By January 1947 Vera Atkins had given evidence at two of the trials organized by the Allies for those high-ranking Nazis held responsible for killing at the various camps that they had managed to capture, hoping both to learn and to see justice done. First was the trial in 1946 of SS officials at Natzweiler-Struthof, where she believed four of her girls had died – Vera Leigh, Diana Rowden, Andrée Borrel and Noor Inayat Khan – and then early in 1947 she assisted the prosecution at the first trial of guards and staff at Ravensbrück, which had claimed the lives of another four – Cecily Lefort, Violette Szabo, Denise Bloch and Lilian Rolfe. But several other agents remained unaccounted for. Just as the Germans had intended for their Nacht und Nebel prisoners, they had disappeared without trace. But, two years on from the end of the war, there was now a palpable change of atmosphere as the victorious powers started to turn their energies increasingly towards post-war reconstruction and diplomacy rather than punishing the perpetrators of war crimes.
For Vera it had never been simply a case of retribution. Establishing the truth was a duty she owed her girls. However, some who knew her felt that her grim determination reflected also the guilt she harboured; some agents had been parachuted directly into already compromised circuits, infiltrated by the Germans. Madeleine Damerment, dropped on the night of 29 February 1944, twenty miles east of Chartres, had been seized on landing in an operation arranged by the Germans as part of their Funkspiel (radio game), using Noor’s captured set. Madeleine was taken to Fresnes, then interrogated at the Avenue Foch SiPo-SD. In May, she was transferred to Karlsruhe civilian jail in Germany with seven other female agents. Quite possibly, Vera’s tangled personal circumstances and insecurity – she dreaded her own lack of Britishness being revealed – were part of the reason she had not spoken out earlier and demanded investigations. In addition, she was always deeply loyal to Maurice Buckmaster, head of SOE’s F Section, with whom she worked so closely. If she could discover the truth now, she desperately hoped, there was at least a chance of winning posthumous justice for these brave girls.
There is still controversy today about why London continued to send agents as well as money into France when there were concerns that the circuit might have been blown. Some historians believe that Buckmaster was simply careless and overlooked security lapses out of a political need to keep the section’s agents in the field. Others conclude that the British were aware of the ‘radio games’ but played along with the deception so as to distract the Germans in anticipation of D-Day. Yet there is now evidence that Sonia Olschanesky, a Russian-born, locally hired agent working for SOE in France, had warned London on 1 October 1943 of Noor’s capture. Buckmaster ignored the warning, worried about the ‘reliability’ of ‘Sonja’ (sic). ‘Had Sonia’s warning been heeded at that time, Dr Goetz’s “radio game” would have been exposed and probably halted there and then, saving countless SOE lives,’ is the view of one historian. Yet Noreen Riols, who from 1943 onwards worked closely with Buckmaster at F Section HQ in London, is at pains to stress that SOE was constantly making life and death decisions without all the means of instant communication available today. She insists that ‘Buck’, as she called him, ‘was always deeply concerned about his agents and far from careless and uncaring about their fate … what critics fail to understand is that SOE was a fledgling organisation; it was unconventional and improvisational since there were no precedents, no previous experience or strategy to help and guide its leaders, no charts, reports or manuals to instruct those in charge. They were obliged to make up the rules as they struggled along.’ Either way, the lives of innocent girls were being squandered. The SOE’s historian M. R. D. Foot explained later: ‘To the question why people with so little training were sent to do such important work, the only reply is: the work had to be done and there was no one else to send.’ Leo Marks, having felt such sympathy for Noor during her training, had given her an extra security check to use only if caught, so he was desperately worried when she used it that she must be in enemy hands. ‘I said a silent prayer that Noor was having one of her lapses,’ Marks wrote later, ‘but knew I was having one of my own not to accept the truth.’ Buckmaster insisted that London must continue responding to her as if nothing were amiss and that the two-way traffic with her should continue.
