The Girl Who Fell From The Sky

What they were about to do defied all knowledge, all common sense, and yet she felt only a great rush of excitement.

Anne-Marie Walters was one of the thirty-nine women agents of the British Special Operations Executive (SOE) who were sent into occupied France during World War II. These agents worked with various groups of the French Resistance providing intelligence, sabotaging German facilities and trains and assisting downed Allied airmen to return to England.

Their work was fraught with danger. Twelve of the 39 were captured and murdered by the Germans, one died of meningitis, while the remainder survived the war. Anne-Marie was one and wrote about her experiences in Moondrop to Gascony. Her friendship with the mother of the British writer, Simon Mawer led to his interest in the women who served in the SOE. Walters is the subject of Mawer’s The Woman Who Fell From the Sky (published in the US as Trapeze).

Part fiction, part fact, Mawrer’s novel is an account of what it was like to serve as an agent in Nazi occupied France. The activities of the men and women of the Resistance is both inspiring social history and one that never ceases to command my respect knowing that these individuals worked day and night, usually alone, under the constant threat of capture and its terrifying consequences.

The novel begins by introducing Marian Sutro whose mother was French and father English; Marian speaks both languages fluently. As a result, she comes to the attention of an SOE recruiter, is sent to Scotland for training where she learns espionage, surveillance, wireless operation, and how to survive behind enemy lines. The training is grueling.

Always assume the worst, one of the instructors warned them: a pessimist makes the best agent.

She is parachuted into France, becomes Alice for a while, and begins work with the resistance. Eventually she is asked to go to Nazi infested Paris where there is no safety. Her task is to deliver an important letter to a French atomic scientist, once her teen-age infatuation.

The letter is from a professor in England. To read the letter, he is given a key. Alice tells him he can open up a minuscule compartment and take out a microdot. A microscope is required to read the embedded letter. Clever! It is persuasive, describing the work of German scientists to develop an atomic bomb.

Alice arranges his escape to England, finds herself unable to join him on the pick-up plane, manages to elude her followers, and returns to the relative safety of the countryside.

Does she return to England to join her former lover, remain in France to carry on with her resistance work, or fall prey to Nazi captors? These questions will not be answered here. Mawer’s account is captivating, fast paced, full of surprise, ingenuity, and suspense.

Once in a while I read such a thriller. I read The Girl Who Fell From The Sky because it is a story about the French Resistance, one of those events where I ask myself once again how I would behave if I were placed in a similar situation. Would I be able to display such courage? It is as simple and unknowable as that.

What are you going to decide? Because you’ve got to make a choice. That’s one of positive thing that this war has brought: we have to choose.

The Courage to Care II

What compelled them to disregard danger and torture—even death—and choose humanity? What moved them to put their lives in jeopardy for the sake of saving one Jewish child, one Jewish mother?

Always there is the question of why, why did the rescuers act the way they did, and why were there so few. As they recounted their experiences, the majority struggled to understand what they did given the enormous risks they were taking. Here is how some of them answered:

Odette Myers (France)
The rescuers usually say, “It was nothing. Why all the fuss? It was the natural thing.”
She speculates that because the rescuers were not so formally educated, they had to do their own thinking and that led them to respond quickly without deliberating about ethical principles.

Max Rothschild (Netherlands)
“…why did I do it? And I don’t let anybody step on anybody else’s toes. I have no philosophy. I don’t belong to a church. But when I see injustice done, I do something about it.”

Herman Graebe (Poland)
“I cannot explain exactly why or how I did these things, but I believe that my mother’s influence on me when I was a child has a lot to do with it….She said, take people as they come, not by profession, not by religion, but by what they are as persons.”

Johtje Vos (Netherlands)
“We were hiding 36 people, 32 Jews, and four others who also were being sought by the Gestapo. We had made a tunnel underground from our house to a nature reservation and when we got a warning or had an inkling that the village was surrounded, they all went in there.…we did it because we believed it was the right thing to do.”

Marion Pritchard (Netherlands)
“It did not occur to me to do anything other than what I did…I think you have a responsibility to yourself to behave decently. We all have memories of times we should have done something and didn’t. And it gets in the way the rest of your life.”

