They had a bad scare when one member, Jean Pouillon, lost a briefcase filled with incriminating pamphlets together with the group members’ names and addresses. They all faced arrest, torture, death. Luckily, the person who found the briefcase turned it in to a lost-property office. The incongruity of this — the threat of Gestapo torture coexisting with the decent civic tradition of the lost-property office — captures the strangeness of life under Occupation.
