AUGUST 13, 1942
PARIS, FRANCE
DAY
The Resistance meets a most suspicious priest.
Germaine Tillion approaches the Café des Voutes on foot. The Colonne de Juillet towers over the Place de la Bastille. At more than a century old, it is familiar enough to ignore. Summer. Cobblestones. Mansard roofs above the roundabout. Germans in uniforms and civilian clothes lounging in sidewalk bistros. Parisians talking about food, because that’s all anyone talks about. No meat. No butter. Everyone is hungry and too thin. Bistro coffee is not coffee at all but ground acorns and chicory.*
Tillion studies the crowd. She can’t help herself. Bad form to wait too long in a public place. So she searches for signs of undercover Gestapo who might think she’s conducting an illicit rendezvous. Even more, the Resistance leader with the kind face is an ethnographer, academically trained to observe human customs and behavior. She spent six years prior to the war in the Algerian desert, living with Berber nomads, a full immersion into scarcity and hardship, literally dwelling among murderers and thieves—a situation not so different than Occupied Paris.
Yet, Tillion’s patience, fearlessness, friendly nature, and reluctance to grumble impressed the tribe as the behavior of an old soul. For even as she studied the Ah’Abderrahman, watching them herd their goats and sow their barley, the nomads were also studying her. Its leaders bequeathed upon Tillion the tribe’s most distinguished title: tamhurt—“Old One.”
Tillion is thirty-five.
Perhaps it is those same compassionate traits that allow Germaine Tillion to avoid suspicion while serving as a major Resistance leader. But as she waits for the priest who possesses a growing reputation for being sympathetic to the Resistance, she is well aware that someone is most likely studying her. Her cell has been compromised—of that she’s almost positive. Too many have been arrested. Tillion would be naïve not to think she could be next.
“When a traitor penetrated part of the organism, like venom,” Tillion will reflect on the perils of maintaining a Resistance network, “his ambition was to move up the arteries to the heart. This was only too easy to do and when it happened there was one network less and a few more deaths.”
It is two years since Tillion returned from Algeria in May 1940, unaware Germany had invaded France. The ethnographer and her widowed sixty-four-year-old mother, Émilie, fled Paris before the city fell. But on their journey to the South, stuck in the morass of humanity also taking flight, she heard the voice of Marshal Pétain on the radio, stating that an armistice had been signed with Germany. The patriot within her was outraged. “When I heard Pétain’s speech, I vomited. Literally,” she writes. “It takes one second for the course of a life to change forever. Once the choice is made . . . one must hold to it.”
And for Germaine Tillion, that choice meant returning to Paris and joining the Resistance. The term now takes on many forms in Paris, from Gaullists to Socialists to men like Colonel Fabien and the Communists. But little was organized when Tillion and her mother first arrived home. Working first with a small French network assisting escaped prisoners of war, then as part of the band named for the Musée de l’Homme—which is also her place of employment—Tillion has avoided arrest. Tillion knows few contacts outside her close circle. Her contact with the SOE is the one-legged Virginia Hall in Lyon, whom Tillion knows only as “Marie.” She regularly funnels information to Hall by courier, who then transmits that intelligence to London.
The priest arrives. Today he will take the three-hour train ride south to Lyon, carrying powerful information to Marie. Father Robert Alesch is a man of the cloth, but is today dressed in nondescript pants and a shirt. Mid-thirties. Powerful shoulders. Dimpled chin. Steel-blue eyes. Something in the priest’s forward manner toward Tillion suggests he does not strictly follow his vow of celibacy. “I did not trust him and carefully kept him from knowing who I was,” she will remember of this day.
But Father Robert Alesch, in fact, knows far more about Germaine Tillion than she would care to admit. The ethnographer and her mother, a noted writer and art critic, share a home in the suburb of Saint-Maur-des-Fossés. This is just one parish over from where Alesch says daily Mass. The mother and daughter secretly shelter airmen and prisoners of war within their three-story residence. Although Tillion had never before met the priest, one day not long ago he showed up at her home unbidden, dressed in black cassock, asking if he might be of help to her group. She was shocked that a complete stranger not only knew about her activities but also knew her home address. Tillion made inquiries. A trusted nun vouched for him. Tillion took a leap of faith and invited Alesch to work for her network.*
After all, it seems wrong not to trust a priest.
The credentials of Father Alesch, who most curiously speaks with a German accent, are actually impeccable. His courageous rants against Nazi Germany from the parish pulpit have earned him a loyal following among the Resistance. Alesch hands out photographs of Charles de Gaulle the way other priests hand out patron saint prayer cards. Many a resistant has kneeled in the confessional to confide in Alesch about their work against the Germans. As is the nature of their fight, these men and women are often later arrested. Alesch attacks the Nazis vehemently in his Sunday homilies when this happens, demanding to know what has become of the resistants.
Tillion and Alesch say their pleasantries. She slips the priest a matchbox containing microfilm laying out the defensive fortifications of a French port named Dieppe. Alesch is to deliver this package to “Marie.”
Tillion and Alesch do not linger. Together, they walk fifteen minutes to the Gare de Lyon. It is on her way home. Alesch pays his fare. Tillion sees him to the platform. A conductor punches the priest’s ticket. Only then, as Alesch is about to board, does Tillion turn to leave.
A man in plain clothes speaking with an accent taps her on the shoulder.
“German police. Follow me.”
“You think perhaps I am Jewish,” she says quickly.
“No,” the policeman responds. “I knew right away that you are not. We only want to check your papers.”
Suddenly, three men grab Tillion, pinning her arms to her sides and rushing her into the back seat of a waiting black Citroën. She has no way of knowing it, but police are also entering the Tillion home to arrest her mother.
Tillion turns to see if Alesch, with the precious matchbox in his possession, is also being detained. She is relieved that the priest is untouched. Oddly, he is not attempting to conceal himself. Instead, Alesch is a spectator to her arrest, the awful twist of his lips looking very much like a smirk.
Germaine Tillion realizes the truth.
Her Judas’s blue eyes, Tillion will long remember, bear a look of triumph.
Tillion has no time to scream. Father Robert Alesch not only possesses vital information about the coastal defenses at Dieppe but is now leading German intelligence straight to Virginia Hall.
And Germaine Tillion has absolutely no way of warning her.