Picasso again. Picasso, the artist of towering genius who produced between three and four hundred paintings plus large numbers of drawings, prints and sculptures during the Occupation years, yet was not allowed to exhibit publicly. Picasso, the artist whose behaviour in Paris during the war is constantly questioned.
Lee Miller believed fiercely that:
from the point of view of art in Paris, the most valuable contribution has been the fact that Picasso stayed here under the Occupation as an inspiration to others. The fact that he didn’t abandon the ship but went on about his business, quietly, unobtrusively, showing himself little in public other than in the immediate vicinity of his studio. He has painted prodigiously during these four years, never accepting anything from the Germans and often pleased to use his ingenuity with new materials as a necessity.
Picasso loved women and needed them to give energy to his life. But he was cruel to individual women, particularly Dora Maar, who died in 1997 aged eighty-nine and whom he never ceased to humiliate. His art always came first. According to Françoise Gilot, this piece of self-knowledge was learned young after he made a crucial promise to God that if his adored little sister, Conchita, recovered from diphtheria he would never paint again. In fact she died but Pablo continued to paint in any case, the promise discarded soon after it was made. Gilot said Picasso only told this story to the women in his life. ‘It was a warning that they, like Conchita, would be sacrificed on the altar of art, a fate all of them, except for Gilot, would share.’
This story about the primacy of art above people is in the forefront of my mind as I visit Paris’s Picasso museum. The museum, housed in a magnificent seventeenth-century mansion in the Marais district, reopened in October 2014 after five years of delays and infighting following a closure for renovation. I am stunned by the serenity of a 1918 painting of Mme Rosenberg, wife of Picasso’s dealer, impresario and friend Paul, and their baby daughter Micheline, who all fled Paris in 1940. This was one of the first pictures the Rosenberg family managed to regain after the war, discovering it in a small museum in Paris after it had been renamed by Göring Mother and Child. A gift from Picasso to his dealer, it must have been painted shortly after Rosenberg discovered that his wife had been having an affair with his business partner, Georges Wildenstein, a poignant story recounted in 2012 by Rosenberg’s granddaughter, Anne Sinclair, when she too was emerging from a painful personal history. The discovery nearly broke Rosenberg. Sinclair wrote a sensitive account of how her grandparents found a way of living together after that, adding that it helped her understand why her grandfather always appeared burdened. So much turbulence followed that sitting. So much history in one canvas.*
The beautiful, talented and sharp-witted Françoise Gilot, Picasso’s mistress for ten years from 1943, moved in with him only in 1946. Picasso frequently insisted that one cannot be a real woman without becoming a mother and, in 1947, their son Claude was born; a daughter, Paloma, was born in 1949, the year of the Dove. Yet Gilot’s independence was as much irritant as stimulant and when, in 1964, she wrote Life with Picasso, an amusing and revelatory book about their life in wartime Paris, an enraged Picasso tried to prevent publication. He failed in his attempt to silence her but, following this debacle, refused to see Claude or Paloma again.
German attempts to impose cultural as well as military supremacy on France, at the same time as drinking from the fountain of French art and literature, is a key theme of this book. The French art scene flourished during the war as the French, on balance, showed scant inclination to resist the aryanization of the art world. All that was required of artists who wished to exhibit at the Salon d’Automne, for example, was to sign a register stating that they were not Jewish. Although many Jewish dealers had been forced to flee, their collections dispersed, there was no shortage of others ready to step up, notably Martin Fabiani, a Corsican well known as a dealer in Nazi-looted art.
At the end of September 1949 the Commission de Récupération Artistique (CRA), in which Rose Valland had played such a crucial role, was disbanded. It had located some 60,000 artworks, 45,000 of which were returned to their original owners. (At the time of writing there are many thousands of artworks still missing.) After ten years in Berlin, Valland returned to France and became, finally, a curator for the Musées Nationaux. In 1948 the United States had awarded her the Medal of Freedom and the French government awarded her the Médaille de la Résistance and Légion d’honneur, as well as making her a Commandeur of the Ordre des Arts et des Lettres. But this quiet resistance operator, whose actions contributed to saving so much of France’s cultural heritage, has not enjoyed the recognition granted to other members of the resistance. Some speculate that the lack of recognition could be because she had no descendants, or, more likely, because she deliberately shunned exposing her private life, one that amid the 1940s glow of praise for resistance heroes was not easy to accept. Her close companion and lover was a British translator and academic, Dr Joyce Helen Heer, born in Liverpool in 1917, who worked at the US Embassy. Or could it be because she was involved in the business of saving not lives but works of art, history valuing the saving of lives over that of worldly goods? Furthermore, because of her professional skills, deep knowledge of art, and refusal to be cowed into submission, Valland was clearly a ‘troublesome’ presence to certain art dealers and a thorn in the side of some museum professionals. ‘Mentioning Valland could have reopened controversies in the art world and called into question the ownership of some valuable pieces kept by the national museums.’ Far from being the ‘shy, timid curator’ depicted by history, Rose Valland was a tireless and vocal advocate for the restitution of artwork. She was able to blend into the background when necessary … but she was not afraid to question the methods and actions of anyone at any time.’
