La Furgole in Toulouse, where the PRUNUS agents spent the month of April 1943 following their arrests
PRUNUS agents were taken from La Furgole to Gestapo Toulouse HQ, now Rue des Martyrs de la Résistance, where they were tortured
Fresnes, the grim German-run prison near Paris, where they spent the next nine months, before being sent to the transit camp at Compiègne.
Postcard from Maurice at Compiègne transit camp, announcing he was being transferred to Germany
Buchenwald, the slave labor camp where Maurice spent 14 months, ending with his execution March 29, 1945, 13 days before liberation. By February, 1944, the camp and its 88 sub-camps, built for 20,000, had grown to 112,000 prisoners, many of whom arrived from camps evacuated as the Allies marched west.
A view of Buchenwald from the opposite angle. Maurice spent February 1944 in quarantine in block 48. After contracting pneumonia, he was sent to medical block 61, which was slightly less lethal than the Rivier, the camp hospital block where medical experiments were conducted. By April he was back in the Big Camp block 26, where he stayed until his execution. He was assigned relatively light work in the camp storage facility, the Effektenkammer.
Maurice’s prison number was #44438. Pictured here is Marcel Petit’s prison badge and number. Petit and Maurice arrived in convoy I.173 (#444) with 3640 men, January 30, 1944.
Maurice’s Buchenwald personal information card designates him as part of Aktion Meerschaum, or Operation Seafoam… a category of political prisoners never to leave camp.Meerschaum prisoners were allowed to write and receive one letter a month. Maurice wrote thisone, dated May 21, 1944, to Vuillemot’s wife in Paris. It gives his location as block 26.Ravensbrück, the women’s camp where PRUNUS agents Odette Laroque, Jeanine Morisse, Yvonne LaGrange and Catherine Vuillemot were imprisoned.
