On 17 January 1944 at around 8.30 in the evening, an air-raid warning sounded especially loudly in the Marie-Louise clinic at the top of Rue des Martyrs, the street which led to Pigalle with its ever busier nightclubs and brothels. The wailing drowned out the cries of a baby girl, born in the middle of the raid to a young single mother, Madeleine Hardy. Madeleine, twenty-three years old, a poorly paid accounts assistant, had recently had an abortion but badly wanted this child, even though she knew that the father, a married man with whom she was not especially in love, would not leave his wife to become her husband. He, however, a well-to-do and financially secure manager of a calculating-machine business, twenty years older than Madeleine, was madly in love with this statuesque free spirit and so rented a small two-room flat in the Rue d’Aumale, where he continued to visit his mistress and admire his new daughter, Françoise. This arrangement did not displease Madeleine. A few months later she was again pregnant with his child. But this time, with the war still far from over and food in the city as scarce as ever, the father wanted nothing to do with the new baby. Madeleine, being strong-minded, determined to keep the child, another girl (Michèle, born in July 1945), and enlisted the active help of her own mother so that she could return to work. The elder daughter kept her mother’s name and, as Françoise Hardy, went on to become one of the country’s best-known pop singers in the 1960s. She was scornful of her father and of how little he provided for the family.
Paris was a dangerous place for most of 1944. As long as the Germans stayed, the curfew remained in force and one night, when Françoise’s father was caught out too late to get home, Madeleine refused to let him into the flat he paid for, suspecting he had been with another woman. He found shelter, but this was unforgivable behaviour as the Gestapo were ratcheting up the tension in those months, resorting to any excuse or none to arrest people in Paris, aware that the tide of war was turning. Following the German defeat at Stalingrad the previous year, the Russians were now gaining on the eastern front and the Allies, known to be preparing European landings, were also pursuing the Germans from southern Italy after successfully securing North Africa. The resistance in Paris itself was becoming bolder. On one occasion when there was a volley of gunfire in the street, Madeleine threw herself on top of the pram to protect her baby from the bullets.
With arrests accelerating to a frenzy, the Germans needed to move prisoners out of Paris to other camps. Jews, male and female, were mostly transported to Auschwitz via Drancy. But Drancy was overflowing, and tragically, because the Germans had banned Red Cross parcels, the UGIF was forced to take over responsibility for trying to provide better food and welfare and thus was, by its very act of cooperation with the Germans, complicit. The UGIF, although never responsible for preparing deportation lists, did provide a range of services for the Jewish community, knew the whereabouts of many Jews, and housed children in homes known to the Germans which helped facilitate disastrous raids. But its leaders faced an appalling dilemma: if they refused to supply basic provisions such as blankets and shoes as demanded, then Jews doomed to extinction would be sent on journeys to the east under even harsher conditions. The UGIF leaders believed they had no choice and were facing reality.
In March, after she had spent sixteen months in Drancy, the Germans decided it was time to despatch Béatrice Reinach, who was now deported to Auschwitz in Convoy no. 69. She survived there for another ten months until her death on 4 January 1945, two weeks before the camp was liberated. Her mother, Irène Sampieri, who had not been able to save her daughter, inherited what was left of the Camondo fortune but spent it all in the casinos on the French Riviera in the post-war years and died in 1963 aged ninety-one. The beautiful house, proudly donated by her father to the French state, remains as Béatrice’s monument, all that is left of the family today.
Hélène Berr, who had initially worked for the UGIF in their offices, was now increasingly concerned to save Jewish children whatever the personal cost to herself. She took on more direct tasks for various illegal and secret networks, which smuggled Jewish children from orphanages and homes to farms, villages and other places of safety outside Paris. These networks included the Oeuvre de Secours aux Enfants (OSE), the organization founded in Russia on the eve of the First World War to help destitute Jews, and the Entr’aide Française Israélite (EFI), some of them operating partially within official UGIF cover, others linked to non-Jewish groups. But the problem for these organizations was that they had still not moved their premises out of legal, easily recognized Jewish institutions. Hélène understood that since the UGIF was German-sanctioned, and had in its possession far too many names, her work risked the taint of collaboration, but her robust sense of morality helped her conclude that working to keep children out of the camps took priority over such personal scruples. This was the most important thing she could do. After the UGIF offices had themselves been raided at the end of July 1943, and all forty-six of the employees found there deported to Auschwitz, Hélène redoubled her own efforts, even going into Drancy itself to help with the feeding and welfare of the internees for two weeks at a time. As the historian David Bellos has concluded: ‘About one third of all Jews resident in France were deported and murdered … but only one Jewish child in ten perished in the years of German occupation and that was very largely because of the courage and skill of people like Hélène Berr and the kindness and generosity of a vast network of French well-wishers who took Jewish children and hid them.’ Notwithstanding, 11,400 French children died.
But on 8 March 1944 Hélène and her parents were arrested at their apartment on the Avenue Elisée Reclus. Most nights they had been sleeping at other addresses, Hélène going to the home of her housekeeper, Andrée Bardiau, to whom she handed her diary, a page or a section at a time, for safekeeping. As Mme Berr had often said to her daughter: ‘Things like that must be recorded, to be remembered afterwards.’ Hélène wrote a quick note to her sister before being taken to Drancy and then to Auschwitz, where her parents were murdered within weeks. She survived Auschwitz for eight months but was then shipped to Bergen-Belsen, where she contracted typhus. Too weak to work, she was beaten to death in April 1945, five days before the British liberated the camp.
Women political prisoners, often after several months in Fresnes or the slightly less harsh Romainville, were also now being deported to camps in Germany, a fate they all dreaded. The women rounded up in 1943, including Odette Fabius, Denise Dufournier, Geneviève de Gaulle and Jacqueline d’Alincourt, could only guess what lay ahead when they were transported early in 1944 from Paris to Ravensbrück, the all-women camp some sixty miles beyond Berlin where Jehovah’s Witnesses and ‘anti-socials’ from a variety of countries had been held since the beginning of the war. They knew enough, from rumours that had reached them, of the cruelty they should expect. As to survival, no one could assume that. But as it was theoretically a ‘work camp’ there was some hope that they might at least be given hard labour in the open air, surely better than being locked into solitary cells in Fresnes? The already weakened women were taken to the Gare de Pantin, a small suburban railway station on the eastern outskirts of Paris, used by the Germans to shift everything they were looting, and were then herded, sixty at a time, prostitutes alongside countesses, lawyers, teachers and cabaret dancers, into desperately overcrowded trucks for the journey north-east to the camp of Ravensbrück. The countesses ‘recoiled in horror’ from the prostitutes, who had been arrested for allegedly infecting the Gestapo with VD. But the women travelled in their own clothes, and some had been allowed to pack bags which contained luxuries such as powder compacts, eau de Cologne or sausages and cheese, smuggled into the Paris jails by their families. Many tried to scribble notes for loved ones and threw them out of a window in the hope they would be delivered, which, amazingly, they almost always were. But, for most, the journey to Ravensbrück meant enduring at least three days and four nights with neither food nor water and one overflowing latrine can. When they arrived at Fürstenberg, they were greeted by German guards who opened the train doors brandishing truncheons and shouting, ‘Quick, quick, five at a time, you filthy pigs.’ To reach the actual camp at Ravensbrück, the cold and hungry women had to march through snowy pinewoods, strengthened only by their conviction that the Allied landings were imminent and that the war would soon be over. As Denise Dufournier commented on seeing a German officer with a riding whip who had ordered everyone out during the journey, ‘He didn’t dare meet our glance for fear of seeing our confidence in our certain victory.’
