Andrée's War (29 page)

Frank was waiting to meet her when she arrived at London's Victoria station, but her pleasure at seeing him gave way to shock and sadness as they left the station. Andrée stared at the rubble and the bombed-out buildings around her, the destruction of a city she loved so much. Trying desperately to find a landmark she recognised, she began to tell Frank tearfully what she remembered of Victoria and the surrounding area when she had last
been in England, in the spring of 1939. In France they had heard of course about the air raids, the bombings and the long nights that Londoners had endured, but she never imagined it was so dreadful. By comparison, she felt, life under the occupation in Paris had been relatively safe. Many years later, she told her granddaughter Chantal: ‘When I came to London after the war and I saw the destruction, I was shattered. There was no Southampton left. I had seen it when I left England by boat in 1939. London was destroyed in the most horrible way, and Coventry and so many English towns.'

Trying to reassure her, Frank took her case and they walked to the Goring Hotel, a small family-run establishment a few minutes from the station. The Goring had escaped any major destruction during the war and Frank had got to know the owners through his shipping company, Gander & White. As the first place Andrée stayed on her initial post-war trip to London, it was a hotel she remained fond of all her life.

Andrée returned to England several times before she married Frank in Paris on 29 July 1947. After their wedding the pair started their married life together in London, where they raised their family. Frank White died in 1966 and, with no prior experience, Andrée took over the running of his business, Gander & White Shipping Limited. Today Gander & White is one of the world's leading fine art shipping companies, with subsidiaries around the world. Ten years after Frank's death, she introduced her daughter and son to her German boyfriend – their relationship a symbol of how much times had changed (though Yvonne and Alain were never to know of his existence). Andrée, who has suffered from Alzheimer's for the last eighteen years, has now been living in England – a country she has always loved – for over sixty-five years.

 

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Andrée and Karl's relationship was serious; he asked her to marry him several times, and she considered doing so, but ultimately could not countenance leaving Europe for America. Years later, in the 1970s, Andrée visited New York and looked Karl up in the phone book. They went out for dinner and she subsequently got to know his family, becoming close friends with his sister in particular.

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Every gendarme joining the Parisian police force is today given a one-day training session on the shameful involvement of the Parisian police force in the round-up of 13,000 Jews on 16 July 1942.

I
n October 1972, Minister of Defence Michel Debré (formerly Prime Minister of France, 1959–1962), awarded Andrée Griotteray White the Ruban Bleu, L'Ordre National du Mérite – the Order of Merit. The ceremony took place at the Ministry of Defence in Paris and all the living members of her family were there to witness it: her mother Yvonne, her two sisters Yvette and Claude, her brother Alain, her brother-in-law, her two nieces, her daughter and son and a group of British friends who had travelled especially from London to witness the event.

It was an occasion of pomp and ceremony, but equally of warmth. Andrée, aged fifty-two, stood between two soldiers in the formal drawing room of the Ministry of Defence as Debré pinned the medal to her navy-blue dress. Some years later, in recording the events of that day in his book
Qui étaient les premiers résistants?
, Alain said of his sister that, in his eyes, she had earned the Légion d'honneur many times over for her actions, completing numerous dangerous missions calmly and courageously. However, as François Clerc pointed out to Alain, Andrée had no need for medals to show off, she never expected any recognition for her actions.

Her extreme kindness and her level-headed personality meant that wherever she went she was welcomed with open arms with no one ever suspecting her of anything. She was so natural and never worried about anything going on around her.
²¹

I
first learnt of my mother's exploits in the French Resistance when I was six years old. I had watched my parents getting ready to go to the British Antique Dealers' Association ball and the following morning I was keen to know how the evening had gone.

‘It was great fun, darling, but all my friends were examining Mummy's cleavage very closely,' he answered, with characteristic humour.

‘What do you mean, Daddy?'

‘Well, Mummy had a low-cut dress on and she was wearing her war medals and they were all having a good look at them.'

‘Why was she wearing medals?'

