The Real Girl in the Blue Beret

Featured at newyorker.com, Page Turners, May 18, 2013

I didn’t know if Michèle Moët-Agniel was still alive. She would be over eighty by now. I had written her a letter—in painstaking French—in August, 2007, and it was now January, 2008. I mailed another copy of the letter with an updated note. I told her I was coming to Paris in the spring and very much wanted to meet her because I was writing a novel about the war years, when she was a teen-ager in the French Resistance.

I studied the photo of her with my father-in-law, Barney Rawlings, taken in 1993 at a reunion of Allied aviators and the Europeans who had helped them escape from the Germans during the Second World War. (Barney was one of these former airmen.) I regretted that I had not been there to meet her then. In the photo, she looked attractive in a short-sleeved yellow dress, and she had the air of someone energetic and fun-loving. A firecracker. I knew that my in-laws had celebrated a D-Day anniversary with her in France, but they are dead now, and all I had was her address.

Barney, a B-17 copilot, at twenty-three, had been shot down near the French border with Belgium, and he spent several weeks hiding in safe houses before being sent to Paris by the Resistance. Michèle, then a girl of seventeen, guided him from Gare du Nord to an apartment where he was hidden. Later she led him on the Metro from her home in Saint Mandé to the Photomaton near the Louvre to make a photo for a fake I.D. He remembered her as the girl in the blue beret. He was supposed to follow her, and they were not to acknowledge each other.

Michèle and her parents had worked with the Bourgogne network, one of many secret networks of ordinary citizens who wanted to participate nonviolently in the Resistance. These networks, the best known of which was the Comète line, returned over three thousand Allied aviators to safety—across the English Channel or over the Pyrenees. Ominous posters throughout Paris warned citizens against helping stranded airmen—men would be shot, women sent to concentration camps.

I had begun my novel with little more than the title, “The Girl in the Blue Beret,” and the notion that a retired airline captain decides to return to France to find the people who had helped him during the war after his bomber crash-landed. I didn’t know what he would find when he got to France, but I knew that he would be searching for the girl in the blue beret. I especially wanted to find a Frenchman who could inspire a character. I made plans to travel to France.

Finally, I received a letter from Michèle Moët-Agniel. Although she had done few interviews, she agreed to meet me because of the link to my father-in-law. I knew that she and her parents had been arrested and deported in 1944 for helping aviators. She and her mother were sent to Ravensbruck, and her father had died at Buchenwald. I could not match these facts in my mind with the vivacious woman who greeted me so warmly.

She was a widow. Her small apartment near the Bois de Vincennes was filled with massive old furniture. The armoire could have hidden a stray airman. (Actually, many airmen were hidden in armoires during the war.) Michèle wore a bright red skirt, a black sweater, and pearls. She had white curls, intense hazel eyes, and a fluttery, enthusiastic manner. She served me coffee, fruit, chocolate, and pâtisseries.

Her English was much better than my wobbly French, but we consulted her well-thumbed dictionary. She had always intended to write her memoirs, she said. But she had procrastinated. Sighing, she said, “It is too difficile.”

Since the nineteen-eighties she has been active with other former political prisoners in documenting the deportations, and she (a former teacher) takes her scrapbooks about the war years to the schools to show children what life was like then.

As she showed me one of these scrapbooks—full of ration books, letters, news clippings, photos, and a secret notebook in which fifty aviators had written their names and addresses—she seemed flustered and clumsy, scattering the photos and papers.

A photo fell to the floor. Picking it up, she said, “This is Jean Carbonnet. I went with him on the train to guide pilots. Sometimes we went to Noyon or Chauny. Once we went to Lizio, a petite village, where nineteen pilots were hidden. We escorted seven of them to Paris in one journey.”

Michèle described how the handsome young man in the snapshot was arrested with her family, how he survived (barely) Buchenwald, how he was forever changed by the war (“his head turn-ed”). Although he had died years before, he struck my imagination and I thought I had found my Frenchman.

In the scrapbook was a stenciled number cut from the clothing Michèle had been forced to wear as a prisoner. She had no tattoo. As she began to tell of the arrest and deportation, her English lapsed and her French sped up. I was having difficulty following.

After several months in prison, she and her parents, as well as Jean Carbonnet, a priest, and two English airmen who were arrested with them, were deported on the last convoy out of Paris before the city’s liberation in August, 1944. Michèle and her mother arrived at Ravensbruck, a women’s concentration camp where political prisoners were sent. It was a shock beyond imagination. Some weeks later, as punishment for their part in a protest against being forced to work in a munitions factory, they were sent to a labor camp at Koenigsberg (now Chojna, Poland). During the hard months of winter on a windy plateau, five hundred women were forced to construct an airstrip—with their hands. At first Michèle had only a cotton dress to wear. The women dug out large squares of frozen sod and heaved them onto a wagon on rails. They had to shift the rails by hand periodically to extend the track. They had no socks.

In February, 1945, as the Russians closed in, the Germans sent the ambulatory prisoners on a death march back to Ravensbruck, but Michèle hid in the infirmary with her mother, who was too sick to walk.

“The incendie!” she cried.

The runway, the heavy wagons, the sod, the cold.

