The Escape of Mrs. Jeffries-I

LAST September, Mrs. Ellen Jeffries, an American expatriate who had lived in France for twenty years because she was in love with it, tardily decided to leave Paris. Actually, Mrs. Jeffries is not her name, nor are any of the other names in this narrative the names of the people involved. In 1942, after two years of the German occupation, she was among the dozen or more diehards, all women, left over from that colony of about five thousand Americans to whom Paris, during the twenties and thirties, had seemed liberty itself. Since Pearl Harbor, however, detention, résidence forcée, or even a concentration camp looked like the inevitable expatriate American way. Or there was flight. By finally making up her mind, on September 1st, to leave, and by moving as rapidly, which in the end meant as illegally, as possible, Mrs. Jeffries managed to arrive in New York the second week of April, 1943. All things considered, including the fact that her travel problems included escapes across two French borders and that escapes are slow-moving projects demanding lots of careful talk first, Mrs. Jeffries, who is forty-five, statuesque, unmelodramatic, New Hampshire-born, a seasoned traveller, and nobody’s fool, thinks she made fast time.

Certainly, by last September, it was already better, in Paris, to be conquered French than unconquered American, especially if you wanted to leave it. A trickle of Frenchmen, preferably those who were on food or collaboration business, were given German Ausweise, the Kommandantur exit visas, which allowed them to cross from Occupied into Vichy France. But no American in Paris last summer was given an exit visa for any reason whatever. The Germans had decided that all Americans were dishonorable. As proof, they pointed out that resident Americans, who before Pearl Harbor had been graciously granted passes merely to visit in the Unoccupied Zone, had from there impolitely run for the Spanish border and home. Even before Pearl Harbor, the Nazis, to keep closer tabs on those who were left in Paris and the environs, had ordered them not to set foot outside the Departments of the Seine and the Seine-et-Oise and to report once a week to their local police station to sign an alien ledger which contained their photographs and data on them. After Pearl Harbor, the ladies also had to register at the Chambre des Députés, where the Germans, ironically, had set up their alien-enemy Büro, and sign a new Nazi alien-enemy questionnaire which included the optimistic inquiry “Avez-vous un cheval?” Two entire lines were reserved for this “Have you a horse?” question. There was no need for the Germans to wonder if American men had horses to donate to the Reichswehr, because all male Americans had been crowded into detention barracks at Compiègne a week after America had entered the war.

In the two years that had passed since the Germans had officially cut France in two, the first, wild seepage of refugees, members of separated families, and soldiers’ wives and children across the Armistice demarcation line had settled down into an orderly but illicit commuting, organized, for patriotism or pay, by guides who shuttled back and forth two or three times a week with passengers in tow. Right now nobody seems to know if this smuggling of human beings is still going on, since the Nazis occupy both halves of France. All that is known is that early in February, 1943, the Germans, typically, declared that the demarcation line had been erased but that identification papers or passports, which are precisely what some people either do not possess or most want to hide, must still be shown in order to cross what no longer exists. Early in the spring of 1942 the French were still crossing, for fifty or a hundred francs a head, or for nothing, if poor and in trouble. Then, in May, there was a terrible, little-publicized rafle, or raid, on the remaining foreign Jews in Paris, which drastically worsened the chances of anyone’s crossing the border. The Nazis ordered that non-French Jewish men, women, and children be separated from one another and sent off, in a new, triple form of segregation, to different camps. When the Gestapo arrived in the Belleville Jewish quarter of Paris to enforce the order, some parents threw themselves and their children, or pushed one another, out of the windows of their homes rather than be separated. A new wild flight of Jews from the rest of Occupied France stampeded the border guides. As a result, the guide fees for everybody, Jew or non-Jew, rose in the tragic competition for flight. Also, the Nazi border patrols, an especially venal lot, boosted their bribery rates or refused to cooperate at all. Then, after the Commandos made their first big Continental raid, on August 19th, at Dieppe, the Nazi restrictions on the movements of the population, which had slackened slightly in the course of two years, suddenly tightened. For passing Jews guides were shot, passing anybody over the line became more difficult, and passing any English-speaking person became dangerous and thus even costlier. Mrs. Jeffries was automatically a bad proposition, from the guides’ viewpoint, because, though a Presbyterian, she was a forty-five-year-old American female and therefore regarded as bothersome if everybody should have to cut and run from a Nazi patrol.

