’s leadership. Another small act of progress was a new law, passed by Vichy in September, rescinding the ‘incapacity’ of women, which they had once shared with minors, the insane and convicted felons, a measure made necessary by the fact that there were now 800,000 women in France, most of them wives of prisoners of war, running their own households.

Now, perhaps more than ever before, the full meaning of occupation was impossible to ignore: 42,500 Jews already deported to the death camps (and not one of the trains bearing them there derailed by the Resistance), the whole of the country in the hands of the German military, the people hungry and miserable, facing their third winter without fuel, and many thousands of resisters either dead, in prison, or on their way to factories in Germany. In his monthly report, the Prefect of Eure-et-Loire noted that the people in his area had become apathetic and wretched: ‘The spirit of Verdun has vanished, and a mood of terrifying individual egotism has taken hold.’ Paris, in the grip of another cold winter, was grim.

Not long before Christmas 1942, one last group of women destined to join the others in exile arrived at Romainville. They were Polish, and not all of them spoke French. Drawn to France in the 1920s and 1930s by the pull of jobs in the north, they had planned to go home when circumstances allowed. They had been a tight-knit community, highly nationalistic, cooking Polish meals of sausage and red cabbage; and, on warm summer evenings, the men played polkas on their harmonicas. But the war and the Nazi persecution at home had trapped the Poles in France and with the armistice had come a Polish Resistance movement called POWN, under the former Polish Consul-General, Aleksander Kawalkowski, who went by the
nom de guerre
of Justyn. In the summer of 1942, the name Angelika, later changed to Monika, was given to a plan to help paralyse German troop movements in the event of an Allied landing; in the meantime, members helped with sabotage, the gathering of information and the smuggling of Jews out of France.

Into the net of David and his Brigades Spéciales, during the early autumn of 1942, had fallen a number of women working for Monika. Some were teachers, come to teach Polish in the mining communities; others worked in shops in Paris, helping repair radio transmitters for the Resistance, or using their homes to shelter Jews. And some were Frenchwomen, who happened to be married to Polish Jews and who had been caught up in the
rafles
of Parisian Jews.

The entire Brabander family—François, his wife Sophie, their daughter Hélène and younger son Romuald—arrived in Romainville together. François had fought with the French in the First World War, and after the armistice had joined the campaign to liberate Poland before finishing his medical studies and opening a surgery for the families of Polish miners living in France. After the fall of France, he tried to reach England with his wife and children via Spain but was turned back at the Spanish border. Resigned to remaining in France, he and Sophie joined the Monika network, until they were finally picked up by the Gestapo. For twenty-four hours, 19-year-old Hélène, who had been staying with a friend, avoided capture; but then she too was caught. In Romainville, François and Romuald spent a terrifying day in the bunker where the hostages about to be executed were kept, and were then transferred to the camp of Compiègne. Sophie and Hélène were put to share the dormitories with the Pican and Tintelin resisters.

Then there was Anne-Marie Ostrowska, who, though not Jewish herself, was married to a Polish Jew called Salomon, with whom she had set up a small leather workshop on the rue Oberkampf in Paris. As the racial laws had become ever more restrictive, so Salomon and their 19-year-old son Alfred tried to cross the demarcation line to safety in the south; but they were arrested and interned. Anne-Marie could think only of trying to find and save her husband and son. As a ‘non-Jew’, she was theoretically allowed to move around freely, but she and her 17-year-old daughter were picked up at Vierzon by the Gestapo. Since Anne-Marie was not Jewish, she was sent to Romainville; to her terror and misery, her daughter, considered a half-Jew, had been taken to the camp at Pithiviers and was now awaiting transfer to Drancy.

Just before Christmas, two other young Polish girls arrived at the fort. Their names were Karolina Konefal and Anna Nizinska and they were dressed like peasant girls, with enormous brightly coloured shawls. Their only possession was an alarm clock. They spoke no French. They seemed uncertain as to why they were in France at all, beyond the fact that they had been given the name of a man who worked with the Monika network.

