Memoir of the French Resistance

1940 December in Paris - Amateur Agfacolor Film

Marco didn’t have to wait long to see his father and brother again. It took them five days to bike to the Loire river. When they got there, they found they could go no further. In an effort to stop the oncoming Nazi forces, the French army had blown up the bridges. Some of the bridges, they were told, had been blown while civilians were still trying to cross. Disheartened and out of options, they got back on their bikes and rode back to Paris. Halfway there, they pulled off the road and watched as German tanks sped by them. Other than being short on food, this was the only eventful part of their trip, which was lucky, since other civilians fleeing by bike and foot elsewhere were being bombed by German planes.

Ten days after they first left, Roger and Jean returned to a Paris they didn’t recognize. Of the 900 people who lived in the Ivry buildings, only 50 remained. The pair had long ago eaten the gingerbread and the tin of sardines given to them by the Red Cross, so Marco broke into a neighborhood grocery store to get food for the family. It wasn’t too risky. Nearly every business was closed and after the 8 p.m. curfew, the area was deserted except for the patrols of German soldiers.

As the Pepins ate their wartime meal of canned food and dime-store candy, Marco recounted the tale of the first time he saw German soldiers in Paris to his father and brother.

He had seen the soldiers after visiting his aunt in the hospital. His aunt Suzanne had had a miscarriage and he went to see her while she recovered in the hospital in Villejuif. Marco passed the soldiers on the street as he headed back home. The pair were in uniform, guns slung across their chests. They chatted easily as they strolled along the sidewalk, and Marco stared pointedly at these arrogant, carefree occupiers of his city, his street. Part of him stared because he couldn’t believe they were really there. Part of him seethed with anger and wanted his glare to show it. But the soldiers were too busy talking to one another to even register his presence or his rage.

Paris’s factories were still open and running and Marco went to work each day with one thought in his head. It was there the minute he woke in the morning, while he walked to the factory, with every repetitive movement he made at work, in every morsel of food he ate for lunch, as he walked home again in the evening: I cannot stand aside and let this happen. I must do something. Step, step, I must do something. Chew, chew, I must do something. Lift, carry, I must do something. Breathe in, breathe out, I must do something.

But what can an 18 year old boy do to fight the whole German army?

German Parade Held in Paris 1940

Marco gathered his friends from the neighborhood. They had been members of the communist youth organization together, and under the new German laws, it was forbidden for them to assemble. But they did. They met in apartments and in the closed-up shops of their parents to figure out what a group of boys could do to make things difficult for the Germans. Later in life, Marco would realize that none of them truly understood the danger then. They knew the consequences for their covert actions, certainly, but being arrested, imprisoned, shot on sight… These were all abstract ideas. It hadn’t happened to them or to anyone they knew. All they knew then was the rage, the desperation to fight, the inability to stand idly by.

The boys didn’t think their campaign would be a long one. They believed that the English would come to their rescue and that when they did, the French people would rise up and fight. They saw it as their job to keep the French people in a state of readiness for this fight. Under the supervision of the famous French Resistance leader Jean LeGalleu, who lived in Ivry, Marco and his nine friends started to distribute leaflets. Le Galleu had the leaflets printed in secret, on a hand-turned mimeograph. For their own safety, the boys were never told where they were printed or by whom. Such knowledge would result in a penalty nearly as severe as possession of the mimeograph itself, which would be a one-way ticket to prison.

Le Galleu directed most of the group’s activities, but Marco occasionally came up with ideas of his own, where the opportunities presented themselves. Unable to sit quietly at home during the curfew and tempted by the fresh stack of leaflets in his hands, Marco convinced his brother and their friend Cocault (an inexplicable nickname, since his real name was Roger Debauvais) to break curfew. The boys moved quickly, stuffing leaflets in every mailbox they passed. The operation was quiet and fast. Then they came across a set of four new road signs the Germans had erected to direct their troops to the base they had set up in the Ivry-sur-Seine fort. The other signs pointed to Luftwaffe, the nearest military airport; and to headquarters.

They immediately started tearing down the signs. It was louder than they expected, and they were afraid. Even though the signs were a mile away from the fort itself, Marco had his first taste that night of that special way sound and fear intertwine in the night, creating something more terrifying than our daytime selves can comprehend. It affected all three of them, and after each boy had pulled down his sign, Cocault and Jean wanted to go home. They started walking. But Marco stayed to finish the job. In spite of his fear, he felt compelled to do it. It would have been cowardly not to.

After tearing down the last sign and throwing it in the sewer, he started walking home. A block ahead of him, he spied his brother and Cocault talking to a German soldier. The soldier spotted Marco. Too late to run, Marco continued to walk toward the man as he let the other two boys go. The soldier approached and grabbed Marco by the arm. Up close, Marco could see that the man was old. He looked more like a member of the administration than part of the elite troops that usually patrolled the streets. He put his gun under Marco’s nose and demanded to know what he was doing out after curfew. He asked in German. Then he showed Marco the communist leaflet he had found and asked again what he was doing out. Marco knew a little German, and with the few words he knew plus a couple of gestures, he managed to convey to the man that he was with a girl.

