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So at last, in May 1940, when the German planes screamed overhead, many Frenchmen saw not just a new style of warfare but the nightmares of the last twenty years superimposed on the wings of those Stukas. That’s why it took four days for the La Rochefoucauld children to reach their grandmother’s house: Memory heightened the terror of Hitler’s blitzkrieg. “We were lucky (#litres_trial_promo) we weren’t on the road longer,” Robert’s younger sister Yolaine later said.
Grandmother Maillé’s estate sat high above Châteauneuf-sur-Cher, a three-winged castle (#litres_trial_promo) whose sprawling acreage served as the town’s eponymous centerpiece. It was a stunning, almost absurdly grand home, spread across six floors and sixty rooms, featuring some thirty bedrooms, three salons, and an art gallery. The La Rochefoucauld children, accustomed to the liveried lifestyle, never tired of coming here (#litres_trial_promo). But on this spring day, the bliss of the reunion gave way rather quickly to a hollowed-out exhaustion (#litres_trial_promo). The anxious travel had depleted the children—and the grandmother who’d awaited them. Making matters worse, the radio kept reporting German gains, alarming everyone anew.
That very night (#litres_trial_promo), the Second Panzer Division reached Abbeville, at the mouth of the Somme river and the English Channel. The Allies’ best soldiers, still in Belgium, were trapped. A note of panic rose in the broadcasters’ voices. The Nazis now had a stronghold within the country—never in the four years of the Great War had the Germans gained such a position. And now they had done it in just ten days.
Consuelo rejoined the family a few nights later (#litres_trial_promo). She told her children how she had barely escaped death. Her car, provided by the Red Cross, was bombed by the Germans. She was not in it at the time, she said, but it quickened her departure. She got another car from a local politician and stuffed family heirlooms into it, certain that the German bombardment would continue and the Villeneuve estate would be destroyed again. Her Red Cross office was already in shambles. “This is it. No more windows, almost no more doors (#litres_trial_promo),” Consuelo had written in her diary on May 18, from her desk at the local headquarters. “Two bombings during the day. The rail station is barely functional. We have to close [this diary] … until times get better.”
But after reuniting with her children, times did not get better. The radio blared constantly in the chateau, and the reports were grim. On June 3, three hundred German aircraft bombed the Citroën and Renault factories on the southwestern border of Paris, killing 254, 195 of them civilians (#litres_trial_promo). Parisians left the city in such droves that cows wandered some of its richest streets, mooing (#litres_trial_promo). Trains on the packed railway platforms departed without destination (#litres_trial_promo); they just left. The government evacuated on June 10 to the south of France, where everyone else had already headed, and the city was declared open—the French military would not defend it. The Nazis marched in at noon on June 14.
Robert and his family bunched round the radio in their grandmother’s salon that day (#litres_trial_promo), their faces ashen. The reporters said that roughly two million people had fled and the city was silent (#litres_trial_promo). Then came the news flashes: the Nazis cutting through the west end and down the Champs-Elysées; a quiet procession of tanks, armored cars, and motorized infantry; only a few Frenchmen watching them from the boulevards or storefronts that had not been boarded up; and suddenly, high above the Eiffel Tower, a swastika flag whipping in the breeze.
And still, no one had heard from Olivier, who had been stationed somewhere on the Franco-German border. Consuelo, a brash and strong woman who rolled her own cigarettes from corn husks (#litres_trial_promo), appeared anxious now before her children (#litres_trial_promo), a frailty they rarely saw, as she openly fretted about her country and husband. The news turned still worse. Marshal Philippe Pétain, who had assumed control of France’s government, took to the radio June 17. “It is with a heavy heart (#litres_trial_promo) that I tell you today that we must try to cease hostilities,” he said.
Robert drew back when he heard the words (#litres_trial_promo). Was Pétain, a nearly mythical figure, the hero of the Great War’s Battle of Verdun, asking for an armistice? Was the man who’d once beaten the Germans now surrendering to them?
The war itself never reached Grandmother Maillé’s chateau, roughly 170 miles south of Paris, but in the days ahead the family heard fewer grim reports from the front, which was unsettling in its own way. It meant soldiers were following Pétain’s orders. June 22 formalized the surrender: The governments of both countries agreed to sign an armistice. On that day, the La Rochefoucaulds gathered round the radio once again, unsure how their lives would change.
Hitler wanted this armistice signed on the same spot as the last (#litres_trial_promo)—in a railway car in the forest of Compiègne. It seemed the Great War had not ended for him either. At 3:15 on an otherwise beautiful summer afternoon, Hitler arrived in his Mercedes, accompanied by his top generals, and walked to an opening in the forest. There, he stepped on a great granite block, about three feet above the ground with engraving in French that read: HERE ON THE ELEVENTH OF NOVEMBER 1918 SUCCUMBED THE CRIMINAL PRIDE OF THE GERMAN EMPIRE—VANQUISHED BY THE FREE PEOPLES WHICH IT TRIED TO ENSLAVE.
William Shirer stood some fifty yards from the führer. “I look for the expression in Hitler (#litres_trial_promo)’s face,” Shirer later wrote. “It is afire with scorn, anger, hate, revenge, triumph. He steps off the monument and contrives to make even this gesture a masterpiece of contempt … He swiftly snaps his hands on his hips, arches his shoulders, plants his feet wide part. It is a magnificent gesture … of burning contempt for this place now and all that it has stood for in the twenty-two years since it witnessed the humbling of the German Empire.”
Then the French delegation arrived, the officers led by Gen. Charles Huntziger, commander of the Second Army at Sedan. The onlookers could see that signing the armistice on this site humiliated the Frenchmen (#litres_trial_promo).
Hitler left as soon as Gen. Wilhelm Keitel, his senior military advisor, read the preamble. The terms of the armistice were numerous and harsh (#litres_trial_promo). They called for the French navy to be demobilized and disarmed and the ships returned to port, to ensure that renegade French boats did not align themselves with the British fleet; the army and nascent air force were to be disposed of; guns and weapons of any kind would be surrendered to the Germans; the Nazis would oversee the country but the French would be allowed to govern it in the southern zone, the unoccupied and so-called Free Zone, in which France’s fledgling provisional government resided; Paris and all of northern France would fall under the occupied, or Unfree Zone, where travel would be limited and life, due to rations and other restrictions, would be much harder.
Breaking the country in two and allowing the French to govern half of it would later be viewed as one of Hitler’s brilliant political moves (#litres_trial_promo). To give the French sovereignty in the south would keep political and military leaders from fleeing the country and establishing a central government in the French colonies of Africa, countries that Hitler had not yet defeated and where the French could continue to fight German forces.
