LILY OF THE VALLEY

At midnight came the air-raid siren’s song;

I thought of you in silence and for long—

how you are faring, how our lives once were,

and how I wish you home this coming year.

We wait till half past one, and hear at last

the signal that the danger now is past;

so danger—if the omen does not lie—

of every kind shall gently pass you by.

—Dietrich Bonhoeffer

Sirens wailed as shells pounded the prison.

Perfect, Peter thought. Surely some of these RAF offerings would be destroying prisoner files and the Gestapo would have a house full of strangers. As concussion after concussion rocked the Albrechtstrasse, guards began unlocking cells, keeping only the bolt. Peter jumped as a massive explosion came from the yard—every prisoner in the underground cells killed instantly.

The bombing finally stopped and a guard opened Peter’s door and peered in.

“How goes it?”

“First class,” Peter said.

He had survived the raid but many of his captors had not, which brought a new danger: vengeance. How many prisoners would be shot in reprisal? he wondered.

Days passed and nothing happened.

---

ON MARCH 2 A guard told Peter to gather his things as he was moving again. But why? He’d not been questioned once.

At the checkout desk, two Gestapo awaited, one sporting a grisly Mensur32 scar. Scarface glared at Peter and opened his jacket. “If you try any funny business, you’ll get this.”

Peter shrugged at the Luger. “Good. Where are we going?”

To his new residence, the German said.

Scarface escorted Peter to an Opel, motor running. They headed north and the signs indicated the destination: Oranienburg.

Home of the Sachsenhausen concentration camp.

As the Opel drew near, Peter could see the machine-gun towers and electrified walls. They stopped at the entrance gate and the ominous sign beckoned:

SCHUTZHAFTLAGER

PROTECTIVE CUSTODY CAMP.

---

“PROTECTIVE CUSTODY” WAS THE Nazi regulation and procedure which allowed unbridled lawlessness. Its usefulness for terror came in three stages. First, after the Reichstag fire in 1933, individual fundamental rights were terminated by decree, and actions now taken by the Gestapo were not subject to review by courts. Second, in 1934, the Reich Criminal Code was amended to allow “preventive arrest” in the “interests of public security.” Those who were considered risks to public security—and subject to unchallenged arrest—were “antisocial malefactors” such as career criminals, Communists, Jehovah’s Witnesses, and prostitutes. The category was soon expanded to include Jews and anyone who challenged Nazi doctrine.

These two steps ushered in protective custody: incarceration in a concentration camp. Anyone charged with being a threat to public security was now automatically sent to a camp, and, as of 1939, such imprisonment was to last at least for the duration of the war. In addition, protective custody cleared the way for Sonderbehandlung: “special treatment” of prisoners.

In other words, execution or extermination through labor.

Peter had no idea what protective custody meant, but the meaning became implicitly clear when a line of pinstriped prisoners staggered by, all lugging sixty-six pounds of bricks on their backs. This was a concentration camp, he realized, the horrors of which he’d now experience firsthand. From what he could tell, Fresnes and the Albrechtstrasse were the country clubs; this was where real work was accomplished.

“Is this my new residence?” he asked.

Scarface shrugged. “What if it is? All you foreigners misrepresent these camps. Just look at those flowers over there. And every Sunday the loudspeakers relay the best music in the world. Why, they even hold football matches here.”

Peter held his tongue. Flowers and Strauss and football. Sure.

Scarface turned Peter over to a guard and they walked along a path and through a wired gate. They came to two small wooden huts almost hidden beneath pine trees and the guard led him inside the first one and opened a door.

Peter’s new home.

The makeshift cell had large windows and Peter stepped to them to drink in the marvelous sky. He thought of Odette and in what kind of hole she was now suffering. He replayed in his mind what had happened at Avenue Foch and grieved that she had accepted the punishment meant for him.

He replayed again and again his answers to the Commissar. Could he have been more clever during his interrogation? Could he have said anything to have improved Odette’s lot? And what was her lot right now?

The huts, Peter soon learned, were for Allied POWs; the main camp on the other side of the wall was for Jews, Christians, Gypsies, malcontents, political prisoners—including Kurt von Schuschnigg, former chancellor of Austria—and anyone the Nazis wished to silence.

