Blood in the Snow, Blood on the Grass (34 page)

They were let out of their cells at 0900hrs, whereupon men knelt in the filthy urinals and licked the walls. The SS took pity on them and brought some water. Early in the afternoon, they were herded into trucks. Some men were handed bread by their captors; others received nothing. At Aubusson, they got down to be locked up in the technical college, guarded by Czechoslovakian conscripts who made no secret of their delight that Germany was done for and told them of the assassination attempt on Hitler’s life and reassured them that they were not going to be shot. Nor could they be deported to concentration camps because of all the railway sabotage. A visit from representatives of the Red Cross was also comforting.

On 23 July, they re-embarked in the trucks, to be driven along the winding little roads of the Massif Central, expecting at every turn to be saved by ‘François’ and his men ambushing the column. It was not to be. He had retreated into a fantasy world, issuing communiqués claiming victory in massive battles with high body counts that had never taken place.
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Arriving in the major city of Clermont-Ferrand, the prisoners were again interrogated, this time violently by the Gestapo and the Milice, but without premeditated torture as such. Two days later, they were put on a train to Dijon, where they were handed over to soldiers of the Wehrmacht. Greeted by the Milice escort with cries of ‘We bring you the criminals!’, the commanding officer did not return their Hitler salutes. He replied dryly, ‘There are criminals everywhere, including among those who bring others here.’ It seemed a good augury, the prisoners thought.

On 29 July they were herded into cattle wagons that rumbled over the tracks, heading east. Four days later they were hauled out of the wagons and found themselves in the Reich after all. And not only in the Reich, but in that state-within-a-state ruled by the AllgemeineSS. Split into small groups, the survivors of Blanchard’s group were despatched to Buchenwald, Neuengamme, Dora and Mauthausen – concentration camps from which they had little chance of emerging alive and where there was every chance of dying an unheroic death from disease, malnutrition and ill treatment.

‘Live free or die!’
had sounded fine to Tom Morel’s men on the plateau de Glières all those months before. Now, for Blanchard’s men the most appropriate slogan was Dante’s ‘
Lasciate ogni speranza, voi ch’entrate
’
–
‘Abandon all hope, ye who enter here …’

Notes

1
Delalande, B.,
De la milice au maquis
,
self-published, St-Amand, 1945, p. 105.

2
Todorov, p. 222.

3
Ibid., p. 224.

4
Delalande, p. 200.

5
Ibid., pp. 218–9.

6
Parrotin, M.,
Le Temps des Maquis
, Aubusson, 1981, p. 458.

BODIES IN THE TREES, BODIES DOWN THE WELLS

Lalonnier’s group meanwhile had managed to escape direct contact with von Jesser’s Ukrainians, thanks largely to two local women, known only as Alix and Jeannine, who guided them by little known routes out of immediate danger and into the neighbouring Indre
département
.

The section of thirty-five men under 28-year-old Chaillaud and their thirteen Milice prisoners managed to get completely lost after changing direction and backtracking repeatedly to escape their pursuers. It was hardly surprising: during the weeks they had spent at Château de Mérignat nobody had thought about getting a compass and the only map they possessed was a very small-scale one on a post office calendar.

The men were depressed by news of what had happened to Blanchard’s group. They were also continually hungry and missing their regular food supply at the château. Finding food for so many men was becoming more and more difficult as supplies ran low even in the towns. Each time they narrowly escaped encirclement by von Jesser’s troops some muttered that it was time ‘to get rid of’ the
milicien
hostages who, they alleged, were deliberately slowing them down. Since so many old friendships had been renewed during their six-week odyssey, it was hard to decide what to do. The only certain thing was that the
miliciens
could not be released because they would then identify all their captors, which would lead to reprisals on their families at home.

On the morning of 20 July the only food being cooked for the midday meal was a pot of beans. Men in German uniform were seen jumping out of their trucks across the fields. Chaillaud gave the order to move immediately. Once again, they stole away, leaving their food behind. Luck was with them. Before the circle around the farm where they had been hiding was complete, they managed to get away. However, it was becoming more and more obvious that they were the target of a massive sweep by von Jesser’s anti-partisan units and their luck was likely to run out at any moment.

After several hours’ march, the enemy was still so close that, if one of the hostages had shouted, he would probably have been heard. Chaillaud made up his mind that the only way of moving faster was by executing the hostages, which would also reduce the problem of securing enough food. The problem was that each one was known personally to one or more of his captors, who argued that chance alone had led one man to the Maquis and another to the Milice. Chaillaud himself owed his freedom, if not his life, to the senior
milicien
Louis Bastide, who had knowingly allowed him to get rid of compromising papers some months previously by tearing them up and flushing them down a toilet just before he was to undergo an interrogation.

To justify his decision, Chaillaud said, thirteen years later in 1957:

There was no question of shooting the prisoners because the nearest Germans would have heard the shots. So we hanged them. We made slip knots with parachute cord attached to high branches. We didn’t have a stepladder or a chair, so we put the cord around their necks, lifted them as high as we could – and let them fall. When I told [Bastide] that they were going to be killed, he said simply, ‘You chose England and we chose Germany. You’ve won and we’ve lost.’ The
miliciens
died bravely.

