The Greatest Traitor (8 page)

His dreams turned to dust on 8 November 1942 with Operation Torch and the landing of British and American forces on the coast of French North Africa. The failure of the French forces to repel the Allies gave the Führer the excuse to revoke any assurances he may have given guaranteeing self-government in the southern half of France. On 10 and 11 November, German troops marched into Vichy, and soon afterwards strict surveillance was ordered over the activities of British and American citizens.

George knew that he could be trapped indefinitely inside France unless he acted swiftly. He gathered together his few possessions and slipped away from the inn, back to Lyon to seek the advice of the colonel. His newfound patron urged him to head for Toulouse, where a journalist in the resistance movement would give him money and instructions on how to contact the
passeurs
, the civilian guides familiar with the best crossing points over the Pyrenees.

That rendezvous successfully accomplished, George then took a train to the city of Pau, birthplace of Henry IV of France and the ‘gateway to Spain’. There, he teamed up with another escapee, a middle-aged, portly Portuguese Jew, and the two of them embarked on a series of bus journeys in the company of a guide (another resistance member), edging further and further up the mountains.

Eventually, on the third day, as darkness fell, the party reached the small village of Seix, whose skyline was dominated by a stunning medieval castle, complete with twin turrets and a watchtower with a panoramic view out across the mountains. There, they made contact with their
passeurs,
two young local men set to accompany them on their hazardous journey.

Perilous it most certainly proved to be. On their journey so far, their primary concern had been avoiding the dreaded
Milice
, the French paramilitary force that gave over-zealous support to the invaders, but now came a gruelling physical test – mile after mile of forest trail, wading across rivers, inching along perilous ledges and clambering up sheer faces of rock. All this was tough enough for a fit, young man like George, but desperately difficult for his companion, who was middle-aged and overweight. They rested at a mountain hut overnight, and enjoyed a nourishing meal of roasted meat and fresh bread, washed down with a bottle of wine. Replenished and revitalised, the group made it to the top of the snowy peaks later that day, and then early the next began the descent towards Spain.

Abruptly, it seemed, once they had reached a meadow that sloped down to a mule track, the guides announced they were leaving. George and his friend were told they were now actually in Spain, and that if they kept to the track they would reach a farmhouse where they could stay the night.

After some mishaps – George’s nervous companion deserted him at one point, insisting they had strayed from the correct path and misguidedly striking out in search of another – they advanced on what they fervently hoped was the last leg of their journey. But their freedom was
not yet assured. ‘On the bank of the stream stood a large farmhouse from which the sound of voices reached us. The figures of soldiers and mules moved among the trees,’ George recalled. ‘We hastily withdrew behind a rock, but it was too late. We had been spotted. A warning shot rang out and the soldiers, who, to judge from their uniforms, were neither French nor German, motioned us to come down. When we got to the stream they surrounded us. We were in Spain, but no longer free.’

In the early days of the war Spain was inclined to send escaping resistance fighters, their associates and Allied servicemen straight back to the Nazis, returning a favour paid by Hitler when he had contributed Stuka bombers to the Nationalist war effort in the Civil War. By October 1940, however, the relationship between Hitler and General Franco had started to cool, with the Führer famously remarking after his meeting with the
Generalissimo
in Hendaye, France: ‘I would rather have three or four of my own teeth pulled out than speak to that man again.’ Subsequent diplomacy failed to shift Franco into more active support for the Axis powers so, in November 1942, when George was arrested at the frontier, Spain’s ‘non-belligerent’ status was still intact, though that certainly didn’t mean they could expect to be treated kindly.

Once he had proved his Portuguese identity, George’s companion was allowed to go on his way. But Behar was taken by bus, along with another group of refugees, to Irun, a well-recognised crossing point on the French-Spanish border. This was one of the lowest moments in his journey. Through the windows of the vehicle, just fifty yards away, he could see German soldiers guarding the frontier – and the rumour circulating was that his group were going to be handed back to them. It was with an initial sense of relief, then, that after a night at a small hotel in Irun, George’s party were driven on to Pamplona, capital city of Navarre. But what greeted them there was just a taste of what was to follow in the coming weeks.

