She consulted on the docudrama Spying on Hitler’s Army and appeared in BBC’s Home Front Heroes.Fry applied the “Page 99 Test” to her latest book, MI9: A History of the Secret Service for Escape and Evasion in World War Two, and reported the following:
MI9: the British Secret Service for Escape and Evasion in WWII provides the first history of this secret intelligence service for over 40 years. From page 99:Visit Helen Fry's website.Back on Avenue Voltaire, Madame Maréchal answered the door to them and was confronted by one of them pulling out a revolver: Madame, the game is up!’ he said. He was in fact a member of the Secret Police. Elsie arrived back home from the Canteen and walked straight into the trap to find eight Geheime Feld Polizei (Secret Field Police of the German army), including the ‘airmen’. Now her interrogation and rough treatment began. They led her to believe that her mother was dead on the kitchen floor. Elsie stalled for time whilst thinking of a strategy of how to warn Nemo. She pretended that she had been to the Black Market and spent all her money. It was 4.30pm and she told them that she had to meet her chief at 5pm at the entrance to a large park. They swiftly bundled her out of the house and got on a tram. In the meantime, her captors had called for back up and extra Secret Police were waiting in the shadows near the alleged meeting point. As time marched on and there was no sign of the chief, the men became restless. After nearly 2 hours of waiting, they took Elsie to Gestapo headquarters where she underwent interrogation and was badly beaten.MI9 has become the forgotten secret service of the Second World War and today members of the public have never heard of it. Therefore it is interesting to see if the Page 99 Test actually works to illuminate this unknown history. Page 99 showcases one of the strongest themes of the book, and that is the courage and sacrifice of thousands of ordinary women and men who led the escape lines and acted as couriers, helpers and guides across Western Europe. Page 99 tells the story of the betrayal of Elsie Maréchal, one of the last surviving veterans of the Comet Line, an escape line that operated from Belgian through France to the Pyrenees and into Spain. In 2019, I travelled to Belgium to interview 98-year old Elsie, a survivor of two concentration camps. Until that moment, the research had been quite academic and consisted of amassing data and stories from declassified files, but Elsie’s interview enabled me to get to the heart of the human stories and to understand the special relationship between MI9 and the people who risked their lives in occupied Europe when they could have chosen a different path. Most significantly in relation to the Page 99 Test, it was Elsie’s interview which was the transformative moment for my research. The airmen and soldiers who were rescued, if caught again by the Germans, would be sent back to prisoner of war camps; but helpers like Elsie faced a different fate – they and their families were shot or sent to concentration camps. Page 99 is the moment when Elsie and her family were betrayed in 1942 with devastating consequences and arrested by the Gestapo in what became known as ‘The Maréchal Affair’. Elsie’s spirit of defiance against the Nazis was still evident when I interviewed her over 75 years later. I was able to ask her why she risked her life at the age of only 16 to shelter Allied airmen whilst working for the Comet Line. Page 99 works for my book precisely because it lands at the point that transformed my writing and understanding of this history. This is where the book is taken to another level, intellectually and emotionally.
Airey Neave learned about what had happened to Elsie because of the many reunions after the war and at a time when personal stories were shared. Many of the personalities who had worked with MI9 became a close-knit community and the ties which had bound them in the war continued in friendships afterwards. Neave wrote in his autobiography: ‘Under the portrait of [the head of the German air force] Hermann Goering, the bastards beat eighteen-year old Elsie until she was covered in bruises and unable to lie on her back for weeks. All night long the inmates of the prison of St Gilles could hear her heart-breaking sobs. I thought of her when, as an official at the Tribunal at Nuremberg, I met Goering in his cell three years afterwards.’
A few hours later Elsie’s father was brought in. He had returned home from work in Flanders to find the Secret Field Police in his home. He and Elsie were taken to St Gilles Prison where, at an opportune time, he whispered to her to say nothing and hold on.
The Page 99 Test: The London Cage.
The Page 99 Test: The Walls Have Ears.
--Marshal Zeringue
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