But although by early 1947 Vera believed she knew most of what she would ever learn, she was not quite ready to close all her files, especially as she was now starting to receive new evidence about what had really happened to Noor. It was only after the Natzweiler trial that she had seen the name of Sonia Olschanesky for the first time appear in lists of prisoners. But ‘Olschanesky’, she assumed, while obviously one of the women imprisoned at Karlsruhe, was a name she did not know and quite probably therefore an alias for Noor. Changing names was something they all did and, since Noor had been born in Moscow, she might well have chosen this one, Vera argued.* Some of the most reliable information which helped her finally unravel the last months in Noor’s life came from her brother, Vilayat Inayat Khan, who had received eyewitness accounts from two sources – a French girl, Yolande Lagrave, who had met ‘Nora’ when both were prisoners at Pforzheim secure prison, not at Karlsruhe, in September 1944, and a German woman who had worked at the jail. It was from Yolande that Vera learned that Noor had had her hands and feet constantly manacled, apparently on orders from Berlin as she was considered an especially dangerous prisoner, that she was fed starvation rations, that she was beaten from time to time and that she was rarely allowed to talk to anyone or go outside. Slowly Vera was able to piece together, mostly from interviews with other guards awaiting trial, information about Noor’s resilience and dignity in the face of her exceptionally cruel treatment at Pforzheim.
The key breakthrough for Vera came in January 1947 when she was able to interview Hans Kieffer, deputy head of the SiPo-SD in Paris, who had finally been run to ground.* Kieffer, she knew, would have interrogated her girls while they were still in Paris, and it was because of him that they were sent to Karlsruhe, his home town. But only Noor, considered a particular risk because she had tried to escape twice, was punished in a solitary cell at Pforzheim and kept permanently in chains. In spite of her barbaric treatment she had refused to give away any information, behaviour which more than anything exasperated her captors. On 11 September 1944 she was driven from Pforzheim to Karlsruhe, where she met up with Eliane Plewman, Madeleine Damerment and Yolande Beekman. They were all then taken to Dachau, where they were kept in separate cells and shot in the early hours of 13 September, but not (as the official version claimed) together, with the four women holding hands as they were shot in the back of the neck. There are different accounts of precisely how Noor was murdered, but – according to information from various sources which Vera appears to have believed, although it was not recorded in the official files – the night before she died Noor was given ‘the full treatment’. A German officer, repeating what he had heard from camp officials, told Lieutenant Colonel H. J. Wickey, who worked for Canadian intelligence during the war, that ‘Noor was tortured and abused in her cell by the Germans. She was stripped, kicked and finally left lying on the floor battered and bruised. Then in the early hours of the following morning she was shot in her cell.’
However, no one from Dachau stood trial specifically for the executions of Madeleine, Yolande, Noor and Eliane, partly because there was no proof of their demise and no witnesses to describe the killings. Those most likely to have been responsible were either dead themselves or already facing trial for other war crimes. All Vera Atkins could do, once she had discovered what she finally believed to be the truth of Nora’s death at Dachau, was to fight tirelessly to have her posthumously awarded a George Cross, the highest civilian award for bravery in Britain. This she did, citing in her recommendation for the award how even Kieffer had wept when he recounted Noor’s exceptional courage. The award was granted in 1949.
Vera herself was demobilized in 1947, and her story continues to fascinate and puzzle. Relatives of those girls unaccounted for found her cold and unemotional, with ‘a callous streak’ according to her biographer, in stark contrast to her dedication to finding the missing. There is a note in a file now at the National Archives at Kew from the mother of the Paris-born Yolande stating that her daughter was pregnant at the time she was sent into France, while Diana Rowden’s mother did not know that her daughter had received the Croix de guerre until the author Elizabeth Nicholas found out while researching her 1958 book, Death Be Not Proud. Nicholas also discovered that the fiancé and family of Sonia Olschanesky, who had shown incredible courage by staying on to work as a courier near Paris after the Prosper ring of Francis Suttill had been blown, had never been informed of her fate. Tania Szabo, Violette’s young daughter, found Atkins ‘cold and distant’, and Vilayat Inayat Khan told Vera’s biographer that she was ‘cold blooded’: ‘Vera Atkins was the intelligence officer who really wanted to find out what happened, she wanted to sort things out – to be clear about things,’ he said. But he believed his sister had been used. Yvonne Baseden, one of those who survived thanks to the Swedish Red Cross, described Vera when she met her on release as ‘quite distant – cold almost at first. Suspicious even … I think she must have thought – you know – why had I been released? What had I done to be released and not the others? I think that must have been why she was a little wary of me.’