When they first walked into the camp, before being humiliatingly stripped and often left standing naked for hours, having their heads shaved and all personal possessions seized, the other inmates, the half-starved creatures who seemed like wraiths from another planet, noticed these Franzöinnen (French women) – the word, half whispered, raced around the camp – still erect and confident, different from the rest. Some had arrived in ski outfits, smart woollen coats or even furs, and some refused to eat the proffered food, thinking it would poison them, especially after at least one of them suffered severe stomach cramps from eating indigestible raw swede or rutabaga. Others tried to laugh at the mad reality of what they were witnessing. A Polish blockova, the block overseer chosen by the SS to police the camp from within (but not always a cruel SS accomplice), remarked how, just before an inspection visit from the Reichsführer of the SS, Heinrich Himmler, ‘the whole camp trembles but you French just laugh’. By late 1943 and into 1944, the Polish and Russian women had had years in which to accustom themselves to the barbarity of the regime and so, when French prisoners started arriving in significant numbers at the camp, the older inmates assigned the French some of the worst jobs. The French women thus suffered a double oppression – from the SS and from fellow prisoners. In addition, the French women seemed to lack the physical strength of their Polish and Russian counterparts, who ‘kept their flesh and colour and strength far longer as well as their bright, gay and brutal energy’.
Geneviève de Gaulle, on the same convoy as Denise Dufournier and Cecily Lefort, an SOE agent married to a French doctor who had worked alongside Noor, described her feelings on arrival:
When I was in Fresnes there would sometimes be a gleam of light, a response. But as we went into Ravensbrück it was as if God had remained outside. The women already there, some of whom had survived for two years, were living zombies drained of expression. In the glare of the searchlights we could see women carrying heavy containers. I barely noticed their wavering forms, their shaven heads. But I was shocked to the core by the sight of their faces.
She was equally shocked by their bodies, especially those of the seventy-four formerly healthy young Polish women known as lapins – one of whom was just fourteen – who had been used for medical experimentation by Nazi doctors, subjected to up to six operations each, including having the bones and muscles in their legs broken, cut out or otherwise damaged. Their wounds were then deliberately infected with bacteria, with the sickening ‘justification’ that they were experimenting in order to find a cure for battle wounds. The daily sight of these brave, young, suffering women, hobbling around the camp, kept alive for nefarious reasons, was something never forgotten by other prisoners.
Geneviève, prisoner no. 27372, recognized that, as her physical resources were destroyed, her survival would depend on her ability to draw on her inner resources. ‘I was obsessed by the certainty that much worse than death was the destruction of our souls, which was the agenda of the concentration camp world.’ But she was determined that, if she endured, what she saw would inform the remainder of her life. Nothing in her previous existence could have prepared her for the back-breaking, twelve-hour shifts to which she was now allotted, smashing boulders for road-building wearing only flimsy shifts. Worse was to follow as she was switched to more gruesome tasks, saw friends dying of exhaustion in the night, witnessed beatings and torture and was herself deliberately knocked to the ground and savagely attacked with kicks and blows. As she became progressively weaker, in unbearable pain from untreated pleurisy, scurvy sores and ulcerations to her cornea, she believed her death was imminent. Like everyone in the camp in 1944, she also knew that Germany was going to lose the war, but not when. Support from friends was crucial in remaining alive until that time. On 25 October, her birthday, these friends gathered together all the breadcrumbs they could, mixed them with some sticky mess resembling jam they had been given as part of their rations, and made her a cake decorated with twigs for candles.
By that time, Himmler had realized the significance of this prisoner who was related to the French General. He also erroneously assumed that Odette Sansom, an SOE agent captured in April 1943, was a relation of Winston Churchill. To protect herself, as a cover story when she was arrested, she called herself Mrs Churchill, claiming that her husband, Peter Churchill, the British agent captured with her, was a nephew of the Prime Minister. But having worked as Peter Churchill’s courier since November 1942, the couple were by this time indulging in a love affair, a distraction which some in London believed had resulted in security lapses which led to their arrests.* For the moment, Himmler wanted both of them to receive special treatment so that they might recover adequately to be used as possible bargaining chips.
On 3 October, returning from work exhausted one day, Geneviève had been summoned to Kommandant Fritz Suhren’s office and asked how she was. ‘Very ill, as you can see,’ she told him. In response he told her she was moving to a different block and would in future work in the relatively comfortable infirmary instead of undertaking the harsh outside labour she had been given. When Geneviève protested that she did not want to be separated from her friends, Suhren told her it was an order. So, for a few weeks, she lived in a privileged block – the ‘show block’ which could be displayed to the few visitors – where she had a mattress to herself covered with a blue and white checked eiderdown, her own towel and a clean camp dress with a jacket and scarf, and she had her scurvy sores disinfected in the infirmary. Crucially, she received the surprising bonus of a few vitamins. At the end of the month she was moved again, to an isolation cell this time, in the Ravensbrück bunker. But even here she was, she was told, not being punished, and soon received a package of medicines including vital calcium tablets. She was hardly well, but she no longer believed she would die.
Jacqueline d’Alincourt arrived at Ravensbrück a couple of months after Geneviève, at midnight, and was left to stand upright, frozen stiff, until morning.
The next day we were ordered by the male and female guards to undress. This was for the first time. We were stripped of everything linked to the human condition: clothing, wedding rings, the few books we had been able to save, the simplest keepsakes, letters, photographs, everything was confiscated. Heads were shaved at random. Naked, penned up, pressed one against the other, all ages thrown together, we went to the showers. We avoided looking at each other before being handed the striped bathrobe, before learning by heart in German the number assigned to each of us, sewed on the sleeve. We no longer had names. I had become number 35243. A red triangle was also sewn above the number: it indicated our category – we were les politiques, ‘political prisoners’. Now completely stripped, we were cooped up for three weeks in a quarantine block. We got up at three-thirty in the morning and left for roll call, which could last for hours, and stood in the cold of dawn, come rain, snow, or wind. When the siren sounded, marking the end of this torment, we returned to the block, but the space where we were confined was so small that at no time were we able to sit down.
