Home on the livestream, we welcome you. My name is martin. And executive director of the institute of war and democracy. We are the humble group of scholars that bring you programs such as this, and its our absolute pleasure to have paul with us tonight. The institute, what do we do . Apologize to the veterans. They hear this every few weeks. The institute serves as a Research Corps and the Higher Education center of the museum. We like to call or sells a community of scholars. Our job is to build bridges to academics and other experts around the world to make them part of the family and plug them into programs such as this. To produce scholarship of our own, as our multiple senior awardwinning historian has done with all 10 of his books. We also offer a wonderful new service, the world war ii veteran Research Project and service, which you can find on the website. You can trace the individual history of world war ii participants throughout the war, put that package together through archival documents, and create a unique, customized biography to help your family connect to world war ii. Were part of that one. Proud of that one. Another part is tonight, meet the author. We are exceptionally lucky to have connections to help bring the worlds most foremost authors an interesting presented to come to this stage and talk to us. Let me start by our usual tradition. Do we have any world war ii veterans or homefront workers with us tonight . Please rise. [applause] martin and veterans of any other areas . Eras . [applause] all, and ink you hope youll enjoy indulge me while i think my favorite veteran, my wife sarah, like hope is working from home. Many of you been that have been to these meet the author events. This has been a great milestone. Illustrious an important speaker series. For the first time, we have a sponsor and were very grateful to welcome the Straight Foundation from houston. We want to certainly think the theight foundation thank Straight Foundation, and we hope theyll continue that relationship for many years to come. [applause] tonight speaker, for me, is an example for the two things i always urge to find. I say you are going to bring me someone who can deliver quality scholarship. Its got to be top quality, best research, hard work, delivers a beautiful narrative. The book has just got to be good. And then the thing i am personally guilty of, it cant be boring. Have to deliver a great presentation. Were very proud to say tonights presenter, paul kix, Deputy Editor of the magazine, heavily involved with espns many platforms i challenge anyone to call espn boring. You might have seen his writings in the new yorker, gq, mens journal, and wall street journal, just to name a few. I hope you all have heard of those. Paul was originally from iowa, was in boston, and now resides in connecticut with his wife, who is an exceptionally nice person, helping out with the event tonight, and their three wonderful children. Paul is going to present for us on a really great book on one of those fascinating characters. I will steal his thunder. It sounds like this has got to be a movie. And maybe it will be. And if it is, were going to invite you to the premiere at the National World war ii museum. To talk about his book, the saboteur the aristocrat who became frances most daring antinazi commando, please join me in welcoming paul kix to our stage. [applause] mr kix thank you, everybody, for coming tonight. This is fantastic. Its great to see this many people here. Its great to see this many people interested about world war ii in general and france in particular. Ago to comemonths down here on the citys 300th anniversary. It seemed fitting for me and thankfully was fitting as well for the museum. I want to start it, actually, a question that i get i will be taking questions after a while, but one of the first questions i get is, would a minute how exactly does a god who edits and rights about sports wait a minute, how exactly does a guy who edits and writes about sports how does he do a book about that guy, and what is his name . Name is Robert Delarosa foucault. One day io it was reading the new york times, flipping through on my phone, and i saw an obituary, and the obituary said, world war ii commander in spy who sabotaged his way across Southern France and worked for a secret group of british commandos dies at 88, and i said, well, im going to keep reading that obituary. The story even in obituary form was remarkable. It was so good that national based radio did a story on the obituary that appeared in the times. It is so good that theres a website called and you will have to excuse the language for a second website called badas week that said, this greatest bad as we have ever had. Had. Im ever assuming there are some people here who have been to france. How many people here are familiar vaguely with the la r ochfoucauld name . For those who are not, it is the fourth oldest family in france. Its lineage literally shaped france. In 1789 in thef garden of versailles, and king louis sees the pitchforks coming. He turns to an aide and says, is this a revolt . No, sire,e says, this is a revolution. That aid was roberts greatgreatgreatgreat grandfather. The family has a street named after them in paris. Proust troost writes exclusively about the family. Extensively about the family. Have been lionized by the church for the roles they played during the reign of terror. They have seen martyrdom. It is a very rich, very old family. Some of this is in that obituary that im reading in the new york times. I didnt do anything with it, though, and thats because i was an editor at espn, the magazine. My wife and i had three kids including twin boys who were probably six month old at the time. And most importantly, i did not speak french. I thought theres no way i could do this book, but summer of 2012 becomes fall of 2012. You have to understand that i just love really good stories for the sake of stories, and i have been wanting for some time to write my first book. I have been wanting to ride books write books since i was about seven years old. By the fall of 2012, i cannot get this story out of my head. I went to my