The Saboteur: True Adventures Of The Gentleman Commando Who Took On The Nazis

He was still a boy, only seventeen, not even of military age, but he understood better than most the darkening afternoon that foretold France’s particularly long night. Robert saw a country that was falling apart.

He saw it first in the newspapers. Many new dailies and weeklies emerged with a collaborationist viewpoint (#litres_trial_promo), sometimes even more extreme than what Pétain promoted. Some Paris editors considered Hitler a man who would unite all of Europe; others likened the Nazis to French Revolutionaries, using war to impose a new ideology on the continent. There were political differences among the collaborators; some were socialists, and others pacifists who saw fascism as a way to keep the peace. One paper began publishing nothing but denunciations of Communists, Freemasons, and Jews. Another editor, Robert Brasillach, of the Fascist Je Suis Partout (I Am Everywhere), praised “Germany’s spirit of eternal youth” while calling the French Republic “a syphilitic strumpet, smelling of cheap perfume and vaginal discharge.” But even august publications with long histories changed with the times: The Nouvelle Revue Française, or NRF (a literary magazine much like The New Yorker), received a new editor in December 1940, Pierre Drieu La Rochelle, an acclaimed novelist and World War I veteran who had become a Fascist. Otto Abetz, the German ambassador, could not believe his good fortune. “There are three great powers in France: Communism, the big banks and the NRF,” he said. The magazine veered hard right.

At the same time, Robert also noticed the Germans begin to bombard the radio and newsreels with propaganda. Hitler was portrayed as the strong man, a more beneficent Napoléon even, with the people he ruled laughing over their improved lives. Robert found it disgusting, in no small part because he had witnessed this warped reality before, in Austria in 1938 at boarding school. He had even met Hitler there.

It was in the Bavarian Alps (#litres_trial_promo), hiking with a priest and some boys from the Marist boarding school he attended outside Salzburg. The priests had introduced their pupils to the German youth organizations Hitler favored and, at the time, Robert loved them, because they promoted hiking at the expense of algebra. He didn’t know much about the German chancellor then, aside from the fact that everyone talked about him, but he knew it was a big deal for the priest to take the boys to Berghof, Hitler’s Alpine retreat, perched high above the market town of Berchtesgaden. When they reached it they saw a gently sloping hill on which sat a massive compound: a main residence as large as a French chateau and, to the right, a smaller guest house. The estate was the first home Hitler called his own and where he spent “the finest hours of my life,” he once said. “It was there that all my great projects were conceived and ripened.”

The students stood lightly panting before it when a convoy of black cars wended down the long driveway and turned out onto the road. The path cut right in front of the boys, and one sedan stopped in front of them. Out stepped Adolf Hitler. The priest, stunned, began explaining that he and his group had just come to look—but Hitler was in a playful mood, not suspicious in the least, and began questioning the boys, many of whom were Austrian, about their backgrounds. When Hitler got to Robert, the priest said that this boy was French. Robert tried to make an impression, and began speaking to Hitler in the German he’d acquired living in Austria. But the phrases emerged with an unmistakable accent, and when Robert finished, Hitler just patted him on the cheek. “Franzose (#litres_trial_promo),” he responded. (“Frenchman.”) And then he moved on.

In a moment, the führer was back in the car and out of view. The encounter was as brief as it was shocking: The boys had seen, had even been touched by, the most famous man in Europe, the shaper of history himself. They looked at each other, and Robert couldn’t help but feel giddy (#litres_trial_promo).

The bliss wouldn’t last, however. Austria was quickly losing whatever independence it had, and when Chancellor Kurt Schuschnigg said in a radio address in February that he could make no more concessions to the Nazis, a frenzied, yelling mob of twenty thousand Fascists invaded the city of Graz (#litres_trial_promo), ripped out the loudspeakers that had broadcast Schuschnigg’s address, then pulled down the Austrian flag and replaced it with a swastika banner. A month later Hitler invaded, and within days the Anschluss was complete.

Robert saw a demonstration in Salzburg a few days later, where everyone shouted, “Heil Hitler! Long live Hitler (#litres_trial_promo)!” He felt the threat of violence begin to cloud the interactions of everyday life. The Nazis occupied the buildings next to the Marist school and one day Robert looked in a window and suddenly a man stormed from the building, insulting and threatening him, simply for peering inside (#litres_trial_promo). Robert began to second-guess a führer who would champion these bullies. By the end of the school year, he was happy to leave Austria for good.

