A Train in Winter by Caroline Moorehead Read Free Book Online

you know what happened? At 9.20, a Jew killed a German soldier, opened his breast and ate his heart! Impossible! For three reasons. Germans have no hearts. Jews don’t eat pork. And at 9.20 everyone is listening to the BBC.’ When, in ones and twos, the student leaders were arrested, it only made their companions more resolute.
    Then, on 30 October, a distinguished scientist in his late sixties called Paul Langevin was arrested in his office in the Faculty of Physics and Industrial Chemistry. In the 1930s Langevin had been the founder of an anti-Fascist movement and he was much admired by his students. Professors and students alike decided to see in his arrest a Nazi attack on French intellectual life. Posters immediately appeared on the walls with the words ‘Free Langevin’. And, since the professor held his classes on a Friday, a mass demonstration was called on Friday 8 November in front of the Collège de France where Langevin had his laboratory.
    Despite the presence of German soldiers and French police, it passed off quietly. But the students now felt themselves to be at war. Meanwhile, in a message relayed over the BBC, the French in London had suggested that wreaths be laid at the Arc de Triomphe on the 11th, to mark Armistice Day. The Germans issued an order forbidding all such gatherings. The students decided to defy this. By 3 p.m. on the 11th, crowds of young people were collecting at the bottom of the Champs-Elysées and starting to walk towards the Étoile in small groups, singing the Marseillaise. One group of friends had produced a huge visiting card, over a metre long, with the words Le Général de Gaulle .
    By mid-afternoon almost 10,000 people had gathered. The weather was fine and the mood was almost festive. But not for long. The Germans opened fire. A number of students were badly wounded, but none died since the soldiers had been ordered to shoot only at their legs. A hundred and fifty were arrested immediately; many more were picked up in the days that followed and sent, for brief periods, to prison. The university was closed. Paul Langevin remained in detention for thirty-seven days, during which time he went on with his research with the aid of some spent matches he found on the floor of his cell, before being sent to Troyes, under house arrest.
    Professor Langevin had a 21-year-old daughter, a solemn, dark-haired young woman called Hélène. After her husband Jacques Solomon, a physicist working on quantum mechanics and cosmic rays, was demobilised from the medical services and returned home, Hélène suggested that they take a holiday cycling in the forests near Paris. As they cycled along, they discussed what they might do to oppose the German occupiers. Jacques said: ‘We mustn’t fool ourselves. Whatever we do will mean throwing ourselves in the lions’ den.’
    On the tracks in the forest they encountered two friends, a Hungarian Marxist philosopher called Georges Politzer and Maï, his wife. Maï, who was 25, was the only daughter of a celebrated cook, who had been chef to the Spanish court. Educated in a convent in Biarritz, she had studied to become a midwife and had met Politzer on a train in the Basque country. Through him, she discovered Marxism. The Politzers had a seven-year-old son, Michel. Maï was blond and strikingly pretty. Cycling along together, the two young couples talked about starting a paper, L’Université Libre , aimed at pulling together the entire sweep of intellectual resistance, regardless of political beliefs. It was, they agreed, to be a ‘national front of all French writers’.

    Maï Politzer, ‘Femme Vincennes’
    Hélène happened to be at lunch with her mother when the two German soldiers had come looking for her father. She quickly spread the word of his arrest. The Politzers and Solomons decided to rush the first issue of L’Université Libre out, 1,000 copies of four roneoed pages, in time for the demonstration on the 11th. By now they had joined