Even if you doubted the effectiveness of your actions, you knew that you were not wrong.
—MARIE-MADELEINE FOURCADE, RÉSISTANTE
The Occupation historian Michèle Cointet states baldly in her latest book that “the Resistance is considered a virile act.”1 She then proceeds to debunk that claim. Still, the assertion continues to be argued today, and it is still considered necessary to correct this canard. The place of women and girls in the resistance to the Germans and their Vichy fellows remains an unsettled terrain of debate, despite such deeply substantiated studies as Cointet’s. Research since the 1980s has vigorously argued that the Resistance’s success might have been decisively impeded without the help of young women, women who put themselves in the same dangerous situations as their male companions. But after the war, men and boys garnered most of the attention, not to mention most of the medals, the role of women tending to become enveloped in, if not overwhelmed by, masculine exploits. And frankly, though many women and girls went to German prison camps to die or barely survive, the image of young men tied to stakes, blindfolded or not, being shot while singing “La Marseillaise” or shouting “Vive la France” captured more fascinated attention.
At the Musée de l’Ordre de la Libération at the Invalides in Paris, the portraits of the 1,038 members of the Ordre de la Libération include almost no women compagnonnes. Charles de Gaulle had established this decoration in 1940 to recognize extraordinary military and civil service to the liberation of France; only six women were awarded this highest distinction, and only one under the age of thirty.* Young women, recognized or not as major players, had often carried out dangerous assignments, and their exploits present examples of courage and decency that should fix their place firmly in the national narrative of resistance.
Today one can find important books about women who resisted, but far fewer than about male résistants. Yet women’s voices continue to be heard; testimonies, formal as well as informal, have been presented and then repeated. One of the most tangible results of résistantes’ postwar notoriety, no matter how hard-won, was that de Gaulle supported the right of women to have the vote, which was legalized before the war had ended.* He could not ignore the evidence of the important contributions of girls and women in the struggle on French territory that helped chase the Germans back across the Rhine.
Decades later, in May 2015, President François Hollande officiated at a ceremony at the Panthéon, burial site of some of France’s greatest political, social, and cultural figures, as the remains of four résistants—Germaine Tillion, Geneviève de Gaulle-Anthonioz, and two men, Pierre Brossolette and Jean Zay—were transferred to lie there.* For the first time in seventy years, widespread and massive public attention was paid to the women of the Resistance.
* * *
The role of girls and young women would present a recurring conundrum for the leaders of the PCF. The early 1920s had seen equal attention given to female youngsters, with photographs of them with fists raised assertively against fascism. But as the Front populaire tried to reassure the general public that their government was not ultra-radical, pressure was put on young women communists to resume their traditional role as intelligent and necessary, but still docile, members of the Party. As such, they were often assigned the mundane tasks of printing and typing, while otherwise keeping out of sight. At times they were even forbidden to pass leaflets out in the street, for fear of rousing the indignation of the center and right. Of course, the most outspoken communist females often defied these restrictions.
* * *
The sacrifice of the lives of almost two million Frenchmen in World War I had brought necessary attention to the crucial role that women played as single parents, house managers, workers in the war industry, and generally protectors of the ideal French family. The numerous youth movements of the 1930s had finally encouraged young women to leave home briefly, during the summer, to attend camps that would offer them a new independence from parental supervision. Through vigorous physical exercise, they learned how to be more confident in public and in social activities. In these camps, they were able to make friends outside of their social class or neighborhood, even with immigrants. And they gained assurance in debating ideological positions. Cultural changes in the 1930s—the introduction of swing and jazz, the establishment of bals where boys and girls could enjoy each other’s company without chaperones, the omnipresent new cinema depicting smart young women engaging with smart—and surprised—young men had transformed the popular image of what a young girl might become.
Still, traditional mores—secular and religious—as well as a deeply patriarchal legal system militated against too much independence. Girls had still to confront a consensus that they should be homemakers, that they were too emotional and fragile to enter the worlds of banking, engineering, or business. Men were legally the head of their family, and girls continued to be educated in single-sex schools. Still, the nation was filled with wives, sisters, and daughters who were caretakers for psychologically or physically wounded men. The same indomitability that had made females indispensable to the home front during the Great War did not leave them for long in the shadows of male-only resistance activities.
Germaine Tillion explained that there were three resistance activities for which young women and girls were immediately needed: to discover and distribute information; to help those trying to escape, especially POWs, Allied aviators, and Jews; and finally, to find ways to inform London and the Free French about what was happening in France. None of these tasks was danger-free. This work began immediately, even before the armistice was signed, for it was obvious that France had lost its war and that, many feared, the country would soon be under some sort of Nazi administration. Most girls and boys had no experience in such work, no organization, and no knowledge of how to distinguish between possible supporters and potential enemies. But both genders were already present on the thin line of resistance.
In her eminently researched study A Train in Winter, the historian Caroline Moorehead outlines how disorganized and chaotic women’s earliest resistance efforts were. Through extensive interviews with surviving women resisters, she discovered that the earliest resisters had decided to participate on their own initiative, that is, they did not need the encouragement of their brothers, uncles, or fathers. Nonetheless, they often needed masculine permission to go out alone, especially at night, or to borrow a bicycle or spend unguarded time with men outside the family—that is, they had to “resist” the gender bias underlying male and female relationships in midcentury France while also figuring out how to resist the Occupier. At first, their activities, almost always nonviolent, often befuddled the German police and even their compatriots, the French police officers. It would take almost two years, until early 1942, before authorities realized how important young women were to the Resistance and how guilefully they did their jobs.