Now, at the beginning of the Occupation, he saw a similar malice embedded within the French newsreels: Everyone smiling too hard and striving to look the same. With each passing day, the Frenchmen he encountered seemed to follow in the Austrians’ footsteps, embracing a fascism they were either too scared or ignorant of to oppose. One exhibition defaming Freemasonry (#litres_trial_promo) attracted 900,000 Parisians, nearly half the city’s population. Another, called “European France,” with Hitler as the pan-national leader, drew 635,000 (#litres_trial_promo). Meanwhile, the German Institute’s language courses flourished to the point (#litres_trial_promo) that they had to turn away applicants. For 90 percent of France, La Rochefoucauld later mused, Pétain and Hitler’s alliance represented the second coming of Joan of Arc (#litres_trial_promo). The historical record would show that collaborators, those who subscribed to newspapers committed to the cause and joined special interest groups, were never actually a majority (#litres_trial_promo), but Robert could be forgiven for thinking this because all around him people declared themselves friends of Hitler. The founder of the cosmetics firm L’Oréal (#litres_trial_promo) turned out to be a collaborator. So was the director of Paris’ Opéra-Comique, the curator of the Rodin Museum, even the rector of the Catholic University of Paris. By the end of 1940, in fact, the country’s assembly of cardinals and archbishops demanded in a letter that laity give a “complete and sincere loyalty … to the established order.” One Catholic priest finished Sunday Mass with a loud “Heil Hitler (#litres_trial_promo).”

It was all so disorienting. Robert felt like he no longer recognized La France. He was eighteen and impetuous and London and de Gaulle called to him—but couldn’t he do something here, now? He wanted to show the Germans that they could control his country, his faith, his house, but they could not control him.

One day he met in secret (#litres_trial_promo) with his cousin, Guy, and they launched a plan to steal a train loaded with ammunition that stopped in Soissons. Maybe they would blow it up, maybe they would just abscond with it. The point was: The Germans would know they didn’t rule everything. Guy and Robert talked about how wonderful it would be, and ultimately Robert approached a man of their fathers’ generation, whom Robert blindly suspected of being in the fledgling Resistance, and asked for help.

The man stared hard (#litres_trial_promo) at Robert. He told him that he and his cousin could not carry out their mission. Even if they stole this train, what would they do with it? And how would it defeat the Germans? And did they realize that their act risked more lives than their own? German reprisals for “terrorism” sometimes demanded dozens of executions.

Already, an amateur rebellion had cost the community lives. A Resistance group in Soissons (#litres_trial_promo) called La Vérité Française had affiliated itself with one in Paris that formed in the Musée de l’Homme. It was a brave but naive group, unaware of the double agents within its ranks as it published underground newspapers and organized escape routes for French prisoners of war. The German secret police raided the Musée and Vérité groups. One museum résistant was deported, three sentenced to prison and seven to death (#litres_trial_promo). In Soissons, two members of Vérité Française were beheaded, six shot, and six more died in concentration camps (#litres_trial_promo). The Nazi agents who organized the Soissons raid (#litres_trial_promo) worked in an elegant gray-stone building—across the street from the cathedral where the La Rochefoucaulds occasionally attended Mass.

So their plan was foolish (#litres_trial_promo), the man said, and Robert and his cousin were lucky to be stopped before the brutal secret police or, for that matter, the army officers billeting in Robert’s house could get to them.

The scolding shamed La Rochefoucauld, and stilled his intent. But the situation in France continued to worsen. The French government was responsible for the upkeep of the German army in France, which cost a stunning 400 million francs a day (#litres_trial_promo), after the Nazis rigged the math and overvalued the German mark by 60 percent. Soon, it was enough money to actually buy (#litres_trial_promo) France from the French, one German economist noted. Oil grew scarce (#litres_trial_promo). Robert began biking everywhere (#litres_trial_promo). The German-backed government in Vichy imposed rations (#litres_trial_promo), and Robert soon saw long lines of people at seemingly every bakery and grocery store (#litres_trial_promo) he passed. The Germans set a shifting curfew (#litres_trial_promo) for Paris, as early as 9 p.m. (#litres_trial_promo) or as late as midnight, depending on the Nazis’ whims. This would have annoyed any college-aged man, but the German capriciousness carried a sinister edge, too: After dark, Parisians heard the echo of the patrolling secret police’s boots (#litres_trial_promo) and might wake the next day to find a neighbor or acquaintance missing and everyone too frightened to ask questions. In 1941, the terror spilled out into the open. Small cliques of Communist résistants in Nantes and Bordeaux assassinated two high-ranking Nazi officers (#litres_trial_promo), and, in response, Hitler ordered the execution of ninety-eight people, some of them teenagers, who had at most nominal ties to Communism. One by one they were sent to the firing squad, some of them singing the French national anthem. As news of the executions spread—ninety-eight people dead—a police report noted: “The German authorities have sown consternation everywhere (#litres_trial_promo).”

