The celebrations for the 70th anniversary for D-Day have come and gone, as has the wonderful Chalke Valley History Festival, where I successfully submitted my pitch to the Penguin Historical Fiction Writer's Workshop. It doesn't mean much other than as an introduction and a boost to my confidence, but at least it tells me that the story is a good one and that I am on the right track. There's still a fair amount of editing to do but in the peace and tranquility that is daily life at Bardies, I'm determined to get to the end of this long journey.
When I started, I envisaged a non-fiction book about the brave and largely unrecognised women of the French Resistance. It angered me that General Charles de Gaulle, a military man who loathed the irregular forces of the FFIs [the Forces Francaises de l'Interieure formed at the beginning of 1944 from the various armed resistance groups inside France] awarded only six Croix de la Liberation to women, out of a total of 1,061. He hated the communists so the brave women, and most of the men too, of 'red Toulouse' and Ariege, especially those of Spanish Republican origin, were relegated to the footnotes of history. Military hierarchy had no place for women.
There are a number of reasons for this, not least the reluctance of the women themselves to talk about their wartime experiences. It was not just the war that they wished to forget. It was also the horrors of l'epuration in the immediate aftermath. No one knows exactly how many people were killed but estimates range upwards of 10,000, an enormous number by any measure. There was also a high degree of sexual retribution, as if the cowardly and politically impotent men of Vichy could only exonerate themselves by turning on the women that they labelled les collabos horizontales. A schoolteacher resister noted that 'in the shaving of heads and so on...we touched rock bottom'. It is estimated that 20,000 women were publicly brutalised.
In the women's accounts, in the main, there was a desire to move on, to rebuild what had been broken. So many people were displaced, so many families were fractured and so many graves were in need of tending; France had paid a high price. There was also the urgent need for reconstruction. France received seven times the tonnage of bombs that the UK received during the Blitz. It was not just the towns of Northern France. Biarritz, Nice, Marseilles and many other cities experienced the effects of Allied bombing. Fifty-seven thousand French people lost their lives after D-Day.
Seventy years on, a more nuanced history has emerged from the oral testimonies of resisters, particularly the women. These accounts give us a flavour of the time. While they do not tell the full story, they help us to comprehend that resistance takes many forms. So why a fictional story, I am asked? The answer is a simple one. I want to give them a voice. There are few contemporaneous oral testimonies from the women of Ariege and Haute-Garonne. I can guess at the thoughts and words of these brave women but I cannot know what they actually said. In a work of fiction, one has the freedom to generate meaningful dialogue and to attempt to recreate the landscape of the time, both physical and emotional.
I am lucky to live close to the town of St Girons, from where a number of evasion lines over the Pyrenees operated, including the O'Leary line. Many accounts can be read in Ed Stourton's Cruel Crossing: Escaping Hitler Across the Pyrenees, which has stimulated a great deal of interest in our little piece of la France profonde. In his introduction, Ed writes of the genius loci of the place, the spirit that makes its story so special. Unsurprisingly, Ariege is called la terre courage on quaint roadside tourist signs. Napoleon Bonaparte designated it le pays du fer et des hommes. Life has always been hard here.
After the fall of Barcelona in January 1939, almost 500,000 desperate men, women and children of the Retirada walked over the mountains in brutal conditions to seek safety in France. Many died, either on the mountains or in the terrible concentration camps that were thrown together to greet them. A large number of them joined the Resistance. Others acted as passeurs, taking Jews, downed Allied airmen and other evaders over the smuggler's paths into neutral Spain, helped by a small secret army of women in safe houses who provided a hot meal and a bed for the night at tremendous personal risk to themselves and their families.
I hope that I can do these women justice. I dedicate my story to them. Now, as I work towards the final chapters, I have decided to use this blog to tell the stories of some of the real women of the Resistance. It seemed to me to be one way to resolve my dilemma about fact and fiction, and that difficult historical middle ground that Anthony Beevor desultorily designates as faction. One day, perhaps, I shall write that history but in the meantime I hope to pay tribute to their courage, their resolve and cunning, but most of all, their generosity of spirit.
