Free A Train in Winter by Caroline Moorehead Page A

partisan groups were to be set up behind enemy lines, and acts of sabotage, the destruction of railway lines and telephone wires were to be carried out. The German occupiers, henceforth, were to be ‘terrorised’. Resistance was to be racheted up to another, far more perilous, level.
    The troubled PCF in France greeted the news of the invasion with immense relief. The months of ambiguity and doubt were over. Maï Politzer, her husband Georges and lover Decour, Hélène and Jacques Solomon, Danielle, Cécile and Betty were in from the cold. The clandestine L’Humanité responded with a call for armed combat.
    For many months, talks had been going on about the need for fighters for an Organisation Spéciale , a group of armed men to protect militants and to punish traitors and informers, and also to collect weapons and plan acts of sabotage. These men were to be, said the resisters, the shock troops of the movement. But there had been considerable misgivings about progressing to armed attacks and the assassination of individual German soldiers, not least because so much of the French population, committed to attentisme , was anxious not to promote further repression and reprisals by the Germans. What was more, the guns that were available were antique and highly unreliable.
    Now, in the wake of the invasion of the Soviet Union, a meeting was called in the Closerie des Lilas on the Boulevard Saint-Germain. To it came Danielle Casanova and a young man called Albert Ouzoulias, who had recently escaped from a prisoner of war camp in Austria. By the time they parted, Ouzoulias, who went by the Underground name of Zouzou, had agreed to set up what would be known as ‘les Battalions de la Jeunesse’, an armed youth wing. To help him there was a 22-year-old veteran of the Spanish Civil War, Georges Pierre, who took the nom de guerre of Fabien or Fredo and was alone in having some combat experience. The two young men, who were inseparable friends, set out to find recruits; before long, they were a band of fifty-six. Not many were older than 20. They regarded Danielle, who was 31, as their big sister.
    Among the first to come forward were 18-year-old Georges Tondelier, who had been running the Jeunesse Communiste in the 19th arrondissement, Isidore Grünenberger, who was Polish, and his school friend, a young cobbler called André Biver. Biver had a girlfriend, Simone Sampaix, an open-faced girl of 16 with a sweet smile and rosy cheeks. Her father, Lucien, was a former managing editor of L’Humanité , a distinguished looking man with thick grey hair cropped severely short. He was much admired within the Communist Party for writing a series of articles before the war linking the anti-Semitic Cagoule movement to French industrialists and the German secret services, for which he had been tried but acquitted. The Sampaix were friends of the Politzers and of Danielle, who was the family dentist, and as a young girl, Simone had attended the ‘vin d’honneur’ held for Fabien’s wedding. Yvonne, Lucien’s wife, worked in a textile factory and the family lived in a little house in the 19th, in the heartlands of the communist working class.
    By the summer of 1941, Lucien was in prison, having been picked up by the French police during a crackdown on the Underground press. ‘To think our grandfathers took the Bastille,’ he wrote to his wife. ‘How many Bastilles are still to be taken!’ Simone visited him in prison, to tell him that she had joined the Bataillons de la Jeunesse and was already transporting material for them under her school books. With her innocent, childish looks, she was an improbable suspect. Lucien told her how proud he was of her, but warned her to be careful. The police were getting more resourceful, and the number of informers was growing. Women and girls would not be safe for long. Yvonne, only now learning of her daughter’s activities, and both admiring of her and extremely fearful, sent her two younger