The urge to fight rose again in Robert and his college friends. Pétain seemed to be speaking directly to young men like Robert when he warned in a broadcast: “Frenchmen … I appeal to you in a broken voice: Do not allow any more harm to be done (#litres_trial_promo) to France.” But that proved difficult as 1941 became 1942, and the Occupation entered its third year. Travel to certain areas was allowed only by permit, thirteen thousand Jews (#litres_trial_promo) were rounded up in Paris and sent to Auschwitz, and the United States entered the war. The Germans, to feed their fighting machine, gave the French even less to eat, forcing mothers to wait all morning for butter and urban families to beg their rural cousins for overripened vegetables (#litres_trial_promo). Robert now heard of sabotages of German equipment and materiel carried out by people very much like himself. He no doubt heard of the people who feared the growing Resistance as well, who wanted to keep the peace whatever the cost, who called résistants “bandits” or even “terrorists (#litres_trial_promo),” adopting the language of the occupier. In 1942, denunciations were common. Radio Paris had a show, Répétez-le (#litres_trial_promo) (Repeat It), in which listeners named their neighbors, business associates, or sometimes family members as enemies of the state. The Sicherheitsdienst (SD), the feared agency colloquially known as the Gestapo, read at least three million denunciatory letters (#litres_trial_promo) during the war, many of them signed by Frenchmen.

This self-policing—which can be read as an attempt to curry favor with the Germans or to divert attention from oneself or simply to spite a disliked neighbor—oppressed the populace more than the SD could have. As the historian Henry Charles Lea said of the culture of denunciation: “No more ingenious device (#litres_trial_promo) has been invented to subjugate a whole population, to paralyze its intellect and to reduce it to blind obedience.” Even children understood the terror behind the collective censorship. As Robert de La Rochefoucauld’s younger sister, Yolaine, who was thirteen years old in 1942, put it: “I remember silence, silence, silence (#litres_trial_promo).”

Robert, though, couldn’t live like that. “Every time I met with friends (#litres_trial_promo),” Robert would later say, “we always endlessly talked about how to kick the Germans out, how to resolve the situation, how to fight.” By the summer of that year, Robert was about to turn nineteen. The German officers had moved on, as quickly as they’d come, leaving the chateau without explanation for another destination (#litres_trial_promo). This only emboldened La Rochefoucauld, who still listened to Charles de Gaulle and cheered when he said things like, “It is completely normal and completely justified that Germans should be killed (#litres_trial_promo) by French men and French women. If the Germans did not wish to be killed by our hands, they should have stayed home and not waged war on us.”

One day a Soissons postman (#litres_trial_promo) knocked on the door of the chateau and asked to see Robert’s mother, Consuelo. The conversation they had greatly upset her. When he left, she immediately sought out Robert.

She told him that she’d just met with a mail carrier who set aside letters addressed to the secret police. This postman took the letters home with him and steamed open the envelopes to see who in the correspondence was being denounced. If the carrier didn’t know the accused, he burned the letter. But if he did, well, and here Consuelo produced a piece of paper with writing scrawled across it. If the postman did know the accused, Consuelo said, he warned the family. She passed the letter to her son. It had been sent anonymously, but in it the writer denounced Robert as being a supporter of de Gaulle’s, against collaboration, and above all a terrorist.

Anger and fear shot through him. Who might have done this? Why? But to fixate on that obscured the larger point: Robert was no longer safe in Soissons. If someone out there had been angry enough to see him arrested, might not a second person also feel this way? Might not another letter appear and, in the hands of a less courageous postal worker, be sent right along to the Nazis? Robert and his mother discussed it at length, but both knew instinctively.

He had to leave.

