The Cost of Courage Read Free

survival.
    NOW , IN JANUARY 1944, André is inside his secret headquarters on the top floor of an apartment building on the Left Bank. With him are his “right hand,” Charles Gimpel, and his assistant, Geneviève.
    Gimpel has arrived one month earlier, carrying another 100,000 francs from England. During his brief time in Paris, Gimpel has already set up an excellent liaison organization with the southern zone, and he has arranged for a large number of radios to be brought up from the south to transmit messages from Paris to London.

    The ranks of the Maquis jump sharply after the forced deportation of French workers to Germany. The poster says “French and German workers unite!”( photo credit 1.3 )
    Because their junior aide, Jacques, has been absent for only a day, neither Boulloche nor Gimpel suspects that he has been arrested.
    They certainly haven’t imagined that Jacques has violated the cardinal principle of the Resistance. No matter how badly you are tortured, you must try with all your might not to divulge anything important for forty-eight hours after your arrest.
    After you have been missing for two days, your comrades are supposed to assume that you have been arrested, and relocate immediately to a new clandestine location. Only then, after the captured agent has endured two days of unimaginable affliction, is he authorized to tell everything he knows.
    If the system works the way it’s supposed to, by then his information should be largely worthless anyway.
    Jacques adores his boss, André. But almost immediately after he is grabbed by the Germans, the young agent realizes that he will never be able to remain silent after his captors begin to beat him, or semidrown him, since a form of waterboarding is one of the Gestapo’s favorite methods of torture.
    He sees only one way out. In a small cell with another Frenchman, he whispers, “Strangle me so I won’t talk! If you don’t, I will tell them everything.”
    But the boy’s cell mate is incapable of providing such grisly mercy.
    Soon after that, the young Sorbonne student begins to give up all of his secrets, including the location of André’s secret apartment.
    Barely an hour later, Jacques is squeezing into the narrow elevator in the apartment house on rue de la Santé on the Left Bank with two Gestapo agents. When it reaches the fifth floor, the three men exit silently onto the landing.
    Jacques has been brought here to perform the secret knock. The young Frenchman points at the door of the doomed apartment, then walks toward it to carry out the sordid duty: one sharp rap of his fist, a beat, then two softer knocks on the door.
    Inside the apartment, André recognizes the cloak-and-dagger sequence and stands up from his desk to acknowledge it. When he opens the door, he sees two Germans in black leather raincoats pointing identical Walther PPK pistols at his heart.
    “HANDS UP!” they shout.
    “WHAT’S GOING ON?” André screams back.
    Instinct propels the Frenchman toward the staircase as the Germans open fire. Two bullets strike the Resistance fighter just below the chest. One agent rushes toward him to check for a weapon as the other one storms the apartment to capture his confederates.
    If he hadn’t been wounded, André thinks, this part would have been easy: He would have swallowed the fatal pill right away. But now he is writhing on the floor, with blood spurting out of his stomach — and the cyanide never leaves his pocket.
    For a very long time, he will wonder whether this has been the right decision.
    BACK ON THE SIDEWALK in front of the apartment building, the German agents shove André into the backseat of the black Citroën, next to Jacques. Then they speed away through the darkening streets of the Paris dusk.
    Jacques is in a state of total collapse; he is weeping and howling and begging his boss for forgiveness. For the rest of his life, André will carry a hideous memory of these moments.
    This part of André’s trauma