TO start dickering for one of these crossings, the regular Parisian phrase was “Connaissez-vous un passage?” This was usually addressed to any of the ubiquitous, omniscient, and trusted café waiters who, since the German occupation, have performed a patriotic service and earned a little extra by purveying to Parisians certain anti-Nazi necessities, such as black-market food tips, contraband cigarettes, British radio news, and introductions to border guides. On September 1st, Mrs. Jeffries found her waiter. His first offer was an exorbitant demand for eleven thousand francs from a type who, upon a refusal, immediately came down to a bargain eight thousand. As was customary, this proposition was offered by a guide’s Paris under-cover, or contact, man, who on an every-other-day schedule got together passage parties of a dozen or more people. The guide furnished transportation, exclusive of railroad accommodation, in the shape of hay carts or trucks for long detours on border side roads, and made arrangements for, but didn’t pay for, food and lodging en route. For his aid, integrity, organization, and knowledge of the ropes, he charged an over-all service fee. Most of the guides operated in one of five or six topographically convenient crossing points, of which the eastern, being closer to Paris, were the more popular. The Nazis got around, in rotation, to each exit, for a spell methodically watched it like a cat, then went and eyed another place while the mice scurried out through the unplugged holes. During the first week in September, all the eastern passage points were suddenly reported brûlé, or hot. The guides got word, through their grapevines, that the Nazi patrols were searching all buses on roads approaching the eastern border crossings; at the same time the Paris Nazis had a temporary fit of checking the identity papers of all travellers leaving by the Gare de Lyon and the Gare d’Austerlitz. Mrs. Jeffries lay low and passed up the eight-thousand bargain.

By the middle of September the coast looked clear again. Through a second and better-connected waiter, Mrs. Jeffries paid a rock-bottom five-thousand-franc fee to a bold, brown-eyed, young de Gaullist named René, the contact man for a guide, a big farm-owner in the district through which she was to cross. She sent her luggage to Lyons, the first city in the Unoccupied Zone she was aiming for, by train; it is one of the anomalies of life under the Nazis that property has more right of way than people. For the crossing, René advised her to travel light, with only a rucksack on her back, in case she had to run. On September 16th, he told her to meet him at a certain railroad station the next morning at six in order to fight for a seat on the eight-o’clock train and for the love of God not to talk in public, as her American-accented French was formidable. At seven o’clock, by which time Mrs. Jeffries had silently struggled into her seat, René appeared and, busy with last-minute details, asked her to find an extra seat for what he called a friend, who was going with them. Largely by sign language, she wangled a seat in the next coach for the friend, who, from the brief view she had of him, looked to be French, fortyish, pale, and nervous. After the train had started and she had painfully watched the Tour Eiffel fade from her life and view, she began, irresistibly, to enjoy her journey through rural France. She had not been allowed to travel for nearly two years. Also, she had a fine shoe-box lunch with her. A French woman friend who owned a little place outside Paris had brought her, the day before, three precious fresh hard-boiled eggs, two pâté maison sandwiches, and a nearly ripe home-grown pear.

Well before noon and well inside the demarcation border, Mrs. Jeffries, according to plan, got off the train at a small town and walked down the main street to the foot of a hill, where René had said she would find a bistro. She found five and, being thirsty, chose the nicest and ordered the customary glass of bad beer. René eventually rolled up in an old Citroën, and with him was the guide. When René introduced her to the guide, Joseph, her stomach, which had turned over in terror whenever she thought about making the crossing, was quieted. Joseph was a middle-aged, bull-necked countryman, paternal, polite, and bustling. René, it developed, was in a hurry to get on to Marseilles. The two men had a confidential conversation, but she could not help overhearing some of it, and she gathered that René was on a gun-running job for de Gaulle and that Joseph planned to hide him in the back of the Citroën under some vegetables and drive him to a railway station on the other side of the border, where René would get back on the train he had just got off. The train, she knew, would be held up for hours at the border while the French and German police inspected Ausweise and civil papers, which René apparently never fussed with, hunted in the toilets and under the seats for refugees, and searched passengers for contraband. Contraband was anything portable, precious, and personal left after two years of German occupation; it could be love letters, family messages, trinkets, old furs, more money than your visa said you possessed, or fine jewels.

