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In 1940 Sergeant Mitterrand was shot in the chest, then captured by the Germans near Verdun. He felt his imprisonment in a Nazi P.O.W. camp was his "first real encounter with other men." He recalls: "At noon the Germans distributed tureens of rutabaga soup and loaves of bread. At first, it was the survival of the fittest—government by the knife. The first men to get hold of the soup or the bread served themselves, passing on no more than a few drops of dirty water to the others." After three months, however, camp leaders emerged to "cut the black bread into equal slices, under the wide-eyed scrutiny of free voters. It was a rare and instructive sight; I was witness to the birth of the social contract."
After two aborted attempts to escape from the camp, Mitterrand finally succeeded in 1941. Returning to Occupied France, he organized a small group of former P.O.W.s who furnished forged papers to members of the Resistance. It was then that he first tangled with Charles de Gaulle. When Mitterrand flew to Algiers to meet with the Free French leader, De Gaulle asked him if he would agree to merge his small P.O.W. group with a larger unit under the command of one of the general's nephews. Mitterrand refused, and De Gaulle curtly dismissed him. It was the beginning of hostilities between the two men, which were to turn Mitterrand into one of De Gaulle's most ferocious critics and political opponents.
It was also the beginning of Mitterrand's cyclical flirtations and disillusionments with the Communists. "I began working with the Communists during the Resistance. The friendships I made during this period are as strong as ever. Among the other benefits that I owe them, they have taught me never to close an eye if I am to avoid being crushed by their fearsome machine."
While in the Resistance movement (his alias was "Morland"), Mitterrand spotted a picture of a girl in an apartment used for exchanging messages. Mitterrand asked a few questions about her and then said, "I will marry her." That year he wed Danielle Gouze after, legend has it, introducing her to his parents with a staccato biography: "Danielle, nonreligious, democrat, socialist." Now a human rights activist in the party, she wrote a letter last month to Maureen Reagan asking her to use her influence to change her father's position on El Salvador.
Mitterrand's 37-year march to power began after France's liberation in 1944. First he ran for Parliament under the aegis of several moderate or center-right parties. Then he held a succession of eight Cabinet posts in the Fourth Republic, including the key post of Minister of the Interior under Pierre Mendes-France.
Mitterrand began gravitating toward the socialist left as his quarrel with De Gaulle grew sharper and he needed broader support for his fight against the general's "dictatorship." It was then that Mitterrand decided to become a spokesman of the opposition.