When Fourcade arrived in Lyon, she discovered a city of vast contradictions. On the surface, it was a sober, stolid, conservative place, full of successful and prudent inhabitants who prided themselves on their bourgeois values and disdained any form of excess. To some people, particularly those from Paris or Marseille, Lyon seemed more Swiss than French in its outlook. One observer described it as “a citadel of old money that was never flaunted.”
But there was another Lyon, one that boasted a tradition of sedition and insurrection. In 1793, for example, the people of Lyon revolted en masse against the radical government that had seized power after the French Revolution. The revolt was violently quashed, but it left behind a residue of antigovernment sentiment in the city, as well as a taste for rebellion and independence.
That tradition of insurgency was one reason why so many members of the French wartime resistance were drawn to Lyon. There was another, more practical explanation: It was a big, sprawling city, with a multitude of warehouses, cellars, and other potential hiding places. It also was the hub of several major rail lines and highways, making it easier, if under threat, to move in and out of it.
Whatever the reason, Lyon became known as the capital of the French underground because so many resistance leaders congregated there. “You couldn’t go ten meters without running into an underground comrade whom you had to pretend not to know,” one leader noted. Among them was Jean Moulin, the former French official who would become known as the greatest figure of France’s wartime resistance. More than any other person, Moulin would be responsible for bringing together a wide array of fragmented movements and welding them into a relatively cohesive body.
Not surprisingly, Lyon also became a hotbed of Gestapo and Abwehr activity. The major figure of Nazi repression was Klaus Barbie, the local Gestapo chief, who gained notoriety as “the butcher of Lyon.” Barbie’s four-year campaign of terror and death, which eventually extended beyond the boundaries of the city, claimed more than twenty thousand victims, most of them resistance members and Jews. He personally tortured many of those whose arrests he had ordered, including a thirteen-year-old girl whose parents had been taken into custody as both Jews and resisters. Trying to get information from the girl about her parents, he came “at me with his thin smile, like a knife blade,” she testified after the war. “Then he smashed my face. He kept doing that for seven days.”
Fourcade had no illusions that she would be safe in Lyon, but she had run out of hiding places. As her pregnancy advanced, she also was in need of help and support. She had several close women friends in the city whom she was sure would shelter her while she tried to figure out how to save her network. The first friend she approached—Anne de Mereuil, a writer for Marie-Claire, the French fashion magazine, whom Fourcade had known in Morocco—warmly welcomed her. Mereuil’s apartment in the center of Lyon was tiny, but she invited Marie-Madeleine, Bontinck, and Rodriguez to share it with her. The three women slept in the bedroom, while Rodriguez bedded down on cushions on the floor of the small drawing room.
The day after Mereuil took Fourcade in, the Lyon Gestapo arrested two Alliance couriers—Madeleine Crozet and Michèle Goldschmidt—who had reported to her just days before. They were taken to the Hotel Terminus, the Gestapo’s headquarters in Lyon, for interrogation by Klaus Barbie.
For more than a week, they endured various kinds of torture at Barbie’s hands as part of his effort to get them to talk. They were punched, beaten with riding crops, and given electric shocks. When they continued to deny any knowledge of Alliance and its leaders, they were stripped naked, and Barbie burned their breasts with lighted cigarettes. Nothing worked. Crozet and Goldschmidt repeated their claims that they had never heard of Hedgehog, Eagle, Magpie, or any of a dozen other animal names hurled at them by Barbie. And since they didn’t know them, they said, they obviously had no idea where they were.
During and after the war, Fourcade paid tribute to the remarkable courage of many of her agents, but she made special note of the women. “In my network,” she said, “no woman ever faltered, even under the most extreme kinds of torture. I owe my freedom to many who were questioned until they lost consciousness, but never revealed my whereabouts, even when they knew exactly where I was.”
The news of the two young women’s arrests was swiftly followed by a report confirming that all the agents in the Marseille sector were also in the hands of the Gestapo, including Robert Lynen, the young movie star turned courier. As she stood in Anne de Mereuil’s drawing room listening to the news from Marseille, Fourcade was overwhelmed by the fast-mounting wreckage of her agents’ lives.
Rodriguez, who failed to notice her despair, summoned her back to reality. He asked if she planned to let MI6 know that she and the other Alliance agents in Lyon were still free. She glanced at him, then at Bontinck, de Mereuil, Colonel Kauffmann, and the other operatives who were standing around her. The second wave had been largely destroyed, she later wrote, but she could not allow the sacrifice of its members to be in vain. She repeated the four words that had become her mantra: “We must carry on.”
