A Train in Winter by Caroline Moorehead

had begun.
    The attack had been minutely planned. Fabien had chosen the Barbès métro station, on line 4, because its platform curved in such a way that the controller could not see the entire train, while the first-class carriage, in which the Germans invariably travelled, stopped immediately by the stairs leading up to the Boulevard Rochechouart. Reconnoitring, Fabien had observed that between eight and 8.30 each morning a number of German officers caught the number 4 line.
    That morning, there were some thirty people waiting for the train. One of them was a newly arrived officer of the Kriegsmarine, Alfons Moser, on his way to a depot at Montrouge. As he stepped on to the train, Fabien fired two bullets into his back. Moser died instantly. Isidore Grünenberger, who had been acting as lookout in the street, thanked Simone for transporting the gun that had made the attack possible. The play-acting was over; it had all become terrifyingly real.
    The German response was instant. Hitler, hearing of Moser’s death, demanded the immediate execution of one hundred hostages. All Frenchmen under arrest, it was announced, whether in French or German hands, were henceforth to be considered hostages, to be shot in response to any attack on the Germans. But von Stülpnagel was not yet prepared to abandon his satisfactory collaboration with the Vichy government, and so he informed Pétain, through his liaison officer Major Boemelberg, that the Kriegsmarine were asking for only ten hostages. Pierre Pucheu, newly elected Minister of the Interior, meanwhile ordered that the streets of Paris be combed for the assassins. A curfew was set for nine o’clock in the evening; restaurants and theatres had to close by eight. Within three hours, eight thousand IDs had been checked, but not one of the members of the Bataillons had been found.
    There were already plans afoot for a special French tribunal to try resisters, with a tacit understanding that death penalties would be handed down. On 27 August, the hastily convened new body sentenced three communists to die, the fourth, Simone’s father Lucien, having his sentence commuted to hard labour in perpetuity, after delivering a particularly eloquent and impassioned speech. He was sent to Caen prison, his hands and feet in manacles.
    It was Vichy that now proposed to carry out the executions by guillotine, in public; the German military, fearing repercussions from the French public, agreed to the guillotine but insisted that it be used in private. On 28 August, the three communists went to the scaffold. For good measure, over the next few days, the Germans shot five other communists—for participating in Samuel Tyszelman’s demonstration—and then three Gaullists. French judges were now sending to their deaths Frenchmen, completely innocent of the crimes for which they were being punished, simply because they were assumed to be close in ideals to those presumed—but not proved—to be guilty.
    Simone, training with the other teenagers under the beeches and oaks in the Bois de Lardy, had been right to question the implications of moving into armed attacks on German soldiers. The attack in the Barbès métro, the first public assassination of one of the German officers, marked a turning point. Ouzoulias would later say that this single act was the most important contribution made by the Bataillons, that of moving the Resistance into a higher gear. But, as the resisters turned to killing, so too would the penalties become more lethal.
    No longer would it be possible for any member of the Resistance—even the women and girls, who had until now felt relatively secure in the shadows—to feel safe. Betty, Danielle, Cécile and the others, who were beginning to meet and forge links, were now living in a state of constant wariness. From now on, in an endlessly repeated cycle of attacks, reprisals, more attacks, more executions, it would be all-out war between occupiers and a growing number of the