The Cost of Courage Read online

  Postel-Vinay has met Paul once before, in Marseille. Although Paul is introduced to him as a fellow Résistant who is working for one of the best Resistance organizations, Postel-Vinay is immediately suspicious of him. He listens as the Englishman delivers a speech filled with beautiful principles — but everything he says rings false in the Frenchman’s skeptical ears.

  Now, in Paris, Paul is accompanied by someone Postel-Vinay has never seen before: a stocky, gray, sinister-looking fellow, who keeps his hands shoved deep into the pockets of his shabby raincoat.

  “That’s him,” says Paul, motioning toward Postel-Vinay.

  “My chauffeur,” Paul explains, indicating his unpleasant companion.

  Postel-Vinay has other reasons to suspect the Englishman. A few weeks earlier he had heard about a fistfight between Paul and his boss, O’Leary. The word on the street is that the fight was about money. Postel-Vinay knows that O’Leary has an impeccable reputation, so he assumes that Paul must have been in the wrong.

  He also knows that Paul usually works in the unoccupied zone. So it feels odd to see him here in the north, where his pidgin French and pronounced English accent can hardly provide him with much cover if he is detained by the Germans.

  Pondering all of this, Postel-Vinay realizes that these two have just been knocking on the door of his parents’ apartment.

  “Let’s talk outside,” Postel-Vinay suggests, hoping to get them away as quickly as possible. He leads the way, as Paul and the other man follow silently.

  On the sidewalk, Paul explains that Patrick O’Leary’s organization has been split into two parts: one to look after downed British airmen, and the other to collect intelligence for the British. Paul says he is working with the intelligence unit, and the stranger accompanying him is actually his new boss.

  “Bring all the information you’ve collected to tomorrow’s meeting,” says Paul. “Even the stuff you’ve already sent to Marseille. We have a new radio post here in the occupied sector, so you won’t need to go to Marseille anymore.

  “I’ll be back to pick you up at nine tomorrow morning,” Paul continues, “with a beautiful fake identity card on the windshield of my car.” Since Germans are almost the only people allowed to drive in Paris now, this boast hardly bolsters Postel-Vinay’s confidence. Yet he agrees to meet Paul anyway.

  In the afternoon, Postel-Vinay gets a visit from Bernard Vernier-Palliez, a young man who has studied for a job in the Foreign Ministry and has been recruited into the Resistance by André Boulloche, after André is signed up by Postel-Vinay. Vernier-Palliez is transporting a case filled with weapons, including a German Mauser — a job often consigned to Resistance women, because women are less likely to be suspected as arms smugglers.

  Vernier-Palliez asks Postel-Vinay if he can keep the weapons for him for a while. Once again, Postel-Vinay agrees, even though he strongly suspects that this is not the ideal moment to perform this favor.

  Then he spends the rest of the day gathering all the information he can for tomorrow’s meeting.

  Of course Postel-Vinay knows that Paul may be planning to betray him. But his judgment is clouded by exhaustion, and he continues to behave as if he isn’t in serious danger. Part of him thinks it’s a terrible idea to meet Paul tomorrow. But is that because he has real reasons to fear a trap? Or is it paranoia, the product of constant danger? During the last twelve months, he has taken many risks, and he has often thought that he was in danger. But he has always come through okay. Perhaps this is making him believe too much in his own luck.

  Postel-Vinay thinks it is difficult to believe in the perfect treason until you have experienced one yourself. He imagines the ideal traitor would do you in with grinning flair. But he finds it hard to imagine such a person in real life. Paul’s story about the organization being split in two does sound plausible. And the new radio transmitter he described in the occupied zone is exactly what Postel-Vinay has been looking for.

  There is one other large question weighing on him, the same one that troubles many of his fellow young Résistants: If he runs away, will his parents be arrested in his place? Those big posters in the Métro are constant reminders that every relative of a Résistant is now subject to arrest.