Still, for the average bourgeois girl (a term to distinghish those girls from their more worldly communist sisters), to resist was not at first a specifically ideological decision but a patriotic one—that is, one that emanated from an embarrassment that overshadowed their pride in being French. Of course, friends and boyfriends who bragged about writing “Vive de Gaulle!” on the walls or making fun of young German soldiers attracted the patriotic attention of the most confident of young women. But for the most part, the girls who did resist just slipped into those roles, often idiosyncratically, before and until the whole movement had had time to organize and direct their impulsive actions. Besides this emerging search for an answer to the question “what should I do?,” girls were also continuously exposed to Vichy propaganda that women and girls were expected to have babies and care for the family. Newspapers, books, magazines, posters, radio announcements, school instruction—all repeatedly reminded girls of the domestic duties they were expected to fulfill. (The fact that men had failed to do their duty seemed to have escaped even the subtlest of the propagandists.)*
Another source of emulation that raised young women’s awareness of the role they could play during the gray armistice period was found in their classrooms: their female teachers, at all levels, were often pacifists, leftists, and antifascists. Having their teachers explain in context what was happening in Europe (at least until they were fired by the Vichy educational establishment because of their assumed ideological prejudices), or hint at the weaknesses of the Vichy project, or ask students how they intended to live through the Occupation—all of these discussions demanded answers to questions that girls’ families might not have been asking. Mothers and fathers were worried about their sons not following police regulations, being drafted, or remaining in POW camps. Girls, the culture assumed, were less vulnerable, saner, more cautious, and less spontaneous. This “invisibility” within their own families allowed some young women the freedom to make important decisions without parental interference.
At the beginning, there was an almost gay “cops-and-robbers” attitude toward interfering with German order. By this, I mean that adults did not take seriously the desire of young women to stand against what was happening. “What are you going to do?” they would ask patronizingly. “Run around whistling at German soldiers, defacing their vehicles, or tearing down posters? It will only get you—and us—into trouble.” But from the winter of 1940 until the summer of 1941, the game continued, as Moorehead explains:
There was yet no very clear goal to their activities, beyond the constant harassment of the Germans whose forces they hoped to keep in a perpetual state of uneasy alert. They also wanted to send a message to Vichy that collaboration was an odious affair, unacceptable to decent people, and that it would, when sanity and victory returned to France, be severely punished. . . . What none of them knew [the youngest as well as the oldest], . . . feeling oddly safe in a country where women were still not perceived to be active in the Resistance, was how lethal it was about to become.2
Once the Gestapo and the SS had replaced the Wehrmacht as overseer of the French police in mid-1942, arrests became increasingly public, security checks more frequent, and examination of IDs less cursory. Young women were now watched closely. They were not often captured in the act of violence, but an arrest would lead back to those who had been instrumental in preparing false papers, finding lodging, hiding resisters, or passing information between resistance groups. Though they still could guilefully use their wholesome youth and apparent innocence to throw both Germans and Frenchmen off the scent, girls discovered that doing so had become more difficult to get away with. And not a few young women were arrested, if only to intimidate them rather than punish them.
As surveillance and betrayal became common, these girls and young women, often still living at home with their families, had to become more sophisticated about their activities. They rarely acted independently—that is, without support from adults, mostly male. There were no “all-girl” resistance groups, charged specifically with doing less onerous, less dangerous, or less significant acts. Maroussia Naïtchenko had a theory about why there were so few girls and young women in the active, or violent, resistance: “[The Resistance] had much difficulty in recruiting liaison agents. Families of sympathizers and even those of militants would not let their young daughters hang around, without supervision or surveillance, with a group of men.”3
Then as now, girls were expected to write about their most private thoughts and dreams, especially as they approached puberty. We saw this in Micheline Bood’s detailed recounting of her daily existence during the Occupation. Blank journals and diaries were given as gifts, some with locks and keys. Thanks to these records, much has been learned of daily life during the Occupation, and of the lives of young women in a repressive society; boys’ diaries are rarer. During the Occupation, girls also wrote letters—to their absent fathers, boyfriends, husbands, and brothers—and to the BBC; they seemed to have an uncanny belief that, as Maroussia Naïtchenko exclaims toward the end of Une Jeune Fille en guerre (A girl at war), “If I escape, I will write! . . . My decision taken then was also a sort of psychological safeguard: a means of being able to support the increasing disappearances and my own suffering. . . . I would be the depository, a witness, having seen and remembered, these days of horror.”4 Micheline Bood called her notebooks les années doubles, “the double years”: every rule, every expectation, every “normality” had a second meaning, a double expectation, an option. And so these documents continue to appear from the mists of history as children and grandchildren find them, stored in trunks and attics and old chifforobes.
* * *
Among the reasons that Maroussia Naïtchenko’s memoir is affecting is because she not only remembers the anxiety of that period but never forgets that she was just a sixteen-year-old teenager. After the Germans arrived in the capital on June 14, 1940, she recounts, she and her friends had a brilliant idea: they wanted to go to the top of the Eiffel Tower, a short walk from the Invalides, and see Occupied Paris from above. Arriving there, they found that the elevators were not working, possibly having been sabotaged. So, being sixteen and with strong legs, they climbed the 1,700 steps. By late June 1940, Paris, almost overnight, was full of Germans. Again, with her friends, Maroussia decided to go to the grand parade ground in front of the Invalides, not far from her grandmother’s apartment, to watch as enemy forces marched before Napoleon’s tomb.
The German tanks . . . filed by in well-ordered ranks that covered the width of the esplanade. It was imposing, almost unimaginable, this tranquil power that, rolling along with a deep, but regular sound, crossed “our” asphalt. . . . I had lost all thought, all feeling, felt emptied, in a stupor. Thus had Nazism won, and now trampled on the soil of my childhood, of my very neighborhood!