Eventually Jacqueline met up with Geneviève and for the next few weeks – until the latter’s removal to the camp’s isolation cell for special treatment – these two were to share the same straw mat, buoying each other up as much as possible. ‘In this fierce determination to help each other, we found the strength to resist.’
For most camp prisoners, female solidarity was of key importance; a small group of about three to five was the best number for support. But what kept Odette Fabius, designated a ‘dangerous terrorist’, going was partly worry about her daughter Marie-Claude and partly the memory of her final half-hour at Compiègne with her lover Pierre Ferri-Pisani at the end of January. Pierre had told her he never doubted that after the torment ‘we would find each other again and that we would spend the rest of our lives together. “When two people have the privilege to discover each other it is a sacred duty for them to be united whatever damage the union might cause others.”‘ They exchanged trinkets and said goodbye. Had she known that Pierre was being sent to work in the salt mines of Magdeburg, where few survived, her memory of their parting, which she said ‘lit up the dark days that were to follow’, might not have offered the same solace.
In August 1944, knowing that rumours of the liberation of Paris were true, Odette, ‘an irrepressible optimist’, decided that she could not stand another day in the camp and would try to escape. She managed to get herself deployed on a work unit clearing rubble following an Allied bombing raid near Fürstenberg. She swapped four bread rations with someone in the camp who had a ‘civilian’ dress, identified a fellow prisoner who spoke German and, having arranged to go together and in the middle of the day, while the guards were having a siesta in the sunshine, they seized their moment and ran. Knowing there would be an immediate call for two fugitives, they decided to separate for the time being and made their way through the forest in the direction, they hoped, of Berlin. Odette survived for two days and three nights on the run, but then came to a police checkpoint where she had to present her papers. She had none. She tried to bluff but was recognized and taken back to Ravensbrück, where she was now tortured. Stripped naked, she was tied to a table and beaten with fifty lashes on her back before being sent to the bunker for further punishment of six days without bed, clothes or food. Her fellow inmates doubted she would survive. In addition, all French women in the camp were punished. They were ordered to spend twenty-four hours on their knees in the sharp, rough clinker with hands held in the air. Some women thought that the price of resistance in the camp was too high and that therefore compromise, even if it meant working in German factories, was not collaborating.
Geneviève de Gaulle’s staunch religious faith offered her a way through this dilemma; it was not unique, but it was unusual enough to be commented on by survivors. Jacqueline Marié, later Fleury, arrested in Paris in February, arrived in Ravensbrück with her mother later in the year and remembers Geneviève’s ‘extremely profound faith … that was the essence of her life. Although she was a militant with a very fiery temper she was not a political animal.’ Worrying about her mother gave Jacqueline Marié an additional reason to stay strong, as it did thirty-six-year-old Germaine Tillion. An ethnographer, Germaine was determined to document what she knew the world would find almost impossible to believe after the war, and she was desperately concerned about the survival of her art-historian mother, Emilie Tillion, who arrived early in 1944. Many in Germaine’s close group of friends tried constantly to protect Emilie, as survival for older women was naturally much harder. The Germans were eager to gas those with grey hair, swollen limbs or wrinkled bodies deemed too weak to build airport runways in the cold, damp weather, or to march to and from the munitions factory for ten-hour shifts. Whenever there was a selection a younger woman, often Anise Girard, tried to help Emilie Tillion hide, or else there was a deputation to a blockova with influence, begging to get names taken off lists. This worked for several months but was becoming harder and harder.
Ravensbrück was a form of hell on earth and not everyone could draw upon religion as a source of strength. Some used whatever means were at their disposal, including the sale of sexual favours, in order to stay alive. One of those who survived by questionable activities was Anne Spoerry, a wealthy young woman of Swiss ancestry, born in France, who at the outbreak of war was training in Paris to become a doctor. Spoerry came from a Protestant family whose wealth derived from textiles in Alsace. She was trilingual, having spent two years at a smart London school, Francis Holland, before embarking on her medical training. Working in Paris, she watched with disgust as the Panzer divisions arrived in the city in 1940 and, soon after, got involved in resistance activities. With a brother, François, working for a resistance cell in the unoccupied south, she decided she could help British operatives in Paris and ran a safe house where they could stay for a short time. But she was betrayed and arrested in March 1943, before taking her final exams and, after months in Fresnes, ended up in Ravensbrück in January 1944.
Spoerry, a small woman with cropped brown hair, was assigned to Block 10, whose blockova was the notoriously powerful, cruel and untrustworthy Carmen Mory. It is hard to explain the twisted camp logic that enabled Mory to survive and prosper. She too was part-Swiss, but had lived in Berlin, become a Gestapo agent and been sent to Paris where the French had sentenced her to death in 1940, following a bungled attempt to murder a newspaper editor. However, she was freed after agreeing to spy for the French against the Germans, and in February 1941 was arrested by the Germans as a double agent and sent to Ravensbrück. She was protected in the camp by one of the camp doctors, Percy Treite, who apparently knew Mory’s father in Switzerland. By the time Spoerry arrived in the camp she had probably been beaten and raped, which made her additionally vulnerable. Several women testified after the war that Mory quickly became Anne Spoerry’s friend, protectress and lesbian lover in Ravensbrück. One of the last survivors of Block 10, the dignified doctor Louise (Loulou) Le Porz, a young tuberculosis specialist from Bordeaux, was disgusted by Mory’s behaviour and her total admiration for Treite. She recalled: ‘Mory used to receive medicine that she did not distribute … food she kept for herself … Anne Spoerry was Carmen Mory’s slave. She must have been very scared.’
Spoerry soon changed her name to Claude, sometimes Dr Claude. For Loulou Le Porz, the fact that a doctor could behave in the ways Spoerry did made her actions additionally shocking and unforgivable. A young Polish girl with a beautiful voice who was kept in the ward for lunatics ‘sang aria after aria, night and day’. This infuriated Mory, said Le Porz. ‘I think she must have asked the … head nurse [for] the authorisation to make her disappear.’ After Le Porz herself had refused to give the fatal injection, ‘Claude … took the syringe. Yes. She did not hesitate … I was dumbfounded. This was a discovery for me. That anyone who is a medical doctor or wants to become one could deliberately execute a patient … I can only explain it by her fear of reprisals.’