In the case of opera, the Germans believed cultural supremacy was already theirs, especially where Wagner was concerned. But Germaine Lubin paid a high price for colluding with this notion, not returning to Paris until 1950 when she sought to resume her career with a recital. Although she met with some sympathy and gave a few further performances, it was a difficult transition, and when in 1953 her son committed suicide, she abandoned public appearances entirely. For the remainder of her life she became a voice teacher, giving lessons at her home on the Quai Voltaire in Paris. Among her notable pupils was the leading soprano Régine Crespin, but by the time she died in Paris in 1979, aged eighty-nine, she cut a sad and lonely figure.
Female performers who had worked in occupied Paris faced the most difficult transition of all, but those whom the public adored and needed were indulged. Although Arletty was forgiven, her wartime liaison was never forgotten and affected her ability to find work. Her first post-war film was not until 1949. When she met Hans-Jürgen Soehring in Paris for the last time that year, she realized that their love affair had ended as he was now married to a German woman with whom he had two sons, and was forging a successful career in the German diplomatic service. In 1960 he was appointed Ambassador of the Federal Republic of Germany to the newly formed Republic of the Congo. Shortly afterwards, during a family outing to the supposedly safe River Congo, he went swimming with his eldest son and disappeared under mysterious circumstances, presumably drowned. His body was never found. Arletty, deeply shocked, went to visit his widow and children in Bad Godesberg. But her own health was not good. Suffering for some time from deteriorating eyesight, by the time she died aged ninety-four in 1992 she was blind. She outlived her lover by thirty-two years.
Although in 1947 Sadie Rigal was declared a ‘privileged resident’ of France for her resistance activities, she left Paris soon afterwards and started a new life in the United States. She and Frédéric, not merely her dancing partner but the man who had saved her life, toured the United States together in 1948 as ‘Florence et Frederic’. (He dropped the accents from his name here.) This produced an emotional visit from the two sisters whom she had helped escape from Paris to Marseilles and eventually to New York, and who now sought her out to thank her. And while performing her routine at the Copacabana Club in New York, she met and fell in love with a young actor, director and academic, Stanley Waren. She trained a new ‘Florence’ for the act, remained in New York and married Stanley in 1949. She went on to enjoy a varied career on Broadway and in television, choreographing shows which Stanley directed in Africa, Taiwan and China. For another decade, from approximately 1973 until 1983, Florence Waren was Professor of Theatre and Dance at New York’s City College and a dance panellist on the New York State Council on the Arts. It was not until 1996 that, for the first time, she visited her parents’ graves in Johannesburg but was nonetheless still reluctant to talk about how she came to be a dancer in Paris and about her daring activities in the 1940s. Eventually in 2003, her son, Mark Waren, directed an award-winning documentary about his mother entitled Dancing Lessons. Thus finally did the world learn of her early life in the resistance, when she danced to please German officers quite unaware of her Jewish roots. She was just twenty when war broke out and she chose the path of active resistance. She could have returned home to a peaceful life in South Africa, as her father had urged her to do. Her son said he thought she was often ‘very scared. But I don’t think it was something she thought much about. It was simply what one did.’ She died, aged ninety-five, in 2012.
Edith Piaf became a national treasure; she belonged to Paris, or a certain part of it. In 1961 Janet Flanner described how, at one of Piaf’s final Paris performances, the singer shuffled on to the stage, walking with difficulty after a series of accidents and much ill health, dressed in an old black shift looking like a withered tramp, and ‘when the thunderous applause strikes her, she mostly acts as if she did not hear it’. Her trademark song, ‘Non, Je Ne Regrette Rien’, had been released only the previous year, in 1960, but it immediately resonated with many French people who saw it as ‘their’ song; they had done whatever they had needed to do to survive. Piaf, who was never precise about the number of fake identity papers she had taken with her on tours to Nazi Germany and never spoke about her relationships with the German officers she knew when she lived above L’Etoile de Kléber, died of liver cancer, aged forty-seven, in 1963, predeceasing by one day her friend Jean Cocteau. She was buried in the Père Lachaise cemetery in Paris, next to her two-year-old daughter.
Piaf, like Chanel, has been the subject of numerous films, plays and biographies, and in both cases their tangled lives remain mysterious. Neither was wholly bad nor wholly good, and both made accommodations with the truth. Their lives reflect the duality of Picasso’s Minotaur, that mythical half-man, half-beast so important to his art, symbolizing the humanity and bestiality of much human behaviour. Yet there is an unyielding fascination with these two Parisiennes, and there have been regular attempts to uncover the truth about whose side they were really on during the war. (Their own, of course.) Artistic and sexual collusion has always received more attention than economic collaboration; women who performed on stage to a German audience were highly visible and therefore an easy target, while economic collaboration is harder to prove. No postwar government wanted to destroy the seeds of its own recovery with potentially dangerous consequences by punishing those responsible. In the course of researching this book I have interviewed descendants of those whose Jewish or part-Jewish families were probably saved because they owned construction companies or because they manufactured wire products, including barbed wire – activities critical to the Germans. But why talk about what at the time was necessary to preserve lives, however unsavoury the behaviour may seem today? Better to keep silent.