‘Because she won them bashing up the Germans during the war.'

From then on, throughout my childhood and teenage years and into adulthood, my mother talked to me about her adventures in the French Resistance during the Second World War. She described ‘those dreadful people I had to work with at Police Headquarters' and how much she hated working there. She told me how she typed up and distributed the underground news-sheet
La France
, how she smuggled the Orion group's intelligence reports out of Paris, about the double life she led working at police headquarters while also acting as Orion's Chef de Liaison, and she described the events of 11 November 1940 when she, Alain and their friends demonstrated against the occupation of France at the Étoile in the first major act of defiance by French citizens towards the Nazi occupation of their country.

She told me about her travels around France during the war years. She could have described herself as an agent, a spy or a courier, but the term she preferred was ‘postman'. She spoke of having to stay the night in a brothel
or on the geriatric ward of a hospital because she had missed a train connection and curfew was about to fall. She described day-to-day life in Paris, the food shortages, the difficulties of living under the occupation and her hatred of the German occupying forces. Whenever we went to Switzerland she recounted tales of her holiday in Evian in 1943 when she looked longingly across the lake to Geneva, ablaze with lights and freedom.

She told me about Alain's disappearance in 1943 when he escaped France for North Africa and about his imprisonment and starvation diet at the Miranda prison near Santander; about her numerous visits to the Château d'Orion and her fondness for Madame Labbé and the kindness of everyone at the château. Andrée told me about how her parents had hidden a Jewish girl in their Paris flat, a girl she described as ‘very nice but very stupid' and how terrified her sister, Claude, was of the Germans soldiers on the streets of Paris. She always claimed that she herself was never scared, declaring instead: ‘I always looked down on them with contempt.' When her grandson Alexander asked her if she had been frightened during her arrest, she was slightly more equivocal, telling him ‘Yes and no – but if you showed you were frightened, that was the end.'

Most of her stories she told lightly, with humour, and she always focused on how she had outwitted the Germans. But beneath the humour there were glimpses of the darker side of her adventures. I never forgot the sadness with which she told me about a close friend who had been shot by the Germans after deciding to ignore curfew following a party. And she never wanted to speak about what happened to the Jews in France during the occupation; there was no lightness there. I once asked her about the Vel' D'Hiv round-up and she went into a kind of trance as she referred to the horror of family friends the Bigards, Bernsteins and Rubinsteins disappearing. She never spoke of her close friend Serge, who escaped into the Free Zone in 1942 and was never seen or heard of again; it was only when reading her journals that I learnt about him. She did, however, tell me about a Jewish girlfriend in the recorded interview she gave my then eleven-year-old daughter Chantal in 1996. She said her friend ‘simply disappeared' one day and then she added strangely, ‘but I did not know she was Jewish'. Perhaps this was because her disappearance was a part of the infamous pogrom,
that part of history the French are so ashamed of and about which I knew so little until I started to research this book in 2009. Indeed I initially only discovered what my mother had done to help Jews in Paris during the war from one of her friends.

I knew that my mother had been given the Médaille de la Résistance and the Croix de guerre because the small ribbons testifying to these were always sewn onto her suit jackets, coats, dresses and blouses, as is the custom in Europe. The first time I was properly able to gloat with pride, however, was in 1972. Andrée was awarded the Ordre National du Mérite, le Ruban Bleu, by former Prime Minister Michel Debré; both my brother and I clearly remember the event and the party afterwards, which was held at the Ministry of Defence in Paris. We met several of her Resistance colleagues and, at a time before good food had made its way across the Channel, the elegance of the surroundings and the excellent dinner that followed still stands out.

In 1985, Alain organised a memorial service at the Château d'Orion, the group's headquarters during the war: a chance for old friends to reunite and to explain to the younger generation what the French Resistance had been all about. Over a thousand people came, including Orion Group members, Madame Labbé's family, several leading members of the French Resistance movement including Marie Madeleine Foucarde (head of the Resistance group Alliance), former Prime Minister Jacques Chaban-Delmas and Jacques Soustelle, who had been head of the French intelligence services in Algeria 1943/44. Several members of the French air force parachuted into the village during the day to commemorate Alain's ‘blind' drop in April 1944 by the OSS. Andrée behaved with intense dignity as she fought to control her emotions.

