The Cost of Courage by Charles Kaiser

Rome Métro, he proceeds in the opposite direction from his destination. He confuses rue des Dames, rue de Saussure, and rue Lebouteux, and suddenly he is in a new nightmare. Then he finds himself back in front of the Rome Métro. Parisians sitting outside a café stare at him. If they notice him this time, it’s because they noticed him a few minutes earlier. “Who is this young tramp who can barely stand up and doesn’t even have a cane?” he imagines them wondering.
    Without his glasses, he can barely read the street names on the sides of the darkening buildings. He takes a left on rue Boursault, and a right on rue de La Condamine. Finally he is going in the right direction, and he spies his destination: 68, rue Nollet.
    Utterly exhausted, he must still climb five flights of stairs. With one more supreme act of will, he makes it up to his friends’ apartment.
    “What a joy!” Henry declares.
    “No! Look at the shape I’m in.” Then he adds the caution every escapee seems to offer whenever he reaches safety: “I’m not even sure the Gestapo hasn’t followed me here.”
    “Ridiculous,” Henry says. “I’ve opened my last bottle of champagne, it’s cold and we will drink it with dinner.”
    That night, Postel-Vinay has the soundest sleep of his life. The next morning, he wakes up with an incredible feeling: “Beloved liberty! Liberty miraculously reconquered, but still so fragile …”
    TWELVE DAYS after Postel-Vinay’s escape, his friend Henry Rollet makes contact with Patrick O’Leary, the head of one of the two Resistance organizations Postel-Vinay worked with before his arrest. O’Leary has always promised that he would get him out of the country if it became absolutely necessary, and he is a man of his word. His message to Postel-Vinay is that he must reach Marseille in four days, on September 18, where he will contact Georges Zarifi, at 12, allée Léon Gambetta.
    Henry organizes Postel-Vinay’s escape from Paris meticulously. The first leg is a bicycle ride to Pont Saint-Michel station — a departure point chosen to avoid the larger stations, which are more dangerous because they are more heavily patrolled by the police.
    At the end of a bridge over the Seine, he is met by Henry and another co-conspirator, Jean Vialla, who takes Postel-Vinay’s bicycle and rides away on it. Then Henry guides him down the stairs into the station.
    They change trains at Juvisy and Brétigny. At six the next morning they arrive at Coutras. Now, the hard part: He must cross the line between occupied and unoccupied France. He has no idea when or how he will do it; he only knows that he must meet a guide in the café in the train station at ten o’clock. Then he is supposed to ride a bicycle for twelve miles. But will he have the strength to do that?
    The café isn’t open yet, so he and Henry sit in the waiting room, a dirty, poorly lit room, with a stone-cold stove in the corner on a black and chilly morning. Suddenly two policemen walk in. Is
this
the end of his voyage? Postel-Vinay remembers the name on hisfalse identity card in his pocket: Fernand François Claude André Duval, an engineer, born July 4, 1912, in Algiers. But the policemen never approach him. Instead, they sit down and talk quietly.
    Fifteen minutes later, they stand up to leave.
    Exactly on time, the young guide arrives at the café with two bicycles. Postel-Vinay and Henry say their goodbyes, and Postel-Vinay begins to pedal painfully behind his guide. Often he has to get off and walk to climb a hill. The weather is clear and fresh and dry. After about two hours, his guide finally dismounts and tells Postel-Vinay to do the same.
    They walk through a silent forest until they reach a clearing; a farmhouse lies beyond it. The guide tells Postel-Vinay to wait outside while he goes in to meet the residents. A moment later he signals him to follow him into the house.
    The farmer and his wife greet him like a son. On the dining room table, among