At dawn on 30 July 1943, Marie-Louise Giraud, aged thirty-nine, was guillotined in the courtyard of Paris’s La Roquette prison, having been found guilty of performing twenty-seven abortions in the Cherbourg region. At her trial in a specially convened court, the prosecution stressed her immorality, but to the populace she became a martyr for a cause – people called her a ‘maker of angels’. Giraud, who came from a poor family, was married to a sailor with whom she had two children, and had worked as a domestic housekeeper and laundress. Since the beginning of the war she had rented rooms to prostitutes and began to perform abortions, initially on a voluntary basis and without compensation. Vichy, which still had limited civil authority in the occupied capital, had decreed in a special law of 15 February 1942 that abortion was so sinful – it was a crime against state security – that it must be treated as a capital offence. Only a pardon from Marshal Pétain himself could save Giraud’s life. But he refused to commute the sentence, and Marie-Louise Giraud thus became the only woman ever to be guillotined in France for the crime of performing an abortion.
Just before the war Dr Jean Dalsace, a friend of the avant-garde gallery-owner Jeanne Bucher, had opened the first birth-control clinic in France, but the war had put a stop to such free thinking and Giraud was victim of a corrupt regime rapidly losing control. Abortions were freely available for the rich who knew where to go and could afford a fee of around 4,000 francs. Arlette Scali, for example, a member of the haute bourgeoisie who had married as a teenager, wrote that her first husband had intended to continue with his lifestyle of mistresses ‘but he did not want children … when I was pregnant my mother-in-law paid for abortions which were illegal and costly. It was horrible.’ At the other end of the social scale the struggling author, later championed by Simone de Beauvoir, Violette Leduc, wrote graphically in her autobiography, La Bâtarde, about how difficult it was for a single mother who did not want to keep a child. She made repeated attempts at an abortion, following visits to ‘so-called midwives’ – back-street abortionists – which left her close to dying and in terrible pain but bolstered by ‘my single woman’s determination to stand by herself and not to fall’. During a terrible winter without coal and heat, she only narrowly survived after several months in bed at her mother’s with ice on her belly, being sick and continually bleeding. Slowly, she learned to walk and live again, though not long enough to see her rackety life, earning money from the black market, and her painful love affair with de Beauvoir translated into a successful film in 2012 called Violette.
One of the most controversial films of 1943, produced by the German-owned Continental Studios and directed by Henri-Georges Clouzot, was Le Corbeau (The Raven), which tackled the issue of abortion. The film, now a classic, was notable for causing serious trouble to its director after the war and was banned at the Liberation not only because of the Continental connection but because it was perceived by the communist press and by some who had been in the underground as vilifying the French people. Le Corbeau is an extremely dark and melodramatic story about the consequences of writing anonymous poison-pen letters. Letters signed by ‘Le Corbeau’ accuse a doctor of having an affair with the pretty young wife of an elderly psychiatrist and also of practising illegal abortions. The film ends as an ambulance arrives to take away the wife, who has been deemed insane, and the doctor finds the psychiatrist dead at his desk just as he was writing Le Corbeau’s final triumphant letter. His throat had been cut by the mother of a cancer patient who had just committed suicide following receipt of one such anonymous letter warning that his cancer was terminal. A powerful illustration of the effect of paranoia on the human psyche.
The film was loosely based on a famous case in 1917, but the relevance in the fevered atmosphere of 1943 to the number of anonymous denunciations being bandied about, revealing that someone was Jewish or in hiding or involved in black-marketeering, added to its heightened air of realism. Denunciations – there had been an estimated three and a half million of them by the end of the war throughout France – acted as a chilling reinforcement of the power of life over death that individual French people could choose to wield during the Occupation. They were made by people from all social milieux, often driven by revenge or by a desire to claim the financial reward, which in some cases was significant. The highest rewards were paid to those denouncing a resister, and could range from 200,000 francs to 15 million. Radio-Paris, the German-controlled radio station, even had a popular programme called Répétez-le, which was entirely devoted to letters from listeners denouncing their neighbours, their rivals in business or love, and even members of their own family. The Germans were said to have been amazed by the response to their call for denunciations, even complaining about the workload involved in investigating them all. Many were from women, signing for example as ‘a little woman who only seeks to do her duty’, pointing out that a particular shop was Jewish-owned and asking if there were any business opportunities available from abandoned businesses.
In 1942 Pétain had weakly denounced the denouncers, but no one took any notice. By July 1943, the execution of the impoverished abortionist Giraud, whose trial had resulted from a denunciation, served to emphasize just how out of touch the Vichy regime had become, regarding abortion as a national plague while legalizing prostitution.
Earlier that year the introduction of the hated Service du Travail Obligatoire (STO) was promoted by Vichy with posters suggesting that Frenchmen who worked in Germany under the scheme were being good fathers by helping to provide for the wives and children they had left behind. But the STO merely added to the general unpopularity of a regime which, it was by now clear, had salvaged nothing from the defeat and was not even a buffer between the French and the Germans. Since November 1942 Vichy had been a mere puppet government clinging to the remnants of power but losing authority. This prompted Vichy in January 1943 to set up its own paramilitary force, the Milice, headed by Joseph Darnand, mandated to fight the resistance and root out Jews and given its own programme for the Nazification of France. Then Drancy, the increasingly overcrowded and unhygienic internment camp in Paris, which had initially been under the control of French police,* loyal to Vichy ideals, was in early July handed over to the Germans. As the Nazis stepped up their Europe-wide mass-extermination policy, the task of running the camp was handed to the loathed and vicious SS Hauptsturmführer Alois Brunner.
The sixty-six-year-old Bernard Herz, from his desperate corner in Drancy, was witness to the increasingly brutal round-ups that were bringing in more and more Jews. All the while he retained the faintest hope that he might any day be summoned to the Rothschild Hospital and from there effect an escape.† Meanwhile Suzanne Belperron, running the jewellery company singlehandedly and at the same time doing her best to get Herz released, was harassed constantly by the Gestapo demanding to see official documents – baptism and burial certificates – proving she was not Jewish. What seems clear today, from a study of the Herz file – innumerable microfilmed pages in the National Archives in Paris showing detailed floor plans made by French officials of Herz’s home in Chantilly as well as inventories of his flat and possessions – is that the Germans were determined to seize his assets. On 21 February he wrote to Suzanne, his ‘Chère Amie’, what appears to be an agonizing final communication from his ‘disgusting’ prison. In tiny writing on a fragment of brown paper, he thanks her for the little parcels she was sending him, recounts the interminable boredom of Drancy and tells her where to find his will. He ends: ‘I do not at all regret staying in Paris, as I thereby shortened the time I will spend away from it. If I had my time again, I would do it all again. Forgive me for all the trouble I caused you. It seems I bring you nothing else when what I wanted so much was your happiness. Thank you for everything.’ After seven months at Drancy, Bernard Herz was deported to Auschwitz on 2 September 1943, where he was murdered.
But as more ordinary French people now witnessed cruelty and barbarity on a massive scale, and with children often torn screaming from their parents, public opinion slowly turned. Consequently, 1943 saw a steady growth in resistance groups, not only those in the countryside, swollen with fugitives from the forced-labour draft (now known as the Maquis or Maquisards because of the scrubland they often hid in), but also in towns and villages throughout France. Small cells or networks were now growing with various types of subterfuge undertaken. Many individuals simply wanted ‘to do something’ to thwart the Germans, without necessarily joining a group. Alongside the collaborators, still buying, still eating, many Parisiennes now put their lives on the line.
‘We were all amateurs,’ recalled Vivou (née Chevrillon), the young music-student cousin of Claire Chevrillon who was desperate to be involved in something more serious than customizing ready-made cork-soled shoes with fabric, important though that was if she was to look chic among her peers in Paris. Vivou had three brothers, one still a schoolboy, but the older two had both left home to join de Gaulle, encouraged by their remarkable mother who, so keen to help them resist, drove her nineteen-year-old son to the Spanish border to help him get out to fight. Like many young women of her circle, Vivou was not a formally registered resister but nonetheless was involved in important and potentially dangerous work creating false identity papers, forging the signature of the Paris Préfet, Amédée Bussière.*
Claire was arrested that eventful summer and on her release, after weeks in Fresnes prison, ‘it was my buoyant cousin Vivou, twenty, who marched me to a hairdresser on Rue Royale and stayed the whole time laughing and talking nonsense lest I run away’. Another friend gave a dinner party, which took two days to prepare, to celebrate Claire’s freedom. But the constant threat of a knock on the door in the middle of the night meant that for anyone with something to hide it was difficult to sleep. Some remember hearing dogs barking or whining during the night, others the anguished cries of torture victims or of those being arrested. Many people lived with a small bag packed in case they had to make a sudden escape. The uncertainty created by constantly changing hideouts and by often poorly forged identity cards, which would not have withstood close scrutiny, was taking its toll on already frayed nerves. The resistance seemed to be suffering one disaster after another in 1943. The Germans’ charm offensive during the first eighteen months of Occupation gave way to repressive control throughout the country, often relying on informers keen to win a promised reward, usually no more than a hundred francs. Many resisters were betrayed and captured in this way, culminating in the arrest in Lyons on 21 June (and subsequent torture and death) of Jean Moulin, the man parachuted back into France and charged by de Gaulle with unifying the various resistance groups under one umbrella. On 27 May the courageous Moulin, known for wearing a scarf wrapped around his neck to hide a previous attempt at suicide, had held the first meeting of the National Council of the Resistance in Paris but was betrayed just a few weeks later. His death along with the arrest of several of his associates was a major blow, leaving the local Gestapo chief Klaus Barbie in total control in Lyons. Paris, larger and with more opportunities for hiding, became a necessary but still intensely dangerous centre for resistance.
