On 9 January 1946, a bitterly cold day, Vera Atkins, an elegant woman with a mysterious past, arrived at Bad Oeynhausen in the British Zone of Allied-occupied Germany. She was determined to secure justice for a small group of women who had given their lives to free France. Atkins, born in Romania in June 1908 as Vera Rosenberg, and briefly educated at the Sorbonne in Paris, was conducting exhaustive investigations into the fate of ‘her’ women agents, of whom thirteen had been reported missing behind enemy lines, never to return. Thanks to her pre-war contacts with diplomats from many countries, and a talent for languages, Atkins had been taken on in 1941, aged thirty-three, to work as a British intelligence officer with SOE’s F Section, successfully concealing both that she had Jewish roots and that she was not a British national. Atkins’s job was to recruit and train the agents, assess their suitability and create cover stories for them. She had forged especially close personal relationships with many of the young women agents before they were dropped into France, sometimes giving them intensely personal good-luck tokens, and usually being the last person they saw before boarding the plane for France.
Immediately after the Liberation of Paris, in August 1944, she and Maurice Buckmaster, her boss, had made a brief visit to Paris, staying at the less than impressive Hôtel Cecil in the Rue Saint-Didier, where they were soon apprised that de Gaulle, determined to create the illusion that France alone had organized its own liberation, was ignoring any contribution SOE might have played in the victory. Vera recognized, in the fetid atmosphere of accusation and counterclaim, in which French security police had taken control of the few German records which had been salvaged, that she was unlikely to discover any significant information in Paris itself and returned home to build up files. Among the information she soon received after this trip was news of one of the SOE women, Cecily Lefort, whose poor French accent had always worried Vera, giving an address for her in a camp at Ravensbrück in Mecklenburg, north of Berlin. It was the first time Vera had heard the name Ravensbrück. In fact, Cecily Lefort, who had been ill almost from the time of her arrival in the camp, had been gassed at Ravensbrück in February 1945. Later, Vera learned from witnesses that, just days before her death, Cecily had received a letter from her French husband seeking a divorce. She did not spare Dr Lefort her views of his behaviour.
During the next year Atkins collected and carefully filed details of several arrests and transfers to different prisons, but still lacked confirmation of anyone’s fate. Of Noor Inayat Khan, codenamed Madeleine, often referred to as Nora, or Nora Baker, she knew nothing for certain at this point. At the end of 1945, SOE had been wound up but Atkins was only just beginning her own search for the missing agents. ‘I went to find them as a private enterprise,’ she was to tell her biographer years later. ‘I wanted to know. I always thought “missing presumed dead” to be such a terrible verdict.’ Atkins, newly promoted to squadron officer in the Women’s Auxiliary Air Force and funded by MI6, now began her investigations in earnest, attached to the War Crimes Investigation Unit. In this position she was able to carry out interrogations of Nazis suspected of war crimes and testify as a prosecution witness in subsequent trials. But her priority was always to search for the stories of what had really happened to ‘her’ missing girls.
Just before leaving for Germany in 1946, Atkins had been in touch with Brian Stonehouse, an SOE agent and artist with a natural aptitude for drawing, a talent which helped him survive four different camps from the time he was first arrested in October 1941.
In June 1944, Stonehouse was a prisoner in Natzweiler-Struthof, a camp in the Vosges which held some 6,000 male prisoners and was the only Nazi concentration camp on French soil. Stonehouse later told Atkins that, although he did not know the precise date, one day around the time of the attempted assassination of Hitler (which had occurred on 20 July 1944) four women, escorted by SS officers, had been marched into the camp, just past where he was working inside the fence on the east side. In fact, several people noticed the girls pass by that afternoon and, while they all remembered something slightly different about them, each of the witnesses commented that they were well dressed, appeared to be in good health and were defiant in their bearing and attitude towards their captors. Stonehouse, eighteen months after the event, dug deep into his memory to supply Vera with drawings and descriptions of the women, one of whom she was easily able to identify as Diana Rowden from the bow she always wore in her hair, and another she thought might have been Noor; ‘obviously continental – maybe Jewish’, Stonehouse had told her. By the time Vera gave evidence at the specially convened Natzweiler trial, from 9 April to 5 May 1946, she believed that the four victims were Vera Leigh, Diana Rowden, Andrée Borrel and Nora Inayat Khan and that they had all been drugged before being burned alive. But she tried to withhold information to the UK press about their individual identity on the spurious grounds that she wished to spare their families undue grief. More likely, as by now the families were pressing for public recognition of their loved ones’ outstanding courage, she hoped to avoid too much press questioning about the recruitment and training of the women.
The one clear fact was that four women were brought to Natzweiler on 6 July 1944 and killed in the camp crematorium the same evening. In a letter to the War Office, Atkins wrote that the four women died by lethal injection, ‘probably Evipan, a narcotic, and were immediately cremated. They were unconscious but probably still alive when thrown into the oven.’ Various graphic accounts of how the four women had died were heard at the trial. They were all told to undress before being injected and one was heard to ask ‘Pourquoi?’ and was told ‘Pour Typhus.’ One asked for a pillow. Several witnesses described hearing groaning as the women were dragged along the floor to their deaths. One of the four clearly woke up from the narcotic and scrabbled and fought to the last to resist being placed, feet first, in the oven. Giving his testimony, camp executioner, Peter Straub, denied everything. But the most shocking statements came from Walter Schultz, who worked as an in interpreter in the camp’s political department. Schultz described how, the day after the killings, Straub, still drunk from the night before, gave him a detailed account of what had happened and how the fourth woman, as she was being put into the oven, regained consciousness. Straub, pointing to scars on his face, said to Schultz: ‘There, you can see how she scratched me … Look how she defended herself.’ By the time Atkins interrogated Straub he still had scars on his face. She believed they were probably inflicted by Vera Leigh, the oldest of the four, but there was no proof.
Although Atkins accepted that in the trial her women should be described as ‘spies’ – there was no other category for military persons operating in civilian clothes in enemy-occupied territory – she had also been concerned that the defence should not therefore be able to claim ‘lawful execution’. However, the prosecution counsel successfully made the case that as the girls were executed without trial, even if they were spies, this was contrary to the Geneva Convention and therefore constituted a war crime. Atkins was reasonably satisfied with the result: the camp doctor and camp Kommandant were sentenced to death; although Straub was sentenced only to thirteen years in prison at this trial, a few months later he was found guilty of war crimes in other trials and was hanged in October.