Reluctantly convinced, the German replied, “schlafen.” Sleep. He motioned with his gun for Marco to move along and go home. Marco noticed how convincing a man’s words were when punctuated with a gun. “Ja,” he replied, and started toward home. He kept his pace steady until he rounded the corner, then he began to run. The German would only have to walk 200 meters before discovering the signs were missing and Marco knew who he’d ask about it first if he had the chance.

When he got to his building, his brother and Cocault were waiting for him. They were wide-eyed. He was breathless. This was their first real act of resistance and they had gotten away with it.

Briane writes:

Why didn’t Marco and the women flee with his father and brother?

Marco says:

It was a difficult choice. We only had three bikes for a family of five and no other transportation was available. Trains quickly proved to be out of the question. With the Germans approaching Paris at great speed, approximately 20 trains with 198 cars left Paris between June 8 and June 13^th. The conditions for passengers were bad – hot, overcrowded and insufficient water – and that was on the trains that weren’t being attacked by German planes.

Still, Parisians were desperate to get on the trains and get out of town. They waited for hours in the stifling June heat. People were fainting, fighting, crying. No medical personnel were on hand to help  sick people or pregnant women. You could almost smell the desperation in the air. When the trains finally shut their doors, they could barely move for the crush of the crowd on the tracks, blocking their way. A train leaving Paris on June 11 took nine hours to travel the first 300 meters.

So people took to the roads. They walked or rode bikes. There were so many people on the roads, though, that going by bike or foot took even longer than it normally would have. On May 10 there were three million people in Paris. By June 13, just one million remained. And that doesn’t count all the refugees from Belgium and the northern parts of France.

My mother, sister and I didn’t go because leaving would have meant giving up our flat, our jobs, everything. And my parents had experience with being occupied. They knew that the Germans would likely capture and send away the adult males, but as a boy under eighteen years old, I was relatively safe, at least for the moment. So the three of us stayed, to hold down the fort, so to speak. We still believed that the French would rise up and drive the Germans out Paris, so we intended to ride out the storm in our home.

The plan was doomed before they left the city limits, though. They didn’t know it, but the French army had already blown up the bridges crossing the Loire. Wanting to be very sure the Germans didn’t traverse the river, they destroyed the bridges themselves. My father and brother never saw the Loire, though. German tanks overtook them on their way and, defeated, Roger, Jean and the rest of the refugees were back in Paris again a few weeks after they first left.

Blair writes:

Did the depression hit France hard the way it did the US? How did the Pepin family cope with that?

Marco says:

France wasn’t a large world economy at the time, so it didn’t get hit as hard as the United States. In 1931, the first effects of the crisis were a drop in prices and a slowdown of industrial and agricultural production. The crisis was less severe but lasted longer than in the States. When other countries were already rebounding, France was still struggling.

I don’t have many memories of that time, as I was quite young (I was about seven years old). But I do remember the strikes of 1936. The workers took over the factories and barricaded themselves inside, halting production and locking out management. The employees lived inside the factory for the duration of the strike, spending their days performing maintenance on the machinery.

My father was one of the workers on strike. He would put a ladder up to the story-high windows of the factory and throw a rope down the outside wall. It was my job to tie the basket of food my mother had prepared to the rope. After nine straight days, the workers’ demands were met. They received a ten percent raise and laws were passed to reduce the work week from 48 hours to 40 and to entitle each worker two weeks of paid vacation per year. My father took his first paid vacation day at age 40.

Marco Pepin, age 20

The war’s architects, heroes and victims all had two things in common that September morning: they all believed they knew what would happen next, and they were all wrong. On September first, 1939, Marco woke up to the news that Germany had invaded Poland. He was sixteen years old. His father woke him to tell him the news and the look that passed between them was one of hard, serious knowing. They were safe today, in their flat just outside Paris. But for how long?

Marco lived with his parents, Roger and Anna, and his brother and sister, Jean and Yvonne, in Ivry-sur-Seine, a working class suburb southwest of Paris. The flat was at 173 Route Stratégique, a joyless expanse of road lined with featureless rectangular apartment buildings that looked like a line of dominoes ready to be pushed over by a giant’s thumb. The nine identical buildings were constructed for burgeoning families, and many inhabitants dutifully filled the rooms with children. One family in Marco’s building had nine. Another, twelve. It was a lively, noisy place to live and everyone knew everybody else there.

