A young fellow took charge of the four of us on the Limoges Railroad Station platform: he would accompany us but, whatever happened, we were not to acknowledge either his presence or that we knew him.

He belonged to the "Garel Group," named after a Grigori Garfinkel, aka "Georges Garel," famed for his courage and daring.

Garel had been picked by the French Underground to lead these OSE smuggling missions.

Train station
Spring 1943. Train Limoges–Toulouse.

The train was filled with German Wehrmacht soldiers in their grey-green uniforms.

They ate delicious-looking rye-bread sandwiches carried in kidney-shaped tin boxes—it was the dark-crusted "Bauernbrot"—the farmbread of grandma Regina—which I had loved eating a million years ago, in Becherbach. To be made pantless for such a delight would not have been too great a sacrifice.

We tried to look our hungriest in the hope that they would share their food—of course, they did not.

Soldiers on the trainSmuggling these two kids with their gummy fake I.D.s together with a couple of typical Semites who looked so innocent that they must obviously be guilty of something, right through this many Germans, took both daring and guts.

Ernest spent most of the trip running up and down the corridor.

The motherly devotion of the OSE volunteers, up in the castle attic in Le Masgelier, had done miracles; he was his own rambunctious self again.

Hearing the soldiers' guttural language, I suddenly knew where I had seen those two girls; they had been caricatures in the hate-mongering Nazi rag "Der Stürmer" which had been posted in a glazed box across the street from our house in Becherbach, so long ago, and was meant to incite the populace to intense race-hatred.

It made perfect sense, as how else would a small-town German farmer know how to identify a subhuman, unless someone went to the trouble of teaching him ethnic hatred.

The journey went on without a hitch, even though it was pure hell to sit by, starving, and watching those teutonic gluttons stuffing themselves.