The Greatest Traitor (7 page)

It was a beautiful morning on Sunday, 19 July when the sisters led George carefully and cautiously through the woods near their home. Greetje selected a trail she particularly liked where she went blueberry picking with her father. They had come through a clearing and were on farmland, just a few hundred yards from the border, when a German soldier appeared from behind a haystack and barred their way with a rifle. It was a tense situation for the party of three, but suddenly the soldier’s frown turned to a smile as he recognised the two girls. ‘What are you doing here?’ he said, some Dutch mixed up with his German. ‘This is a forbidden zone.’

Fortunately, he was not a complete stranger. A few days earlier, Greetje had helped him buy potatoes in the grocery, saving him from embarrassment, and then, a day or so later, they had a friendly encounter in the Church of Saint Trudo in the village where he, an Austrian Catholic, attended mass. Greetje explained hurriedly that George was a cousin of theirs, and they were merely on their way to visit an aunt who lived in a nunnery close to the border in Belgium. The soldier not only let them through without a word of admonishment, but said that, if they returned the same way in the evening, he
would be at his post in the same place and would guide them back across.

Greetje, Wietske and George duly crossed the border and made their way to their destination without any further alarms. But Greetje had been angry with George, as the man she married after the war, Leopold van Ewijk, recalls: ‘My wife afterwards was absolutely furious with this George Behar because he told her he had all his papers hidden in his shoe. That was a stupid thing to do, because if the Germans had found out they could have shot him there and then.’

George later acknowledged the enormous debt of gratitude he owed his companions: ‘Once more I had to say goodbye that day and for the first time I experienced a feeling which was often to recur in later life – a feeling of the inadequacy of words to express gratitude and admiration to people who, by assuming very considerable risks, had ensured my safety and freedom.’

3

Flight to England

O
n that July weekend in 1942, as George Behar headed for Antwerp on the first leg of his dangerous thousand-mile journey across Europe, the Jews of Holland were desperately trying to find sanctuary as transportation to the concentration camps began in earnest.

Four days earlier, the first train had left the Westerbork transit camp for Auschwitz, with two thousand men, women and children on board – the majority of them German Jews who had found sanctuary in Holland between 1933 and 1939. Many Dutch Jews were now going deep underground, being given shelter by non-Jews in towns such as Winterswijk and Aaalten.

Then, that very Sunday, 19 July, the Nazi hierarchy gave another indication of its ultimate intent. Heinrich Himmler,
Reichsführer
of the SS, sent a directive to Lieutenant-General Friedrich-Wilhelm Krüger, head of the police force in German-occupied Poland, ordering ‘the resettlement of the entire Jewish population of the General-gouvernement to be carried out and completed by 31 December . . . in the name of the New Order, security and cleanliness of the German Reich’. At the same time, in France, the round up had also started.

The following day, Monday, 20 July, George left Antwerp and
made for the University of Louvain in Brussels. Greetje de Bie’s aunt had given him an introductory letter to take to a friend of hers, a Dominican monk. At their meeting, the priest told George he had a contact in Paris – another Dominican – whom he felt sure could put the young fugitive in touch with resistance workers, who would help him along the way.

George next boarded a train to the French capital, knowing that his first major test on his journey across the continent could well come at the frontier, although as Belgium and occupied France formed one German military district, he was hoping the customs officers there would only take a cursory glance at his luggage.

In fact, he faced trouble even before the border. Just as the train was approaching Mons station, George saw two German
Feldgendarmes
(military police) moving purposefully down the corridor, inspecting identity papers. He had concealed his British passport in a loaf of bread and instead presented the officers with his fake Belgian identity card. They did not appear satisfied and told him they would return to speak to him after they had been through the rest of the train. It seemed as if the game might be up even as it had just started. After a moment’s thought, he waited until the train started to slow down as it entered Mons station – the last stop before the frontier – jumped out, ran down the platform and raced through the exit before it had stopped.