Violette Lecoq, a talented artist also in Block 10, had worked as a nurse at the front with the French Red Cross at the beginning of the war and joined the resistance soon afterwards. Like many, she had already spent a year in solitary confinement at Fresnes by the time she arrived at Ravensbrück. She, too, was horrified by Mory and Spoerry’s behaviour together. ‘Carmen Mory was a horrible woman and the little one followed her … They were lovers. Lesbians. Dr Claude would do everything she asked her to do.’ Once this involved administering a lethal injection to a hunchback. Another time the pair dragged a Polish girl recovering from surgery ‘to the toilets where they hit her, splashed her with cold water – all of which advanced her death’. As the Allies progressed towards the end of 1944, Mory was removed to another, less well-known camp. Spoerry never saw her again and was herself transferred to Block 6, where she resumed her real name, Anne, and tried to behave as nobly as she could, aware that the end of the war was approaching or because a woman who started out with noble intentions had finally freed herself from such a powerful and malign influence. She was now responsible for trying to cure typhus and dysentery patients, rather than administering lethal injections, and it was here that she encountered Odette Fabius, who later testified that Spoerry had saved her life by hiding her for three critical months in a sickbed when she emerged from her punishment. According to another account Spoerry opened a rear block window and, by pushing and shoving, helped six sick Hungarian Jews escape the gas chamber. But nobody could guarantee that this change of heart in the last few months would be enough to allow her to complete her medical exams in Paris once the war was over, as she so keenly hoped.
Not surprisingly, at Ravensbrück as in normal life, there were women prepared to steal bread and betray, as well as women determined to support each other; and there were divisions among various groups over who behaved selflessly by sharing food and who did not pull their weight, who could not summon the resources to deal with what faced them, often because their previous lives had comprised nothing but wealth and privilege. Among the new wave of Parisiennes who arrived in August there were some women wearing ‘ridiculous dresses they had concocted somehow’, including one sporting an Hermès scarf and another a powder compact that she had managed to smuggle through the showers. Yet on the whole these were cheerful women who spread the news that Paris had been liberated, and their compatriots, who had managed to survive the hell of the last few months, marvelled at such gaiety. ‘It was as if a little of our former life had slipped illegally into the camp. A breath of France,’ wrote Denise Dufournier.
Among the smart summer arrivals from Paris was Elisabeth de Rothschild, born Elisabeth Pelletier de Chambure, the exquisitely chic daughter of wealthy Catholic aristocrats from the Burgundy region whose ancestors included the famous Napoleonic General Laurent Augustin Pelletier de Chambure, and whose father was the local mayor. Elisabeth, known as Lili, was married first to a Belgian aristocrat, Marc Edouard Marie de Becker-Rémy, but she soon embarked on a passionate affair with the handsome, swashbuckling Baron Philippe de Rothschild, owner of one of France’s most famous vineyards, Château Mouton Rothschild. Although their daughter, Philippine, was born in 1933 the couple could not marry until 1935, after Elisabeth’s divorce had come through. In 1938 Elisabeth and Philippe had a second child, Charles, a severely disabled boy who survived only a few days, and by then the stormy marriage was already foundering. Philippe knew that Lili believed he was to blame for the tragedy. ‘She had taken pills to make her sleep all through the pregnancy and she couldn’t sleep, she said, because of me.’
Philippe, promiscuous and a womanizer by his own admission, had had numerous affairs before meeting Elisabeth, including one with the Russian-born countess Mara Tchernycheff, who became one of the most notorious Parisian black-marketeers during the Occupation. Mara had been a teenage model for Chanel, then a shop assistant at Schiaparelli before becoming Philippe de Rothschild’s mistress in the early 1930s. His connections helped with her brief career in film, but then he married Lili and Mara married a failed actor. Mara survived the war through a highly lucrative alcoholtrafficking partnership with the arch-collaborationist Max Stoecklin, providing Germans with supplies of hard-to-buy champagne, armagnac and cognac. This enabled her to rent a new flat near the Trocadéro, renew her wardrobe and embark on a further affair with an SS officer, Hans Leimer. Later, thanks to her close friendship with another collaborator, the petty criminal Henri Lafont, she had at her disposal a four-storey mansion – 3 bis Place des Etats-Unis – where she ran her own buying office and furnished the floor that became her office with furniture stolen from an abandoned Jewish flat in Rue de Courcelles. German soldiers under Lafont’s influence helped her with the removals.* Perhaps it was Countess Mara whom Philippe de Rothschild had in mind when he explained how words like collaboration ‘change colour as the years pass’. In his memoirs, Milady Vine, he cited a smart Parisienne whom he knew looking back on the war years as a time when ‘it was so much more chic to collaborate’.
Rothschild’s estranged wife was also consorting with pro-Nazi types who knew where anything could be bought for a price. ‘I did not much care for Lili’s behaviour during the German Occupation,’ he wrote later. His marriage to Elisabeth had initially been one of great mutual passion but soon turned to tempestuousness and mutual recrimination. Early in the war Philippe was imprisoned in Algeria by Vichy forces but the moment he was released, in 1942, he decided he should go to London to join the Free French. Elisabeth, who according to Philippe ‘was influenced by some of our former friends who had thrown in their lot with Vichy’, did not want to leave France. She reverted to using her maiden name, Pelletier de Chambure, and believed that the Germans would respect her as the daughter of an old French Catholic family. However, the Gestapo – two men in grey suits, according to Rothschild family retainers at 17 Rue Barbet de Jouy who witnessed the arrest – came for her at 8.30 one May morning, three weeks before the Normandy landings. Ten-year-old Philippine had just left for school with her governess. The men charged up the stairs, pushed the butler, Marcel, to one side and shouted outside Elisabeth’s bedroom door, ‘Open up, Gestapo!’
‘“What are you doing here?” we heard her say. They ordered her to get dressed and took her away in a van. Marcel followed on his bicycle.’
Later that day she was brought back and allowed to have some lunch while they searched the house. During this time Elisabeth asked to see Philippine, who was home from school but whom the staff were desperately trying to hide. There was then a discussion among the Gestapo men about whether they should take the child too, but in the end they decided against. Elisabeth, trying to remain calm, said a casual ‘goodbye, see you later’ to Philippine and then told the Germans imperiously that she had a hairdressing appointment. They disabused her of that notion and drove her away to prison instead. Philippine was swiftly smuggled out of Paris in an ambulance, with her legs in fake bandages, to stay with her grandfather.