  Postel-Vinay sleeps badly. The next morning, his sister, Marie-Hélène, is the first person to arrive at their parents’ apartment, at eight thirty. Like the Boulloche sisters who work with their brother André, Marie-Hélène participates in her brother’s clandestine activities. Until today she has always managed to bury her fears about her brother’s fate. But after he tells her about Paul’s visit, she begs him not to meet with him again.

  Postel-Vinay does his best to calm her down. Then his sister leaves the room to speak with their parents. At that moment, Postel-Vinay turns around to remove a loaded six-shot Enfield pistol from the closet. He slides it into the inside pocket of his overcoat. In his other pocket, he places a bulky envelope with all the intelligence he has gathered for Paul.

  When his sister returns, he tries to mock her fears. But then he blurts out, “If Paul betrays me, I’ll kill him! And then I’ll kill myself.” He thinks this is the first really good idea he has had all morning.

  As soon as he walks out into the street, a black car pulls up beside him. Paul’s “chauffeur” is in the driver’s seat, with Paul next to him. When he tells Postel-Vinay to climb into the empty backseat, that somehow feels reassuring.

  Now they are driving through the place de la Concorde, then past Madeleine and Saint-Lazare. They pause for a moment in front of a Métro entrance. The perfect moment to jump out, Postel-Vinay thinks to himself. But his hand never touches the door handle.

  A few minutes later they are passing the cemetery in Montmartre. Finally, they arrive at the Terrass Hotel, a venerable institution with panoramic views of Paris. Paul and Postel-Vinay climb out of the car, leaving the chauffeur behind.

  As Paul guides him up to the second floor, Postel-Vinay thinks he sees the hotel clerk giving them an odd look. But then they walk into an empty, ordinary-looking hotel room, and Postel-Vinay decides it’s a good sign that the chauffeur hasn’t accompanied them. When the door is closed behind them, he hands Paul the fat envelope filled with intelligence reports.

  The documents include information about German troop movements, detailed blueprints of airports used by the Germans, a plan of the port of Brest, and descriptions of the results of British bombardments of military targets.

  He asks Paul about the location of the new radio transmitter, but Paul deflects his question.

  Suddenly the door bursts open, and the chauffeur runs in with three accomplices. All four of them are pointing their pistols at Postel-Vinay. Just like André Boulloche, who is carrying a cyanide pill when he is arrested and has always planned to kill himself if the Germans capture him, Postel-Vinay is carrying a revolver for the same purpose. He reaches into his pocket so that he can shoot himself. But first he thinks, I must shoot Paul!

  Before he can fire a single shot, four gun barrels are pressed against his chest. One of the men grabs his Enfield revolver, which is still in his pocket, as another one slams on the handcuffs.

  Postel-Vinay feels himself entering a new universe, separated by a vast distance from the world where he lived before — somewhere dangerously close to hell.

  He is impressed when one of the men throws Paul on the bed and starts slapping him. These men obviously take pride in their work, because they are trying to make it look as though Paul isn’t the one who has betrayed him. The man attacking Paul seems to be enjoying the violent pantomime, but Postel-Vinay doesn’t think any less of him for that.

  PAUL’S REAL NAME is Harold Cole. Trained as an engineer, he was known in England before the war as a con man and a burglar. As a sergeant with the British Expeditionary Force in France, he had absconded with the sergeant’s mess funds. When he turned up in Lille after the armistice, he identified himself as “Captain Harold Cole” of the British Secret Service.

&nbs
p; During the fall of 1941, Cole had actually helped thirty-five British airmen escape. But on December 6 — one week before he met Postel-Vinay in Paris — Cole had been arrested by the Germans in Lille. Probably to avoid a threatened execution, it was at this moment that he switched sides to the Nazis.*

  ALTHOUGH HE IS UNABLE to shoot himself at the moment of his arrest, suicide remains Postel-Vinay’s urgent priority. Three days after entering the Prison de la Santé, he breaks away from the guards and flings himself over a railing, down two stories into the center of the prison courtyard. The violent plunge breaks most of the bones in his body, but he survives his own suicide attempt.

  Now he decides to feign madness, and the Germans transfer him to the Quentin Pavilion in l’hôpital de la Pitié.