. . . The soldiers who drove these tanks and trucks, with their impeccable belts, appeared young and in excellent form. Nothing like our poor men, in faded uniforms, clumsy, exhausted. . . . Never would one have believed that this blond youth who paraded impassively by us had been successful in defeating us in such a short time. Against this hated army, what would we be able to do? In a single instant, I finally understood the word “Occupation.”5
In another telling anecdote that casually describes what must have been an important adjunct to the growth of a more violent resistance in later months, Maroussia recounts that her grandmother was afraid to give up an old pistol, as ordered by the authorities. The French police, advised by the Wehrmacht, had issued the early injunction to Parisians that they should surrender all personal arms by taking them to the nearest police station. Maroussia’s grandmother was too nervous to comply, so she offered her small pistol to one of Maroussia’s comrades and asked him to throw it into the sewer. Later, Maroussia learned that many had done the same and that communist sewer workers collecting them were slowly building an arsenal against the Occupiers.
Naïtchenko’s captivating memoir might be the most intimate remembrance we have of not only the bigger questions that led adolescents to challenge authority, but the day-to-day preoccupations of courageous but nervous youngsters who, unlike their often-guarded parents, wanted to actively confront the Occupier. They itched to express how angry they were about the betrayal of their nation. The brilliantly provocative interaction of Maroussia’s conservative grandmother and faithfully communist mother made the teenager a sensitive, always inquisitive fighter against the “new revolution” that was endeavoring to replace her pride in the French Republic.
After the exodus, Maroussia’s account recalls, with youngsters returning to the capital, amateur posters and wall scribblings began to reappear. At first, the authorities had not been too severe toward the young miscreants, who were typically taken to the nearest police station, where they were scared to death by the cops and their parents were called. But, as Maroussia writes, “we were not aware that the Gestapo was working away in the shadows.” Lists were being compiled, and foreign Jews, communists, and Freemasons were quietly being arrested. The homes of Jewish merchants were being looted, and “undesirables” were filling the concentration camps that had popped up all over France to handle Spanish refugees; though not death camps, they were still unpleasant. “Silently, the traps that would close in on us were being quietly set up.”6 Nevertheless, Maroussia and her young comrades fearlessly continued their timid harassment of both the Germans and the French police. They learned which street markets were the safest for the distribution of their tracts; which streets were dead ends; and which seemed to be dead ends, but in fact opened onto other avenues of escape. They found out where and how to hide their bikes.
And then a miracle occurred: Maroussia’s mother found a job at the Kommandantur, headquarters for the Occupying Authority, situated on the Place de l’Opéra. (In applying, she had used her maiden name, de Guilhermy, and the particle “de” probably impressed German snobs.) She was hired as a professor and interpreter of French, and most important she had access to an official Ausweis, the pass that allowed her to go anywhere in Paris, enter all the finest hotels that the Germans had occupied, use public transit for free, and be out after curfew. This “cover” would be of inestimable use to her daughter, the young résistante.
It was during this time that Naïtchenko befriended the three boys whose names would become synonymous with youthful resistance: Guy Môquet, Thomas Elek, and André Kirschen. As was often the case among teens and students in the underground, their bonds, though often brief, were intense. Adult leaders were few, and the spontaneity and fearlessness of these youth often led them to unforeseen danger they had not anticipated. They could not always protect their parents from learning about their activities, nor prevent the family arguments that often ensued when they were found with incriminating evidence in their rooms or on their persons. One young warrior recalls that a friend’s father had found, hidden under his son’s mattress, not sexy magazines but dozens of pages of anti-German leaflets. Furious, the father threw them out of the window—onto the busy Avenue Bosquet. Mortified at his own spontaneous stupidity (which happily had no repercussions), he made sure his eighteen-year-old son was locked in his room at night, and he was forbidden to go anywhere but to school and back.
If she lacked patience in the classroom, Maroussia had spirit, a sense of humor, and a readily displayed impatience with cant. Pretty and popular, she was a “normal” youngster who had to grow up quickly. Soon, with her girlfriends, she acted illegally for the first time. All posters on Parisian walls had to have official stamps applied to them. Cautiously, she and a friend began delicately removing the expensive stamps, hoping that the Jeunesse communiste could use them for their own signs. When stopped by a policeman and warned that she was breaking a law, she and her friends giggled, acting as though they had been playing a game; the policeman smiled and walked away. It was not the first time she would use her girlishness as camouflage.
Maroussia learned several important lessons while acting out her romantic fantasies as a young communist: she observed that solidarity in a group was similar to belonging to a family; she learned to express her ideas in an environment where they might be questioned, but not ridiculed; she felt comfortable interacting with boys and young men, as her equals; and she realized that one’s life plans could suddenly be changed by external events. She also came to recognize that internal fractures, even among the most committed, could suddenly make another suspicious, and that one could mysteriously become herself an object of suspicion. Even after the German invasion of the Soviet Union had freed French communists to act aggressively, the French Communist Party was divided between those who supported Stalin, with his belief that the Soviet Union should represent the ideal totalizing socialist state, and Trotsky, a close ally of Lenin, who emphasized the responsibility to promulgate international socialism. Arguments among her fellow Party members led to resignations and caused enmity among the most passionate. Young Maroussia often wondered if her comrades were forgetting the larger picture as they disputed each other’s claims to be the most loyal communist.
Once she had thoroughly committed herself to action against the Occupier, Maroussia proudly describes her first golden moment, which would be remembered for four years by all who were there, or who were there in spirit:
That day, we entered the main court [of the Sorbonne] shouting: “Free Langevin!” The doors of the great auditorium, opening onto the courtyard, were closed, so we had to wait on the steps shouting our protest. . . . The small group of protesters then went to the Collège de France [the elite institution of higher learning adjacent to the Sorbonne]. There were not many of us and our intervention certainly did not make the administration tremble, but this handful of protesters had showed this venerable establishment that we were present. We lit then the first torch of student resistance.7
This was, of course, her memory of the first major demonstration against the Occupier, on November 11, 1940, discussed earlier in Chapter Six.