Gaby Cohen (France)
“I do not have a scientific answer for why those who helped did it. I have asked myself that question over and over. For those of us who were young Jewish people at the time, it is not difficult to give an answer as to why we took the risks. We young Jews felt that it was our duty to help the helpless, to help those who were even in more danger than we were. But for the Catholic and Protestant families who took risks to help our children, it is not so easy for me to answer why. …What we know is that many people did it, they helped, even though we cannot say why.”

John Weidner (France)
“I only knew what I had to do, what my conscience and ethics compelled me to do. And I can tell you that I found a lot of people in all kinds of places---small people, of low social position; big people of high social condition; educated and uneducated—who were ready to help because they had pity and love and compassion in their hearts, and who thought, “It is my duty to help the Jews.”

These are the straightforward answers of a small sample of rescuers. While their behavior was of large significance, the reasons they offer for doing so seem nothing out of the ordinary. Of course, they were far more than that.

In an essay at the conclusion of The Courage to Care, Elie Wiesel poses the reverse question, Why were there so few rescuers? He asks what happened to those well-educated liberals and humanists who write eloquently about injustice and the many Nazi collaborators? “Why did they choose to remain insensitive to the plight, the tragedy, the murder of Jewish men and women and children?”

He has no answer. The question is disturbing and difficult and there are no accounts in this volume that give any hints as to what motivated their behavior. A companion volume of the non-rescuers and collaborators would be instructive.

The Courage to Care I

In those times there was a darkness everywhere…all the gates of compassion seemed to have been closed. The killer killed and the Jews died and the outside world adopted an attitude of either complicity or of indifference. Only a few had the courage to care.
Elie Wiesel

Imagine for a moment you are living in Nazi occupied Paris. One night an old friend comes knocking at your door. She is nervous, pale and rather emaciated. She is wearing a yellow star on her coat. Your husband is asleep, as are your three young children.

The person whispers in a pleading voice: “Can you hide me and my two boys for a few days? The Nazis are about to roundup of all the Jews in Paris.”

What do you do? Do you really have any idea? Can you imagine the risks involved, to you, and everyone in your family, that if you are caught, each of you will probably be shot or taken away to be tortured and then, if you survive the beatings, shipped off to Auschwitz in a cattle car, where your fate will be unspeakable?

The Courage to Care, edited by Carol Rittner & Sondra Meyers, recounts the experience of individuals throughout Europe who, in spite of these risks, did rescue and protect Jewish individuals in Europe during World War II. They did this by hiding, feeding, and helping them to move to a safer place that in many instances meant another country.

Each of the rescuers describes, in their own words their experience in aiding these Jewish men, women and children. All told, it is currently estimated that over 23,000 individuals can be identified as rescuers. They came from countries throughout Europe, Italy, the Netherlands, Denmark, Norway, France, Bulgaria, Poland, and even Germany.

It is impossible to estimate the number of Jews who were saved during the Holocaust; we know how many were not. The Courage to Care documents the story of 20 of these individuals. Portions of the book are included in the award winning film, A Courage to Care that I often showed in my social psychology class when we were discussing bystander intervention in crisis situations.

Odette Myers and her mother were saved by the Catholic concierge of the apartment building in Paris where they lived. She awoke them in the early morning of July 1942 when she heard the Nazis were beginning to round up over 13,000 stateless Jews. She hid them in a broom closet in her apartment and convinced the Gestapo agents the family had gone to their country home. After the Germans left, her husband, a member of the resistance, walked with them to the Metro where another member of the resistance took them to a hiding place in the country.

The experience of John Weidner of France was one of the most detailed of the accounts and, in several respects, representative of the majority of the others. While he wanted to help Jewish individuals in the Netherlands where he was originally from, he admitted that initially he had no idea what to do.

However, he lived close to the French-Swiss border and was familiar with several routes between the two countries. Eventually with the help of others, including his family and friends, he established a network, known as the Dutch-Paris network, that brought Jews from the Netherlands to Belgium then through France, and on to Geneva.

He described how difficult this was—it was extremely perilous to help Jews, he had to find safe places along the route, and ways to feed them, arrange for false papers and find money to pay for their papers and food. Above all he had to trust the people who were part of his group, as well as the Jews, who if caught and tortured, might reveal the names and addresses that would put all of them in danger.