Yet, however keen the French public and government might have been to move on, there were some whose crimes were so heinous they could never be forgiven. Anne Spoerry, or ‘Dr Claude’, who had been seen on several occasions to execute patients by lethal injection in Ravensbrück, was one such. After the Liberation, Spoerry had returned to Paris hoping to complete her medical exams, but once she was asked to defend the sadistic blockova Carmen Mory at the Ravensbrück trials in Hamburg, even though she refused to attend, her anonymity was over. She was swiftly arrested herself on charges of torture and murder, and throughout 1946 and 1947 was summoned to appear in courts in Switzerland as well as before a Free French Forces Court of Honour in Paris, where she was judged by former members of the resistance. Mory, at her trial, accused Spoerry of being the Block 10 murderer, but Spoerry’s defence lawyers persuaded the court that this could not be proven, thus absolving her from the most serious charges. Mory was sentenced to death by hanging, but in April 1947 she killed herself by slitting her wrist with a razor blade a week before the sentence was due to be carried out.
Spoerry, at her own trials, tried to deny everything, yet she admitted she had been spellbound by Mory, whom she called a devil. The Court of Honour now found her guilty of different charges: impersonating a doctor, being a traitor to the French and bringing shame on France through her inhumane behaviour. The punishment: exile from France for twenty-five years. Although by now Spoerry had a tropical medicine diploma, she did not yet have her full medical degree because the French Faculty of Medicine blocked it following the Court of Honour verdict. In the wake of this, she decided simply to call herself ‘Dr Spoerry,’ took a slow boat to Africa and, by 1949, had settled in Kenya where she taught herself to fly and became a much loved flying doctor for the rest of her life. If anyone mentioned the war she flew into a rage. Her good work in Africa no doubt brought her a degree of redemption but, not surprisingly, she never forgot Ravensbrück.
On 12 February 1947, Christian Dior dramatically moved the conversation forward in Paris when he launched his debut haute couture collection. The temperature that day was 21 degrees Fahrenheit (–6 degrees Celsius), but the excited Parisiennes who arrived for his show at 30 Avenue Montaigne were well protected in their mink coats. Marcel Boussac, the cotton magnate who was Dior’s backer, was confident that the show would be a success, not simply because of the magnificent floral arrangements organized by his protégé but because of the buzz that had preceded it. The House of Dior had been established only the year before, in October 1946, but it seemed to have captured the widespread political desire to move on and away from the war and to do so in as obviously extravagant a fashion as possible. The eager audience, perched on the edge of their little gilt chairs, watched with delight as the models paraded ninety fabulous outfits of wide skirts, ballerina length, with layers of petticoats accentuated by tiny cinched waists. As the models, full of flounce, flair and feminine drama, twirled and turned on the catwalk, their voluminous skirts sent cigarette ash flying. To an audience used to tight, short pencil skirts, this opulence was a breathtaking statement. There was an explosion of bravos at the end of the show, so loud that Dior himself was seen putting his hands over his ears. The two doyennes of the fashion press, Harper’s Bazaar editor-in-chief Carmel Snow and Bettina Ballard of Vogue, were both ecstatic in their praise for what was a radical departure in style but nonetheless rooted in Belle Epoque ideas.
It was Snow who exclaimed with delight, ‘It’s quite a revelation, dear Christian. Your dresses have such a new look,’ thereby coining the phrase for what is now seen as the most iconic debut collection of all time. Ballard, not noted for being overly generous in her praise, declared: ‘We were witness to a revolution in fashion and to a revolution in showing fashion as well … Never has there been a moment more climatically right for a Napoleon, an Alexander the Great, a Caesar of the couture. Paris fashion was waiting to be seized and shaken and given direction. There has never been an easier or more complete conquest than that of Christian Dior in 1947.’ Carmel Snow said quite simply: ‘Dior saved Paris.’
The American press was united in its view that this was a global fashion revolution, restoring Paris to the pinnacle of haute couture. British journalists who wished to write as rapturously faced a conflict, because Dior appeared to be signalling an end to austerity and to the wartime fabric restrictions to which British designers were still subject. Alison Settle, then editor of British Vogue, was refused permission to mention Dior in her pages at a time when austerity in Britain was biting even harder than it had during the war as a result of the wartime loans the government was now having to pay back. In addition, the New Look’s wasp waist and wide hips, even when worn by extremely slim models, depended on firm foundation garments.* But most corsetry, regarded as inessential in Britain, was banned under rationing unless required for medical reasons. In short, the British feared that the New Look would create impossible demands for additional fabric. When Settle suggested lifting fabric quotas, Sir Stafford Cripps, President of the Board of Trade, roared at her: ‘What New Look?’