By contrast, there has been a prolonged and inequitable silence in France about the role of so many ordinary women who in some way resisted the occupiers – like the young woman who, persuaded by her Catholic priest, cycled around Paris distributing anti-German newsletters, or tractes as she calls them, an activity for which she could have been imprisoned if caught, yet which was important in persuading others in Paris that they were not alone in opposing the Occupation. Her work was significant enough for her to have preserved these tractes for seventy years and now, in her nineties, she shows me these fragile documents on fading brown paper. They are called Témoignage Chrétien.* The ones I see declare that ‘France disarmed is momentarily reduced to powerlessness but will not consent to let herself remain like that, to deny her traditions, her hope, her honour and her soul.’ They offer a spiritual and patriotic form of resistance against Hitlerism. Yet the woman who risked her life to deliver these asks me not to mention her name.
‘Why?’ I ask.
‘Oh well, what I did was nothing,’ she shrugs.
The full names of many other noble French concierges who sent police away knowing there were Jews, resisters or evaders hiding in their buildings will never be known to history. One such was Nana, the brave former concierge who during the Occupation also ran a little shop behind whose displays of soap dozens of wanted men and women hid. Nana tried to do the impossible, and with the help of a chaplain, some nuns and one or other of her ‘old aunts’ or ‘cousins’ promised to get parcels to imprisoned resisters like André Amar, husband of Jacqueline Mesnil-Amar. At least posterity knows of her existence.
Only in May 2015, seventy years after the end of the war, were two of the best-known female résistantes, Geneviève de Gaulle and Germaine Tillion, friends since Ravensbrück, honoured at a ceremony in France’s hallowed Panthéon, a secular mausoleum for the great with its famous inscription to the nation’s exemplary men: ‘AUX GRANDS HOMMES LA PATRIE RECONNAISSANTE’. In fact the coffins of the two women were buried with only earth taken from their graves but without their remains which, according to family wishes, were to stay undisturbed. In 1964 President de Gaulle, back in office, had arranged for the transfer there of the remains of Jean Moulin, the resistance hero and his own personal emissary who was tortured and murdered by the Nazis in 1943. But until May 2015 the only woman there in her own right was the scientist, Marie Curie.
When President Hollande announced that he was planning a major ceremony to commemorate De Gaulle and Tillion entering the Panthéon (two men, Jean Zay and Pierre Brossolette, were also being honoured), the story made headline news because the function of women in the resistance has never been fully acknowledged. It was a far greater role than the one they were allowed in society at the time. After the war, many women were both self-effacing, insisting that they did little more than ‘simply’ deliver newsletters or act as couriers, and keen to get on with their normal lives – an attitude given official sanction by French authorities – or else concerned to protect children by shielding them from the harsh realities of the Occupation and war. In addition, it was harder for women to prove that they had actually been ‘combatants’ handling weapons. Only six women (four of them posthumously) were awarded the title Compagnons de la Libération by de Gaulle between 1940 and 1946, out of a total of 1,038,* and just 1,090 women received the Médaille de la Résistance (a lesser honour) out of 48,000 awarded in total between 1943 and 1947. But now, with the admission to the august Panthéon of de Gaulle and Tillion, the traditional understanding of how women resisted the German occupiers is being dramatically challenged.
In 1999 I met Mme Geneviève de Gaulle Anthonioz. She had just written her wartime memoirs, having been pressed to do so for years, and was being celebrated as the ‘Mother Teresa of France’ for her lifetime of work heading a major welfare organization for the homeless which she had helped found, the ATD (All Together in Dignity) Fourth World movement. The organization’s aim is to help those who are most marginalized escape the cycle of deprivation by their own efforts, and it therefore focuses on providing street libraries, workshops and training, rather than on handouts.
What was abundantly clear in the time I spent with her, a view reinforced since from meeting many other résistantes, is that what they had to endure during the war became the defining experience of the rest of their lives. This is not to say that they could not move on, nor is it simply a matter of who their friends were, but it defined how they lived and what they did. In all her subsequent work, whether for the deportees at ADIR or for the homeless on the streets of Paris, Geneviève de Gaulle clung to the reality of what had made her life bearable in the camps – several small tokens of friendship which enabled survival and hope.
In the course of our 1999 meeting, a still spritely Geneviève de Gaulle walked over to a chest and took out a large gold box once filled with chocolates. ‘Mes petits souvenirs,’ she said with a wry smile. ‘I do not show these to many people.’ Her hands shook slightly – the result of Parkinson’s, she told me – as she slowly opened the box and, one by one, pulled out the contents. There were false identity and ration cards, not the ones she was arrested with as she used several; a letter from her father, Xavier de Gaulle, the only one she ever received while incarcerated; and then items of almost unbearable poignancy: a doll with pink dress and beige lace that her friend Jacqueline Péry d’Alincourt somehow smuggled to her, a needle-case made from the stolen leather of a German tank commander’s beret, miniature playing-cards she made herself and the small embroidered cloth bag in which she kept her bread ration.