René and Joseph left on their mission, Joseph promising to return as soon as possible. As Mrs. Jeffries sat alone, drinking her beer, the pale Frenchman of that morning’s journey came up and introduced himself as Monsieur Georges. Then he introduced what seemed to be the rest of Joseph’s crossing party—three French provincial matrons who said they were sisters, a Jewish Frenchwoman with a sick-looking little boy, three melancholy young Dutch Jews, and a French sailor in uniform. As if France had never been defeated or divided, the sailor had spent his leave, as usual, visiting his mother in Paris and was now on his way back to his ship in Toulon. Georges begged Mrs. Jeffries, on account of her accent, not to talk, and then invited her to play belote, a talkative card game. Since she didn’t know how, he told her the story of his recent life. He had wanted to fight on the side of noble-hearted Russia and so had volunteered to be smuggled from Paris across the border near Lyons and thence to London to join the de Gaulle army as a mechanic. She asked in a whisper whether he was an airplane or a tank mechanic. He said he was neither; he was an expert maker of frames for ladies’ petit-point handbags, the sort formerly sold to the American and now to the German tourist trade. He proudly said that it cost the de Gaulle movement twenty thousand francs to smuggle a man like him from Paris to London. He had false teeth, limp gray hair, spots on his vest, and delicate, artisan’s hands. Because Mrs. Jeffries was polite, she didn’t say she thought that the Fighting French had made a poor buy.

LATE in the afternoon Joseph returned and moved his party to a second bistro, one farther up the hill and near a church. Four Gestapo agents were drinking beer at the zinc. Joseph claimed that he could spot them a mile off, because the Gestapo invariably wore ersatz tweeds of either a bilious brown or an unpleasant gray, apparently the only choice left to the Germans, and they always shaved their necks and carried briefcases, neither of these habits French. The waiter at the new bistro warned Joseph’s party not to talk over their drinks and then cracked off-color jokes, which made the three Gallic matrons laugh hysterically. At five o’clock Joseph led Mrs. Jeffries around the corner to a photographer, who took her picture and made out a false French civilian’s identification paper which she would get, complete with her picture, the next day on the other side of the border. He told her that the paper was made out in a Gallic version of her name and warned her not to forget that she was to become, temporarily, Madame Hélène Geoffroi.

Shortly afterward, behind the church, Joseph and Mrs. Jeffries joined the rest of the party, who were huddled against the choir door. Joseph hurriedly piled them all into a waiting butcher’s camion and pulled a pair of black curtains tight across the back. Inside they found fragments of suet and dried blood and three more Jews. The camion started off. Five minutes later, Joseph, who was driving, was stopped for questioning by two German patrolmen. Behind the black curtains the three new Jews whispered nervously, which made everybody else even more nervous. Then the Germans said, “Heil Hitler und merci,” and the truck set off again. After an hour’s drive the truck stopped, Joseph unbuttoned the curtains, and they climbed out. They were in the country, behind a building that will here be described as an old blacksmith’s shop. They hurried inside and were put in a new annex, where apparently machine parts were being manufactured. This part of the shop was not yet entirely roofed over, and for the next few hours the party watched the darkening sky and then the stars. As they sat, they could hear an unseen little river frothing against boulders. Joseph had told them that the river, which marked the border, was where they were to cross into the Unoccupied Zone that night and that the rocks were what they were to cross on. No one, not even Monsieur Georges, talked much. It was better not to say anything about where you came from and it was certainly too soon to discuss where you thought you would eventually arrive. Finally they heard two members of the German night patrol approach the shop on their first round. Over the noise of the water and their own thumping hearts, the hidden party listened to the German voices lifted in puffing, pidgin French. Apparently the two Nazis were hungry only for conversation, though Mrs. Jeffries heard Joseph offer them chocolate. He did not offer them cigarettes or money, the two other things German soldiers have an appetite for.

The party was to cross at nine. At ten minutes to nine, Joseph brought in a young peasant whom he called his nephew. He looked nothing like Joseph. He was big, stalwart, and dressed only in swimming trunks. Joseph explained that the river was no more than four feet deep and that if anyone fell in, not to scream, because his nephew, who would be standing in the middle, would come to the rescue. “We have him here to tranquillize the ladies,” Joseph added gravely. Then, less confidently, he said that the Nazi patrol ought to be a quarter of a mile away by then but that one never could tell about those monsters. Everyone was instructed to crouch while crossing the river, in order to be less visible and a smaller target in case the Nazis came back and started to fire. The party was to cross rapidly and one by one.