Tuesday 8 July 2014
Wednesday 2 July 2014
Freddie Knoller: Living With the Enemy
Last week I drove almost a hundred miles to see someone special at the Chalke Valley History Festival. His name is Freddie Knoller and he is a spritely ninety-three year old Auschwitz survivor. He was born on 17 April 1921 in Vienna, the youngest of three sons born to Marja and David Knoller. His parents were born in Galicia, then part of Austria-Hungary but part of what became Poland after the First World War. The three brothers were musicians, the eldest brother, Otto, a pianist and the middle one, Erich, a violinist. Fredl, Freddie, was a cellist.
After the Anschluss and Kristallnacht, David Knoller was determined that his three sons had to leave Nazi controlled Austria, by whatever means. Freddie left for Belgium via Cologne and Aachen at the end of November 1938, entered the country illegally and made his way first to Antwerp, then Eskaarde, near Ghent. When l'exode began, with the German invasion of Belgium on 10 May 1940, Freddie found himself walking to France on roads crammed with refugees. In Lille, he came upon a solid blue cordon of French police. He was taken to a police station, forced to show his penis to prove he was a Jew, and put in a cattle wagon to the internment camp of St Cyprien, near Perpignan. He remains angry with the French for their treatment of foreign Jews fleeing Hitler.
Three months later he escaped under the barbed wire and made his way to Gaillac, in the Tarn, deep in Vichy France. There, he purchased false papers and returned to Brussels to rescue his cello and take the bus to Antwerp to find out what had happened to his friends. When he could find neither his cello nor his friends, he decided to head for Occupied Paris where he lived amongst the Paris demi-monde under the false identity of Robert Metzner, born in Metz in Alsace. In July 1943 he was picked up by the Gestapo for procuring girls for German soldiers. He blagged his way out of Gestapo HQ and hightailed it from the Gare d'Austerlitz to the village of Cardaillac, in the Lot, not far from Figeac.
Freddie was arrested by the French Milice on a train en route from Figeac to Bergerac on 5 August 1943. He was probably denounced by his angry, jilted ex-girlfriend, Jacqueline, to whom he had confided both his Resistance activities and his false, non-Jewish identity. He was an agent de liaison, a courrier who ran messages from one Resistance cell to another. 'I am not a terrorist!' he shouted under interrogation. 'I am an Austrian Jew from Vienna called Alfred Knoller. I am hiding from the Germans and have nothing to do with any Resistance group.'
His decision to betray his origins rather than his colleagues resulted in him being taken to Gestapo headquarters, put under armed guard and taken by train back to Paris. From there, he was taken by the French Garde Mobile to Drancy, in the quiet suburb of Bobigny, the assembly camp for deportation to the East. On 6 October he was put in a cattle wagon to Auschwitz. There, he was reduced to a mere number, 157103. Aided by his friend Professor Waitz who managed to get him extra food, he avoided the selections. In January 1945, as Russian artillery approached, he survived the death marches in temperatures of -20 degrees. He was liberated at Bergen-Belsen in April 1945, weighing just forty-one kilograms.
'Every event in my story leads up to Auschwitz and no subsequent thought or action in my life is untouched by the memory of Auschwitz.....The person who stumbled into the cattle truck at Drancy lost once and for all his youthfulness, if not all his naivety.' The man on the stage, charming, amusing, witty and self-deprecating, was a careful observer filled with the will to live. His book, Living With the Enemy: My Secret Life on the Run from the Nazis details his story with no hint of self-pity, just an effusive love of life born of tremendous optimism. With each year that passes, there are fewer survivors like him to tell the story of what happens when a society loses its moral compass.
Freddie's story is one of many which concern the role of the French police and SNCF, France's railway provider. As Leo Bretholz, Freddie's friend and fellow raconteur, says, 'Wartime France was the most important and very venal cog in the wheel of Hitler's co-conspirators.' Undoubtedly, France is coming to terms with Vichy's complicity in the deportation of its own Jews. This process has been slow and painful. Where I live in Ariege, many local people are still unaware of the existence of the Le Vernet camp, the Drancy of the south, as well as the many other camps.
Perhaps they do not wish to remember. Many deportees were not Jewish and they struggled to be remembered too. One of them was Charlotte Delbo, in whose memory a conference which I attended was held at the Institut Francais on 18 March, the centenary of her birth. Charlotte's story, and that of the 229 other women of Le Convoi des 31000, is told by Caroline Moorehead in her book, A Train in Winter. I drove back to the Chalke Valley History Festival two days later to hear Caroline recount their tale, as well as the story of the villages around Chambon-sur-Lignon in the Auvergne which hid thousands of Jews. That story, however, is another blog.