But that afternoon on the radio, the La Rochefoucaulds heard only about the severing of a country their forebears had helped build. Worse still, all of Paris and the Villeneuve estate to the north of it fell within the Germans’ occupied zone. The family would be prisoners in their own home. Listening to the terms broadcast over the airwaves, the otherwise proud Consuelo made no attempt to hide her sobbing. “It was the first time I saw my mother cry (#litres_trial_promo) over the fate of our poor France,” Robert later wrote. This led his sisters and some of his brothers to cry. Robert, however, burned with shame. “I was against it, absolutely against it (#litres_trial_promo),” he wrote, the resolve he’d felt under the stars amid other refugees building within him. In his idealistic and proud sixteen-year-old mind, to surrender was traitorous, and for a French marshal like Pétain to do it, a hero who had defeated the Germans at Verdun twenty-four years ago? “Monstrous (#litres_trial_promo),” La Rochefoucauld wrote.
In the days after the armistice, Robert gravitated to another voice on the radio. The man was Charles de Gaulle, the most junior general in France, who had left the country for London on June 17, the day Pétain suggested a cease-fire. However difficult the decision—de Gaulle had fought under Pétain in World War I and even ghostwritten one of his books (#litres_trial_promo)—he had left quickly, departing with only a pair of trousers, four clean shirts, and a family photo in his personal luggage (#litres_trial_promo). Once situated in London, de Gaulle began to appeal to his countrymen on the BBC French radio service. These soon became notorious broadcasts, for their criticisms of French political and military leadership and for de Gaulle’s insistence that the war go on despite the armistice. “I, General de Gaulle … call upon (#litres_trial_promo) the French officers or soldiers who may find themselves on British soil, with or without their weapons, to join me,” de Gaulle said in his first broadcast. “Whatever happens, the flame of French Resistance must not and shall not die.”
De Gaulle called his resistance movement the Free French. It would be based in London but operate throughout France. Robert de La Rochefoucauld listened to de Gaulle (#litres_trial_promo) day after day, and though he had been an aimless student, he began to see how he might define his young life.
He could go to London, and join the Free French.
CHAPTER 2 (#ub73d4e94-6ac9-5940-b968-e053d0fbfebe)
The family drove back to a Soissons they did not recognize. German bombs had leveled some storefronts and German soldiers had pillaged (#litres_trial_promo) others. Out the car window Robert saw half-collapsed homes and the detritus of shattered livelihoods littering the sidewalks and spilling onto the streets. The damage was not total—some houses and shops still stood—but this capriciousness made the wreckage all the more harrowing.
Approaching the Rochefoucaulds’ home, the car turned onto the familiar secluded avenue just outside Soissons; Robert saw the lines of chestnut trees and the small brick-covered path that cut through them. The car slowed and made the left, bouncing along. Groves of oak and basswood crowded the view and the car kept jostling as the path curved to the right, then the left, and back again. At last they saw the clearing (#litres_trial_promo).
The chateau of Villeneuve still rose from the earth, with its neoclassical design, brick façade, and white-stone trim, a stately home that the La Rochefoucauld family had purchased from the daughter of one of Napoléon’s generals (#litres_trial_promo) in 1861. Beams of sunlight still winked from the windows of the northern wing, a welcoming light that bathed the interior, and all the chateau’s forty-seven rooms (#litres_trial_promo), with an incandescent glow. But at the circular driveway at the side of the home, something strange came into view.
German military vehicles (#litres_trial_promo).
A cadre of German soldiers seemed to have made the La Rochefoucauld house their own, judging from the armored cars and trucks (#litres_trial_promo) parked at odd angles. But this wasn’t even the worst news: On closer inspection, the family saw that the chateau’s roof was missing.
My God, Robert thought, trying to absorb it all.
The children clustered together in the driveway, gawking. Then, unsure what else to do, the family made its way to the front door.
When they opened it, Consuelo and her children saw the same stone staircase (#litres_trial_promo) rising from the entryway to the front hall. But passing above them were German officers, who barely acknowledged their arrival. The Nazis had indeed requisitioned Villeneuve, just as they would other homes and municipal buildings, hoping that the houses and schools and offices might serve as command posts for the French Occupation, or as forward bases for Germany’s upcoming battle with Britain. From the Germans’ apathetic looks, the family saw that the chateau was no longer theirs. “There was absolutely nothing (#litres_trial_promo) we could do against it,” Robert later said.
Consuelo told her children (#litres_trial_promo) not to acknowledge the officers, to show them that they were impermanent and therefore unremarkable: Robert would not sketch in any journal who these Germans were, what they looked like, or which one led them. But he and his siblings did record the broad outlines of the arrangement. The Nazis begrudgingly made room for the family. They soon redistributed themselves (#litres_trial_promo) across one half of the house, so the La Rochefoucaulds could have the other. On the first floor, the officers chose the great room, whose floor-to-ceiling windows looked out on the magnificent manicured gardens, and the dining room, which seated twenty (#litres_trial_promo). The family took the salon—where they had once entertained visiting dignitaries and had debated Hitler’s rise to power—and the living room, cozy with chairs, rows of books, and, above the fireplace, the family crest, which depicted a beautiful woman (#litres_trial_promo) with a witch’s tail—which in earlier times instructed La Rochefoucauld to live fully and enjoy all of life’s delights. The second and third floors—the bedrooms and playrooms for the children, and utility rooms for the staff of twelve (#litres_trial_promo)—were divided similarly: Nazis on one side, the family on the other. Robert still had his own room, a grand chamber with fifteen-foot ceilings, a private bathroom, and fireplace. But he couldn’t stand (#litres_trial_promo) the heavy clacking echo of German boots going up and down the second and third floors’ stone staircase. The noise seemed to almost taunt him.
The family and Germans did not eat together. The La Rochefoucaulds set up a new dining room (#litres_trial_promo) in the salon. They shared the grand spiral staircase because they had to, but the family and its staff never spoke to the Germans, and the Germans only spoke (#litres_trial_promo) to Consuelo, once they learned she was the matriarch and local head of the Red Cross.
Consuelo’s relationship with these occupying officers was, to put it mildly, difficult. In little time they settled on a nickname for her: the Terrible Countess (#litres_trial_promo).
It is easy to understand why. First, Consuelo had built this house. When she and Olivier were married after the Great War, a plump girl who was more confident than pretty, she looked at the ruins of what remained of the La Rochefoucauld estate and told her husband she would prefer it if the rebuilt chateau no longer faced east-west, as it had for centuries, but north-south (#litres_trial_promo). That way the windows could take in more sunlight. Olivier obeyed his young wife’s wishes and brick by brick a neoclassical marvel emerged, one that indeed glowed with natural light. Now, twenty years later, the Germans were sullying the chateau, German soldiers who played to type, too, always loud, always shouting Ja!, parking up to seven bulky tanks (#litres_trial_promo) in her yard and then endlessly cleaning them, meeting in her house, meeting in a tent they set up outside her house, their decorum gauche regardless of where they went, the sort of people who literally found it appropriate to write on her walls (#litres_trial_promo).
