On 1 January 1945 the factory at Torgau fell silent. One day’s respite. The women forced to work at Torgau, the munitions factory in eastern Germany used as a sub-camp of Ravensbrück, sometimes believed they could take no more. Jacqueline Marié felt she was immersed in blackness. ‘We were so cold: it was minus 20°C outside! Snow covered everything. We were terrified. Fortunately we had no mirror. But I could see my mother and it hurt me to see her legs reduced to bones, sticking out miserably in her ridiculous galoshes that were so heavy. She maintained an incredible serenity, lavishing affection on our young companions. She was also very lucid and, having so many memories of the war of 1914–1918, warned us about the end of the war, and the most dramatic period we might yet have to endure.’
January and February 1945 were among the coldest winter months of the twentieth century in Europe, with blizzards and temperatures occasionally as low as –13 degrees Fahrenheit (–25 degrees Celsius), and the bitter cold remained until the middle of March. Even if the war was nearing the end, some of the women in the camps felt they could not continue one more day. They were ill, underfed and suffering a variety of problems from painful sores to blisters, frostbite and gangrene. Sometimes a dead body would be discovered, frozen fast to the ground where it had fallen. One day Virginia found a friend crouching behind rubbish piles, sobbing, ‘I want to die. I can’t stand it any longer. I want to die.’ There was further panic in March for the Parisian workers at Torgau as the Gestapo made an appearance, interrogating them to see why they could not increase productivity. ‘While chaos reigned in Germany, the French women felt as if their very low yield was being held responsible for the end of the Great Germany.’
But then without explanation they were locked into cattle wagons and sent to yet another sub-camp. For Jacqueline and her mother, Markkleeberg, near Leipzig, was the fourth and harshest of all camps where, after several days of a cruel journey,
we were ‘greeted’ by beatings and the ranting of yet another commander who seemed even crazier than any yet endured … We (the 250 French) were parked in a miserable shack … The other barracks were occupied by 1,300 Hungarian Jews who had come from Auschwitz or Bergen-Belsen … With the French women, SS and kapos [guards chosen by the SS from prisoners] were particularly fierce: at dawn, still exhausted, staggering along, we would work under constant threat of blows as for twelve hours a day we tried to extract stones deeply embedded into a frozen earth. Sometimes we were harnessed to a huge roller that we had to pull on the roads near the camp. At other times, we had to cut down trees in the forest or, more terrible, unload coal trucks all day long. We had no gloves or stockings, no change of clothes, no soap! We were always wet and fed a meagre swede soup with a small, very small, ever smaller piece of bread! The days seemed endless and we often felt like we were about to die on the spot … We were no longer even ghosts of women, we were so ugly.
Here, too, they guessed from the bombing of Leipzig which lit up the camp that the end must be near. ‘But then the SS, reacting to the bad news, were increasingly fierce. We had little strength left as food hardly contained anything solid any more. How to hold on until our liberators came? Our universe was growing grey, miserable, and I dared not look at my mother and see the degree of physical deterioration.’ And yet the desperate desire to survive, in what sometimes felt like a grim race with her captors, persisted.
Geneviève de Gaulle was spared these bitter final months because in late February 1945 she was released from Ravensbrück. Suddenly one morning she was given some odd clothes to cover her emaciated frame: a navy-blue dress with short sleeves, canvas shoes and, extraordinarily, her own coat, handed in when she had arrived. She tied up the few special things she wanted to keep as mementoes in a piece of cloth she had been using as a towel,* and then was sent for an interview with a senior Gestapo officer ‘who talks to me about Paris, where he spent a few months and now remembers the time with great pleasure!’ The officer’s secretary similarly told Geneviève how much she adored Paris and asked her to write a few lines from a popular song in her autograph album – ‘for instance, the opening words of a Lucienne Boyer song, I admire her so much’. And then, flanked by two SS guards and a warder, holding hands silently with a fellow prisoner, ‘a terribly gaunt woman who seems very old … a few stray hairs have grown again on her shaven head’, Geneviève went through the camp gateway one final time, trying to ignore the snow and the icy winds. The little group eventually arrived at a Red Cross camp at Liebenau on the Swiss–German border, where she started the long process of recovery in a Swiss sanatorium.
Her companion, a woman who looked ‘like Gandhi during the last few moments of his life’, was Virginia d’Albert-Lake, released largely thanks to her American mother repeatedly pestering Eisenhower. Geneviève’s release had also been requested at the highest levels by her uncle, now head of the French provisional government, who had been informed of the situation by his elder brother, Xavier de Gaulle, the French Consul in Switzerland and Geneviève’s father. Geneviève always insisted that her uncle had nothing to do with her release, and indeed she may never have known of his actions. She always maintained he would never have used his influence to favour one member of his own family. But there is now evidence to suggest that he made his concerns known to the ICRC in Geneva in September 1944, who in turn wrote to the German Red Cross, requesting that she be sent to Switzerland to recuperate.
The final months in Ravensbrück were hellish for the Parisian women who remained. Everyone grew weaker, colder, sicker. At the same time, the air raids were more frequent, the guards even edgier, and whispers of the Allied advance grew louder as a smuggled radio had been rigged up in Ravensbrück. By mid-January, as the Russians advanced to within 400 miles of the camp, the killings intensified. And many were killed from sheer exhaustion while working in the polar cold. If the shootings were too slow, the gassings increased. After Auschwitz closed, starting in January 1945 Ravensbrück made use of a small shed as a temporary gas chamber near the crematorium. The women were pushed in, 150 at a time, and then a canister of Zyklon B gas was thrown in from the roof. Witnesses described hearing moaning and crying for two to three minutes and then silence.
This shed was dismantled early in April 1945 and then, according to Countess Karolina Lanckarońska, the Polish resistance fighter and prisoner, ‘a machine appeared which resembled a bus and was in the forest near the camp. It was a mobile gas chamber and was painted green.’ These mobile gas vans and trucks, painted green so they would be camouflaged in the forest, were a new mechanism in the Nazi machinery of death.
In April, at yet another Appell or roll call, both Anise Girard and Emilie Tillion were forced to line up, but this time Emilie was called for selection. Anise ran to tell Emilie’s daughter Germaine, successfully hiding under the covers in the infirmary, what had happened. But it was too late. She had been taken, they hoped, to the euphemistically named ‘youth camp’, merely an annex where prisoners were taken before being killed, but who knew where? In the next few days they heard that she had been gassed. Anise never stopped blaming herself and would weep whenever she spoke about what had happened. Jeannie Rousseau firmly believed that there was nothing anyone could have done. Emilie, she said, had insisted that ‘I have always looked my life in the face; I want to look my death in the face.’ Releasing her would only have resulted in someone else being substituted. There was much sympathy for all the French prisoners who had done their best to protect this dignified and courageous woman. But in the camp, as in life, there were divisions. Some, like Loulou Le Porz, believed it was for Germaine herself to have shouldered the blame for not staying with her mother until the end.*
By April, a few French women including Odette Fabius and Jacqueline d’Alincourt were released from Ravensbrück thanks to the efforts of Count Folke Bernadotte, a rich and distinguished member of the Swedish royal family and Vice-President of Sweden’s Red Cross. In late February 1945, with Hitler determined to exterminate all witnesses to his camps, Bernadotte undertook a risky operation and negotiated with Himmler to release camp victims. He transported them in white buses to recuperate in neutral Malmö in Sweden. Initially, the scheme applied only to Scandinavian citizens, but it was rapidly expanded to save as many victims as possible. Ultimately, more than 15,000 prisoners were released in this way. The last white bus left on 25 April. On that day another 4,000 women were loaded on to a Swedish train, used as a rescue vehicle in addition to the buses and bound for Hamburg, but it broke down outside Lübeck. By the time the freight cars were finally unbolted, four women were found dead inside.
Toquette Jackson, now fifty-six and desperately ill, also owed her rescue to the Swedish Red Cross, eventually sailing to freedom from Lübeck, along with approximately 223 other women from Ravensbrück, aboard the Swedish ship, the Lillie Matthiessen, as part of the same rescue operation. Once in Malmö, desperate for news of her husband Sumner and her teenage son Phillip, she trembled as she wrote to her sister that she had ‘open wounds on three fingers and no eyeglasses’, and could barely hold a pen. ‘I also have otitis and my ears run – I can’t hear on one side, my feet are swollen and I have terrible dysentery. But after all that my morale is good.’ An American Red Cross official reported on 29 April 1945 that, in addition, Mrs Jackson had ulcerated sores on her hands and legs, and required urgent hospitalization to have her ears drained. ‘She is little more than a skeleton,’ he added. She had been devoured by lice to such an extent that her skin was pockmarked all over from the bites.