Everybody filed out of the blacksmith shop and to the edge of the river. Mrs. Jeffries followed the French sailor. Crossing the river, she could see, on the far side, the pompon of his cap silhouetted against the stars. As she stepped, crouching, on the third boulder, she put one foot on the hem of her raincoat and almost fell in. The unlikely nephew, chest-deep in the water, laughed and whispered, “Courage.” When Mrs. Jeffries got to the other side of the little river, she ran, still crouching, for a quarter of a mile through a field of stubble. Finally she came to a dirt road that led to a village. Then, as already instructed by Joseph, she turned to the right and knocked at the door of the second cottage. A fat, red-faced young woman opened the door. When Mrs. Jeffries asked if she were Joseph’s aunt, she nodded indifferently. Falsehoods and the pounding heart of someone who had just run the line meant nothing to her. Fugitives were a business. Without being asked, she said that Mrs. Jeffries could have a bed to herself for fifty francs. Apparently Joseph, like a capitalist carefully splitting up his investments, had distributed his party all over the neighborhood.

Mrs. Jeffries inspected the bed. It looked filthy and stank in memory of other refugees who had lain on it, maybe trembling the way Mrs. Jeffries trembled now. From her rucksack she took out a bottle of perfume and sprinkled the pillow, and then tried, unsuccessfully, to eat one of the hard-boiled eggs. She went to bed with her clothes on. The combination of the bed smell and the perfume made her sick, but there was nothing in the room to be sick in, so she forced herself to go to sleep. In the morning the fat young woman gave her acorn coffee and a slice of sour gray bread. She took the fifty francs agreed upon and absorbed another fifty as tip because she had not asked Madame to sign a lodger’s slip, as the law demands. For fugitives, every evasion of the law is a luxury which must be paid for extra, though unofficial kindnesses often come free of charge.

Joseph had told Mrs. Jeffries to go to the local épicerie after breakfast and ask the owner for her false French civilian paper. Like a prestidigitator, the grocer obligingly pulled it out of the inside of his old hat. Then he pointed down the empty road and said, “Joseph said to walk that way. You’ll meet a truck.” After walking a mile in the mild sun, she sat down under a tree to smoke, to wonder what had happened to the truck, and to look at herself, and her new life history, as Madame Hélène Geoffroi. The photograph was nothing like her and the paper said that she had been born in Normandy in a town she had never heard of. A truck rattled by, stopped, and backed up; it contained Joseph and the rest of his party. “You will never get to New York sitting down like that,” he called, and they all laughed excitedly. Everyone, even the melancholy Jews, seemed united by a temporary sort of gaiety because of the success of what they had been through together the night before.

At noon they pulled up at one of those modest country inns famed for generations for its cuisine. The black-market luncheon proved to be finer than anything Mrs. Jeffries had sampled since France fell—multiple hors-d’œuvres, delicious local trout (it being Friday), grilled chops, two vegetables, ripe cheese, fruit compote, and a serious Burgundy. Monsieur Georges, who sat beside her, remarked how wise he had been to put his false teeth in his breast pocket before the crossing. He had been afraid that, as he jumped for the rocks, the teeth might fall out of his face. Mrs. Jeffries paid a luncheon check of seven hundred francs, or seven dollars. The waiter had regarded Georges as her husband and had put him on her bill. After the tasty barley coffee, the chef-owner of the place came in to receive compliments on his food. He said that he had run a fin bec restaurant at Menton until the Italians came but that he did not like macaroni cooking. Being both an artist and a patriot, he had moved away.

AFTER lunch Mrs. Jeffries and Georges, who were bound for Lyons, said goodbye to the rest of the party. Where the others were going, or trying to go, they alone knew. On saying goodbye to Joseph, Mrs. Jeffries thanked him with real emotion. He must have been used to that. All he said was “Ce n’est rien, Madame. À votre service.” He was, going back to the bistro on the hill and tomorrow night he and another party would be crossing the river. A local guide named Jean, who did odd jobs for Joseph, was detailed to the Lyons contingent, which was joined by an elderly Serb underground worker. They were to sit up in the restaurant until three in the morning, walk to the nearest railway station, and catch an early train for Lyons. There Jean would introduce them in a certain café, where a patriot (as in French Revolutionary times, today all the pals among le peuple are patriots) would tip them off to some safe rooms to live in. As Madame Hélène Geoffroi, Mrs. Jeffries tried to show her false paper to the ticket taker at the station next morning. Though under orders from the Vichy police to check up on all travellers, he didn’t bother to glance at her forgery, which disappointed her.