Created in 1936 to provide forced labor33 for factories, Sachsenhausen would, with its sister camps Dachau and Buchenwald (created in 1933 and 1937, respectively), serve as Heinrich Himmler’s model for concentration camps. Pitching the purpose of camps as “education” institutes, Himmler stated in a 1939 radio address: “The slogan that stands above these camps is: There is a path to freedom. Its milestones are: obedience, diligence, honesty, orderliness, cleanliness, sobriety, truthfulness, readiness to make sacrifices, and love of the fatherland.”

What he didn’t tell his compatriots was that the educational tools were hard labor, corporal punishment, starvation, terror, and execution. That, and the fact that common criminals and “dangerous” political enemies would never be released.

Selecting a special breed of sinister keepers for these camps, Himmler adorned their uniforms with a skull-and-bones badge and dubbed them Death’s Head units. The moniker fit. At Sachsenhausen, SS guards would direct new prisoners to Himmler’s slogan—“Work makes free”—painted on barracks in the roll call area. With a miscreant’s grin, they’d then point to the crematorium and crack: “There is a path to freedom, but only through this chimney!”

The prisoners responded—among themselves—accordingly: “There is a path to the SS. Its milestones are: stupidity, impudence, mendacity, boasting, shirking, cruelty, injustice, hypocrisy, and love of booze.”

Though not designated a death camp, Sachsenhausen became one. Through starvation, hard labor, and a myriad of tortures, some forty thousand would die here, including Stalin’s son.

Peter learned soon enough. Occasionally at night he’d hear a burst of machine-gun fire—a would-be escapee caught in the search lights. During the day it was the other—smoke and stench coming from the stack; another burned in the crematorium.

He thought of these men from time to time.

He thought of Odette constantly.

Fresnes Prison

May 1944

MEANWHILE IN PARIS, ODETTE was despondent. Peter was gone, she’d been sentenced to death, so what was left? A few more weeks of starvation and loneliness. More days without a bath or the ability to wash her hair or brush her teeth. And then what?

It was a torture all its own.

On May 12 a guard told her to pack her things; she was going to Germany. Odette asked to see Father Paul and minutes later the priest was at her door.

She gazed into the kind eyes—eyes that took you in and held you, comforted, and promised that everything he had was yours.

“I wanted to say good-bye to you, Father, because you have been more than a good friend to me. I am being sent to Germany.”

Father Paul, quick to listen and slow to speak, said tenderly, “There is little I can say. You will yourself know that I am not very beloved by the Gestapo and I don’t know if I will still be alive at the end of the war. I doubt it very much. But there is a thing I would hope to do for you. If you write a letter to your children now and give it to me, I will, if I live, see that they get it after the war. That I would like to do.”

Odette wrote the letter and said good-bye to the saint.

Word spread that Frau Churchill was leaving, and one of her cellmates gave her a sleeping gown, another a bouquet of lilies of the valley. Trude brushed back tears as Odette made her way down the corridor for the last time. In the yard the captain of the guard stood by the waiting Black Maria and saluted her. In his other hand, more lilies of the valley.

“Frau Churchill, I have brought you some flowers,” he said. “Please accept them.”

She thanked him and again he saluted. The one prisoner Fresnes would never forget.

The captain wanted to say something more but couldn’t find the words. Odette smiled, gave him her hand and the warmth of her eyes, and boarded the van.

---

THE BLACK MARIA TRANSPORTED Odette and six other prisoners to 84 Avenue Foch and the women were locked in a waiting room. As they looked at one another, it dawned on them—they were all F Section agents. They shared their code and real names, and what they did for each network. Odette was amazed and impressed.

There was Vera Leigh (“Simone”), courier for the INVENTOR circuit; Diana Rowden (“Paulette”), courier for ACROBAT/STOCKBROKER; Andrée Borrel (“Denise”), courier for PROSPER; Yolande Beekman (“Yvonne”), radio operator for MUSICIAN; Madeleine Damerment (“Solange”), courier for BRICKLAYER; and Eliane Plewman (“Gaby”), courier for MONK.

The stories were different but, like Odette’s, shared the same result. Vera Leigh, the forty-six-year-old dress designer, had been betrayed by none other than Roger Bardet and was arrested in Paris on 30 October 1943 when meeting another operative. Bardet might have had a hand in Diana Rowden’s arrest as well.