Yet her morale was good because she believed her husband and son were still alive. In June, however, she learned the truth. Sumner and Phillip had been taken from Neuengamme concentration camp and, along with 2,000 others, herded below deck on the SS prison ship Thielbek, which was strafed by the RAF. Phillip survived by clinging to a piece of wood, searching for his father, who eventually drowned in Lübeck Bay. By July, Toquette was writing to her sister-in-law explaining that as soon as she was able she was going to look for a job, adding: ‘Life is very expensive in France and we [she and Phillip] have not the means to live on our income. I want you to know that I never ceased to be in love with Sumner, for whom I had moreover a great admiration and respect. He had such big qualities.’
Toquette was one of the ‘lucky’ ones. But the outlook was grim for the remainder as the Germans began to force-march as many of their starving captives as could walk, and shot them if they faltered. Jacqueline Marié and her mother were among those, usually in groups of two or three hundred at a time, forced to march westwards as part of the evacuation of the camps undertaken by the Germans, partly in the hope that prisoners would die of exhaustion and partly so that the camps would be deserted when the Allies eventually arrived, leaving no one alive to reveal the barbarity that had taken place within them. The weakened prisoners were hopelessly ill equipped for the evacuation, having suffered months of poor rations, leading to painful hunger and thirst, and having inadequate clothing. The Marié women, feeling like zombies and with bleeding feet, walked from 13 April to 9 May, scavenging herbs where they could. Occasionally, they encountered French prisoners of war, abandoned by their captors and struggling home, who handed them morsels to eat. Or they sucked grass and drank water from puddles, tiny amounts, which ultimately saved them. Too much, and their stomachs could not have coped. But Jacqueline recognized that they would soon collapse and then be beaten to death. They passed Leipzig, followed by Wurzen, Oschatz and Meissen; until they arrived at Dresden, completely flattened by bombs, with escape seemingly impossible. And then in early May they reached the Czech border and saw soldiers of the Red Army. As Jacqueline wrote laconically, they were ‘our saviours but also, hélas, violators of our friends’. She was fortunate not to be one of the thousands of cadaverous creatures now brutally raped as the advancing Red Army indulged in an orgy of uncontrolled sexual rampage.
The former teacher and communist Micheline Maurel, who after two years as a prisoner including days when she ate nothing at all, suffered from constant dysentery – and, according to her own description, was little more than stretched skin over painful bones covered with scabies and sores – reported graphically on the Russian soldiers who raped Ravensbrück survivors and who saw even women like her as sexual objects. ‘They had no evil intent, no animus whatever against us. Quite the contrary, they were filled with extreme cordiality brimming over with an affection which they had to demonstrate immediately.’
‘French? You French, me Russian, it’s all the same! You are my sister. Come lie down there!’
Maurel described how they would swiftly have their way with the sick and emaciated women ‘with a hearty brotherly laugh’ and then be off across the fields. More Russians would find the women and they would have to explain all over again how, in spite of loving the Russians very much, they were ill and exhausted and neither fit nor willing ‘to make love’. Only the ulcerated condition of her sores, which she insisted were contagious, saved Maurel herself from being raped. After the war she remarked that the question she was most frequently asked was whether or not she had been raped. ‘In the end I regretted having been spared this. Seemingly, by my own fault, I had missed one part of the adventure, to the great disappointment of my audience.’ As she astutely explained, the people who posed such questions were little different from those who inflicted the torture. ‘Men and women who have forgotten they have a soul.’
Paris itself in 1945 was a very different city without its occupiers. By the time the women who had survived the camps reached the capital, it had been liberated for some nine months and many of its inhabitants were determined to get on with their lives, which meant ignoring these skeletal figures, all too grim reminders of the war they believed was over, suddenly appearing in their midst. Some concentration-camp survivors, returning with heads shaved and camp numbers tattooed on their arms, women so painfully thin and ill that even their families could barely recognize them, found themselves in a city that did not want to acknowledge them.
Simone Rohner, a political deportee freed in April, was deeply traumatized by the hideous symmetry of being shunned anew, mistaken for a tondue merely because she had no hair. ‘Civilians looked at us with an air of disgust; some insults were flung at us. We looked at each other in surprise. What? France did not know about the deportees? … We had to endure scathing words, we cried in rage from it … we received a hostile reception … [and] we were shocked.’
Almost all the returning women had geared themselves up with joy and exhilaration at the thought of returning to a ‘normal life’, but were now enraged, disillusioned and distraught to find they were instead greeted with a lack of empathy and understanding. A decision by Henri Frenay, newly appointed head of the Ministry for Prisoners, Deportees and Refugees, implemented by his department to try banning dissemination of information about the deportees, did not help. Frenay, a former resister who well knew the high price women had paid for their actions, was charged with organizing and overseeing the prisoners’ return shortly after de Gaulle’s provisional government took office in Paris. Yet he claimed that ‘inexact information’ might result in reprisals for the prisoners and cause unnecessary anxiety for their families. In addition, as part of the 1945 government repatriation programme, Frenay regularly emphasized how essential it was for women to leave their salaried jobs now and allow men to return to their position as chef de famille so that former prisoners of war ‘could regain their lost self-confidence’.
With few exceptions, the particular experiences of the several thousand French female political prisoners were excluded from the histories of the period. As the French historian Annette Wieviorka has written: ‘Reading the wartime memoirs of de Gaulle, one would never know that French women were among those deported and subsequently repatriated. Writing of the prisoners’ return, he called it “a grand national event … [one] charged with joy … when the nation recovered its two and a half million sons”.’
Superficially de Gaulle’s provisional government was overseeing a return to normality. On 29 April French women voted for the first time in municipal elections, following a decree the previous year which declared that ‘women are voters and eligible under the same conditions as men’.* Food now appeared in the shops, including bananas, an exotic item for many children who were seeing them for the first time; however, rationing, queues and squabbles over provisions were still very much in evidence. Occasionally families were reunited and then the fine wine, well hidden in cellars or behind secret walls throughout the Occupation, would be retrieved. But, more often, families learned of loved ones who would never return, and they had little to celebrate.
Almost immediately after the Liberation of Paris, as Allied troops moved into the city, so too did their support teams of diplomats, civil servants, secretaries and journalists, many of whom were astounded by the flamboyance of French fashion. Expecting to see a nation on its knees, they saw instead war-slimmed Parisiennes wearing very short skirts, over-padded shoulders, extravagant turbans (often stuffed with old stockings to make them fuller), loud colours and very high wooden or cork platform shoes. Some Americans were outraged by such showiness while a war was still being fought. But they misunderstood French culture and the belief among some Parisiennes that to look dowdy was a negation of their patriotic duty, when by sporting extravagant costumes they could thumb their noses at the Germans. Some even went as far as to call it ‘resisting’. Fashion was, for the French, even after four years of occupation, anything but trivial. For them, remaining stylish provided a beacon of hope for the future. It was a matter of pride to make a dress from old curtains if they could, or to adapt a man’s suit if the man wasn’t coming home. ‘Many French women tried to assert their individuality in defiance of the enemy; they remained as fashion conscious as possible throughout the war in order to retain their pride, boost morale and remain true to themselves, because fashion expressed their identity.’
Lucien Lelong, President of the Chambre Syndicale, who had argued so strongly with the Germans at the beginning of the war to keep French couture Paris-based, now felt the need to write to American Vogue defending the extravagance of the first fashion shows after the Liberation: ‘For four years we have fought to keep couture alive because it represents a Parisian industry of prime importance and because it was a means of avoiding unemployment for workers and consequent forced labour in Germany and, lastly, to preserve for la Haute Couture Parisienne the place it has always had in the eyes of the world.’
