The Secret Ministry of Ag. & Fish (25 page)

Eileen Nearne was made of a different fibre. She was tough in one way, but fragile in another, surviving arrest, hard labour and two concentration camps. But once she returned to peacetime life
her life seemed to go to pieces, and it was a long time before she was able to recover her former joie de vivre.

Born of an Anglo-Spanish marriage and brought up in Boulogne-sur-Mer, Eileen was the youngest of four children, three of whom – Jacqueline, Eileen, or Didi as she was always known, and
Francis – became F Section agents. We know very little about her brother Francis’s activities. Her elder sister Jacqueline, the more beautiful of the two beautiful sisters, seems to be
the one who is better known. Like Eileen, Jacqueline trained as a radio operator; she had one successful but uneventful mission, from which she returned unscathed. Didi’s exploits were much
more spectacular, so spectacular in fact that she took a long time to recover from them, whereas in 1946, immediately the war ended, Jacqueline went on to begin a successful career with the United
Nations in New York.

As ‘Rose’, Didi landed by Lysander in March 1944 to work as a radio operator for Wizard, a small
réseau
outside Paris. She was arrested the following July, just after
transmitting. In spite of telling a fairly convincing story about being a governess, she was given the ‘bath treatment’, imprisoned at Fresnes and then sent to Ravensbrück and on
to Torgau, the nearby concentration camp. Here she was sent to work in the fields, dig roads and work in factories, before being sent back to Ravensbrück and ending up at Markkleeberg.
Managing, with another woman prisoner, to escape from a death march, she was finally discovered by the advancing Allied armies hiding in a belfry and taken into care. But on her return to England
after the liberation in 1945 she was in such a state of physical and mental shock that she was hospitalized for over a year. During this time she painted abstract pictures in vivid colours, which
might have given a glimpse into her mental state at the time. When she was discharged she took up a position as an auxiliary nurse in a hospital and after her mother’s death in 1950 returned
briefly to France, but came back to England after a few months and went to work as a care nurse in an old people’s home. This position she held until she retired.

Although the two sisters were close and kept up a steady correspondence, their lifestyles were very different, and each remained independent of the other, though occasionally Jacqueline did help
Didi out financially. Didi recovered from her horrendous experiences and was able to live what one might call a normal life. In her later years she became a recluse, knowing no one, having few
visitors, living a solitary life with her cat in a flat in a seaside town in Dorset. She kept very much to herself, and the neighbours seemingly knew nothing about her. When she was found dead from
natural causes in 2010 she was about to be buried in a pauper’s grave when the authorities, searching her flat seeking some evidence of next of kin, stumbled across her medals, an impressive
array, and her citations and realized that she was a ‘forgotten war heroine’. Then, all the stops were pulled out. She was given a wonderful funeral, with standard-bearers, flags,
magnificent wreaths, lots of top brass and splendid newspaper coverage.

But it was too late for Didi. She had died alone and, apart from her niece who lives in Spain and visited her when she could, forgotten. What a pity the authorities had not enquired of her
welfare while she was still alive. In Didi’s case, taking into account all she had suffered, it was surprising that her mind had not flipped. Some people can endure the most dreadful mental
and physical torture and survive.

The terrible massacre inflicted by the German Army in Oradour-sur-Glane is well known, but few people realize that this was not the only village in France to experience such a dreadful fate.
Castelnau-sur-l’Auvignon in the Gers also suffered, and another massacre took place in St Pathus, a village outside Paris, shortly afterwards. After the liberation of Paris in August 1944
twenty-year-old Jeannine Pernette, having recently qualified as a nurse, decided to follow the retreating German Army in order to tend any wounded they had left behind. She went to St Pathus, east
of Paris – where Henri Diacono had been radio operator for the Spiritualist
réseau
– with a jubilant lorryload of résistants, who believed that only a handful of
Germans, whom they could engage and easily defeat, remained in the area. But when they arrived they were met by an entire contingent of German soldiers, and a fierce battle took place. The
résistants, hopelessly outnumbered, were quickly defeated, leaving many casualties on both sides. Jeannine was busy tending the wounded when the remaining résistants, together with
the villagers, were lined up to be shot. Jeannine was with them when one of the Germans recognized her. ‘Don’t shoot her,’ he shouted. ‘She looked after our wounded.’
On his testimony, her life was spared, and she was told she was free to leave. But she didn’t leave.