They were led to the city’s prison, crowded seven in a cell, and served some unpalatable brown, liquid gruel. The next morning their
heads were shaved, and their afternoon meal was the same brown liquid, this time leavened with a few potato peelings. This grim regime continued for three weeks, until one morning they were taken out of their cells, handcuffed together, and marched through the streets of Pamplona. They were then put on a train bound for the notorious prison of Miranda del Ebro, forty miles south of Bilbao.

Franco had created ‘Miranda’ in 1937 in order to house thousands of Republican prisoners during Spain’s civil war: now it was the place where most foreign refugees eventually ended up. It had all the trappings of a Nazi concentration camp. Built next to a railway for easy delivery of detainees, it was filled with rows of parallel blocks of basic huts, surrounded by barbed wire, floodlights and sentry boxes. Originally meant to house around 1,500 prisoners, by the time George arrived, the camp’s population had swelled to well over 3,000. In the huts, inmates slept on two tiers of bunks with just a tattered blanket to keep warm. The first few days were entirely discouraging. The diet was invariably poor, there was a lack of water and decent sanitation – the latrines emptied into a stream that was also the wash place – and disease was prevalent.

Then George’s luck turned: he found out that each nationality had a representative in the camp, and when he sought out the British envoy, to his great relief he discovered it was the young man from the British consulate in Lyon who had issued him with his travel document a month earlier. He was now eligible for a generous food ration, supplied by the British Embassy in Madrid – including tea, coffee, milk, sugar, tins of sardines, packets of biscuits and cigarettes. His fear of death by starvation disappeared.

But while the Britons in the camp were now in reasonable shape because of these food parcels, others fared less well. The Poles, who had been there the longest and who had formed a tightly-knit community of their own, decided they had had enough of the squalid conditions and lack of food. They determined to go on a hunger strike, which they hoped would alert the international community to their plight
and they called on all the other nationalities to join them. The strike started on Wednesday, 6 January. The Polish contingent picketed the food queues and made sure no one accepted any food. The protest lasted a week and only ended when a diplomatic negotiating team from four nations persuaded the strikers that they had won assurance from the Spanish authorities that conditions would definitely improve.

‘I cannot say that I felt the worse for this experience,’ was George’s recollection. ‘In the beginning I suffered from headaches, but after a few days my body seemed to get used to doing without food. The feeling of hunger disappeared and gave way to a strange feeling of elation, lightness and energy.’

Meanwhile, his bona fides were being checked out by MI9 and its sister organisations. Their operations were coordinated from the British Embassy in Madrid, led by attaché Michael Creswell (codenamed ‘Monday’) who performed heroics to secure the freedom of stranded Britons, negotiating with the Spanish authorities while ferrying British evaders and escapers around the country.

These diplomatic efforts worked and a week after the strike, George and a group of about fifteen other inmates were released. He and a young Dutchman were met at the camp by an official from the British Embassy and taken to Madrid. There, they were put up in a hotel for a couple of nights before boarding a train for Gibraltar, accompanied by two embassy officials.

The following afternoon the party arrived at La Linea, the coastal town that formed the boundary between Spain and the British territory of Gibraltar. George was escorted to the Spanish customs post, where, after his papers were formally checked, he walked through.

At last, after a journey lasting 185 days and covering well over a thousand miles, he had reached his destination. He was now on British soil.

With barely any time to savour the moment, he was taken to a waiting bus that transferred him and a large group of others to the quayside. A naval launch saw them on to the RMS
Empress of Australia,
a stately ocean liner then functioning as a troopship. She was due to
leave in convoy with a host of other ships, great and small, in a few hours’ time.

When asked years later about the dangers of his epic journey, of the apprehension and fear he must have felt, George replied: ‘Scared? You had the pressure of the Germans all around you, but I’d been used to that for more than two years. You get used to being scared – it’s a part of your life and you stop thinking about it. And when you’re young, you are far less scared than you are later in your life.’