Quite why Elisabeth was picked up as the war was ending has never been made clear. She had never become Jewish and was now separated from her Rothschild connections, or so she thought. It is possible that the Germans wanted her to reveal the whereabouts of Philippe, by then back in France fighting with Allied forces and whose name had been mentioned on the German-controlled Radio-Paris. According to Odette Fabius, a pre-war acquaintance, the fact that Elisabeth didn’t understand why she was in a camp compounded her suffering.
Nor did she understand why her erstwhile ‘good friend’ Fernand de Brinon, the influential Catholic aristocrat with a Jewish wife who was Vichy’s Ambassador to the occupied zone, did not come to her rescue. ‘She went on her knees at Ravensbrück repeatedly protesting that she wasn’t Jewish even though her former husband was,’ Fabius recalled.
But that wasn’t why she was there; it was for her disagreeable attitude towards Madame Suzanne Abetz during a fashion parade at Schiaparelli. In the company of one of her relations, she took the liberty of changing places to take herself further away, knowing the Allies were at the doors of Paris and perhaps belatedly trying to distance herself from her earlier connections. But she mistimed her actions and that evening Otto Abetz had her arrested. I had told her to shut up, telling her all the world could hear her and judge her, except the Germans, who did not understand and who found her exasperating.
The final convoy from Paris which left the city on 15 August, a swelteringly hot day, brought to the camp another 603 women – including the British SOE members, Violette Szabo, Lilian Rolfe and Denise Bloch – packed into wagons for deportation, just ten days before the city was finally liberated and the same day that the Allies landed on the Mediterranean coast. Many of these prisoners, women such as thirty-four-year-old Virginia d’Albert-Lake, the only American-born woman in the camp, Catherine Dior, sister of Christian; Jacqueline Marié and her mother Maisie Renault, sister of Colonel Rémy, one of de Gaulle’s top secret agents inside France; and Jeannie Rousseau, who had been arrested some months earlier – but, as the war dragged on, the Nazi hierarchy concluded that the women were badly needed to work as slave labour in Ravensbrück’s dozens of satellite camps. The Allied invasion, far from convincing Hitler it was all over, stretched weary Axis forces in yet another direction.
Virginia had been picked up on 12 June as she escorted downed airmen to safety as part of her work with the Comet escape line, just days before the liberation of Paris. Everyone involved in this work knew that, as the Allied invasion neared, such work had become ever more critical – and dangerous – not only because a trained airman was a valuable commodity but because his successful return was a huge morale booster for pilots back in England waiting to fly. As Virginia commented later, if she and her friends had known how long they would be held and how brutally they would be treated on arrival, they wouldn’t have struggled with all the boxes and luggage they tried to carry with them on the train journey to Ravensbrück but would have ditched them on the journey. By this time the camp was so full – it now held about 40,000 women, rising to 65,000 by the end of 1944, having been designed for approximately 10,000 – that there were no more uniforms for them and they wore whatever was doled out to them, however unsuitable; this rarely included underwear and never an outer garment of any sort. Jacqueline Marié was issued with a long dress with just one sleeve and a pair of galoshes – size 41 when she was a 36. The clothes had a large X sewn or even painted on, to denote prisoner status. Virginia had her money – sixty francs – confiscated but her jacket, in which she had hidden her engagement ring in a shoulder pad, was, amazingly, kept for her. The flea-infested bunk beds were now occasionally shared by as many as seven women, although some of the new arrivals were not even assigned a place in one of these but were forced instead to sleep on the floor of a hastily constructed tent, where up to 7,000 malnourished women were crammed together, oozing misery.
Ravensbrück had from the start been used as something of a dumping ground – a place to send any women the Germans wanted out of the way. It was from Ravensbrück that the SS ‘hired’ prostitutes, and forced them to work in brothels in other concentration camps, and those who survived told horrific tales of rape and abuse which sometimes lasted sixteen hours a day. After all, Heinrich Himmler reasoned, the women in those camps were already ‘degenerate’. In 1944 he set up three new brothels in Ravensbrück itself but was struggling to find women to work there when his eye fell on the new French arrivals, some of whom had been working as prostitutes.
But the French women prisoners were different. According to one of the Polish women, the influx of young French political prisoners ‘coming from a nation that had not known captivity, often, very audaciously, though unwisely, opposed the authorities’ orders and with a great deal of bravura’. This opposition took a variety of forms, but by 1944 the intense overcrowding at Ravensbrück meant that rules could sometimes be broken. The Parisian girls learned survival tactics such as lingering in the infirmary queue to avoid work or finding cherished items in the clothing store – which they dubbed ‘Galeries Lafayette’ – then hiding them under their bunks, now so closely packed together that guards could rarely penetrate to inspect. These treasures included medicines, underwear and – especially valuable – shoes, which were taken from prisoners on arrival. But a potato or a pencil would be preciously guarded too. The French ‘organized’ themselves and had lectures from Emilie Tillion, for example, on French art and culture. On 11 November about 250 French prisoners at a sub-camp observed one minute of silence as a protest: ‘What hope that minute gave us; six machines ceased simultaneously.’
Often it was the countesses who took the lead in mobilizing protests. Jacqueline d’Alincourt was one of those who had arrived with what she believed was an entire brothel from Rouen, uneducated women who suffered especially because they had no idea why they were there. ‘They had nothing to hold on to, no religion, no values … we in the resistance, we knew why we were there. We had a superiority of spirit, you understand,’ she explained. D’Alincourt and her friends helped these women – not always successfully – to resist the brothel work. Yet the bewildered French prostitutes in some ways suffered a double punishment. They never wrote memoirs, were not part of the resistance, and so, in spite of being responsible for several courageous acts during the Occupation, such as sheltering evading airmen in brothels as well as undertaking individual acts of great kindness in the camp, have largely been forgotten by history.
In spite of attempts at solidarity as the biting winds and winter snows hit, several women regularly lost consciousness when forced to stand for hours for roll call, and died on the spot. Others were often too weak by now to be helped to stand. Virginia d’Albert-Lake gradually became seriously ill and emaciated – like almost all the women at Ravensbrück she no longer menstruated, while those who did suffered the humiliation of blood running down their legs as there was no sanitary protection – but said later that she survived the ordeal thanks to an attitude of mind. ‘It was a matter of morale. You couldn’t let them see you weep. The women who wept at night were usually dead by morning. You couldn’t give in.’