It was in this atmosphere that he and colleagues such as Robert Ricci, head of public relations for the Chambre Syndicale and son of the couturier Nina Ricci, dreamed up a brilliantly original scheme to create a Petit Théâtre de la Mode, harking back to an eighteenth-century practice of presenting fashion to the world by means of dressed dolls. The plan was to dress up 170 scaled-down figures, one-third of human size, made of wire with porcelain heads, in clothes fashioned by at least fifty of the great Parisian couture houses, including Cristóbal Balenciaga, Jacques Fath, Jean Patou and Elsa Schiaparelli, all desperate to revive their pre-war fortunes. The dolls, wearing real jewellery designed to scale by Boucheron, Cartier and Van Cleef, and lingerie that could not be seen but which was delicately stitched on, were mounted on sets created by designers such as Jean Cocteau and Christian Bérard. It was an entirely Paris-based initiative, an unashamed attempt to reassert quickly the dominance of French high fashion and to demonstrate the superiority of French creativity. And it was supported by the newly created French Ministry of Reconstruction partly because, while the country’s economy was in ruins, it provided employment for the hundreds of ancillary seamstresses and bead-makers, craftsmen and artisans involved in the textile industry, and partly because it was a way of bringing much needed dollars into the country to rebuild its shattered industrial base. For hours, days and weeks everyone worked, often without heat, with little electricity and meagre food supplies, to create the tiny shoes, handbags, belts, gloves and bags, all meticulously crafted – often, given the shortages of fabric, from scraps. Top hairdressers were brought in to create elegant wigs from a mixture of human hair and glass thread.
The show opened at the Louvre in Paris on 28 March 1945, and was enormously popular, attracting more than 100,000 visitors, as well as raising a million francs for French war relief. Plans were put into operation to tour the exhibition, which moved to London in early December, followed by Leeds, New York and San Francisco, as well as Copenhagen, Stockholm and Vienna the following year. For many British women, whose wartime clothes had been guided by comfort, restraint and deliberately sober severity, such a lavish display, often impractical and overtly sexy, was perplexing.
And all the while the trials continued. In the months following the Liberation until 1 July 1949, as part of the épuration légale (as opposed to the épuration sauvage), the High Court handed down 108 judgements, eighteen of which involved the death sentence. Taking into account other official courts in France, 6,763 people were sentenced to death (3,910 in absentia) for treason and other offences. Only 791 executions were actually carried out as, in addition to those who had escaped, several of those sentenced had died in the interim. The majority of defendants were sentenced to dégradation nationale, a punishment introduced at the Liberation which involved loss of political, civil and professional rights and that was handed out to those found guilty of indignité nationale. The most high-profile of all was the one-day trial at the beginning of the year of Robert Brasillach, novelist, poet, playwright and editor-in-chief of the fascist paper Je suis partout. Brasillach, erstwhile admirer of Irène Némirovsky, had launched wounding attacks on republicans, communists, Jews and foreigners. For a time he was France’s most envied and reviled writer. But on 19 January 1945, on trial for his life, he was unrepentant, convinced by the scenes of brutality at the Liberation that these ‘horrible things show what the Occupation might have been like for four years if there hadn’t been calm, collaborationists, a Vichy government’.
Unlike fellow collaborationist journalists and politicians, Brasillach did not make any attempt to flee but decided he would tough it out, insisting that he was a patriot, loyal to the constitutional Vichy government. He was helped by Marguerite Cravoisier, a woman from his home town of Sens in Burgundy, who had been in love – unrequited – with Brasillach for years and, understanding the dangers he faced, had already prepared a hideout for him in the maid’s quarters of a building in Paris near the Sénat. Cocooned here for a month, he did not know that an armed-resistance group of the FFI had arrested his mother and thrown her into jail, where she was detained with political prisoners and those accused of collaboration horizontale. When he learned this, he immediately handed himself in to the police. His trial, in a special court of justice for treason (for the offence known as ‘intelligence with the enemy’) revealed something of the hypocrisy raging amid the current vengeful frenzy in Paris. The judge, who had served Vichy, may have thought he could exonerate himself by condemning Brasillach. After twenty-five minutes’ deliberation, the jury, all veterans of the resistance Brasillach had so vehemently denounced, called for the death sentence.
One of the new breed of young journalists who wrote about the trial was Arlette Grebel, a twenty-year-old graduate of the Paris journalism college who made her name reporting on the scenes of Liberation for France Libre. Grebel was lucky to graduate first in her class at a time of enormous opportunity; the collaborationist press was being closed down and the events on the street were of unrivalled excitement. She was so inexperienced that when she was sent to cover the trial of Charles Maurras, the extreme right-wing philosopher behind Action Française, she did not even know who he was. The Liberation provided a window of opportunity for young women such as Grebel. As Simone de Beauvoir, who was present at the Brasillach trial and who wrote about it in an extended essay the following year, commented: ‘to be 20 or 25 in September of ‘44 seemed the most fantastic piece of luck: all roads lay open. Journalists, writers, budding film makers were all arguing, planning passionately, deciding as if the future depended on no one but themselves.’ Grebel, with her little white bobby socks and short skirts, perfectly encapsulated the widespread idea that France had a chance to start afresh with younger people and create a future untainted by wartime rivalries.
De Gaulle, asked to consider a plea for mercy, upheld the sentence, later explaining that ‘in literature as in everything, talent confers responsibility’. Brasillach was hanged on 6 February 1945, aged thirty-five. De Beauvoir had refused to sign the petition for clemency, arguing that although she opposed the death penalty in principle, in his case death was justified. But the position of de Beauvoir herself during the Occupation had been far from uncomplicated, and it is tempting to explain her especially intense hatred of intellectual collaborators such as Brasillach in the light of her recognition that he had been active in creating the world in which she too found herself to be complicit. A committed anti-Nazi, she had nonetheless managed to eat well for most of the last four years thanks partly to her relationship with Jean-Paul Sartre, whose mother continued to serve all the best black-market foods while sending her maid to stand in queues. De Beauvoir herself, once she worked for the German-controlled Radio-Paris, also had access to black-market foods which enabled her to entertain guests, including Picasso and Dora Maar, offering them ‘bowls of green beans and heaped dishes of beef stew, and I always took care to have plenty of wine’. She and Sartre may have voiced opposition to the occupiers and did not attend the openly German-supported salons of Florence Gould, but de Beauvoir signed the Vichy-inspired oath stating that she was neither a Jew nor a communist so that she could teach, and she continued to publish under conditions of Nazi censorship while other writers refused, thus working within the German system in Paris. Sartre in particular, by stepping into the shoes of Henri Dreyfus-Le Foyer, a Jewish teacher (and a great-nephew of Captain Dreyfus) who had been dismissed from the Lycée Condorcet, arguably profited from the war.
In March came the turn of Florence Gould herself. Recognizing her ambiguous position, she had made a generous donation to the FFI immediately after the Liberation and now invited passing Americans to her Thursday lunches. She still had to face a French investigating magistrate. In the event, she was not interrogated about her friendly relations with Germans, but rather was asked why she had invested in a Nazi-financed bank in Monaco late in 1944. Gould maintained in a sworn statement that she had been blackmailed into becoming a partner in the Banque Charles, claiming that, had she refused, her husband’s companies would have had to pay a far larger sum to the Aerobank, a Luftwaffe-controlled bank with links to the Banque Charles. She had acted in the way she had, she claimed, because she believed that ‘M. Charles could keep my husband, who was especially threatened, out of danger. He was sixty-seven and in fragile health and I feared he might be forced to leave his home at Juan les Pins and, as an enemy alien, be taken to Germany.’ She insisted that her actions had not in any way been ‘against the interests of the Allies’. She was not charged, and the salons continued. However, three years later the case was reopened, and a new report gave a more plausible account of the bank’s purpose as being not so much to help the German war effort but rather to channel German money abroad either to establish a Fourth Reich or to provide cash in the event of a Nazi defeat. Again Florence was not charged, but this report concluded that she, ‘a Franco-American, appears to have enjoyed singular protections during the Occupation and, if it’s not certain that she committed the crime of ‘intelligence with the enemy’, it is certain that we have no reason to congratulate her for her attitude’. Florence was extremely lucky.*
There was, however, a greater sense of urgency in the chase to catch those who had openly fulfilled Nazi policies. In September 1944, immediately after the Liberation of Paris and in some cases before, some Vichy government leaders including Fernand de Brinon (who had managed to shelter his Jewish wife), Pétain, Laval and several senior collaborators such as Céline, Lucien Rebatet, Jean Luchaire and his daughter Corinne had all fled to Sigmaringen, a village in southern Germany where, based in a German castle, they established a government in exile. However, just as American forces were approaching in April 1945 Laval was flown to Barcelona by the Luftwaffe but, under pressure from de Gaulle, the Spanish government delivered him to the American-occupied zone of Austria. There he and his wife were taken into custody, turned over to the French army and flown to Paris, where they were imprisoned at Fresnes. Mme Laval was later released but her husband remained in prison, awaiting trial as a traitor. Pétain handed himself over to French authorities on 26 April.