One of his agents was eventually arrested and wasn’t able to hold up under the torture, resulting in the capture of nearly 300 members of his group who were deported to Nazi concentration camps. Forty, including his sister, never came back.

He concludes that the most important thing he learned was “…that you can have all kinds of theories but if you do not have love in action, those theories and creeds do not mean anything at all.”

Doctor to the Resistance

We lived in the shadows as soldiers of the night, but our lives were not dark and martial. . . There were arrests, torture, and death for so many of our friends and comrades, and tragedy awaited all of us just around the corner. But we did not live in or with tragedy. We were exhilarated by the challenge and rightness of our cause. It was in many ways the worst of times and in just as many ways the best of times, and the best is what we remember today. Jean-Pierre Levy

Few Americans participated in the French Resistance, a movement that will always represent in my mind the epitome of moral courage. I wrote about one here. Although I imagine there were others, the only one I am aware of is Dr. Sumner Jackson. These are individuals we don’t want to forget.

Jackson’s various roles in the Resistance are described in Hal Vaughan’s Doctor to the Resistance: The Heroic True Story of an American Surgeon and His Family in Occupied Paris. Sumner Jackson graduated from the Massachusetts General Hospital in 1919 and soon thereafter joined the British Royal Medical Corp as a field surgeon during the First World War. Once America entered the war, he was enlisted by the U.S. Army Medical Corp to serve at the Red Cross Hospital in Paris. It was there that he met his wife, Toquette, a French citizen who was a nurse at the hospital then.

After the war, the couple returned to his home in Maine. But they found it difficult to adjust to life there and moved back to Paris. Jackson worked at the American Hospital in Paris, where he remained until the Germans captured him in 1944.

The Jacksons began acting as Resistance agents in 1940, soon after the Germans occupied Paris. At one point they even asked their 14 year-old son, Phillip, to gather photographic intelligence of German submarine and ship building installations around the port of Saint-Nazaire. However, most of their activities took place at the American Hospital and their home on Avenue Foch, not far from the hospital.

They used their home as a shelter for downed Allied pilots who they helped to escape back to England via the various secret routes to the Spanish coast, to hide French militants wanted by the Nazis, and to relay encrypted messages to members of the Resistance. At the hospital Jackson also treated and provided care for injured pilots, French citizens on the run from the Nazis, and members of the Resistance itself.

All the while they were trying to survive through bitter winters with scarcely any heating fuel and with limited food and medical supplies for themselves, the staff and patients at the hospital.

In 1944 the Jackson’s housemaid found anti-Nazi notes in Phillip’s clothes while doing the laundry. Soon after, the Gestapo detained the three members of the Jackson family and transported them to work camps, where most prisoners either died of beatings, starvation, or exhaustion.

Toquette was send to Ravensbruck and somehow managed to survive the war. Jackson and Philip were sent to Neuengamme. As the Americans approached the camp, the prisoners were taken to the port of Jubeck and forced into a prison ship. In an aerial attack on the German ships as they leaving the port on their way to Sweden, Jackson and Philip’s ship was bombed and quickly sunk. Jackson drowned while ministering to the injured, while Philip was able to swim back to shore.

By participating in the French Resistance Dr. Jackson, Phillip and Toquette joined with “Thousands of French patriots…who, under circumstances that none had foreseen, began to do things they never would have imagined possible. … They simply refused, at risk of their lives, to accept dishonor and degradation of human values.”

American Resistance Heroine

In the late fall of 1943 Virginia D’Albert-Lake and her husband Phillipe were contacted by a local baker in the town of Nesles, France where they were living at the time. He asked the couple if they would come to his shop to meet some strangers.

Virginia was a young American teacher who met Philippe d’Albert-Lake in 1936 while traveling in France. Philippe was from a family of substantial means with two apartments in Paris and a home in Brittany. They were married in 1937 and moved to a small cottage in Nesles, north of Paris.

The strangers the baker asked them to meet were several downed American pilots that he was hiding until he could arrange their return to England. He asked the young couple if they could help. They agreed to do what they could.

Virginia and Phillipe contacted the French Resistance to organize their return to England via the Comet escape line, a key part of the Resistance that transported downed airman through France, across the Pyrenees, into Spain and eventually back to England where they could resume their missions.

