A Train in Winter Read Online Free PDF Page B

1935, Cécile became a party member. What appealed to her about the PCF was that the communists wanted enough bread for everyone. Having had a hungry childhood, it made sense to her.
    The Nazi–Soviet pact of non-aggression, signed by von Ribbentrop and Molotov on 24 August 1939, came as a shock, as it did to the entire French Communist Party. Overnight, communists were regarded by the new French centrist government, and its Prime Minister, Edouard Daladier, as being on the side of their old enemy, the Germans. After L’Humanité , the main PCF paper, published a long communiqué in praise of the pact, Daladier shut it down, along with its sister publication, Le Soir . On clandestine presses, L’Humanité fought back, attacking the French and British governments as imperialists, waging war against the workers. In what they called an ‘essential national purge’, police raided party offices, arrested known militants, suspended communist mayors. The thirty-five communist deputies sitting in parliament were arrested and eventually sentenced to five years in prison for acting on behalf of the Comintern. By the autumn of 1939, there were said to be several thousand communists behind bars.
    The party found itself bitterly divided. Outraged by the PCF’s initial stand of support for the pact, feeling betrayed by Stalin, a number of members now left the party. But many more remained within, preferring to ignore a move that they either could not or did not want to understand, and as they watched comrades arrested and led away to internment camps, their sense of solidarity grew stronger.
    With the German occupation in June 1940 came a further moment of confusion. Watching the troops march into Paris made Cécile feel physically ill. Standing near the Panthéon, she thought to herself, ‘How terrible this is going to be.’ After L’Humanité —still Underground but widely distributed and read—published an article saying that German soldiers were nothing but workers, just like French workers and should be treated with friendliness, communists felt optimistic that they might be allowed by the occupiers to return to the public arena. A number of prominent communists came out of hiding, which only made it easier to find them when Pétain and the French police suggested to the Gestapo that militant communists should be rounded up, along with Freemasons and foreign Jews, as ‘enemies of the Reich’. Pétain’s proposal was more than acceptable to the Germans, who praised the prefects and French police for their zeal and declared that the communists in detention would henceforth be regarded as ‘hostages to guarantee the safety of German soldiers’. Pétain’s internment camps were fast turning into holding depots for resisters and Jews.
    By September 1940, what with all those who had been made prisoners of war and were in camps in Germany, and those now in custody, there were said to be barely 180–200 active Communist Party members left in the whole of the Paris area. But these were men and women who, like Cécile, now felt that they had a new goal, one more in keeping with the mood of much of the country: anti-Fascist, anti-Vichy and anti-occupier. Quickly, they set about regrouping, spurred on by Maurice Thorez, the PCF leader in exile in Moscow, who issued his own appel to the French: ‘Never,’ declared Thorez, ‘will a great nation like ours become a nation of slaves.’
    As Cécile saw it, she now had real work to do. She contacted a man she knew from the fur business, who was also a communist local councillor, and asked how she could help. She discovered that Raymond Losserand was running the military section of the communist resistance in Paris and that he had been forced to go underground, fearing arrest. He had grown a bushy moustache and wore a wide-brimmed hat. Losserand offered Cécile 1,500 francs a month for her expenses, and gave her half a métro ticket, telling her only to trust the person who contacted