Geneviève suffered forced labour, beatings and semi-starvation during her year in Ravensbrück, as well as witnessing scenes that would haunt her for the rest of her life. She saw a female German guard severing a prisoner’s throat with a spade while screaming with hatred. And yet, on her release in 1945, she was determined to do something to improve the post-war world. Despite the obvious advantage of her name, she shunned the prospect of a political career. ‘Quite the reverse, I wanted to transcend politics. For me the most important goal in life is to combat misery and exclusion.’ In 1957 she was introduced to Père Joseph Wresinski, a Catholic priest working with the homeless and hopeless in Paris’s cardboard city. She explained that the expressions in the eyes of those she saw there reminded her so keenly of the haunting eyes of the Ravensbrück inmates that she felt compelled to devote the rest of her life to lobbying on their behalf and building up the ATD.
Jeannie Rousseau – still alive in her elegant nineties at the time of writing – was another whose story has had to wait. She chose to keep silent about her wartime exploits until the Washington Post reporter David Ignatius ‘discovered’ her at a party and persuaded her, in 1998, to give an interview. Realizing how extraordinary her account was, he deposited for posterity a lengthy recorded interview with her at the Washington International Spy Museum. But why wait until almost fifty years after the events? Was it a natural reticence, a question of moving on with life, or the sobering realization which came with age that several women had lost their lives at Torgau as a result of her hot-headed heroism? Jeannie, like many, so young when she first resisted, believes her refusal to accept death or to accept what was happening around her was partly because she was so young. When she finally agreed to talk about her wartime life she simply scoffed at that question. ‘I just did it, that’s all … it wasn’t a choice. It was what you did. At the time, we all thought we would die.’ As Ignatius put it: ‘And that’s her answer: Heroism isn’t a matter of choice, but of reflex. It’s a property of the central nervous system, not the higher brain.’
The notion that resisting was a visceral response was important to many of the résistantes who believed fundamentally that resisting the occupier was not for them an act of politics. Their behaviour was above politics, as Geneviève de Gaulle maintained. ‘Very few of us were anti-fascist before the war, my mother, Andrée Bès, a Ravensbrück deportee, always insisted,’ said Marie-Odile Tuloup, her daughter. ‘She could not accept standing by while her country was invaded and while Jews were taken away and murdered.’ In other words, it was an automatic response based on her instinctive moral values.
Jeannie Rousseau’s behaviour at Ravensbrück offers an insight into the deepest complexities of how good people ‘should’ react to evil. Not all the other Parisiennes in Ravensbrück felt the same certainty about how to respond to their jailers, and although the camp contained many examples of sisterly support and survival systems, there were, too, compliance with oppression, lying, stealing and cruelty. Faced with depravity, nobility was not always possible. The story of Anne Spoerry, a young woman training as a doctor to save lives, who joined the resistance at the beginning of the war, is particularly fascinating – and horrifying – as it reveals how easily good motives can, under extreme circumstances, all too easily become warped. Spoerry spent the rest of her life in Africa, searching for redemption.
Odette Fabius and Genevieve de Gaulle, friends since Ravensbrück, on the occasion of Fabius being awarded the Officier de la Légion d’honneur in 1971
The camps provided many Parisiennes with extreme circumstances which tested their moral reflexes. The author of a recent study of Ravensbrück, Sarah Helm, believes the camp has been marginalized for too long in histories of the war, ‘and yet it is precisely because this was a camp for women that Ravensbrück should have shaken the conscience of the world … Ravensbrück showed what mankind was capable of doing to women.’ It also shows what women are capable of doing for each other.
War, as always, is a catalyst which gave some Parisiennes, such as Lily Pastré and Odette Fabius, a sense of purpose which they could not always recreate in the post-war years, sometimes with disastrous consequences. It was the war which had brought the very different worlds of Odette Fabius and Pierre Ferri-Pisani to collide, while a sensation of risk fed their passionate relationship. In 1956 Odette and Robert divorced and seven years later, in 1963, Pierre put a revolver into his mouth and committed suicide. Like so many who had managed not to die in the camps, ultimately he was unable to survive in the world – whether from a sense of guilt, humiliation or helplessness. Odette was devastated. She went immediately to Marseilles where she met his son, Charles, a lawyer. He told her that three factors had precipitated his father’s decline and death: the first was undoubtedly the rupture with her, the second and third were political disappointments. He tried to regain his position as a powerful union leader, but, facing opposition from a younger generation, lost elections and was caught up in attempts by the CIA – who viewed him as little more than a Corsican gangster – to use him in the battle to control dockworkers in the fight against communism. Odette, removed from that side of his life, wrote after his death: ‘Now I realized I had lost not only an old love but the best friend I ever had on this earth.’