Then there was the damage to the roof. And though Consuelo learned that a British bomb (#litres_trial_promo), and not a German one, had missed the bridge it aimed for a half mile distant during the fight for France and instead flattened the fourth floor of the chateau, she resented that the Nazis hadn’t offered to close the gaping hole above them, especially as the summer became late fall and the temperature turned cold. The Villeneuve staff (#litres_trial_promo) had to put a tarp over the roof’s remnants, but that did little good. When it rained, water still flowed down (#litres_trial_promo) the stairwell. Winter nights chilled everyone, brutal hours that required multiple layers of clothing. The bomb had set off a fire that momentarily spread on the second floor, which destroyed the central heating system. Now, before the children went to bed, they had to warm a brick over a wood-fired oven (#litres_trial_promo) and then rub the brick over their sheets, which heated their beds just enough so they might fall asleep.
Finally, there was Olivier. The family found out that he had been arrested by German forces (#litres_trial_promo) near Saint-Dié-des-Vosges, a commune in Lorraine in northeastern France, on June 27, five days after the armistice. He was now imprisoned in the sinister-sounding Oflag XVII-A (#litres_trial_promo), a POW camp for French officers in eastern Austria known as “little Siberia (#litres_trial_promo).” He was allowed to write two letters home every month (#litres_trial_promo), which had been censored by guards. What little Consuelo gleaned of her husband’s true experience at the camp infuriated her further.
Given all this, it wasn’t really a surprise to see Consuelo act out against the Germans. On one occasion, a Nazi officer, who was a member of the German cavalry and an aristocrat, wanted to pay his respects to Madame La Rochefoucauld, whose name traveled far in noble circles. When he arrived at Villeneuve, he walked up the steps, took off his gloves, and approached Consuelo, who waited at the entry, all stocky frame and suspicious gaze. He gripped her hand in his and kissed it, but before he could tell her it was a pleasure to stay in this grand home, she slapped him across the face (#litres_trial_promo). The Terrible Countess would not be wooed by any German. For a moment, no one knew how to respond. Then the officers, only half joking, told Consuelo a welcome like that put her at risk of deportation.
Robert was his mother’s son. The fact that the Nazi officers were a few rooms away only increased his talk about how much he hated them, those Boche (#litres_trial_promo). He was brash enough, would say these epithets just loud enough, that even Consuelo had to shush him. But Robert seemed not to care. His olive complexion reddened with indignant righteousness when he listened to Charles de Gaulle’s speeches, and even after the German high command in Paris banned the French from turning on the BBC, Robert did it in secret. He never wanted to miss the general’s daily message (#litres_trial_promo). Oftentimes, to evangelize, he would travel across Soissons to the estate of his cousin, Guy de Pennart (#litres_trial_promo), who was his age and shared, roughly, his temperament. Guy and Robert talked about how they were going to join the British and fight on. “I was convinced (#litres_trial_promo) that we had to continue the war at all costs,” Robert later said.
He was seventeen by the fall of 1940 and had graduated from high school (#litres_trial_promo). He wanted to join de Gaulle but wasn’t sure how. One didn’t “enlist” in the Resistance. Even a well-connected young man like Robert didn’t know the underground routes that could get him to London. So he enrolled at an agricultural college in Paris (#litres_trial_promo), ostensibly to become a gentleman farmer like his father, but, more likely, he went to meet people who might help him reach de Gaulle.
These individuals, though, were not easy to find. There was little reason to be a résistant in 1940. The Germans had disbanded (#litres_trial_promo) the army and all weapons, all the way down to hunting knives, had been handed in or taken by Nazi authorities. The “resistance” amounted to little more than underground newspapers that were often snuffed out (#litres_trial_promo), their editors imprisoned or sentenced to death by German judges presiding in France.
So Robert and a small number of new friends, all of them more boys than men, turned to one another with refrains about how much they despised the Germans (#litres_trial_promo), and despised Vichy, a spa town (#litres_trial_promo) in the south of France where Pétain and his collaborating government resided. The boys talked about how France had lost her honor. “I didn’t have much good sense,” Robert said, “but honor—that’s all (#litres_trial_promo) my friends and I could talk about.”
Its vestiges were all around him. Villeneuve was not just a home but also a monument to the family’s history, replete with portraits and busts (#litres_trial_promo) of significant men. The La Rochefoucauld line dated back to 900 AD (#litres_trial_promo) and the family had shaped France for nearly as long. Robert had learned from his parents about François Alexandre Frédéric de La Rochefoucauld-Liancourt, a duke in Louis XVI’s court. He awoke the king during the storming of the Bastille in 1789. King Louis asked La Rochefoucauld-Liancourt if it was a revolt. “No, sire,” he answered. “It is a revolution (#litres_trial_promo).” And indeed it was. Then there was François VI, Duc de La Rochefoucauld, a seventeenth-century duke who published a book of aphoristic maxims, whose style and substance influenced writers as diverse as Bernard Mandeville, Nietzsche, and Voltaire (#litres_trial_promo). Another La Rochefoucauld, a friend of Benjamin Franklin’s, helped found the Society of the Friends of the Blacks (#litres_trial_promo), which abolished slavery some seventy years before it could be done in the United States. Two La Rochefoucauld brothers, both priests, were martyred during the Reign of Terror (#litres_trial_promo) and later beatified by Rome. One La Rochefoucauld was directeur des Beaux Arts (#litres_trial_promo)during the Bourbon Restoration. Others appeared in the pages (#litres_trial_promo) of Proust. Many were lionized within the military—fighting in the Crusades, the Hundred Years’ War, against the Prussians. The city of Paris named a street after the La Rochefoucaulds.
For Robert, the family’s legacy had followed him everywhere throughout his childhood, inescapable: He was baptized (#litres_trial_promo) beneath a stained-glass mural of the brother priests’ martyrdom; taught in school about the aphorisms in François VI’s Maxims; raised by a father who’d received the Legion of Honor (#litres_trial_promo), France’s highest military commendation. Greatness was expected of him, and the expectation shadowed his days. Now, with the Germans living in the chateau, it was as if the portraits that hung on the walls darkened when Robert passed them, judging him and asking what he would do to rid the country of its occupiers and write his own chapter in the family history. To reclaim the France that his family had helped mold—that’s what mattered. “I firmly believed that … honor commanded us to continue the fight (#litres_trial_promo),” he said.
But Robert felt something beyond familial pressure. In his travels around Paris or on frequent stops home—he split his weeks between the city and Villeneuve—he grew genuinely angry at his defeated countrymen. He felt cheated (#litres_trial_promo). His life, his limitless young life, was suddenly defined by terms he did not set and did not approve of.
What galled him (#litres_trial_promo) was that few people seemed to think as he did. He found that a lot of people in Paris and in Soissons were relieved the war was over, even if it meant the country was no longer theirs. The prewar pacifism had gelled into a postwar defeatism. Fractured France was experiencing an “intellectual and moral anesthesia (#litres_trial_promo),” in the words of one prefect. It was bizarre. Robert had the sense that the ubiquitous German soldiers who hopped onto the Métro or sipped coffee in a café were already part of a passé scenery (#litres_trial_promo) for the natives.