When the newspapers carried headlines about British women being burned alive there was a shocked response, especially as the British public had not previously been aware that any women had been sent into the field on such dangerous missions. On 18 September 1946 Vera Leigh, the former Parisian milliner, was awarded the King’s Commendation for Brave Conduct. She was, according to the document proposing her for a posthumous decoration, ‘a very gallant girl. She was secretly terrified by the idea of the mission but still more terrified by the fear of showing her terror to anyone. She was very game, very plucky and rather imaginative …’
As Vera Atkins remarked later, all the girls in F Section had different motivations but the one quality they had in common was bravery. ‘You might find it in anyone. You just don’t know where to look.’ Bernard de Gaulle, nephew of the General who later married Sylvie, the youngest Geoffroy-Dechaume daughter, and who knew many résistantes, elaborated: ‘Those women who gave their lives were not without fear. One of the reasons why the role of women has not been recognized for so long – and it’s complicated – is that one lived in permanent fear, one trembled with fear, but nobody wants to talk about fear. People afterwards talk about war in general but it’s not “their” war. That is irracontable – something they cannot talk about. They are ashamed of having fear.’ Odette Churchill was another who admitted later that none of them was without fear in Ravensbrück, but she suggested that it was a question of how they managed it. ‘Everybody tried to be a little braver than they felt. All of us had a moment of weakness, we did all cry together at one moment.’ Both Odette Churchill and Violette Szabo were awarded the George Cross in 1946 (in Szabo’s case posthumously), but Atkins knew that her own work was not over and that in her search to uncover what had happened to all the women she would have to follow up every lead urgently, interviewing prison guards and former prisoners who might help before it was too late and they either died, escaped or were executed. In October she had her honorary commission extended so that she could stay longer in Germany to assist the prosecution in the Ravensbrück trial, which started in December and lasted into early 1947 and beyond.
In mid-January 1946 Charles de Gaulle resigned, to the surprise of many, and retired to the country, ostensibly to write his memoirs. His main task had been to unite the country and to give it back a sense of pride following the humiliating defeat. His determination to create the narrative that France was not one of the defeated countries but a victorious nation gave further strength to his criticism of the Communist Party, which was most in favour of continuing with the épuration trials and bringing to justice everyone who could possibly be described as a collaborator. De Gaulle believed that while well-known traitors had to be punished, so-called ‘economic collaborators’ (occasionally industrialists but more often civil servants and police chiefs) had to be forgiven where possible in order to ensure the continued smooth running of the country. In addition, as Head of State de Gaulle assumed the right to stay executions and, of the 1,554 capital sentences submitted to him, he commuted 998, including all those involving women.
These political machinations go some way to explaining the government’s frenzied attempts to stage trials of high-profile collaborators, allowing them to proceed faster than many considered decent, and on 22 February the journalist and editor Jean Luchaire was executed. During his trial the prosecuting counsel began his opening speech by explaining that ‘when men committed treason with their pen, their treason was often inspired by fascism. In Luchaire’s case, it was inspired by venality and corruption.’ He said that the anger that had moved him in other trials was joined by ‘disgust’. Luchaire’s daughter Corinne, now a divorced single mother with a small child – Brigitte, born in May 1944 after a brief liaison with a Luftwaffe officer, Wolrad Gerlach – wrote pathetically, ‘and still it was not all over for me. There was still my trial to come but … I remember nothing. I was crying the whole time. I was in mourning for my father.’ Corinne, whose golden youth – when she had lived off nothing but champagne and cigarettes – had long since evaporated, had not made a film since 1940, was still battling tuberculosis and was reduced to little more than a character in other people’s novels. She had to wait another four long months for her own trial. When it came, a journalist for Life reported in an article headed ‘The Nazis’ Courtesan, French actress-collaborationist, once the toast of Occupied Paris, loses her beauty and citizenship’:
While the court recited a long list of the lovers and parties she had enjoyed, she stood by silently, her pride destroyed, her face aged by dissipation and TB. When the judges sentenced her to ten years of ‘National Indignity’ without any of the privileges of a French citizen, she could plead only: ‘I was young and stupid. I did not realise.’
She had become, according to the Life reporter, ‘a haggard wreck’. Brigitte, her child, was placed for a time with a family who took in paying guests in Châtel, a village in Haute-Savoie. She went to school in the village and was seen occasionally on the ski slopes in winter. Those who knew who she was whispered about the mother, the Marilyn Monroe of her day. There were even those who sympathized. According to the French novelist and Nobel Prize winner Patrick Modiano, Corinne, or ‘my sister Corinne’ as he referred to her, doubtless with his own childhood and dubious father in mind, ‘was in a certain sense a victim of her father’s adventure … an adventure which was nothing in comparison to that of Rebatet or Brasillach’. Modiano, who has created several fictional characters based on Corinne, has pointed out that her father hailed from the political left and was surrounded by Jews in his close family: his brother-in-law Théodore Fraenkel was Jewish, as was his father Julien’s third wife, Antonina Silberstein.
He was led astray into collaboration through a weakness of character and taste for the easy life and a need for money – money which he shared as he was generous in intervening with the Germans to save lives. Fascists like Rebatet and Brasillach hated him and considered him pro-Jewish. Luchaire seemed to me representative of a certain atmosphere and troubled world of Paris in the Occupation, caught up in the black market and which my own father unfortunately was part of in the scheme of things. Luchaire paid for his thoughtlessness with his life.
While the trials attempted to offer justice for those who would never return, the women who had survived often needed more. Early in 1946 the young death-march survivor and résistante Jacqueline Marié married Guy Fleury, fellow resister, and her first child was born later that year. ‘I saw this not only as a sign of life but as a snub to the Germans. Of all the things that the Germans did, I can never forgive them for what they did to children,’ she said.
She and her brother, Pierre Marié, went on to have five children each, and today, as Mme Fleury, she has grandchildren and greatgrandchildren, not only a source of enormous pride but a critical part of her recovery. ‘When I first returned in 1945 nobody wanted to hear our stories. So after three attempts I stopped. But then I started speaking to my infant son and eventually (in 1961) I started going into schools and since then have never stopped talking about what happened.’ Never forget and always bear witness, the twin mantras which motivated many of those who, like her, became involved in the running of ADIR (she is, at time of writing, its President). But as Jacqueline d’Alincourt explained, it was difficult for most of them to talk because it was, quite simply, ‘an unspeakable experience. We had no words to express it. Little by little, however, the wall of silence that imprisoned us cracked. Some were bold enough to ask us what happened. The need to speak, to stave off oblivion, became obvious. I still hear the scream of a companion being trucked off to the gas chamber: “Tell it to the world!” Those words will forever echo in my mind.’
Geneviève de Gaulle was also married in 1946 to a man she had met while recuperating in Geneva: Bernard Anthonioz, a publisher from Lyons, a friend of Louis Aragon and André Malraux and a fellow resister. General de Gaulle was a witness at their May wedding and the couple subsequently had four children. One month later in June, ADIR published its first newsletter, Voix et Visages, in which Geneviève de Gaulle Anthonioz, as she insisted on being called from then on, wrote to remind fellow déportées of the ‘virile, effective total’ friendship that had sustained them in the camps, ‘as it would again as they undertook their new humane tasks’. Initially, the newsletter was devoted to recording fallen comrades but during the following months and years it published a bewildering array of relevant laws and policies concerning the rights and benefits that were due to resisters.
Often more important than the newsletter was human contact, and the organization’s Rue Guynemer headquarters provided conversation and companionship for those who called in for the regular Monday afternoon teas. It also helped women to find work or housing, offered advice in dealing with the various government ministries charged with administering benefits, and provided urgent medical care which was often crucial and which the state was not equipped to do. Many of the returning women suffered from a range of illnesses including undiagnosed tuberculosis, typhus, gangrene, dysentery and various infections and digestive ailments. ADIR provided its members with the services of seventeen doctors free of charge, it bought screening equipment for TB, and twice weekly the association’s medical personnel offered unlimited consultations and referrals to its members. In addition it subsidized long-term care in convalescent homes, where possible in France and Switzerland. By January 1947 more than 500 women had spent time in one of their homes, sometimes for as long as a year, and by the end of the decade more than a thousand women had benefited from this initiative. Even so, for some this was too late. Among the approximately 40,000 surviving racial and political deportees, nearly 3,000 died within a couple of months of their liberation. And by October 1954, less than ten years after their return, roughly 35 per cent of the deportees had died as a direct consequence of their injuries or maltreatment.