During his imprisonment Laval wrote his only book, a posthumously published Diary (1948), which his daughter Josée, determined to prove his innocence, smuggled out of the prison, page by page. Laval firmly believed that he would be able to convince his fellow countrymen that he had been acting in their best interests all along, a view Josée and her mother held with a passion. ‘They lived in a fever, where agony was mixed with hope. They were busy with pleas, interviews, telephone calls, whatever they could do to save Laval from death.’ One of those whose help Josée tried to enlist was the celebrated Catholic author François Mauriac, who commented that if ever there was a desperate case this was it. ‘I shall never forget,’ wrote Mauriac, ‘the admirable daughter of Pierre Laval coming to me one evening as if I could save her father … Pierre Laval had in a way assumed all the hatreds, even those of the partisans of the Marshal. Never was a scapegoat more bitterly condemned – less for what he did than for what he said.’
Josée did her best to assemble the most experienced team of defence lawyers, while her husband, René de Chambrun, having largely spent the war in America, now returned to support his wife and father-in-law. He assured the press that, with enough time to summon documents and witnesses from abroad, Laval could refute all charges. Laval’s short trial – one that a number of historians believe today was deeply flawed, reflecting the poisonous political atmosphere in France at the time – began on 5 October 1945 and lasted just over a week. He was found guilty and sentenced to death. Following a failed suicide attempt – Laval swallowed poison so old that it failed to work adequately and he was revived by use of a stomach pump – he was executed by firing squad on 15 October. His was one of just three death penalties imposed on politicians in the following four years.*
The instant the verdict was announced, Josée, apparently, was seized by fright. She was ‘stricken like a wounded animal. The brilliant light of those extraordinary eyes was suddenly extinguished as she stared blankly at all those around her and at a fate she could not accept.’ But she quickly recovered. Childless, she devoted the rest of her life to the fight to clear her father’s name, and to caring for her dogs. In the grounds of the family mansion at Châteldon in central France, she had a well-tended dog cemetery resembling those surrounding ancient village churches. Each pet, having died of natural causes, had its own engraved tombstone. There was Barye (1890), Pompée (1891), Madou (1908), Brutus (1909), all buried before she was born. But then came ‘Whisky, 1948–1962, the issue of Soko, loyal friend of my father’. It was seeing the tombstone for a dog that had once belonged to Pierre Laval, the man who said in his own defence that he had encouraged the deportation of children under the age of sixteen in order that families should not be separated, that prompted the author Philippe Grimbert, son of Holocaust victims, to realize that part of his ongoing trauma resulted from the fact that his dead half-brother and mother had never been remembered properly. The thought that even Pierre Laval’s dogs were being honoured in death so outraged Grimbert that he was inspired to write a bestselling autobiographical novel called A Secret.
Josée de Chambrun died in 1992, at which point her husband handed over her papers to Yves Pourcher, her biographer. According to Pourcher, her faith in her father was like a religion. ‘She never accepted that he had had a fair trial and battled to the end. She had a limitless admiration for her father.’
There were not many people, other than daughters and wives, prepared to speak up for those on trial for collaboration. And sometimes families turned upon one another. Agnès Humbert, a member of the early Musée de l’Homme resistance group, had survived a sentence of five years’ slave labour at Anrath prison in Germany. Forced to work in gruesome conditions at a nearby rayon factory where many workers went blind, she survived against the odds and was freed by American troops in early 1945. She then worked alongside these troops for two months, setting up soup kitchens and first-aid posts for German civilians, returning to Paris eventually in the summer. There she learned that one of her sons, Jean Sabbagh, a naval lieutenant, had spent two days following the Liberation under arrest in Bordeaux because of his position there during 1944 in charge of the Harbour Police. She wrote to Jean: ‘Monsieur, I understand that you [she used the formal ‘vous’] were arrested for collaboration with the enemy. Henceforth you will therefore no longer consider yourself as my son.’ Some months later there was a reconciliation of sorts. But irreparable damage had been done to the family.
One of those who went out of her way to help a collaborator was Simone Signoret, schoolfriend of Corinne Luchaire, when she heard that both father and daughter had been arrested in May and were awaiting trial in Fresnes. Simone was by 1945 ‘an actress without a contract, a future unwed mother’. André Kaminker, Simone’s Jewish father, had now returned to France with the Free French to find, as Simone put it, his ‘pretty child pregnant thanks to the labours of a director who had never directed anything and, just to round everything off, was the younger brother of Colonel Allégret, who was my father’s direct superior in the chain of command that led to General de Gaulle’. Reminding her father how her job at Luchaire’s paper Les Nouveaux Temps had been so critical for a time in ensuring his family did not starve, she immediately asked him to file a deposition in support of Jean Luchaire, ‘the same Luchaire who had provided his family with a livelihood for a little while’.
The Luchaires both spent the rest of that year in various prisons. Corinne, ill from tuberculosis, had tried to commit suicide but remained heedless of the implications of her friendship with Nazis, asking constantly, what did I do wrong, what did my family do wrong? When she complained about how badly she had been treated in French prisons after the Liberation, accusing French officers of speaking to her harshly and not providing enough milk for her baby, she revealed the vacuum in which she had lived during the Occupation, oblivious of how the Germans had treated other detained women. But then, as the deportees now slowly dragging themselves back were soon to find, oblivion was the religion of many others in Paris.
By June 1945 the returnees included both Jews and political prisoners from the camps, as well as prisoners of war. They arrived by the trainload, mostly at the Gare de l’Est, and were greeted by uniformed women recruited to the newly formed Repatriation Service who referred to the prisoners of war as ‘the poor boys, the poor boys’, while a loudspeaker played ‘La Marseillaise’. The writer Marguerite Duras, anxiously awaiting news of her husband Robert Antelme in Dachau, captured a moment when one of these ‘ladies’, pointing to her stripes, scolded a soldier:
‘So my friend – we’re not saluting? Can’t you see I’m a captain,’ she said.
The soldier looked at her. ‘Me, when I see a skirt, I don’t salute her, I fuck her.’ The lady, in shock, beat a dignified retreat.
Duras conveyed brilliantly in her writings the fevered anguish, ‘the throbbing in the temples’, of wives waiting for husbands, mothers for sons. Would there be a phone call, a ring on the doorbell, a letter? Would a fellow prisoner bring bad news? Or might he telephone directly, himself, without warning? Was it safe to go out, just in case?
And then she heard from Antelme’s friend François Mitterrand (whom she refers to under a pseudonym, Morland):
I do not know what day it was, it was definitely one day in April, it was not a day in May. At eleven o’clock the telephone rang. It came from Germany, it was François Morland. He did not say ‘Hello’, it was almost brutal, but clear as ever.
‘Listen to me. Robert is alive. Calm down. Yes. He is at Dachau. Listen again with all your strength. Robert is very feeble to a level that you cannot imagine. I must tell you, it is a matter of hours. He can live perhaps three days, but no longer.’
As it turned out the liberation of Dachau came just in time for the seriously ill Robert Antelme. He survived and returned to France on 13 May 1945. His sister, Marie-Louise Antelme, who had been deported to Ravensbrück, did not return. Duras later recalled the ‘smile of embarrassment’ of her husband upon their reunion after wartime separation: ‘He’s apologizing for being here, reduced to such a wreck. And then the smile fades and he becomes a stranger again.’ Antelme returned to Paris weighing 86 pounds and for three weeks wavered between life and death. The story ‘Did Not Die Deported’ plots Duras’s agonizing wait for him and the almost more appalling account of tending his damaged and bony body back to health. For months he had eaten nothing but grass and earth. ‘Had he eaten solid food on returning from the camp his stomach would have ruptured under its weight.’
Duras deliberately gave graphic details of her husband’s bodily functions, and concluded: ‘Those who wince at this very moment, reading this, those whom it nauseates – I shit on them. I hope one day they encounter a man whose body will empty out like that through its anus and I hope that man is the most beautiful and beloved and desirable thing they have. Their lover. I wish that kind of devastation on them.’