Other people got the same sense. In a surprisingly short amount of time, the hatred of the Germans and the grudges held against them “assumed a rather abstract air” (#litres_trial_promo) for the vast majority of French, philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre wrote, because “the occupation was a daily affair.” The Germans were everywhere, after all, asking for directions or eating dinner. And even if Parisians hated them as much as Robert de La Rochefoucauld did, calling them dirty names beneath their breath, Sartre argued that “a kind of shameful, indefinable solidarity [soon] established itself between the Parisians and these troopers who were, in the end, so similar to the French soldiers …
“The concept of enemy,” Sartre continued, “is only entirely firm and clear when the enemy is separated from us by a wall of fire (#litres_trial_promo).”
Even at Villeneuve, Robert witnessed the ease with which the perception of the Germans could be colored in warmer hues. Robert’s younger sister, Yolaine, returned from boarding school for a holiday, and sat in the salon one afternoon listening to a German officer play the piano (#litres_trial_promo) in the next room. He was an excellent pianist. Yolaine dared not smile as she sat there, for fear of what her mother or older brother might say if they walked past, but her serene young face showed how much she enjoyed the German’s performance. “He was playing very, very well (#litres_trial_promo),” she admitted years later.
It was no easy task to hate your neighbor all the time. That was the simple truth of 1940. And the Germans made their embrace all the more inviting because they’d been ordered to treat the French with dignity. Hitler didn’t want another Poland (#litres_trial_promo), a country he had torched whose people he had either killed or more or less enslaved. Such tactics took a lot of bureaucratic upkeep, and Germany still had Britain to defeat. So every Nazi in France was commanded to show a stiff disciplined courteousness (#litres_trial_promo) to the natives. Robert saw this at Villeneuve, where the German officers treated the Terrible Countess with a respect she did not reciprocate. (In fact, that they never deported his mother can be read to a certain extent as an exercise in decorous patience.) One saw this treatment extended to other families as they resettled after the exodus: PUT YOUR TRUST (#litres_trial_promo) IN THE GERMAN SOLDIER, signs read. The Nazis gave French communities (#litres_trial_promo) beef to eat, even if it was sometimes meat that the Germans had looted during the summer. Parisians like Robert saw Nazis offering their seats to elderly madames on the Métro, and on the street watched as these officers tipped their caps to the French police (#litres_trial_promo). In August, one German army report on public opinion in thirteen French departments noted the “exemplary, amiable and helpful (#litres_trial_promo) behavior of the German soldiers …”
Some French, like Robert, remained wary: That same report said German kindness had “aroused little sympathy” (#litres_trial_promo) among certain natives; and young women in Chartres, who had heard terrible stories from the First World War, had taken to smearing their vaginas with Dijon mustard, “to sting the Germans (#litres_trial_promo) when they rape,” one Frenchwoman noted in her diary. But on the whole, the German Occupation went over relatively seamlessly for Christian France. By October 1940, it seemed not at all strange for Marshal Pétain, the eighty-four-year-old president of France’s provisional government and hero of the Great War, to meet with Hitler in Montoire, about eighty miles southwest of Paris. There, the two agreed to formalize their alliance, shaking hands before a waiting press corps while Pétain later announced in a radio broadcast: “It is in the spirit of honor, and to maintain the unity of France … that I enter today upon the path of collaboration (#litres_trial_promo).”
Though Pétain refused to join the side of the Germans in their slog of a fight against the British, he did agree to the Nazis’ administrative and civil aims. The country, in short, would begin to turn Fascist. “The Armistice … is not peace (#litres_trial_promo), and France is held by many obligations with respect to the winner,” Pétain said. To strengthen itself, France must “extinguish” all divergent opinions.
Pétain’s collaboration speech outraged Robert even as it silenced him. He thought it was “the war’s biggest catastrophe (#litres_trial_promo),” but his mother quieted him. With that threat about divergent opinions, “There could be consequences (#litres_trial_promo),” she said. She had lost her husband and wasn’t about to lose a son to a German prison. So Robert traveled back to Paris for school, careful but resolved to live a life in opposition to what he saw around him.
CHAPTER 3 (#ub73d4e94-6ac9-5940-b968-e053d0fbfebe)
He was still a boy, only seventeen, not even of military age, but he understood better than most the darkening afternoon that foretold France’s particularly long night. Robert saw a country that was falling apart.
He saw it first in the newspapers. Many new dailies and weeklies emerged with a collaborationist viewpoint (#litres_trial_promo), sometimes even more extreme than what Pétain promoted. Some Paris editors considered Hitler a man who would unite all of Europe; others likened the Nazis to French Revolutionaries, using war to impose a new ideology on the continent. There were political differences among the collaborators; some were socialists, and others pacifists who saw fascism as a way to keep the peace. One paper began publishing nothing but denunciations of Communists, Freemasons, and Jews. Another editor, Robert Brasillach, of the Fascist Je Suis Partout (I Am Everywhere), praised “Germany’s spirit of eternal youth” while calling the French Republic “a syphilitic strumpet, smelling of cheap perfume and vaginal discharge.” But even august publications with long histories changed with the times: The Nouvelle Revue Française, or NRF (a literary magazine much like The New Yorker), received a new editor in December 1940, Pierre Drieu La Rochelle, an acclaimed novelist and World War I veteran who had become a Fascist. Otto Abetz, the German ambassador, could not believe his good fortune. “There are three great powers in France: Communism, the big banks and the NRF,” he said. The magazine veered hard right.
At the same time, Robert also noticed the Germans begin to bombard the radio and newsreels with propaganda. Hitler was portrayed as the strong man, a more beneficent Napoléon even, with the people he ruled laughing over their improved lives. Robert found it disgusting, in no small part because he had witnessed this warped reality before, in Austria in 1938 at boarding school. He had even met Hitler there.
It was in the Bavarian Alps (#litres_trial_promo), hiking with a priest and some boys from the Marist boarding school he attended outside Salzburg. The priests had introduced their pupils to the German youth organizations Hitler favored and, at the time, Robert loved them, because they promoted hiking at the expense of algebra. He didn’t know much about the German chancellor then, aside from the fact that everyone talked about him, but he knew it was a big deal for the priest to take the boys to Berghof, Hitler’s Alpine retreat, perched high above the market town of Berchtesgaden. When they reached it they saw a gently sloping hill on which sat a massive compound: a main residence as large as a French chateau and, to the right, a smaller guest house. The estate was the first home Hitler called his own and where he spent “the finest hours of my life,” he once said. “It was there that all my great projects were conceived and ripened.”