It was the first of several events intended to help subsequent generations understand in more detail what Resistance groups like Orion had accomplished. Alain had been shocked to discover that my brother and I still did not feel we knew much about what he and Andrée had done during the war. Yet it was not always easy to understand. Each member had different memories and their stories did not always line up with each other – unsurprisingly, as they had all been working on the basis that it was safer
not to know what the others were up to. In 1990, Alain talked to a friend of his, Alain Gandy, about the possibility of a book on the group's exploits.
La jeunesse et la Résistance: réseau Orion, 1940–1944
was published in France the following year.

Although at times I found Gandy's book difficult to follow – especially when he attempts to explain the politics of French North Africa (a contemporary report in
The Times
in November 1942 also acknowledged the difficulties they had reporting the events) – it was essential when it came to writing my own book. Gandy spent many hours interviewing the key Orion players, especially Andrée and Alain, and without his book, I could not have written mine.

On 22 September 1990, in Coole near Châlon-sur-Marne (today Châlons-en-Champagne), there was a thanksgiving service, which Alain organised with the abbé Le Meur. The event was intended to commemorate forty prisoners, including Biaggi, who had escaped from a train to Germany in 1944. It was at that dinner that I first met Yves de Kermoal, who has been such a help with my research.

Five years later, in May 1995 – more than fifty years after the end of the war – my mother Andrée was given the Légion d'honneur, described at the beginning of this book. By July 2000 she had begun her long descent into darkness and Alain invited me to take her place at a wreath-laying ceremony at the tomb of the unknown soldier under the Arc de Triomphe.

In 2001, we were invited – as Andrée's family – to a lunch given by Jacques Chirac at the Élysée Palace to celebrate Alain's appointment as a Grand Officier de la Légion d'honneur. Alain asked me whether I had told Andrée of the occasion and the honour shortly to be bestowed on him by the President of France. I hadn't; she might not have understood, but it would have been worse if she had. She should have been there to watch her brother: it was her right. My eighteen-year-old son Alexander was introduced to the President shortly before the meal, who asked him if he spoke French – to which Alexander rather impudently replied, ‘Mais naturellement!' President Chirac promptly begged his pardon.

I smiled to myself. Andrée's English grandson's love of France had made its way into the Élysée Palace straight to the head of state in the same
way as Andrée's love of England had reached out into British society when she was sixteen.

In 2004, as France celebrated her sixtieth anniversary after her liberation from Nazism, there was yet another commemoration service, this time in St Tropez, where a plaque was unveiled in the harbour to commemorate the landing of a group of Frenchmen in British battle-dress (Henri d'Astier de la Vigerie and Yves de Kermoal among them): the first Frenchmen to land at the port of St Tropez since the war began. My husband Martin and I later held a party at our home in Ramatuelle, which included members of the CIA and military representatives of the British and American embassies, as well as many of Andrée and Alain's friends and colleagues.

Alain died in 2008 and his funeral was held at la cathédrale Saint-Louis des Invalides, attended by numerous politicians as well as friends and family. We grieved as Alain's body was draped in the Tricolore and carried by thirteen soldiers. The Minister of the Interior, Michèle Alliot-Marie, took the salute and a military band played while more than fifty members of the armed forces saluted Alain's coffin.

Writing this book has been a long and emotional journey. It has taken me about four years – roughly the same period of time that Andrée, Alain and their friends endured in occupied France during the war. How to compare the last four years of my life in the twenty-first century to that of a group of youngsters living in an occupied country among Nazi soldiers, collaborators, double-crossers, traitors, informers and their own police force, in constant fear of being watched and betrayed, risking their lives on a daily basis?