The situation changed slightly, as the Princesses Elizabeth and Margaret were both captivated by the New Look even though, of course, they were forbidden to flout the regulations. But that autumn, when Dior was in London, the Queen Mother asked for a private show. From then on, British designers found ways of adapting old coats or inserting black velvet bands to give the illusion of extra fabric. The novelist Nancy Mitford, now living on the Left Bank in Paris, wrote to her sister Diana Mosley after seeing the collection, saying that with ‘one stroke’ Dior’s New Look made ‘all one’s clothes unwearable’. But as Mitford, who had moved to Paris in 1946 in order to be close to her faithless lover, Gaston Palewski, was to discover, wearing such expensive extravagant outfits came with risks, even in Paris. ‘People shout ordures at you from vans,’ she wrote to Eddy Sackville West, ‘because for some reason it creates class feeling in a way no sables could.’ And when, one month later, Maison Dior decided to hold a photoshoot in the streets of Montmartre, the models found themselves attacked by a group of angry women stallholders who tried to beat one model, pull her hair and tear her clothes off, shouting insults all the while at such conspicuous and excessive profligacy which failed to reflect the hardships they had suffered in recent years or the ongoing shortages of food.
There was another launch at the Avenue Montaigne that momentous day in February. Many of the audience were aware of an exotic perfume, liberally sprayed throughout the premises, to accompany the show. It was called Miss Dior, named after the designer’s youngest sister, Catherine Dior. Quite possibly, however, no one at the show was aware of who she was nor of the dangerous resistance work she had been engaged in for three years from 1941 until her capture. Her story has only recently become known, making headline news following the arrest in 2011 of Dior’s then creative director, John Galliano, for alleged anti-Semitic remarks recorded in a phone video. At that point the company decided it was time to remind people of ‘the values of the House of Dior’ by talking of Catherine.
Catherine died in 2008, aged ninety-one, having rarely spoken of her wartime activities. She had been an agent in the Massif Central unit of a resistance network whose main aim was gathering information about German troop and rail movements, production and weaponry, vital knowledge for those involved in active sabotage. According to Gitta Sereny, the Austrian-born writer who worked as a nurse in Paris in 1940 and knew members of ‘this elite organisation of more than 2,000 agents – which suffered enormous losses’, the group ‘was later credited as one of the most dynamic intelligence movements in Europe. By the end of 1942 most of its leaders had been killed by the Gestapo.’ Catherine joined the network at the end of 1941, aged twenty-five, persuaded by fellow résistant Hervé Papillaut des Charbonneries, whom she met and fell in love with when she went into a shop to buy a radio. A founding member of the network, Hervé was already married with three young children, so the romance was discreet. Another close friend and fellow resister in the same network was Liliane (Lili) Dietlin, ‘the epitome of the Parisienne, small, slim, finely boned with that very special elegance of speech, behaviour and, of course, dress that none of us adoptive Parisians could ever emulate’. Lili and Catherine worked as couriers, carrying huge amounts of information, sometimes in their heads if they could memorize it, between sections. When she came to Paris, Catherine would stay at 10 Rue Royale, the apartment used by her brother and his friends. However, in July 1944 she was trapped into a meeting with Gestapo officers, arrested, tortured and deported on the final train from Paris on 15 August to Ravensbrück, where she worked in German munitions factories in notoriously atrocious conditions.
Probably Christian knew of his sister’s resistance activities, because immediately after her arrest he used whatever contacts he could to try and get her released. Working at the house of Lelong, he counted among his clients a handful of German officers’ wives and he approached them for help. But he was unsuccessful and she was not released until April 1945. When Catherine returned to Paris a month later she was emaciated and ill after eleven months of starvation rations and harsh treatment. But she was one of the lucky ones who recovered relatively swiftly. From now on she lived and worked with Hervé des Charbonneries, building up a business as a mandataire en fleurs coupées, a dealer in the exotic cut flowers of southern France and the French colonies. She and Hervé, who never divorced his wife, would leave at four in the morning to go to Les Halles to buy supplies of fresh flowers to send all over the world. It was a job and a way of life she loved, but perhaps living with a married man was an additional reason for the reticence about her resistance activities.
Two years after her release, her brother named his first scent after her. Catherine was awarded a rare Croix de guerre (normally this was reserved for those in the regular armed forces); she also received the Croix du combattant volontaire de la Résistance, the Croix du combattant and the King’s Medal for Courage in the Cause of Freedom (the latter, courtesy of Britain), and she was named a Chevalière of the Légion d’honneur. Not many women were so highly decorated so soon after the end of the war.