Disappearing into the narrow streets of a strange city, he walked into a church in a secluded square, and was steadying himself, assessing his options, when he was approached by the priest. George, sensing a sympathetic ear, claimed he was an English pilot and that he urgently needed to reach the unoccupied zone. The priest advised him that he could go most of the way to the border if he boarded a certain tram outside Mons, and promptly gave him directions out of the city.

When he eventually reached the frontier, he saw a German airman on a bicycle, leaning against the barrier, nonchalantly smoking and chatting to two Belgian customs officers. After a while, the airman put
out his cigarette and left, and had no sooner turned the corner than George heard the Belgians talking about him with disdain. In what was to prove the first of many fortunate encounters, he decided to gamble on the customs men helping him rather than handing him over to the German authorities. He had calculated correctly because, upon hearing his story, they offered nothing but encouragement, one of them promising he would find George a bed for the night and then see him on his way in the morning.

As he settled down to eat in a nearby farmhouse he could hardly believe his luck. ‘To this day I remember the homely scene round the table with the customs officer’s two little girls and his plump, friendly wife,’ he recalled. ‘At the end of the meal my host produced a bottle of brandy which he kept for a special occasion. We drank to Allied victory.’

The co-operation from the Belgians did not end there. In the morning, the other officer arrived to fetch him and escort him to the border post at the town of Maubeuge, about an hour’s walk away. From there he took a bus to Lille, and then the train to Paris; by the evening he was excited to be in
La Ville-Lumière
, the city where he believed his father had lived and studied some thirty years before.

That feeling of exhilaration turned to one of anxiety when it became clear that his contact – the Dominican monk recommended to him by the priest in Brussels – was unwilling to harbour him. The monk explained that, although sympathetic to his plight, he was under strict instructions from the Abbot of his order in Paris not to hide anyone from the Germans, as discovery could seriously hinder the work of the Dominicans in the country. Nonetheless, he told George to give him a few hours and he would find a solution. Later that night, he returned from a lecture in the company of a middle-aged couple who offered to shelter George in their nearby apartment. They were devout Catholics and also fervent patriots, supporters of General de Gaulle, with many contacts in the resistance movement. For the moment, George was safe.

The branch of the intelligence service charged with assisting the escapes of British prisoners of war, and securing the return to the United Kingdom of those who had succeeded in evading capture on enemy territory, was Military Intelligence Section 9, known as MI9. Working hand in glove with the Secret Intelligence Service (SIS, also known as MI6) and the Special Operations Executive (SOE), MI9 set out to establish ‘escape lines’ across Europe to help thousands of captured soldiers, downed airmen and important members of the resistance to flee across Holland, Belgium and France and into supposedly neutral territory of Spain before finding a passage home, usually via British-controlled Gibraltar.

The ‘O’Leary line’ (aka ‘Pat’) and the ‘Comet line’ were perhaps the two best-established routes. The former was created by a Belgian, Albert-Marie Guérisse, whose
nom de guerre
was Pat O’Leary, and tended to run from Paris to Dijon, through Lyons and Avignon to Marseille; then via Nîmes and Perpignan, on to Barcelona. The latter was the brainchild of a courageous young Belgian woman, Andrée de Jongh, known as ‘Dedee’, and started in Brussels or Lille before taking in Tours, Bordeaux and Bayonne, terminating over the Pyrenees at San Sebastian, Spain.

Both routes were ‘staffed’ by a network of helpers, some connected, formally or informally, to intelligence organisations, though many were not. They provided food, clothing and sanctuary for the escapers, as well as false identity documents. George’s path would more closely follow the ‘Pat’ line, although as his journey unfolded, it took him on several detours.

At first, he had to contend with disappointment. Two weeks into his stay, a resistance leader who went under the pseudonym ‘The Belgian’ arrived at the home of George’s new Paris hosts to assess his worth for a place on one of the lines. Having heard his story, ‘The Belgian’ told George that, being neither an airman or a key member of the resistance, he was of insufficient importance to the war effort to warrant
special assistance. He did, however, furnish him with a false French identity card and an address in Salies-de-Béarn in south-western France, where there were people who could help him over the border into unoccupied French territory. He also gave him the name and address of a contact in Lyons.