The students stood lightly panting before it when a convoy of black cars wended down the long driveway and turned out onto the road. The path cut right in front of the boys, and one sedan stopped in front of them. Out stepped Adolf Hitler. The priest, stunned, began explaining that he and his group had just come to look—but Hitler was in a playful mood, not suspicious in the least, and began questioning the boys, many of whom were Austrian, about their backgrounds. When Hitler got to Robert, the priest said that this boy was French. Robert tried to make an impression, and began speaking to Hitler in the German he’d acquired living in Austria. But the phrases emerged with an unmistakable accent, and when Robert finished, Hitler just patted him on the cheek. “Franzose (#litres_trial_promo),” he responded. (“Frenchman.”) And then he moved on.
In a moment, the führer was back in the car and out of view. The encounter was as brief as it was shocking: The boys had seen, had even been touched by, the most famous man in Europe, the shaper of history himself. They looked at each other, and Robert couldn’t help but feel giddy (#litres_trial_promo).
The bliss wouldn’t last, however. Austria was quickly losing whatever independence it had, and when Chancellor Kurt Schuschnigg said in a radio address in February that he could make no more concessions to the Nazis, a frenzied, yelling mob of twenty thousand Fascists invaded the city of Graz (#litres_trial_promo), ripped out the loudspeakers that had broadcast Schuschnigg’s address, then pulled down the Austrian flag and replaced it with a swastika banner. A month later Hitler invaded, and within days the Anschluss was complete.
Robert saw a demonstration in Salzburg a few days later, where everyone shouted, “Heil Hitler! Long live Hitler (#litres_trial_promo)!” He felt the threat of violence begin to cloud the interactions of everyday life. The Nazis occupied the buildings next to the Marist school and one day Robert looked in a window and suddenly a man stormed from the building, insulting and threatening him, simply for peering inside (#litres_trial_promo). Robert began to second-guess a führer who would champion these bullies. By the end of the school year, he was happy to leave Austria for good.
Now, at the beginning of the Occupation, he saw a similar malice embedded within the French newsreels: Everyone smiling too hard and striving to look the same. With each passing day, the Frenchmen he encountered seemed to follow in the Austrians’ footsteps, embracing a fascism they were either too scared or ignorant of to oppose. One exhibition defaming Freemasonry (#litres_trial_promo) attracted 900,000 Parisians, nearly half the city’s population. Another, called “European France,” with Hitler as the pan-national leader, drew 635,000 (#litres_trial_promo). Meanwhile, the German Institute’s language courses flourished to the point (#litres_trial_promo) that they had to turn away applicants. For 90 percent of France, La Rochefoucauld later mused, Pétain and Hitler’s alliance represented the second coming of Joan of Arc (#litres_trial_promo). The historical record would show that collaborators, those who subscribed to newspapers committed to the cause and joined special interest groups, were never actually a majority (#litres_trial_promo), but Robert could be forgiven for thinking this because all around him people declared themselves friends of Hitler. The founder of the cosmetics firm L’Oréal (#litres_trial_promo) turned out to be a collaborator. So was the director of Paris’ Opéra-Comique, the curator of the Rodin Museum, even the rector of the Catholic University of Paris. By the end of 1940, in fact, the country’s assembly of cardinals and archbishops demanded in a letter that laity give a “complete and sincere loyalty … to the established order.” One Catholic priest finished Sunday Mass with a loud “Heil Hitler (#litres_trial_promo).”
It was all so disorienting. Robert felt like he no longer recognized La France. He was eighteen and impetuous and London and de Gaulle called to him—but couldn’t he do something here, now? He wanted to show the Germans that they could control his country, his faith, his house, but they could not control him.
One day he met in secret (#litres_trial_promo) with his cousin, Guy, and they launched a plan to steal a train loaded with ammunition that stopped in Soissons. Maybe they would blow it up, maybe they would just abscond with it. The point was: The Germans would know they didn’t rule everything. Guy and Robert talked about how wonderful it would be, and ultimately Robert approached a man of their fathers’ generation, whom Robert blindly suspected of being in the fledgling Resistance, and asked for help.
The man stared hard (#litres_trial_promo) at Robert. He told him that he and his cousin could not carry out their mission. Even if they stole this train, what would they do with it? And how would it defeat the Germans? And did they realize that their act risked more lives than their own? German reprisals for “terrorism” sometimes demanded dozens of executions.
Already, an amateur rebellion had cost the community lives. A Resistance group in Soissons (#litres_trial_promo) called La Vérité Française had affiliated itself with one in Paris that formed in the Musée de l’Homme. It was a brave but naive group, unaware of the double agents within its ranks as it published underground newspapers and organized escape routes for French prisoners of war. The German secret police raided the Musée and Vérité groups. One museum résistant was deported, three sentenced to prison and seven to death (#litres_trial_promo). In Soissons, two members of Vérité Française were beheaded, six shot, and six more died in concentration camps (#litres_trial_promo). The Nazi agents who organized the Soissons raid (#litres_trial_promo) worked in an elegant gray-stone building—across the street from the cathedral where the La Rochefoucaulds occasionally attended Mass.
So their plan was foolish (#litres_trial_promo), the man said, and Robert and his cousin were lucky to be stopped before the brutal secret police or, for that matter, the army officers billeting in Robert’s house could get to them.
The scolding shamed La Rochefoucauld, and stilled his intent. But the situation in France continued to worsen. The French government was responsible for the upkeep of the German army in France, which cost a stunning 400 million francs a day (#litres_trial_promo), after the Nazis rigged the math and overvalued the German mark by 60 percent. Soon, it was enough money to actually buy (#litres_trial_promo) France from the French, one German economist noted. Oil grew scarce (#litres_trial_promo). Robert began biking everywhere (#litres_trial_promo). The German-backed government in Vichy imposed rations (#litres_trial_promo), and Robert soon saw long lines of people at seemingly every bakery and grocery store (#litres_trial_promo) he passed. The Germans set a shifting curfew (#litres_trial_promo) for Paris, as early as 9 p.m. (#litres_trial_promo) or as late as midnight, depending on the Nazis’ whims. This would have annoyed any college-aged man, but the German capriciousness carried a sinister edge, too: After dark, Parisians heard the echo of the patrolling secret police’s boots (#litres_trial_promo) and might wake the next day to find a neighbor or acquaintance missing and everyone too frightened to ask questions. In 1941, the terror spilled out into the open. Small cliques of Communist résistants in Nantes and Bordeaux assassinated two high-ranking Nazi officers (#litres_trial_promo), and, in response, Hitler ordered the execution of ninety-eight people, some of them teenagers, who had at most nominal ties to Communism. One by one they were sent to the firing squad, some of them singing the French national anthem. As news of the executions spread—ninety-eight people dead—a police report noted: “The German authorities have sown consternation everywhere (#litres_trial_promo).”