One of those victims was Malka Reiman, the Jewish mother rounded up in the Vél’ d’Hiv rafle with her two daughters, whose extraordinary courage, resourcefulness and ingenuity had enabled all three of them to escape the camp at Beaune-la-Rolande. Having found a hiding place for her adolescent girls in Vendôme in 1942 with a relatively impoverished Christian family, the Philippeaus, located thanks to her local postman, she then had to find money to pay them, and returned three times to occupied Paris to recover pieces of jewellery and linens that she had hidden. For two years Malka hid in a variety of places, making clothes and food for herself and others to get by. At the Liberation she hoped that her husband Abraham would return, and went endlessly to the Gare de l’Est and the Lutetia, scanning lists, trying throughout 1945 to discover his fate. When she heard that the policeman at Pithiviers, who had shown her family such kindness while her husband was incarcerated there, was now himself facing trial for collaboration, she went to testify in his favour.
But by January 1946, aged thirty-nine, she knew without doubt that Abraham had been murdered at Auschwitz, and from then on she lost the will to live. She stopped speaking, collapsed in the street and suffered ever worsening headaches, unable to contemplate a future without Abraham, her childhood sweetheart. ‘She died of a broken heart,’ as Arlette Reiman described it. ‘I wanted her to live for us, but she was too ill. Her last words were “I need to see Papa. Tomorrow we will be together again.”‘ From now on the two girls were orphans: Madeline, at fifteen, was sent to work, Arlette, thirteen, to boarding school in a village in north-west France near Le Mans where she started her life again as ‘la petite orpheline Parisienne’.
The historian Debra Workman believes that ADIR, the association for returnees largely set up by Geneviève de Gaulle, understood the range of diseases resulting from the deportation far earlier than governmental and medical authorities. ‘Only in 1953, eight years after their return, did the Ministry for Veterans’ Affairs create a special commission to study the pathology of the deportation in order to develop a comprehensive, systematic approach to care for the health needs of those who had been deported.’ In addition, the experience of those deported for political reasons and those deported because they were Jews was vastly different. De Gaulle himself never said anything about the Jews nor apologized for their treatment.*
Clearly those deported merely because they were Jews needed their own repatriation organization too. Three weeks after Paris had been liberated, André and Jacqueline Mesnil-Amar helped set up one such information network, the Service Central des Déportés Israélites (SCDI). Jacqueline became editor of its monthly bulletin, using reports from Switzerland, Poland and Belgium in attempts to bring families, sundered by war, together again. For Jacqueline Mesnil-Amar, the hunger and fear of the Occupation while André was in the Jewish Combat organization, a resistance network in the south, as well as the trauma of witnessing the post-war dislocation of survivors, turned her, unusually, from a non-observant Jew into a deeply committed one, ‘seized by conscience’. Both she and André – who had so narrowly survived deportation himself by jumping off a train – had grown up in an atmosphere where ‘they adored French culture and Latin and Greek took precedence over Hebrew …’. Pre-war they had been French citizens first and Jews second. Now they had become just ‘Juifs’. So, deeply concerned also not to forget the fate of the foreign Jews, they became ever more immersed in Judaism until, as their daughter Sylvie later wrote, it ‘devoured’ their thinking. Some of their friends, finding the couple’s concerns obsessive, became estranged, and even Sylvie protested that they thought about little else.
But they were not alone. Even in a city where so many of the returning Jews internalized their fate, or else, finding it too painful to speak of, remained silent either to protect their children or, in the inimitable phrase of Romain Gary, chose not to speak ‘pour ne pas compliquer les choses’.*
Within a year, her close colleague Andrée Salomon left her work in France for OSE – the Oeuvre de Secours aux Enfants, which had played a critical role in saving Jewish children in France during the Occupation – and emigrated to Israel, where she worked on the OSE archives and tracked the fate of ‘her’ children, now scattered around the world.
The children who survived now created a special problem. Some 11,600 Jewish children in France had been deported, all of whom perished in the camps, but many had been hidden in France. Vivette Samuel was the daughter of two well-educated Ukrainian Jews who had settled in Paris during the First World War. According to Vivette, who had worked for OSE since 1940 when she was twenty-two, 72,400 under eighteen years old who were not deported survived. About 62,000 of them were able to stay with parents or were directly entrusted by them to institutions or to non-Jewish families, and the issues involved in reintegrating them into a normal life were unprecedented. In addition, the plight of the Jews was, in the post-war context of a continent in ruins, just one problem among many. Thérèse Bonney, the New York-born photojournalist who was the first American to win a scholarship to the Sorbonne, had been documenting for years the appalling conditions in which many children were now living. Already in 1943 her book Europe’s Children had been considered shocking. Lee Miller, who moved on from Paris to Germany, witnessed similar horrors and the photographs she took of children in a hospital in Vienna are among the most harrowing and important of her entire wartime oeuvre. She wrote:
For an hour I watched a baby die. He was dark blue when I first saw him. He was the dark dusty blue of these waltz-filled Vienna nights, the same colour as the striped garb of the Dachau skeletons, the same imaginary blue as Strauss’s Danube. I’d thought all babies looked alike, but that was healthy babies; there are many faces for the dying. This wasn’t a two months baby, he was a skinny gladiator. He gasped and fought and struggled for life, and a doctor and a nun and I just stood there and watched … There was nothing to do but watch him die. Baring his sharp toothless gums he clenched his fists against the attack of death. This tiny baby fought for his only possession, life, as if it might be worth something.
But after the war the problem of abandoned, lost and homeless children became magnified not just in France but throughout Europe. The devastation had left behind it a continent of displaced orphans and homeless children: some 50,000 in Czechoslovakia, 280,000 in Yugoslavia – statistics which cannot easily convey the individual heartache behind them. The UN Relief and Rehabilitation Administration (UNRRA) was by 1947 caring for some 500,000 orphans in Germany alone, many of whom had forgotten who they were or where they came from, or never knew, too young to remember anything about their previous lives and often too emotionally fragile to be told. In the summer of 1945 posters had started appearing on the walls of train stations and post offices across Europe, often put there by the Red Cross, showing pictures of babies and small children with the words: ‘Who am I?’ Malnourished, wary, sickly, described by one aid worker as ‘tired, wan, broken little old men and women’, these children became for Jacqueline Mesnil-Amar the symbol of European culture and humanity in disarray. In France, as the war ended, the OSE estimated that there were between five and six thousand Jewish children who were now orphans, whether hidden in non-Jewish homes around the country or over the border in Switzerland or Spain. They needed to be traced, their families and heritage restored.