Immediately after her release, Claire went back to teaching at the Collège Sévigné, where her pupils treated her as a heroine. But the euphoria was short-lived. On 23 September her flatmate, the beautiful twenty-two-year-old aristocrat Jacqueline d’Alincourt, was arrested at their flat on the Rue de Grenelle after a landlady had denounced one of her contacts. Jacqueline found several Gestapo officers awaiting her when she returned to the flat and she tried to escape towards an inner stairway that led to the roof:
I was overtaken, handcuffed behind my back, and the interrogation began then and there. I tried in vain to overcome the trembling that took hold of me, head to foot, distressed at the idea that the men would notice it. Questions rained down on me thick and fast, and, because I refused to answer, one of them yelled at me, ‘We have ways of making you talk!’ I answered immediately: ‘I am sure you are capable of anything.’ I was slapped in the face and the trembling stopped. A feeling of relief came over me. The strength now within me would not abandon me throughout the five long days and nights that awaited me.
Fortunately Claire was out at the time of the arrest but, as the one who had introduced Jacqueline when she first came to Paris from her home in Poitiers two years previously to Jean Ayral, regional head of the Office of Air Operations (BOA) and a close collaborator of Jean Moulin, she was distraught.
Jacqueline was a young widow, her husband having died suddenly in 1941 while he was held prisoner in Germany. Tall and willowy, she had an inner strength partly derived from watching her widowed mother courageously bring up a family of seven. Resentment over her husband’s premature death, and anger when she saw a child forced to year a yellow star in Paris, had helped overcome her fear of the enemy. ‘Should one resign oneself to bow one’s head in submission? I knew that I would rather die. The shock gave me a resolve that nothing would destroy, for the enemy is powerless over him who has no fear of death.’ She started work encoding messages to be despatched to London, ensuring that secret agents sent from England had lodgings, some form of professional cover, false papers and ration cards, as well as finding ‘mailboxes’ where illegal messages from all over France could be transferred. One fellow agent was a friend called Josette, ‘a public relations director for a celebrated couturier, highly esteemed by German officers’ wives. Thanks to the comings and goings of many women on the fashion house’s premises, our couriers passed unnoticed. No one could conceive of resistance activity going on in the heart of this grande maison frequented by the upper crust of the army of occupation.’
After her arrest Jacqueline was imprisoned first at 11 Rue des Saussaies, the Gestapo headquarters where prisoners were chained, interrogated and tortured, then at Fresnes and eventually Ravensbrück. Not surprisingly Claire, who guessed but could not know what torment Jacqueline was suffering, concluded that now she too must commit fully. ‘This work had become my chief interest in life.’ She resigned her job, moved apartments and went underground, living clandestinely as Christiane Clouet. She could no longer see her parents as to do so would endanger them all.
‘For me the strongest memory of that time is not fear, but solidarity, which was stronger than fear,’ recalled Vivou.
When we heard that one of our friends had been arrested we felt we must do something. We didn’t feel the drama in the same way that of course our parents did. The most dangerous thing I did was when my friend (and fellow musician) Antoine Geoffroy-Dechaume was arrested and imprisoned at Compiègne camp just outside the city. I wanted him to know we were aware of what had happened and were doing all we could for him. So I went with Antoine’s sister, Marie-France, intending to walk around the camp playing a tune on my violin that he would recognize and know it was me. Unfortunately the SS officer outside the camp, a very Aryan type, warned me: ‘I do not advise you to do that.’ So we went home, but not defeated.
At the same time André Chevrillon, Vivou’s uncle and Claire’s father, an esteemed member of the French Academy, wrote to René de Chambrun, who he had heard was hoping for a seat in the Academy, and pleaded ‘in the name of French music’ for Antoine’s release – but to no avail. Antoine was deported to Buchenwald on 20 January 1944.
Antoine and Marie-France Geoffroy-Dechaume were part of a family emblematic of the deep-rooted French patriotism that was stirring now, a countervailing force to those dealing on the black market, buying expensive clothes and contributing to the image of normality in Paris. Nominally Catholic, they were both outward leaning, towards England, and fiercely defensive of a certain idea of what France stood for. Their ancestor Adolphe-Victor Geoffroy-Dechaume, born in Paris in 1816, was a sculptor who believed that the Middle Ages were France’s golden age, and whose best-known statues adorn the pier of Notre Dame Cathedral. He was buried at Valmondois, an ancient French village just north of Paris on the River Oise, where the family subsequently made their home. Charles, his grandson, a painter, lived in England before the First World War, and became close friends with Winston and Clementine Churchill and their circle. But, having lost a leg in action during that war, Charles decided after his marriage to return to the comfortable old house at Valmondois. Here he could bring up his ten children in an unusual musical, artistic and creative community. The family sometimes performed Bach chorales or sang small-scale operas.
Bernard de Gaulle, nephew of the General, who was to marry Sylvie Geoffroy-Dechaume, the youngest in the family, told me about Marie-France, born in 1919 and given the name France to signify her parents’ satisfaction with the terms of the Treaty of Versailles. ‘Marie-France was an angel,’ he says of his sister-in-law. Bernard, a keeper of so many flames, lives today in an apartment in the shadow of the former Cherche-Midi military prison, now a memorial but notorious as the place where Dreyfus was convicted and where, later, several resisters were tortured and shot. It is almost impossible here not to experience a sense of the past enveloping the present. ‘There was something heavenly about her which was a mixture of sincerity and force,’ he adds. Another friend recalled that, after the war, Marie-France could never walk along the Avenue Foch because of her memory of hearing loud cries from torture victims there. Sylvie, born in 1924, was too young at first to take an active role in resisting, and had to live with the torment of knowing that her brother Antoine was a prisoner while another brother, Jean-Pierre, had been captured following Dunkirk but managed to escape and subsequently joined the Maquis in the south. As soon as she was old enough, Sylvie joined him there.
Since 1941 Marie-France had been helping pilots on the run, even taking some of them to hide at Valmondois if they wanted to use Brittany as their escape route. She often worked with a local car mechanic, François Kerambrun, a trusted friend of the family, who would drive the boys in his old truck to a house close to the sea and from there, once they heard the all-clear on the BBC, lead them down a steep cliff (so steep they hoped the Germans would not watch it) to the sea. The whole party then waited in caves for the British to send dinghies which would ferry them out to a ship waiting offshore. On one occasion she bought her charges French newspapers to read on the train from Paris to Brittany but was horrified to see that, as a German inspector arrived, one of them was reading it upside down with trembling hands. Luckily their documents were accepted so they did not have to say anything.
But in mid-1943, on seeing a Gestapo officer leave her Paris building, Marie-France realized that she had to move away immediately. Using a false identity, she was sent with a band of resistance fighters to a small house on the north Brittany coast, in the Saint-Malo region, part of an undercover operation intended, among other things, to sabotage the railways and the roads to prevent the Germans from reaching the coast and transporting arms and ammunition. From then on her work became more dangerous as, in addition to helping evaders, she was involved in preparing to lay explosives on railway lines in readiness for the Allied invasion, a task not initially given to women resisters and which required her to carry weapons.
Although many women were volunteering in 1943, other than communist workers who were used to being organized, most were well educated and well intentioned but with no previous experience of political or military work. In January 1943 Andrée (known as Dédée) de Jongh, founder and a key organizer of the Comet escape line,* and a former commercial artist and nurse who had made thirty-two journeys over the Pyrenees, was betrayed and captured at a farmhouse in the French Basque country. Interrogated and tortured by the Gestapo, Andrée eventually admitted that she was the organizer of the escape network. Chaos ensued in the wake of her arrest, as it was hard to know amid the infiltrations and multiple arrests who could be trusted.