As Fourcade began assessing the network’s status, she realized that although the situation was bad, Alliance was far from dead. Granted, its principal sectors in the southwest and Nice had been wiped out, but the stations in Vichy, Grenoble, and some parts of central France remained intact. Those in the northern part of the country, including Paris, were still operating well, as were the crucial stations at Bordeaux and on the Atlantic coast. Although a sizable number of her senior agents had been arrested, many of them, including most of her top lieutenants, were still free.
In response to Rodriguez’s cable to London that Fourcade was safe, she received an effusive message of relief from Eddie Keyser, who said he and the others at MI6 had been sure she’d been caught up in the Gestapo raids. He renewed his appeal to her to come to London, but she again turned him down, saying she must begin rebuilding the collapsed sectors before she could even think of leaving. She presumably also had no intention of letting MI6 know about her pregnancy.
At the moment, Fourcade’s first priority was to find a larger headquarters for herself and her staff. Once again, one of her female friends came to the rescue. Marguerite Berne-Churchill, a physician who was already involved in resistance work, invited her to share her apartment. Berne-Churchill’s teenage children volunteered as Alliance couriers.
Berne-Churchill also introduced Fourcade to a French industrialist who had headed a branch of a resistance network in the southwest that had recently been annihilated by the Germans. He placed himself and his agents at Fourcade’s disposal. Four of them became part of a new protection team, whose role was to guard her and other high-level Alliance operatives.
IT WAS NOW EARLY MARCH. As a result of the chaos of the previous six weeks, there had been no Lysander landing since Faye had left in January, but one was definitely needed now. A flood of detailed intelligence reports, including Jacques Stosskopf’s information about the Lorient submarine base, was waiting to be sent. And Fourcade felt an equally urgent need for the return of Faye.
The RAF scheduled the flight for March 8, saying it preferred to use the landing ground near Ussel. Fourcade was assured by Jean Vinzant that the field was still secure despite the German raids in nearby Tulle in early February. For the first time, she decided to be present at a Lysander landing, presumably because of her eagerness to have Faye back.
Rodriguez had gone to Ussel before her and installed his radio set in the attic of Vinzant’s house, where he, she, and the agents scheduled to leave on the Lysander would stay for a few hours before the plane landed. The outgoing passengers were to arrive at the Ussel train station on the night of the eighth.
When she arrived earlier in the day, she met Rodriguez at a safe house near the landing field. While there, she received word that German security forces had surrounded Vinzant’s house, barricaded the roads leading in and out of Ussel, and were driving stakes in the landing field to prevent its use. Dumbfounded by this latest disaster, Fourcade had no idea how she was going to extricate herself and her network. She reckoned without the ingenuity of Vinzant’s elderly maid, Marie.
Marie had been snapping string beans for dinner when the Gestapo pounded on Vinzant’s front door. She answered it, clutching her apron, which was piled high with the beans. Apologizing to the Germans for his “simple-minded” maid, Vinzant ordered her to leave the room. She trudged up the stairs, still holding up her apron and muttering about the nerve of “les Boches.”
The Gestapo officers told Vinzant they had been informed he was hiding a radio transmitter in his house. Ignoring his protests, they began ransacking the ground floor. When they found nothing, they stormed upstairs and again came up empty-handed. As they climbed the stairs to the attic, Vinzant behind them, they passed Marie, still holding the edges of her apron high, coming down. To Vinzant’s astonishment, their search again turned up nothing.
Drenched with sweat, Vinzant collapsed in a chair after they had left. Marie entered the room. “Have they gone?” she asked. Then, with a grin, she lifted up her apron: “Your radio, it’s very heavy, Monsieur.”
She told Vinzant she had heard strange tapping sounds coming from the attic the night before, and, when the Gestapo came, she figured that the source of the noise might be the reason “les sales Boches” were there. Years after the war, Vinzant would tell an interviewer: “I had always thought she was a simple country woman. Thank God she knew about the radio and had the wit to go to the attic, to get it and clean up the mess we had made. She saved my life, as so often the lives of many of us were saved by simple, brave citizens everywhere in France.”
