The Cost of Courage Read online

  Choosing the obvious tourist stops, Hitler continues on to the Tour Eiffel, the Arc de Triomphe, and Les Invalides. Inside the monument to the French emperor, he stands for a long time gazing silently at Napoleon’s tomb. Perhaps he is already contemplating a Russian invasion — and vowing to make his more successful than Napoleon’s.

  Hitler poses in front of the Eiffel Tower, but he never gets to the top, because the French have cut the cables to the elevators before his arrival. The elevators will remain out of commission until the end of the war.

  Three hours after he lands, Hitler climbs back onto his plane to return to Germany. He has spent less than half a day inspecting his most glorious conquest.

  He will never enter the City of Light again.

  ANDRÉ AND HIS COMRADES reach Algeria the same day Hitler visits Paris. They are disgusted when they are greeted like deserters instead of patriots. Two of them make contact with the British consul. But when they ask the diplomat for help to get to England, he urges them to wait out the war in Morocco instead.

  André is completely baffled by his predicament. He is desperate to continue the fight, but he has no idea how to do that. Should he stay in Morocco until the war is over? Or should he return to France to confront the enemy?

  On July 6, 1940, the twenty-four-year-old lieutenant sits down at his desk to describe his anguish in a letter from Rabat. The letter smolders with his devotion to duty.

  My Dear Father,

  I can finally write to France with a small chance that my letter will actually reach you. I won’t try to tell you how I’ve experienced the past month — I can’t find the words to describe it. Once again, it seems as though we have reached the depths of degradation and debasement, but day after day, our descent continues. What a struggle it will be to pull our country out of this abyss!

  All I can tell you is that I came to North Africa so that I would be able to battle the enemy, by joining an organized resistance, but you know as well as I do how vain that hope was … Ignorance is a formidable thing at a time like this. Whatever one decides to do, it’s a descent into the unknown. I desperately want your advice right now. I’ve been reduced to imagining what it might be, but I can’t be sure you would approve of the course that I’ve chosen.

  Now I am posted at a base at Rabat, without any real responsibilities. I’m suffering terribly from inaction … There is one question in particular for which I need your advice … Should I return to France?… Everyone here agrees our country is in terrible disarray, and people like me may not be experienced enough to help put it back together. Some people think I should stay here to gain some seasoning, so that I can be more effective when I return home.

  Personally, I prefer the opposite course. The ghastly state my country was in when I left makes me want to return as soon as possible. It can only be saved by a complete moral resurrection, something that will require the work of all men of good will … I think I can contribute a great deal. And if more troubles lie ahead, isn’t it my duty to be present?

  This is the question that has really gotten under my skin. I never thought it would be so difficult to determine one’s duty, once one had put aside all personal considerations. And yet, for the last two weeks, I have been at war with myself.

  I am impatient for news about all of you … If the only thing that Frenchmen still have is the affection of our families, at least ours won’t be the most badly divided.

  André

  André’s last sentiment did not turn out to be prescient.

  His father’s response has not survived. But ten weeks after writing his letter, André has returned to France to resume the struggle against the Germans.

  * This led, of course, to Churchill’s famous riposte eighteen months later: “Some chicken. Some neck!”

  † Later, de Gaulle said of France’s collapse in 1940, “We staggered, it is true. But was this not, first of all, a result of all the blood we had shed twenty years before in others’ defense as much as our own?” (Complete Wartime Memoirs, p. 461).

  ‡ De Gaulle spoke on June 18, but Christiane thinks she didn’t hear the broadcast until it was repeated the following evening.

  § At the height of his fame, Lindbergh became one of Hitler’s most naïve supporters.

  Six

  The Resistance was irresistible.

  — André Postel-Vinay

  THE FEARS Jacques Boulloche described in his letters of a permanent separation from his family were premature. At the end of the summer of 1940, his wife and daughters return to the French capital from Brittany, and they move back into the family’s spacious apartment.