The suicide rate of Holocaust survivors is today generally accepted to be almost three times that of the general population.* As the world today is still struggling to try and understand the camps and the mass killings that became the defining events of the twentieth century, it may seem too obvious to state that nobody ever ‘got over’ the experience of the camps. For many survivors, this meant they had reached a point where they could not continue to live. The Austrian writer Thomas Bernhard explained: ‘We’re constantly correcting, and correcting ourselves, most rigorously, because we recognize at every moment that we did it all wrong (wrote it, thought it, made it all wrong) … that everything to this point in time is a falsification, so we correct this falsification, and then we again correct the correction of this falsification and we correct the result of the correction of a correction and so forth.’ Too often suicide became the ultimate correction.
Some survivors managed to continue living, often responding by creating a family, writing books or teaching. Although for decades there seemed to be no appetite for hearing their stories, by the 1980s that had changed markedly. There was a hunger to hear them before the generation that had lived through such evil and terror died out. One of the last films made by the celebrated French film director François Truffaut – and one of his most successful financially and critically – was Le Dernier Métro (1980), based on the story of Marcel Leibovici and Margaret Kelly, whose Bluebell dance troupe had enjoyed great success in post-war Paris. One of the screenwriters was Jean-Claude Grumberg who, as a child, had also known the fear of being hidden because he owed his own survival to his mother’s brave decision to hand him and his small brother to a passeuse for an unknown destination.
In the attenuated legacy of the Second World War, many reputations were created and destroyed, but occasionally fame came too late for those being celebrated. In 1942, when the novelist Irène Némirovsky was deported, she was a successful and moderately well-known writer in France but little known outside. Two months later, after her husband, Michel Epstein, had also been arrested, the family’s two daughters, thirteen-year-old Denise and five-year-old Elisabeth, were briefly picked up but released again, thanks to a German officer who noticed a resemblance to his own daughter. ‘He told Julie, our governess: “we’re not going to take the children this evening. Go home. We’ll come for them tomorrow morning.” The governess took the hint. She got in touch with her brother, who was in the resistance, and we were hidden.’
Miraculously, they took with them a small suitcase with clothes and personal mementoes, including some manuscripts filled with minuscule handwriting. ‘I did not know what it was, but I knew it was precious to mother,’ Denise said later. But the girls put the case away and did not read the contents. They survived the next few years thanks to the courageous actions of a teacher, friends and Julie, who arranged for the girls to be hidden in convents and safe houses until after the war, when they realized that both their parents had been killed. Like many others, they got on with their lives and raised families until, in 1992, the younger daughter, Elisabeth Gille, published an imagined biography of her mother entitled Le Mirador, for which she used some of the letters found in the suitcase. There are differing accounts and dates as to precisely when the daughters realized the manuscript existed. But the writer Myriam Anissimov, approached by Denise because she knew Romain Gary who had known Némirovsky, was one of the first in the French literary world who saw the hidden notebooks and, realizing they contained an incomplete novel, suggested publication. The reception was ecstatic. Némirovsky’s harrowing and tragic fate, and the story of how the unfinished work had remained hidden for years in the suitcase, may have contributed to the publicity, but the book, Suite Française, was hailed as a masterpiece and has since been translated into dozens of languages. Suddenly, Irène Némirovsky was described as a literary genius and compared to Balzac and Tolstoy, her success crowned by the 2004 award of the prestigious Prix Renaudot, never before awarded posthumously.
In 2014 a film was made of Suite Française, bringing her work to a still wider public and helping to show the complex web of what had had to be done to survive. But it also revived arguments about Némirovsky’s own blindness to anti-Semitism in France until it was too late; and discussions around whether or not the old-established Jews of Paris had sacrificed the interests and lives of immigrant (or so-called ‘foreign’) Jews in order to safeguard those of native-born French citizens – a discomfiting argument which risks overlooking who the real enemy was.
Walking around Paris today, one is assailed not only by memorials honouring the role of brave resisters, but also by a number of plaques which finally admit that the French state itself was responsible for taking some Jewish children to their deaths. One of the first in this vein was unveiled on 16 July 1995 at the Gare d’Austerlitz, for the Jews arrested in the Vél’ d’Hiv round-up, the same day that President Chirac made his important speech accepting state responsibility for the Vél’ d’Hiv tragedy. There are street names that honour those who gave their lives in the fight against the Nazis: Avenue Georges Mandel and Place Hélène Berr are just two among myriad others.
In 2008, more than fifty years after her death, Hélène Berr’s diary was finally published. It’s an important document not merely because it is all that is left of this talented young woman, so full of musical and literary promise, but also because Berr was so insightful about the nature of the choices facing her and the inevitable catastrophe lurking at the heart of the Union Générale des Israélites de France, the UGIF, itself. This tainted body, neither collaborationist devil nor resistance bastion for Jewish survival it might once have aspired to be, was, as the American historian Richard Cohen subtly argued, an organization with an innate ‘precarious duality’ at its core. Picasso’s Minotaur again. Eventual publication of The Journal of Hélène Berr was largely thanks to the determination of her niece, Mariette Job, who had known of its existence since 1946 when the family housekeeper gave it to Hélène’s brother, who passed it on to Jean Morawiecki. In the 1990s Mariette searched in earnest and found an elderly Morawiecki, by then retired as a diplomat and living once more in Paris.