Although Marie’s quick-wittedness had indeed saved Rodriguez’s transmitter and Vinzant, the situation was still dire. German forces had set up checkpoints on every road out of Ussel and were conducting extensive searches of the trains leaving and entering the town. Somehow Fourcade had to warn the three London-bound agents, who were scheduled to arrive in Ussel by train that evening. One of them was Pierre Dallas, the head of Alliance’s transportation unit, who was heading to Britain for a month of advanced training.
After sending a terse message to London canceling the Lysander flight, she told one of Vinzant’s agents—a country doctor—about her dilemma. He replied that he had an ausweis allowing him to transport patients in his car at any time of the day or night. He would tell the Germans that she was a patient of his, whom he was taking to the city of Clermont-Ferrand for an immediate operation. Rodriguez would pose as her husband. After they’d cleared the roadblock, he would drive them to the railway station closest to Ussel so they could catch the next train and try to intercept the inbound agents at a station hub where they would change trains.
Fourcade had no trouble appearing ill when the doctor’s car was waved over by a German sentry at one of the checkpoints. She was trembling with fear and her face was bathed in sweat as the German guard’s flashlight swept over her in the car’s backseat. The doctor explained the urgent reason for his travel and produced his ausweis and identity papers.
After a few excruciating moments, the guard removed the roadblock, and the doctor drove off at top speed. When he pulled up at the station, their train had just left, and their rescuer again pressed down on the car’s accelerator, shouting that they would catch it at the next station. After a few nail-biting minutes, Fourcade and Rodriguez did get to the second station just a few seconds before the train pulled out. As they jumped from the car, Fourcade hurriedly thanked the doctor for saving their lives. Shrugging, he replied, “That’s what doctors are for, madame.”
Once aboard the train, she and Rodriguez anxiously checked their watches, agonizing over whether they would make it to the junction in time. When their train finally pulled in, they got off and hurried into the buffet, squinting through the smoky haze to try to locate their colleagues. Fourcade was the first to spot them, sitting uncomfortably at a table with a group of German soldiers on leave. As the three looked up in surprise, she walked past them without a sign of recognition and murmured under her breath, “Back to Lyon.”
“Merde alors,” Pierre Dallas muttered back.
AFTER HER RETURN TO LYON, Marie-Madeleine looked so ill that Marguerite Berne-Churchill summoned a doctor. When he asked how she felt, she told him she suffered from chronic insomnia, and that when she did grab a few hours of sleep, she was plagued with nightmares. She ate very little. Every time she tried to do so, she said, she was racked with stomach pains. She didn’t tell him that she also smoked three packs of cigarettes a day.
After examining her, he announced that she was suffering from a severe case of nerves: Marie-Madeleine made no mention in her memoirs of any discussion of her pregnancy. According to her, the doctor prescribed plenty of sleep and a respite from the stress of whatever she was doing. Staring at him in disbelief, she struggled hard not to laugh. He was talking sheer fantasy! After docilely agreeing to do as he said, she sent a message to London rescheduling the aborted Lysander landing for the night of March 11 at Alliance’s other landing field, near the banks of the Saône River outside Lyon.
She stayed up the entire night of the eleventh, waiting for news of the landing and Faye’s safe return. But instead of Faye, her first visitor the following morning was Pierre Dallas, who was supposed to have been on the Lysander flight back to Britain. He and his crew had waited all night, he said, but the plane didn’t come, even though the weather was perfect. Marie-Madeleine felt faint. Had the plane crashed? Had she lost Faye when she needed him most? Throughout the rest of the day, she tried to focus on her work, with little success.
Late that evening, she received word from London that Faye was all right. The pilot of his plane had gotten lost the night before and had been forced to return to his base in Britain. The plane had already taken off again and would be at the Saône airfield early in the morning. Dallas and the other passengers were alerted, and they, along with the reception crew, headed for the field.
When Faye walked in the following day, Marie-Madeleine broke down, her body shaking with the convulsive sobs she’d been suppressing for days. Faye stared down at her. “Marie-Madeleine, there’s nothing left of you!” he said. “I don’t recognize you anymore.” She responded with a tremulous laugh. He was referring not only to her thinness but to the color of her hair, which was now bright red. (As part of an ongoing effort to change her appearance, she would dye her hair a total of five times during the war.)
But just as she was rejoicing in Faye’s return, the Germans struck again. In Paris, Gestapo agents rounded up several Alliance radio operators and couriers. The Duke of Magenta, head of Alliance’s operations in the northern part of the country and the main target of the Gestapo raid, managed to escape and headed back to the Château de Sully, his grand ancestral estate in the heart of Burgundy.