The entrance at 173 Route Stratégique

The buildings were seven stories high and, as they were outside of downtown Ivry, had views of fields and the fort of Ivry, one of several nineteenth century forts built around Paris and now used as military bases. Each apartment had three bedrooms, a large dining room, a small balcony and an even smaller kitchen. The apartments were considered quite modern for their inclusion of gas and electricity, but there were no bathrooms. The tenants shared a toilet at the end of the hall, and bathing was done at the town’s municipal showers, or at the kitchen sink with a bucket of water. At the time, though, this was the best that the working-class families who lived there could have dreamed of, and the residents were proud of their community. The men worked in local factories. The children went to the same school. The women ran frugal but happy households. Life was good.  

The Pepins were communists. Everyone in Ivry was a communist, except those who were socialists. Roger had a shoe repair shop for a while, which he closed when he began working at the nearby light bulb factory. Anna was a cleaning lady. They weren’t rich, but they weren’t poor, either. They had everything they needed in the way of clothing and food and wine, and there was enough left over for toys and movies and books, the things that mattered to children.

But Marco was sixteen now, no child anymore, and he’d heard enough stories about the last time the Germans came to France to be scared. His mother was from Montescourt, in the Aine region northeast of Paris and she had spent her teenage years forced to make bandages for German soldiers from the bed sheets they stole from French people’s homes. Marco’s father had been in the trenches. He was captured twice and escaped twice, a near miracle given that most of the young men they knew never came back at all.

Marco with l'Avant Garde, the Communist youth newspaper, first row, second from right

Marco knew all these stories and more. Disinterested in academics, he had quit school at age 14 to work in a factory that made water heaters and spent his days side-by-side with his neighbors, talking about the evils of fascism, the likelihood of world peace and the threat Hitler posed to Europe. Too young to be a full-fledged member of the communist party, he joined the local communist youth organization and sold their newspaper, l’Avant Garde, on Sundays, his one day off per week. He also joined his father at meetings and communist marches and impressed the old man with his verve. His brother, Jean, was a year and a half older than he was, but lacked Marco’s passion for world affairs. His enthusiasm was more for chasing girls, in particular, one named Lydie.

So, while Jean stayed in Paris, working at what was, even then, a very nice restaurant in the Gare de Lyon (and ensuring that no one jumped his claim on the pretty Lydie), Marco and Yvonne, 19, were sent to their grandparents’ house in Ouvier, northwest of Paris in the Eure region and far from the terrifying German border. There were rumors that Paris would be bombed, and many families sent their children to live with relatives in the country, fearing for their lives.

Being sent away wasn’t all bad. Marco fell in love with the countryside. He could sit for hours and watch a family of squirrels go about their business in a tree. He took long walks along the canal with the family dog. He begged to help with the garden but was turned down for the job by his grandfather, who cited his lack of expertise. For fun, Marco and Yvonne would sometimes go into town to look through the window of a local factory at all the weaving looms. They would stare at the flying yarn, the finished fabric, the workers; then they turned around and went back home. It was uneventful, but safe. However, after three months of waiting for their worst fears to materialize, the Pepin children were sent home. Nothing had happened in Paris and there was more work than ever in the factories now, as France geared up for the impending war.

One thing had changed since Marco last set foot in Paris, though. He was now an outlaw. Since the USSR attacked Poland, the French had banned the communist party and their meetings were now held secretly and in small groups. They got together in basements, in someone’s flat, in shops that were closed for the day and they talked about what had happened, what was happening, what would happen next. They believed in France and the French. Marco believed it when people said that this aggression would not stand. People would rise up, they said. People would fight back, they predicted.

On May 10, 1940 the Wehrmacht invaded Holland, Belgium and Luxembourg. Their force was unstoppable by the Allies and the Blitzkrieg forced an evacuation of forces from Dunkerque to England, which took place from May 25^th to June 3^rd. The residents of Ivry began to see refugees trickle in from Belgium. This turn of events was worrisome, but the French government kept up its propaganda, telling the people not to worry, not to run, that the Germans would be stopped.

As the front line approached, now only 200 km away from Paris, Roger and his eldest son decided to flee. There was no available transportation and the family only had three bikes. As Marco was only sixteen, it was less likely that he would be rounded up with the other adult males, as the Germans had done the last time they invaded France. Besides, he was wary to leave his mother and sister alone, and his income was necessary to support them. So Roger and Jean mounted their wooden-seated bikes and pedalled southwest toward the Loire, which the newspapers now insisted was a natural border that would stop the Germans. Marco had no idea whether he’d ever see his father and brother again, but part of him truly believed, against all odds, that he would. So he didn’t cry when they left.

The Germans arrived. On June tenth the French government left Paris for Bordeaux, and, to protect the people and the architecture, declared Paris an open city, allowing the capital of France to fall into the hands of its enemy on June 14^th without a single shot fired. It's debatable which side was more surprised.

More to follow. In the meantime, please e-mail any questions for Marco you may have.