The urge to fight rose again in Robert and his college friends. Pétain seemed to be speaking directly to young men like Robert when he warned in a broadcast: “Frenchmen … I appeal to you in a broken voice: Do not allow any more harm to be done (#litres_trial_promo) to France.” But that proved difficult as 1941 became 1942, and the Occupation entered its third year. Travel to certain areas was allowed only by permit, thirteen thousand Jews (#litres_trial_promo) were rounded up in Paris and sent to Auschwitz, and the United States entered the war. The Germans, to feed their fighting machine, gave the French even less to eat, forcing mothers to wait all morning for butter and urban families to beg their rural cousins for overripened vegetables (#litres_trial_promo). Robert now heard of sabotages of German equipment and materiel carried out by people very much like himself. He no doubt heard of the people who feared the growing Resistance as well, who wanted to keep the peace whatever the cost, who called résistants “bandits” or even “terrorists (#litres_trial_promo),” adopting the language of the occupier. In 1942, denunciations were common. Radio Paris had a show, Répétez-le (#litres_trial_promo) (Repeat It), in which listeners named their neighbors, business associates, or sometimes family members as enemies of the state. The Sicherheitsdienst (SD), the feared agency colloquially known as the Gestapo, read at least three million denunciatory letters (#litres_trial_promo) during the war, many of them signed by Frenchmen.
This self-policing—which can be read as an attempt to curry favor with the Germans or to divert attention from oneself or simply to spite a disliked neighbor—oppressed the populace more than the SD could have. As the historian Henry Charles Lea said of the culture of denunciation: “No more ingenious device (#litres_trial_promo) has been invented to subjugate a whole population, to paralyze its intellect and to reduce it to blind obedience.” Even children understood the terror behind the collective censorship. As Robert de La Rochefoucauld’s younger sister, Yolaine, who was thirteen years old in 1942, put it: “I remember silence, silence, silence (#litres_trial_promo).”
Robert, though, couldn’t live like that. “Every time I met with friends (#litres_trial_promo),” Robert would later say, “we always endlessly talked about how to kick the Germans out, how to resolve the situation, how to fight.” By the summer of that year, Robert was about to turn nineteen. The German officers had moved on, as quickly as they’d come, leaving the chateau without explanation for another destination (#litres_trial_promo). This only emboldened La Rochefoucauld, who still listened to Charles de Gaulle and cheered when he said things like, “It is completely normal and completely justified that Germans should be killed (#litres_trial_promo) by French men and French women. If the Germans did not wish to be killed by our hands, they should have stayed home and not waged war on us.”
One day a Soissons postman (#litres_trial_promo) knocked on the door of the chateau and asked to see Robert’s mother, Consuelo. The conversation they had greatly upset her. When he left, she immediately sought out Robert.
She told him that she’d just met with a mail carrier who set aside letters addressed to the secret police. This postman took the letters home with him and steamed open the envelopes to see who in the correspondence was being denounced. If the carrier didn’t know the accused, he burned the letter. But if he did, well, and here Consuelo produced a piece of paper with writing scrawled across it. If the postman did know the accused, Consuelo said, he warned the family. She passed the letter to her son. It had been sent anonymously, but in it the writer denounced Robert as being a supporter of de Gaulle’s, against collaboration, and above all a terrorist.
Anger and fear shot through him. Who might have done this? Why? But to fixate on that obscured the larger point: Robert was no longer safe in Soissons. If someone out there had been angry enough to see him arrested, might not a second person also feel this way? Might not another letter appear and, in the hands of a less courageous postal worker, be sent right along to the Nazis? Robert and his mother discussed it at length, but both knew instinctively.
He had to leave.
CHAPTER 4 (#ub73d4e94-6ac9-5940-b968-e053d0fbfebe)
He went first to Paris (#litres_trial_promo), in search of someone who could at long last get him to de Gaulle and his Free French forces. After asking around, Robert met with a man who worked in the Resistance, and Robert told him about his hope to head to London, join de Gaulle, and fight the Nazis. Could the Parisian help?
The man paused for a moment. “Come back in fifteen days (#litres_trial_promo),” he said, “and I’ll tell you what I can do.”
Two weeks later, Robert and the résistant met again. The Germans patrolled the coast between France and England, so a Frenchman’s best bet to reach the UK was to head south, to Spain (#litres_trial_promo), which had stayed out of the war and was a neutral country. If La Rochefoucauld could get there and then to the British embassy in, say, Madrid, he might find a way to London.
Robert was grateful, even joyous, but he had a question. Before he could cross into another country, he’d have to cross France’s demarcation line, separating the occupied from unoccupied zones. How was he to do that under his own name? The Parisian said he could help arrange a travel permit and false papers for La Rochefoucauld. But this in turn only raised more questions (#litres_trial_promo). If lots of Frenchmen got to London by way of Spain—if that passage was a résistant’s best bet—wouldn’t the Germans know that, too?
Probably, the man said. Everything in war is a risk. But the Parisian had a friend in Vichy with a government posting who secretly worked for the Resistance (#litres_trial_promo). If the Parisian placed a call, the Vichy friend could help guide Robert to a lesser-known southern route. Robert asked the man to phone his friend.
The Parisian and Robert also discussed false IDs. Maybe Robert needed two aliases (#litres_trial_promo). With two names it would be even harder to trace him as he traveled south. Of course, if the Germans found out about either, Robert would almost certainly be imprisoned. La Rochefoucauld seemed to accept this risk because French military files show him settling on two names: Robert Jean Renaud and René Lallier. The first was a take on his given name: Robert Jean-Marie. The second he just thought up, “a nom de guerre I’d found who knows where (#litres_trial_promo),” he later wrote. Both had the mnemonic advantage of carrying some of his real name’s initials.
He used René Lallier for the journey south to Vichy. The photo in his false identity card (#litres_trial_promo) depicted La Rochefoucauld in a three-piece suit, with his wavy black hair parted to the right in a pompadour, the corner of his lips curling into a smile, as if he couldn’t keep from laughing at the deception. At the demarcation line, the Nazi auxiliaries in the gray uniforms who checked papers, and whom the French called “the gray mice (#litres_trial_promo),” studied La Rochefoucauld’s ID, the name René Lallier in big block type, the black-and-white photo beneath. The date of birth was given as August 28, 1925, almost two years after La Rochefoucauld’s real birthday. The residence was listed in the Oise department, which was to the immediate west of La Rochefoucauld’s actual home in the Aisne. The gray mouse pored over the form, and then handed it back to La Rochefoucauld. He could proceed.
He took the train to Vichy, but when he got off, a wave of panic swelled within him. He wondered if it had been idiotic to come here, to the epicenter of German collaboration (#litres_trial_promo). Everyone seemed to eye him suspiciously; even cars and buildings looked “hostile (#litres_trial_promo),” he later wrote. He tried to push down the fear rising up his throat and appear casual, as if he belonged. But that was a difficult act. In the end, “I made an effort to be seen as little as possible (#litres_trial_promo),” he wrote, walking in the shadows of the streets, avoiding eye contact. He settled into a hotel that his Paris friend had arranged for him. The plan was to meet the man from the Vichy government in the lobby, but now that he was in his room, the whole affair seemed absurd: To meet with an actual Vichy official? In a Vichy hotel? Was this madness? “I was wary of everything and everyone (#litres_trial_promo),” he wrote.