CHAPTER 4 (#ub73d4e94-6ac9-5940-b968-e053d0fbfebe)

He went first to Paris (#litres_trial_promo), in search of someone who could at long last get him to de Gaulle and his Free French forces. After asking around, Robert met with a man who worked in the Resistance, and Robert told him about his hope to head to London, join de Gaulle, and fight the Nazis. Could the Parisian help?

The man paused for a moment. “Come back in fifteen days (#litres_trial_promo),” he said, “and I’ll tell you what I can do.”

Two weeks later, Robert and the résistant met again. The Germans patrolled the coast between France and England, so a Frenchman’s best bet to reach the UK was to head south, to Spain (#litres_trial_promo), which had stayed out of the war and was a neutral country. If La Rochefoucauld could get there and then to the British embassy in, say, Madrid, he might find a way to London.

Robert was grateful, even joyous, but he had a question. Before he could cross into another country, he’d have to cross France’s demarcation line, separating the occupied from unoccupied zones. How was he to do that under his own name? The Parisian said he could help arrange a travel permit and false papers for La Rochefoucauld. But this in turn only raised more questions (#litres_trial_promo). If lots of Frenchmen got to London by way of Spain—if that passage was a résistant’s best bet—wouldn’t the Germans know that, too?

Probably, the man said. Everything in war is a risk. But the Parisian had a friend in Vichy with a government posting who secretly worked for the Resistance (#litres_trial_promo). If the Parisian placed a call, the Vichy friend could help guide Robert to a lesser-known southern route. Robert asked the man to phone his friend.

The Parisian and Robert also discussed false IDs. Maybe Robert needed two aliases (#litres_trial_promo). With two names it would be even harder to trace him as he traveled south. Of course, if the Germans found out about either, Robert would almost certainly be imprisoned. La Rochefoucauld seemed to accept this risk because French military files show him settling on two names: Robert Jean Renaud and René Lallier. The first was a take on his given name: Robert Jean-Marie. The second he just thought up, “a nom de guerre I’d found who knows where (#litres_trial_promo),” he later wrote. Both had the mnemonic advantage of carrying some of his real name’s initials.

He used René Lallier for the journey south to Vichy. The photo in his false identity card (#litres_trial_promo) depicted La Rochefoucauld in a three-piece suit, with his wavy black hair parted to the right in a pompadour, the corner of his lips curling into a smile, as if he couldn’t keep from laughing at the deception. At the demarcation line, the Nazi auxiliaries in the gray uniforms who checked papers, and whom the French called “the gray mice (#litres_trial_promo),” studied La Rochefoucauld’s ID, the name René Lallier in big block type, the black-and-white photo beneath. The date of birth was given as August 28, 1925, almost two years after La Rochefoucauld’s real birthday. The residence was listed in the Oise department, which was to the immediate west of La Rochefoucauld’s actual home in the Aisne. The gray mouse pored over the form, and then handed it back to La Rochefoucauld. He could proceed.

He took the train to Vichy, but when he got off, a wave of panic swelled within him. He wondered if it had been idiotic to come here, to the epicenter of German collaboration (#litres_trial_promo). Everyone seemed to eye him suspiciously; even cars and buildings looked “hostile (#litres_trial_promo),” he later wrote. He tried to push down the fear rising up his throat and appear casual, as if he belonged. But that was a difficult act. In the end, “I made an effort to be seen as little as possible (#litres_trial_promo),” he wrote, walking in the shadows of the streets, avoiding eye contact. He settled into a hotel that his Paris friend had arranged for him. The plan was to meet the man from the Vichy government in the lobby, but now that he was in his room, the whole affair seemed absurd: To meet with an actual Vichy official? In a Vichy hotel? Was this madness? “I was wary of everything and everyone (#litres_trial_promo),” he wrote.

Still, at the appointed time, he found the strength to walk to the lobby. He saw the government official the Parisian had described. The two greeted each other; Robert tried to ignore any gooseflesh pimpling his neck. They sat down, the official opening the conversation lightly, with banal questions and asides. He was trying to feel Robert out, which began to put him at ease—the official was “extremely nice (#litres_trial_promo),” La Rochefoucauld later said. The two could only playact for so long, though. The Vichy man told La Rochefoucauld that a group was about to leave for Perpignan, a city in southeastern France near the border with Spain. The official had a friend there, someone Robert would meet and who would help him cross over.