Naïtchenko and her young friends continued to find ways to resist the orders of the higher-ups in the Party during the winter of 1940–1941 while the Hitler–Stalin pact was still in force. They impudently printed tracts and distributed them; they played havoc with the hundreds of German and Vichy propaganda posters that littered Paris; and they regularly met in small groups to bemoan the pusillanimity of the Soviet Union and its shameful non-aggression treaty with Hitler. The youngsters also searched high and low for ronéotype machines and even printing presses; found isolated locations to do the noisy work of printing; taught themselves to discern whether they were being followed; and learned how to avoid being stopped for ID checks. These kids were still living at home and still hearing their parents, who were also communists for the most part, complain about the noose the Russians had put around their efforts. Yet the adventure of doing something, of showing one’s solidarity, if not with the Party then at least with their generation, was addictive. They knew they needed to be especially careful: they were being watched by a multitude of suspicious entities—the Germans, the Vichy police, the hierarchy of the PCF, and anticommunist resistance cadres.
Certainly, they were cautious when asked where their fealty lay. They were careful not to mention anything about their surreptitious gatherings, not even to their parents, and they astutely avoided fights with students who had nothing but disdain for communists, Jews, and Gaullists. All the while they were hearing about youngsters like themselves who were being rounded up, held indefinitely, and, like Môquet, sometimes executed.
These young communists were defined by their solidarity with each other, by their commitment to freedom (innocent as they were of Stalin’s vicious dictatorship), and by respect for what each of them—girls as well as boys—could bring to the cause. Girls especially were welcomed and recruited, for they had attributes, skills, and a cultural camouflage that would prove useful in the later struggles. During this gray period, Maroussia often served as a lookout for youngsters, communist and other, who would suddenly make a brief speech in a market, throw leaflets into a crowd, or pass to people leaving a church tickets that said “Join us in our fight against fascism.” She and her friends were careful not to identify themselves as communist—so as to avoid conflict with their Party’s obedient hierarchy—but they did not sit still while adults dickered over international politics and Jews, Roma, and political refugees were being rounded up and often deported.
“We were clandestine,” Maroussia writes simply—hidden, under cover, subversive, silently antagonistic, obsessively secretive.8 And it was not only young communists who were clandestinely subversive; a range of students, from the far right to the pacifist center to the noncommunist left, formed groups based on friendship and politics. For about a year, even though a few youngsters were caught and punished, the authorities were more concerned about their elders. As a result of this inattention, these youth were allowed time and space to become confident in their activities, but they also became less and less careful about making sure that they went unnoticed.
Not surprisingly, the strain of operating under so much surveillance began to show its effects. Maroussia, the teen who had wanted to climb the Eiffel Tower, was now short of breath after repeatedly going up five or six floors of apartment house stairs. Her fatigue and undernourished figure made her look harried to observers and suggested that she was perhaps on some clandestine mission. She had to worry about where to leave her bicycle while she distributed the tracts; a stolen bicycle was a crisis almost as serious as an arrest for anti-German activity: “I would come home wiped out by these activities. . . . I was always out of breath, and dizzy. Obviously, not having enough to eat made the least effort almost impossible. I began to have brief moments of deafness . . . in metro stairways. All of this would have been supportable had I not been the only one doing most of this work, feeling alone, exhausted.”9
Released from their leashes by the German invasion of the Soviet Union in June 1941, communist resistance teams began to be organized. Maroussia now had two boys accompany her wherever she was distributing tracts, to warn her if they saw cops or plainclothesmen approaching. She regained her confidence, and her morale rose. Almost immediately, the activities of these teenagers became more serious, and more respected by the Party. She was told, in the deepest secrecy, that the loosely organized groups of the Jeunesse communiste would now take up sabotage of railroads, electrical pylons, and German warehouses.
Maroussia was surprised at how well led this new Organisation spéciale was, and she reluctantly supported it, though she knew nothing about arms. She learned of the effectiveness of these clandestine attacks, as did other Parisians, not through the newspapers, which tried to keep them quiet, but through the red posters “announcing the execution of hostages as reprisals for actions committed in Paris against the German army. On the walls of the capital these [red] posters . . . were like a smear of blood spattered on the stone.”10
It was soon after Maroussia’s eighteenth birthday that the Germans executed twenty-seven young communists in a camp in Brittany, including her comrade Guy Môquet, in reprisal for resistance actions. The ethical questions that violent resistance raised increasingly tormented her. Her cadre had to do all within their power to let the Germans know and feel that they were illegal occupants of a free nation, but what if, in doing so, they put some of their comrades in danger? If the Germans chose willy-nilly Jews and communists to be shot when violence occurred, how were they not responsible for their deaths? Such was the ethical web in which these youngsters lived and operated.
Naïtchenko repeatedly put her life on the line. She was caught up not only in a sense of party and patriotic passion but also in a sense of solidarity, friendship, and family as she worked with others to protect the young men who were living undercover lives.
Ah! No, they did not appear to be heroes! For the most part, they weren’t even old enough to be drafted. They lived far from their families, without girlfriends, without a cent in their pocket, with shoes always in need of repair, wearing worn-out clothes, not even having enough money to pay for a metro ticket to get them to the next rendezvous. Some older militants, those who had fought in the International Brigades in the Spanish Civil War, gave them a few lessons in guerrilla warfare. They practiced in the fields, risking capture and death, even though they were still uneasy about killing. Our only strength was the very strong affection that linked us, that solidarity which led each of us to gamble our own lives to help the other, for the common goal. I had for my comrades an affection that only exists in extreme conditions.