But it was not only impoverished Parisiennes who reacted angrily to Dior’s New Look. Chanel, who had welcomed the success of the New Look ‘with barely suppressed contempt’, was motivated not by concern that Dior’s lavish designs failed to take account of ordinary women’s suffering so much as by jealousy and fury that her own earlier success in sweeping away the corsets women had been forced to wear was now being trumped. ‘I make fashions women can live in, breathe in, feel comfortable in, and look young in,’ she had declared to Ballard. Now she felt her fashion legacy slipping away. One wealthy Dior client commented that the dress she had just bought was ‘the most amazing dress she had ever seen’, adding, ‘I can’t walk, eat or even sit down.’
Chanel, Schiaparelli and Jeanne Lanvin, three enormously influential pre-war female designers, had, it seemed, all had their day. The post-war couture houses were almost exclusively male. During the war, both Dior and Pierre Balmain had learned their trade working for Lucien Lelong. But Balmain now decided to found his own maison de couture and in 1947 hired an English woman as his Directrice. Ginette Spanier was married to a French doctor, Paul-Emile Seidmann, and being Jewish had spent most of the war in hiding from the Nazis in occupied France.* They managed to avoid deportation by frequently moving about the country and often went without money or enough food. After the Liberation, Ginette found a job working as a translator for the American army, not least at the Nuremberg trials, while Paul-Emile worked with camp survivors in Paris. Both were decorated for their work. Ginette said later that her character had been forged in the war years. It was the war that had ‘confirmed in me all I find most important in life: friends and England and love of warmth and love of life itself. It taught me to fear anything dead and cruel and genteel and therefore lacking in humanity … the war taught me to mistrust possessions.’ And yet this woman who might have been killed at any instant, who darned threadbare clothes over and over again, never saw fashion as trivial. In Paris it wasn’t. As Directrice at Balmain, she was responsible for every human problem throughout the front and back offices, including parts of the company which the public could see and much that they could not, such as feuds between two vendeuses, each claiming commission when a dress was sold. This was a significant matter, since Balmain counted among his clients the Duchess of Windsor† and Marlene Dietrich, as well as many other actresses and royalty. Ginette took her job immensely seriously and became something of a legend.
With fashion spearheading the economic revival of France, the twenty-two-year-old Simone Bodin, daughter of a Normandy railway worker, was not unusual in seeking her fortune in Paris. After her father had abandoned the family, Simone and her sister were brought up during the war by their mother, a teacher. As soon as Paris had been liberated, Simone moved to the capital, finding whatever work she could either as a babysitter or as an architect’s assistant, but hoping to become a dress designer. A chance introduction to the couturier Jacques Costet led to an offer to model for him, as he admired her fresh-faced, country-girl looks and her slim figure. But when his business floundered, she went to work for Lucien Lelong, having turned down an offer from the less experienced Christian Dior. However, she was soon tempted away from Lelong to work for Jacques Fath, who had flourished during the war and was able to offer her a five-times salary increase.
It was Fath who made her famous, renaming her Bettina because he wanted to convey a modern, American spirit and a brand-new attitude in tune with the post-war ideals. ‘He liked that I was different. I was very young, I wore no make-up and I had red hair.’ Being a mannequin was still for ‘couture only’, with no ready-to-wear, but Bettina herself, who had grown up in an impoverished family, was unlike the pre-war, haute-bourgeoise Parisian model, both in looks and in ideals. Bettina’s story illustrates one of the greatest changes in the post-war fashion world – the emergence of the professional model, now viewed as a proper career in its own right. The countesses and princesses of high society were being edged out as muses or icons of fashion. Once she had cut her chignon and wore short cropped hair, Bettina became the most photographed face in France, epitomizing the new, chic young Parisienne, or the embodiment of the freedom-loving, modern woman. After a brief marriage in the late 1940s to the photographer Gilbert Graziani, Bettina had numerous relationships with men, including the photographer Robert Capa, but in 1960 was planning to marry Prince Aly Khan. Pregnant with his child, she and Khan were tragically involved in a car crash which killed him and caused the loss of her unborn child.