The official gave La Rochefoucauld an address for the man in Perpignan—and then stopped Robert before he could write it down. He said La Rochefoucauld had to commit the address to memory. “I began to soak up this code of conduct (#litres_trial_promo),” Robert later wrote, “which was so necessary to what I was undertaking but previously not really in my nature.” The Vichy man said once Robert arrived, the Perpignan friend would in turn put him in contact with smugglers who moved other clandestine agents or downed British pilots into Spain. How La Rochefoucauld got to the safety of, say, a British embassy would be at the discretion of the smugglers. The Vichy official and La Rochefoucauld then wished each other well and Robert watched him leave the lobby.

The meeting apparently made him feel better because Robert later described the trip to Perpignan as “very pleasant (#litres_trial_promo),” free of the paranoia of Vichy. At the given address in Perpignan, a man in his thirties answered La Rochefoucauld’s knock on the door, greeting Robert formally and aware of his plans. The Perpignan man was, like the one from Vichy, also a civil servant secretly awaiting the fall of Pétain’s government, and insisted La Rochefoucauld make himself comfortable. It could be a while before the next trip across the border, he said. So Robert stayed that night (#litres_trial_promo), and then seven more: The man and his smuggler friends planned to take a few clandestine fighters at a time and were rounding them up, he said. On the eighth night the Perpignan man told Robert that the smugglers would traffic two British pilots desperate to make it to Spain. Robert would travel with these Englishmen across the border.

One day soon thereafter Robert and the man from Perpignan set out to meet the Brits and the smugglers who would guide them across. The Occupation and scarcity of oil in France—the Nazis demanded more of it from the French than Germany produced annually (#litres_trial_promo)—had forced many of the French by 1942 to abandon their vehicles and live as if it were the nineteenth century. “Distances,” one observer wrote, were suddenly “measured in paces—of man or horse (#litres_trial_promo).” The people who kept a vehicle often retrofitted the engine so that a pump placed near the rear of the car, resembling the cylinder jutting up above a steam-engine train, could convert coal or wood chips into fuel in lieu of oil. That was what the man from Perpignan had (#litres_trial_promo): A rickety bus with what was known as a gasified tank grafted onto it, its cylinder rising high above the rest of the bus’s body. He and La Rochefoucauld traveled along the small roads snaking through the outskirts of the Pyrenees mountains, stopping at a modest village a dozen miles from Perpignan. They parked the bus and the man, pointing to the heavy forest around them, said they would walk from here. They set off through the woods (#litres_trial_promo) and the sloping mountainside until they saw it, about three miles into their hike: the makeshift camp of a dozen mountain men. They were large, hairy, and not particularly clean (#litres_trial_promo), but after introductions they promised they knew the routes to Spain better than anyone. Before trafficking Resistance fighters, they’d moved a lot of alcohol and cigarettes across the border. La Rochefoucauld snorted his approval.

The French and sympathetic Spaniards had their preferred escape routes, and the British government even sanctioned one, through an offshoot of MI6, called the VIC line (#litres_trial_promo). But many border crossings shared a common starting point in Perpignan, in part because the city lay at the foot of the Pyrenees that divided France from Spain. A crossing through the range there, though arduous, wasn’t as demanding as in the high mountains (#litres_trial_promo), more than two hundred miles to the west. The problem, of course, was that the Nazis knew this too, and Spain was “honeycombed with German agents (#litres_trial_promo),” one official wrote. So if the Pyrenees themselves didn’t endanger lives, a résistant’s run to freedom might.

The British pilots arrived, noticeably older than La Rochefoucauld and not speaking a word of French. Robert’s childhood with English nannies suddenly came in handy (#litres_trial_promo). He said hello, and soon found that they were career soldiers, a pilot and a radioman, who’d been shot down over central France during a mission, but parachuted out and escaped the German patrols. They had hiked for days to get here. La Rochefoucauld translated all this and the group decided to let the exhausted English rest. They would set out the next night.