wife one night and said, ive got to do it. The very first step was to find roberts memoir. He had written a memoir about his role in the war that had never been translated to english. The first thing my wife and i did was we found it on amazon. It cost about 200 euros. It was rare at the time. Its now not as rare. We set about trying to figure out how to piece this together, but of course, neither of us spoke french, so we used Google Translate. [laughter] here haveany people used Google Translate . We [laughter] people here have used it for more than a sentence or phrase . Because what do you start to see when you do that . You see that, boy, you have really no sense of what is going on here. That is what happened. Page after page i would get back , and it was very hard for me to figure out what was going on. So we retranslated. We had thrown it back into the Google Translate machine until finally, we had something that i thought was about 85 of i could understand about 85 of roberts story. Story isd, ok, this unbelievable, and then the cynical journalist in me kicked in. And i thought, wait a minute, this story is literally unbelievable pure unbelievable. Before i wrote a proposal, before the book was optioned by dreamworks and we can talk about that afterwards if youd like i have to figure out, all right, is this a story who is even worth that is even worth doing . I had some friends in boston who had friends in paris. He says in the book he received commendations by the french government. If thats true, at least theres french trail by the government who here has been to france . Actually, we have some french people. Who here has dealt with french yurok receipt . So you know what its like. This became a very laborious process, almost as laborious as translating the book itself. After a few months, i got a call , and sophie was her name, the journalist helping me in france. She said, paul, its wonderful. He is who he says he is. She sent me an email, and he actually received all the commendations he says he received in the memoir. Then the real work begins. Im going to talk a little bit about roberts wife and read you a short snippet of the book itself. Life. Ut Roberts Robert comes from a very prestigious family, and one of the first things i had to try to figure out is why does he choose to fight . Somethingave done that the vast majority of the french date, which was absolutely nothing. Scholars of later contended that perhaps as few as 80 , perhaps as much as 90 of the french populace neither aided the. Llies nor aided the fascists about 10 of the french populace were openly collaborating with the nazis. Of that,aller percent as few as 2 of the french populace according to scholarly estimates, were active in the resistance. Robert was one of them, but what really fascinated me was he did not have to be. Again, the money alone, the connections alone could have meant that he could have gone to neutral spain, could have meant that he could have found a nice farm in the english countryside, could have meant that he could have had the wherewithal to get to the states without too much problem, but he did not do that. He did the hardest thing possible, which was to actively participate in the resistance, and to do so would mean if they were captured by the germans, they were killed. They were not treated like prisoners of war. In fact, it was far worse than an immediate death. It was torture. It was excruciating torture. So why . Why does robert do this . This became one of the animating questions. Part of it is because of the storied family history. Roberts father was a decorated world war i officer, who was actually recommissioned at the outbreak of world war ii. He was captured after the battle for france was lost. In fact, captured five days after that battle, at a point where he was still fighting, so saith his military records. That gives you a sense of the La Rochefoucauld family. Home the La Rochefoucauld was actually commandeered by the germans. Was anLa Rochefoucauld angry, young, 17yearold man trying to find a place for world. In this scary new the third consideration was his mother. His mother, consuelo, just to give you a hint of the sort of aaracter she was, there was highranking german army officer who was part of the nobility in germany, and he came to stay at the La Rochefoucauld house. This is while the germans were living among the La Rochefoucaulds. The story goes that he walked up the front steps you have to understand, consuelo was a woman who made her own cigarettes from corn husks. She is a short, stocky woman, and she doesnt take any growth from anybody. She is standing there, scowling at the man, and he is being his most chivalrous. He takes off his gloves and says, madam de La Rochefoucauld , it is a great privilege to state in your home. Your name has extended across the french border. As he extends his hand, she slapped him across the face. Theres another officer with them that says, madam, an introduction like that could risk deportation. But she did not care, and neither did her 17yearold son, who wanted to find a way to fight. Course, by 1940, after the battle for france is lost, everything has been turned over to the germans, all the way down to hunting knives, so roberts ed in joining the resistance, but he could not actually do it. But on the bbc, there is one general who had led france pulpitance, and from the of the bbc, he said every night, i want the battle for france to carry on. Robert listened every night to the forecast. That general was the most junior general in france, and his name was charles de gaulle. Robert was so taken with what de gaulle had to say, that he found to get to london. He had to do it by first sneaking his way south through spain because you could not actually cross the channel. There was no way that that could have happened. Isgets there, and he interrupted, as the british like to say. There was a new force whose colloquial name was the ministry of gentlemanly warfare of entlemanly warfare. Im a big fan of british understatement, and that was the way ofderstated characterizing what they did. Ian fleming, who rode james bond, basedte james his