After the Anschluss and Kristallnacht, David Knoller was determined that his three sons had to leave Nazi controlled Austria, by whatever means. Freddie left for Belgium via Cologne and Aachen at the end of November 1938, entered the country illegally and made his way first to Antwerp, then Eskaarde, near Ghent. When l'exode began, with the German invasion of Belgium on 10 May 1940, Freddie found himself walking to France on roads crammed with refugees. In Lille, he came upon a solid blue cordon of French police. He was taken to a police station, forced to show his penis to prove he was a Jew, and put in a cattle wagon to the internment camp of St Cyprien, near Perpignan. He remains angry with the French for their treatment of foreign Jews fleeing Hitler.
Three months later he escaped under the barbed wire and made his way to Gaillac, in the Tarn, deep in Vichy France. There, he purchased false papers and returned to Brussels to rescue his cello and take the bus to Antwerp to find out what had happened to his friends. When he could find neither his cello nor his friends, he decided to head for Occupied Paris where he lived amongst the Paris demi-monde under the false identity of Robert Metzner, born in Metz in Alsace. In July 1943 he was picked up by the Gestapo for procuring girls for German soldiers. He blagged his way out of Gestapo HQ and hightailed it from the Gare d'Austerlitz to the village of Cardaillac, in the Lot, not far from Figeac.
Freddie was arrested by the French Milice on a train en route from Figeac to Bergerac on 5 August 1943. He was probably denounced by his angry, jilted ex-girlfriend, Jacqueline, to whom he had confided both his Resistance activities and his false, non-Jewish identity. He was an agent de liaison, a courrier who ran messages from one Resistance cell to another. 'I am not a terrorist!' he shouted under interrogation. 'I am an Austrian Jew from Vienna called Alfred Knoller. I am hiding from the Germans and have nothing to do with any Resistance group.'
His decision to betray his origins rather than his colleagues resulted in him being taken to Gestapo headquarters, put under armed guard and taken by train back to Paris. From there, he was taken by the French Garde Mobile to Drancy, in the quiet suburb of Bobigny, the assembly camp for deportation to the East. On 6 October he was put in a cattle wagon to Auschwitz. There, he was reduced to a mere number, 157103. Aided by his friend Professor Waitz who managed to get him extra food, he avoided the selections. In January 1945, as Russian artillery approached, he survived the death marches in temperatures of -20 degrees. He was liberated at Bergen-Belsen in April 1945, weighing just forty-one kilograms.
'Every event in my story leads up to Auschwitz and no subsequent thought or action in my life is untouched by the memory of Auschwitz.....The person who stumbled into the cattle truck at Drancy lost once and for all his youthfulness, if not all his naivety.' The man on the stage, charming, amusing, witty and self-deprecating, was a careful observer filled with the will to live. His book, Living With the Enemy: My Secret Life on the Run from the Nazis details his story with no hint of self-pity, just an effusive love of life born of tremendous optimism. With each year that passes, there are fewer survivors like him to tell the story of what happens when a society loses its moral compass.
Freddie's story is one of many which concern the role of the French police and SNCF, France's railway provider. As Leo Bretholz, Freddie's friend and fellow raconteur, says, 'Wartime France was the most important and very venal cog in the wheel of Hitler's co-conspirators.' Undoubtedly, France is coming to terms with Vichy's complicity in the deportation of its own Jews. This process has been slow and painful. Where I live in Ariege, many local people are still unaware of the existence of the Le Vernet camp, the Drancy of the south, as well as the many other camps.
Perhaps they do not wish to remember. Many deportees were not Jewish and they struggled to be remembered too. One of them was Charlotte Delbo, in whose memory a conference which I attended was held at the Institut Francais on 18 March, the centenary of her birth. Charlotte's story, and that of the 229 other women of Le Convoi des 31000, is told by Caroline Moorehead in her book, A Train in Winter. I drove back to the Chalke Valley History Festival two days later to hear Caroline recount their tale, as well as the story of the villages around Chambon-sur-Lignon in the Auvergne which hid thousands of Jews. That story, however, is another blog.
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