Many of the women, once released, made their way directly to the Lutetia, the vast, Art Deco hotel on the Left Bank straddling the Boulevard Raspail and the Rue de Sèvres, built in the more confident days of 1910. In September 1939 the hotel housed numerous refugees, including several artists and musicians fleeing to Paris ahead of German forces. But when Paris fell, the Germans requisitioned the hotel, and its fine cellar was enjoyed by German military intelligence, the Abwehr, who used it as a base. At the Liberation it was converted into a chaotic repatriation centre for prisoners of war, displaced persons and returnees from German camps, many of whom had not slept in beds for years and were unable to do so now, some still wearing their striped prison garb. Accounts of relatives coming daily with hopeful eyes to post requests or scan lists are among the most agonizing of all occupation and war stories. They throw long shadows. In many cases the desperation, illness, suicide and death come years later, beyond the timeframe of this book. Few stories in real life had a happy or straightforward ending, as the tale of Marguerite Duras well illustrates. In 1942 she and Antelme had a stillborn child, and soon after this tragedy she began a love affair with a mutual friend, Dionys Mascolo, which continued while Antelme was imprisoned in the camps. In 1945 Mascolo helped nurse Antelme back to health, but Duras and Antelme divorced in 1946 and the following year she and Mascolo had a son, Jean.
As well as losing loved ones, many had to face the further grief on their return arising from the loss of all their possessions, often with no one still alive to help. Looting furniture, not just fine works of art but everyday household objects, predominantly from Jews, had been a major preoccupation of the German occupiers. The confiscation was partly to dehumanize those from whom it had been stolen and partly to provide small luxuries for German citizens at home and soldiers in the colonized east. It was another sphere where the Germans had been assisted by willing collaboration from the Vichy regime and French civilians to create what they considered was a proper process. Although occasionally concierges (and friends, such as Jeanne Bucher in the case of Vieira da Silva) managed to protect empty Jewish homes, when the dwellings were looted it was the concierge, usually female, who was asked to witness the removal of the goods by Parisian removal companies, thus giving authority to the theft; but she might already have helped herself in advance. Between July 1943 and August 1944 nearly 800 prisoners spent anything from a few weeks to a year in one of the storage warehouses, where they were subjected to forced labour, mostly sorting furniture and objects seized by the Germans.*
The vast scope of the looting may not have been acknowledged at the time amid the general wartime chaos, but tens of thousands of homes had been completely emptied between 1942 and 1944. A report by Kurt von Behr, dated 31 July 1944, mentions a total of 69,619 dwellings emptied, 38,000 of which were in Paris. As the Germans retreated in the summer of 1944, some goods were simply abandoned in these warehouses, and it was here that the provisional government made a start in the long and painful process of restitution for returnees, almost all of whom were Jewish. Returning small items of furniture was a less traumatic process than giving back disputed homes, as it required no dispossession of current users but, at a time of scarce resources and personnel, reuniting furniture and other objects with their rightful owners was an exceptionally fraught task. Some argued that it might have been easier simply to distribute any abandoned goods to whomever seemed most in need, of whom there were thousands, and, from November 1944, some such warehouses were set up. But it was never enough. When twenty-year-old Frida Wattenberg returned to the family flat in 1944 she found not only the furniture and all personal possessions gone but even the light switches had been dismantled to remove the copper. At the same time as the new government, determined to impose unity on the country, was trying to enforce an ordonnance of November 1944 to return expropriated goods, there were also dozens of associations set up that aimed to legitimize certain French wartime acquisitions and make them permanent. The Union Confédérale des Locataires de France petitioned the authorities in August 1945, threatening that if the government attempted to enforce the ordonnance it would risk ‘strengthening the already existing strains of anti-Semitism in the country’.
However, after many setbacks, including the fact that some 135,000 lots of stolen goods had been sold off before their owners had had a chance to claim them, so that some Jews had to resort to buying their possessions back from the French state as the only way of reclaiming them, legislation was passed and a budget allocated for the newly created Service de Restitution des Biens Spoliés (SRBS).
In addition, two organizations set up to prevent any return of Jewish properties were banned by the government in April 1945. But as Leora Auslander makes clear in her poignant and revelatory article, ‘Coming Home? Jews in Postwar Paris’, ‘These everyday furnishings were only the tip of the iceberg: lying just beneath the surface were the confiscated bank accounts, libraries, art collections, businesses, stocks and bonds and dwellings of Jews resident in France in 1940. Working out restitution or compensation for these goods (and reparations for trauma and loss of life) is still an ongoing enterprise.’ Admittedly, France was not the only country facing the post-war problems of homelessness and dispossession, and within France both Jews and non-Jews suffered. ‘But the experience of returning Jews was special because, whereas non-Jews were dispossessed by a foreign enemy, Jews were excluded from what they had thought was their home by people they had understood to be their fellow citizens and in some cases, their neighbours … Even more painful for returnees was the response of their fellow Parisians to their efforts to come home.’
In the face of strong opposition from those determined to keep hold of their wartime booty – frequently women proud of what they had managed to come by – the system for restoration required returnees seeking to reclaim goods to write explaining their situation, to submit a precise inventory of the contents of their home at the moment of departure and to provide a confirmation from the concierge, owner or manager of the building that the goods had been confiscated. It was made clear to claimants that unless the pillage had occurred in the final phase of the Occupation, that is after spring 1944, it was unlikely that anything would be recovered in Paris because before that most objects had been swiftly shipped out.
As Auslander shows, among the tens of thousands of returnees who filed petitions between the autumn of 1944 and 1947, there was a wide range of claimants, including men and women, French and foreign, rich and poor, very few of whom recovered the objects that had so painstakingly been bought or, freighted with emotion, transported to Paris from other countries or inherited. Historians estimate that only about 20 per cent of the contents of pillaged homes was ever recovered. And yet, this double dispossession struck at the heart of what it meant to be French and what it meant to be surrounded by domestic objects which defined identity, who one was and how one lived. Although men were often the petitioners, the creation of the domestic space was (and remains in many cultures) predominantly a female activity, and the need to recreate, through objects, the life they once had was pressing. As the increasingly hopeless and emotionally fraught petitions continued well into 1947, the sentiment of many changed from hope to anger.
Most returnees, Jews and non-Jews alike, having dreamed of the day they would return to Paris, were filled with deep disappointment when they actually arrived. ‘We were, like thousands of deportees, certain that we had been forgotten and above all certain that several people might have wished never to see us again,’ Jacqueline Marié recounted. ‘There was a general lack of excitement on seeing the deportees return and not knowing who among them had collaborated and who had done nothing. We felt we had returned to a different planet. We had nothing but rags, we weighed 36 kilos and had barely any skin covering our bones.’ All the women returnees looked strange – gaunt, wild-eyed and often with shaven heads and a sense of disorientation. Many were also ill and needed months if not years of medical treatment. Jacqueline added, ‘We came to the Gare de l’Est where we were given ten francs and taken to the Hôtel Lutetia where we had a room and were given an assortment of ill-fitting clothes and a Métro ticket. But we had to take the mattress off the bed as it was too soft. We were used to a hard floor.’ When Jacqueline and her mother returned to the family apartment in Versailles they found it had been looted, but at least it was theirs. M. Marié, Jacqueline’s father, was there, still alive, but he had suffered dreadfully and never fully recovered. ‘When I recounted what we had been through,’ Jacqueline said, ‘no one believed us. They thought the camps had a canteen like a “soldiers’ mess” to eat in, and we were given beefsteak and chips. It was such a gulf so I stopped talking about what had happened to us.’
Another Ravensbrück returnee, Michèle Agniel, recounted how, since she could barely stand, she was given a permit to jump the queues for rationed food. ‘But when I did, a man complained, so I said I had just come back from a concentration camp. He said, “Mais quand même, they know how to queue in concentration camps, don’t they?” I hit him.’ Some tried to explain the gulf of misunderstanding. François Mauriac wrote: ‘It is a mistake to think that the public avoids accounts such as this because it has heard them too often. The truth is that it has never listened to a single one to the end, and it makes it clear that it does not want the subject brought up.’
Simone Veil, the Jewish lawyer and politician who had survived Auschwitz but on her return to Paris found her father, her brother and one sister had been killed, spoke of ‘being forgotten’ as a second death. Marceline Rozenberg (later Loridan-Ivens) felt muted in the same way. ‘Don’t say anything, they won’t understand,’ she was told when she arrived back. Just fifteen years old when she was arrested with her Polish-born father, she had witnessed more horror than any child (or adult) could cope with, together with the knowledge that an uncle, who had killed a German in Paris, had subsequently jumped out of a window at the Rue des Saussaies rather than confess under torture. In the next eighteen months she managed to survive three camps: Auschwitz-Birkenau, Bergen-Belsen and finally Theresienstadt.