‘He gave me the manuscript, which he had been keeping on top of a very high cupboard. It had been a weight almost too heavy for him to bear,’ Mariette explained. He agreed to publication which was, after all, what Hélène had wanted, and wrote in the epilogue, ‘In that sink of iniquity, Hélène never gave up on the future. She never lost the strength to struggle against the abjection all around her. She preserved her soul and helped her comrades keep theirs … May this journal survive down the ages so as to nurture the memory of all those whose words were annihilated.’
One of Hélène’s friends, Jacqueline Mesnil-Amar, who also kept a diary, questioned how she herself had been able to continue living when so many of her friends had been killed. ‘Is there an element of choice in the ordeal? How is it possible that one is able, in spite of everything, to bear it, even to accept it? Is there a part of ourselves, a point at which we consent to it, as the price we pay to cleanse ourselves of the remorse that lies beneath the web of an almost happy life? A kind of penance … is it a betrayal to be alive?’ Eventually Jacqueline found a solace in work, helping Jewish déportées less fortunate than herself, and in identifying with Jewishness.
Lise London, having survived first the Spanish Civil War, then months in French prisons followed by almost three years in Ravensbrück and the 1945 death march, finally wrote her memoirs in the 1990s, La Mégère de la Rue Daguerre or The Shrew of the Rue Daguerre – the name given to her by the Vichy Ambassador to the Nazis in Paris, Fernand de Brinon, when she organized the food riot in that street. She said communism gave her faith and strength to survive prison and torture. ‘To be a communist was more than just belonging to a party: it was about faith. There was a religious element to it. We wanted to spread the revolution. When you lost faith, everything collapsed.’
After the war, she went to live in Czechoslovakia, the birthplace of her adored Jewish husband Artur London, with whom she had shared so much over the previous decade. Having survived Mauthausen, he wanted to return to his native land and became a successful communist politician in a Soviet-backed government. However, he fell from grace, was arrested in 1951 and, accused of being a Zionist traitor, had to face a Stalinist show trial. Eventually freed and ‘rehabilitated’ in 1956, following Stalin’s death, he and his family moved back to Paris, where Lise continued to work for left-leaning, progressive causes. In 1970 a play written by him called The Trial was made into a film, starring Simone Signoret as Lise and Yves Montand, who had to lose more than thirty pounds in order to resemble the half-starved Artur. The play was based on notes which Lise had managed to smuggle out of his Soviet prison. She was a loyal and brave wife who remained passionate about justice in general and defiant to the end. According to her son, Michel, she rarely mentioned the Nazi camps. But in 2005, after Artur’s death, she decided to take her family to Mauthausen. ‘It was very emotional for her but she didn’t lose her composure. She showed the grandchildren the barracks, the ovens and the striped pyjamas as if it were the most natural thing in the world.’ In her final interview she said she was still a communist, ‘but not in a political sense any more: I tore up my membership card. I remain a communist out of loyalty to all those comrades who shared our dreams, and who died for freedom.’
But among the plethora of volumes published in recent years, not all enhanced reputations. Bernard Ullmann, the journalist son of Lisette de Brinon by her first husband, waited until 2004 when he was eighty-two to publish a disturbing book about how his Jewish mother had survived the war married to a leading anti-Semite such as Fernand de Brinon. Lisette, born into an assimilated family of bankers, became a hostess of enormous sparkle and superficiality in pre-war Paris, and converted to Catholicism shortly after divorcing her first husband, Claude Ullmann. She always believed that, although anti-Semitism existed in France, ‘it couldn’t reach people like us’. Ullmann vividly describes how, the day before he was smuggled out of France in 1942 in the trunk of his mother’s car so that he could fight in North Africa – a ploy part-organized by his stepfather – he watched the deeply anti-Semitic film Jew Süss and was then taken for dinner at La Tour d’Argent by de Brinon. When de Brinon rose to prominence under Pétain, he protected Lisette and her two sons as long as they remained out of sight, but it was protection of which Ullmann grew deeply ashamed: ashamed of himself and his good manners in never facing up to the man who was his mother’s husband; ashamed that this was the man to whom he owed his life. In 1947, Ullmann had the good grace to visit de Brinon in prison as he prepared for his trial for treason, days before he was executed by firing squad. Lisette, who had herself been briefly held in Fresnes, always remained loyal to her husband’s memory, continuing to call herself the Marquise de Brinon as she socialized in Paris with friends from Vichy until she died, broke, in a Paris nursing home in 1982.