  André Boulloche is tipped off to Postel-Vinay’s new location by André’s cousin, Funck-Brentano, his only relative with a Jewish wife. His cousin also happens to be the chief surgeon at l’hôpital de la Salpêtrière next door to the one where Postel-Vinay is a prisoner. With the help of a young doctor, the surgeon locates an underground passage that connects the two hospitals.

  After months of work, which includes help from his brother Robert, Jacques Postel-Vinay (a close cousin of the prisoner), André’s fellow Résistants Bernard Vernier-Palliez and Hubert Rousselier, as well as the fabrication of a number of keys, they finally manage to reach the cellar beneath Postel-Vinay’s cell. There they remove a floorboard above them and try to communicate with Morse code. But Postel-Vinay only remembers enough of the code to respond with a simple SOS.

  Postel-Vinay considers this attempt to free him crazier than his own decision to feign madness. Even if his rescuers manage to open a hole for him to escape through, he will never be able to perform the gymnastics required for an escape, since he can barely walk.

  Before they can proceed to the next step, he is moved again, and the escape effort is abandoned. Postel-Vinay thinks it’s a miracle that his would-be rescuers haven’t themselves been captured during their attempts to free him.

  * After the war, Cole was shot and killed after exchanging gunfire with a French police inspector in January 1946. “A Soldier in Four Armies: He Betrayed Them One After Another,” reported France-Soir. (Murphy, Turncoat, p. 258)

  Nine

  POSTEL-VINAY has undergone two surprisingly civil interrogations by his German captors after his attempt to kill himself. He is completely baffled by the gentleness of his interrogators. But he concludes that logic is just as irrelevant as justice in his present circumstances.

  Put into multiple casts by the Germans after his misadventure, he endures excruciating pain. But after his second interrogation, Postel-Vinay feels gigantic relief. He deduces from his interrogators’ questions that his parents probably haven’t been arrested, and he concludes that the Germans have failed to find his blue notebook — the one that includes the names of some of his confederates — because he is never asked any questions about it.

  His ultimate nightmare — that he might have endangered his family or his comrades — has “miraculously disappeared.” As a result, he regains some of his will to live, even as he remains certain that the Germans will eventually execute him. “The fear of talking stopped haunting me. Now I was sure I would be able to die in peace.”

  A month or two after the arrest, his mother makes contact with a German officer who is a chaplain to find out if her son is alive. The next day, the chaplain comes to Postel-Vinay’s cell and extends his hand, covered in a field-gray glove, and declares, “Take this hand. Your mother touched it yesterday. She loves you very much. She is really very courageous.”

  Even more remarkably, a month later, one of Postel-Vinay’s interrogators authorizes one package from his parents, every fifteen days, containing food, books, pencils, and paper. He begins to write poems, deep into the night, and goes to sleep with “the joys of an author’s vanity, and duty accomplished.”

  Then around April 15, 1942, he receives a visit from a German officer and a white-haired man whom Postel-Vinay at first mistakes for an artist. In fact, his visitor is Clovis Vincent, the prewar head of neurology at the hospital who has retained his post during the German Occupation. Gradually, Postel-Vinay realizes the famous doctor has been sent there by his family to urge him to feign insanity, to avoid a firing squad.

  Part of him remains eager to die. But is it fair to spurn his parents’ attempt to save him? He knows their hope isn’t completely far-fetched: Even one of his interrogators has mentioned the possibility that he will be tried by a tribunal rather than face summary execution.

  Finally he decides it is too selfish to reject his parents’ plan. He has already made them suffer too much. So he embarks upon “a ship of fools” to try to deceive his captors.

  For the first stage of his fake madness, he pretends to suffer from terrible migraines. Then, toward the end of April, the casts are finally removed from his legs. They are skeletal, with no trace of calves, and his ankles are frozen in place. Postel-Vinay is certain he will never again be able to walk more than a few yards.

  Realizing that his fake migraines and fraudulent tics will never get the attention of guards already numbed by the genuine traumas of his fellow prisoners, Postel-Vinay decides his only option is to attempt suicide — again.