Still, at the appointed time, he found the strength to walk to the lobby. He saw the government official the Parisian had described. The two greeted each other; Robert tried to ignore any gooseflesh pimpling his neck. They sat down, the official opening the conversation lightly, with banal questions and asides. He was trying to feel Robert out, which began to put him at ease—the official was “extremely nice (#litres_trial_promo),” La Rochefoucauld later said. The two could only playact for so long, though. The Vichy man told La Rochefoucauld that a group was about to leave for Perpignan, a city in southeastern France near the border with Spain. The official had a friend there, someone Robert would meet and who would help him cross over.
The official gave La Rochefoucauld an address for the man in Perpignan—and then stopped Robert before he could write it down. He said La Rochefoucauld had to commit the address to memory. “I began to soak up this code of conduct (#litres_trial_promo),” Robert later wrote, “which was so necessary to what I was undertaking but previously not really in my nature.” The Vichy man said once Robert arrived, the Perpignan friend would in turn put him in contact with smugglers who moved other clandestine agents or downed British pilots into Spain. How La Rochefoucauld got to the safety of, say, a British embassy would be at the discretion of the smugglers. The Vichy official and La Rochefoucauld then wished each other well and Robert watched him leave the lobby.
The meeting apparently made him feel better because Robert later described the trip to Perpignan as “very pleasant (#litres_trial_promo),” free of the paranoia of Vichy. At the given address in Perpignan, a man in his thirties answered La Rochefoucauld’s knock on the door, greeting Robert formally and aware of his plans. The Perpignan man was, like the one from Vichy, also a civil servant secretly awaiting the fall of Pétain’s government, and insisted La Rochefoucauld make himself comfortable. It could be a while before the next trip across the border, he said. So Robert stayed that night (#litres_trial_promo), and then seven more: The man and his smuggler friends planned to take a few clandestine fighters at a time and were rounding them up, he said. On the eighth night the Perpignan man told Robert that the smugglers would traffic two British pilots desperate to make it to Spain. Robert would travel with these Englishmen across the border.
One day soon thereafter Robert and the man from Perpignan set out to meet the Brits and the smugglers who would guide them across. The Occupation and scarcity of oil in France—the Nazis demanded more of it from the French than Germany produced annually (#litres_trial_promo)—had forced many of the French by 1942 to abandon their vehicles and live as if it were the nineteenth century. “Distances,” one observer wrote, were suddenly “measured in paces—of man or horse (#litres_trial_promo).” The people who kept a vehicle often retrofitted the engine so that a pump placed near the rear of the car, resembling the cylinder jutting up above a steam-engine train, could convert coal or wood chips into fuel in lieu of oil. That was what the man from Perpignan had (#litres_trial_promo): A rickety bus with what was known as a gasified tank grafted onto it, its cylinder rising high above the rest of the bus’s body. He and La Rochefoucauld traveled along the small roads snaking through the outskirts of the Pyrenees mountains, stopping at a modest village a dozen miles from Perpignan. They parked the bus and the man, pointing to the heavy forest around them, said they would walk from here. They set off through the woods (#litres_trial_promo) and the sloping mountainside until they saw it, about three miles into their hike: the makeshift camp of a dozen mountain men. They were large, hairy, and not particularly clean (#litres_trial_promo), but after introductions they promised they knew the routes to Spain better than anyone. Before trafficking Resistance fighters, they’d moved a lot of alcohol and cigarettes across the border. La Rochefoucauld snorted his approval.
The French and sympathetic Spaniards had their preferred escape routes, and the British government even sanctioned one, through an offshoot of MI6, called the VIC line (#litres_trial_promo). But many border crossings shared a common starting point in Perpignan, in part because the city lay at the foot of the Pyrenees that divided France from Spain. A crossing through the range there, though arduous, wasn’t as demanding as in the high mountains (#litres_trial_promo), more than two hundred miles to the west. The problem, of course, was that the Nazis knew this too, and Spain was “honeycombed with German agents (#litres_trial_promo),” one official wrote. So if the Pyrenees themselves didn’t endanger lives, a résistant’s run to freedom might.
The British pilots arrived, noticeably older than La Rochefoucauld and not speaking a word of French. Robert’s childhood with English nannies suddenly came in handy (#litres_trial_promo). He said hello, and soon found that they were career soldiers, a pilot and a radioman, who’d been shot down over central France during a mission, but parachuted out and escaped the German patrols. They had hiked for days to get here. La Rochefoucauld translated all this and the group decided to let the exhausted English rest. They would set out the next night.
In the end, seven left for Spain (#litres_trial_promo): La Rochefoucauld, the Brits, and four guides—two advance scouts and two pacing the refugees. They took paths only the smugglers knew, guided by their intuition and a faint moon. The narrow passages and ever-steepening incline meant the men walked single file. “The hike was particularly difficult (#litres_trial_promo),” La Rochefoucauld later wrote. Vineyards gave way to terraced vineyards until the vegetation disappeared, the mountain rising higher before them, loose rubble and stone at their feet. As the night deepened, Robert could see little of the person in front of him. The people who scaled these mountains often misjudged distances (#litres_trial_promo), stubbing their toes on the boulders or twisting their ankles on uneven earth or, when the night was at its darkest, flailing their arms when they expected a jut in the mountain’s face that was nothing more than open air. This last was the most terrifying. Germans posted observation decks (#litres_trial_promo) on the crests of certain peaks, which discouraged strongly lit torches and slowed or, conversely, sometimes quickened the pace, depending on whether and when the guides believed the Germans to be peering through their telescopes. The peaks at this part of the Pyrenees were roughly four thousand feet, and the descent was as limb- and life-threatening as the climb. The passage exhausted everyone. “Every two hours, we took a quarter of an hour (#litres_trial_promo)’s rest,” La Rochefoucauld wrote. At dawn the group closed in on a stretch of the range that straddled the two countries, but didn’t want to risk a crossing during the day. So they hid out and waited for nightfall. When they resumed their hike, the going proved “just as hard, and increasingly dangerous (#litres_trial_promo),” Robert later recalled. The group nearly stumbled into view of a German post, etched into the night’s skyline. They detoured quietly around it, but then, having rejoined the route, saw another Nazi lookout, rising amid the shadows. So once more they redirected themselves (#litres_trial_promo), trying to be safe but also trying to take advantage of the darkness; they needed to cross into Spain before dawn. These were tense moments, moving quickly and silently and almost blindly, and all while listening for footsteps behind them. Eventually they made it to the Perthus Pass (#litres_trial_promo), a mountainous area right on the border. Nazi patrols were known to roam the grounds at all hours here. The group’s advance scouts went ahead and came back in the last small minutes before daylight. “The road is clear (#litres_trial_promo)!” they said. With a rush of adrenaline and fear, everyone scurried across, into Spain.