‘When I returned in July 1945 to the Lutetia I had become a savage. I was like a wild child. We were rock hard, like stone – we had to become human again.’ Similarly another woman, explaining that the reason she had survived deportation was because she had learned to steal, never forgot how shocked her aunt had been to hear that her well-brought-up niece had become a thief. But in the camps stealing was merely taking whatever you could find in order to survive. It was called ‘organizing’, and life or death might depend on being able to organize a spoon.
Marceline was able to articulate only much later, aged eighty-six, how after the camps there could be no more humanity inside her: she had killed off the little girl she had been. When she finally wrote her memoir, Et tu n’es pas revenu (You Did Not Come Back) – a reference to her adored father – published in 2015, she explained that in order to survive it was necessary to destroy memory. ‘If you cried for others, you would drown in tears.’ She had, she explained, been forced to do the work of death itself in the camps. She had become death’s tool. For years, she was never able to talk of the work she had been forced to do in the camps: dig shallow trenches in which to burn the corpses of women. She would say instead she had dug trenches in which to grow vegetables. Only very recently was she able to admit: ‘I didn’t have a choice but I did it. And the simple act of doing it has meaning. I participated like the collaborators did.’
Marceline wrote movingly not only of the guilt of survival but of why it was impossible for others, even close family, to understand. ‘Very quickly, Mother asked me in a low voice if I had been raped. Was I still a virgin? Good for marriage? That was her question.’ She believed that the intense post-war desire to rebuild, to let life continue its course with weddings and babies, even when many of those who should have been there to celebrate were absent, was a Jewish madness. Two years after her release from Theresienstadt, the year her brother married, Marceline threw herself into the Seine. Saved by a stranger, she later suffered from TB and was sent to recover in a sanatorium in Switzerland.
Marceline was one of a convoy of 1,500 sent out to Germany of whom 100 returned, a statistic that illustrates one of the lingering problems in France, arguably never resolved: the disparity among those who came back. Half of those deported for resistance activities returned, but only 3 per cent of the Jews (2,500 out of 76,000 deported), an unwelcome statistic for those in France denying that a genocide had taken place. Yet the attitude which saw resisters as patriots who had been involved in combat entitled to a higher level of compensation than the deported Jews, perceived as victims, persisted at least until the end of the twentieth century in some quarters, and derives from the problem of what the French historian Henry Rousso later identified as résistancialisme to describe the myth which exaggerated French involvement in the resistance to the Nazi Occupation and played down the role of collaboration. But it also fed into the notion that to have been deported as a resister was noble, but to have fallen into German hands as a victim was shameful. ‘Even the dead, guilty of passivity, were not immune from this shame, for they had allowed themselves to be corralled by the anti-Semitic laws.’*
Philippe de Rothschild was another who went to the Lutetia that summer, seeking news of his wife.
A group of French women had just arrived not long out of Ravensbrück. They looked as if they had risen from the grave. Among them one recognized me. I looked again, it was Tania, Comtesse de Fleurieu, a brave woman in the resistance. She had been very lovely but now all her teeth were smashed. They had beaten her across the mouth. She knew about Lili [Elisabeth], she had been there, in the same hut. Beaten, degraded and too broken to move, Lili had been dragged from her plank bed by the hair of her head and thrown into the oven alive. She died because she had borne my name. There was no doubt about that … I did not make any more enquiries and to this day I have never received official notification of her death … poor pretty woman, until they came for her that morning her life had been so easy, all silk and roses.
She was the only member of the Rothschild family to be killed in the Holocaust. After the war Odette Fabius had dinner with Elisabeth de Rothschild’s sister-in-law, who asked her what had happened in the camp. ‘I told her about the work there but she understood nothing. When I said that for two years we had to build roads and clear up dead bodies and shit the sister-in-law said to me: “Hmm … she never even carried her own suitcase. How could she carry a spade?” Was she expecting me to smile?’
Many of the prisoners were given ill-fitting clothes for their return, items that had turned up in a hoard confiscated by the camp authorities, but Denise Dufournier, the lawyer, now desperately thin and psychologically damaged like all the others, arrived at the Lutetia via Switzerland in a ballgown. Later, she would enjoy making a joke of this, dark humour being part of her armour in post-war years, as her daughters would come to recognize. Dufournier was both a published novelist and a lawyer used to living independently when she was arrested, which gave her ‘a forensic ability to see things clearly and dissect them’. Within months of her return, recognizing immediately the total lack of comprehension on the part of other Parisians, who regularly told her that they had had a ‘jolly tough time in the city’, she escaped to a cousin’s house in Anjou where she had, before the war, written a romantic novel. There she immediately started writing about Ravensbrück.
‘She felt she was carrying a burden and had to get it all done before the stories were corrupted. She was determined never to forget.’ The book, La Maison des Mortes, published in 1945 by Hachette, was one of the first accounts of the camps and therefore bore an extraordinary and horrific freshness as well as being a solemn, factual account thanks to Dufournier’s legal training and good memory. She was ‘fortunate’, as publishers would soon stop accepting such manuscripts from deportees, believing that a largely indifferent public was not yet ready to hear, or would not believe. Dufournier was especially driven by a need to document the atrocious treatment of the so-called lapins. These were the young, formerly healthy, Polish girls who had been used for crippling and barbaric pseudo-medical experimentation, such as Hella, who continually suffered in the camp from bits of bone emerging out of her leg. But, having written the book, Denise now wanted to rebuild her life. ‘The one thing she longed for was normal family life,’ and in 1946 she married James McAdam Clark, a British scientist turned diplomat she had met in London in 1939 and who had served in the Royal Artillery in North Africa and Italy during the war. She even turned down an invitation to attend as a witness the Hamburg trials of Ravensbrück guards, which began at the end of 1946. She remained close to Hella for years afterwards; indeed, according to her daughters, all her closest friends after the war dated from that time and were in some way connected to these shared experiences.
Denise Dufournier on her honeymoon in Monte Carlo, 1946
Similarly, Germaine de Renty did not at first want to see any of her friends from ‘before’. She was one of those only just saved by the efforts of Count Bernadotte and the Swedish Red Cross, who took her, first, to recuperate in Malmö in May 1945, but then she also returned to the Hôtel Lutetia with the standard Métro ticket allowance. Once home, she was unable for months to talk about the horrors she had witnessed.
‘She could not speak and I dared not ask,’ commented her daughter, Claude. ‘I respected her silence. She too slept on the floor at the side of her bed because she was unused to such comforts as a soft mattress and space to turn.’ In Ravensbrück she had shared her thirty-inch board with two others, a young student and a communist, and these at first were her post-war friends. ‘Slowly she started to recover what initially were automatic responses like getting herself dressed in the morning and making breakfast for her children and then the arrival of her first grandchild. She had to become mother and father as her husband (my father) had perished at Ellrich [concentration camp].’
She said it was painful for all the survivors to ‘reconnect with a world which had lived without you, children who didn’t know you, families who thought you were dead’. Those who saw her in the camp remembered that what kept her going was a belief that she had to return to bring up her daughter. So Claude understood that their life from then on needed to re-establish the bonds that had been ruptured in the year spent apart, and she recognized too that the most important thing for her mother was the need to listen to those others who had suffered with her the same shame of hunger and dysentery, the fear and ever present despair, in order to try and pick up an ordinary life once again. ‘No one who had not witnessed this hell could understand, only those who had, became her new world.’ On one never to be forgotten occasion Claude overheard an old friend comment, ‘So, life at Ravensbrück wasn’t quite so bad as they’d have us believe then?’ My mother replied in an icy tone, ‘Every morning we had to step across the remains of those who had died in the night as the rats would start with the eyes.’
There was a range of reasons for the women’s silence that in some cases lasted their entire lives. Some could not speak of the camps because it was a hell they wanted to expunge from their minds; others because of the shame of surviving, the shame that it might be assumed they had been raped or had collaborated in the camp or the feeling that they were in some way responsible for their fate. They did not want to speak and others did not want to listen. According to the historian Debra Workman: ‘Unable or unwilling to believe the accounts, an often indifferent public was not yet ready to hear their testimonies, and by 1947, editors no longer accepted the manuscripts of the deportees.’ Fellow historian Annette Wieviorka summarized the nation’s difficulty in responding to the deportation in the early post-war years with a statement that the deportees attributed to several editors: ‘Enough of cadavers! Enough of torture! Enough of stories of the resistance! We need to laugh now!’