When Rowden’s circuit leader, John Renshaw Starr, was arrested in July 1943, Rowden and her wireless operator, John Young, went to ground. In November Young received a message from London indicating that they were to meet a newly arriving agent named Benoit, whose real name was André Maugenet. Rowden and Young met him in Paris at the Chez Mas cafe, in the Place des Ternes. Only it wasn’t Maugenet—he had been arrested weeks earlier—but an SD imposter, apparently Bardet. That evening, Rowden and Young were arrested.

Andrée Borrel, the first female agent to parachute into France, was captured the night of 23 June 1943 with her wireless operator when their hideout was compromised. In many ways, Borrel was remarkably similar to Odette. As courier to F Section’s leading network, PROSPER, Andrée was given tremendous responsibility and was viewed by her circuit leader as “the best of us all.” And she, too, was a rock. After arrest, she refused to talk and maintained her silence with such firmness that several Germans said she treated them with fearless contempt.

Yolande Beekman, a thirty-two-year-old Swiss agent, was captured in St. Quentin when she committed a radio operator’s unpardonable sin: routine. To avoid detection by the German direction-finding squads, wireless agents were safest if they transmitted sparingly, with brief messages, at irregular times, on multiple wavelengths, and from various hideouts. Beekman, perhaps with the approval of her circuit leader, did just the opposite: she radioed London at the same hour, the same three days of the week, from the same location. Although beaten after arrest, she refused to betray her colleagues.

Madeleine Damerment, a brave and gentle soul thought to be the best of available couriers in the spring of 1944, suffered an agent’s worst nightmare: parachuting into enemy hands. It occurred the night of February 28–29, twenty miles east of Chartres, when she and her circuit leader and wireless operator sailed into a Gestapo reception committee.

Eliane Plewman parachuted into the Jura the night of August 13–14 and worked her way to Marseille to rendezvous with her MONK leader and wireless operator. They were betrayed by a local Frenchman and arrested at the end of March 1944, but not before putting sixty German trains out of action. Though beaten about the face after capture, Plewman told the Gestapo nothing.

The clock was ticking for these women.

After several hours the Gestapo commandant came in. He announced that the group would be departing for Germany on the six thirty from Gare de l’Est. Did they have any requests?

They had been cooped up for hours, Odette told him, and a cup of tea would be greatly appreciated. Not as it was made in France or in Germany, she said, but in the English manner, with milk and sugar.

The commandant gave a sidelong look and left. Minutes later tea arrived—English style—with seven Sèvres china cups.

At six o’clock a guard came with travel instructions. They would be handcuffed in pairs, he said, and departing momentarily. If anyone caused trouble or attempted escape, he added, his men would not hesitate to shoot.

Odette was handcuffed to Yolande Beekman and the party was led through a cordon of guards to the awaiting coach. The transfer to the train was conducted with typical German efficiency. The prisoners were herded into second class, two pairs per compartment; Odette and Yolande were seated across from Vera Leigh and Andrée Borrel. An SS man kept watch outside the door, an SS woman inside. Other guards patrolled the corridors.

The train whistle blew and the scorned seven were on their way.

When they reached the countryside, they passed through a station and marshaling yard; rubble was everywhere. “That is the work of the R.A.F.,” a guard said to Odette. “They have also destroyed my mother’s house in Dortmund. I only wish that an accident could happen to the train for, if it did, it would give me great pleasure to crush your skull under my heel and save the German hangman a job.”

“You are a man under orders,” she fired back, “and it is your duty to deliver all of us, alive and well, to Germany. If an accident were to happen, your first care should be to the safety of your prisoners.”

He swore at her and Odette held his gaze as one with authority.

“You are neither clever—nor efficient.” She held up her unshackled wrists. “For example, it has only taken me thirty minutes to slip my handcuffs.”

The guard disappeared and returned with a key. He reapplied her handcuffs, snapping the steel so tight that it bruised the bone.

Dusk turned to darkness and Odette tried to sleep as the train rumbled through the night. The cuffs were cutting into her, though, and she could close her eyes only a few minutes at a time. At dawn they passed over the mighty Rhine—German bastion of superiority and power.

Odette stirred—gone was her beloved France; she was now in Hitlerland.

She turned to an SS man. “Where are we going?”

“You are going to Karlsruhe,” he said, “where you will be killed.”