Again and again, those who survived cite the importance of female support systems operating within the barbarity. Germaine Tillion, using her training in the systematic study of human beings to try to understand what made the Germans operate in the way they did, was always writing on whatever paper she could find, every day, determined to bear witness. She was also creating a darkly comic operetta, Le Verfügbar aux enfers, inventing words and scenes for existing music, but later refused to have it performed lest the world conclude that life in the camp had been soft, with opportunities to make music.* She was a source of great strength to twenty-one-year-old Anise Girard, repeatedly telling her that as she was young she would survive and have many children.† Other women used scraps of paper to write out favourite recipes, even while starving. One of the extraordinary aspects of this barbaric life, when they ate nothing more than watery soup, wild dandelions or stolen bits and pieces, was the need to discuss food – food that they longed for and dreamed of but had not seen for months or even years. In fact, the hungrier and more deprived they became, the more a longing for food appeared to have seized their imagination. Micheline Maurel, a literature teacher, kept a small notebook diary, which she used when she came to write of that first winter: ‘Ate nothing … first snow. Ate nothing … very cold. It is freezing, so sad.’ A few weeks later, trembling, dizzy and short of breath, she wrote: ‘I wished I could let myself go and disappear completely. From the depths of this barrack, I prayed God to let me die on the spot. I also called for my mother.’ Since soup aggravated her dysentery, it was only tiny morsels of bread from her friend Michelle which sustained her.
Virginia was deeply grateful for the friendship of Toquette Jackson, the French head nurse at the American Hospital picked up in May by the Milice, along with her husband Sumner, Chief Surgeon at the hospital, and their only child, the sixteen-year-old Phillip. The Jacksons had endured numerous French prisons that summer until Toquette was finally deported in the same August convoy as Virginia. By the time she arrived in Ravensbrück she had no idea what had happened to either of her menfolk. ‘I have never known a woman with such courage, willpower and vitality,’ declared Virginia. Courage helped in facing the daily fear of selection for the gas chamber, but courage alone failed to combat illness, and by the time Virginia was moved to the infirmary she was close to death. Her mother, Eleanor Roush, was writing to the US State Department begging for help, pointing out that ‘Virginia is a Gentile, which may be in her favour in view of Nazi standards.’ Washington responded that the Swiss-based International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) was insisting it had no access to the Gestapo-run camps as its remit was to look after the welfare of military prisoners rather than civilians and, scandalously, therefore could not intervene.
One of the most powerful protests in Ravensbrück involved the spirited Jeannie Rousseau, who (as seen in earlier chapters) had managed to survive a previous spell in prison at the beginning of the war by outwitting the Nazis. For the previous four years Jeannie had been responsible for sending precise reports on the development of Germany’s V-1 flying bombs and V-2 rockets, transcribing all she had seen and heard at the house on the Avenue Hoche where she worked with German officers and French industrialists. After work she would go directly to George Lamarque’s safe house at 26 Rue Fabert on the Left Bank and write it up. Even if she did not understand the significance of the Raketten, Rousseau knew she was party to highly sensitive information and so helped create one of the great intelligence documents of the Second World War.
She admitted later that she felt lonely at times doing this work. ‘It’s not easy to depict the chilling fear, the unending waiting, the frustration of not knowing whether the dangerously obtained information would be passed on – or passed on in time – recognised as vital in the maze of the couriers.’ But her reports helped convince Churchill to bomb the test site at Peenemünde in the Baltic, thereby blunting the impact of a terror weapon the Nazis had hoped would change the course of the war, and were considered so crucial that the author had to be brought to London for questioning. Betrayed by the French guide paid to lead her and other agents through minefields to a waiting boat in a cove, she was arrested and, even though she fabricated a story that she was just there to make money by selling two dozen pairs of French nylon stockings on the black market in Brittany, she was sent to Ravensbrück.
When she arrived at the camp, she knew about the D-Day landings and was determined to give existing prisoners some hope by telling them the war would soon be over and they would all be free. Still only twenty-four, she believed it was her duty to boost morale; with two friends, the older countess Germaine de Renty, who had been working in various resistance activities since 1941, and a communist from Montmartre, Marinette Curateau, they made a pact that they would not carry out work that might support the Nazi war machine. If they were sent to such a factory or work camp, they would organize a protest. Jeannie had been arrested under her false name, Madeleine Chauffeur, which helped her since by now she was insisting that her name was Jeannie Rousseau and that she was not a spy, thereby confusing her captors who did not realize she was the same woman arrested and then released in 1940 in Rennes. ‘Fortunately it was a bad interrogation,’ she explained coolly.
Soon after her arrival Jeannie and most of the French women who had arrived with her were selected for work at one of the many sub-camps. She was ordered to Torgau, a Heinkel munitions factory 200 miles to the south. Conditions seemed better there but, having made her pact, Jeannie refused on principle to manufacture ammunition which would be used to kill her own people. She went to the camp chief, a fat-faced German, and declaimed in fluent German that, as the women were prisoners of war, the Gestapo had no right under the Geneva Convention to force them to make ammunition. The other women followed her example and said they, too, would refuse. The camp chief responded by threatening to despatch them back to Ravensbrück.
Even when several of the women, Virginia d’Albert-Lake among them, concluded that they were better off staying at Torgau than returning to Ravensbrück, Rousseau urged her fellow prisoners to continue with their gesture of defiance. ‘You see I was convinced somebody had to do something. Somebody had to stand up. I decided to do it.’ In the intervening decades, Jeannie avoided discussion of her resistance career, including this episode. She knew that some women may have died as a direct consequence of the protest she had fomented, that some of her comrades blamed her, and indeed still do today, for her actions. Yet, as she approached old age, she decided it was time to talk. ‘We were so childish, but there you are,’ she told one interviewer.
However, she was not alone. Jacqueline Marié was another young résistante at Torgau who ‘refused to participate in the war effort of a country that we were fighting, working 12 hours a day in a factory to clean shells in bins of acid. It was unhealthy work and exhausting.’ But after the protest Jeannie and others were cruelly punished. Jeannie spent three weeks in a punishment cell doused with cold water every morning, then beaten and led back to her cell. Every day the same. Eventually she was returned to Ravensbrück for questioning. If entering Ravensbrück the first time was bad, returning there was unimaginable.
‘I would have died that time,’ she said, but the Germans could not find the papers for Jeannie Rousseau, because there were none. When they asked her why she had been sent to Ravensbrück, she replied: ‘I don’t know!’ The Gestapo had concluded by now that, whoever she was, she was a troublemaker. So, papers or not, they sent her and her two compatriots as punishment to Königsberg in the east, her third and by far the worst camp. There the women worked outdoors in the freezing snow, hauling rocks and gravel to build an airstrip. They would stumble back to the camp after dark, bitterly cold, for a hot meal of soup. The soup was kept in great vats policed by the head guard – a fat beast of a woman the French called La Vachère, or the cowgirl. Being fat was enough of a provocation, but in addition she would taunt the hungry prisoners by kicking the vat of soup until it spilled into the snow and then watch them scavenge in the slush for tiny scraps of food. Jeannie now realized that her own survival depended, bizarrely, on an escape plan which reinstated her and her friends again in Ravensbrück. They hid in a truck taking TB-sufferers back to be gassed and managed to slip away when the truck stopped, and return to the main camp.