I tried to piece together what she was saying. The Germans set fire to the camp and fled. The Germans left; the Red Army came.

I decided not to probe further that day. Her son, Francis, drove me around Paris and showed me the various locales that figured in his mother’s story—the Jardin des Plantes, Gare d’Austerlitz, the Colonnade on the rue de Rivoli where the Photomaton was located, and the site of the infamous Gestapo headquarters on the rue des Saussaies.

The camp at Koenigsberg was not extensively documented because there were so few survivors, but I managed to gather some more details about it and Michèle told me more a few days later.

After being rescued by the Russians—almost a year after their arrest—and spending four months in a hospital in Poland, Michèle and her mother arrived at Hotel Lutetia, the welcome center in Paris for returning deportees. Anxiously they searched the bulletin boards for word of Michèle’s father. A cheerful aide said, “Oh, we do have a Monsieur Moët. Wait here.” The aide returned with a long face of apology. “It wasn’t Monsieur Moët. It was Monsieur Chandon.”

I had never heard such a cruel twist of fate, like a mean joke.

I don’t know why she trusted me to transform her story into fiction, but it was clear that she wanted it told. What could I possibly write that would do justice to this painful past? It is never easy to write about actual people, but her resilience, her high spirits, inspired my character, Annette.

I visited Michèle several times, each time filling out more of my picture of wartime Paris and her difficult history, and we became friends. I became aware of the fun she had before the arrest—an exuberant girl ready to take risks, willing to use her schoolgirl advantage to fool the Germans, and infatuated with the “big American boys.”

In the story I wrote, I couldn’t resist inventing a romance between the character Annette and the young man she accompanied on the missions to collect aviators. I thought it gave an added dimension of sorrow—a young couple whose possibility of raising a family was lost. That wasn’t Michèle’s story, but I was writing a novel, I reasoned. On the other hand, I felt strictly bound to use exact details about the Koenigsberg airstrip. In writing about concentration camps, the imagination cannot trump reality.

Eventually, “The Girl in the Blue Beret” appeared in print, and Michèle read it avidly, quickly. I was concerned that her family might think the teenage romance in the novel was true—an embarrassment to her. “I didn’t like that part,” she admitted. But she forgave my liberties, granting that fiction goes in a different direction from a documentary.

When I did a reading at Shakespeare and Company, she was there, and the audience loved her—a real live member of the Resistance. Seeing the impish smile on her face, I imagined again the schoolgirl with a book satchel, strolling through the Bois de Vincennes with several awkward, gawky Americans in ill-fitting French garb following at a distance, trying to keep that blue beret in sight.

In my own walks, I had noticed the many plaques honoring the Resistance on buildings around Paris, and I wondered why there was no plaque on the apartment building where Michèle’s family had sheltered aviators. As an American with typically big ideas, I inquired, although I suspected that I’d be stymied by the French bureaucracy. But it turned out to be a reasonable request, especially coming from abroad from a representative of an Allied aviator. The Moët family was long overdue for recognition, and to my amazement, a plaque was ordered. As the Second World War generation recedes, there has been in France, the same as here, a determined effort to document and remember stories from the war.

This year, National Deportation Day, the last Sunday in April, was also the anniversary of the arrest of the Moët family, April 28, 1944. Sixty-nine years had gone by. At midday a ceremony dedicated the plaque on the building in the suburb of Saint Mandé where Michèle and her family had lived during the war. The day was cold. The street was blocked off for about a hundred of her family and friends (all generations) who were gathered to honor Michèle, her brother, and their parents. I was freezing, and I was the only one wearing a hat, except for one grandmother. Michèle had brought a blue beret, but forgot and left it in the car.

The mayor of Saint Mandé, dashing in his official, ceremonial, red-white-and-blue sash, addressed the crowd, which included two women who, like Michèle, had escorted airmen.

Michèle’s eight-year-old grand-nephew, from a ladder, pulled the string that dropped the bunting and revealed the plaque. Then he read the words aloud.

Après avoir accueilli ici de nombreux aviateurs alliés en 1943 et 1944, la famille Moët à été arrêtée par la milice et remise à la Gestapo le 28 avril 1944, puis déportée. Gèrard Moët est mort à Buchenwald le 6 Mars 1945.

La ville de Saint Mandé en hommage à leur courage et à leur sacrifice. Le 28 avril 2013

(After having sheltered here numerous Allied aviators in 1943 and 1944, the Moët family was arrested by the Milice and taken to the Gestapo April 28, 1944, then deported. Gerard Moët died at Buchenwald March 6, 1945. The town of Saint Mandé in homage to their courage and to their sacrifice. April 28, 2013)

Michèle read a lengthy, carefully prepared text, telling her story movingly, insisting on an explicit, factual accounting of what had happened. Many in her family had not known the whole story before. She told it without faltering until she came to the part where she and her mother returned to France after the end of the war. Her voice broke, and then she wept when she told of finding her little brother again. When they were arrested, he had been left behind on the sidewalk with his teddy bear.

The honor of the plaque was not for her, she stressed, but for her father, who loved France enough to die for it.

Michèle had written her own story at last. She ended by quoting Primo Levi,

N’oubliez pas que cela fut, non ne l’oubliez pas.
(Never forget that this has happened, do not forget it.)