And so, in November 1945, at the first meeting of the survivors’ group called ADIR (Association Nationale des Anciennes Déportées et Internées de la Résistance) it was quickly recognized that the organization should be for women only, and only those who had been deported to the camps because of their work in the resistance, and that their first duty should be to testify. They preferred, at a time when the public perception of the resistance was unashamedly masculine, to keep the organization small and focused on allowing members to extend the links established in the camps, to provide moral, medical and social support to all survivors as well as honouring the memory of their dead comrades. They knew that their experience had been peculiar to them and could not be shared with a male group whose suffering might have been equally appalling but was different. This was not about promoting their actions, about which they remained modest, to the world at large. One of their most important activities was always to bear witness on behalf of those who had not survived.*
ADIR grew out of two experiences: on the one hand that of the Amicale des Prisonnières de la Résistance (APR), which united a small group of female resisters who had been imprisoned in Paris during the summer of 1942 and had recruited friends and family members to prepare care packages for women they had befriended in prison, especially for those alone and scheduled for deportation; and on the other hand, the experience of the deportees in Ravensbrück. Having foreseen the difficulties many would face in returning to a normal life, given their grave physical and mental state, they had decided to form an organization as soon as possible to provide aid and support to the survivors.
Geneviève de Gaulle, niece of the new French leader, within weeks of leaving the Swiss sanatorium where she had gone to recuperate, began to hold a series of meetings with prominent Swiss citizens to raise awareness of the deportees’ plight and of the need for long-term convalescence that many would require. At the same time fellow deportee Irène Delmas, who had been one of the first to be released, was already working to hand out care packages. While in Switzerland, de Gaulle and Delmas met and, realizing that they shared a vision, decided to merge the two groups. The women of the ADIR did not view themselves as agents of change nor as political actors; rather, they identified themselves personally and collectively as ‘patriots’ – the wives, mothers and daughters of France who had voluntarily taken the same risks as the men in defence of their country; had suffered the same punishments, and now had united to care for one another and obtain the rights and recognition that they had legitimately earned. Their intense wartime experiences transformed these women, and after the war many of them continued to operate outside the traditional roles assumed by French women.
As Debra Workman has explained:
At a time when women in France had only just received the right to vote and still remained legally under the guardianship of their husbands and fathers, the women of ADIR chose to organize themselves on the basis of gender, as formerly imprisoned women resisters, independent of established political parties and direct institutional affiliation. This choice reflected their awareness of their unique circumstances and their belief that their wartime activism had been little understood or accepted. Their conviction that no one would speak for them if they did not do so for themselves determined the ‘innovative character’ of the ADIR from its inception.
ADIR managed to bridge the huge social chasm among its members, a bridge that had already been built in the camps where countesses and factory workers might share a bed and supported each other in myriad ways, and this remarkable organization became the principal means through which most female political deportees re-established their post-war lives.
It was not just in publishing but in the arts generally that there was a conscious effort to move on, a belief in recovery through renewal. Les Enfants du paradis was shot during the German Occupation, mostly in Nice, directed by Marcel Carné, starring Arletty and Jean-Louis Barrault, and involving the talents of many ‘secret’ Jews in hiding, including set designer Alexandre Trauner and composer Joseph Kosma, both Hungarian Jews who worked clandestinely under assumed names. Many of the film’s approximately 1,800 extras were also Jews for whom the work was valuable daytime cover. Set among the Parisian theatrical world of the 1820s and 1830s, this melodrama took months to make and was constantly running into difficulties – practical, bureaucratic and financial – but was finished at the end of 1944 amid enormous expectations. Given the tempestuous times, the premiere was delayed until 9 March 1945, one of the first after the Liberation when, with the end of the war in sight, it helped to restore national pride in the indomitable spirit of French culture. Hailed as France’s own version of Gone with the Wind, it sought to demonstrate the supremacy of French cinema over Hollywood. French audiences found the film deeply symbolic, seeing it not just as a homage to love but specifically as a demonstration of the freedom enjoyed by Garance, the main character played by Arletty, a woman loved by four men, to choose whom to love and on her own terms. Ironically, Arletty was by then incarcerated in her chateau as punishment for her relationship with Soehring, and was forced to miss the premiere. Nonetheless, the film was a spectacular box-office hit, shown at the Madeleine Theatre for fifty-four consecutive weeks, and it has since acquired legendary status.
Jeanne Bucher, who had done so much bravely to support modern French art during the Occupation, began the year crippled with sadness by the news that her beloved grandson, Pierre, had been killed in action. Facing the almost insupportable task of continuing to live, she nonetheless immersed herself in work by continuing to organize exhibitions in her Montparnasse Gallery of artists the Nazis had banned. In April she had a show for Nicolas de Staël and another in the spring for Dora Maar, Picasso’s spurned and unhappy mistress.
After the Liberation there had been a major Picasso exhibition at the Musée d’Art Moderne which formed part of the Salon d’Automne that year. As Françoise Gilot, the young woman who had recently become Picasso’s lover, commented, ‘Since Picasso was painter number one on the German index, the first revenge to take on the Germans was to mount a big Picasso retrospective.’ Bucher could not afford to compete in this league so she decided to mount a Dora Maar exhibition instead. Primarily this was an artistic decision but it was commercial too as Bucher knew that Picasso would attend. And in the plan there was also an element of sympathy for Maar. Born Henriette Theodora Marković, part Jewish on her father’s side, French Catholic on her mother’s, Dora Maar was an interesting, talented but troubled woman. Picasso had kept her in a state of constant anticipation – she never knew from one meal to the next if he would want to see her for lunch or dinner. When they first met, Maar was part of the surrealist group of Man Ray, Michel Leiris and Paul Eluard and had been working as a photographer. But gradually, as she grew closer to Picasso, she devoted more and more time to painting, gave up photography and became the subject of many of Picasso’s portraits during this period. Some of them were full of torment and anguish but others convey the colourful radiance of her youth and personality and are expressions of optimism, energy and tenderness.
At the time of Maar’s exhibition at the Galerie Jeanne Bucher, Gilot was treating Picasso in the same way that he had behaved towards Maar, refusing to show any commitment to him, not seeing him at all for weeks at a time, a policy that had a marked effect as Picasso struggled to insist he would never allow himself to be permanently attached to Gilot. ‘I could admire him tremendously as an artist but I did not want to become his victim or a martyr. It seemed to me that some of his other friends had: Dora Maar, for example.’ So when Gilot attended the Maar exhibition it was ‘because I was interested to see what she was doing and not at all because I thought Pablo might be there. As it happened he arrived only a few minutes after I did.’
The works on display were mostly still lifes, ‘very severe most of them, showing just one object. They may have reflected in a measure her community of spirit with Picasso,’ wrote Gilot, who was generous in her praise for the work, which she insisted was not derivative. ‘She had taken the most ordinary objects – a lamp or an alarm-clock or a piece of bread – and made you feel she wasn’t so much interested in them as in their solitude, the terrible solitude and void that surrounded everything in that penumbra.’
Shortly after the exhibition, however, Maar suffered a nervous breakdown. Picasso blamed not his own behaviour for this, but rather Maar’s proximity to the surrealists, and she was hospitalized at a Paris clinic where, after lengthy analysis with the psychiatrist Jacques Lacan, she regained some equilibrium.
