The Cost of Courage Read online

  ALSO BY CHARLES KAISER

  1968 in America: Music, Politics, Chaos, Counterculture, and the Shaping of a Generation

  The Gay Metropolis: The Landmark History of Gay Life in America

  Copyright © 2015 by Charles Kaiser

  Production editor: Yvonne E. Cárdenas

  Text designer: Julie Fry

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without written permission from Other Press LLC, except in the case of brief quotations in reviews for inclusion in a magazine, newspaper, or broadcast. For information write to Other Press LLC, 2 Park Avenue, 24th Floor, New York, NY 10016.

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  The Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  was unavailable at the time of this book’s printing.

  Hardcover ISBN 978-1-59051-614-0

  E-book ISBN 978-1-59051-615-7

  v3.1

  For Joe

  &

  For Christiane

  naturellement

  If mankind lasts because of the masses of people for whom enduring has a higher value than acting, its fate is determined by those who choose, act, and decide.

  — Stanley Hoffmann, paraphrasing Paul Valéry

  This is such a story of coincidences — or luck, or destiny.

  — Eric Katlama

  CONTENTS

  Cover

  Other Books by This Author

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Epigraph

  Prologue

  Part I

  Part II

  Afterword

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  PRINCIPAL ACTORS

  NOTES

  SELECT BIBLIOGRAPHY

  PHOTO CREDITS

  Prologue

  THE FIRST TIME I SAW PARIS, I FELL IN LOVE.

  It was 1962, and I was eleven years old.

  Her name was Christiane Boulloche-Audibert.

  She was a beguiling thirty-eight-year-old brunette, the mother of four children, a campaigner for women’s rights, and a hero of the French Resistance. She was strong and warm, percolating with life and love, and ten years younger than my own mother.

  Her husband was Jean Audibert, a brilliant, high-spirited engineer with a belly-shaking laugh, a passion for fast cars, and a gigantic joie de vivre.

  Jean had fought in the Free French Navy, and he witnessed the Normandy invasion from the sea—a good war, but not nearly as fraught as Christiane’s. Their sons and daughters, each just a little bit older or younger than I was, were smart, political, precocious, and bilingual, which made them very much like everyone in my family.

  I was the third of three sons. My father had just become a diplomat, and we were living in Dakar, in West Africa, where John F. Kennedy had made him his ambassador.

  As a child, I was obsessed with the black-and-white images of World War II. To a young American who hadn’t lived it, the war glowed with the romance of victorious history. When I met Christiane, the war was seventeen years behind her—an expanse that felt like a lifetime and a half to an eleven-year-old.

  My uncle, Henry Kaiser, who moved in with Christiane and Jaqueline Boulloche at the end of 1944, when he was an American lieutenant stationed in Paris. He quickly learned everything that had happened to them while they were in the Resistance.(photo credit 1.1)

  It did not occur to me that for Christiane, it felt more like the day before yesterday. And, as she admonished me twenty years later, to her it had never been romantic at all.

  In the fall of 1944, just after the Liberation of Paris and the triumphant return of Charles de Gaulle, Christiane and her sister, Jacqueline, saw an ad in the newspaper seeking housing for U.S. Army officers. That ad created a bond that continues after seven decades.

  My uncle, Henry Kaiser, was the lieutenant they took in, rent free, “in gratitude to the Allies,” as Christiane always explained it. They installed him in an empty bedroom in their parents’ sprawling apartment in the 16th arrondissement.

  The most dramatic movie about the war was one I learned by heart but had seen only in my head. All of its images came from my uncle Henry, a charismatic storyteller with animated eyebrows and magnetic good looks. In an implausibly deep, tobacco-tinged baritone, he re-created the movie’s layers of suspense for me, over and over again.

  The film starred Christiane, Jacqueline, and their brother André, and its plot was exhilarating.

  During the twelve months my uncle Henry lived in their apartment, he learned about almost everything the two sisters had endured during the four years the Nazis occupied Paris. There had been many narrow escapes. I reveled in their brave adventures and their incredible grace under pressure.

  Years later, as the red wine flowed freely around the dining room table at their apartment in square Alboni in Paris, or the picnic table at their country house in Fontainebleau, where Christiane and Jean were joined almost every weekend by Christiane’s extended family, Kaisers and Audiberts and Boulloches dissected everything from de Gaulle and Kennedy to Jules and Jim. But I don’t remember anyone telling the stories I had heard from my uncle about the war. I may have assumed that it was not discussed because the grown-ups had already talked about it so often. But there was also the number tattooed on André’s forearm—the first one I had ever seen—and André’s grim demeanor, hinting at unvanquished demons.

  Nevertheless, for a very long time, I did not realize that World War II was a taboo subject within Christiane’s family. The ones who had been so magnificent in the Resistance never discussed their bravery with their own children.

  They actually avoided anything that might remind them of those piercing years. Christiane had had many close friends in the Resistance, but after the war ended, she never saw any of them again. She blotted out that part of her life, as much as she could, after she and her sister decided that “it was necessary to turn the page.”