There was one other voice raised in mild disapproval of Dior’s opulence: the designer born Carmen de Tommaso who took the name Marie-Louise Carven. Carven, a petite five foot one, was known for her dislike of old-fashioned Parisian sophistication, or what she saw as the Belle Epoque grandeur of heavy silk and corseted cut, favoured by wealthy older women, that had been revived by Christian Dior. Carven had been designing dresses since she was a teenager in the 1920s and, after studying architecture and interior design at the Ecole des Beaux-Arts in Paris, had courageously opened her own fashion house in the Champs-Elysées in July 1945, immediately the war was over. This was at a time of dramatic fabric shortages throughout Europe, with almost no raw fibres imported or produced, and mills and factories abandoned or destroyed. Couturiers in Paris could mount a show only if they had small caches of pre-war textiles, or if they had access to supplies, as Dior did through Marcel Boussac with his global empire of cotton textile factories and printing plants.
Marie-Louise Carven, by contrast, was ingenious in her search for every scrap of fabric. For her opening show she was able to make a generous-skirted summer dress, created from a roll of striped mint-green and white cotton found in the attic of a chateau and possibly bought before the First World War, intended for maids’ uniforms.* Her dresses were seen as young, fresh and informal in both style and colour, as opposed to the structured gowns of the day which did not flatter small women like her. But more importantly her ideas matched an alternative new mood where fashion became part of everyday living and not just for dressing up to attend a ball. Dior’s New Look grabbed the headlines, but arguably it was Carven, one of the first designers to launch a ready-to-wear or prêt-à-porter range, whose influence was more far-reaching in changing how women dressed.
Fashion and the film industry had always fed on each other and they continued to do so in post-war Paris. Carven’s clothes were in demand from petite stars such as Edith Piaf (who nonetheless insisted on having all the fancy trimmings removed), Leslie Caron, Zizi Jeanmaire and Simone Signoret. Marcel Carné followed his huge success of 1946, the dark thriller Les Portes de la nuit, with a project once again starring Arletty, about children who were jailed in pre-war France under horrific conditions. Mysteriously, the film, called La Fleur de l’âge and based on the true story of a mass escape that took place on the island of Belle-Ile-en-Mer and of the child hunt that ensued, was never finished. However, it marked the start of a seventy-year career for one of the child actresses who appeared in it, Anouk Aimée. She acquired her first name, Anouk, from a character she played in that film; Aimée came later. Still just fourteen, that same year she also had a role in Henri Calef’s La Maison sous la mer.
Anouk Aimée was born in Paris as Françoise Sorya Dreyfus in April 1932, the daughter of two actors. Her father, Henry Dreyfus, who was Jewish, worked under the stage name Henry Murray, and her mother, Geneviève Sorya, was Catholic. Little is known of the family’s Jewish background (they may have been related to Captain Alfred Dreyfus), nor of how they survived during the war, but according to one story Françoise was walking home from school one day in occupied Paris when her classmates shouted out, ‘Here’s a little Jewish girl for you,’ just as German soldiers came by. Fortunately, a ‘good’ German soldier took pity on her, told her to take off her star and brought her home to her grandmother. She then moved south with her mother, was baptized a Catholic and attended boarding school in Bandol.
No doubt something of the tension of those days always remained with her, and her stunning if disturbing beauty not only made her the ideal actress for Claude Lelouch’s Un Homme et une femme of 1966 but also equipped her for the central role of a Jewish woman coming to terms later in life with her time at Birkenau as a teenage prisoner in the 2003 film La Petite prairie aux bouleaux (The Little Meadow of Birch-Trees). This was based on the real-life experiences of writer-director Marceline Loridan-Ivens, formerly Rozenberg. The film historian Ginette Vincendeau has written that Aimée’s films ‘established her as an ethereal, sensitive and fragile beauty with a tendency to tragic destinies or restrained suffering’. In recent years, having converted as an adult to Judaism (her mother was not Jewish), Aimée is often referred to as an icon for world peace and reconciliation, but she has not revealed details of her own childhood. At the 2003 screening of the Birkenau film she simply spoke about the importance of documenting this chapter of Jewish history.
Summer 1947 was, according to a young British would-be writer trying to disentangle herself from an unsuitable love affair, ‘a summer that will never end, a golden summer of unbroken heat and unclouded blue skies and sunshine: timeless’. Emma Smith had grabbed an opportunity to escape to Paris following a chance encounter in London with one of the five Geoffroy-Dechaume sons. Claude, a jeweller, explained that his family was based in a large, rambling and rather derelict house at Valmondois, north of Paris, and was trying to make ends meet in the difficult post-war climate by taking in English and American students. They needed someone to help with chores such as bedmaking, vegetable-peeling and fetching the early-morning milk and baguettes. Was she interested in such an unpaid post in return for her board and lodging? Emma accepted and moved to Valmondois where she found her new existence basic – her room was illuminated by a single dangling light bulb, had shutters but no curtains, an uncarpeted floor plus bed, chair and table – but more than adequate.