‘I am a nurse,’ Jeannine replied with as much dignity as she could muster. ‘I tend the wounded. I do not ask their nationality.’ And she insisted on accompanying the
wounded of both sides who were being loaded onto a lorry, in order to look after them on the journey to wherever they were going. She did not know whether she was heading for Germany or not!

After a long, tiring journey they arrived at the Red Cross camp at Armentières-sur-Brie, to the east of Meaux, where the French were put into prison camps and the Germans taken to a
German military hospital. Jeannine thought that she was now free to leave and return to Paris to resume her nursing career. But she was arrested and sent to Metz and later imprisoned in the
fortress at Queuleu, where she remained until the following April, when the Americans, together with Leclerc’s army, liberated her.

After the war we became friends. Jeannine was a lovely woman, a typical
parisienne,
very slight, scarcely more than five feet tall. She died in June 2012, aged eighty-eight, and it was
only at her funeral in a crowded church overflowing with magnificent floral tributes, and standard-bearers, with many dignitaries present, that I realized the extent of her bravery and learned of
the decorations she had received, including the prestigious Chevalier de la Légion d’Honneur. Like all true heroines Jeannine was very modest and had hardly ever mentioned her dramatic
wartime experiences.

A few years ago I met Honoré d’Estienne d’Orves’s daughter, and her story both moved and impressed me. Her father was a regular naval officer who, when France fell, left
his wife and family and escaped to England, where he trained and returned to France to organize a Resistance
réseau.
He landed on the coast of Brittany, a dangerous operation, since
the beaches and the sea were heavily mined, and there was also a ban stretching the length of the coast forbidding civilians from going within twenty-five kilometres of the shore. So, even when
they landed, agents arriving by this route were not ‘home and dry’. On a pitch-black, moonless night the Royal Navy would bring the agent or agents as near to the coast as possible,
where a fishing boat, usually manned by Breton sailors, would be waiting to take them ashore. The transfer in the dark was perilous and made more so because a sea which on that coast appeared to be
as calm as a mill pond could suddenly erupt, causing violent waves to dash against the rocking fishing vessel, threatening to overturn it.

D’Estienne d’Orves landed safely one night and immediately set about organizing his
réseau.
But he was eventually captured, together with several of his men, and
condemned to death.

On the night before his execution his wife somehow managed to get permission to visit her husband in his prison cell to say goodbye. ‘I was eight years old at the time,’ his daughter
Rose, now a middle-aged married woman with a family of her own, told me, ‘and my mother took me with her.’ I was horrified.

‘Wasn’t it awful?’ I asked. She smiled.

‘No,’ she replied, ‘it wasn’t awful at all. We weren’t allowed to stay with my father for long, but we were able to say goodbye.’ She paused. ‘That
evening I witnessed my father’s courage and his calm and composure confronted with what was inevitable. And I also witnessed the love my parents had for each other, and the dignity with which
both my mother and my father faced this situation. I think it taught me something which has stayed with me ever since, something I shall never forget. And perhaps the memory of that evening gave me
courage when I later faced difficult situations in my own life. The following morning my father was taken to the fortress at Mont-Valérien and shot.’ Mont-Valérien, where so
many résistants were taken to be shot, stands on a hill in the shadow of a beautiful American cemetery where hundreds of US soldiers from the First World War lie beneath the impeccably kept
white crosses. It is almost ironic.

Rose seems to have survived what can only be described as a traumatic experience for a little girl of eight. I don’t know whether I would have had the courage to take my daughter, or
whether I would even have been able to face such a situation with dignity and courage.

Stéphane Hessel was a Jew born in Germany who emigrated to Paris with his parents when he was eight years old. In 1939, at the age of twenty-two, he became a naturalized French citizen.
In 1941, agreeing with neither the armistice nor the Vichy government, he fled to England and joined General de Gaulle’s BCRA, the Free French intelligence service. He returned to France in
March 1944 to organize communications in the run-up to D-Day but was arrested the following July by the Gestapo, having been denounced under torture by one of his fellow résistants. Given
the ‘bath treatment’, he himself broke down and talked.