This was the environment which struck the British novelist Marghanita Laski so profoundly on her frequent post-war trips back to the Paris she loved. She and her husband had not only lived in Paris from 1937 to 1938, they had been married there and knew it well. In addition Laski was well equipped to understand the needs of French orphans at close hand since her own secular, intellectually aware Jewish family had rescued two Jewish refugees from Europe, days before the outbreak of war. Little Boy Lost, the bestselling novel that resulted, was not published until 1949 but it describes an all too chillingly familiar France of 1946 ‘enveloped in a miasma of corruption’ where the rules of the black-market economy predominate. Hilary, the anti-hero who has to decide whether or not to take as his own a child from a chilly Catholic orphanage whose identity cannot be proven, asks his resistance friend Pierre how he copes with constantly wondering what everyone did during the Occupation. Pierre tells him that yes, he wonders, ‘but automatically now and without caring about the answer. I’m tired with “collaborationist” as a term of abuse; we each did under the Germans what we were capable of doing; what that was, was settled long before they arrived.’ Meanwhile, the nuns are weighing up Hilary just as much as he is questioning himself, informing him: ‘You will understand that we must be very, very certain that the child is yours before we allow him to pass into a non-Catholic home.’
Some of the wartime schemes to save children had been ingenious and risky, but few had been without consequences, which were now unravelling. María Errázuriz, cousin of Jacques Tartière and now friend of Drue, his widow, had worked closely with Abbé Henri-François Ménardais, the parish priest of Chalmaison just outside Paris, who was deeply involved in the effort to save Jews. He hid whole families in his presbytery, at the orphanage at Chalmaison and at the Château de Tachy there, where nuns from the Fondation Eugène Napoléon resided after their Paris home had been requisitioned by the Germans. Ménardais, a frequent visitor to the Rothschild Hospital, also worked closely with social worker Claire Heymann. They would meet surreptitiously at the opera, where Ménardais was, usefully, chaplain to the ballet dancers, known as les Petits Rats de l’Opéra, and there he would give Heymann dozens of signed baptism certificates that she could use to reclassify Jewish children. He even entrusted Jewish children to some Public Aid orphanages, where they would stay until the war’s end, as he believed (correctly) that no one would think of looking for Jewish children among gentile orphans. In this way Ménardais saved more than 200 Jewish children from the Nazis during the Occupation. But what was to be done with them all now? Some, like Arlette Reiman, had gone regularly to church and learned to say mass, but while profoundly grateful to their Christian saviours they nonetheless still felt Jewish. Others, mostly younger Jewish orphans who had been baptized for their safety during the war, now faced complicated futures, as some Christian institutions argued that, if the mothers had had their children baptized, this was obviously because they wanted them brought up in the Christian faith.
Baronne Edouard de Rothschild, née Germaine Halphen, not without experience in dealing with parentless children, took control of the Rothschild Orphanage immediately after the war when it was transferred to the Château de la Guette, a Rothschild property in Villeneuve just outside Paris, where children had been living since 1939. Some children were still being reunited with lost families even in 1947, a situation charged with trauma given the ordeals that the survivors had endured. Little professional help was available in this desperate and unprecedented state of affairs where nobody knew which was the right or wrong way to behave. Many parents maintained a stubborn silence, thinking that to repress their memories was best for the child, others made emotional demands on the child to have their sufferings recognized. Vivette Samuel had found during the Occupation that one of her most daunting tasks had often been having to ask for written consent from parents interned at one of the French camps, such as Gurs, to remove their child, believing this was the child’s only chance of survival. Now one of the most difficult problems was remembering the promises made to those parents to have their children raised in a Jewish setting, whether during the war or, if the parents did not survive, afterwards, when she knew this might involve a new separation, ‘an emotional laceration just as they had found a new serenity. Did we care enough not to traumatize the children again, especially the youngest ones, who had been placed in families that they had emotionally adopted and that hoped to keep them?’ Where possible they compromised by keeping the child in the family with the assurance that the child’s identity would be preserved. But the problem for children who had been placed in convents was more complex, as some had had themselves baptized and converted. ‘Certainly they had been saved and that was the essential thing.’ But Samuel recognized that families, however well meaning, were not always the best place for traumatized children in this tragic dilemma:
Paradoxically, it was possible for children raised in institutions to find differentiated, often beneficial, role models – thanks to their being surrounded by teachers of diverse political or religious allegiance, thanks to the friendship of their peers and also thanks to the efforts made to give them the greatest opportunity possible on the material, educational and moral planes. They shared the same past as the other children of the institution and adapted to that environment better than to families that had sheltered other children.
For some, having remnants of a family survive created its own difficulties. Rosa Liwarrak, aged thirteen in 1946 when she came back to Paris, was now an orphan and still a child in many ways. But she was also a young woman with both a mind of her own and a Catholic stepmother. She had been several times to the Lutetia looking, in vain, for her father. Now she had to continue with her schooling, paid for by OSE. But she was, by her own admission, a disruptive and aggressive child, thrown out of two schools. She recalls being taken by an aunt to a rabbi with the intention of converting her back to Judaism. ‘But when he told me all the things I could not do, like switch on a light on the Sabbath because I might offend God, I said to him: “You are telling me I lost all my family in a gas chamber and now mustn’t switch on a light in case I offend God?” I pushed my finger into his fat belly button and ran out in disgust.’ Today, while acknowledging the role both Catholicism and Judaism have played in her life, she feels ambivalent about all religion.
Rosa, having been born in France just as her parents had arrived in the country from Germany, thought of herself as French. But many of the lost children, the impoverished offspring of east European tailors, knitters, miners and tinkers who had sought sanctuary in France, had never been accepted by that country and had known only fear, exile, hunger, loss and ultimately abandonment or death. How, asked Jacqueline Mesnil-Amar in her painful post-war memoir, can you ever make these children ‘normal’? How to give them the childhood they never had? How to stop them regarding adults as enemies, for it was adults who had crushed their parents?
‘It’s not a gift, but restitution, not charity but justice,’ she wrote. It was the duty of adults, she insisted, to care for them in such a way that they would once again belong to the human family. ‘We will restore their hope because they are our only hope in a world in which we have failed.’
Odette Fabius, elegantly slim before she was captured, returned skeletally thin. She had been sent from Ravensbrück to Malmö with Toquette Jackson, equally sick and thin, until both were well enough to walk. Odette recovered although needed the help of her sticks for several months. Excited as she was to see Marie-Claude again, she was also shocked to discover that the svelte little girl she had abandoned in 1943, two years later ‘had blown up … of course still pretty but twice the size since everyone around her had tried to spoil her with food to help her forget the absence of her mother’. Not many women were consulting doctors at this moment, worried about overweight children but, extraordinarily, Odette took her daughter for a consultation with the famous Paris paediatrician Robert Debré, a decision which goes some way towards explaining the iron will of a woman who could survive Ravensbrück. Odette also went to the synagogue in the Rue de la Victoire to attend a memorial service for her murdered aunt and uncle, Raymond and Antoinette Berr, parents of Hélène, the gifted young French woman deported first to Auschwitz then to Bergen-Belsen, where she died in 1945. Odette was appalled to discover there a poisonous atmosphere among those who had survived; some were whispering about who had survived thanks to calling in certain privileges, while others gossiped about who had benefited from the Occupation and how. In this mood, Parisians were not ready to commemorate Hélène Berr’s short life, but at least Andrée Bardiau, the family housekeeper who had been with the Berrs for fifty years and had carefully looked after Hélène’s diary as it was handed to her page by page for safekeeping, now, on 20 June 1946, passed the manuscript to Hélène’s brother, who typed up a copy for the family and gave the original to her fiancé, Jean Morawiecki. Consumed by guilt for abandoning her, he put the diary quietly to one side.
