The Comet Line
Andree “Dedee” de Jongh was imprisoned first at the French Chateau Neuf prison in Bayonne to be interrogated by the Gestapo. They began torturing her for answers, but she would tell them nothing.
Dedee’s distraught father, hearing of her capture and the arrest of the three airmen, considered a plan to rescue the four from Chateau Neuf. The Germans were convinced her father headed the escape line. She cleverly avoided revealing her real name, and no one recognized her as Andree de Jongh. Had they known her real name, it would have led the Germans directly to her father in Paris. The escape plan to free Dedee was abandoned when Frederic de Jongh realized how impenetrable Chateau Neuf was.
Tante Go conceived another rescue plan which involved a key maker of all the locks at a new prison where the four had been transferred to a week later, the Villa Chagrin. For unexplained reasons, the plan failed and was never carried out.
Dedee passed her time in her cell singing opera much to the annoyance of her guards, until she became so weak from hunger and the cold to continue. But the torturing continued, and she remained relentless in pleading her innocence. Then finally, by eventually admitting she was the chief of the escape organization, she hoped it would take attention away from her father.
“Who do you work for? Who is the leader of your escape line? Where are the other safe houses from here to Brussels?” the Gestapo officer yelled as he threatened more physical harm to her than she could continue to bear. Rather than implicate other members of the Comet Line, she decided to take full responsibility for the escape line. Her German captors needed to interrogate her twenty times before she finally confessed.
“My name is Andree de Jongh and I am the leader of the Comet Line you are referring to. There are no others in the group at this time. The guide who takes us over the mountains into Spain is gone and I doubt I will ever find him. As a matter of fact, no one will find him if he chooses not to be found. I pay the lady at the house in Urrugne to rent her house. She is not aware who any of these people are. What else do you want to know?” Dedee said with a serious and painful look on her face.
“Do you take me for a fool?” the Gestapo agent yelled back as he slapped Dedee across the face. “You, a young girl barely sixteen, expect me to believe that you are in charge of an underground escape movement from Belgium to Spain?”
“It is true. I am the one you are looking for, no one else.”
“This is not possible. I won’t listen to this dribble. Take her to Fresnes prison in Paris. I won’t waste my time with this little girl. Let them handle her.”
Dedee tried to remain calm while the German panel truck opened and she and the three airmen were ordered to get in. Another man entered the truck, obviously another German agent or a Belgian traitor working for the Germans. The van drove several miles to the Bayonne train station and the Germans led the four prisoners onto the next train to Paris. Once Frederic de Jongh heard this news, he too started to head back to Paris to take over leadership of the line.
Jean-Francois Nothomb (Franco), a member of the Comet Line and a close friend of Dedee, coincidentally was on the same train as Dedee and the airmen. When they arrived in the city, Franco drove his carriage by a window at police headquarters where Dedee gave him a wink to show that she had seen him. Shortly after, the prisoners were taken to Fresnes prison in the outskirts of the city. Franco quickly headed to see her father to give him the news.
When the prisoners were driven to Fresnes, they drove through the main entrance and were taken inside to a holding cell. Dedee was separated from the three airmen and she thought she would never see them again. The women’s cells were segregated from the men. The men’s cells were on an upper floor above the women’s cells. Fresnes would be where the men and women would be officially charged and tried in expectation of some ultimate punishment, imprisonment or execution at St. Gilles prison in Brussels, or a transfer to a work or concentration camp somewhere in Germany.
Dedee was led in front of the warden at Fresnes, a member of the Belgian police force who administered the prison until Gestapo agents took over the interrogation segment. He informed Dedee, who had claimed her name to be Lucille Mongeon when she was arrested, she would be placed in an isolated cell pending the arrival of the Gestapo the following morning.
The cell was no larger than six feet wide by eight feet long. It had a rolled up mattress against the wall, a bucket to be used as a toilet, and a small basin with a metal ewer, seemingly to be used for bathing. The floor was tiled, and there was a small frosted window eight feet up the cell wall, allowing some light from outside, but providing no fresh air. In the warden’s office earlier, a German guard had taken Dedee’s personal belongings-money, watch, identity papers, if any, and placed them all in an envelope labeled Lucille Mongeon. Dedee was not fed that day and the night would pass very slowly in a dark, isolated and cold cell.
Dawn came quickly, it seemed. Dedee had fortunately managed to get some sleep as she pondered what to expect next. Although there appeared to be a lot of commotion in the hall outside her cell, her cell door was not opened until a few hours later. She had no idea what went on, since her cell door had no window in it.
She was then escorted down a flight of stairs by a matron and turned over to a Gestapo agent. He took Dedee out of the prison into a car parked near the entrance gate. She remained silent as the car seemed to be heading back into the city. She was at a loss as to where she was being taken, and what to expect, but her questions were answered when the driver pulled up in front of Gestapo headquarters in Paris.
Dedee was led to a second floor office by the Gestapo agent and was ordered to sit in a chair facing the center of a desk.
“It will be so much better if you cooperate and tell me everything, Mademoiselle Mongeon,” the agent stated.
