European Resistance Archive/European Resistance Archive (ERA)

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.

We had to be very careful.

We took many precautions: we’d hide the material to make the leaflets at someone’s place, the paper with somebody else.

We’d try to distribute them at night, to escape from the police.

But the police was there at night as well.

We also handed out leaflets at the gates of the factories, even though we were quite visible there.