Odette and Robert returned to living together for the sake of their daughter, but now with what she described as an affectionate ‘modus vivendi’, or total liberty for each of them to pursue their own friendships. As soon as she could, Odette went to Marseilles to visit Pierre Ferri-Pisani. Having thought of him constantly during her time at Ravensbrück, she had tried to prepare herself for their reunion, but even so his dramatic decline and frailty were unimaginable. He had lost forty-four pounds, was partially deaf having stepped on a mine, and was uncertain of himself, having not spoken aloud for a year. At the sight of Odette, he opened his arms for her and then fainted. ‘He was emptied of life and energy. He could not understand how I could say that, having lived through an abominable experience, I was trying to find positive aspects of the experience such as the force of friendship.’
The relationship continued for a few more months as Ferri-Pisani travelled to Paris, ostensibly to meet political comrades while he was fighting elections, but also to see Odette and rekindle their wartime romance. He hoped to find a more permanent job that would allow him to come regularly, but then his wife, having only now discovered the relationship, attempted suicide. Odette believed that, without the links that bound them in fighting a common enemy, their relationship was doomed. Ferri-Pisani’s post-war style of life was not what she had remembered in 1943. ‘Paradoxically our liberation just produced obstacles … I realised I was not capable of breaking with all my past life which, now that the war was over, had reawakened in me.’ In addition, she had money worries as her husband’s business had all but collapsed and family finances were precarious. She decided she had to end the affair with Pierre and in mid-1946, a year after her return from the camps, Odette Fabius accepted a job working for the United Nations in New York. She never saw Pierre again, ‘the most brilliant man that I was ever to meet’.
Like Geneviève de Gaulle and Jacqueline Marié, Jacqueline d’Alincourt married in 1946. Her husband was Pierre Péry, a Buchenwald survivor, and the couple decided to live in New York. Several friends had told her she must meet a remarkable American woman called Caroline Ferriday. ‘I know you two will understand each other.’
Caroline Woolsey Ferriday was an only child, auspiciously born on 4 July 1902, into a family of wealth and privilege. She was a stunning young woman, a Francophile who spoke fluent French, and was interested in politics from a young age. By the time Hitler came to power she was working as a volunteer in the French Consulate in New York and by 1941 was actively involved in running France Forever, the American support organization to which Micheline Rosenberg, Paul’s daughter and the mother of Anne Sinclair, was also committed. Deeply concerned about the suffering of the French people, especially children, she was involved in raising money throughout the war to help orphans and already in 1945 had lists of women and children desperately in need of food, clothing and other support. As she wrote in an emotive appeal on behalf of France Forever shortly after the war: ‘Although the Germans suffered a crushing military defeat, Germany will in the long run emerge the victor and it will be Germany who has won the war unless the youth of liberated Europe survive to enjoy the fruits of Victory.’ Caroline and Jacqueline became lifelong friends. As Jacqueline recalled, ‘Our friendship was sealed after the first meeting when she immediately asked: “What can I do?” She became a sister.’ Caroline set up an American friends of ADIR and was constantly looking for ways to help the French victims of the war.
Caroline Ferriday, the lifelong Francophile who played a key role helping the post-war recovery of the Ravensbrück lapins
Not surprisingly, those who feared that the justice they faced might not be to their liking also escaped Paris. Chanel, still under a cloud, spent much of 1946 in Switzerland, part of the time with the writer Paul Morand, an active supporter of the Vichy government who knew her well and whom she now commissioned to write her memoirs. She was still indulging, more discreetly these days, her affair with Spatz, described by those who saw him at this time as ‘an impoverished, ageing playboy who nevertheless managed to keep up the pretence of wealth’. This charade was largely made possible by Chanel; even after the affair had petered out when Spatz went to live in the Balearics, she continued to remit a monthly allowance. According to Morand’s view of Chanel at this time, she was still full of ‘brooding fury and barely suppressed energies during her years away from the fashion business that had shaped her life and bore her name’. She was also now fighting in earnest for control of her perfume business, employing the lawyer René de Chambrun, who had been her legal adviser since the early 1930s.
Chanel was neither the first nor the last couturier to realize that extending her brand to perfume could be immensely profitable and did not involve designing new clothes every season. In the summer of 1920 she had met the legendary perfumer Ernest Beaux, who had a laboratory in Grasse in the south of France. According to Bettina Ballard, the influential editor of Vogue, she concocted Chanel No 5 there in the aftermath of her grief over the death of Captain Arthur Edward ‘Boy’ Capel, an English polo-player with whom she had had an intense nine-year affair and who had financed her early shops. However, production did not properly begin until 1924 when she was introduced to Pierre Wertheimer, owner, with his brother Paul, of Bourjois, one of the largest cosmetics companies in France. The Wertheimers were a longstanding French Jewish family with some factories, and whose investment in the new company, Les Parfums Chanel, ensured that Chanel perfume and beauty products could be produced in large enough quantities to be sold commercially in Galeries Lafayette and other stores and would make them immensely rich.
But there were arguments from the start. When the company was first established, Chanel herself owned 10 per cent, the Wertheimers 70 per cent with the final 20 per cent going to Théophile Bader, owner of Galeries Lafayette, who had brokered the introduction. But Bader was subsequently bought out by the Wertheimers. Chanel regularly tried to get a greater percentage, which Pierre Wertheimer just as regularly resisted. But even though the perfume was so profitable that Chanel had security and independence for life, the 10 per cent continued to rankle. In 1940 the Wertheimers had to flee Paris and, in order to aryanize the perfume company, handed it to Félix Amiot, a French Christian businessman in whose aviation business they had had a 50 per cent share which they now returned. Chanel was infuriated by the Wertheimers’ successful aryanization, since it prevented her from using the opportunity of the Occupation to seize control herself. After the war, Amiot immediately returned the company to the Wertheimers,* which prompted Chanel to initiate legal battles, once again to win a greater share of the company for herself.
So in 1946 she decided to produce samples of her own perfumes with names such as Mademoiselle Chanel No. 1 and No. 2. This obvious challenge to the Wertheimers could not be ignored, and a deal was eventually struck which made her ‘unassailably rich’. After May 1947, Chanel received 2 per cent of the gross royalties of perfume sales throughout the world, in the region of $1 million a year. She also received a sum calculated to cover past royalties … She was, as one of her biographers put it, now ‘wealthy enough to need never work again’.
The return of Jewish companies to their legitimate owners provided plenty of work for lawyers. As part of the long process of regularizing the affairs of Van Cleef & Arpels, on 3 June 1946 the body of Renée Puissant, after four years lying in a Vichy grave, was exhumed by her mother, Estelle Van Cleef, and transported to Nice where it was reburied alongside her father in the Jewish cemetery. The company soon returned to trading from its familiar shop front in the Place Vendôme, but this time it was run by various members of the Arpels family. Although the Van Cleef name was retained, Renée’s death, childless as she was, spelled the end of the line for that branch of the family. Some historians of the business have argued that it was the bogus aryanization set in motion by Renée, selling the company to Comte Paul de Léséleuc, which saved it. Without that, the Germans would have confiscated the company for themselves.