Immersed in this intensely French Resistance family, Emma fell in love not with one son but two: both Denis and Jean-Pierre, the two youngest. After all, both brothers were ‘Heroes of the French Resistance’, she wrote later of her youthful adoration, ‘bravest of the brave, young men who hid up in the hills and fought alongside the gallant Maquis and by their indomitable courage saved the whole world from wicked German fascism. I am bound – am I not? – to adore them both.’
Antoine, the eldest son, the musician friend of Vivou Chevrillon, had, he told her, survived Nazi torture by playing in his head Bach’s harpsichord music, while his mother, Mme Geoffroy, had embroidered over the hole in another son’s shirt where he had been shot in order to commemorate the wound. Emma was to hear many tales of derring-do that summer, such as how Jean-Pierre had hauled his wounded brother out of hospital minutes before the Germans arrived to take him into captivity. Marie-France, their sister, a heroine decorated by de Gaulle for her work escorting downed airmen to freedom and for cycling with guns concealed beneath onions and gelignite under her coat, passed through Valmondois that summer on her honeymoon with Dermod MacCarthy, a British paediatrician. Sylvie, the youngest of the five daughters, who had also worked in the south with the Maquis (not yet married to the President’s nephew, Bernard de Gaulle) was the same age as Emma and became her special friend as they worked together in the kitchen. ‘I remember being permanently hungry and thin and feeling there was never quite enough to eat,’ said Emma. But the overriding memory of that summer as she immersed herself in French post-war life was the fun she had smoking pungent, wispy Gauloises Bleues cigarettes and drinking ‘un petit coup de vin blanc’ at the village bistro, while thinking Jean-Pierre was the handsome prince she had been waiting for. But then, after three months, she was suddenly dismissed. François, the second son who worked in the diplomatic service but was effectively the head of the family, told her she was an extra mouth to feed and the Geoffroy-Dechaumes could no longer afford one of those. Distraught, Emma went home and that autumn, goaded to succeed, wrote her first novel.
Lee Miller, who loved Paris so much, was now back in England, too. She gave birth in September 1947 to her first and only child, Anthony, son of Roland Penrose; she virtually gave up journalism and tried to settle into a new life. To mark the birth, Man Ray, her erstwhile lover when she first came to Paris and responsible for teaching her photography, sent her a signed, original photograph of Nusch Eluard, modelling a Suzanne Belperron bracelet, with a matching ring and brooch. It was a poignant reminder of their pre-war Paris life together when the beautiful Nusch, a muse for and lover of both Eluard and Picasso, had been a jewellery model and one of Lee’s closest friends. But Nusch, always physically frail, struggled during the war to find enough to eat and lived with constant anxiety and fear as she and Eluard, both in the communist resistance, were regularly moving homes to avoid the Gestapo. On 28 November 1946, alone in Paris while Paul was away in Switzerland, just after she and Dora Maar had been talking on the phone and making plans to meet for lunch, Nusch suddenly collapsed with a fatal cerebral haemorrhage. It was a terrible loss for many, Paul especially of course, but also for Dora, to whom it seemed that she was losing everyone she loved at the same time. For Lee, it underlined that this was the end of a chapter in her life.
One of the best advertisements for Dior’s New Look gowns that year in Paris was Susan Mary Patten, the beautiful and patrician wife of the US diplomat Bill Patten, and Duff Cooper’s lover. She had arrived in the city in 1945 and had taken a while to feel at home but was determined to understand it by travelling around, attending some of the collaboration trials and doing her duty as a hostess. Her high-level social connections coupled with her hourglass figure encouraged Christian Dior to lend or even give her dresses on occasion as he knew she made a wonderful model on whom to display his dramatic creations. As they moved from one diplomatic dinner party to another, Susan Mary was intelligent and interested enough to observe the shifting political scene where distrust was growing over increasing Soviet influence and there was controversy over how that was to be countered. In France communists polled five million votes in October 1945, and in the November 1946 national elections they took 29 per cent of the vote. Churchill, although out of power, had made an influential speech the previous year warning of the ‘Iron Curtain’ that had fallen across Europe, but in general the Americans took the view that German war reparations should not be too heavy and the emphasis should be on rebuilding Germany. But when Susan Mary referred to this one evening at a dinner, Cooper exploded as he, like the French, did not believe that the Germans should be allowed any possibility of rising anew.