  Jacques’s youngest daughter, Christiane, has a visceral reaction to what she sees in the newly occupied capital. The French tricolore has been banned. In its place there are huge swastikas swaying in the wind, freshly painted street signs in German — “black on yellow,” she remembers clearly — and German drummer boys in front of Wehrmacht soldiers goose-stepping down the Champs-Élysées. “There would be parades in the morning and they would sing. And they sang well — that was especially annoying!”

  Christiane is stunned by all of this. She sees it as “the visible proof of our defeat. Seeing the Germans in Paris is ghastly. You feel like you are no longer at home. We were touching the reality of the Occupation with our fingers. It was a succession of shocks.”

  A German soldier complained to an attractive Parisian girl that her city seemed sad. “You should have been here before you got here,” she replied.

  This is when Christiane begins to ride a bicycle, when there is no longer any heat in her parents’ apartment, and when she begins to feel hungry all the time. Jacqueline goes to work for an organization that sends packages to French soldiers who are imprisoned in Germany.

  Jacques and Hélène Boulloche share their children’s revulsion at the German Occupation. As early as July 1940, Jacques writes to his wife that the new anti-Semitic campaign is going to make life difficult for one of his colleagues. Three months later, the government publishes its first “Jewish law,” which excludes Jews from the higher levels of public service, as well as professions like teaching and the press, where they might influence public opinion.

  Back at her Paris lycée in the fall of 1940, Christiane and her friends take up a collection for Mademoiselle Klotz, a much-loved history teacher, who is fired after the publication of the new law. Christiane is shocked by the persecution of the Jews, especially when one of her classmates, Janine Grumbach, is forced to start wearing a yellow star.

  Beginning in October 1940, all foreign Jews can be interned at the discretion of prefects. On November 1, even in the unoccupied zone, every Jewish-owned business must display a yellow poster in the window: ENTREPRISE JUIVE.

  By the start of 1941, some forty thousand Jews are held in seven main camps, in atrocious conditions. Some three thousand Jews perish in the French camps even before the Final Solution has begun.

  In June 1942, every Jew over the age of six in the occupied zone is ordered to wear a star over the heart, and they are forced to buy three of them from their local gendarmerie. Adding insult to humiliation, those purchases are even deducted from their clothing coupons. In July, they are banned from all public places: cinemas, main roads, libraries, parks, cafés, restaurants, swimming pools, and phone booths, and they can only ride in the last car of the Métro.

  By 1941 the swastika was everywhere in Paris. Here the former (British) WHSmith had become a German bookstore on the rue de Rivoli.(photo credit 1.8)

  Christiane considers all of this outrageous, and she thinks that her parents are helping some of their Jewish friends to escape. Her family is also directly affected by the new law, because one of her cousins, a surgeon named Funck-Brentano, has a Jewish wife, and she is forced to go into hiding.*

  IN SPITE OF their shared hatred of the Boches, the two halves of the Boulloche family choose very different paths after the fall of France. Unlike their three youngest children, neither Jacques nor
Hélène will ever join the Resistance.

  Jacques and Hélène both turn fifty-two in 1940, and they share the caution of middle age. Jacques helps some Jewish friends to go into hiding, but he is always discreet. He is also careful not to do anything that might jeopardize his family’s safety, or weaken the nation, to which he and his ancestors have devoted decades of service.

  As the British historian Julian Jackson observed, “Conduct which might be described as collaboration could incorporate a myriad of motives including self-protection, the protection of others, even patriotism.”

  Christiane doesn’t consider her father “pro-German at all.” She thinks he merely wants to make France work for the French, “not for the Germans.” The Boulloches defiantly listen to the BBC at home. They realize that if the British don’t stay in the fight against Hitler, their only hope for the future will be extinguished.

  Jacques Boulloche never confronts the German occupiers directly. He keeps his government job, and he commutes to Vichy, the seat of the collaborationist government. His family notices he is always particularly depressed when he returns from Vichy. He never tells his children whether he has signed an oath of loyalty to the Vichy government, but he is almost certainly required to do so.