While Spatz was being looked after by Chanel, his half-Jewish first wife Catsy, or Maximiliane von Schoenebeck, was faring less well. Having survived various internment camps at the beginning of the war, she was expelled from France and went to Austria to stay with cousins. But at some point towards the end of the war, she returned to her beloved Paris with a new name, only to be arrested once again in 1944 for collaboration. Known to have been involved in the black market, selling lingerie, she spent the following two years in prison, the price for her first marriage to Günther von Dincklage as well as for subsequent relationships with German officers.
‘She has had an appalling time,’ wrote Allanah Harper, the English-born founder of the French literary review Echanges and a close friend of Catsy’s half-sister, the writer Sybille Bedford. Harper visited Catsy von Dincklage in September in Paris following the latter’s release after almost two years in a French prison. She reported back to Bedford: ‘I took her to the Bar in Rue de la Paix, as she said they were the only place that had champagne that was really good. We had three glasses each at 100 francs a glass.’ She added that Catsy had been kept in the most filthy conditions, with only bread and water for months.
She said, typically, that it was amusing in the beginning because the prison was full of Marquises and Countesses who had collaborated, but after a few months they were all let out through influence, but she remained with only ‘les femmes de ménage et des grues’ [cleaners and hookers]. She thinks she was put in because of her husband, but I think it was for going about with officers. Any rate it could not be for being Jewish as it was after the Liberation she was put in and only came out four months ago … I think she feels rather lonely … she says she has to work to make money as she has none. She is going to work from next week in a hat shop with a friend.
It was not a story that Sybille, however affectionately she felt towards her sister, and in spite of a fierce belief in justice, was ever comfortable with.
Meanwhile, the British, if they could not ensure justice, were doing their best to promote goodwill between the former allies through the activities of the British Council. Following the success of a big art exhibition featuring John Piper and Graham Sutherland among others, the Council turned their attention to music. Mary Wallington, who had studied French and Italian at Oxford before working in publishing, now aged thirty-two, landed a job in the summer of 1946 as a music assistant with the Council, based at 28 Avenue Champs-Elysées. Other than the constant rain that summer, Mary loved her job, which mostly involved organizing orchestral exchanges and gramophone concerts, or ‘séances’ as she called them, promoting British music by Purcell, Vaughan Williams and Delius (Delius’s Paris: The Song of a Great City was a predictably popular choice) and traditional sea shanties, ‘which brought a light touch to the end of the proceedings’. Because getting to the office required her to walk down the Rue du Faubourg Saint-Honoré, ‘I have done a lot of gloating at the unbelievable shop windows but have been so overpowered that so far have only dared buy 3 pairs of stockings!’
Mary was also well placed to see how ordinary Parisian women, preoccupied as ever with food, were managing the transition to peacetime shopping and cooking. Although she bemoaned the lack of marmalade, soluble sanitary pads and Turkish cigarettes – ‘I have plenty of Virginians but Naafi don’t rise to Turkish’ – she told her ‘darling family’ that the food was mostly very good with plenty of meat but no salads. She was shocked when invited to dinner one evening to see her profligate hostess throwing a large pat of butter into the frying pan to cook some veal and then mixing even more butter into the noodles. The story well illustrates the terrible disparity between those in Paris who had more than enough to eat (the British, Americans and rich Parisians), while many others in the city were on the verge of starvation. There was plenty of meat – but at a price, and butchers were good at exploiting this – while other staples were in short supply. On 1 January 1946 the government had had to introduce bread rationing once more, which led to angry demonstrations as well as violent arguments at bakeries. Women seen to be buying several loaves were sometimes attacked by those still queuing who feared there might not be any left. Once again the black market flourished, and wherever possible, goods – sometimes stolen – and services were bartered. This avoided the cash economy, creating additional difficulties for the government as it tried to collect taxes. One of the most notorious methods of increasing rations was to use the name of a dead relative to acquire an additional ration card. After four years of Occupation, many Parisiennes, cooks and countesses alike, had had time to perfect their forging. Janet Flanner, the US reporter now back in the city sending her ‘Letter from Paris’ to the New Yorker, described the delight of one literary Parisienne ‘who, browsing in her attic among pre-war books, found two boxes of pre-war cartridges’. For twenty shells, a neighbourly crackshot brought her back in trade ‘two pheasants, a kilo of country butter and a roast of veal’.
However, there was little that anyone could do about the extreme cold weather yet again that winter, especially harsh since there were grave shortages of heating fuel. Public buildings such as theatres were largely unheated. Mary was lucky to attend some of the autumn season’s cultural highlights, before the blizzards set in, including what she called ‘the great theatrical event of the moment’ – Jean-Louis Barrault as Hamlet in a translation by André Gide at the Théâtre Marigny, a production which dismayed Janet Flanner as ‘athletic, hearty and hasty’, though she realized that no one dared criticize ‘the demi-god Gide’.
On 16 October, Mary Wallington was excited to be invited to a gala performance with Marjorie Lawrence, the pre-war Wagnerian rival of Germaine Lubin who had overcome a crippling wartime bout of polio, in aid of establishing penicillin research centres throughout France. Lubin herself was finally brought to trial in 1946, having already served almost three years in prison. In the event, she was acquitted of the most serious accusations after several testimonials were produced from people she had helped during the war. But her career was finished.
‘My trial was a complete vindication: I was completely cleared … Nobody knows how many prisoners I had released,’ she insisted. ‘Did anyone bother to ask me why I did not accept Winifred Wagner’s invitations to sing in Germany during the Occupation?’ Nevertheless she was sentenced to dégradation nationale for life (subsequently reduced to five years), confiscation of property, which included a chateau at Tours, and a form of exile which forced her to live with friends in Italy. Lubin did not return to Paris until 1950, by which time she was increasingly bitter about her treatment, claiming that she had been robbed of ten years of her singing career. But she would have derived mild satisfaction had she read Mary Wallington’s description of the gala to her parents as ‘most elaborately and vulgarly staged with press photographers creeping to the stage to flash cameras in Marjorie Lawrence’s face even while she was singing … she certainly had the most magnificent voice though unfortunately she had a bad throat and cracked on the high notes at the end of the evening’.
Not everyone was forced to account publicly for how they had lived during the Occupation, but Picasso was one of those frequently questioned. It was known that German soldiers came to visit and even buy from him (or to ensure that he had adequate supplies) as he worked away in his studio in the Rue des Grands-Augustins, a house both shabby and sumptuous that his friends felt suited him so well. André Breton, the surrealist poet who was a friend of Picasso as well as of Eluard, had spent the war years in America. When he arrived back in the summer of 1946 and was reunited with Picasso, he criticized him for his politics since the Occupation, in particular for joining the Communist Party. According to Françoise Gilot, who witnessed the unhappy exchange, Picasso told him: ‘You didn’t choose to stay on in France with us during the Occupation. And you haven’t lived through the events we lived through here. My stand is based on those experiences. I don’t criticise your position since your understanding of those events was acquired at a different angle from mine … I place friendship above any differences of political opinion.’