In early August, together with thirty-six other British agents, he was deported to Buchenwald. By October, twenty-seven of them had been executed. It was then that Yeo-Thomas, with the help of
résistants working in the infirmary, devised his ingenious escape system. Unfortunately only three of the remaining prisoners were able to take part. Hessel was one of the lucky ones; Harry
Peulevé was the other. They exchanged places with three prisoners who had died of typhus. But, like Yeo-Thomas, once on the other side of the barbed wire Hessel became separated from the
others and, wandering alone in the forest, was recaptured. He said that when he was taken to the camp commandant, who told him that the penalty for escaping was death, he looked him in the eye and
replied in his native language: ‘What would you have done in my place?’ The commandant, startled perhaps not only by the audacious question but also by being addressed in perfect
German, finally agreed that he would have done the same. ‘And yet you are going to execute me for doing what you admit you would have done,’ Hessel challenged him.

This account is not reported in any official document so cannot be verified, but it was told to me by Maurice Southgate’s daughter, Patricia Génève, who heard it from
Stéphane Hessel himself when they met and lunched together at a Buchenwald commemoration. The commandant did not order Hessel to be executed, he sent him to Dora, the extermination camp,
from where he again made an unsuccessful attempt to escape and narrowly escaped his punishment, death by hanging, when he was despatched on the death march to Belsen. Escaping en route, he made his
way to Hanover, where he joined up with the advancing Allied forces.

The war over, Hessel returned to Paris and, on the surface, suffered no ill effects from his experiences. He plunged into politics and went on to have a brilliant career, culminating in being
nominated as French ambassador to the United Nations. Small and slightly built, his bright eyes always twinkling with amusement, in 2013, at almost ninety-six, he was still very active –
lecturing, writing books, and much in demand as a public speaker – until the evening of 26 February when, his diary no doubt crammed full of scheduled lectures, and his mind full of articles
half-written or waiting to be written, he went to bed – and never woke up. One of the ‘survivors’, he died as he had lived, bursting with life to the very end.

Maurice Southgate was with Hessel on that convoy to Buchenwald. One of F Section’s agents, he had been parachuted into France in January 1943 to organize the new Stationer
réseau,
from where he built up a network which stretched across the Limousin and as far south-west as Tarbes. He did sterling work attacking railway targets, power stations and
aircraft factories, building up an army of 2,500 men. But the Gestapo were looking for him. He was eventually arrested on 1 May 1944, badly beaten up by his Gestapo interrogators and taken to
avenue Foch, where the torture continued. When he arrived there, John Starr, a fellow agent who had apparently defected to the Germans, was in the hall and greeted him by name. Southgate must have
felt betrayed. But he affected not to hear or to understand, and in spite of being tortured he never broke. He, too, was then sent to join the convoy.

Southgate had had a traumatic time before joining SOE, having served with the BEF (British Expeditionary Force) at the beginning of the war. Evacuated from St Nazaire at the time of Dunkirk, the
ship on which he was sailing, the
Lancastria,
was sunk by air attack with a loss of over 3,000 lives. But Southgate was a strong swimmer and managed to stay afloat until he was picked up
by another vessel and brought back to England.

When Yeo-Thomas had to choose the prisoners who would be ‘allowed’ to escape, was he aware of what Southgate had gone through? I certainly thought he should have been a candidate for
the group, possibly more so than Stéphane Hessel, who was younger, unmarried and had had so little time between his arrival in France and his arrest to prove his worth. I couldn’t help
wondering how Yeo-Thomas made his choice. Admittedly, it was a very difficult decision to make. There were nine agents from the original convoy still alive: six of them had to be left behind. One
might almost say six had to be sacrificed. Did they draw straws? I knew Yeo-Thomas; he was a very kind, fair-minded man. Why he chose Hessel and left Maurice Southgate to face almost certain death
baffled me for a long time. And I couldn’t help wondering what Southgate’s feelings must have been when Yeo-Thomas, his compatriot and comrade-in-arms, chose a BCRA agent and not him to
be one of the escape team. The entire group had been under threat of execution since their arrival, and those remaining would be even more vulnerable once news of the escape broke.