The Gestapo tracked him there, and a few days later, several German plainclothesmen crossed the moat in front of the château and pounded on its door. The duke’s wife, Marguerite, ushered them in. The château contained dozens of rooms, which the ducal couple used to their advantage. The duchess, who was pregnant with her fourth child, allowed the Gestapo to inspect all the rooms, knowing that her husband was “dodging from room to room, using secret doors and odd recesses known only to him.” After searching for hours the Germans finally gave up, saying they would return. Before they did so, Alliance agents spirited the duke, the duchess, and their three small children out of France and into Switzerland.
That good news, however, was overshadowed by the fact that the Germans had captured the entire Alliance network in Vichy—thirty-five operatives in all. Among others caught up in this new onslaught of raids were members of Marie-Madeleine’s own family. Her elder sister, Yvonne, who had been tangentially involved in the network, was arrested by Italian secret police in Nice. Although Yvonne’s husband, Georges Georges-Picot, had stayed aloof from resistance work, he was warned that as Marie-Madeleine’s brother-in-law, he was on the target list, too. Friends helped him escape to Spain.
Also on that list, to Marie-Madeleine’s horror, were her own two children. She received a message from the head of her son’s boarding school that the Gestapo had ordered him to turn Christian over to them as a hostage, in order to force her to give herself up. He had refused. Marie-Madeleine’s mother, who had been caring for Béatrice at her villa on the Côte d’Azur, worried that the Germans would make the same demand of her.
Marie-Madeleine made arrangements to bring both children to Lyon and hand them over to Amitie Chretienne, a Lyon-based organization run by two Catholic priests that had helped save hundreds of Jewish children and others at risk by hiding them in private homes or Catholic institutions like convents and schools. The group promised to smuggle Christian and Béatrice out of France and into Switzerland, where her mother owned a chalet.
During her brief, clandestine stay in Toulouse in January, just three months earlier, Marie-Madeleine had managed to see Christian. But she had not been with Béatrice for almost a year, ever since she had stayed with her during her hospitalization at the Toulouse clinic. She desperately wanted to see her son and daughter now, if only for a few minutes, to explain what was happening and to kiss them and say goodbye. But she remembered how Navarre had been arrested in 1941 after making arrangements to see his family before attempting to escape from France. She decided that for the children’s safety and that of the network, she could not risk a meeting.
Monique Bontinck had taken care of the children since their arrival in Lyon. Shortly before they left, Marie-Madeleine asked Bontinck to walk them past the window of Marguerite Berne-Churchill’s apartment. She looked down at her son and daughter, who appeared lost and helpless, with no idea of what was happening to them. “As I watched them walk past me,” she recalled, “I had the feeling of being buried alive.”
She was not informed until much later that the children’s escape route to Switzerland had been blocked and that the French-Swiss border was bristling with German patrols. Just before their party reached there, the French peasants to whom the children had been entrusted refused to go any farther and simply pointed to the barbed wire marking the frontier. Christian and Béatrice were forced to evade the patrols and cross the border alone. “My son came through the test with flying colors and saved his sister,” Marie-Madeleine noted. “He was 12 and she was 10.”
ALTHOUGH DEEPLY WORRIED ABOUT her children, Marie-Madeleine had little time to focus on their departure and uncertain fate. Her most immediate concern now was the safety of the agents who were with her in Lyon. As she knew, the Gestapo noose was fast tightening around her and her headquarters. To strengthen security, she split up her staff and sent them to new locations. She and Rodriguez left Berne-Churchill’s apartment to take cover in a private clinic on the outskirts of Lyon, where a nurse involved in the resistance, known to Marie-Madeleine as Madame Prudon-Guenard, watched out for them and also likely monitored Marie-Madeleine’s last weeks of pregnancy.
Faye and Bontinck, meanwhile, moved to an apartment in downtown Lyon, joined by Marguerite Brouillet, Marie-Madeleine’s friend from Le Lavandou, whose house had been the base for Alliance’s rescue of General Giraud the previous November. Also sent to new quarters were the security chief Ernest Siegrist and Pierre Dallas’s Avia team.