Elisabeth Barbier, a thirty-one-year-old divorcee living with her mother in the Rue Vaneau in Paris, had been involved in resistance activities since 1940, working with friends in the Mithridate Franco-British network collecting vital information to help plan military operations. But, late in 1942, she and her mother also became involved in sheltering various resisters, downed pilots or evaders – men on the run trying to avoid being drafted into the STO – in their own apartment or in those of friends until they could be moved on. It was enormously risky work, especially if the men were neither French-speakers nor, in the case of North Americans, French-looking. Money was needed to feed and clothe them or to dye their hair. Cigarettes (important to calm nerves) could be bought for them on the black market but they cost between 150 and 250 francs a packet. Drue Tartière, bringing food from the country, went to visit some of these boys, as she described them, often mere teenagers who were bored hanging about, frustrated at not being allowed outside (since they might all too easily give themselves and others away) and who, she believed, did not appreciate what was being done for them.
Occasionally she took them to a barber for a haircut or for walks around Paris, disguising them as best she could in old French clothes and forbidding them to speak. Once she brought her friend Sylvia Beach, the bookshop owner, to amuse them; on another occasion she had to reprimand a young American lieutenant who was behaving badly, reducing his Parisian host to tears. Drue reminded him that these not very well-off Parisians, paid a paltry sum by various resistance groups as it was difficult to get money to them from abroad, were risking their lives every minute of the day and night for him, and she threatened to turn him out into the street to fend for himself if he didn’t show more concern and gratitude. Why did the women do it? According to Jeannie Rousseau, those who resisted were ‘almost powerless’ because they were responding to ‘an inner obligation to participate in the struggle’.
Denise Dufournier, a colleague of Elisabeth Barbier and Jeannie Rousseau, had, like them, been involved in resistance activities almost from the outset. ‘You either did something or you were a collaborator’ is how Denise’s daughter explains her mother’s viewpoint today. ‘She had a very strong moral compass.’ Born in 1915 into a family of artists, doctors and intellectuals, Denise was educated at the Lycée Molière, a leading Paris girls’ school of the day where many of her friends were Jewish. This made her keenly aware of the increasing injustices, once the German Occupation began. But her parents died when she was just thirteen and her brother sixteen, forcing self-sufficiency on her from an early age. By the time war broke out, she had qualified as a lawyer and, with her brother working in Lisbon as a diplomat, was an unusually independent young woman who was also a published novelist. With few male barristers still working in Paris, she was in great demand. In addition to her day job, she was running enormous personal risks to help Allied airmen forced to bale out over France and keen to get out of the country. But on 18 June 1943 she and Elisabeth Barbier and Elisabeth’s mother were all betrayed by their new courier, a man who called himself Jean Masson but was actually a Belgian conman and traitor, Jacques Desoubrie. Denise later recognized him as her betrayer at her first interrogation when he entered the room and sneered at her.
Dufournier, like de Jongh, was questioned first at Fresnes for six months, but she did not break. Fresnes was now a place of terror, where by this time ‘the Germans are shooting hostages or people who have been convicted … every day’. Jean Guéhenno, citing a source, ‘V’, wrote in his diary:
the order goes from cell to cell through the gutters, the toilet pipes, the water pipes: ‘six o’clock for cell thirty-two’ and at the appointed time the whole prison begins to sing the Marseillaise or the song of departure. The prisoners have broken all the windows so the victims can hear their farewell song as they cross the prison yard. The Germans have forbidden all singing. They are going to make examples, torture and execute. Uselessly. The prison continues to sing.
Denise was familiar with Fresnes, as many of the young clients she had been helping to defend had been sent there. She knew she could survive it, and she did. After six months, Denise and Elisabeth Barbier were transported to Ravensbrück, where a new form of torture began.
*
Vera Leigh had by 1943 become a true Parisienne, having lived all her adult life in Paris, working in fashion. But, by virtue of having been born in Leeds in 1903, she was also a British citizen, so she decided she should now get herself back to England where she could be more actively involved in the struggle against the Nazis. Leigh never knew her birth parents because she had been adopted while still an infant by an American businessman and racehorse trainer called Eugene Leigh and his English wife, who took her to live in France. Thanks to the Leighs, Vera grew up around the Maisons-Laffitte stables, where Eugene kept horses. As a child she had wanted to be a jockey, but instead she worked in fashion, first as a vendeuse with the milliner Caroline Reboux.
In 1927 Vera went into partnership with a friend, and the pair set up their own hat shop, which they called Rose Valois, in the Place Vendôme. By the time war broke out Vera was a successful businesswoman with a fiancé, Charles Dussaix, a Swiss based in Lyons. It is not clear why they did not marry, but in 1940, when Paris was first occupied, she went to live with him intending to leave immediately for England. But once in Lyons she became involved in helping Allied airmen to escape until that became too dangerous. In 1942, needing to get out herself, she joined one of the underground escape routes across the Pyrenees into Spain. She was briefly interned just outside Bilbao, but eventually arrived in England via Gibraltar and immediately offered her services to the various women’s organizations. She was soon picked out by F Section of Special Operations Executive (SOE) because of her perfect French. Her interviewer noted that she was ‘a smart businesswoman and commerce was her first allegiance’, but thought this would not lessen her suitability for the work they had in mind for her. She was almost forty, and she agreed from now on to drop all contact with her fiancé. According to the official report ‘she felt she had jeopardised him enough by letting him hide her while on her way out’.
The SOE had been created by Churchill in 1940 ‘to set Europe ablaze’ by giving support to the local resistance organizations in occupied Europe. Some sixty SOE agents were women, not all of whom were sent into the field. But the forty chosen for F Section were selected partly because it was believed they would blend in better than men in wartime, and could invent a better cover story, especially in Paris where young men were increasingly a rarity.* This was especially important for couriers, carrying messages often for long distances by train or bicycle, and it was thought in London that women who hid messages in their underwear were less likely to be subjected to a body search.
In this tense climate female couriers were a great help to resistance radio operators, as a woman with a transmitter at the bottom of her basket covered with carrots and turnips could pretend she was carrying a heavy shopping bag, whereas a young man carrying a heavy suitcase was immediately suspect and far more likely to be stopped and searched. Nonetheless it was an unprecedented decision for the British to send women into the field, even or especially as volunteers, where they risked capture, brutal interrogation, torture and death. Although Churchill’s approval for using women was never official, when Captain Selwyn Jepson, recruiting officer for F Section, told him of the plans, his response – ‘Good luck to you’ – was always taken as tacit authority. But it could not be revealed to the public at the time that Britain was using women in this way as, under the Geneva Convention, women were not allowed to take on combatant duties so their activities had to be highly secret: one reason why so little was known about many of them until many years later. A team of lawyers was seconded to SOE and it was decided that SOE women should be enrolled into the First Aid Nursing Yeomanry, known as FANYs, partly to give them useful cover to tell family and friends, partly to train them in the use of firearms; and also in the vain hope that if captured they would have some military status to protect them according to the Geneva Convention. The female agents of F Section did not always carry weapons and were expected to exploit their femininity to maximize their usefulness.
Vera underwent immediate training and her commandant reported that she was ‘full of guts’, had kept up with the men and was ‘about the best shot in the party … a plumb woman for this work … a woman of outstanding ability and courage and determination’. Another report noted that she was very interested in clothes and hated the hideous khaki uniform she had to wear as a FANY. During the night of 13–14 May, Ensign Vera Leigh, codenamed Simone, was flown back to France and dropped east of Tours in one of the small Lysander aircraft, used not only as they could land without runways but because the lone pilot could fly them low, below enemy radar, with only moonlight to guide him along shiny rivers, lakes or railway line before picking up as well as dropping off those who were not parachuting. She was met by Henri Déricourt, F Section’s Air Movements officer in northern France, and immediately moved back to Paris where she was to be a milliner’s assistant called Suzanne Chavanne working with the Inventor circuit.* With her well-attuned eye for observing fashion, Vera found Paris in many ways unchanged. Women, or at least certain women, were still shopping at the couture houses around the Place Vendôme and the Ritz Hotel, as shown by figures for turnover of couture clothes, as well as surtax paid by customers.† Feeling if not relaxed at least comfortable in her native city, Vera Leigh foolishly even used the same hairdresser she had frequented in pre-war days where they knew exactly who she was, no mere milliner’s assistant, and in addition to her SOE work she continued with her former activities, helping Allied airmen hiding out in various Paris flats who needed escorting through France to Spain often via the Comet line.