In the end, seven left for Spain (#litres_trial_promo): La Rochefoucauld, the Brits, and four guides—two advance scouts and two pacing the refugees. They took paths only the smugglers knew, guided by their intuition and a faint moon. The narrow passages and ever-steepening incline meant the men walked single file. “The hike was particularly difficult (#litres_trial_promo),” La Rochefoucauld later wrote. Vineyards gave way to terraced vineyards until the vegetation disappeared, the mountain rising higher before them, loose rubble and stone at their feet. As the night deepened, Robert could see little of the person in front of him. The people who scaled these mountains often misjudged distances (#litres_trial_promo), stubbing their toes on the boulders or twisting their ankles on uneven earth or, when the night was at its darkest, flailing their arms when they expected a jut in the mountain’s face that was nothing more than open air. This last was the most terrifying. Germans posted observation decks (#litres_trial_promo) on the crests of certain peaks, which discouraged strongly lit torches and slowed or, conversely, sometimes quickened the pace, depending on whether and when the guides believed the Germans to be peering through their telescopes. The peaks at this part of the Pyrenees were roughly four thousand feet, and the descent was as limb- and life-threatening as the climb. The passage exhausted everyone. “Every two hours, we took a quarter of an hour (#litres_trial_promo)’s rest,” La Rochefoucauld wrote. At dawn the group closed in on a stretch of the range that straddled the two countries, but didn’t want to risk a crossing during the day. So they hid out and waited for nightfall. When they resumed their hike, the going proved “just as hard, and increasingly dangerous (#litres_trial_promo),” Robert later recalled. The group nearly stumbled into view of a German post, etched into the night’s skyline. They detoured quietly around it, but then, having rejoined the route, saw another Nazi lookout, rising amid the shadows. So once more they redirected themselves (#litres_trial_promo), trying to be safe but also trying to take advantage of the darkness; they needed to cross into Spain before dawn. These were tense moments, moving quickly and silently and almost blindly, and all while listening for footsteps behind them. Eventually they made it to the Perthus Pass (#litres_trial_promo), a mountainous area right on the border. Nazi patrols were known to roam the grounds at all hours here. The group’s advance scouts went ahead and came back in the last small minutes before daylight. “The road is clear (#litres_trial_promo)!” they said. With a rush of adrenaline and fear, everyone scurried across, into Spain.

Robert and the airmen laughed (#litres_trial_promo), euphoric. They were hundreds of miles south, but so much closer to London.

The guides said they needed to head back; smugglers out after dawn risked imprisonment (#litres_trial_promo). Everyone shook hands. The guides pointed to the road. “This will take you to a town (#litres_trial_promo),” one of them said.

Robert and the Brits set out, with a plan to get to the village (#litres_trial_promo), clean up somewhere, and take a train to Madrid without raising suspicion. Once there, they would cautiously make their way to the British embassy.

Though they had slept little and eaten sparingly, they walked at a good pace, full of life. They reached a thriving market town that morning; it was likely Figueres, the first municipality of any note across the Spanish border. They immediately discovered that it was crawling with police and customs agents. They were three men who had just climbed through the Pyrenees over two sleepless nights—“We looked more like highway robbers (#litres_trial_promo) than peaceful citizens,” La Rochefoucauld wrote—and before they could find a hiding spot or a public washroom, two Spanish agents approached them (#litres_trial_promo) on the street. The Spaniards were kind and one of them spoke French (#litres_trial_promo). Given their appearance and the toll the trek had taken on them, they felt that any story they might concoct wouldn’t sync with reality. So La Rochefoucauld tried an honest tack, to appeal to the officers’ intelligence. He said he had escaped from France with these British pilots, who had been shot down and fled to the border. The Spanish agents’ faces didn’t harden; they seemed to appreciate the honesty. But the lead officer told the men they had no choice but “to take you with us to the station.” In the days ahead, with Spanish bureaucracy in wartime Europe being what it was, La Rochefoucauld and the Brits went from one law-enforcement agency to another, and ended up at Campdevànol in Girona, twenty-five miles south of Figueres.

Robert Jean Renaud, La Rochefoucauld’s twenty-two-year-old French-Canadian alias, was booked in the Girona prison on December 17, 1942 (#litres_trial_promo). The Girona authorities found Renaud’s case beyond their jurisdiction and on December 23, they transferred him and, according to La Rochefoucauld, the British pilots to a place even less accommodating: the prisoner of war camp in Miranda de Ebro.