  Jacques and Hélène’s oldest son, Robert, serves in the army during the German invasion, but he avoids capture after the armistice. Now he has returned to his job as an inspector for the Finance Ministry, in Toulouse.

  Robert shares his parents’ prudence and their commitment to the French government. Like his father, Robert probably sees some value in keeping France functioning for the French, despite the invasion of the Germans.

  Jacques and Hélène Boulloche. Jacques was the family patriarch, who kept his job as the director of the national bureau of highways after the Occupation began. Like her husband, Hélène never joined the Resistance. But when her daughters told her that they had, she said, “That’s what I would have done.”(photo credit 1.9)

  A twenty-seven-year-old bachelor, Robert is not as good-looking as his younger brother, André. But he has a terrific sense of humor, a passion for art, and an impressive collection of original paintings.

  At the end of 1940, Robert becomes the first member of his family to be asked to join the Resistance. The invitation comes from André Postel-Vinay, who had met Robert two years earlier, when the two of them took the exam to become finance inspectors together.

  Postel-Vinay is a strikingly handsome twenty-nine-year-old, with delicate features set off by a broad forehead and an aquiline nose. As a lieutenant in the 70th Régiment d’Artillerie in 1940, he is celebrated for his bravery and his exceptionally accurate shooting. On June 17, he is captured by the enemy, but he manages to escape a week later. After three days on foot, he makes it back to his parents’ home in Paris, utterly exhausted.

  Robert Boulloche was the oldest son in the family, and shared some of his parents’ caution. He declined André Postel-Vinay’s invitation to join the Resistance at the end of 1940 — but he predicted that his younger brother would be eager to join the fight against the Germans.(photo credit 1.10)

  The apartment is empty, because his parents are in Brittany. The next morning, he is awakened by a German military ceremony taking place in the street below. When he goes to the window, he has the same reaction as Christiane and thousands of others. He is appalled by the savage sight of German soldiers holding gilded crosses in the air as they parade down the street.

  LIKE JACQUES BOULLOCHE, Postel-Vinay had seen the war coming many years earlier. After the Night of the Long Knives in 1934, when Hitler ordered the execution of Ernst Röhm, the gay commander of the Nazi SA, two army generals, and at least a hundred others, Postel-Vinay decided that “war is the only way to communicate with the Nazis — because even among themselves, they behave like butchers.”

  (In a speech to the Reichstag after the bloody massacre, Hitler freely admitted that what he had done was completely illegal. The legislature quickly passed a law that retroactively legalized his butchery.)

  After France’s collapse in 1940, Postel-Vinay thinks that any victory over the Nazis will take a very long time, if it ever comes at all. But he is propelled by the conviction he shares with the small number of very early Résistants: He believes that his life will have no meaning until he finds a way to fight for the Germans’ defeat.

  By October 1940, he has linked up with one of the earliest British Resistance groups in the Paris region, which is helping downed British airmen escape back to England through Spain. Then he connects with a group of French officers from the army’s intelligence service, the Deuxième Bureau, who are collecting information on German troop movements and relaying it to London.

  Postel-Vinay also makes contact with a group of anti-Fascist intellectuals at the Musée de l’Homme in Paris, who have begun to organize in the summer of 1940. Most of them are leftists, and some of them aren’t French, including the group’s most active member, Boris Vildé, a linguist with anarchist leanings and Estonian origins.

  The group at the Musée de l’Homme is one of the very first Resistance groups. In December 1940 it starts to publish the newspaper called Résistance. During the next three years, dozens of other clandestine newspapers will appear all over France. Delivering some of these publications is one of Christiane Boulloche’s earliest acts of resistance.

  When Postel-Vinay asks Robert, his former classmate, if he will join the Resistance to collect intelligence about the Germans for the British, Robert shows no interest. He doesn’t seem to think the work will be very useful, and as the oldest son in his family, he probably shares some of his parents’ caution.