Like Vera, Noor Inayat Khan, the part-American daughter of an Indian Sufi mystic, who wrote children’s stories and had escaped from Paris to England with her family in 1940, was by the end of 1942 eager to get back to England, her adopted country, and be of real use. Against her mother’s wishes, she had joined the Women’s Auxiliary Air Force (WAAF), having changed her name to Nora and given her religion as Church of England to avoid awkwardness. Influenced by her brother Vilayat, who had joined the RAF, she repeatedly applied for a commission within the WAAF and by October 1942 came to the attention of SOE because of her interesting linguistic qualifications and was called for an interview in November.
Linguistic abilities were key, and Noreen Riols, born in Malta to English parents, was another young woman recruited to F Section in 1943 when she was still a teenager. She believes she was picked simply because she had attended the French Lycée in London. Like many of the women recruited, she was also very pretty. She recounted the story of one courier, Maureen O’Sullivan, always known as Paddy, who was cycling around Paris with a transmitter strapped to the back of her bicycle when she had to stop at a level crossing. To her horror a car full of Gestapo officers drew up alongside. One of them wound down the window and asked her what she had in her suitcase. ‘She knew that if she hesitated or appeared flustered she was lost so she gave a big smile … and said “I’ve got a radio transmitter and I’m going to contact London and tell them all about you” … the officer smiled back and said “You’re far too pretty to risk your neck with such stupidities” and drove off.’
But it wasn’t always that easy, nor was the training given to these keen young women always as rigorous as it might have been in view of the need to get agents into Paris as quickly as possible. From the start there were political tensions in London as the other intelligence services, chiefly SIS (the Secret Intelligence Service, also known as MI6), clashed with SOE and its often unorthodox methods; there was also rivalry with the Gaullist organizations in London. Language and appearance were crucial to recruitment, while character and private life were merely taken into consideration. Noor, or Nora as she was now known, was accepted after just one interview, deemed to be ‘sure and confident’, according to Selwyn Jepson, chief recruitment officer. She joined officially on 8 February 1943 aged twenty-nine, was also enrolled as a FANY and commissioned. Her training, which included fitness instruction and handling explosives, now started in earnest. However, she was not as supple and sporty as Vera and was, it was noted, ‘unsuitable for jumping’ and ‘pretty scared of weapons’. No one doubted her courage, but her examiners stated that she made ‘stupid mistakes, always volunteered far more information when questioned’ and ‘must learn to be more discreet’. There were clearly doubts about Noor’s suitability and readiness. Some thought her too emotional, exotic and dreamy and felt that she might therefore be a security risk, but others considered that as she was an excellent radio operator she would be useful. According to her final report: ‘she has an unstable and temperamental personality and it is very doubtful whether she is really suited to work in this field’. But Maurice Buckmaster, the Old Etonian F Section head, who was under enormous pressure to provide trained operators, not only believed she could cope but, alongside a comment that she was ‘not overburdened with brains,’ scribbled: ‘we don’t want them overburdened with brains.’ Whether Noor would have been retained for further assessments, had the shortage of radio operators not been so acute, is impossible to say.
When other women agents training with Noor expressed their doubts, Buckmaster’s deputy, the Sorbonne-educated, elegantly mysterious Vera Atkins, stepped in. She took Noor to lunch at a quiet restaurant and told her about the misgivings, insisting that if she stepped back now nobody would know or consider it shameful. But Noor was firm and maintained that nothing worried her other than concern for her mother.
Leo Marks, a brilliant young cryptographer who got to know Noor well during her last weeks in England, was also worried. The system which agents used at that time to receive and transmit messages was code-based around a well-known poem they had memorized which always concerned him as it could be so easily deciphered. Many agents chose well-known poems which the enemy could guess. It was for that reason that in December 1943 he gave a poem called ‘The Life that I Have’, which he had written himself in memory of his girlfriend Ruth, who had just been killed, to another SOE agent Violette Szabo and which nobody else knew. Nonetheless, if caught and forced to transmit under duress, an agent had, as additional security, both a ‘bluff’ check to precede the message which was a warning even if it was then followed by a ‘true’ check, which it was supposed only London could know about. But for Noor, using such a false check would, of course, involve lying to her captors since it was intended to deceive, and when Leo discussed this with Noor she replied, shocked, ‘Lie about them. Why should I do that?’ Lying went against her religion. Noor insisted that rather than lie she would just refuse to tell them anything no matter how often they asked.
Marks, clearly smitten with the beautiful Noor, was worried that in practice this would mean her enduring unimaginable torture. In an attempt to protect her he gave her a new security check, telling her ‘you won’t have to lie about it because no one but you and me will know that it exists’. When she went off to practise encoding the messages for him with the new check, ‘I prayed … that she’d repeat all her old mistakes and that I could write a bad report on her to prevent her from going in.’ But she did it perfectly, so Marks wrote Buckmaster the positive report he needed for Noor to be given clearance to fly off at the next full moon. On 16 June, Vera Atkins drove down to Sussex with Noor. At the last minute, just before she flew off, Vera gave her a silver brooch, suddenly removing it from her own suit and pinning it on to her lapel with the words: ‘It’s a little bird. It will bring you luck.’ From now on Noor was Jeanne-Marie Renier, a children’s nurse, with a complicated cover story worked out by Atkins herself.
The summer that Noor and Vera Leigh were sent back to Paris, reprisals and arrests were an everyday occurrence as denunciations from collaborators and infiltrators were flooding into Gestapo offices. One of those suspected by the Allies of being an informant for the SS with a specific brief to foil the activities of SOE was Violette Morris, the bisexual former athlete highly visible thanks to her enormous size, her habit of dressing as a man and the freedom with which she drove her black Citroën car from Paris to Cannes or Nice in the south of France, chauffeuring members of the Gestapo or Vichy officials. She still lived on her houseboat on the Seine, ‘where she frequently receives German officers’, and although she had handed over the car-parts garage she owned in Paris to the Luftwaffe in 1941 she continued to run it for the Germans, which entitled her to an apparently never ending supply of fuel and other black-market goods. Many of those she drove knew her as ‘la fameuse Violette Morris’, the former racing driver of the 1920s. She was implicated in a number of arrests in 1943 and prisoners taken to Fresnes shuddered at the mention of her name.
As London knew, the average life expectancy for a wireless operator in this treacherous climate was six weeks. Within ten days of Noor’s arrival in Paris the network she was meant to work with had fallen into German hands and was in complete disarray. In early July hundreds of French agents were rounded up and arrested as the Germans infiltrated the circuits. Noor and two others remained at large, one of whom was a former businessman called France Antelme, in his mid-forties, who it seems was captivated by Nora. The pair tried to warn others and hide while the Germans were torturing those agents they had captured in the hope of locating their comrades. One of those captured was Francis Suttill, a half-French lawyer known as Prosper, who was forced to stand for days on end with no food, water or sleep. Infuriated when he would not talk, his captors beat him mercilessly and broke his arm. Although other agents were told by London to escape across the Pyrenees or return by the August moon when a Lysander pick-up could be arranged, Noor was advised to stay in Paris, simply to lie low for a while and not transmit to London even though she desperately wanted to do her duty. Buckmaster saw her as being of key importance if F Section was to have any chance of recovering after this disaster. When Antelme returned home in late July he reported that he had done what he could to orientate Noor and before leaving had placed her in contact with Déricourt, who needed a wireless operator. But Antelme was clearly unsettled and anxious that he had left her in grave danger. When London finally heard from Noor in August and September there was good news and bad. Her morale seemed high, but she was ignoring basic security by sending out messages en clair when they should have been encoded. They did not then know that she was contravening another important security regulation by copying into a notebook all the messages she had sent as an SOE operative. She thanked Miss Atkins for the little bird brooch, which she said had brought her luck. F Section concluded that she had settled into the job, and when later they ordered her to return to London she refused to do so until satisfied that Atkins had found a replacement for her, which she never did.
One of the people Noor stayed with that summer while the Germans were on her tail was a friend of the Marié family from Versailles, a woman who was later caught and deported, although Jacqueline Marié, a seventeen-year-old schoolgirl when war broke out, did not realize who Noor was until she heard about her after the war. Jacqueline herself, stirred by an automatic instinct to resist, now began making anti-German drawings, using tracing paper, which she and her elder brother Pierre delivered to what they hoped were reliable houses in the neighbourhood. But she soon started distributing more sophisticated resistance leaflets, including the news-sheets Le Courrier de l’Air, Témoignage Chrétien and some issues of Défense de la France, the newspaper of one of the most important resistance organizations, which had its own clandestine publishing press. ‘It was unacceptable to live in an occupied country,’ she says very simply. Her whole family, scarred by memories of her grandfather who had been deported to Germany in the previous war and who never recovered, was involved in some form of resistance.