Jeannie, convinced that the war would be over by the autumn, did not have any doubts at the time that her protest at Torgau was the morally correct way to behave and would ensure the best outcome. But the cruel winter dragged on. If indeed Paris had been liberated, and the Allies had succeeded in pushing the Germans out of the rest of France while the Soviets were advancing across Poland and Ukraine, why was it taking so long for the women to be rescued? In fact, throughout 1944 even more women were being sent as labour for the hundreds of sub-camps upon which Hitler, ever more crazed in his determination to fight on, had decided his ability to continue the war depended. Even when, in October, French newspapers, no longer under Nazi control, ran interviews with a woman released from Ravensbrück who had directly witnessed fellow prisoners dying from starvation and bodies burned daily in the crematorium, it was proving hard to press for international action. As evidence accumulated in 1944 of gas chambers and other barbarities, the International Committee of the Red Cross continued to insist to those who expressed their horror at what they now knew was happening in Ravensbrück that it had no access to the camp and could do nothing. Its rules governing interference on behalf of civilians forbade it to publicize the women’s appeal.*
The Germans had not picked up all the young Parisiennes working for the resistance. Marie-France Geoffroy-Dechaume, now hiding out with her group in her small house on the coast, was actively engaged in planning night-time operations which involved laying mines or planting bombs both on railway lines and by roadsides in response to information they received about German manoeuvres, about what they were transporting and, crucially, about when they would be passing. She learned to make homemade bombs on the kitchen table and sometimes would bicycle around with gelignite strapped to her chest, having secretly fetched the ingredients from elsewhere, then brought them back to the house to assemble into a bomb, all the time looking to any German soldier every inch the innocent country girl. As her daughter recalled, she rarely talked about these activities, but ‘I think she relished this role of looking or playing the innocent, knowing all the while that she had the means to blow the Boches sky high!’
The group planted their bombs under cover of night and, after months of inaction and waiting, there was a deep sense of satisfaction verging on euphoria when they saw their targets successfully blown up, a feeling that they were finally doing something positive to help their country.
Later, when it was clear that the Germans had been defeated, there were still small groups of German soldiers straggling along the country roads looking weary and defeated. Marie-France and her gang lay in wait and then ambushed some of these; the soldiers all too readily flung their arms in the air, shouting hopefully, ‘Camarade!’ She had been instructed to disarm rather than kill them and never forgot the look of humiliation on their faces – to be disarmed by a woman!
The Paris all these women had left behind was increasingly a place of terror, consumed by shortages and despair. In the spring and early summer of 1944, even though the Allied invasion was imminent, only a handful of trusted people knew the precise details. But the constant rumours of a coup to remove Hitler fed Nazi paranoia, and in January 1944 Helmuth von Moltke was arrested and sent to a special prison section at the Ravensbrück camp. He was treated reasonably well at first and got to know prisoners such as Carmen Mory, whom he described to his wife Freya as someone who ‘told splendid stories’ and was ‘a magnificent source of information for me’. Geneviève de Gaulle, during the time she was held in solitary confinement, was also aware of his presence there, but did not know why he was being held.* But the volatility in Paris of random shootings and reprisals intensified into terrifying chaos after 20 July, when the Claus von Stauffenberg plot to kill Hitler failed. As a result hundreds of conspirators and anti-Nazis, who had thrown in their lot with Hitler’s opponents, were now rooted out and punished.
And there were summary executions, on all sides, of those thought to have been betraying secrets or people. On 26 April, Violette Morris, the lesbian former athlete and collaborator, was gunned down at the wheel of her Traction Avant on a country road in Normandy with two other collaborators in the car as well as the collaborators’ two young children, all killed in a hail of bullets fired by members of the Maquis Surcouf. Violette was fifty-one and was thought to have been responsible for numerous infiltrations of SOE networks and other resistance groups.
Of course the fear and deprivation felt by women in the capital queuing for food were as nothing compared to the suffering experienced by those in Ravensbrück. Nonetheless, alongside the tension there was a genuine sense of hardship in Paris itself because most of the women there had no concept of how much worse it was for the women imprisoned in the camps. Violette Wassem, a young secretary who had worked in Paris throughout the war, said that after four years of Occupation the low point of deprivation came in 1944 when gas and electricity often failed.
As I was ‘Mécanographe’ [early electric-typewriter secretary] at that period, I worked during the night. In order to do that, I took the last underground at 9–10pm and returned by the first at 6–7am. We would be given a ‘casse-croûte’ [snack] at midnight made of a dish of white beans boiled in water (eugh!) and this, for five or six weeks. The newspapers had only a page, perhaps a half. No white machine-paper, but an inferior pink sort … Altered or forged coupons were sold for a great price and to increase the value in weight of the bread coupons, for example, one of our employees was scratching out figures and drawing others all day long. I bought some for us, for my family in the countryside and even for a baker friend so as to satisfy his clients and his miller!
Janet Teissier du Cros was, like most other mothers in this period, worried about adequate food and nutrition for her small children, one of whom, lacking adequate vitamins, was now diagnosed with curvature of the spine. By the winter of 1944 life was an hourly struggle to find enough food.
‘Our fat allowance, and this covered all fats, was ten ounces a month and dwindled to two ounces that winter of 1944. Adults got no milk – we had a very small allowance of fatless cheese.’ Janet kept a note of these figures at the time because it was so little. ‘Our bread ration was six ounces a day but often on some pretext or other, reprisals or what not, it was less.’ It was impossible to subsist on these rations, eked out only by such carrots, Jerusalem artichokes, swedes (rutabaga) or an occasional cabbage as she could wrest from the market by dint of long queuing as everything involved queuing among grumpy women. What she found as distasteful as the swedes was the lying. ‘We were all of us driven to some form of dishonest practice,’ she admitted. The elderly living alone suffered most and of course those in hiding. Fake ration cards were rife; once Janet had an altercation at the fishmonger, when she was loudly accused of using a card twice, which she just as loudly denied only to find out that it was her maid who had purloined it the previous day. Such problems were very real to Parisian women, leading to ‘a dishonest way of life in full view of the children and in contradiction to all we were striving to teach them’. Those who could not quite bring themselves to use the black market might be tempted by the grey market. ‘There were real false cards and false real cards. The first were counterfeits of the real thing, the second and more expensive were genuine bread cards sold in the towns by country people who could obtain wheat illegally and make their own bread.’ And it was not only food in demand on the black market. At one fashionable lunch party the guests left their hats and coats on the banquette in the entrance hall and one also deposited two large bars of soap she had managed to buy. But another guest picked them up on her way out, behaviour unthinkable before the war at such a gathering.