The increasing worry over security affected Rodriguez most directly. In an attempt to keep German direction-finding vans from zeroing in on him and his radio set, he roamed around the countryside near Lyon, transmitting from various places. As he noted in a letter to MI6 early that spring, his peripatetic travel was mostly on foot, meaning that he had to carry his heavy, bulky set from place to place. “Last Sunday,” he wrote, “I had to walk 9 miles carrying the set and the aerial—you can guess what a sport that is. Incidentally, the handle of the case is not strong enough—mine has broken twice—and I can tell you it is not very easy to carry without a handle.”
A RADIO SET LIKE THOSE USED BY FERDINAND RODRIGUEZ AND OTHER ALLIANCE RADIO OPERATORS TO TRANSMIT TO LONDON
Rodriguez proposed that MI6 provide him with additional transmitters that could be left in various locations, so that he would not have to put himself constantly at risk by carrying his only set. Commenting on Rodriguez’s letter, Kenneth Cohen noted that the network “had been more or less on the run during the previous two months” and urged that more sets be sent to Rodriguez immediately.
But none had yet arrived by early April, and Rodriguez was still carrying around his case. In the late morning of April 7, he transmitted from Meyzieux, a small town near Lyon. London had demanded several repetitions of one of his messages, and realizing that he had been on the air for a dangerously long period, he abruptly cut off contact, retrieved his antenna, and set off by foot back to Lyon.
As he walked past the town’s central square, he noticed a black car, whose rear windows were shielded by dark blinds, pull up behind him. Two men got out and hurried toward him. Rodriguez knew instantly who they were—Gestapo agents—and approached a priest who was in the square. “Act as if you know me,” he murmured to the priest. “Talk to me as if we’re old friends.” The startled priest did as he was told, and the two men were chatting when the plainclothesmen approached them, one with a revolver in his hand. “Police!” the man with the gun yelled in German. “Show us what you have in your suitcase.”
Rodriguez hurled his set at the head of the agent and sprinted across the square. He was chased by his pursuers, both of whom began shooting at him. Bullets crashed into the windows of nearby shops, and customers took cover.
A champion sprinter in high school, Rodriguez lengthened his lead, dashing down one street and then another. When he reached the outskirts of the town, he saw an open gate that fronted a large vegetable garden. He darted in, observed by an old gardener, whose bald head was shielded from the sun by a large straw hat. Trying desperately to catch his breath, Rodriguez asked the bewildered man if he had fought in the 1914–18 war. “Of course,” the gardener replied. “Then please hide me,” Rodriguez panted. “I’m being chased by the Germans.” Without hesitation, the man escorted him to the back of the garden and hid him behind a woodpile. Then he went to summon the mistress of the house.
Within a few minutes, he returned with a woman in late middle age who introduced herself as Madame Clément. In a ragged voice, Rodriguez explained who he was and what had happened. He asked her if she knew a man named Mathieu, an Alliance agent who lived in the area and who had selected the places from which Rodriguez transmitted. Once again, luck was with him: Madame Clément’s husband, as it turned out, was also in the resistance and had worked with Mathieu. Madame Clément went back to her house and soon returned, a glass of red wine in her hand. “Drink it,” she told Rodriguez. “It will do you good.” She had contacted Mathieu, and he was sending someone to take Rodriguez away. She warned him that the Germans were searching the town but added that its postmaster, whose office was next door and who had seen him enter the garden, had directed them to the other end of Meyzieux.
Rodriguez waited for what seemed an eternity. Finally, a teenage boy—Mathieu’s son—arrived, bringing with him two bicycles. After Madame Clément inspected the road and gave an all-clear signal, the boy, followed by Rodriguez, bicycled to a small house outside the village. He told the elderly woman who lived there that Rodriguez was an escaped French prisoner of war and asked her to hide him for a couple of days. She agreed. When Rodriguez finally returned to Lyon, the Nazis had embarked on an intensive citywide search for him, and Marie-Madeleine knew she had to get him out of there as fast as possible. He was soon spirited away to Paris.
For Marie-Madeleine, Lyon had become a tinderbox. The Germans had on their payroll dozens of French informers, whose job was to loiter in cafés and on street corners, eavesdropping on conversations and taking note of anyone they found suspicious. Marie-Madeleine’s concern was not eased by an MI6 radio message that strongly urged her to leave the city.