The breach was never healed, but Gilot was steadfast in her defence of her lover, believing that ‘It took a good deal of courage for him to stay there during the war since his paintings had been denounced by Hitler and the Occupation authorities took such a dim view of intellectuals. Many artists … had gone off to America before the Germans arrived. It must have seemed wiser to many not to run the risk of staying.’ She told how, when she had asked him directly why he had remained in occupied France, he responded, ‘Oh I’m not looking for risks to take … but in a sort of passive way I don’t care to yield to either force or terror. I want to stay here because I’m here. The only kind of force that could make me leave would be the desire to leave. Staying on isn’t really a manifestation of courage; it’s just a form of inertia. I suppose it’s simply that I prefer to be here. So I’ll stay, whatever the cost.’
On 27 October 1946 the French constitution was finally changed to include among the basic principles of the Republic the law ‘guaranteeing women equal rights to those of men in all spheres’, and the national elections a month later in November were the first in which women in France were able to participate. At the same time several magazines were urging women, many of whom had run households as well as holding down jobs during the war, now to return to a time of innocence and femininity, to ‘stop making decisions, stop balancing cheque books, stop being aggressively punctual’. But the prevailing feeling was that women could be interested in fashion, beauty, health and décor and still be intelligent enough to have interesting jobs. The new magazine Elle, a far cry from the pre-war Vogue, catered to this mood and in 1946 hired as its first editor the brilliant thirty-year-old journalist, writer and communicator Françoise Giroud, a liberated woman with a strong social conscience.*
And in the spring of 1946, the loi Marthe Richard was passed, set to take effect in October, legislation outlawing the legal brothels, which had operated in France since 1804, and pimping, while allowing prostitution itself to remain a lawful activity. Since there were some 7,000 registered prostitutes in France there were justified fears that the law would simply swell the number of those working illegally on the streets and disease would spread. Richard herself, like the new law, was controversial. A former prostitute, she may even have been a double agent, who had spent months profiting in Vichy eventually returning to Paris where it was said that she procured girls for evenings attended by Germans, practised some small-time swindling and eventually joined the resistance, just in time. She became a councillor in 1945 and worked to promote the anti-brothel laws, but her motives seemed dubious to many who saw the new law as an attack on French culture. Among those who lamented the end of the grand Parisian maisons closes was the British Ambassador, Duff Cooper – and some commentators believed that, at a time when France was suffering shortages of everything from electricity to potatoes, this should not have been a priority. Was ‘Gay Paree’, the world’s capital of pleasure, succumbing to post-war prudery?
But there were other motives behind the change in the law. One was that the existing system, with its myriad rules and inspections, was open to police abuse and corruption. More significantly, the brothels had flourished during the Occupation, as Fabienne Jamet, owner of one of the most notorious, the One Two Two, recalled: ‘I’m almost ashamed at having to admit that I’d never had such a good time in my life … Those nights of the Occupation were truly fantastic … The brothels of France were never as well run and kept as while they [the Germans] were here.’ It was not that the girls themselves or even the madams were pro-Nazi or collaborators. A few of the best-known houses had been requisitioned exclusively for officers’ use and so the girls who worked there had no choice. But the whole industry was tainted and it was well known that those who wanted the brothels closed down included such bizarre bedfellows as the communists and the de Gaulles. Even though he was no longer in power by the time the law was passed, the General and especially his wife Yvonne loathed the very idea of state-approved brothels in post-war France.
Clearly, closing the brothels was not about supporting women. It had more to do with trying to establish normality in Paris and other cities, and not allowing the Americans to dictate how the city functioned. Just like the Germans before them, American soldiers saw Paris as one ‘tremendous brothel’, to quote Life magazine’s reporter Joe Weston. But there was one critical difference: the Germans had regulated the brothels used by their officers, keeping prostitutes under strict medical supervision with weekly doctors’ visits to ensure that, in an era when penicillin was not widely available, their men were not infected by syphilis. In the chaotic post-Liberation months the system floundered, as the French could recruit neither adequate medical care nor sufficient police oversight in the face of what came to be known as the ‘silver foxhole’, a magnet for GIs on leave serviced by women and girls from all over France flocking to the big city hoping to make money. According to Mary Louise Roberts, the author of What Soldiers Do, a study of sex and the American GI in France in the Second World War, the French did make an attempt to introduce rudimentary government medical care, which the prostitutes did their best to avoid. ‘The treatment awaiting them was at best ineffective, at worst physical torture. Examinations were given under poor lighting and in unsanitary conditions. Often no effort was made to wash the speculum in between examinations, or for that matter to change the linen and the pot of Vaseline. The sickest of the women ended up in locked hospital wards, where nuns did their best to wage a battle against alcohol, bad language, and lesbian sex.’
When American military authorities first took over the Petit Palais, a beautiful 1900 exhibition centre in the centre of Paris, one of the first things they did was put up a large sign announcing distribution of free condoms to US troops. The US military did not really care if a GI had sex with a French woman. What it did care a great deal about was that a soldier did not contract a venereal disease. But the men themselves, who faced violent death every day, were not easily scared by the threat of a curable infection. Since the authorities in 1944 could neither ban brothels nor monitor the hygiene of individual French women, they tried to manage with enormous stocks of condoms. But because supplies could not be well organized behind a rapidly moving army, condoms were often nonexistent and army-issue products generated an endless stream of complaints. Furthermore, some American officers concluded that trying to control the sexual behaviour of a soldier ‘operating in a place like France … was tantamount to making him eat raw carrots in a steakhouse’.
‘In both popular American culture and high diplomatic and military circles, the whore came to represent “Frenchness” itself,’ explains Roberts, and selling her body was seen as part of a broader French subservience to American money and power.
Some American soldiers behaved as if, when it came to young French women, anything can be bought. SHAEF’s [Supreme Headquarters Allied Expeditionary Force] frustration with French regulation and its inability to see French women as infected as well as infectious had a significant impact on Franco-American relations. Besides reinforcing American prejudices about France as decadent, the ‘problem’ of VD inspired further condescension, invited American intervention into French affairs, and naturalised the army’s ‘right’ to manage the freedom of the civilian population … The supposedly ‘infectious’ body of the prostitute became the site of a power struggle, but it operated at a more symbolic level as well.
Closing the brothels represented the end of an era, an era when young provincial girls, usually in their early twenties, would be seduced into coming to Paris to seek fame and fortune, often enticed by a man who promised them love and riches, only to find that they had to work to support themselves. A brothel, complete with pimp or madam, was their only option. Some young girls, brought to Paris by a wealthy patron, such as Coco Chanel and Jeanne Toussaint, had made good in the city. But as is shown by the registers from La Petite Roquette (a women’s prison used for prostitutes) indicating that fewer than 20 per cent had been born in Paris and its immediate suburbs, most did not fare so well.
With the passing of the new law, furniture from the Belle Epoque bordellos was now auctioned, properties were sold and ‘Screw Marthe Richard’ was daubed on one famous brothel door as it closed. But the new system, whereby young women in garish clothes were seen plying their trade all too openly on the streets around the Rue Saint-Denis, just as they did in any other city, was not popular either and seemed to threaten Paris with losing its charm – for men at least. As Nancy Mitford wrote (incorrectly of Marthe Richard since she was not a deputy) of the brothels: ‘These, having lately been driven underground by the ill-considered action of a woman Deputy, had become rather difficult for a foreigner to find.’