  I grew up inspired by the story of my remarkable French cousins, whom I thought of as a branch of my own extended family. Christiane was like a beacon. Her life proved that you could do the right thing, the most difficult thing, if you were determined to do it. Perhaps one wouldn’t, but one always could—even under the most chilling circumstances.

  But their own children were never really nourished by their parents’ bravery. They admired it, they appreciated it, they were intimidated by it — but it never felt nurturing.

  What they experienced most of the time was an amorphous black cloud, never fully visible, hovering somewhere above their parents’ past.

  It would take me five decades, including two and a half years living in France, to unravel the reasons for the heroes’ silence.

  The answer is The Cost of Courage.

  Part I

  One

  PARIS — JANUARY 12, 1944

  IT IS a few minutes before four on a gray Paris afternoon when the black Citroën Traction Avant pulls up in front of a drab apartment building in the rue de la Santé on the Left Bank. The low-slung, front-wheel-drive Citroën is famous as the getaway car for French gangsters, but now it has acquired a more menacing pedigree: It is the official automobile of the German secret police.

  Two Gestapo agents in black leather raincoats jump out onto the sidewalk. They pull a single prisoner, a short twenty-year-old Frenchman named Jacques, out of the car after them. The youth’s nearly limp body broadcasts defeat, but he shows no obvious marks of a beating.

  Two and a half miles away, a swastika sways in the wind atop the Eiffel Tower. It is the one thousand three hun
dred and eighth day of the Nazi Occupation of Paris. Dozens of other swastikas defile the French capital. Below them, street signs written in German punctuate the avenues with unfamiliar accents, humiliating Parisians at every carrefour.

  The city’s best restaurants, like Maxim’s and La Tour d’Argent, are still flourishing, but now their customers are mostly German officers and their young French companions.

  German street signs punctuate Paris avenues with unfamiliar accents, humiliating the French at every carrefour.(photo credit 1.2)

  Starvation rations for the French have transformed apartment terraces into rabbit farms, as the urban dawn is oddly heralded by roosters. More fortunate Parisians rely upon the generosity of country cousins, who have much more access to food.

  Daytime Paris echoes to the sound of shoes with wooden soles clip-clopping down its narrow side streets and grand avenues. “If an old pair of shoes needs a new sole, you can’t do anything about it, because there is no leather,” said Pierre Mendès-France. “It’s really very difficult to describe what life is like in a country where everyone spends all their time looking for things.”

  The nightly blackout means the only authorized light outdoors is the eternal flame under the Arc de Triomphe. Electricity and gas are both erratic. Heated apartments are a dimly remembered luxury from 1940. Only seven thousand cars circulate on the streets of the City of Light — many of them converted to run on wood. They are called gazogènes. Two million bicycles are the best way to get around aboveground. But a good bicycle can cost 10,000 francs — almost as much as a car did before the war. The only taxis are pedicabs pedaled by bicycle riders, or “taxis hippomobiles,” pulled by a single horse. The fastest pedicab is propelled by veterans of the Tour de France.

  Bicycle power also keeps the movie theaters open: four men pedaling a generator at thirteen miles an hour for six hours can produce enough reliable electricity for two full shows.

  Jews and Communists are the first victims of the Occupation, but the dangers of resisting the Nazis are escalating for everyone at the beginning of 1944. Huge yellow posters plastered on the walls of the Métro proclaim that members of the Resistance are no longer the only ones facing German firing squads. A new edict ordains that their fathers, cousins, and in-laws will be executed as well.

  And yet, in January, there is a new uncertainty bubbling underneath the humid winter air. All across Nazi Europe, the occupied are buoyed, and the occupiers menaced, by the event that everyone knows is coming, but no one knows exactly when or where: the Allied invasion of the Nazi-ruled continent.

  Across the English Channel, massive numbers of British, American, Canadian, and French troops are gathering on the southern coast of England, where General Dwight Eisenhower is making the plans for a spectacular invasion of France. Thanks to a huge disinformation campaign, its location remains a secret six months before the assault begins. After four years of war, a cautiously optimistic Churchill believes that the biggest danger now facing the Allies is stalemate rather than defeat.

  YESTERDAY, the young prisoner accompanying his German captors was a proud member of the French Resistance. Today, he is leading the German agents to the secret address he had sworn to conceal, so that they can arrest his boss, André Boulloche — a man he worships. If André is really there, the Germans have promised Jacques that he will be rewarded with his freedom.

  But can he believe them?

  Jacques is young looking, even for his age; especially today, he looks practically like a little boy. Deeply religious, he has joined the Resistance just three months earlier, after being recruited by his Sorbonne classmate, André’s sister Christiane Boulloche. Christiane has no trouble persuading him to join their cause. When she asks him if he wants to work for her brother, the boy signs up immediately, without hesitation or reflection.

  Jacques is the same age as Christiane, who turned twenty at the end of 1943. Christiane is smart, strong, and attractive. She also has a prominent nose that she thinks is unattractive. She worries, perhaps, that it makes her less glamorous looking than her older sister, Jacqueline, who has joined the Resistance with her.