“I don’t know what you are talking about,” she replied.
The agent stared at Dedee, picked up a package of cigarettes and offered her one. She declined. As he dropped the package on the desk, he swung his right arm in the same instant, and his hand hit the left side of Dedee’s face with full force. Her head jerked backwards from the blow.
This would be her initiation to the German’s way of interrogating prisoners.
Over the next two hours, questions were thrown at her, interspersed with threats of bodily harm if she didn’t cooperate. Dedee remained steadfast and said nothing. She wasn’t about to admit that she ran the entire Comet Line again, for fear of instigating the agent like the one in Bayonne who didn’t believe someone so young could be in charge of an escape organization.
The agent’s voice started getting louder and his heavy hand landed again across her face with full force. Dedee soon lost her hearing in one ear, a condition which persisted for several days.
After she had been in the room with the agent for several hours, she was marched out of his office into another room decorated only with a table and a few chairs, and left there for a few hours. The silence enabled Dedee to rest for a time while she tried to regain her composure.
The afternoon session was a repetition of the morning session, and the agent’s frustration grew to anger at Dedee’s insistence of her innocence of any crime. Since when was it a crime to be talking to three men in a boarding house she often stayed at when in the Bayonne area? She claimed she had no idea who these men were at the time of her arrest. As the afternoon produced nothing further for the agent, he drove her back to Fresnes.
Dedee had not eaten anything all day and the food passed into her cell consisted only of carrot soup with a small piece of bread and a pat of butter. The cell was damp and cold, and there was only a small pipe across the cell wall about four feet high, which provided heat from hot water running through it. She lay on her mattress on the tile floor and fell asleep from exhaustion.
Early the next morning, her cell door opened and a matron asked her to hand over the toilet bucket. A few minutes later, the matron returned with water for her washing bowl and a cleaning rag. Dedee was told that after she washed herself, she needed to swab the cell floor using the same water. A short while later, the lock in her cell door was opened again, and an aluminum cup with boiling hot coffee and a slice of bread with another pat of butter were placed on the floor at the door of the cell.
An hour later, Dedee was escorted down the flight of stairs to the welcome of the Gestapo agent again. This time he brought her into an interrogation room in the prison.
“Where were you taking the three men in Bayonne? Where had they been before they were with you?” he asked.
“I don’t know what you are talking about.”
“The three men are here, Mademoiselle, at Fresnes. Two Americans and one British airman. We know all about your operation, Lucille. We know the routes you use from Brussels, and the one to get over the Pyrenees to Spain. So, why not just tell me who you work for and we can stop all this foolishness.”
The two American pilots were told by the Germans that they would be shot as spies if they did not prove they were officers by reconstructing every stage of their journey from Belgium to the Pyrenees.
A few minutes later, a knock on the interrogation door startled Dedee. As the door opened, there stood one of the Americans with bruises on his face and in shackles.
“Ah, one of the Americans. So nice of you to join us. I believe you two have met before,” he said as he pointed to Dedee with a sneer on his face.
“Yes, she is the woman from the house where we were staying. I don’t know her name,” the airman answered.
“Isn’t she the one who brought you to Bayonne?”
“Her? No. This woman was already at the boarding house. I think she is a friend of the woman who owns the house. The woman who brought us there was named Deeday, or something like that. She left us with a guide who was going to take us over the mountains. But he got sick, and we were waiting for him to get better. He’s got some cabin in the mountains that he goes to.”
“Do you know what we do to people who lie to us, Captain?”
“I’m not lying. The other men will tell you the same. She has nothing to do with us.”
The second American pilot and the British airman all individually told the Gestapo agent the same story.
“I don’t believe any of you. I think this little fraulein has more to do with this, but it doesn’t matter. We have the escape routes you use from Bayonne to Brussels, and we will clean up this escape group in the next two weeks. Take her back to her cell. We will deal with her later.”
Dedee was angered by this news, but couldn’t do anything about it. Two days later, Dedee faced the prison warden again in his office.
“Mademoiselle Lucille Mongeon, you have been found guilty of collaboration with the enemy and aiding them to escape capture. This is a violation of the German authority and punishable by death. You will be sent tomorrow to Ravensbruck concentration camp where a date will be determined for your execution.”
That night she felt nauseated at the thought of facing a firing squad and found herself short of breath in her cell. She climbed onto the pipe fastened to the wall and could reach the frosted window. She pounded on the glass several times until the glass panel shattered and glass fell to the ground in the courtyard below. She took in deep breaths of fresh air.
Suddenly, from the men’s section above her, she heard a cough, a very special cough. This was her father’s cough. Dedee could always recognize her father’s cough, she was certain. Her heart began to pound. Was he here too?
She frantically thought how to communicate with him. She couldn’t yell. There were guards there at all times. Then a thought flashed her mind. Her father used to always sing the same song to her when she was a child. She held her mouth near the broken window pane and began to sing that song.