On the morning of May 16, Monique Bontinck failed to show up as scheduled at the clinic where Marie-Madeleine was hiding. In midafternoon, the phone rang at the clinic, and Madame Prudon-Guenard, the nurse who acted as Marie-Madeleine’s protector, handed it to her. Bontinck, her voice trembling, told her that she had badly hurt her foot and couldn’t come that day, and neither could the others. She abruptly hung up.
Marie-Madeleine instantly understood the meaning of Bontinck’s message: Her staff in Lyon had all been caught. Whom could she turn to now? She wanted to rush out and find out what had happened, but Madame Prudon-Guenard gently told her she couldn’t appear on the street. “Sit quite still,” she said, “and tell me what to do.” Marie-Madeleine asked her to warn Anne de Mereuil and Marguerite Berne-Churchill, her previous hosts in Lyon, that they were in great danger, and to tell them to alert other members of the network.
Finding it hard to breathe, Marie-Madeleine waited for further news. Early in the evening, the door to her room in the clinic abruptly opened and Faye rushed in. Struggling to catch his breath, he exclaimed that he had just escaped. When she saw him, she later noted, “the blood flowed to my heart again.” She fetched him a glass of water, and after he’d drained it, he told her what had happened.
He, Bontinck, Brouillet, and three male agents had been having lunch at their apartment when four French police inspectors burst in. Faye told the police he and the others were Vichy secret agents working for Marshal Pétain. Perplexed by his claim, two policemen took Faye and his male colleagues to the central police station for questioning, while the other two inspectors remained in the apartment to guard Bontinck and Brouillet. When the car reached the station and all the men got out, Faye and the other Alliance agents broke free from their captors and sprinted down the crowded street, melting into a throng of pedestrians and disappearing from view.
Meanwhile, at the apartment, Bontinck managed to evade her guards’ attention long enough to warn Marie-Madeleine. When the two policemen began searching the living room and bedrooms, Marie-Madeleine’s assistant sneaked into the kitchen, rolled up a pile of coded messages into a paper log, lit a flame on the gas stove, and burned the paper. “My guards burst into the kitchen, but it was too late,” she recalled. “There was nothing left but ashes.” They were, she noted in a masterpiece of understatement, “in a pretty bad mood.”
Bontinck and Brouillet were forced to stay at the apartment for several days as bait for a “mousetrap”—a common Vichy police and Gestapo tactic of lying in wait in the house or apartment of an arrested résistant to see if other members of his or her network would show up. But no other Alliance agents appeared, and Brouillet was taken away to jail. Bontinck, for her part, was told she would be turned over to the Gestapo that afternoon.
With the saddest expression she could muster, Bontinck asked her captors if she could first take a bath, saying that it probably would be her last. They agreed but told her to hurry. She went into the bathroom, turned on the taps of the tub full blast, and then retraced her steps. It was a beautiful spring day, and her guards had gone out for a smoke on the balcony. Taking off her shoes, she tiptoed down the hallway, quietly opened the front door, and raced down four flights of stairs. By the time she got to the ground floor, she could hear shouts from the policemen in the stairwell.
Knowing that the front of the apartment building was under police surveillance, Bontinck ran into the courtyard, climbed atop a trash can, scaled a wall next to it, and yanked open the back door of an adjacent building. She made her way to its entrance, which faced a parallel street, and, as calmly as she could, put on her shoes, walked out, and caught a passing tram. Within a few minutes, she was at the office of a Lyon lawyer and part-time Alliance agent, who found her a hiding place.
The Gestapo, informed by the French police about the various escapes of the Alliance agents, began conducting house-to-house searches. Marie-Madeleine was taken from the clinic by Madame Prudon-Guenard and hidden in a seamy hotel frequented by prostitutes. Faye and the other agents found their own temporary hideouts. Thanks to Marguerite Berne-Churchill, who had close contacts with the French Red Cross, several of the fugitives—including Faye, Bontinck, and Brouillet, who was rescued from jail—were soon spirited out of Lyon in Red Cross ambulances.
With the exception of Ernest Siegrist, Marie-Madeleine was the last member of the Alliance headquarters left in Lyon. About to give birth, she was hidden away by her female friends and guarded by Siegrist. Her baby, a boy, was born in June.
But she had very little time with her newborn son. He was entrusted to the care of Monique Bontinck, who whisked him away to an Alliance hideout in the south of France. Meanwhile, Marie-Madeleine, with new identity documents forged by Siegrist, left to join Faye and Rodriguez in Paris, the most Gestapo-ridden part of the country.