‘One of the most frightening things was emerging from the Métro with a bag full of anti-Nazi leaflets and finding either French or German police waiting at the exit. Sometimes there were alerts at Métro stations as papers were searched lasting for two hours, so then we would walk through tunnels, which had no light in them at all, and leave by a different exit. But often only one station in three was open so you’d keep on walking. That was normal life for a Parisian resister. Everyone was doing it,’ she shrugs, making light of the daily terror. Returning home from the centre of Paris to Versailles, where she sometimes distributed leaflets at the nearby Renault factory, she remembers having to take elaborate routes and sneak into buildings or hide in a lobby if the Germans were doing the rounds or if she had missed the curfew. ‘At least you heard them approaching as their hobnailed boots made a noise on the cobbled streets of Versailles,’ Jacqueline recalled.
Mme Marié, her mother, was involved in one of the most dangerous jobs of all, hiding young people in the family apartment and allowing them to use it for transmitting. ‘We never discussed our work even though we knew what the other was doing, nor did my mother ever try to stop me doing this work,’ she says. ‘I did feel fear.’ In addition to distributing leaflets, Jacqueline’s job was to find constantly changing places for radio transmissions as the Germans roamed around in lorries with antennae trying to find them.
Geneviève de Gaulle was, like Jacqueline, a young girl with an elder brother when she first joined a resistance group the day they heard Marshal Pétain’s ‘cowardly surrender’ from Bordeaux on 17 June 1940. ‘There are moments in life which are completely unacceptable and the invasion of our country by the Nazis was one. My father Xavier [General de Gaulle’s elder brother] had made me read Mein Kampf, so I knew Hitler’s doctrine. I had a great need to do something, so I went to the nearest bridge, over the River Vilaine in Brittany, and pulled down a Nazi flag,’ she explained.
It was, like Vivou Chevrillon’s attempted violin-playing at Compiègne, or the tearing down of propaganda posters by the newly married Jacqueline D’Alincourt who went out as soon as curfew ended each morning with her three teenage sisters, a small act of resistance on its own but one which soon led to others. In addition, Geneviève was spurred on by the knowledge that her brother Roger, who had crossed the Spanish frontier, had managed to join the Free French Forces of her uncle. She had grown up in a family who identified themselves as strongly Dreyfusard; in addition, having lost her mother when she was four, she had learned to fend for herself from an early age. Wanting to do something as active as her brother, she returned to Paris from Brittany and wrote articles for La Défense de la France, usually under the pseudonym Galliard, but she used a variety of false names. She also helped people to escape, mostly would-be fighters who wished to join her uncle in London, through either Spain or Brittany, sometimes travelling to the border with them. She was constantly on the look-out for small pieces of information about German troops or equipment and was also used for delivering packages or false papers.
Jacqueline Marié exaggerated her youth by wearing white ankle socks and carrying her tracts in a school bag. Similarly, Geneviève de Gaulle considered ‘it was an advantage that I looked only about sixteen. Once a German official offered to carry a suitcase for me, not knowing that it contained arms. Another time I took hold of the boy I was with and pretended to kiss him, just to look innocent,’ she recalled.
But on 20 July 1943 her luck ran out. The then twenty-three-year-old niece of the exiled French leader was picked up by the Gestapo at a bookshop on the Rue Bonaparte where she regularly delivered false identity papers. Like the others, she was transported first to Fresnes, then to Ravensbrück, one of eighty arrested over the next few days, fifty of whom, like her, were young people working for La Défense de la France. Jacqueline Marié still remembers the terror she felt that July when scores of members of various resistance groups were arrested, including some she knew. But she continued with her work, trying to be more careful. There was no alternative.
As the Gestapo discovered more names and addresses they tightened their grip everywhere, and fear spread throughout the country. Families who had moved to Marseilles from Paris thinking themselves safe suddenly found themselves endangered but unable to move. Children especially, constantly on the move and changing schools, experienced the fear of their parents without being able to express their emotions, possibly for years. ‘It was something so heavy, even if you didn’t know what was going on precisely it was so terrible and you had no power over it. It was breaking you,’ explained Paris-born Claude Kiejman, whose family moved south in 1940.
Odette Fabius was now involved in a passionate love affair with the Corsican socialist Pierre Ferri-Pisani and, working closely with his resistance network, was inspired to undertake increasingly dangerous activities. Secret action was something of a drug, she confessed, and she delighted in the opportunity to meet people whom she would never have discovered without war if confined to her own society. Writing about Pierre after the war, Odette admitted that the extreme danger and the uncertainty about what would happen the next day heightened their passion. She ran the love affair alongside the resistance work, one feeding off the other, and although she maintained later that it was a ‘wartime love affair’, she also recognized that at the time ‘we took it to the limit, intensely aware that we had to live in the present and were threatened by the future as one or other of us was likely to die before victory. We dreamed and planned our post-war lives … we loved each other so deeply … we said to each other that at least this absurd war had the merit of helping us find each other.’
Other than their shared patriotism and ‘strong souls’, they could not have been more different. The war enabled them to put their differences aside. Try as they might to be discreet, all Pierre’s associates were aware of the affair. Odette was engaged in various missions in early 1943, but, having just been to Vichy to collect her daughter for the holidays, was hoping that Easter that year would be spent quietly with Marie-Claude at their rented house at Le Lavandou. However, on 23 April she learned that Pierre and some of his team had been picked up. She went immediately to warn the network of eight ‘mailboxes’ – the courageous people whose houses couriers used for passing on messages collected throughout France to be sent on to London – that they were being watched. Telling twelve-year-old Marie-Claude to wait for her in a cinema while she did this, she set off, promising to return as soon as she could. But at the eighth stop, a coal merchant, the Gestapo were waiting for her. She tried to bluff her way out, saying she could come back another day, the coal was not urgent as it was hardly winter. But it was useless; she was seized and taken to the local prison. Long after the film was over, Marie-Claude eventually gave up waiting for her mother and decided to make her way to family friends where her father, in due course, came to look after her.
Odette spent two months in the local Saint-Pierre prison, insisting she was a political not a Jewish prisoner – a denial which earned her, as an Aryan, the right to a one-hour walk every day. She longed to tell the other Jewish prisoners that, like them, she was Jewish but could not afford to do so ‘because I was engaged in an action which went beyond my personality.’ While there, by loudly singing ‘La Marseillaise’ she discovered that Pierre was in the same prison. Then to her great delight they were transferred to Paris together, enduring a three-day train journey in the same compartment. ‘In this sad situation here was a moment of unforgettable joy, even happiness, although the word may shock,’ wrote Odette.
But at Fresnes she was put into solitary confinement until in October she was deported to Ravensbrück via Compiègne. She did not know that in November her husband Robert was also arrested but he, by insisting that his wife was a Catholic, managed to avoid immediate deportation to Drancy. Instead, because the Germans knew of his expertise as an antique dealer, he was put to work in a camp inside Paris itself, based in the former department store Lévitan, where his job was to sort furniture and works of art stolen by the Nazis. According to his daughter, when he saw his own family’s silver pass through he did what he could to bend the cutlery to render it useless for the Germans to whom it was being sent.
Lévitan, at 85–87 Rue du Faubourg Saint-Martin, had been a well-known Jewish-owned furniture store in Paris but was requisitioned by the Germans in July 1943 and used for sorting, repairing and packing stolen items. There was another warehouse at the Austerlitz train station, one at the Hôtel Cahen d’Anvers in the Rue de Bassano, one at the wharf in Bercy and another at the Quai de la Gare. Of these, the Lévitan furniture store in the heart of the city was the best-known, and detainees who worked there were usually those who had (not always permanently) managed to avoid deportation to Drancy and Auschwitz by virtue of insisting on some sort of special privilege, such as being the spouse of an Aryan, wife of a prisoner of war or a ‘half-Jew’. Only remarkable objects were sent to Germany. Furniture and small objects were mostly made available for Nazi officials to choose for their homes, while high-quality artworks went, if not to the Jeu de Paume, where more than 20,000 works of art stolen from Jews were recorded and stored, to the Palais de Tokyo and the Louvre.
It is, of course, impossible to estimate how many Parisiennes must have walked past or been aware of what was happening at Lévitan yet continued with their daily life as best they could. However, alongside the terror, so great that some people never dared venture out of their homes, Paris was also, as one German visitor to the city noticed, full of ‘elegant ones’ who still held sway over the street scene, causing not only men ‘but women who want to know what the fashionable ones wear, to glance in their direction … Their resourcefulness in remaining fashionable brought colour to an otherwise grey everyday life.’
