Free A Train in Winter by Caroline Moorehead Page B

children, Pierre and Jacques, to stay with friends in the country. The new young recruits to the Bataillons, some no more than 16 or 17, were often penniless, hungry, without money for the métro, and with nowhere to sleep. Their shoes leaked. In the little house in the 19th that looked more like a cottage than a city home, Yvonne often cooked for them.
    All gatherings of more than half a dozen people were prohibited by the Germans, but Ouzoulias and Fabien, under the pretence of participating in one of Vichy’s approved camping holidays, arranged to take twenty of the new recruits to the Bois de Lardy, in Seine-et-Oise. They left from the Gare d’Austerlitz, carrying knapsacks and wearing shorts. The youngest was André Kirschen, who had recently turned 15. In the woods they set up tents, cooked over open fires and discussed tactics. The boys were taught how to fire revolvers, throw grenades and make bombs out of empty tins, packed with dynamite, nails and little bits of wire; the girls did the cooking and washed the plates in the river. As Maroussia Naitchenko had rightly observed, there was a strong element of daredevil and bravura among the young resisters.

    Simone Sampaix, on a camping holiday before the war, with her brothers
    Simone and the few other girls were told that, as women, their roles would lie in ‘logistics’. At night, they debated what they felt about shooting someone in cold blood, and Simone, far from certain that she would have the courage ever to do so, was relieved that she was not going to receive a gun. Fabien recounted the story of a hero of the First World War, an elderly peasant who, with only a pitchfork, attacked a platoon of heavily armed German soldiers. Like the Serre sisters, Carmen and Lulu, Simone would later remember thinking that there was nothing very heroic in what she was doing. What seemed to her strange was that others were not doing the same. From their exile in their farmhouse in the countryside, her younger brothers were envious of her good fortune.
    Simone’s father’s fears, however, had been well placed. Confrontations between resisters and Germans were becoming daily more explosive. Among the first young people to join the Bataillons had been a number of Jews drawn from the large populations of Russians, Poles and Armenians who had settled in France in the 1920s and 1930s and set up their own association, the Main-d’Oeuvre Immigrée. Many spoke Yiddish at home. Early in August, three friends, all under 20—Samuel Tyszelman, Charles Wolmark and Elie Walach—raided a quarry in the Seine-et-Oise and came away with 25 kilos of dynamite. On 13 August, Tyszelman and another friend, Henri Gautherot, led a demonstration protesting against German restrictions. Thousands of people gathered, shouting ‘Vive la France!’ and ‘à bas l’Occupant!’ German soldiers opened fire. Tyszelman was hit in the leg, and he and Gautherot were arrested.
    Simone and her young friends were appalled by this sudden violent turn of affairs and even more upset when they learnt that Tyszelman and Gautherot had been condemned to death by a German military tribunal. On the 19th, posters went up, in the usual bold red and black lettering, announcing that the two young men had been executed that morning by firing squad. As if to underline Vichy’s attitude towards France’s foreign Jews, a simultaneous round-up in the 11th arrondissement took 4,232 into custody, to join the other 30,000 Jews already held in French internment camps.
    Two days later, early on the morning of 21 August, André Biver asked Simone to accompany him to the grands boulevards . He did not explain why. They had only just reached the Barbès métro stop when they heard shouts and Fabien and several members of the Bataillons raced up the stairs from the métro and scattered into the crowds. As he ran past them, Fabien called out, ‘Titi and Henri have been avenged.’ The killing that Simone had so feared to be part of