In spite of the bitter cold, with no heating and so little gas or electricity that food could rarely be cooked properly, some sophisticated Parisian women, despite the shortages, took pride in being able to produce miracles with their clothes.
With hardly anything one could still dress well; we turned and remade our dresses and coats; with articulated wooden soles we had magnificent high-heel shoes … Hairstyles and hats were fashioned from tulle scaffoldings, veils, flowers, and recycled feathers. With four or five old handbags, one could have one big one made, very chic.
But although there was no silk for stockings, one new source of fabric was now occasionally available: parachute silk. Downed airmen were instructed where possible to bury their chutes but if they could not, women eagerly seized whatever was not torn or damaged, knowing it might provide enough fabric for a blouse as well as several pairs of luxurious camiknickers.
Young French feminists demonstrating at the Longchamp race course with posters demanding the right to vote.
Germaine Lubin (centre), feted as the first French-born soprano to sing Isolde at Bayreuth, was praised by Hitler himself who told her she was the finest Isolde he had ever heard. Although smiling here, the photograph contributed to her painful postwar punishment.
The circus ball, July 1939: (left) Elsie de Wolfe, Lady Mendl (centre), wearing a heavily embroidered butterfly gown by Mainbocher, the first American designer in Paris, with guests Oliver Messel and Lady Jersey; (above) Brazilian socialite Aimée de Sotomayor in one of the first dresses designed by Christian Dior.
Once general mobilization of all men between the ages of eighteen and thirty-five was ordered on 1 September 1939, and war declared two days later, there were many emotional scenes at railway stations.
An elegant Parisienne, wearing soon-to-disappear seamed nylon stockings, examining the notice in a shoe shop indicating a shelter to which customers would be immediately escorted in case of danger. Most shops, worried about losing their clientele, hastily transformed cellars into similar shelters in 1939.
Jeanne Lanvin’s cylindrical bags designed to carry gas masks – one in green felt and the other in red, dotted with small stars – were an immediate success. For several months no one in Paris moved about without a gas mask and designers quickly took advantage of the opportunity.
Gabrielle ‘Coco’ Chanel in her suite at the Ritz Hotel in Paris where she lived for the duration of the war, having closed her Rue Cambon boutique.
Irène Némirovsky, novelist born in Kiev into a family of Jewish bankers, who lived most of her life in France and wrote in French but was deported to Auschwitz in 1942, where she died of typhus, leaving behind two small daughters and the unfinished manuscript of Suite Française.
Publicity shot of Corinne Luchaire, the film actress who shot to fame as a teenager for her pre-war roles in Prison sans Barreaux and Le Dernier Tournant. After the war she was sentenced to ‘national indignity’ for her close connections with collaborators throughout the Occupation.
Bernard Herz, the pearl dealer whose financial and emotional support of Suzanne Belperron enabled her to flourish as a brilliantly original jewellery designer.
Refugee women and children fleeing Paris in anticipation of the German invasion. Some used babies’ prams or bicycles tugging trailers, while a few had cars, often with mattresses on top – but this group was reduced to walking, carrying only what they could hold.
After the Fall of France in June 1940 approximately 1.8 million French soldiers were taken as prisoners of war, most of them deported to Germany. Here, a month later, women scrutinize the first official lists of the wounded and captured.
German propaganda posters in French encouraged women to look upon the occupiers as helpful friends unlike the husbands who had abandoned them. ‘Abandoned populations, trust the German soldier!’
German soldiers chatting up French women outside the Moulin Rouge in summer 1940. Many Parisiennes commented how, for the first months of the Occupation, most were courteous and charming.
German auxiliaries, dubbed ‘Grey Mice’ by the Parisians, looking at a display of scarves in the department store, Printemps. A posting to Paris was highly sought after by men and women as it offered culture, charm and – in 1940 at least – luxury goods unavailable at home.
Dancers performing semi-naked to a sea of grey-green uniforms at the Moulin de la Galette, an historic tavern and music hall in Montmartre painted by several French artists including Renoir and Picasso.
Parisian women spent many hours queuing for basic foodstuffs, including bread, throughout the Occupation. The shortages resulted in food rationing and a black market as well as visits to country cousins living hours away from Paris who could supply some fresh produce.
A workshop set up to mend mesh stockings. As silk stockings disappeared, some women painted their legs with special iodine dye available in different shades.
As fashionable clothes became harder for ordinary Parisiennes to afford, at least new underwear remained a possibility with enough coupons.
(left) Béatrice Bretty, star of the Comédie-Française, in costume as Dorine in Molière’s Tartuffe. Bretty left the company in 1940 to support her Jewish lover, former minister Georges Mandel, imprisoned by the Vichy government and later assassinated by the Milice. (above) While Mandel was interned his Paris home was looted.
Rose Valland, French art historian who secretly recorded details of thousands of paintings being shipped to Germany and in 1945 was assigned military rank to work as a member of the Commission for the Recovery of Works of Art (CRA).
Jeanne Bucher, courageous gallery owner who continued to organize exhibitions of contemporary art in Paris despite Nazi prohibitions on showing work denounced as ‘degenerate’.
French Jews and foreigners arrested in Paris on 14 May 1941 – the first major round-up organized during the Second World War in France.
On 5 September 1941 the pseudoscientific propaganda exhibition Le Juif et la France (The Jew and France) opened at the Palais Berlitz in Paris. An estimated 200,000 people visited the exhibition intended to show the corrupting influence of Jews in all walks of French life.
* The pair were married after the war in 1947 and divorced in 1956.
* The owners of the flat, a Jewish couple named Panigel, sued the Countess after the war.
* The operetta received its premiere in Paris in 2007, when Tillion herself at 100 was too frail to attend but had at last agreed to its being staged.
† She did both. In June 1946 she married André Postel-Vinay and the couple had four children.
* Ironically, as Caroline Moorehead points out in her history of the Red Cross, although many of the women imprisoned were there largely for their work sheltering and aiding men, it was men on the committee who insisted on doing nothing and the single voice urging action was a woman’s (Caroline Moorehead, Dunant’s Dream: War, Switzerland and the History of the Red Cross, Introduction).
* Helmuth von Moltke was transferred from Ravensbrück to Tegel prison in Berlin on 11 January 1945, tried before the People’s Court on 23 January and executed in April. Freya, Caspar and Konrad von Moltke were evacuated to Czechoslovakia, and in the 1960s Freya settled in the United States.