Bluebell, the Irish dancer Margaret Kelly, now married to the Jewish pianist Marcel Leibovici, was finding life extremely tough. There was never enough food. In 1940 the Germans had taken her, with one child and pregnant with her second, to the internment camp at Besançon. Eventually Count Gerald O’Kelly, the wealthy and influential Special Counsellor at the Irish Legation, extricated her by supplying documents declaring her a Catholic Irish woman, papers that were to prove invaluable in the next few months. Marcel Leibovici, meanwhile, decided to leave Paris for Marseilles, hoping to make life easier for his wife, but she was unwilling to work at the Folies Bergère given the attitude they had taken to her Jewish husband and, in any case, she disliked the way the largely German audience there regarded a visit to the nightclub as the high spot of Paris life. Instead, she put on a small cabaret of her own in the Chantilly, a small theatre in the Rue Fontaine, with just ten dancers on a tiny stage, including two British girls married to French men. But although her clientele here was not German, she attracted black-marketeers who liked to conduct deals over drinks, often hoping to mingle with the girls too. The German authorities clearly had an eye on Bluebell and on one occasion she was invited for an interview with a Colonel Feldman, who wanted her to tour her show in Berlin. She refused, a brave choice, telling him that as she had a British passport and had relatives who were fighting against the Germans, ‘I cannot for a moment contemplate entertaining your troops.’
But soon after she heard that Marcel had been arrested, having been denounced as a Jew, and was being held in the Gurs detention camp, by now being used as a transit camp for many Jews before deportation to Germany. She was terrified that the trail would soon lead to her as Marcel’s wife, and at six o’clock one morning was woken by two French policemen accompanied by a German in Gestapo uniform who searched her apartment. As they could not find anything incriminating, they did not take her for questioning. Then, news that was both thrilling and worrying; she heard that Marcel had managed to escape and make his way to Paris, thanks to help from a musician friend with resistance contacts who provided clothes and a false identity card for him. For the next two and a half years, Bluebell, effectively a single mother with a demanding job, kept her Jewish husband hidden in various attics and flats, without a piano because of the noise it would make and with only minimal amounts of food because she did not have a separate ration card for him. As he could not go out, he needed reading material and manuscript paper, and his washing had to be done secretly. Hiding a Jew was a crime sometimes punishable by death, and Bluebell daily risked her life on behalf of her husband.
But in the summer of 1943 she was again arrested, this time six months pregnant, and taken to 84 Avenue Foch. Unsurprisingly, the German officer asked where her husband was. In her own account of the interview she said that when she realized she was about to be asked, in English, if her husband would like to see his children again, she responded, via the interpreter, by asking her interrogator if he would like to see his. She was fortunate to get away with such insolent responses and the subject of her pregnancy was avoided. Had she been questioned, she had an answer prepared: that a German should not examine a girl’s morals in wartime too closely. Her own explanation for being set free was her ability to tell convincing lies. ‘I’ve never been shifty-eyed. I always looked them full in the face.’* On 22 October Bluebell gave birth to her third child, a daughter called Florence, but Marcel was not able to see his new baby.
When Bluebell was desperate for food she would visit Frédéric Apcar in Vaucresson, about an hour south of Paris, who kept her well supplied. Frédéric was now the dancing partner of Sadie Rigal, renamed Florence, the young South African who had met Bluebell when both were interned at Besançon. Sadie had been released from the camp early in 1941 and allowed to return to Paris, but was required to sign in daily at her local police station. A resistance friend had picked her up from the train station, rented her a hotel room and bought her dinner. She was later to hide a revolver for him in return. Sadie began work again at the Bal Tabarin music hall, at first sleeping in the dressing room, since she did not have a pass that allowed her to be out at night. Later, when she had acquired a pass, she used it to assist others. It was at the Tabarin that she met Apcar, with whom she developed first a dance act, ‘Florence et Frédéric’, and then a relationship. The pair quickly became one of the top dance teams in France, and although the love affair did not last, they became part of an informal resistance network helping Jewish artists and musicians, including Marcel Leibovici. The Hungarian-born Gisy Varga, famous for dancing naked at the Tabarin, sheltered Gilbert Doukan, a Jewish doctor in the resistance with whom she was having a tempestuous love affair. These were passionate times, as one never knew who would be alive tomorrow. Sadie not only hid and transported weapons for the resistance, she also sometimes hid Jews, most of whose names she never knew, in her frequently changing apartments, and sometimes she accompanied nervous, fleeing Jews without papers when they walked from one hiding place to another.
Once back in Paris, Leibovici was occasionally walked by Sadie, trying to look relaxed, through streets where armed soldiers might suddenly appear – one of the most dangerous but necessary jobs to give air to those in hiding. On one occasion while Sadie was housing two Jewish sisters, escapees from a camp, a policeman followed her from her daily sign-in. As they stood side by side, looking out over the Seine, he warned her that her landlady had informed on her and that the apartment would be searched. Sadie walked the girls to a convent, witnessing on the way there a Nazi raid on an orphanage, in which Jewish children were savagely tossed from upper-storey windows on to the street. The two Jewish sisters eventually reached the south of France, made their way from there to New York and never forgot the woman to whom they owed their lives. The same anonymous policeman warned Sadie a second time, when she was hiding a gun in her apartment.
Sadie Rigai, now the French dancer Florence, posing in front of Berlin’s Brandenburg Gate while on a controversial performance tour of Germany in 1943. On the far left is her dancing partner and fellow resister Frédèric. Edith Piaf is 3rd from the right
When ‘Florence et Frédéric’ were invited along with the singers Charles Trenet, Edith Piaf and Maurice Chevalier to tour four French prisoner-of-war camps in Germany, Sadie was advised to accept or else she would draw attention to herself by her refusal. She did not believe the German promise that 500 prisoners would be released if they went, but nonetheless managed to use her trip to help in a small way by filling her suitcase on her return with illegal letters from prisoners to their relatives in France. Before they reached Paris, the French artists stopped in Berlin, where they were caught in an Allied bombing raid. In the bomb shelter, the musicians played jazz, causing a debate among the Germans in the shelter. Piaf, Trenet and Chevalier were among many artists who felt compelled to perform to German audiences, trips for which after the war they were viewed as collaborators.
However, as Sadie’s decision clearly shows, nothing was straightforward: Trenet, whose song ‘Douce France’ was performed in front of French prisoners in Berlin in 1943, felt especially vulnerable as a homosexual, while Chevalier, dangerously, was married to a Romanian Jewish actress, Nita Raya, and lived with her in a comfortable villa near Cannes. In 1942 she had brought her parents there to protect them. They survived, but the marriage did not. Nonetheless Chevalier would be forever tarnished by photographs showing him performing in Berlin, though those same photos failed to show that he performed only for French prisoners of war.
Edith Piaf, born Edith Giovanna Gassion, according to legend on the pavement in the Belleville area of Paris, was the child of an impoverished acrobat father and a mother who was a singer. Abandoned by her mother at birth, Edith was for a time looked after by prostitutes in a brothel run by her grandmother. Performing and pleasing men was all she knew. She became a mother herself at seventeen, but when her daughter, Marcelle, died aged two from meningitis, she was apparently so short of money that she had to sleep with a man in order to pay for the funeral. Edith had been ‘discovered’ in 1935 by nightclub owner Louis Leplée, who dressed her and drilled her, and encouraged her to use the stage name Piaf – the word was Parisian street slang for sparrow – because of her tiny, waif-like appearance which was in stark contrast to the powerful and dramatic projection of her voice.
During the Occupation, Piaf’s career in nightclubs and cabarets frequented by Germans flourished. She undertook to register with the German propaganda department, had her lyrics checked (as did all performers) and deliberately maintained good relations with the Nazis, who enjoyed her performances. But she used her popularity to help friends of hers in difficulty and took a number of risks which might have landed her in trouble. One of her most successful hits was a song called ‘L’Accordéoniste’, originally performed by the Jewish musician Michel Emer, whose escape to unoccupied France she helped pay for, just as she had helped the Jewish pianist Norbert Glanzberg, briefly her lover, who had worked as a jazz musician with Django Reinhardt in 1930s Paris and who was taken in by Lily Pastré to live in her chateau at Montredon for months. Both Glanzberg and Emer survived in hiding until the Liberation. By 1942 Piaf was earning enough to live in a luxurious set of rooms, with heating, in the 16th arrondissement above L’Etoile de Kléber, a well-known nightclub and brothel close to 84 Avenue Foch, the building used by the SiPo-SD to interrogate and torture. The apartment belonged to Madame Billy, also known as Aline Soccodato, a brothel-owner who hid a number of Jews and resistance fighters and whose secretary, a resistance worker called Andrée Bigard, moved in with Piaf under the pretext that she was employed to help the singer.