But find them they still did. One of the best-known, which should have closed in 1946 but somehow managed to continue more or less legally as a ‘meeting place’, was L’Etoile de Kléber, whose upper rooms had housed Edith Piaf and friends for months at a time during the Occupation. Piaf may not have played an active role in any resistance group and she had performed in numerous brothels and nightclubs frequented by Germans or French collaborators or both. Yet, when she was brought before a post-war tribunal, Andrée Bigard had spoken in her favour, and she was forgiven. Her popular song, ‘La Vie en Rose’, although written in 1945, was not performed in concert for the first time until 1946 and immediately became a huge hit. Similarly, Charles Trenet – allowed to forget his far more questionable behaviour during the Occupation when he had performed at the Folies Bergère and the Gaieté Parisienne, favourite Wehrmacht haunts – now released ‘La Mer’, which also became a massive hit. Both songs captured the mood two years after the Liberation: namely that whatever the hardships and pain of war, it was time to move on and forget. Life in Paris was good.
The milliner Madame Agnès used new German fabrics such as fibranne (spun rayon) mixed with wool for her 1941 collection and praised the succesful combination of ‘French creation, German production’. Suzanne Abetz, wife of the German ambassador, sits behind the model on the right.
Day of Elegance on Bicycles, June 1942. Designers were constantly looking for ways to make riding a bicycle – a necessary means of transport in Paris without cars – appear elegant. Most tried to disguise the divided skirt since trousers were officially prohibited.
(left) Shortages of shampoo and electricity resulted in the closure of many hair salons and encouraged women to adopt a turban as the most fashionable way to hide dirty or uncoloured hair. This enterprising hairdresser is offering an open-air service in the sunshine.
(above) A 1942 evening clutch bag made by Boucheron. The inside contains a mirror and compartments for powder, lipstick, eyeshadow, a comb, cigarette box and lighter. Such boxes were fashionable when the possibilities for buying new jewellery were limited.
Women and children using metro stations that were deep underground as shelters from bombing raids, most of which targeted Greater Paris where factories were located.
Two girls walking in Paris with yellow stars sewn on to their clothing in 1942. This became law for all Jewish adults in May that year.
French buses used in the infamous round-up on 16 and 17 July 1942 of 13,152 Jews, including more than 4,000 children, held at the Vélodrome d’Hiver sports stadium in Paris with almost no food or water for five days before deportation to other camps, mostly Auschwitz-Birkenau.
Women and children trying to wash clothes in the courtyard at Drancy, an unfinished housing complex just outside Paris, which became the principal transit camp for French Jews before deportation to Nazi extermination camps.
Renée Puissant, who moved to Vichy following the Occupation to run her family’s jewellery business from the Van Cleef & Arpels boutique in Vichy. This photograph was taken weeks before her death in 1942.
Béatrice de Camondo Reinach, a convert to Catholicism, believed her wealth and close friendships with German riding companions would protect her. In 1943 she and her family were arrested and later killed in Auschwitz.
Comtesse Lily Pastré, wealthy Noilly Prat heiress, who left Paris during the Occupation and sheltered many Jewish artists at her chateau near Marseilles.
(above) Two posters produced by the Vichy government: one to celebrate Mother’s Day; the other aimed at persuading Frenchmen to volunteer for work in Germany. At the end of 1942 the Nazis demanded that France send 250,000 labourers to Germany, promising that they would repatriate one French prisoner of war for every three volunteer labourers. But there were not enough volunteers so conscription had to be introduced.
(left) Film poster for Le Corbeau, the powerful 1943 film directed by Henri-Georges Clouzot which tackled denunciation and abortion, two key issues of the day.
Jacqueline Mesnil-Amar, assimilated Jewish mother and writer who after the war established an organization to help deported Jews.
Many women in Paris were involved in distributing secret leaflets with news of Allied or Resistance activity. If caught the punishment could be severe as the Germans tried to discover others in their network.
Marie-France Geoffroy-Dechaume worked actively in the Resistance, mostly on the Normandy Coast where she helped evading airmen escape, made bombs to lay on railway lines and cycled with gelignite strapped to her chest.
Violette Morris, the bisexual former athlete who dressed as a man, worked with collaborators and was implicated in a number of arrests in 1943.
The Milice, a paramilitary force founded by Vichy to counter the Resistance, distributing to grateful mothers bottles of wine seized in black market raids in Paris, April 1944.
Elisabeth de Rothschild, standing in the drawing room of the family’s country home, Le Petit Mouton. She was killed at Ravensbrück in 1945.
(below left) Drawing of a skeletally thin Odette Fabius at Ravensbrück by fellow prisoner Mopse von Dorothée de Rippert. Fabius did not think she would survive her incarceration.
(below right) Several young, formerly healthy Polish girls, called lapins, were experimented on in Ravensbrück, often by having their legs cut open and injected with gangrene. They were befriended in the camp by several Parisiennes.
Parisians building barricades at Rue du Renard, next to the Hôtel de Ville, after Colonel Henri Rol-Tanguy, commander of the FFI, organized posters on 21 and 22 August 1944 calling for barricades throughout the city.
Terrified Parisiennes run for cover as German snipers open fire from buildings in the battle for liberation of the city, 26 August 1944.
A group of armed partisans keeping watch on the roof of a house, Paris, 28 August 1944. Note the woman in a skirt and sling-backed shoes with a hard hat and submachine gun.
Jubilation at last following the Liberation of Paris. This crowd, holding banners proclaiming ‘Long live de Gaulle, long live the Republic’, were ready to celebrate but the war was not over in the rest of Europe for another eight months.
(left) Public humilation of a French woman, accused of collaboration horizontale, in Paris. She has had her head shaved and a swastika painted on her forehead, while the men surrounding her make victory gestures. Some tondues were also forced to parade semi-naked.
French women welcoming British troops bringing a food convoy to Paris at the end of August 1944.
Cartier remained open throughout the Occupation, ingeniously making objects – mostly clocks – despite shortages of luxury materials and money. In 1944 they designed a singing bird in an open cage in French national colours as a symbol of the country’s newly restored freedom.
* According to one of his biographers, Jonathan Fenby, de Gaulle ‘very rarely said the Nazis and I don’t know of any reference to the Holocaust’ (‘Charles de Gaulle and the French Resistance’, http://fivebooks.com/interview/jonathan-fenby-on-charles-de-gaulle-and-the-french-resistance/). Others, referencing remarks he made about those who died ‘pour La France’, point out that such a phrase does not address the suffering of millions of Jews in France.
* Romain Gary, born in Vilna, educated in Nice, became a pilot with the Free French and coined the phrase in telling the story of his reply when presented to the Queen Mother in England after the war. See http://mayatouviere.com/uploads/3/4/2/3/3423798/la_promesse_de_laube_romain_gary.pdf, p. 23.
* But even that did not prevent some believing that, as he had been forced to work for the German aircraft manufacturer, Junkers, to say nothing of selling Chanel perfume to the Germans, he had been a Nazi collaborator. In fact he had set up a resistance network and even tried to build planes for the Free French, but it was his deal with the Wertheimers which may have saved him from prosecution.
* Giroud went on to become Minister for Women’s Affairs under President Jacques Chirac in 1974.