Returning military servicemen to England was a crucial part of the wartime effort since it took considerable time and money to train new airman. It is estimated that 4,000 Allied airmen were successfully returned to England by means of the Comet escape line before the D-Day landings in 1944. It is also believed that at least 12,000 individuals took part in this highly risky wartime activity.

Virginia was one of three American women who participated in the French Resistance and is thought to be the only one who has provided a first-hand account of her experiences in her diary and memoir An American Heroine in the French Resistance.

In this account she makes it clear that she did not join the Resistance out of any deep political conviction, but rather because she “was simply doing the right thing.” No matter her motivation, she “had a share” in helping to ensure the successful escape of approximately 200 downed Allied airman. Much of this work involved providing the aviators shelter and assistance in Paris, moving them to secret hideouts in apartments there, or at a hidden forest encampment south of Paris.

It was on one of these risky journeys south of Paris that the Germans captured her. At the time she was on a scouting expedition ahead of the group of airmen she was escorting to the hideaway. She spent the next eleven months in one German camp after another finally ending up at the “infamous” Ravensbruck concentration camp where she almost died.

In her memoir Virginia describes a premonition she had just before she was captured:

“Something broke inside me. I knew somehow that it was all over. There was no more reason to hope. The sun that only a few moments ago was so bright and warm, now seemed eclipsed by a grey fog….I had no choice but to stand there in the center of the dusty road, grip my [bicycle] handle bars, and wait.”

While she participated in the Resistance barely a year, the tasks she undertook were both dangerous and significant. After the war was over, she received numerous awards from the Allied governments including the United States Metal of Honor, the Order of the British Empire and the Legion of Honneur, France’s highest honor.

I imagine of equal if not more personal importance to her was the gratitude expressed by the many airmen whose life she had saved, as well as those concentration survivors who after the war testified to her “courage” and “generosity.”

Note: I am grateful to Judy Litoff for the background information she provided in the Introduction to An American Heroine in the French Resistance.

Female Agents

On the night of April 24, 1942 Lise de Baissac was parachuted behind German lines into occupied France near the town of Poiters, south of the Loire. De Baissac was an agent for England’s Special Operations Executive (SOE) established by Churchill to work with the French Resistance. Her mission was to set up a safe house for a group of British trained agents to be sent to France.

She returned to London on August 16, 1943 just before the Germans discovered her “circuit” in Poitiers. Undeterred, she returned to France in April of the following year to work with another SOE group. A leader in the British Special Forces group of World War II wrote that in risking her life every day she played an indispensible role in aiding the guerilla groups of the French Resistance who inflicted heavy losses on the German forces.

Lise de Baissac died in 2004 ago at the age of 98. Her exploits were the inspiration for the film, Female Agents (Les Femmes de l’Ombre) that I saw recently. The film is reported to have won critical praise in France for recognizing the role of women resistance fighters during the War. The film’s director said, he first thought of making the film after reading de Baissac’s obituary in The Times of London.

The plot is complex but in a word four women are parachuted into occupied France in May of 1944 on a mission to protect the details of the forthcoming Allied landing and kill a colonel in a German counter-intelligence unit who is on the verge of learning its location. The Germans have captured an English geologist who had studied the beaches of Normandy and might therefore be forced (i.e., tortured) into revealing the plans.

They join a fifth woman who is already undercover with the Resistance. There are failed night-time shootouts, regroupings, the suicide of the captured brother of the group’s leader, harrowing torture scenes, the capture and subsequent killing of four of the original group of five women, and finally the successful assassination of the German colonel by the woman playing of role of Lise de Bassac, the only surviving member of the original group.

I write about this film out of admiration for these individuals whose convictions meant enough to them to put their lives at risk. In fact, I marvel at such individuals. The fact that they were women is less important to me, although it is clear they never achieved the recognition that men did.

Lise de Baissac was one of the few to be recognized. She was awarded a Legion d’Honneur, the highest decoration in France, and the Croix de Guerre, a French military decoration. In Britain she was honored with a MBE, a member of the Order of the British Empire.

The film ends as the fictional de Baissac lights four candles in a church in remembrance of the four who didn’t survive.