Built in 1937 (#litres_trial_promo) during the Spanish Civil War, the concentration camp near the Ebro River in the homely flatness of northern Spain first housed Republican soldiers and political dissidents who defied Franco’s fascism. Its watchtowers, barbed-wire fences (#litres_trial_promo), and barracks in parallel lines across 103 acres of Castilian soil were designed with the help of Paul Winzer (#litres_trial_promo), a Nazi member of both the SS and Gestapo, then working in Madrid. Franco’s men understood cruelty as well as any budding Nazi. They shipped the Republican prisoners to Miranda in cattle cars, starved them, humiliated them, exposed them to weather conditions and savage guards and all the diseases that thrive in overly populated spaces (#litres_trial_promo). The twenty-two barracks, made to hold two thousand men, held 18,406 prisoners (#litres_trial_promo) at one point in 1938. All told, an estimated ten thousand people (#litres_trial_promo) died there during the Spanish Civil War.

With Franco’s victory in 1939 and the outbreak of World War II, the camp was converted into a prison for refugees fleeing Hitler’s Europe. Its political allegiances shifted and baffled both the Allied and Axis powers (#litres_trial_promo). One would think a Nazi supporter as fierce as Franco would listen to the Germans and allow them sway within the camp, considering an SS man built the place. But Spanish officials informed the Nazis that because they’d overseen the prison since 1937, they didn’t need any outside guidance. No German helped to direct it during World War II. And because of Franco’s friendliness toward Great Britain and the diplomatic dexterity of British ambassador Samuel Hoare, to whom the general listened, British prisoners at Miranda served shorter stints than nationals from any other European country.

But that didn’t endear the remaining Allied prisoners to the Miranda staff. It routinely complied with the German embassy in Madrid, which issued exit visas and repatriation documents for its “subjects (#litres_trial_promo),” the Czechs, Poles, and French who had fled the German occupation of their home countries.

In short, it was a bad time to be a Frenchman entering Miranda—which is why French-Canadian seemed such an inspired nationality for La Rochefoucauld’s nom de guerre Robert Jean Renaud. To say he was a Canadian freed La Rochefoucauld from a forced return to Vichy France, or from the more barbaric treatment the Miranda staff imposed on certain French nationals: the beatings and the exhausting, morally degrading forced labor.

None of this meant, however, that Robert’s stay in Miranda was enjoyable. After his and the Brits’ booking, the guards shoved all three in the same cell (#litres_trial_promo), which other political prisoners described as “cattle stalls” or “windowless huts (#litres_trial_promo).” It was little better outside their unit. Miranda was well beyond its capacity of 2,000 prisoners, holding 3,500 by the end of 1942 (#litres_trial_promo). Everyone risked whippings or smaller humiliations from taunting guards. In January 1943, some prisoners began a hunger strike (#litres_trial_promo).

Every day the two British pilots wrote letters to their embassy in Madrid, begging for release (#litres_trial_promo). While they awaited a response, food was scarce (#litres_trial_promo) and the three subsisted on little more than the morning’s slice of bread and conversation. The winter wind whipped through the airy barracks (#litres_trial_promo) and inmates froze in their thin uniforms. Medical care was inconsistent, and when doctors did perform rounds they often asked that hot irons be pressed onto inmates’ dirty clothes, to kill off the lice (#litres_trial_promo). Scabies and diarrheic diseases, which prisoners called “mirandite (#litres_trial_promo),” were rampant. Rats attacked the camp dogs in broad daylight. To visit the latrines at night “necessitated a good deal of courage (#litres_trial_promo),” the British spy and Miranda survivor George Langelaan wrote, because there the same great rats “fought and squealed furiously, regardless and unafraid of men.” Sleep came fleetingly. The guards on night patrol sporadically shouted Alerta (#litres_trial_promo)!, either to make sure other guards were awake or to torture dozing inmates. In the morning, everyone stood outside for roll call and on Sundays they marched by the commandant and his officers who were clustered around a Nationalist flag on a miniature grandstand (#litres_trial_promo). The Miranda staff, dressed in their Sunday best of white belts, white epaulets, and white gloves, formed a band, and the prisoners walked behind it in time to music. This amused the elderly officers in their large silk sashes. Inevitably, one of the band members fell out of step or grew confused by the complicated formations, and the prisoners snickered under their breath at the band.

Every week, two large trucks from the British embassy (#litres_trial_promo) arrived, dropping off cigarettes and other provisions and picking up whichever Brits the Spanish authorities had agreed to release. Ambassador Hoare had a keen interest (#litres_trial_promo) in freeing pilots; the Allies increased their air missions (#litres_trial_promo) over France in 1942 and ’43, dangerous missions in which the Germans often shot the planes down. If the pilots survived the crash and ended up in Miranda, getting them back to London and back in the air took less time than training new men.