And self-doubt comes up often: “Guerrilla war was not made for sensitive young girls, but I had no choice. I had to support my comrades. One didn’t just quit like that.”11
The mental fatigue that would set in was debilitating; it came not only from constant work but also from the sense of being constantly surveilled. Still, sometimes a bit of humor could be found. At one point, a Party member recommended a doctor to her, a woman sympathetic to the left. Maroussia made an appointment about a stubborn bronchitis that had been weakening her. The day before, her friend Robert had confided to her that in their work, “one can only expect a life of about two months, as if he were talking about preparing an oral exam.” He too was exhausted, so he accompanied her to the physician’s office. Once there, Maroussia asked the doctor if she might check him out also. She gave the young man prescriptions for his blood pressure, which she had found to be quite elevated. She also advised him to “lead a calm and well-regulated daily regime; no agitation, no emotion; go to bed early.”12 The two resisters laughed all the way down the stairs.
Naïtchenko’s loyalty to her Party and to her nation closed off some of her ideological concerns about Stalinism, and if she thought too much about her growing disenchantment with the Party’s beliefs, the brutality of the Germans always brought her quickly back to the fold. The names of the executed continued to be published on posters and in newspapers. Sometimes even their photos were made available for all to see how young they were. As 1943 rolled over to 1944, there was no longer any doubt that the authorities were much better at controlling the resisters than vice versa. “During this period, . . . more comrades fell than German soldiers.”13
A reader of Maroussia’s memoirs marvels at how fortunate she and her comrades were as they skirted the deadly zones of police control. She realized that even the best planning could be undone in an instant: “An arrest, liberty, or death depended on what during those days? On a handshake with a friend met by chance, in a garden in the spring? . . . All was nothing but chance and coincidence.”14 It was an increasingly stressful period for this intelligent young woman as she struggled to distinguish between orthodoxy and loyalty to friends. No matter how much the résistants and résistantes professed not to have any other ideology than ridding France of a foreign Occupier and an illicit government, preoccupations often surfaced. How important would the Parti communiste français be after the war? Which communist factions would dominate? Was de Gaulle but another Pétain—conservative, military, and autocratic?
New recruits often knew no more than a few members of their group, not only because they might be arrested and made to reveal secrets, but also so that the organizers of their cadres could use secrecy to retain their own influence and authority. This social isolation weighed on the gregarious girl. Maroussia details how she became caught up in Party factionialism and was made persona non grata in some quarters of the city because she was not trusted by a faction of the Party:*
Up until then, I had always believed in the Party’s message, but given its conduct [against some of its most loyal members], I realized that it was no longer possible for me to adhere to it. Fortunately, many solid comrades had surrounded my adolescence, had inculcated in me a conscience, and had armed me well enough so that I did not fall into any delinquency. I too found it completely incapable to denounce my friends. I might disapprove of their views, but condemn them, no. I too shared their disappointments.15
She succeeded in maintaining her activities even after she became pregnant by a fellow résistant and bore a son whom she named Guy, after the martyred Môquet. (Sadly, Georges Grünenberger, Maroussia’s lover and later husband, had been caught by the Germans. While he would survive the war, he did not meet his son until little Guy was two and a half years old.)
After Guy’s birth, Naïtchenko was encouraged to begin participating again in the Party’s activities, but this time in the provinces, where she became an important member of Inter 7, a group operating in the départements immediately surrounding Paris. Her mother had agreed to take care of her baby, and she was adamant about returning to the confrontation with the Occupier. Maroussia led a more dangerous life there than she had in the city. Since there were only a handful of members of the network, her activities were more diverse and expansive. She had to type codes one day and on another practice riding a bicycle over unpaved roads and through fields; acting as a courier another day, she would turn to transporting weapons on the next.
Maroussia did finally uncover that her troubles within the Party had resulted from her having casually signed a petition regarding the reappearance of L’Humanité in 1940, while the German-Soviet pact was still in force. Such petty criticisms, and the lack of recognition for what she and Georges had done to resist the Occupation, forced her after the war not only to leave the Party but to leave communism in general. Nevertheless, she affirms that she felt fortunate to have joined the Jeunesse communiste while only a child: “I received from them an exceptional education, a civic morality, an ability to adapt, a sense of responsibility, and an entrepreneurial expertise, all of which have never left me.”16
* * *
One of the subtlest memoirs—one that examines not only active confrontation but the psychology of those who chose to do so—is Annie Kriegel’s Ce que j’ai cru comprendre (What I thought I knew), published a few years before she passed away in 1995. A fervent communist during the Occupation, Kriegel left the Party after the war. She wrote histories and critiques of the Party and was consistently and vehemently criticized by her former colleagues. But that was later. Swept up into the battle against fascism, Annie was not as ideologically confused as young Maroussia. She was only thirteen when the Germans invaded Poland, and since she was from an Alsatian-Jewish family, she was more aware than most of the threat of Nazi politics. Living in Paris, in the Marais, quartier juif par excellence, Annie learned early of the socio-religious split between poor Catholics and Jews, as well as of the tensions between Jews of different regions of Europe. But these differences became less important as the laws of Vichy and the Germans themselves failed to distinguish between types of Jews in rounding them up for deportation.