  Christiane’s clandestine duties require her to ride her bicycle all over Paris, sometimes as much as sixty miles in a day. She picks up telegrams from secret drop-off points and decodes them, transports forbidden radio equipment, and sometimes smuggles guns through the capital, usually in a basket underneath eggs or vegetables.

  All Boulloches share an innate sense of duty. When Christiane returns from the countryside after the armistice to find German soldiers goose-stepping through Paris, she is consumed by a single thought: “This is wrong.” Before the war started, she had been certain: “We wouldn’t just resist them, we would beat them. That’s why the Occupation was a thunderclap.”

  Coupled with youthful fearlessness, and hero worship of her brother, that simple notion — “This is wrong” — propels her into the underground fight against the Germans. She is hypnotized and horrified by the Occupation. It swallows all of her attention.

  The Boulloche sisters’ very first act of resistance occurs when they are stopped by two German soldiers on avenue du Président Wilson. When the young Germans ask for directions to Place de la Concorde, the girls cheerfully dispatch them in the opposite direction.

  There is no heat at her lycée, and Christiane wears gloves to turn the pages of the classroom dictionary. She is upset when one of her Jewish teachers loses her job, but she does not consider the plight of the Jews to be the most important thing. More than anything else, it is instinctive patriotism that pushes her into battle.

  When the Germans are finally driven out of France, everyone’s nightmare will be over.

  Or so she believes.

  As 1944 begins, her brother André François Roger Jacques Boulloche has been back in France for only four months. He is an engineer, a lawyer, and something of an adventurer. He and his sisters come from many generations of Catholic judges and prominent civil servants.

  Iconoclasm is a leitmotiv in their family: Two Boulloche ancestors were members of the Cour de Cassation, the highest court in France, at the turn of the century. Both of them, remarkably, had been pro-Dreyfus: a belief that had made them strangers to their class — because they were partisans of the truth.

  FOUR MONTHS EARLIER, in the second week of September 1943, André has taken off from England under a nearly full moon, with seven other passengers in a single-engine Westland Lysander. Many underground fighters are being parachuted into occupied France, but the plane carrying this group touches down on a secret airstrip in the Loire Valley, near Tours.

  These landings are dangerous, because there is always the possibility that the Germans have been tipped off. This one has been organized by Jean-François Clouet des Pesruches, who has arrived the night before from London, and it goes off without a hitch. Resistance members outline the tiny runway with flashlights pointed straight up at the sky. Foil extends over the tops of their torches, to make them invisible to everyone except the airplane circling above them.*

  André is a handsome twenty-eight-year-old with brown hair and thick eyebrows that hover over a permanent glint in his eyes. Nearly six feet tall, he walks with a tempered, youthful swagger. Before the war, he was considered something of a dandy.

  André has been ordered back to occupied France by Charles de Gaulle, to be the general’s personal military delegate in Paris. Pseudonym, Armand, code name, Hypotenuse, André’s charge from the renegade general† is to bring some order to the burgeoning Resistance movements now operating in eleven different departments in northern France.

  During André’s absence from France in 1943, there has been a dramatic increase in the membership of the Resistance. In the fall of 1942, the collaborationist Vichy government has taken one of its most unpopular steps, shipping off two hundred thousand Frenchmen to work in Germany. But with so many German soldiers fighting on so many different fronts, that isn’t nearly enough slave labor to satisfy the voraciou
s appetite of the Nazi war machine.

  In February 1943, Vichy makes an even bigger blunder: It inaugurates the Service du Travail Obligatoire. The STO requires all Frenchmen between the ages of eighteen and twenty to work in Germany for two years. Faced with the prospect of forced deportation, thousands of these young men simply disappear into the mountains, where, by June, they have vastly increased the number of Résistants. They and their place of refuge both become known by a Corsican word for mountainous scrubland: Maquis.

  As one historian put it, “The concept did not exist in January 1943; it was everywhere by June.”

  In September 1943, after a nine-month absence, André has returned to France on that Lysander. He is carrying 500,000 French francs in cash. Like everyone in the Resistance arriving from England, he also carries a cyanide pill in his pants pocket. It will stay there, always, unless he is arrested. When he touches it with his index finger, it feels like his insurance against torture. Or, perhaps, like his destiny. Either way, he knows he will swallow it if he is captured by the Germans. In this period, the average life of an agent is just four months before he is arrested.

  A certain fatalism fuels André’s fearlessness. “I never felt the slightest hesitation on his part,” said his sister Christiane. But there is one irony that probably escapes him: The only thing that could impinge on his heroism might be his own survival.

  NOW, IN JANUARY 1944, André is inside his secret headquarters on the top floor of an apartment building on the Left Bank. With him are his “right hand,” Charles Gimpel, and his assistant, Geneviève.

  Gimpel has arrived one month earlier, carrying another 100,000 francs from England. During his brief time in Paris, Gimpel has already set up an excellent liaison organization with the southern zone, and he has arranged for a large number of radios to be brought up from the south to transmit messages from Paris to London.