Robert and the airmen laughed (#litres_trial_promo), euphoric. They were hundreds of miles south, but so much closer to London.
The guides said they needed to head back; smugglers out after dawn risked imprisonment (#litres_trial_promo). Everyone shook hands. The guides pointed to the road. “This will take you to a town (#litres_trial_promo),” one of them said.
Robert and the Brits set out, with a plan to get to the village (#litres_trial_promo), clean up somewhere, and take a train to Madrid without raising suspicion. Once there, they would cautiously make their way to the British embassy.
Though they had slept little and eaten sparingly, they walked at a good pace, full of life. They reached a thriving market town that morning; it was likely Figueres, the first municipality of any note across the Spanish border. They immediately discovered that it was crawling with police and customs agents. They were three men who had just climbed through the Pyrenees over two sleepless nights—“We looked more like highway robbers (#litres_trial_promo) than peaceful citizens,” La Rochefoucauld wrote—and before they could find a hiding spot or a public washroom, two Spanish agents approached them (#litres_trial_promo) on the street. The Spaniards were kind and one of them spoke French (#litres_trial_promo). Given their appearance and the toll the trek had taken on them, they felt that any story they might concoct wouldn’t sync with reality. So La Rochefoucauld tried an honest tack, to appeal to the officers’ intelligence. He said he had escaped from France with these British pilots, who had been shot down and fled to the border. The Spanish agents’ faces didn’t harden; they seemed to appreciate the honesty. But the lead officer told the men they had no choice but “to take you with us to the station.” In the days ahead, with Spanish bureaucracy in wartime Europe being what it was, La Rochefoucauld and the Brits went from one law-enforcement agency to another, and ended up at Campdevànol in Girona, twenty-five miles south of Figueres.
Robert Jean Renaud, La Rochefoucauld’s twenty-two-year-old French-Canadian alias, was booked in the Girona prison on December 17, 1942 (#litres_trial_promo). The Girona authorities found Renaud’s case beyond their jurisdiction and on December 23, they transferred him and, according to La Rochefoucauld, the British pilots to a place even less accommodating: the prisoner of war camp in Miranda de Ebro.
Built in 1937 (#litres_trial_promo) during the Spanish Civil War, the concentration camp near the Ebro River in the homely flatness of northern Spain first housed Republican soldiers and political dissidents who defied Franco’s fascism. Its watchtowers, barbed-wire fences (#litres_trial_promo), and barracks in parallel lines across 103 acres of Castilian soil were designed with the help of Paul Winzer (#litres_trial_promo), a Nazi member of both the SS and Gestapo, then working in Madrid. Franco’s men understood cruelty as well as any budding Nazi. They shipped the Republican prisoners to Miranda in cattle cars, starved them, humiliated them, exposed them to weather conditions and savage guards and all the diseases that thrive in overly populated spaces (#litres_trial_promo). The twenty-two barracks, made to hold two thousand men, held 18,406 prisoners (#litres_trial_promo) at one point in 1938. All told, an estimated ten thousand people (#litres_trial_promo) died there during the Spanish Civil War.
With Franco’s victory in 1939 and the outbreak of World War II, the camp was converted into a prison for refugees fleeing Hitler’s Europe. Its political allegiances shifted and baffled both the Allied and Axis powers (#litres_trial_promo). One would think a Nazi supporter as fierce as Franco would listen to the Germans and allow them sway within the camp, considering an SS man built the place. But Spanish officials informed the Nazis that because they’d overseen the prison since 1937, they didn’t need any outside guidance. No German helped to direct it during World War II. And because of Franco’s friendliness toward Great Britain and the diplomatic dexterity of British ambassador Samuel Hoare, to whom the general listened, British prisoners at Miranda served shorter stints than nationals from any other European country.
But that didn’t endear the remaining Allied prisoners to the Miranda staff. It routinely complied with the German embassy in Madrid, which issued exit visas and repatriation documents for its “subjects (#litres_trial_promo),” the Czechs, Poles, and French who had fled the German occupation of their home countries.
In short, it was a bad time to be a Frenchman entering Miranda—which is why French-Canadian seemed such an inspired nationality for La Rochefoucauld’s nom de guerre Robert Jean Renaud. To say he was a Canadian freed La Rochefoucauld from a forced return to Vichy France, or from the more barbaric treatment the Miranda staff imposed on certain French nationals: the beatings and the exhausting, morally degrading forced labor.
None of this meant, however, that Robert’s stay in Miranda was enjoyable. After his and the Brits’ booking, the guards shoved all three in the same cell (#litres_trial_promo), which other political prisoners described as “cattle stalls” or “windowless huts (#litres_trial_promo).” It was little better outside their unit. Miranda was well beyond its capacity of 2,000 prisoners, holding 3,500 by the end of 1942 (#litres_trial_promo). Everyone risked whippings or smaller humiliations from taunting guards. In January 1943, some prisoners began a hunger strike (#litres_trial_promo).
Every day the two British pilots wrote letters to their embassy in Madrid, begging for release (#litres_trial_promo). While they awaited a response, food was scarce (#litres_trial_promo) and the three subsisted on little more than the morning’s slice of bread and conversation. The winter wind whipped through the airy barracks (#litres_trial_promo) and inmates froze in their thin uniforms. Medical care was inconsistent, and when doctors did perform rounds they often asked that hot irons be pressed onto inmates’ dirty clothes, to kill off the lice (#litres_trial_promo). Scabies and diarrheic diseases, which prisoners called “mirandite (#litres_trial_promo),” were rampant. Rats attacked the camp dogs in broad daylight. To visit the latrines at night “necessitated a good deal of courage (#litres_trial_promo),” the British spy and Miranda survivor George Langelaan wrote, because there the same great rats “fought and squealed furiously, regardless and unafraid of men.” Sleep came fleetingly. The guards on night patrol sporadically shouted Alerta (#litres_trial_promo)!, either to make sure other guards were awake or to torture dozing inmates. In the morning, everyone stood outside for roll call and on Sundays they marched by the commandant and his officers who were clustered around a Nationalist flag on a miniature grandstand (#litres_trial_promo). The Miranda staff, dressed in their Sunday best of white belts, white epaulets, and white gloves, formed a band, and the prisoners walked behind it in time to music. This amused the elderly officers in their large silk sashes. Inevitably, one of the band members fell out of step or grew confused by the complicated formations, and the prisoners snickered under their breath at the band.
Every week, two large trucks from the British embassy (#litres_trial_promo) arrived, dropping off cigarettes and other provisions and picking up whichever Brits the Spanish authorities had agreed to release. Ambassador Hoare had a keen interest (#litres_trial_promo) in freeing pilots; the Allies increased their air missions (#litres_trial_promo) over France in 1942 and ’43, dangerous missions in which the Germans often shot the planes down. If the pilots survived the crash and ended up in Miranda, getting them back to London and back in the air took less time than training new men.