Piaf sang all over France, with Germans in the audience or not. But it was her performances at prisoner-of-war camps in Germany which were probably her most useful as well as most controversial acts. Of course the tours boosted Piaf’s popularity with the German occupiers, allowing them to show the world that French entertainers were happy with the Occupation and life was ‘carrying on as normal’. But Andrée Bigard, who went with her on one occasion, maintained that she deliberately had herself photographed with dozens of prisoners during her German trip so that the resistance could use the images to create as many as 120 false identity cards, delivered by Piaf on her next visit, to help those prisoners escape.
And all the while Parisian highbrow cultural life continued alongside the low. In the autumn Vivou Chevrillon was invited to a performance at the Comédie-Française to make up the numbers and, in the foyer, happened to notice an official book lying open with a signature certifying that the work being performed had been passed by the censor. She gave a knowing look to her companion as it was a familiar signature, that of the Paris Préfet Amédée Bussière, one she knew well as she copied it regularly to make false identity cards. The unaccompanied man in the party noticed her surreptitious look of amusement and a few days later contacted her saying he was working for the resistance in Lyons and could she make him a false carte d’identité. Shocked, she asked how he knew she was in the business of supplying them. He told her that she had given herself away with that look. A few months later the man, Guy de Boysson, became her husband.
The activities of the Comédie-Française were never far from the mind of Béatrice Bretty, the actress who had gone into ‘voluntary exile’ with her Jewish lover, the politician Georges Mandel and potential post-war leader of France, deciding that her presence and tasks were more necessary elsewhere. In 1943, when the Schiller Theatre of Berlin was imposed twice on the Comédie-Française stage, she was further disgusted, ‘unable to stomach the German accent … permeating the prose of Molière’. Invitations had been sent to the gratin de la collaboration and other bigwigs in the capital in what the diarist Hervé Le Boterf described as ‘a Franco-German festival’.
Bretty had for months been following Mandel as he was sent from one jail to another. While he was in the Pyrenees, held at Fort du Portalet, the nineteenth-century prison built steeply into a cliff face overlooking the Spanish border, she had been able to cook his lunch almost daily and take it to him, as well as caring for his daughter, Claude. She would hide messages from de Gaulle and others in her bouffant coiffure, then use all her acting talent to get past the guards without being searched. The couple were even allowed brief walks together in one of the fortress yards. It was a surreal existence. Mandel had not been given a public trial and neither the resistance nor the Free French attempted to help him escape, partly because the resistance feared vicious reprisals while Bretty believed that de Gaulle was keen to keep him out of London where he would be a rival for Churchill’s ear. His followers had discussed some vague plans to help him flee, but it was difficult to arrange anything that involved him descending by rope as he was so unfit. Another plan involved him leaving, disguised in Bretty’s cloak, while she waited behind in the cell. But it was not easy to organize an escape for someone so well known and so well guarded. In April 1943 Mandel was taken briefly to a concentration camp in Oranienburg, north of Berlin, where he was kept in solitary confinement but allowed to write letters. From there he wrote a poignant message to Claude, trying to impart to her his philosophy for life. But later that month he was sent to Buchenwald, albeit kept in a small hut set apart from the rest of the camp. His former political opponent, Léon Blum, was already incarcerated there and had been granted permission while in prison to marry Mme Jeanne Reichenbach, who then lived with him. As soon as Bretty heard this she asked, via Fernand de Brinon in Vichy, for similar permission to marry Mandel. But Mandel himself, although her request was forwarded to him, declined. He would not ask for permission to marry on the grounds that he did not want her to share the harsh winter or his fate. He had books and could meet the Blums, with whom he presumably now made friends, and, although he felt very alone and weak, he tried to believe that his torment would end soon with an Allied victory.
In July 1944 he was moved from Buchenwald back to France, to La Santé prison, and his last words to the Blums were: ‘Tell Béatrice Bretty and my daughter that I regret nothing of what I have done, that I know I have acted well, and that no matter what happens, they will not have to be ashamed of me.’
In the frenzied summer of 1943, Rose Valland, the courageous would-be curator at the Jeu de Paume, had to watch the burning of some five or six hundred ‘degenerate’ paintings, many of them stolen, judged by a Nazi-appointed panel of ‘experts’ to have little artistic or commercial value. There was a huge bonfire in the Tuileries Gardens of works by Picasso, Miró, Léger, Ernst and many others. ‘Impossible to save anything,’ she wrote to her boss, Jacques Jaujard, on 23 July. But other than keeping him fully informed of what was happening, which she did constantly, there was nothing more she could actually do.
The Germans continued to propagate the illusion that art in Paris was flourishing, and the American heiress Florence Gould was one of those still visiting the various art exhibitions that the Germans allowed, making the most of Paris cultural life and running her salon. But 1943 was a difficult year, even for her. In March she slipped and broke her leg as she was leaving the Montmartre apartment of Louis-Ferdinand Céline, where she often went in the company of the Comédie-Française actress Marie Bell. According to Céline, writing after the war, Gould had wanted to buy his manuscripts but he had refused, ‘not wanting to owe anything to the American multimillionaire’. After the accident, Ernst Jünger continued to visit her, sometimes with Gerhard Heller, and on one occasion, according to Heller, Florence introduced a friend as ‘Colonel Patrick’, a German from the Lyons branch of the Abwehr. Possibly he was just another admirer, but she may have needed high-level protection as investigations were continuing into whether or not her husband was Jewish, in which case of course he would be arrested and deported and his extensive properties confiscated and aryanized. Frank Jay Gould had sent off for baptism certificates to prove he was Protestant several months before, but it was only in March that the CGQJ, somewhat reluctantly, agreed that as the Goulds were not Jewish their properties could not be aryanized. Nonetheless the Germans seized control of various Gould hotels and casinos on the Riviera, on the grounds that the owner was now an enemy alien, and administered them until the end of the Occupation.
In October, both Noor and Vera Leigh, the SOE women, were arrested. Khan had managed to transmit some twenty messages while on the run but was betrayed to the Germans, either by Henri Déricourt or by Renée Garry. Déricourt was an SOE officer and former French Air Force pilot who had been suspected in London of working as a double agent for the SiPo-SD. Garry was the sister of Emile Garry, Noor’s organizer in the Cinema network. Allegedly paid 100,000 francs, Renée may have betrayed Noor out of jealousy because she suspected that Antelme had transferred his affections from her to Noor. At all events, on or around 13 October 1943, Noor was arrested and interrogated at SiPo-SD headquarters, 84 Avenue Foch.
Though SOE trainers had at the outset expressed doubts about her gentle and unworldly character, on her arrest Noor fought so fiercely, even biting the officer trying to arrest her, that the Germans from then on treated her as an extremely dangerous prisoner. Her interrogation lasted over a month, during which time she made two escape attempts. Hans Kieffer, number two in the Paris SiPo-SD, told Vera Atkins in a post-war interview that Noor did not give the Gestapo a single piece of information, but in fact managed after all to lie consistently. Yet although Noor did not give away anything under interrogation and refused to reveal any secret codes, the Germans found her notebooks, from which they gained enough information to continue sending false messages imitating her, a ruse that London failed to spot. As a result, three more agents sent to France were instantly captured by the Germans on landing, among them Madeleine Damerment, a twenty-six-year-old postmaster’s daughter from Lille, another SOE agent trained in London.
And on 27 November Josée de Chambrun went with her friend Arletty to watch a gala performance at the Comédie-Française of Le Soulier de satin, (The Satin Shoe), by Paul Claudel which lasted in its original form for eleven hours but was reduced to a mere four on this occasion. ‘Fortunately there is not a pair,’ quipped Sacha Guitry. Arletty was equally stirred to wit by the occasion and commented that the audience consisted of ‘Les touts: Tout-Paris, Tout-Résistant, Tout-Occupant’. Clearly that was something of an overstatement, since that same day Noor was taken to Germany ‘for safe custody’ and in complete secrecy imprisoned at Pforzheim in solitary confinement as a Nacht und Nebel (literally ‘night and fog’) prisoner, condemned to disappear without trace. Two days earlier she had tried to make a daring escape with two other prisoners, but although she managed to saw through bars and get out of her cell she was arrested in the neighbourhood. From then on she was kept in chains, not allowed out for the next ten months.