Because of her father’s leanings in 1938–1939, Annie went to a leftist camp, where she heard the Internationale for the first time. Still, camp was camp: activities included hikes, bonfires, singing matches, and marches through the country. Before the world changed, Annie took full advantage of this organized adolescent freedom:
That September 1, 1939, the weather was still beautiful. Legs and feet bare in my sandals, my shoulders uncovered too, I sped on my bike in front of the Halle aux poissons. There, before a large white poster with two crossed French flags at its stop was a small group, especially women, . . . that drew my attention. I braked quickly, and jumped off my bike. It said “general mobilization.” At 4 a.m., without declaring war, the German army had invaded Poland. After two days of indecisiveness, the 3rd September, Great Britain and France declared war on Germany, the first at 11 a.m., the second at 5 p.m.17
Having heard her father bemoan the antisemitism of the Germans for years, she sensed that this event would mean more to her than to the women reading the poster. She was definitely French, but she was also Jewish.
With the invasion of the Low Countries and France, Annie’s father tried to get his family to Saint-Nazaire on the Atlantic coast and over to England, but by the time they arrived the harbor had been ruined by the German air force. They were trapped in France. “Occupied France closes over us like an oyster. . . . We are Jews,” her desperate father intoned.18 They had no choice but to return to Paris.
Late one evening, returning from a mission, Kriegel found herself in the Jewish quarter after curfew. She remembered the address of gentiles in the Marais who hid Jews seeking temporary refuge and knocked at the door of one of them, who welcomed her. She was shown to a room filled, for the most part, with other Jews, all waiting until dawn and the lifting of the curfew. When she peeped out of the apartment house’s large door, she saw, coming toward her, a French policeman carrying two large suitcases, tears streaming down his middle-aged, weathered face. Following him, carrying small bags of belongings, was a group of children, women, and old folk. (By this time, Jewish men had learned not to spend the night at home, thinking they alone were arrestable.) “It was a roundup,” she recognized. Kriegel heard the screams of mothers being separated from their children—an unforgettable wailing that she never forgot. Annie knew not to go home; her mother had warned her about that. Finally, as dawn broke, she decided to walk to her new job, near the Avenue de l’Opéra, where she was an underpaid typist. Just act as if all is normal, she reasoned. That evening she returned home to find that her mother had left the apartment with her little sister until the arrests calmed down. They were safe, but not for long, her father insisted.
Annie was stricken by her parents’ fear. Why run? They were French. They belonged in France. They had done nothing illegal. Had not Joan of Arc stood proudly against the English? Why not the Becker (Kriegel’s maiden name) family against the Germans? She kept these thoughts to herself, but her anger and passion moved her closer to the shadows of clandestinity. Her family snuck out of Paris the next day, taking a train from the Gare de Lyon to Grenoble in the Unoccupied Zone. (This was before November 1942, when the Germans invaded the Unoccupied Zone.)
In Grenoble, Annie made her first contact with an organized resistance network. Instead of making her confident, her minor experiences in clandestine activities in Paris had intimidated her; she did not know what frightened her more—Germans, French police, administrators, or her parents. When asked to distribute larger and larger numbers of leaflets in Paris, she had done so, and then had vomited from fear. Now, in Grenoble, when she thought back on it, Annie realized what had terrified her: it was the fact that she had entered the underground world and new rules had to be learned for a life in the shadows. She writes of a difference between “clandestinity” and “resistance.” This subtle distinction reveals how exquisite some of the rationales were for those moving deeper into the world of dangerous action:
The passage into clandestinity differed according to whether one lived alone, or was involved [in an organization with its own rules and regulations]. . . . One could not just wave a magic wand and cause all of one’s [social obligations] to disappear. . . . It was a slow process of submersion, the process of weakening [though leaving unbroken] former social ties. . . . This is what marked the years 1940–1942. . . . It was the passage from thought to action, from the permitted to the forbidden, from the public to the clandestine. Not everyone is made for transgressions, no matter the kind or the motive. I was less so than most. I do not easily become a rebel.19
In Grenoble, Annie soon learned that the group she became affiliated with was from the Jeunesse communiste and thus had the patience and respect for young women that most groups lacked. Her decision to join was almost casual. She knew that the communists were being constantly hunted, but they knew how to live secretly and were not afraid to confront the Germans. But just associating with young communists was considered dangerous, so what drew this timid girl in? There was a familiarity remembered from her summers in leftist camps. But more compelling was an impulse to act, rather than just complain about the situation.
These cadres of young communists used first names only, and most often not their own. This was another protection against inadvertently revealing information to spies or traitors. Even beyond names, most of the youngsters adopted a complete clandestine identity, which enabled them to establish social relations as blank slates: no class distinction, no geographical distinction, no ethnic distinction. For specific missions, an additional onetime layer of false identity was assigned, and after the mission that name and biography had to be forgotten for it would be used again by underground colleagues. This play with and interchange of identities, which noncommunist groups came also to use late in the war, may have unconsciously reminded the youthful miscreants of their own still-evolving selves. The continuous need to hide one’s identity must have been both exhilarating and exhausting.
Soon, Annie was assigned to a working-class Jewish network. This brought her to consider, once again, why she was resisting. “Perhaps no one has measured the irreparable rip in the fragile tissue of our souls [when we found ourselves] from one day to the next brusquely rejected, thrown out of the national community, and even more, out of our social worlds.”20 She had concluded that Jews had little choice, but, she wondered, why did non-Jews join in resistance too? They had nothing to fear; they were not to be separated from their parents. Why would a sixteen-year-old girl worry herself about the outcome of the war unless she was Jewish? These were naive questions, of course, but the answers eventually brought young Jews to admire their gentile brothers and sisters.
Annie’s adventures made her bolder and more confident, though like most youngsters her age, she was occasionally somewhat scatterbrained as well. Once, while carrying incriminating materials in the saddlebags of her bike, she jumped off, leaned her bike against the wall of a store, and went in quickly to buy a comb. Her hair was a mess, and she did not want her father to ask questions about where she had been. Leaving the store, she found her bike gone—stolen!—as would have been almost any bike in those days that had been left unlocked and unattended. She was terrified, not only that police or Gestapo officers had found it, but also at what her teammates would say. The next day, when she arrived at an agreed-upon rendezvous, she was verbally thrashed by her leader. Then, miraculously, he brought the bike in! It had been taken by one of the young “followers”—girls and boys assigned to keep an eye on the couriers—and brought to headquarters. Relieved beyond expression, she also realized then and there that the Jeunesse communiste organization was a well-maintained machine.
