A Train in Winter by Caroline Moorehead Page B

assassinations, they would alienate the French public. But Danielle, Cécile and Maï were among those who argued passionately in favour of a ‘national war of independence and liberation’, with all the armed violence that the words implied. On the walls of Paris appeared posters with the words: ‘For every one patriot shot, 10 Germans will be killed’. To back away from the tactic of armed attack launched at the Barbès métro, argued Ouzoulias, would spell ‘capitulation and dishonour’ and only lead to further and more terrible repression. Simone Sampaix and the young boys and girls of the Bataillons de la Jeunesse remained at home, waiting for further instructions. Simone’s repugnance at the idea of shooting in cold blood had not altogether gone away, but she had no intention of abandoning the fight now.
    When, earlier in the year, the united Front National of the Resistance had been set up, it was clear that some kind of military wing would follow. Around the time of the Barbès shooting, the Main-d’Oeuvre Immigrée, the Opérations Spéciales of the PCF and the Batallions de le Jeunesse merged as the Francs-Tireurs et Partisans (FTP) under a former editor of L’Humanité called Pierre Villon. It was given four goals: to hit railway lines carrying men and materiel to the eastern front; to punish traitors and collaborators; to sabotage factories working for the Germans; and to excecute soldiers of the occupying forces, all actions whose symbolic value would go far beyond the actual damage caused.
    A silent, dour, pipe-smoking former boilermaker at the Renault car factories, Arthur Dallidet, who was ferocious about discipline and prudence, and fanatical in his hatred of renegades and traitors, was put in charge of security. A librarian called Michel Bernstein became the master forger of false documents. And France Bloch, a young chemist with two science degrees, who as a Jew had lost her job in the Musée d’Histoire Naturelle, was given the task of making explosives. France was the daughter of the distinguished critic and historian, Jean-Richard Bloch, now in exile in Moscow. She was married to a metalworker, Frédo Sérazin, and had an 18-month-old son.
    Ever since the mid-1930s, when they had attended anti-fascist rallies together, France had been close friends with a chemical engineer, Marie-Elisa Nordmann, a round-faced, somewhat plump young woman with a gentle manner. As a promising young researcher, she had spent a year in Germany and returned shocked by the spectacle of Hitler’s rallies. She married young, and had a son, whom she doted on. But the marriage did not last and Marie-Elisa and the baby moved in with her widowed mother. In the evenings, she and France attended meetings of the newly founded Vigilance Committee of Intellectual Anti-fascists, of which Marie-Elisa became treasurer in the 5th arrondissement of Paris. Hélène and Jacques Solomon and the Politzers became good friends of hers. Like France, Marie-Elisa was Jewish.
    During the summer of 1940, having joined the exodus south, the two women and their sons briefly shared a house near Bordeaux. Now, they made bombs and grenades together, Marie-Elisa stealing mercury from her research institute, others providing metal tubes from car factories. In her laboratory at number 5 avenue Debidour in the 19th, France also kept medicines and vaccines for the Resistance. At night, Marie-Elisa and her mother sheltered resisters who, discovering that their houses were being watched, had nowhere to sleep. Not far away, in boulevard de la Villette, another young woman and her husband had a bicycle shop; here, in the evenings, they cleaned revolvers and made explosives.
    To Danielle as to the other leading figures in the new merged Resistance, the moment seemed right to take the armed struggle to the other occupied areas of France, the better to tie down more German soldiers, and to lighten the burden of repression in and around Paris. As the Parisian