  André Postel-Vinay in his army uniform. He convinced André Boulloche to join the Resistance at the end of 1940.(photo credit 1.11)

  Robert tells Postel-Vinay he won’t become a clandestine enemy of the Germans. Then he makes a fateful prediction: “I know someone who will jump right in.”

  “Who’s that?” asks his friend.

  “My little brother, André,” Robert replies.

  ANDRÉ BOULLOCHE has managed to return to France from Morocco at the beginning of September 1940. He is demobilized in Marseille, then quickly makes his way back to Paris, where a family reunion takes place, as joyful as it is unexpected.

  He rejoins the Department of Bridges and Highways, where he worked as an engineer before he was mobilized, and he is posted to Soissons, where he is named adjoint ingenieur-en-chef (deputy chief engineer). This puts him sixty miles northeast of Paris.

  When Robert takes him to meet Postel-Vinay, André responds just as Robert had predicted: He immediately joins the underground. For the first time since the armistice, he has finally found a way to fight the Germans.

  On the surface, André doesn’t seem very emotional. But Postel-Vinay quickly discovers that beneath a placid exterior, André is full of zeal. The two of them agree about everything that matters at this ominous moment. Neither can bear France’s defeat, they share a profound horror of Nazism, and they both feel a compulsion to do something about it. “It was absolutely unbreathable,” said Postel-Vinay. “André was very passionate, and he couldn’t sit still.”

  Although Postel-Vinay is four years older than his new recruit, the two men share another quality that pushes them into this treacherous adventure: the impetuousness of youth.

  “For the two of us, the Resistance was a kind of lifesaver,” Postel-Vinay explained, “because without it, life no longer had any meaning.” Their decision to join the Resistance is so instinctive, and so immediate, they barely consider the possible consequences — for themselves, or for anyone else.

  THE DECISION of these two young technocrats to join the secret war against the Germans at the end of 1940 is very unusual for Frenchmen of their class. There is hardly any other milieu more unprepared for clandestine activity than bourgeois civil servants, and at this point there is only a small number of Frenchmen actively challenging the German Occupation.

 
; Unlike so many early members of the Resistance, these fiercely committed young men are not outsiders at all: they are neither Jewish nor foreign-born nor Communist. But they share a larger idea about human progress, which makes them passionate about the horror and the absurdity of Nazism — and the perils it poses for everyone.

  By now the Third Reich has conquered Austria, Poland, Czechoslovakia, Holland, Belgium, Luxembourg, Denmark, and Norway, as well as France, and most people consider it invincible at this stage of the war.

  However, there remain a couple of skeptics. When the Russian foreign minister, Vyascheslav Molotov, visits Hitler in Berlin in November 1940, the Führer tells him the British are finished. “Then whose bombers are those overhead?” Molotov asks. “And why are we in this bomb shelter?”

  Over the next eighteen months, André Boulloche convinces his boss, Pierre Pène, and a fellow engineer, Jean Bertin, to join him in collecting information about German troop movements in the region. He reports on the work of the Germans who are constructing a secret headquarters in a tunnel at Margival, outside Soissons. This is supposed to become Hitler’s headquarters when he invades Britain, but he will not visit it for the first time until 1944, after the Normandy invasion.

  Through his own contacts and those of his colleagues with local builders, André obtains the plans of more than 150 structures being built by the Germans, and he believes that they are reaching London.

  He also marks off parachute fields and sets up arms depots. To make himself a better secret agent, he memorizes a book that interprets every insignia of the German Army. The book is easy to get when the Germans first arrive in France. It disappears when the Germans realize how useful it can be to their enemies.

  Employing primitive spy craft, he sends Postel-Vinay letters written with lemon juice, which only becomes legible when the pages are heated over a candle. Twice a month he goes to Paris to give his information to one of Postel-Vinay’s contacts, who is supposed to transmit it to London. These trips also make it possible for him to visit his parents. But he never discusses his clandestine activities with his family, partly because he doesn’t want to influence his sisters.