Owing to a saboteur’s wreck on the main line, their train was four hours late, and they wearily arrived at eleven in the morning at the Lyons café. There a peppery young Fighting Frenchman, Marcel, who had expected only Jean, and him on time, flew into a temper at the sight of an unexpected American woman, an unexplained old Serb, and the unwelcome Georges. As one of the local Fighting French authorities, Marcel ordered Georges back to Paris because he considered him something de Gaulle would not have as a gift. Suspicious and arrogant, Marcel then shut up like a clam, refusing aid to any of them. Apologetically, the Serb offered Mrs. Jeffries the address of a compatriot’s boarding house which was reported to have nice food. With her rucksack still on her back, she took three wrong trams to the outskirts of Lyons, walked up four long, wrong streets, and finally managed to arrive, weeping with fatigue, at what turned out to be an ordinary French lodging house for men workers. “Ah, if Madame were only not a woman,” the patriot proprietor wailed. He nevertheless offered to give her lunch in his barracklike dining room, where about a hundred workmen were already feeding. However, as the Serb had prophesied, the stew was excellent. While Madame was still reviving herself on it, he walked in. He apologized for intruding and said he had worried about her. It occurred to Mrs. Jeffries at that moment that for the past two years in Paris she had lived her quiet, expatriate, familiar existence without difficulties and also without anyone’s help. In Lyons she was a stranger and in a bad way. It was over her stew that she realized that the war had indeed reclassified people; that to those in trouble people had now become very kind or very cruel or as indifferent as stones. At the Serb’s kindness she started crying again.

Like friendly homing pigeons, Mrs. Jeffries and the Serb returned to the café. It was closed. From behind the door the owner shouted that the police were expecting an anti-Vichy riot and to get off the streets, quick. Mrs. Jeffries and the Serb ran down the street. At the first hotel they came to, he pushed her in and, still running, disappeared. When she asked for lodging, the woman at the desk calmly offered her a bathroom to sleep in. The city was jammed; the annual commercial fair, the famous Foire de Lyon, was opening that week, just as if war and riots were routine and just as if the fair would show something besides ersatz. When Mrs. Jeffries handed over her false French civilian paper, which, if she spent the night even in the bathroom, would have to be copied on a fiche to be presented to the police the next morning, the woman said sharply, “French? With that accent?” Mrs. Jeffries, a poor liar, lamely murmured that she had been brought up in America. “You should say that with more conviction,” the woman replied, and put the fiche into a desk drawer. Alarmed, Mrs. Jeffries casually strolled out onto the street, then ran back to the café, where, on the deserted sidewalk, the Serb and the angry Marcel were arguing. Marcel became even angrier when she told him of the suspicion which her false French paper had aroused. He declared that since she was an American she hadn’t needed such a paper in the first place, that her Parisian carte d’identité sufficed in Vichy France, and that if the woman squealed, all of Joseph’s papers forged by that particular photographer for foreigners who did need them would become hot. While tearing up her Geoffroi paper, he forbade Mrs. Jeffries to return to the hotel. When she said that she had to sleep somewhere and that she hadn’t had her clothes off for two nights, he unexpectedly apologized. Rather grudgingly, he invited her to stay the night with him, explaining that he was sleeping, sub rosa, in a collaborationist uncle’s flat and that both he and she would have to be up and out before seven the next morning, when the uncle was returning from a big business trip. Marcel said that his family were bitterly divided; half were de Gaullists like himself and the other half were like the rich, Pétainist, avuncular swine. While they were still talking, the café reopened, and she was able to get a much-needed glass of weak beer. Apparently the riot had been called off.

That evening, after dinner, she took a Saturday-night bath in the collaborationist’s luxurious bathtub. Next morning, early, she made both beds, as womanly thanks for the hospitality, and by seven Marcel had installed her in the centre of Lyons in what called itself a hotel but was really three floors of furnished rooms over a side-street shop. The hotel did not register its lodgers on any fiche and had no breakfasts, hot water, or closets. The clothes cupboard in her room was a length of pink cretonne stretched diagonally across one corner on a string, not nearly big enough to hold her clothes when she picked up her trunk, which had come through more easily than she had. She was to live in this room for the next eight weeks, which was the length of time it would take her to get the solemn, legal papers necessary for her to leave France illegally. The Nazis have upset the law, the logic, and the sense of humor of all Europe. ♦