Resistance heroine who waged war with a teddy
HAD William Heath Robinson ever got wind of what the Resistance was up to in occupied France he would have smiled. In the winter of 1940, a group of Resistance fighters in Lyon came up with an ingeniously batty contraption to distribute their anti-Collaboration leaflets.
A member of the group The Last Column would clamber up on to a roof, set a mousetrap and prop against it a pile of papers denouncing the occupying Nazi forces and the Vichy high command.
Attached to the mousetrap by a piece of string was a tin can filled with water with a hole punched in the bottom. As the water dripped out, the can became lighter until — snap! — the trap was released, showering the pamphlets onto the passers-by below. Meanwhile, the Resistance member who had set the trap would be long gone.
One of The Last Column was Lucie Aubrac. She was a fearless, often reckless, agent who even when heavily pregnant took on the most dangerous assignments.
She hid explosives to be transported to other members of the Resistance inside cuddly toys and smiled sweetly as she handed them to a local Frenchman unsympathetic to the Resistance, who was to carry them between Vichy and Occupied France.
She twice confronted Klaus Barbie, the ‘Butcher of Lyon’, a Gestapo senior officer charged with crushing the Resistance. Disguising herself with a tiny, veiled pillbox hat, she marched into his office intent on discovering whether her Jewish husband Raymond Samuel, who had been captured and tortured by the Gestapo, was still alive.
It is disappointing then that Rees’s account of her life is so ploddingly told. The raw ingredients are there but the pan never sizzles.
Having failed in her appeal to Barbie to have Raymond released, Lucie busts him out of Gestapo custody in a Citroen van with submachine guns pointing out the windows. You want to hear the screech of wheels, the shouts of the guards — instead it all seems to happen in slow motion. You wish Rees had hammed it up for dramatic effect.
But you come to understand why she didn’t. Hamming things up for dramatic effect got Lucie Aubrac into terrible trouble.
When she came to write her memoirs in 1984, the idea of fact-checking bored her. ‘One night,’ she explained, ‘I had the idea of writing it like a diary. That would allow me to evoke particular memories without having to describe the whole Resistance.’
Three years later, historian Gerard Chauvy accused the couple of acting as double agents. He had found inconsistencies in their accounts and interviews.
The Aubracs, now in their 70s, had to defend themselves in front of a commission of historians. Rees examines the court proceedings in forensic, interrogative detail and there is never any doubt that the Aubracs are the good guys. But Rees might, for the sake of suspense, have kept her readers guessing about just how much of Lucie’s tales of mousetraps and exploding teddy bears to believe.