“Je suis la fille de mon pere…”
Nothing happened. She did not want to sing it too loud, just loud enough to reach the floor above. She tried a second time, a little louder. Still, there was no response. If it was indeed her father, either he could not hear her or perhaps suffered from ear blockage from similar beatings that she had suffered.
The next morning, she was processed for removal at Fresnes and put on a train for Ravensbruck.
After her arrest, Jean-Francois Nothomb, better known by his code name Franco, became Comet’s leader in the France/Spain border area, and his first move was to retain Florentino as his main guide over the mountains. Jean-Francois had been a Belgian prisoner of war who had escaped in September 1941. At the time, his plans were to try to get to England or to the Congo, a Belgian colony at the time, where he hoped to join the anti-Nazi struggle. Instead, in August 1942, he was convinced by Georges d’Oultremont to join the Comet Line. Dedee had trained Jean-Francois about the France-Spain border area and the Bidassoa River where many crossings were made into Spain.
While Franco now handled the southern crossings into Spain with his Basque mountaineer Florentino, a new Comet Line member was assigned to run the Brussels operation…Jean Greindl, code name Nemo. He ran a Red Cross section in Brussels that cared for needy children, and set up the Brussels headquarters for the escape line right on the premises. Nemo was entrusted to rebuild the Brussels operation which had severely been infiltrated by fake American airmen, while Franco and Florentino continued to make border crossings and to alert the British in Madrid of Dedee’s arrest. However, fearing that their old escape routes were at risk, Franco and others began to use a new route south to Bordeaux, France instead of Bayonne. Throughout this time, no one heard any further news about Dedee, whether she was still alive or not.
Back in Belgium in early 1943, a member of the Brussels group received a circular from the underground movement warning the group about a man who posed as an English captain, Captain Jackson, but spoke English with a Canadian accent. Included in the circular was full description of the man along with two women who worked with him…his name, Prosper Dezitter. Dezitter and his mistress had been responsible for nearly one hundred Belgian underground workers delivered to the Germans. Knowing that airmen had been told that Belgian priests were usually trustworthy, Dezitter had passed the word around the clergy that he could help evading airmen. As the word spread, Dezitter began taking evaders to Brussels and then to Paris to the Hotel Piccadilly. As the evaders were moved from the hotel to a different location, the German police would arrest all of them, and release Dezitter when the others were whisked away.
In the spring of 1943, while Prosper Dezitter continued his infiltration of the Comet Line primarily in Belgium, the escape lines around Paris were also infiltrated, this time by a man calling himself Jean Masson. A member of the Belgian Resistance had introduced Masson to Frederic de Jongh and no one bothered to check his background. Had they done so, they would have discovered that he was sought by the Belgian police. Masson was also known as Pierre Boulain, but his real name was Jacques Desoubrie, a small fair-haired man with prominent blue eyes.
“Monsieur de Jongh, I can help you. I know many places between Brussels and Paris. I am French, but I was raised mostly in the Brussels area. All I ask is that you give me a chance to prove myself,” Desoubrie said while using the alias of Jean Masson.
“We are always in need of good men, Monsieur Masson, but we need to be very careful. How do I know you aren’t secretly working for the Gestapo? We have had too many spies pretending to want to help, and we’ve had hundreds of our people arrested in the past six months since my daughter was arrested herself in Urrugne,” Frederic questioned.
“Look at me, Monsieur.” Masson said with a broad smile on his youthful face, “I will do anything to help people escape from the Germans to a safer place. Try me out doing simple jobs until you feel comfortable that I’m telling you the truth. Only after you believe my intentions do I ask to do more for you.”
“Very well, I’ll take a chance with you. Come back tomorrow and I’ll have you take some information I need to get to Brussels within a few days.”
After several courier runs between Paris and Brussels, Masson carried a message back to Frederic de Jongh that a large group of airmen would arrive in Paris on June 7. He had been asked to guide these men to Paris. The group consisted of five English airmen and an American. They all arrived at de Jongh’s location in Paris. He walked up to Frederic with his boyish smile and big blue eyes and shook his hand. As if on cue, a dozen German policemen appeared and arrested the whole group, including de Jongh. Frederic looked at Masson and shrugged.
“You are nothing but a traitor to your own people. What are you getting for this from the Germans, your thirty pieces of silver?”
“Oh, no Monsieur de Jongh, it is more like five thousand francs for each airman, and twenty-five thousand for you. And once we arrest the others in the Comet Line from here to Brussels, I get ten thousand for each of them too. Does that sound like just thirty pieces of silver to you?”
“Someone will get you one day, you miserable man,” de Jongh replied.
“But it won’t be you, will it Monsieur de Jongh? You won’t live to see that day.”
Ironically, Jean-Francois witnessed the arrests from a short distance away, and by sheer luck, managed to get away. The Comet Line was crumbling. Not only had Dedee’s father been arrested, but forty-two more Comet members were arrested as well in the following weeks. Jean-Francois feared the network would completely collapse unless something was done immediately. He quickly returned to Bayonne in the south of France to try to figure out how to salvage the Line. He also contacted MI9 in Madrid, seeking their advice.