Aged seventy-three when the war ended, Bucher was rescued in September 1945 by an invitation from the Museum of Modern Art to visit New York, where she spent the next seven months giving occasional lectures about French art during the Occupation and generally promoting some of the modern French artists whose work she loved, such as Vieira da Silva who had had her first show in Paris in 1933 at the Jeanne Bucher Gallery.*
Eight months after the Liberation of the city, what had begun with a vanguard now turned into a battalion of British and American journalists, spies, diplomats, soldiers and support personnel in Paris, who did much to elevate the mood, tantalize with their food parcels and fine stockings, and foster the idea of new beginnings being within reach. Suddenly well-brought-up, middle-class Parisiennes were revelling in dinner and dancing dates with men from a different world. When the Sorbonne-educated Elisabeth Meynard, the newly qualified primary school teacher who had taken her class to cheer de Gaulle, met a tall and handsome British sergeant by the name of Ivan du Maurier, she described it ‘as if a strange and mysterious being had just landed on our planet’, as in the film Les Visiteurs du Soir. Mlle Meynard had been hired by the Paris Welcome Committee, one of several organizations set up, as its name implied, to salute the droves of Allied officers now in the city and introduce them into French homes. While working for them, Elisabeth met Sergeant du Maurier and just six months later on 14 March 1945 the couple were married, with her new husband providing the parachute silk out of which she created a wedding dress. By then Elisabeth, or Betuska, as she had become, had learned that her husband, now restyled Captain Robert Maxwell MC, was in fact a Czech-born Jew who, having lost most of his family in the camps had, he assured her, given up all religious faith. She, coming from a long line of Huguenot Protestants on her father’s side as well as having been educated latterly at the free-thinking Collège Sévigné in the Marais, had many Jewish friends which made her open to the idea of marrying someone whose background was so far removed from her own. But above all she fell in love with this charismatic, forceful and unusual man with whom she created a large family and fortune.* By the end of the year they had gone to England.
Elisabeth and Robert Maxwell on their wedding day, 14 March 1945
The need to move on and draw a line under the war was especially strong after the celebrations of VE Day on 8 May when the war in Europe was finally over and General de Gaulle, in sonorous tones, once more reflected on French glory. Buildings may have been heavily pockmarked, wooden barriers still prevented access to some roads and there were even a few plaques with wreaths to mark the spot where partisans had been killed. But an American military policeman now directed traffic around the Place de la Concorde, American bands played in nightclubs, and water flowed once more from the fountains in the Tuileries Gardens. Americans and British were highly visible since, although the Métro worked, there were still no buses or private cars in the city. While Parisiennes used bicycles, mostly the British and Americans walked everywhere, either from the British army staff HQ in the Faubourg Saint-Honoré, or to one of the hotels requisitioned for the forces such as the Hôtel Bedford in the Rue de l’Arcade (which cost a mere five francs a night), or to the American mess in the Place Saint-Augustin, or to a Red Cross club or restaurant.
And there was, once again, a flurry of activity around the British Embassy itself – a sumptuous and elegant eighteenth-century building, called the Hôtel de Charost and bought by the Duke of Wellington when the Rue du Faubourg Saint-Honoré was a winding road that passed through fields and market gardens. The first postwar British Ambassador was Churchill’s friend and supporter, the intensely Francophile politician Duff Cooper, who arrived at the end of 1944 with his beautiful and long-suffering wife Lady Diana. The Coopers, who held numerous dinners, banquets and receptions – as well as occasional ceremonies to decorate (mostly male) members of the resistance – were not enormous fans of de Gaulle, whom they dubbed Charlie Wormwood (as in Gall and Wormwood), nor of his austere Catholic wife Yvonne, who disapproved of ostentation and adultery in equal measure and rarely emerged in public. She made her first official appearance later that year at a wreath-laying ceremony for Armistice Day.
It was at one of the sparkling British Embassy receptions that Duff met Susan Mary Patten, the attractive young wife of a US diplomat, Bill Patten. Susan Mary, not yet thirty, was soon consumed by an intense longing for Duff; he, at fifty-five more than twenty years her senior, was cool. They embarked on an affair which was to last for several years and changed Susan Mary’s life dramatically. Cooper was well known for his voracious sexual appetite and juggled a string of mistresses who often became Diana’s friends.
In fact it was Diana who had proposed inviting Susan Mary. This intelligent, serious-minded former debutante, born in Rome to a patrician American family, quickly acquired a reputation in Paris as one of the prettiest and most fashionable women of the diplomatic circuit. Carmel Snow, influential editor-in-chief of Harper’s Bazaar, now returned to Paris, had her regularly photographed for her magazine. Balenciaga was happy to lend her dresses or else let her buy at ‘mannequin rates’. She was also a frequent guest of the peripatetic Windsors, still unhappily undecided as to where they would make their post-war home; they were living in hotels and a number of rented houses (where guests remarked the heating was turned up higher than in any other home), as well as having, until 1948, their house in the south of France, La Croë. Through the Coopers, Susan Mary got to know a circle of writers including Evelyn Waugh and Nancy Mitford, rich hostesses like Louise de Vilmorin (another of Duff’s lovers) and artists such as Cocteau and Bérard, not to mention politicians and diplomats. Thanks to Duff, she discovered some of the finest Parisian restaurants as well as the most notorious such as Lapérouse, with its small private rooms where French men had been taking courtesans since 1766, or Larue, a favourite of Proust’s. Slowly she was learning what you could or could not say at a dinner party, and when once she referred to the need to rebuild Germany, she quickly realized her faux pas as the French and British did not share the American view on this issue. She was also slowly picking up on growing anti-American sentiment in Paris.
Misia Sert, a woman who had known great wealth and been a muse to many men of genius, lamented what she referred to as ‘the banality of France becoming Americanised’. She may have outlived her golden years of artistic influence in the city, but she continued to receive guests at tea time in her apartment as she had in the 1930s. Now, since she had friends in both camps, she had to be careful to invite collaborators and resisters on different days, something she resented, as they tried to make adjustments and an uneasy peace with each other. The wounds were every bit as deep and ran along similar lines as they had fifty years previously when she had lived through the violent arguments between Dreyfusards and their opponents.
On 14 December Lucie, the formidable widow of Captain Alfred Dreyfus, died. She was a few months older than Misia Sert. Lucie had spent the Occupation initially in Vichy, but then moved around until she was forced into hiding as ‘Madame Duteil’ (her sister’s married name) in a home run by nuns. In 1944, after the Germans had left, she returned to Paris already in poor health and died, a year later, aged seventy-six. She was buried in Montparnasse cemetery, and on the tomb she shares with her famous husband is also inscribed the name of their much loved granddaughter, Madeleine Dreyfus Lévy. A social worker for the Red Cross, Madeleine had worked for the Combat resistance network helping smuggle other Jews out of France. She was arrested in November 1943, taken to Drancy and then to Auschwitz, where she was killed aged twenty-five. Long shadows indeed.
* There were other stories of mothers and daughters providing comfort and support for each other. Suzanne Legrand, who had sheltered evading airmen, was most audacious in saving her mother from the gas chamber. When she heard that her mother had been lined up she stole a uniform and, screaming and shouting and slapping her mother, dragged her away from the selection line past the baffled guards. Both survived the war (Caroline McAdam Clark, conversation with the author, 1 October 2014).
* This decree did not formally become law until 27 October 1946 when it was definitively adopted into the French Constitution.
* Eugène Charles, the Swiss businessman behind Banque Charles, turned out to have been Count Albrecht von Urach, then working at the German Embassy in Berne, who had been involved in smuggling capital out of Switzerland to the US via the bank in Monaco, where his second cousin Louis II was on the throne. He was interned in May 1945 but escaped further punishment.
* The others were Fernand de Brinon, Vichy’s Ambassador in Paris to the German authorities, and Joseph Darnand, head of the Milice. The death penalty for Pétain was not carried out because of his age.
* Already in 1943 Isaac Schneersohn in Grenoble had begun creating in secret what became the Centre de Documentation Juive Contemporaine (CDJC) with the specific purpose of documenting the seizure of Jewish goods to support restitution claims once the war was over. For a fuller account see Jean-Marc Dreyfus and Sarah Gensberger’s Nazi Labour Camps in Paris: Austerlitz, Lévitan, Bassano, July 1943–August 1944 Oxford, Berghahn Books, 2011.
* See also Annette Wieviorka who wrote about the disparity in the way resistance fighters and holocaust victims were commemorated in France in Déportation et Génocide: Entre la mémoire et l’oubli.
* This continued into the late twentieth century in the face of neo-Nazis or Holocaust-deniers. Germaine Tillion and Anise Postel-Vinay gave written testimony in 1984, four decades after they had been there, that there had been a gas chamber at Ravensbrück at least from late January or early February 1945 to late April that year, published in Les Chambres à gaz, secret d’Etat, Paris, Editions de Minuit, 1984.
* Shortly after she returned to Paris in the summer of 1946 Bucher was diagnosed with inoperable stomach cancer and died in October that year.
* Robert Maxwell became one of the world’s most successful media moguls. He drowned in 1991, having possibly committed suicide.