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16 ___________________ Homage to the Comet Line In 1985 Margie and I returned to Belgium. This time we spent four weeks instead offour days and were able to tie up important loose ends. Finding the Thibauts, the couple with the baby, at whose house I had stayed for eight days, was one piece of unfinished business. In 1984 I had seen their pictures in Malfait's copy of Colonel Remy's book Reseau Comete-Raoul and Marie holding baby Ines-but my joy had immediately turned to grief when Malfait told me that the symbol next to Raoul's name meant he had died in a concentration camp. Then, several months later, he wrote me that it was Marie Thibaut who had died in concentration camp Ravensbriick in March 45. "Raoul died two years ago," he wrote, "but little Ines was caught with her mother by the Gestapo on 23 January 1944." But when we saw Henri Malfait again in 1985, he greeted me excitedly: "I have wonderful news for you. Raoul Thibaut is alive! And he lives right here in Brussels." Ten minutes later Margie and I were in our rented car racing to the other end of Brussels to meet him. I did not recognize him. The Raoul I remembered, the one in the photograph, had a sharp angular face and a full head of red hair. Now his face was round and his hairvery thin. His voice had not changed, but his English was not as fluent as it had been forty-two years earlier. Neither was my French. We had a hard time conversing, but we managed. I learned the tragic story of Marie's arrest. On January 22, Homage to the Comet Line 131 1944, a Saturday, Thibaut's servant spotted Gestapo agents on the street below and signaled Raoul. Robert Hoke, an American airman, was hiding in the same apartment at 134 Avenue du Diamant where I had stayed only two months earlier. Raoul and Hoke scooted down a back stairway into the garden, jumped over two walls, and got away. The Gestapo waited all afternoon and night for Raoul to return. Sunday at noon, when they realized he wasn't coming back, they took Marie with her baby to Gestapo headquarters. Thibaut's voice dropped with a soft sob as he finished telling this story. I didn't ask any questions. Margie and I talked about our children and grandchildren, and Raoul took out some family pictures. "There's my wife" (after the war he had married Jenny Roehrig). "She was also in the resistance and in Ravensbriick concentration camp with my first wife, Marie. She has been ill for the last years," Raoul said. "She's in the hospital. It's a result of the concentration camp. She suffered very much." He continued with the photographs. "There's my mother. This is my sister. This is my daughter." "Your daughter? Which daughter?" My pulse quickened. "Ines. I have only one daughter." "lnes? The baby I played with?" "Of course." "But I thought she was dead. I heard the Gestapo took her away with Marie and no one knew what became of her." "She was taken with my wife to Gestapo prison. But when they were getting ready to deport Marie to concentration camp, the officer asked her if she had someone to leave the baby with. Since I was in hiding, they sent Ines to Marie's aunt, who raised her till after the war." "This is like a fairytale," I said. "My head is spinning. First I had heard that you were dead. Then I heard it was Marie who was dead and that Ines had disappeared in the camps. Now, in the ] Project MUSE (2024-04-25 04:47 GMT) 132 ESCAPE FROM HITLER'S EUROPE space of two hours, I learn not only that you are alive but that Ines is alive also. You have no idea how happy I am." When I told Raoul that I was writing a book on my experience with the Belgian underground, he readily agreed to be interviewed on tape, and we set a date for the Monday after Margie and I would return from a visit to Madame Ugeux in southern France. Though I had never heard of Madame Ugeux until a few months before, her name proved to be central to my story. When I left Belgium in 1984, the biggest unresolved question was the nature of the organization that had...

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