A Train in Winter by Caroline Moorehead

chasse , the hunt, for resisters.
    What no one expected was how tenaciously and bravely the resisters would fight back. In the weeks and months to come, more German soldiers and informers were shot, there were explosions on railway lines, grenades were rolled into German restaurants, bombs thrown at depots, at German libraries and German canteens. The industrial zone of the Seine-Inférieure, where Germaine Pican and Claudine Guérin were active, was the scene of constant attacks—railway lines cut, petrol bombs thrown, engines sabotaged by a collection of Gaullists, communists, Catholics and socialists working together, many of them students or railway workers. At one point, the attacks on the railways were so frequent that the Germans placed a number of French civilian hostages on board all trains carrying German soldiers. When the resisters ran out of money, they held up local mairies , and made off with whatever cash they could find.
    For Betty, travelling up and down France as a courier, hearing herself and her companions described as terrorists, was to misunderstand the meaning of the word. Terrorists were people who shot innocent bystanders; she and her friends were fighters, engaged in war against the enemy. They felt elated.
    In the early days of the occupation, the Germans had been wary of the French police, suspecting them of being ardent republicans at heart. A few, indeed, were, and these quickly resigned. But for the most part the 15,000 men who policed Paris and the department of the Seine stayed at their posts, and, as the months passed, were drawn ever deeper into a web of collaboration, into Primo Levi’s ‘grey zone’, somewhere between occupier and occupied. Like many French people, they believed that Germany was bound to win the war. At best, they did what they could to mitigate the harshness of the occupiers; at worst, they became torturers.
    A law had been passed in the summer of 1940 to the effect that any civil servant would be dismissed if he failed to give satisfaction. Infected by years of public hostility to the Communists, remembering the confrontations with ‘Blum’s creatures’ of the left, frightened for their jobs, coerced by appeals to their sense of duty, many French policemen chose simply to try to survive the war years unscathed and uncompromised. By the summer of 1941, it was becoming increasingly hard for them to do so.
    The assassination at the Barbès métro, as well as the attacks in Rouen, Nantes and Bordeaux, merely speeded up a process that was already under way. Since Pucheu, as Minister of the Interior, was determined to do everything possible to prevent the monopoly of repression passing solely into German hands, plans were already well advanced for a reorganised, reinvigorated French police force, committed both to Vichy’s révolution national and to all-out attacks on the Resistance. All his best men, Pucheu promised von Stülpnagel, would be thrown against those guilty of the attacks. There was to be better pay for police officers, more training and new uniforms, but not, to their disappointment, new guns, for the Germans remained reluctant to see the French better armed.
    Along with new sections dedicated to tracking down Jews, Freemasons and foreigners, run by their own ‘specialists’, came two new brigades, one for ‘Communists’, the other for ‘terrorists’. There had been brigades spéciales before, under the office of the Renseignements Généraux, the intelligence service of the French police, whose job it had been to spy on possible troublemakers, but these would be more ruthless, more independent, more skilful.
    In the summer of 1941, the new Prefect of Police, instructed to hunt down enemies of the Reich, appointed a senior French policeman called Lucien Rottée as head of the Renseignements Généraux. Rottée, a tall, thin man, wore three-piece suits and went everywhere accompanied by a large dog. He loathed communists, whom he regarded as agents