Accounts of the hangings by other men present differ. It seems that Louis Bastide vainly begged the man whose life he had saved to spare his in return.
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In any case, the same parachute cords could have been used to tie up and gag the
miliciens
, leaving von Jesser’s men to find them alive, instead of thirteen strangulated corpses hanging from the trees. But then, they could have given away their captors’ names, so the gruesome hangings can be attributed to Chaillaud’s fear of reprisals. In the event, several of his men were so disturbed by seeing old friends hanged in this way that they threw away their weapons and took a chance on being able to walk home. Within hours, Lécussan received a phone call from one of them, later identified as ‘the traitor’, saying that eight of the
milicien
hostages had been hanged, which suggests that he had downed arms in protest after the first batch of executions before walking out in disgust. At any rate, the exact number of men hanged was not important to Lécussan, whose rage was about to be directed at his favourite target.

There had been few Jews living permanently in St-Amand before the invasion of 1940 brought a number of refugees from the north-east and Paris to the area, using the same rationale as Bout de l’An: that it was a safe place, where ‘nothing ever happened’. St-Amand being in the Free Zone after the armistice, nothing much did happen to them until June 1944. Although thousands of Jews were deported by the Vichy regime to concentration and death camps in the Reich, exemptions could theoretically be made for those who had French nationality, a French spouse or children, also for pregnant women, ex-servicemen and the disabled and those over
60
. In the latter cases, this was to preserve the fiction that the deportees were going to work camps in the east.

In St-Amand during 1943 officials of the sub-prefecture had tried to make Jews leave on the pretext that their accommodation was required as billets for the officers of the newly created 1RF regiment, but the drive had not been very successful, largely because the civil servant responsible was a clandestine
résistant
, who frequently warned those at risk.

Lécussan intended to change all that. Had he needed an excuse, it came in the early morning of 28 June when a team of
résistants
wearing Milice uniforms and bearing false papers managed to penetrate inside the Ministry of Information in Paris, where the virulently anti-Semitic and pro-German politician Philippe Henriot was sleeping. They shot him dead in front of his wife, who had pleaded with him not to open the door to their quarters. Lécussan’s hatred of Jews making him believe that they had been behind the assassination, he ordered several to be arrested in St-Amand, torturing some before killing them all, their bodies left floating in the canal.

On learning of the hanging of Chaillaud’s hostages in the afternoon of 20 June, Lécussan went berserk. The perpetrators were out of reach, so he decided that the Jews of St-Amand must be considered guilty in their stead. Determined to make St-Amand
judenrein
– or cleansed of Jews, to use the Nazi terminology – Lécussan now ordered a total round-up for the following day.

His most enthusiastic collaborator was the sadistic 23-year-old Gestapo interpreter Pierre-Marie Paoli, already notorious as a torturer and so hated in the region that the FTP had mounted an attack on him in April 1943, which left him with a bullet in his belly that required surgical removal and three months’ convalescence. Fully recovered and delighted to be working with Lécussan, whose reputation was well known, Paoli obtained the go-ahead from the Bourges Gestapo boss, Erich Hasse, and gathered a task force which included forty-five German soldiers, fifteen
miliciens
and several French and German Gestapo officers.

Paoli, Hasse and their men arrived at St-Amand at about 1600hrs. The men were accommodated in the cinema, the bosses repairing to a hotel for a generous meal with plenty of alcohol. It was not difficult to know where the Jews were living because Vichy legislation made it compulsory for the heads of families to declare their place of residence to the local authorities. That night, starting at 2300hrs, doors were smashed in by rifle butts and seventy-one victims were dragged out in night attire or underclothes. Some elderly men and women were even forbidden to collect their false teeth or spectacles, or to get dressed. Under Paoli’s direction, nationality was ignored as they were all – French-born and foreigners alike – herded into the Rex cinema.

No one bothered to use the customary pretence that they would be deported to a labour camp. One bewildered old lady, arrested with her 3-year-old grandson, asked permission to bring her sewing things, only to be told, ‘You won’t need them. You’re going to paradise.’ Already dressed and waiting for Paoli’s men to arrive, 76-year-old veteran Colonel Fernand Bernheim told the
miliciens
, ‘You must have sunk really low to come and arrest the likes of me’.
²

In the cinema an ex-serviceman prisoner named Léon Weill asked politely for his confiscated identity papers to be returned. The reply was a sneering, ‘You won’t need them any more’. Interpreting this correctly and without being noticed, Weill managed to open a pass door that led to the next-door cafe also owned by van Gaver. He crossed its courtyard, climbed a wall and leapt down into another courtyard, where he threw himself on the mercy of the household, who hid him for thirty-six hours at the risk of their own lives, until he could be taken to a Resistance safe house. Many others thought of escape before it was too late, but could not leave behind their spouses or children. Fortunately for him, Weill was single and had no one to think of except himself.

Back in the Rex cinema were twenty-eight men, thirty-eight women and ten children, including a baby of ten months old. Of these, one man, three women and the baby were released on the ground that they were not legally Jewish, although related to Jews. At 0700hrs the other prisoners were herded at gunpoint into trucks. As they drove off, the Milice HQ in St-Amand resounded with gunshots as the
miliciens
, drunk off looted liquor, celebrated their ‘victory’. After spending the day without food or drink in the stifling courtyard of Bordiot prison, the prisoners from St-Amand were locked into overcrowded, stiflingly hot cells, where eighteen people had to share one stinking toilet bucket, emptied every twenty-four hours. The only food was a ration of dried beans twice a day and there was no longer any Brother Albert to soften the treatment or bring extra rations. Any valuables had been stolen. In the afternoon of 24 July Lécussan arrived to oversee what he considered proper revenge for the killing of the
miliciens
taken hostage at St-Amand. In this he was enthusiastically assisted by Paoli, wearing his German uniform.
³