It was also, as mentioned before, a machine that in most cases treated its workers equally, whether girls or boys. Annie had noticed in her courier rides around the countryside that most of the members of the groups hiding in the mountains and valleys of southeastern France were boys and young men; there were very few girls and young women. But in the city there were as many girls as boys in clandestine work, with similar tasks to perform. This fact would become publicly important after the war, when women would argue that the men were receiving the great majority of the honors and benefits of the Resistance, while little was done to acknowledge the contributions of women beyond thanking them. The rural Maquis had been made out to be a network of attractive, virile heroes only.
“The concept of clandestinity evokes, in those who have not practiced it, a sense of the fictional, even the romantic. . . . Clandestinity during the years of 1940–1944 was in and of itself, defiance against a ferocious force. [It] was not a game.”21 The popular images of untold numbers of brave Frenchmen taking up arms to harass the Germans and their Vichy supporters was a postwar fantasy that undermined the truth: being clandestine was tedious, often seemingly fruitless work. Most of the activities of this increasingly large group of young people centered on printing and distributing tracts—newspapers, warnings, and propaganda. The fabrication of false ID papers—passes, cartes d’identité, food tickets, metro tickets—occupied much of their time. They could not casually walk into a stationery store and purchase colored ink, different types of paper, and pens; they had to visit different stores, buying paper a few sheets at a time and purchasing one color of ink in one store and another in the one down the street—or better yet, in a completely different neighborhood or town. In the end, these monotonous routines, not the more “romantic” work of lobbing a grenade into a parade of German soldiers, defined most of the resistance work. Nevertheless, carrying out such banal tasks could also end perilously for the resisters.
Secret networks did not encourage the relationships that teenagers seek at that age; of course, there were episodes of illicit sexual relations—after all, rules had been bent by everyone, n’est-ce pas? But for those who were most serious about their work, one of the primary fascinations of teenagers, sexually intimate connection, lost some of its luster as they all sought to succeed in their resistance and avoid being caught.
For young women who offered their intelligence, energy, and imagination to the Resistance—some of whom were married, pregnant, or mothers—the fear must have been corrosive. In the 1940s, French society still upheld nineteenth-century norms for what girls and women should be doing with their talents. Women were still legally minors: they could not vote; they could not open personal bank accounts; and their financial affairs were kept in the hands of their fathers or husbands. Yet post–World War I society had seen some major advances for women in employment, brought more freedom in dress, and opened up new liberties in socializing with men. Still, a woman had to work three times as hard to make her mark in the company of men.
* * *
Women resisters were not spared the horrors of the concentration camps. The niece of Charles de Gaulle, Geneviève, twenty-two, was arrested in Paris on July 20, 1943, caught in a dragnet by the Bonny-Lafont gang (the Gestapo française). She had been performing the same undercover work as Annie Kriegel and Maroussia Naïtchenko—passing information and messages, helping Jews and others to escape. After her arrest, she spent six months in French jails and finally, in February 1944, was sent to Ravensbrück. Located north of Berlin, this concentration camp was established especially for women political prisoners. Geneviève de Gaulle never tried to hide her relationship to her uncle, even after she joined the Resistance at the age of twenty. The Germans knew they had a prize.
Geneviève understood and spoke German, which allowed her to hear bits of information in camp that could make her life and those of her fellow inmates a bit better. She remained a resister, undermining as much as she could the rigorous rules and routines of a hellish existence. When her name was called in the interminable roll calls every morning and evening, the crowd of women prisoners would shout “Vive de Gaulle!” She thus provided intangible succor to a psychologically famished population. Many French résistantes were sent there, including Germaine Tillion. “I am no longer alone when the door closes. My comrades reminded me of that fraternal chain which unites us, one and all.”22 Doubtless she feared being alone, not only for survival’s sake, but for her own mental health. As with Jacques Lusseyran’s blindness in Buchenwald, Geneviève’s notoriety provided both advantages and drawbacks at Ravensbrück.
She is exceptionally attentive to detail in her memoirs. Vittorio de Sica, the Italian film director, is reported to have observed that “there are no small events in the lives of the poor.” And the same is true in the lives of camp inmates—no detail, even a large roach crossing the dirt floor of a hut, is ignored. She writes too of the inmate’s preoccupation with her body, for it is a gauge of time passing in a camp and a prediction of the future. Her memoir of despair persistently repeats her conviction that she was living in an alternative universe, a place of fractured time. She writes that “the days pass astoundingly fast, while every moment seems interminable.” And further: “Time exists no more; there is no frontier between dream, or nightmare, and reality.”23 The arbitrary behavior of her guardians, both the Nazis and the inmates who had taken on the role of proctors, added even more unpredictability, preventing any psychological certainty and creating permanent stress for the suffering human body and hallucinating mind.
Yet there is a reliable clarity and observational sobriety in her depiction of the qualities of others who had been in the Resistance. “I found great diversity among these women, of age, of social milieu, of geographical origin. Most of them having been arrested for resistance, but with differing motives, were alike in their refusal of the defeat and of Nazism. . . . Odette told us of how her son, sixteen years old, had cried out to her [at her ‘trial’]: ‘Mama, don’t talk; Mama!’”24 And other small portraits constellate her memoir, illuminating those remarkably brave women and girls who had threatened—and frightened—the enemy. This sorority of shared anger and shared pain represented the best that France could offer against an implacable regime. The guards called them Stücke (pieces, things), but they were women, and proved themselves to be.