In 1992 a new edition of Denise Dufournier’s book La Maison des mortes was published with a ‘reflection’ by the author, prompted partly by the number of letters she had received from mothers of the pilots whom she had helped to escape, young men who were often killed on their next sortie. The women wanted to thank her for looking after their sons when they needed help. But she was also motivated by what she perceived as a lack of comprehension, especially in England, about how much women like her had done. ‘It would be so nice if the English could understand that we did run massive risks.’ Like many women who resisted the Occupation, Denise Dufournier went for many years without official recognition of those risks. In her own case, marriage to a British diplomat precluded her from receiving a foreign award until he retired, whereupon she was, finally, made an Officier of the Légion d’honneur. But others did not receive official recognition until the closing years of the last century or even into the twenty-first. Pearl Witherington, one of the most famous of the SOE women, who actually commanded her own réseau, the Wrestler network amounting to almost 3,000 men at one point, rejected the offer of a civil MBE with an icy note pointing out that ‘there was nothing remotely “civil” about what I did. I didn’t sit behind a desk all day.’ She later accepted a military MBE and in 2004 was presented with a CBE by the Queen, who told her at the ceremony: ‘We should have done this a long time ago.’ Finally in 2006, more than sixty years after she parachuted back into France, Witherington was awarded her parachute wings, an award which she considered a greater honour than either the MBE or the CBE.
One of the most painful controversies I encountered throughout the research for this book is the distinction between Parisiennes deported because they chose to resist, who were therefore decorated by the state on their return, and Parisiennes deported because they were Jewish, and were therefore victims. Vivette Samuel volunteered for the children’s organization OSE during the war and subsequently for the deported women’s organization ADIR. She wrote sensitively of the great love and admiration she had for the women she met at ADIR, but also of the misunderstandings she encountered. ‘Because they had fought in the resistance network I heard them express only contempt for the racial deportees. I had nightmares about it but … at the end of my three-month probationary period [at ADIR], I decided to stay.’ But, as my interviewees constantly reminded me, ‘C’est très compliqué,’ and sometimes the divide even fell within families, as it did in the Jacob family. Denise, later Vernay, although Jewish, worked as a résistante and was deported to Ravensbrück; but Simone, later Simone Veil, along with her mother and her other sister Madeleine, were all taken to Auschwitz-Birkenau as Jews. Mme Jacob, the girls’ mother, died of typhoid in March 1945 after surviving the death march, while Madeleine survived the camps but was killed in a car crash in the 1950s. Vernay, on returning from Ravensbrück, was made Commandeur of the Légion d’honneur and awarded numerous other medals including the Grand-Croix of the Ordre national du Mérite, the Croix de guerre 1939–1945 avec palmes and the Médaille de la Résistance avec rosette. Veil, however, although she had a glittering political career, best known for her determination to legalize abortion in France – the law was finally passed in 1975 after bitter debate – was awarded the Légion d’honneur only in 2012, albeit the Grand-Croix, the highest level. ‘We were only victims and not heroes,’ she complained in 1993. ‘What we experienced mattered little, something people did not fail to tell us in a brutal way, even those belonging to the associations of former resisters.’ Veil also faced virulent personal attacks comparing the legalization of abortion to the Holocaust; one parliamentary député asked if she would agree to the idea of throwing embryos into crematorium ovens.And, as historians weigh up the tally of what exactly France is responsible for, it needs pointing out that while the Vichy government deported a shocking number of Jews living in France – 76,000 out of a population of 330,000* – to their deaths between 1940 and 1944, on the other hand the proportion of Jews – approximately 25 per cent – deported from France was much lower than that deported from Belgium, Norway or the Netherlands, where it was as high as 73 per cent. This disparity, often described as the French paradox, is often used to defend the Vichy State as well as the French population, which undoubtedly worked hard to rescue many thousands of Jews. But in a sense that misses the point, which is that had Vichy and its accomplices in the French population not collaborated so actively, thousands of Jews would not have been sent to their deaths, especially in 1942, when the Germans alone did not have the resources to do this effectively.
But war, of course, is neither about merely statistics nor about playing with reputations. War destroys lives. Toquette Jackson never fully recovered her health after Ravensbrück and lived quietly at the family home at Enghien-les-Bains, outside Paris, until she died in 1968 at the American Hospital, where her husband Sumner had worked so tirelessly. She had been continually ill, too sick to return to nursing or even to work at all, although she had talked about having a small business in Paris as a way of affording life in the city. She struggled, but retained both her dignity and her courage and was decorated with many awards, including the Croix de guerre, the Croix du combattant volontaire and, in 1946, Chevalière of the Légion d’honneur, promoted to Officier in 1964. No amount of medals could, however, compensate for loneliness. Some days she wrote in her diary simply: ‘Nobody came …’ In the event Phillip, her son, looked after his mother. He too was highly decorated, testified at the War Crimes Tribunal at Hamburg in May 1946, studied to be an engineer, married and brought up a family. At the time of writing he is a resident of Les Invalides, the distinguished home for war veterans in the centre of Paris, where we met to discuss his mother.
