European Resistance Archive/European Resistance Archive (ERA)

Petit Quevilly was a little town of 20,000 inhabitants and the police knew everyone, especially those they shouldn’t have known.

The French and German police came to arrest us in the middle of the night.

They came at four, five o’clock in the morning, knocked on the door.

My father had barely opened the door; they had already arrived on the second floor, as I slept up there.

All went very quickly: getting dressed, going downstairs. That was on October 21st, 1941.

They took us to Rouen and started interrogating us, asking us various questions.

We were very careful to say as little as possible.

Then we were taken to a kangaroo court in Rouen.

We knew they would never let us go, but we did not know what was going to happen after imprisonment.

I knew the risk I was taking. But to be able to hide you needed a place to do so.

Many people were not ready to put us up, even if they were friends. They were scared of the police, of being arrested as well.

It was very difficult, so I stayed with my parents.

When I’d come home my father would give me a beating.

I didn’t have the possibility to hide. I was getting ready to do so.

But I was arrested two or three weeks before I was about to leave and really go undercover.

Semi-clandestine activities 1939-41

The reason we distributed these leaflets was to alert the population and the workers in the factories.

We distributed leaflets in front of the factories and in different neighborhoods.

Often we would do that at night. But at night there were also police patrols.

So there would be two or three of us to distribute the leaflets and two or three to watch out for the police.