In June the US Secretary of State, George C. Marshall, who had been Army Chief of Staff throughout the war, announced a European Recovery Program which would eventually channel $13 billion into Europe to stimulate economic recovery. It was a vital three-year package of aid, if communism was to be countered in Europe. France needed desperately just to improve the daily life of the population, which was suffering serious food shortages once again and an active black market. Nineteen-forty-seven saw yet another severe winter in Paris, this time exacerbated by constant disruption and violence as three million workers went on strike to protest against rising prices and stagnant wages. But there were also communist groups agitating against the Marshall Plan itself. As the disruption spread, telegraph lines were cut and railway lines sabotaged, electricity cut and mail interrupted. One incident involving a train derailment killed sixteen people. However, at the height of the bitter strikes and tension the CGT (Confédération Générale du Travail), one of the country’s major unions, called off its strike, enabling dockworkers to return to work just in time to receive the first Marshall Plan shipments from America. Time magazine called this scheme of unprecedented beneficence ‘the D-day of the peace’; others, seeing a weak, vulnerable, insecure continent with little hope of recovery, described it as a lifeline to a drowning man. The veteran journalist Theodore White wrote, ‘Like a whale left gasping on the sand, Europe lay rotting in the sun.’
Susan Mary, however fascinated she was by the political environment, had learned that it was beyond her role as the wife of an economic analyst to express opinions, and so it was not on account of her political views that Duff found this twenty-nine-year-old American beguilingly attractive. Yet by May 1947 the pair were indulging – on her part at least – in a passionate affair. Duff, nearing sixty, was flattered and excited but probably not in love; he was still emotionally if not physically involved with Louise de Vilmorin. But Susan Mary had fallen deeply into adulterous love and, as she was to discover, there was no better place than Paris with its upstairs dining rooms and its culture of amorous secrecy to experience such an affair.
However, Duff had known since September that his tour in Paris was ending, and on 10 December the Coopers hosted a magnificent farewell ball at the Embassy. Susan Mary was heartbroken. Duff had once said that when his time was up, ‘I shan’t mind except for leaving the library’ – a magnificent room thanks to Lady Diana enlisting her artistic friends in the decoration, created to house her husband’s books. There were several British visitors who attended the ball, including Winston Churchill who could not resist an opportunity to see Odette Pol Roger, of the champagne dynasty, whom he adored, and of course a number of French government ministers. Susan Mary, looking stunning in a Schiaparelli mauve satin and ivory grosgrain gown, stayed until 5 a.m., writing to Cooper later that she would have given anything if ‘in return I could have the next five minutes sitting on your lap and be held tight, tight against your heart’. By then, although she did not know it, she was in the early stages of pregnancy. Duff was the never publicly acknowledged father, and he wrote laconically in his diary when told the news that, although Susan Mary had been married for nine years, this was her first child. By the time she saw a gynaecologist she was four months pregnant. There was no question of an abortion; the asthmatic Bill was thrilled and delighted and since Duff would quite clearly never take any particular interest, Susan Mary felt justified in keeping from her son the secret of his parentage. The story of Bill Patten Jr’s real father was not revealed until 2006 in a magazine article by the journalist Susan Braudy, more than fifty years after the events in question and two years after Susan Mary’s death. Children and the identity of their legitimate parents were a vexing subject for many in 1947 Paris.
* Even when she later discovered that Sonia Olschanesky had existed, Vera was never as interested in finding out her story as she was in knowing how Noor had died.
* He was hanged in June 1947, but his trial had nothing to do with the women SOE agents.
* Jean Weston, known as Rowlande, who started her modelling career in 1947 Paris for Worth in the wake of the New Look at the age of seventeen, was five foot nine inches tall, weighed a mere 101 pounds and had an eighteen-inch waist.
* In one secret location Ginette had come across the British nanny trying to get home, Rosemary Say.
† Wallis shopped at most of the Parisian couture houses and was an early fan of Dior, but she spread her favours widely and also patronized Mainbocher, now back in New York.
* The green and white was so popular that she used it for the packaging of her perfume, Ma Griffe (My Signature), which she launched in 1946 using an aeroplane flying over Paris to release hundreds of tiny parachutes bearing a sample of the scent.