July Book of the Month: Lucie Aubrac
The next few months mark the 72nd anniversary of the liberation of France by Allied troops, which makes it a perfect time to be talking about Lucie Aubrac and other members of the French resistance who fought their Nazi occupiers for years until the Allies arrived. As one of the founders and leaders of Libération-Sud, Aubrac not only helped to distribute the underground newspaper Libération during World War II but also served as a courier, arms carrier, and saboteur. Her time under the Vichy regime was like something from a John Le Carré novel, involving disguises, swapped suitcases, and clues left in crosswords. Aubrac, working under the last name Montet, even managed to fool SS officer Klaus Barbie, infamously known as the “Butcher of Lyon,” to help her husband skirt certain death. British and American propaganda turned her exploits into the stuff of legend, and she was revered in her country for decades, but it all nearly ended in 1983, when she and her husband found themselves accused of secretly aiding their most-hated enemies. Lucie Aubrac helps parse out exactly what the couple’s actions and motivations were during the war while offering a thrilling portrait of a brave, resourceful woman who went to extraordinary lengths for love and country.
Here is a short excerpt from the book:
As
a founder and leader of Libération-Sud, an arm of the French Resistance during
World War II, Lucie Aubrac ran guns and messages, committed acts of sabotage,
and multiple times faked her identity to helped others escape from Nazi POW
camps. In the first half of her new book, Lucie
Aubrac: The French Resistance Heroine Who Outwitted the Gestapo, Siân Rees
details these exploits, including the two different times that Lucie rescued
her own husband, Raymond. Below is an excerpt from the book detailing the first
rescue operation, when Lucie (operating under the last name Samuel) traveled to
Sarrebourg with a plan to get Raymond sick enough to be sent from prison to a
hospital—from which she could sneak him away.
Still in Vannes, Lucie Samuel had
had no news of her husband for weeks. She passed her first birthday as a
married woman as she had done her first Christmas: alone and frightened, not
knowing where her husband was, or even if he was still alive. Her parents-in-law
knew no more than she did; it seemed nobody had information about their men.
Some semblance of ordinary life had to continue, nevertheless, as millions of
people waited for news. However bewildered and frightened teachers and pupils
were with foreign soldiers in the streets and fathers, brothers, and husbands
who had vanished, the girls and boys who had been working toward their baccalauréat
had to sit their examination.
Bravely, Lucie contacted the German
authorities in Vannes, persuading them to release four French officers from the
nearest internment camp to form the examination jury. She was enraged when all
four refused to seize the opportunity to escape; had they no courage, no
principled determination to resist defeat? Term had ended by the time she
finally received a card from the Red Cross at the end of July, with a note that
her husband was confined to a barracks in Sarrebourg, converted to a
prisoner-of-war camp. He had written the card on her birthday:
Nothing
is more monotonous, my love, than life in camp. More than the lack of comforts
and the terrible food, it is the false and contradictory reports which weigh on
the thousands of poor blokes who are here and who see no hope on the horizon. .
. . When I leave here, I will go to Dijon, and I will find you, and we will
choose what must be done, won’t we. I hope you are very well, and ready for our
future life. And this evening, your birthday, my thoughts will be entirely with
you. Raymond.
With most of France lapsing into
the stunned inactivity known as attentisme—waiting to see what would
happen—Lucie Samuel went into action. She had no more faith than her husband
that the Nazis would soon let their French prisoners go home, and she knew that
if Raymond were transferred to a prisoner-of-war camp in Germany his Jewishness
would put him in terrible danger. He had to escape immediately, and Lucie was
not a woman who waited for other people to step in and take care of things. She
would rescue him herself.
Once again she
crossed France, traveling in even more dangerous circumstances than she had
done the previous November, for the roads were blocked not only by refugees but
also by the German troops fanning out across a traumatized country, ramming
home the fact of their victory as they entered town after town in sleek,
gray-green, seemingly endless processions. Single-minded in her determination
to rescue Raymond, Lucie had come up with a simple plan: she would engineer her
husband’s transfer from barracks to hospital, then smuggle in a disguise to facilitate
his escape. In Champagne, she stopped off to find Raymond’s brother, Yvon, in
the military hospital to which he had been posted. Yvon provided her with a
drug guaranteed to provoke fever, and on she went, against the current,
traveling east as everyone else traveled west, until she reached Sarrebourg and
begged permission to see her husband. There was a brief, charged contact
between prisoner and visitor—it was the first time they had seen each other
since Paris in May—the drug was passed from one to another, time was called,
and a couple of days later a heavily sweating Raymond was transferred to the
hospital. Visiting as the anxious wife, Lucie produced the cap and suit of
workman’s blue overalls in which he would escape. If it was a simple plan, it
was also a terrifying one for Raymond, who was more frightened than he had ever
been in his life—hiding next to the garden fence was easy enough, but he was
all too aware that if the nearby guards saw him during the moment it would take
to haul himself over, their bullets would not miss. After what seemed like
hours of gut-cramping hesitation, he pulled himself up, threw himself over the
top, and fell into the street below, where Lucie was waiting.
Excerpted from Lucie Aubrac: The French Resistance Heroine Who
Outwitted the Gestapo, by Siân Rees, with
permission from Chicago Review Press. Copyright (c) 2016, all rights reserved.
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