The winter of 1943 was yet again fierce and bitterly cold, worse even, according to some accounts, than the previous icy wartime winters thanks to the lack of coal and the tense atmosphere. By December, the ten-year-old Rosa Liwarrak was totally alone. Her mother had died giving birth to her in 1933. Her elder sisters were in hiding and her father had been arrested in Paris in September. Before his arrest, he had tried to make arrangements with his accountant to look after Rosa and her brother, but the accountant had refused to take the brother as he was circumcised, and the money was now running out for Rosa. So she was put on the last civilian train to leave Paris for Brittany to live with her young stepmother in the country. But the train, which had a swastika on the roof and many German soldiers inside, was bombed by the British just after Rennes, killing hundreds of passengers. Amazingly Rosa (who had now changed her name to the more Breton-sounding Rose Livarec) survived and, as she did not look Jewish, one of the German soldiers on the train agreed to drive her in a jeep to her stepmother’s house. Pauline Bohic, who came from a devout Roman Catholic family, immediately fell on her knees when she saw Rosa, declaring it was a miracle: obviously, her prayers to the Virgin Mary had saved her. Within hours Rosa was converted by the local priest and for the next year attended a Catholic school in a local convent. It was, she said years later, such a relief. ‘The Catholic Church is very attractive to a child. Jesus is very forgiving and full of compassion. The church is full of lovely songs and pictures and sculptures. It isn’t full of rules about things you cannot do.’
Conversion was less help to Béatrice de Camondo Reinach in Drancy, who was constantly writing letters to her mother, Irène Sampieri, who was herself writing to Georges Prade, a fixer, who had close contacts with Jean Luchaire. Contacts were everything in this murky world. Why could he not fix the Camondo situation? Was there nothing left to barter or were they being punished for their earlier sense of security? On 31 March 1943, Georges Duhamel, Permanent Secretary of the French Academy, had asked Fernand de Brinon for clemency for the Reinach family and Brinon had passed on the request to Helmut Knochen, Senior Commander of the SiPo-SD. In response the SiPo-SD concluded that as various German authorities considered Léon Reinach a ‘typical and insolent Jew’ he should be deported from Drancy forthwith, although Béatrice could be kept longer. She was given a variety of chores, from sweeping and cleaning the floor to peeling vegetables for the soup. Her daughter Fanny was working in the infirmary acting as a nurse, while Bertrand, although separated in the men’s quarters with his father, made himself useful with carpentry.
The musician Marya Freund, who had taught Germaine Lubin, got to know the Camondo family during her own incarceration here at this time and spoke of Béatrice’s dignity. Freund, aged sixty-seven, had been arrested on 11 February at her Paris apartment and imprisoned in Drancy for five weeks, until 21 March, when she was transferred to the Rothschild Hospital, thanks to the intervention of the pianist Alfred Cortot. But even Cortot could not arrange Freund’s release from the hospital. Freund owed her second escape, and thus her life, to a doctor there who revealed to her a good moment to escape, information she used one day in July by walking out of a door when no one was looking, without coat or gloves (a noticeable deficiency at all times of the year in 1943), to spend the rest of the war in hiding.*
By mid-November there were no further negotiations for any of the Reinach family. Léon was one of approximately forty detainees who tried to dig an escape tunnel four feet high and two feet wide out of Drancy. The diggers, split into three teams and using some of the equipment intended for the renovation of the camp, were taking advantage of the temporary absence of Alois Brunner and his commandos, who had gone to arrest Jews in Nice and the surrounding area. On 9 November 1943, before the escape could take place, the tunnel was discovered by the Germans and punishment was severe for those involved. Reinach and both children, Fanny and Bertrand, were taken to the suburban railway station at Bobigny and on 17 November deported in Convoy no. 62 for Auschwitz. It is inconceivable that the local population of Drancy were unaware of the enormous and constant transfers of prisoners and the almost daily arrests and arrivals of thousands of detainees at Bobigny train station, just as it is inconceivable that Béatrice, who remained, ‘preparing nourrissons’, (baby food), according to a 1943 pitiful plan of Drancy,* did not know that this was the final time she would see her children. What is not known is if she was allowed to say goodbye to them, nor how she retained her own will to survive.
Many women that year were seen on trains reading Gone with the Wind, which had recently appeared in French as Autant en emporte le vent and, as Drue Tartière noted, they often had tears in their eyes as they read of the hardships during another war, the story making their own suffering more poignant to them. ‘The people on these trains were now looking very shabby and, since there was a great shortage of soap, the smells in the train were almost overpowering.’ It was, in certain circles, now chic to be shabby in France, with some women determined to wear trousers, especially if they were cycling, because they were warm and comfortable and, if left over from a husband who had been killed or taken prisoner, often made sound emotional and economic sense – even though Vichy had declared trousers to be masculine and condemned those who wore them for displaying signs of moral turpitude. ‘Only collaborators could afford to dress well,’ according to Drue Tartière. Most ordinary Parisiennes became adept at making do, at being ‘des virtuoses du secours, du miracle domestique et quotidien’. In other words, they became miracle workers on a daily basis, virtuosos always able to seek and find help when needed, as Colette recognized.
* A number of factors had led to mounting discontent among the French police: their workloads had become significantly heavier as they dealt with the growth of resistance, policed the black market and sifted through thousands of denunciation letters, while their numbers had declined partly thanks to the STO. In addition, many had been unhappy about their role in Operation Spring Wind.
† The Rothschild Hospital, often referred to as an annex to Drancy, was situated next to the Picpus cemetery in the 12th arrondissement, the site of a series of mass graves of aristocrats guillotined during the Revolution. In 1797 the land was secretly purchased by Princess Amalie Zephyrine of Salm-Kyrburg, a German aristocrat brought up in Paris who married into the house of Hohenzollern-Sigmaringen, as her brother and lover were both buried there. As a result the cemetery was apparently treated as sacred ground by the Germans, not to be actively policed, and it thus offered a useful escape route.
* In 1946 Bussière was convicted of ‘collaboration with the enemy’ and sentenced to life imprisonment, but was pardonned after serving five years.
* The Brussels-based Comet line was a resistance group intended to help Allied pilots and a few others on the run to escape to Britain by guiding, feeding and clothing them through France, usually down to Bayonne, over the Pyrenees into neutral Spain and then on into British-controlled Gibraltar. The Pat line, named after Pat O’Leary’s code name for Albert Guérisse, had a similar function but used different routes, all of which started from Paris, but one went via Brittany, from where men were shipped to Britain.
* In addition to the nearly two million French soldiers initially kept as hostages to ensure that Vichy would reduce its armed forces and pay a heavy tribute in gold, food and supplies, Germany continually demanded more workers. It has been estimated that by the end of 1943 there were 646,421 French workers in Germany, almost all male as most had been sent to work on railways or on the land or now as part of the STO (see Julian Jackson, France: The Dark Years, p. 233 onwards).
* SOE operations in France were organized into networks or cells known as Circuits which covered different parts of the country based around three key figures: an organizer, a courier and a wireless operator, almost all of whom were trained in Britain. The circuit organiser then recruited additional local men and women.
† Turnover in 1943 rose to 463 million francs, from 67 million in 1941. The fashion magazines continued to publish photographs of Parisian high society with details of what the women were wearing, at least until February 1943, when the Germans, not wishing to encourage an appetite for clothes its own women could not satisfy, finally banned the distribution of photographs of French fashion. Those regularly buying the latest Parisian couture designs included wives of German officers, wives of Parisian collaborators, journalists, film stars and wives of industrialists with flourishing businesses. Among them were the actress wife of ‘Steve Passeur’, nom de plume of Etienne Morin, a journalist and dramatist popular at the time who occupied a suite at the Ritz; Françoise Luchaire, wife of Jean; Mme Lisette de Brinon, newly created honorary Aryan; and Josée de Chambrun. They formed a distinct and limited circle of women intent on keeping up their position in society as they attended a plethora of Franco-German receptions.
* According to this account, as told to her biographer George Perry, she was interviewed by the Gestapo. But 84 Avenue Foch was the headquarters of the SD and the SiPo, the Sicherheitspolizei. As the two were complementary, Bluebell may easily have been mistaken in thinking it was the Gestapo – in fact headquartered at 11 Rue de Saussaies – who interviewed her.
* In one of her hideouts, a cabin in the forest near Montfort-l’Amaury, she finished a diary she had started at Rothschild which was later found by her son, Doda Conrad, while going through papers to write his own autobiography, Dodascalies: ma chronique du XXe siècle, Arles, Actes Sud, 1997.
* In this handwritten schedule of 26 July 1943 the Germans have tidily boxed away the Lévys, Kasriels, Dreyfuses, Schwabs, Nathans and others, identifying all their allotted tasks such as bread, vegetables, painting, hygiene and medical. The sense of order, the notion that this was where the Jews belonged, in their boxes, is chilling.