character on what they did. What they did was anarchy by any means. They would train foreign nationals in all legal and illegal means of warfare, parachute them back into their native lands, and then watch as they fomented revolution. Decided that even if well, he wanted to still fight for de gaulle, but he ended up deciding that perhaps the best way to do it was to align himself with the british. What he learned from the british thumbs break films , how to properly kick a man in the testicles, how to properly break his back, how to properly slice a knife across his throat, how to properly roll out of a train moving at 40 miles an hour, how to do something called silent killing. This tactic of silent killing so enraged hitlers that he issued what was known as a commander order in 1940 two, and that commando order was directed at the british, and it said, if anyone is found to have been trained by them, these bandits of the british are to be killed immediately or cup immediately. In 1942. Robert flew back to france in the summer of 1943, having been trained in also its of work, confidentw back knowing that he had a skill set that so few people actually had having been trained in all sorts of work. His initial assignment was to sabotage facilities in france that were essential to the nazi war machine. He carried it out absolute ofomb, but the last mission e right before they got on the plane to get back was one of humility. Robert had to keep that in mind as summer of 1943 turned into the fall of 1943. Agent as gave every soe cyanide pill. They said, there have men many brave agents that have come before you, and you need to remember the odds will start to work against you after about six months in country, and if ever you are captured, swallow this quickly because we dont want you giving up any information. Fall of 1943 turns into late and now robert sees what they mean. The nazis, in particular the gestapo, were very effective in infiltrating resistance cells in france in 1943. Robert was working for one known as noahs ark. Run by a woman, and it was the largest resistance cell in all of france at the time. Murray ended up leaving france just as robert entered it, marie ended up up leaving france just as robert entered it, and she called 1943 the terrible year. She literally forgot how many agents were arrested. Robert is seeing the people he is working with one day, and then he does not hear from them again, so he has to imagine well, he knows that he will probably never see them again. So paranoia sets in. My next . In. T sets and guilt sets why am i not captured . Those captured . Next am i next . He is still thinking there is a way to carry out the work even though his cell has been decimated. One night, hes asleep in a barn and he is jostled awake. He sees a half circle of men around him in felt hats and leather jackets and thin smiles on their face. They said, how are you this evening . And then they started to beat him. They did not stop until he was tied up, he said, like a sausage. One of the gestapo agents went immediately to a corner of the n where he had hidden guns the guns, and he said, what is this . Robert says, thats not mine. He smiles and says, yes, it is. How did theyof, know . Who gave me up . Is replaced with a much darker fear where are they taking me . Taken to ag prison, and whatever you can imagine the nazis doing to extract information from a resistance fighter like robert, it happened. Time i had a chance to look at the records from the prison roles most inmates were therefore one week or two weeks and were released. The local historians i spoke with in france believe that is because the nazis gave them the information they wanted, and then they left. Monthswas there for four. The nazis gained the information they wanted. He went before a kangaroo court, and within 10 minutes, his execution was ordered, and he spent his last night in his cell and sort of bemoaned the fact spent enough time in germany, but the german priest who had given him his last, he did not understand a word the guy was saying. Hadhe german priest who given him his last rites. \ that is where i would like to begin reading from the book. There we are. Just before 8 00 a. M. , two guards escorted La Rochefoucauld out of the b wing into the bed of a waiting truck. They told him to sit on the coffin line. Robert saw another coffee next to him, and here came another prisoner pushed along by the guards onto the box that he, too, would soon fill. Robert did not know this man, and as the guards tossed him in the back, highpowered rifles in their arms, he did not see the point in introductions. The truck felt into low gear, and the red doors that had closed behind La Rochefoucauld 4 months earlier, parted now to let him out. The truck stop before the citys major thoroughfare whose northbound lane directed one to paris. The truck, however, turned right, south, toward the countryside. They were headed for a series of each narrower and bumpier than the last, the terrain moving from uninterrupted wheat fields to groves of trees, to a fork in the road, where the path drove one ever deeper into woods until a clearing came interview where the road ended. There against trees pockmarked with bullet holes, La Rochefoucauld would be told to stand. He would look out on the distant brush and listen to the birdsong while the nazi guards took aim. 43 people would be executed here during the war. As the truck started out on this path, passing a brownstone chapel on the grounds of a psychiatric hospital, La Rochefoucauld had a thought. Why give into the nazis now . He had spent the last four months ignoring the basest screams of his body because he could not fathom giving the germans anything they wanted. Now they wanted him dead, but he did not wish to die. He looked at the beneath him rushing past and noticed nazis one mistake the germans had never learned much about him, which meant they never understood the extent to which he had been trained to maim and kill. On hiskept his eyes wrists. There were no handcuffs on him. He glanced at the guards, saw their guns resting on their laps. If he could not succeed, he thought, he wanted to