Alice Viterbo, an Italian singer in her late forties, born in Alexandria in Egypt and who had sung at the Paris Opéra, reached Romainville on 15 December. Not long before the war, Alice had lost a leg in a car accident. No one could discover just what she had done in the Resistance but it was thought that she had helped a Gaullist network. She was a sunny presence, uncomplaining about her wooden leg, and she could often be heard singing in her dormitory. Alice was followed by 31-year-old Charlotte Decock, a metalworker from Nogent arrested after her resister husband escaped from prison, and held hostage in his place. Charlotte had been given leave to attend a christening, and could have used the occasion to escape, but voluntarily returned to prison. Her husband was persuaded by the family not to turn himself in. No one believed the Gestapo would really hold an innocent woman, mother of a 10-year-old boy and seven-year-old girl, for long. Charlotte was immediately popular; like Alice, she was certain that nothing bad would befall them, and that they would soon be on their way home. In her wake came Mitzy Ferry, a 24-year-old waitress who had been helping Jews across the demarcation line. Mitzy had spent three months in solitary confinement, manacled to the wall, and had been repeatedly tortured. The other women closed in round her and did what they could to comfort her. One of the last to join them was Georgette Rostaing, who had teetered so cheerfully around Ivry on her high heels. Later, Pierrette would remember clinging to her hands and crying.

Even with the huge efforts made to keep up their spirits, many of the women gathered at Romainville were in mourning, whether for their lost husbands or for their children, scattered among grandparents and relations and not seen now for many months. Annette Epaud had managed to smuggle into the fort with her a photograph of her son Claude, in his beret. One of the men prisoners she met in the courtyard was an artist, and he offered to make a drawing from the photograph. It was an excellent likeness and she was very pleased that she now had two pictures of her son to look at. Those who had left babies behind, however, like Lulu and Madeleine Zani, were painfully conscious that they were missing all the stages of their infancy, as they learnt to talk and to walk; and that, already, the children would not know them. It was a bitter punishment that none had imagined.

The 9th of January 1943 was Danielle’s 34th birthday. The women in her dormitory managed to have a bunch of flowers smuggled into the fort; all day, as she walked along the corridors and in the exercise yard the women she met presented her with little gifts, sewn from scraps of material, or cards, drawn and decorated on paper saved from the Red Cross parcels. ‘You cannot imagine how fond we are of each other,’ Danielle wrote to her parents, ‘nor just how important each of us is to the others.’ Friends had sent in a present of a pot of veal and carrots.

It was mid-January when Trappe suddenly announced that the women in Romainville would be allowed to receive and send letters. ‘A wind of departure is blowing,’ noted Marie-Claude, though she, like the others, thought it would be some months before they were actually freed. ‘But I have in me a wealth of patience, so sure are we that the end is coming.’ There were rumours that the Allies were about to take Tripoli, and that the Germans were facing defeat at Stalingrad. Poupette and Marie had just learnt that their mother had died of stomach cancer. When she heard the news, Marie fainted.

In July 1942, a first contingent of 1,170
Nacht und Nebel
prisoners had left the nearby camp of Compiègne for an ‘unknown destination’. They were all men. On board were metalworkers, plumbers, electricians, railwaymen, dockers, tailors, postmen and farmers. Ninety per cent were communists and all had been arrested for Resistance activities. One was Betty’s uncle, Charles Passot. In Compiègne they had kept up their political studies, exercised and shared their food. Where they had gone, no one had any idea. With the realisation that mass executions had failed to deter resisters, and that deportation, especially cloaked in secrecy, might prove more effective, the Germans decided to send off a second train into the unknown, thereby disposing of the troublemaking women in Romainville.

On the evening of 22 January, just as they were going to bed in their dormitories, the women were called together and the names of 222 of them read out. They were instructed to keep just one small case, which they could carry themselves, with warm clothes. ‘What fate awaits us?’ Danielle wrote quickly to her parents. ‘But never feel downhearted when you think about me… I feel I have energetic and youthful blood flowing in my veins.’ Her companions, she said, were ‘ready for anything’. She had just been informed that her brother, who was attached to the civil governor of Morocco, had arranged for her to be transferred to a prison in the south; but she had refused to go, saying that she needed to stay with the others. Her resolve was both a measure of how she perceived herself as their leader, and the fact that no one yet realised what danger they were in.