FEBRUARY 23, 1942
FORT MONT-VALÉRIEN, FRANCE
DAWN
The chapel is a perfect place for prayer. This small stone building was once a place of worship. Now it is a holding cell.
Monday morning. A wooded hilltop fortress outside Paris. Armed guards outside the thick wooden doors. Two tall stained glass windows letting in pale winter light. Benches without a backrest, once pews, offer a place to sit. The whitewashed walls are dingy and covered in handwriting. Seven members of the Groupe du Musée de l’Homme stand together for the last time in their lives, talking nervous and wondering inside if death will hurt.
It is almost seven weeks since a German court sentenced Pierre Walter, Léon Maurice Nordmann, Georges Ithier, Jules Andrieu, René Sénéchal, Boris Vildé, and Anatole Lewitsky to be shot. The women in their group, including librarian Yvonne Oddon and art historian Agnès Humbert, were also convicted. French law prevents the execution of a woman, so they have been sentenced to five years hard labor in a German concentration camp instead. If it can be considered lucky to be allowed to live behind barbed wire, endure brutal discipline, and live on a starvation diet, then that can be said of these women from Groupe du Musée de l’Homme—the Germans much preferring to transport convicted women to Germany for a quick beheading.
The group was at the forefront of homegrown rebellion until the first arrests were made a year ago in January. Résistance lit a fire in the people of Paris that burned far beyond this group of museum employees.
“It is so inspiring to know that there are thousands and thousands of Parisians, anonymous and unknown, working like us—often better than us—to organize a resistance movement that will soon become a liberation struggle,” Agnès Humbert journaled just a few days before her own arrest in March.
The group lives on. Germaine Tillion, a thirty-four-year-old ethnographer from the Musée de l’Homme, has taken charge of the Resistance activities. Even as the arrests continued throughout 1941 her identity was never revealed. Tillion originally joined the organization to “do something,” not knowing what that might be. She now runs a network numbering several hundred operatives. Tillion has boldly come to the prisoners’ aid, sending food when she can, and even wrote a letter to Adolf Hitler requesting clemency for the condemned. Tillion is in touch with Britain’s SOE. Not having a radio of her own, she works closely with the one-legged Virginia Hall in Lyon to transmit information back to London.
And yet, despite Tillion’s almost miraculous ability to avoid detection, the Nazi investigation of the Groupe du Musée de l’Homme was exceptionally thorough. Information was gathered through torture and paid collaborators, leading to a series of arrests spread out over several months. The men and women were incarcerated first in Cherche-Midi Prison before being transferred to the equally medieval Fresnes penitentiary south of Paris. The Nazis are making Fresnes their preferred choice for captured Resistance and SOE operatives. Once again, however, it is the Groupe du Musée de l’Homme who have had the distinction of going first.
The trial itself was on January 8 of this year. The charge was espionage.
Then came the waiting.
It is forty-six long days since the verdict. Each man in this chapel has been forced to sit and contemplate his impending death. Forty-six days without hope or a future. Ample time to ponder at length the patriotic decision to be resistant and whether that choice will make a lasting difference. They will never know. Written on these walls are the last words of men who went before—condemned who knew precisely how the Groupe du Musée de l’Homme feel right now. Seventy prisoners were shot here on a single day in December. Many scratched farewells into the rock before being led to the post.
It is bitter cold. The chapel is unheated. Execution posts rise from the frozen mud one hundred yards outside. Patches of snow litter the forest where they will be shot. Soldiers wearing ankle-length gray winter coats and black gloves make small talk, bitch about the cold, and tell bad jokes as they wait to do their job. Hell of a way to start the week.
Finally, the Germans come for the condemned.
The chapel doors open. The seven are led out. Unnervingly, they break into song. “The beautiful green hills, French country in full splendor,” the men cry, the words of “Vive la France” echoing across the hilltop.
“How beautiful life can be. It feels like a romance. Vive la France. Vive la France.”
Long live France.
Shooting seven men requires a massive firing squad. At least sixty armed soldiers face the prisoners as they are lashed to the thick wooden poles, hands tied behind their backs. The executioners stand extremely near—almost close enough to touch. The German teenagers listen for the order to ziel—aim.
The view from Mont-Valérien is spectacular, all of Paris spread out beneath the mountain, the Seine a thick artery coursing through a city once revered for its intellectual light and freedom.
A blindfold is placed over the eyes of all seven. They have seen Paris for the last time. Boyish German soldiers find it unnerving to look into the eyes of a man as they kill him, so the courtesy of a blindfold is as much for the firing squad as the men being shot.
No one misses.
Yet the Resistance lives on.
Vive la France.