While the
Empress of Australia
was ploughing its way towards Britain, Franklin Roosevelt and Winston Churchill sat down in the comfort of the Anfa Hotel in Casablanca to consider ways of combating the ruthlessly effective U-boat attacks on Allied shipping. In January 1943 German submarines, backed up by the Luftwaffe’s Focke-Wulf Fw 200 Condor bomber aircraft, could still lay claim to hold the upper hand in the Battle of the North Atlantic. The President and Prime Minister discussed when and where to introduce better technical equipment and increase aircraft cover, in order to begin to turn the tables. In the meantime, George and his companions would endure that mid-winter voyage in a state of perpetual tension, with more than a few nerve-wracking moments before they eventually sailed up the River Clyde and moored safely in the Scottish port of Greenock.

This was George’s second sight of his father’s adopted country. His first had come in the summer of 1937 as he returned home from Cairo to Rotterdam for the school holidays. Then, on a brief stop at the East India Dock, London, he had taken his first walk on British soil, wandering the length of Commercial Road, noting that the people looked ‘just that little bit grimier and shabbier than in my home town’.

If this time he had been hoping for a welcoming reception party to greet his arrival, then he was to be disappointed. No sooner had the
Empress of Australia
docked than he and his travelling companions – the official description for them was ‘aliens’ – were lined up and questioned, their travel documents closely scrutinised. Then, with an
escort of soldiers, they were put on trains and whisked down south to London.

Once there, they were taken on buses to a ‘monstrous building – built in the style of a Burgundian château and set in the midst of a bald and sooty park’. They had arrived at the grandly named Royal Victoria Patriotic School in Trinity Road, Wandsworth, the forbidding first port-of-call for all male foreigners coming from occupied Europe. Behind a neo-Gothic façade that hid detention and interrogation rooms, and even some cells in the basement, the RVPS hosted officers from MI5’s B Division, who were busy working to separate what they called the ‘sheep’ (genuine refugees) from the ‘goats’ (suspected enemy agents). Although there were few of the latter, all those who passed through the gates of the RVPS could expect rigorous questioning from intelligence officials before their credentials were accepted and their freedom finally granted.

As the war went on, these cross-examinations proved immensely valuable. Knowledge about Gestapo interrogation techniques, safe houses, couriers and enemy penetrations of escape organisations was carefully indexed and cross-referenced in a central Information Index of intelligence, then made available to Whitehall departments.

But those interviews also served another purpose – one that was ultimately to benefit 20-year-old George. The intelligence agencies represented at RVPS were on the lookout for prospective recruits, and this regular influx of resourceful individuals from the continent provided them with a rich pool of talent.

The RVPS first opened its doors on 8 January 1941 and it quickly acquired a reputation as an inhospitable detention centre. Such was its oppressive atmosphere that on 21 February, Major W.H. Churchill-Longman, Commandant of the School, wrote a letter to Colonel Tommy ‘Tar’ Robertson of MI5, saying that the longer-term inmates would ‘become lazy or crazy, or both’ unless they were granted some diversionary activities. In response, officials at the RVPS endeavoured to create a more relaxed, informal environment. Outside of the
interviews – usually conducted one-to-one – entertainment included dance bands, a croquet lawn and a football pitch. Eventually, MI5 allowed a wireless set into the camp. For some detainees, however, the whole experience still remained demeaning and depressing. To be treated with suspicion and, occasionally, a certain animosity after all they had endured to get to a country they admired and for which they hoped to fight, was a bitter blow.

George, although irritated at having his actions and motives pored over, confronted the situation with relative equanimity. He spent three days answering detailed questions from a young Army intelligence officer, who was particularly interested in the minutiae of his escape from enemy territory. On the fourth day, he was interrupted while watching a showing of
The Great Dictator
starring Charlie Chaplin and told there was someone on the telephone for him. When he picked it up, he heard his mother’s voice for the first time in over two and a half years. He was to be released.