By mid-November there were no further negotiations for any of the Reinach family. Léon was one of approximately forty detainees who tried to dig an escape tunnel four feet high and two feet wide out of Drancy. The diggers, split into three teams and using some of the equipment intended for the renovation of the camp, were taking advantage of the temporary absence of Alois Brunner and his commandos, who had gone to arrest Jews in Nice and the surrounding area. On 9 November 1943, before the escape could take place, the tunnel was discovered by the Germans and punishment was severe for those involved. Reinach and both children, Fanny and Bertrand, were taken to the suburban railway station at Bobigny and on 17 November deported in Convoy no. 62 for Auschwitz. It is inconceivable that the local population of Drancy were unaware of the enormous and constant transfers of prisoners and the almost daily arrests and arrivals of thousands of detainees at Bobigny train station, just as it is inconceivable that Béatrice, who remained, ‘preparing nourrissons’, (baby food), according to a 1943 pitiful plan of Drancy,* did not know that this was the final time she would see her children. What is not known is if she was allowed to say goodbye to them, nor how she retained her own will to survive.
Many women that year were seen on trains reading Gone with the Wind, which had recently appeared in French as Autant en emporte le vent and, as Drue Tartière noted, they often had tears in their eyes as they read of the hardships during another war, the story making their own suffering more poignant to them. ‘The people on these trains were now looking very shabby and, since there was a great shortage of soap, the smells in the train were almost overpowering.’ It was, in certain circles, now chic to be shabby in France, with some women determined to wear trousers, especially if they were cycling, because they were warm and comfortable and, if left over from a husband who had been killed or taken prisoner, often made sound emotional and economic sense – even though Vichy had declared trousers to be masculine and condemned those who wore them for displaying signs of moral turpitude. ‘Only collaborators could afford to dress well,’ according to Drue Tartière. Most ordinary Parisiennes became adept at making do, at being ‘des virtuoses du secours, du miracle domestique et quotidien’. In other words, they became miracle workers on a daily basis, virtuosos always able to seek and find help when needed, as Colette recognized.
* A number of factors had led to mounting discontent among the French police: their workloads had become significantly heavier as they dealt with the growth of resistance, policed the black market and sifted through thousands of denunciation letters, while their numbers had declined partly thanks to the STO. In addition, many had been unhappy about their role in Operation Spring Wind.
? The Rothschild Hospital, often referred to as an annex to Drancy, was situated next to the Picpus cemetery in the 12th arrondissement, the site of a series of mass graves of aristocrats guillotined during the Revolution. In 1797 the land was secretly purchased by Princess Amalie Zephyrine of Salm-Kyrburg, a German aristocrat brought up in Paris who married into the house of Hohenzollern-Sigmaringen, as her brother and lover were both buried there. As a result the cemetery was apparently treated as sacred ground by the Germans, not to be actively policed, and it thus offered a useful escape route.
* In 1946 Bussière was convicted of ‘collaboration with the enemy’ and sentenced to life imprisonment, but was pardonned after serving five years.
* The Brussels-based Comet line was a resistance group intended to help Allied pilots and a few others on the run to escape to Britain by guiding, feeding and clothing them through France, usually down to Bayonne, over the Pyrenees into neutral Spain and then on into British-controlled Gibraltar. The Pat line, named after Pat O’Leary’s code name for Albert Guérisse, had a similar function but used different routes, all of which started from Paris, but one went via Brittany, from where men were shipped to Britain.
* In addition to the nearly two million French soldiers initially kept as hostages to ensure that Vichy would reduce its armed forces and pay a heavy tribute in gold, food and supplies, Germany continually demanded more workers. It has been estimated that by the end of 1943 there were 646,421 French workers in Germany, almost all male as most had been sent to work on railways or on the land or now as part of the STO (see Julian Jackson, France: The Dark Years, p. 233 onwards).
* SOE operations in France were organized into networks or cells known as Circuits which covered different parts of the country based around three key figures: an organizer, a courier and a wireless operator, almost all of whom were trained in Britain. The circuit organiser then recruited additional local men and women.