The dividing line between the occupied and ‘free’ (Vichy) zones of France ran along the periphery of Salies-de-Béarn. When George arrived at the town after his train journey from Bordeaux, he headed for his contact at a small boarding house, where, after quoting the correct password, he was allowed in and told to prepare for the crossing that night.

It proved to be a nerve-wracking affair in the company of three Jewish women and their dog, which was there to alert them, by barking, to any German patrols. After navigating the back streets of the town, then crawling through ditches and scrambling over hedges in the fields, their two Basque guides saw them to their destination. ‘We had arrived safely in unoccupied France,’ Blake said. ‘Reaching the crest of the hill, we suddenly saw lights twinkling everywhere like a promise of peace and security, while behind us the land lay dark. It was as if an immense burden of fear and gloom was lifted from me. I was out of the hands of the enemy.’

When dawn rose, he made his way towards the medieval town of Argagnon. There, in the market square, he boarded a bus for Lourdes and his identity card was put to the test for the first time. The gendarme returned it to him without comment and he was on his way. From Lourdes, he boarded a train for Lyon and he was in the city by nightfall.

In September 1942, this city in the so-called
Zone Libre
(Free Zone) was becoming an increasingly dangerous place in which to seek sanctuary. The Germans were frustrated by resistance activities, and were preparing to send in 280 police under SS Major Karl Bömelburg to hunt down the possessors of illegal radio transmitters. Lyon had always been an intellectual hotbed and was now the effective ‘capital of the
resistance’. Leaflets and clandestine newspapers like
Vérités
had begun to appear from the summer of 1940 onwards, and crucial figures like Captain Henri Frenay, who helped form the
Mouvement de Libération Nationale
and
Combat
, and Jean Moulin, de Gaulle’s personal emissary, were based in the city or its suburbs. The network of dark, dingy
traboules
(passageways) that snaked their way through apartment blocks, under streets and into the courtyards of the Vieux Lyon district provided the perfect terrain for those escaping or attempting to hide from the Gestapo.

Young Behar’s new contacts were a French colonel and his wife, both active members of the resistance, who lived in one of the city’s better hotels. They were impressed by his credentials, especially by the recommendation from ‘The Belgian’, and soon found him somewhere to stay while the next leg of his journey was planned. His new refuge proved to be a bedroom on the top floor of an old, medieval house where two sisters ran a modest restaurant, which was open for lunch and dinner for regular customers like the colonel, but also doubled as a meeting place for resistance groups.

During his three-week stay, George was relieved to be put to work and allowed to contribute to the work of the French underground. He helped ferry a weekly Gaullist paper to distribution stores in wine cellars or factories, with two or three others wheeling a handcart through the streets with hundreds of copies hidden underneath its canvas cover. All the while, however, he was anxious to move on.

British interests in the city were represented at the American consulate. Here George was fortunate enough to encounter a young English diplomat (actually an SIS officer), who proved more than willing to help. He listened to George’s story and then examined his British passport before suggesting that the best way forward would be to issue him instead with a travel document that would put his age at 16 rather than 19. In that way, he would not be of military age, and the Vichy authorities would grant him an exit visa. At the same time, the officer said, he would apply for Spanish and Portuguese transit visas. Once all
these permits were gathered, George would be able to make his way to England legally.

After three weeks, word came back from the American consulate that permission had been received from London for George’s onward journey to be arranged. He was issued with a travel document, given some money and was now able to report to the Vichy authorities and apply for an exit visa.

While he awaited all the necessary documentation, he was obliged by the Vichy authorities to live in a place chosen by them, which he could not leave without permission. It was called a
résidence forcée
(compulsory residence), and amounted to a form of internment. George was unperturbed. He was used to confinement of one sort or another and did not find life at his particular
résidence,
a small inn in a village outside Grenoble, unduly constricting. Throughout October he waited patiently, preparing himself for an arduous climb over the Pyrenees and then a lengthy journey across Spain before he finally boarded a ship at Gibraltar that would ferry him across the Atlantic Ocean.