Fortunately, Geneviève de Gaulle-Anthonioz (her postwar married name) survived her incarceration, and fortunately also for posterity, through her descriptions we can gather an inkling of the daily, never-ending exhaustion of living in a place reeking of hatred and cruelty. Geneviève’s memoir, along with others, such as Charlotte Delbo’s Auschwitz et après: Aucun de nous ne reviendra (Auschwitz and after: Not one of us will return), reflect how courageous young women were, in camps as well as on the streets where they served as couriers and planners before their capture. The Germans had separated the genders, but their methods in handling incarcerated women and men were equally cruel, both for those who resisted and those who did not.
Also in Ravensbrück was Anise Postel-Vinay, born in 1922 in the Jura region of eastern France. Her mother was an intellectual who wanted her daughters to learn about the complex cultural and philosophical ramifications of faith and religion, not devotion to a particular denomination. She also ensured that her daughters learned German, given their home’s proximity to their Teutonic neighbor; this skill would be crucial to Anise’s survival in Ravensbrück.* While there, she befriended both Geneviève de Gaulle and Germaine Tillion.
Anise was sent to the camp after being arrested as a spy. The description in her memoir of her brief career as a member of the underground reveals how confused, disorganized, and even incompetent the early resisters were. Like most teenagers, she had not known where to turn to “do something” (faire quelque chose, the term commonly used for resisting). She had participated in the march up the Champs-Élysées on November 11, 1940, barely escaping arrest, but had concluded then that marching in demonstrations was not going to undermine the German presence. Anise thought that her knowledge of the language and culture of the enemy state would surely be useful to some activist group, but she did not know where to find them. “We had all decided that we must do something against the Occupier, but what? How? With whom? From time to time, pamphlets fell into our hands, but they were never signed; there was no address: it was impossible to track down who had printed them. It was quite difficult to penetrate Resistance networks.”25 As noted, this was the experience of most young people who wanted “to do something,” except for members of communist organizations, which had begun organizing as early as the late 1930s.
Anise then decided to try to reach England, but her mother forbade her leaving without a friend to accompany her. Not one of the young women she asked accepted her request; most people wanted to wait out the war, without causing trouble. Finally, through friends of friends, she contacted a woman professor connected to the English intelligence service. Immediately, she was recruited and put to work locating and identifying major armaments of the Wehrmacht, despite a near total lack of expertise:
I knew absolutely nothing about military affairs; it seemed folly to give me such a mission; moreover, I was petrified that I could not complete them. To ask a nineteen-year-old girl to tell the difference between one tank and another! . . . I could barely distinguish a machine gun from a tank! For me a corporal was the same as a colonel! 26
But intrepidly, when assigned to count and identify German tanks leaving the Vincennes fort on the outskirts of Paris, she took with her a seamstress’s tape measure for cleverly gauging the difference in tank treads. She sent this information to England, relying on the intelligence services there to figure out which tanks were in Occupied France. Soon she was tasked with a variety of new duties, among them mapping bomb blasts and identifying German bunkers and the anti-aircraft balloons that surrounded Paris. She became quite adept at pinpointing these sites and photographing them, then sending the information through Le Havre to England.*
Of course, Anise’s luck ran out. In August 1942, she traveled from Le Havre, where she had been gathering information for the English for a map that would pinpoint damage and possible targets, to Paris, where she was to deliver the information. The only clandestine contact she had in Paris was the same professor who had recruited her two years previously. Arriving at this woman’s address, she noticed a large black car parked in front of the apartment house, with its official ID—Ausweis—proudly displayed. Something felt wrong—Don’t go up there, her gut said—but she figured that it could be a medical doctor’s automobile, like her father’s, as they also had passes like the one she saw. She climbed to the fifth floor and knocked on the door, expecting to see the face of her mentor, but instead encountered that of a young German in shirtsleeves. The apartment had been identified and was being searched by the Gestapo. Anise had walked into a trap, and to make matters worse, she carried the photographed maps of Le Havre in her backpack.
This was the beginning of three years of incarceration for the young girl, first a year in Paris’s La Santé prison, then a stint in Fresnes; finally she was taken to a transit camp at Romainville.* She was kept in isolation for most of the time; though she was not tortured, the threat of execution hung over her for thirteen months. In October 1943, the Germans suddenly ordered her to gather her belongings and get on a train headed east, to Ravensbrück. For the next eighteen months, until the camp’s liberation in late April 1945, she managed to survive in a satanic universe. Not everyone else was as lucky: by war’s end, the number of women and children murdered in the camp could not be accurately determined, but was at least ninety thousand, and perhaps more.
After the war, she married another résistant, André Postel-Vinay, but a profound sadness appears to have become part of her identity, not only because of the loss of her sister, who died in deportation, but because her return did not seem to have brought any feeling of closure: “We were coming back to a country that had been liberated for some time, but that had forgotten its [returning] prisoners.”27 One finds variations of this sentiment in numerous memoirs that describe what it was like to come back from the concentration and death camps in Germany and Poland; and so felt many POWs who had been held in Germany for five years. It was as if their very presence reminded the French of the mistakes and moral failures that had enabled their defeat and the Occupation. The wounded nation needed time to heal, to forget, now that the Nazis had been crushed. But for those who could not forget, coming home caused a different type of festering wound.
Much is owed to those young women who would not let prejudice keep them from confronting a vicious enemy and its Vichy minions. And thanks to their commitment to remembering, to witnessing, they have left for us narratives that still resonate with their passion for justice. Their desire to remind subsequent generations of their honest service, even when afraid or confused, is another manifestation of their resistance to injustices that never quite vanish.