  At the beginning of May, he begins to search for the right instrument of destruction. The only one he can find is a short nail at the end of his bed. Blunt, rusty, and slightly twisted, it is hardly ideal, but it’s all he has.

  His first thought is to plunge the nail into his right eye (which doesn’t see very well anyway), but he quickly realizes that he lacks the resolve to mutilate himself that way.

  Once a week he is given a Gillette razor for ten minutes so that he can shave himself. On June 20, he shoves the handle of the razor into a bar of soap, then plunges the naked edge of the blade into his left forearm. He means only to cut some veins, but instead he hits an artery and severs some tendons.

  When his captors return to his room a few minutes later, they instantly take him away to the operating room. There the surgeon spends an hour and a half repairing the artery and the surrounding tendons — without offering any anesthetic.

  On August 1, he is ordered to get dressed. Then he is removed from his cell and taken outside. Waiting for him in the street is the familiar Citroën Traction Avant used by the Gestapo. Postel-Vinay is pushed into the backseat. Then he watches the streets go by — boulevard de l’Hôpital, boulevard Saint-Marcel, boulevard Arago, rue de la Santé. Now he knows he is being sent back to the place where his misfortune began — the Prison de la Santé.

  After a month back in his old prison, on August 31, a guard opens his cell and tells him to gather all of his belongings, which at this moment consist of a single toothbrush. Is he being sent to a concentration camp? Or to the “next world”? He has no idea where he is going, but — to his own surprise — Postel-Vinay feels no fear.

  This time, a windowless gray van awaits to take him to his next destination. Ten minutes later, he knows there will be no deportation or execution today. He has been returned to the Quentin Pavilion in the l’hôpital de la Pitié — to a cell just down the hall from the one he left four weeks earlier.

  The following afternoon, on September 1, he is moved again. This time there is an ambulance downstairs, attended by a male nurse and a German soldier. Postel-Vinay lies down on the ambulance bed and the soldier closes the door. Ten minutes later, he has arrived at a new, unfamiliar building. He is led to something that looks like a shower room, and the nurse locks the door behind him.

  Through the window he peers into a garden, where he sees other inmates walking around, who are obviously crazy. He doesn’t know it yet, but he is actually in a psychiatric institution: l’hôpital Sainte-Anne, in the 14th arrondissement of Paris.

  Nothing happens for two more days, and Postel-Vinay becomes increasingly nervous about the performance he has planned. He must convince his captors that he is truly cr
azy. Meanwhile, he is praying with all his might: “Here I am at the end of my strength. Help me God!”

  Finally, on the afternoon of his third day at Sainte-Anne, a nurse leads him into the office of a German psychiatrist.

  “So,” the doctor asks, “what’s wrong?”

  “What’s wrong?” he replies. “I know where I am. I’m in an insane asylum! My parents always thought I belonged here, but they are the ones who are crazy!”

  Postel-Vinay continues his charade for several minutes, but to no avail. Finally, his German interrogator speaks again. “Monsieur Postel-Vinay, now I’m going to tell you what I think. You have played your role very well. But you are not crazy.”

  “Of course I’m not crazy,” Postel-Vinay replies. “It’s only my parents …” But suddenly the doctor’s face darkens, and he stands up. Postel-Vinay stands up with him. At last the prisoner lets down his guard: “Whatever I did, I did for my country.”

  “Ah, yes,” the German replies. “That is exactly the way I understand things.”

  The doctor walks him back out into the hallway, noticing that he is still suffering tremendously because of his barely healed ankles. “You really walk as badly as that?” he asks. “I will order an ambulance to take you back to Quentin.”

  The doctor deposits him on a bench and returns to his office. Postel-Vinay looks around him. He is in a narrow hallway, surrounded by other patients, all wearing the blue uniforms provided by the hospital. One door off the hall leads to a room where he can hear German being spoken — that must be a guard post. At the far end, another door leads to the garden — and possible freedom? But a soldier is guarding that exit.