Wallis and Edward, the Duke and Duchess of Windsor, no matter how hard they tried, failed to shift perceptions of themselves in the post-war world as defeatists or, worse, as Nazi sympathizers, and were from then on purposeless exiles, part of European café society moving from one reception to another. From time to time Wallis complained to the British Ambassador that her husband was not being informed of current events or invited to official receptions, or both. Hoping in vain that the British royal family would see fit finally to give Wallis her royal initials – HRH – thus ensuring that she was curtseyed to and therefore enabling the couple to return to England unashamed, they declined to find a permanent home anywhere else. New York, Canada (Edward had a ranch in Alberta) and the south of France, where they continued to rent their heavily staffed, pre-war villa La Croë, were all considered. They became an isolated element of postwar Paris life, or of a certain part of it, le gratin, invited to fashion shows, to jewellers and in Wallis’s case to the Elizabeth Arden beauty salon, which she especially liked as she rarely paid and was always given her own robe with the initials SAR (Son Altesse Royale) – the French version of royal initials – on the pocket. But waiting to see what would happen in Britain was an unsettling existence, so in 1948 they rented 85 Rue de la Faisanderie, a palatial building where some of the decoration had been created by Wallis’s pre-war friend Elsie de Wolfe, but for which neither of them felt any particular affection. And then, after the coronation of Queen Elizabeth II in 1953, when it became clear that the royal family’s attitude towards Wallis had not softened, they decided to settle in Paris.
They accepted an offer from the French government to live at 4 Champ d’Entraînement, a fine three-storey, turn-of-the-century mansion in the Bois de Boulogne, a house which came with four acres as well as its own history, having been expropriated from Renault after the war on the grounds that the motor manufacturer had collaborated. Louis Renault had initially refused to produce tanks for the Germans but ended up making trucks. In the poisonous atmosphere of the Liberation, he was arrested on 23 September 1944 and taken to Fresnes, where he died in ‘mysterious circumstances’ a month later, awaiting trial. The company was then nationalized by General de Gaulle, who briefly lived in the Bois de Boulogne house himself – his wife, the ever modest Yvonne, described it as ‘a degree above what I would have liked’. It was offered to the Windsors on a fifty-year lease for a peppercorn rent and it was here that Wallis undertook some grand entertaining (the Duke died in 1972). It was not until the 1980s that the formidable lawyer known as Maître Suzanne Blum came to dominate the Duchess’s life. During the Second World War, Suzanne Weill (as she then was) and her lawyer husband managed to escape to New York, returning to Paris in 1945. From the moment she established her law practice in Paris, Maître Blum began acquiring a remarkable list of clients, mostly prominent figures in the film industry, but she also defended Bernard Faÿ, the prominent collaborator, protector and friend of the American writer, Gertrude Stein. In her spare time, under a pseudonym, Maître Blum wrote detective stories. Her own complicated life would have provided a good plot.
But while the Windsor reputation was suffering, Florence Gould managed to keep hers intact and, in spite of her success as a hostess entertaining well-known anti-Semites, to overcome taints of collaboration. She died in 1993 and left the bulk of her fortune to establish the Florence Gould Foundation, an American charity devoted to supporting the arts, especially Franco-American cultural exchanges. New York boasts a Florence Gould Hall and San Francisco a Florence Gould Theatre.
Many buildings in Paris, as much as people, were swiftly busy reinventing themselves. Just as the prison at Fresnes was used in 1945 to house collaborators awaiting trial, often holding prisoners in the same cells where resisters had been locked up before them, so Drancy too continued to function in the immediate post-war period but with different inmates. Then slowly, as 1940s France found itself confronted with an accommodation crisis, the buildings there, the La Muette complex, were returned to their original purpose: housing. Since 1976 there has been a large and powerful monument at the entrance to the buildings dedicated to Drancy prisoners and created by Shelomo Selinger, a former Jewish deportee of Polish origin. Just beyond is a symbolic freight car of the same type as those used to transport the deportees to their deaths. But visiting Drancy, so recognizable from photographs of the days when it was an overflowing sink of inhumanity, is a deeply disconcerting experience. When I asked a resident of the flats how he could live in a place of such sorrow and pain he looked at me strangely before replying, ‘But everywhere in Paris has a history. Mostly there are places where Germans lived. Surely this is better than that?’
Some battles, far from ending, were just beginning in the 1940s and dragged on for decades. The passionate Francophile Caroline Ferriday, who never married and devoted her life to helping those who had suffered in France, took on the fight for compensation for the young Polish lapins, the girls, now often deformed women, who had been the subjects of hideous experimentation by the Nazis in Ravensbrück. Informed of their plight by Jacqueline Péry d’Alincourt, who had befriended a number of lapins in the camps, Ferriday was horrified to discover that as the women now lived in communist Poland, with whom the West Germans did not currently have diplomatic relations, they were not eligible to be included in the compensation agreements for Nazi victims, which started to pay out reparations from 1952 onwards. They were abandoned and ignored in the post-war world, many of them requiring constant medical treatment for a range of chronic conditions including cardiac illness, hepatitis and cystitis, not to mention financial assistance. Yet, despite her forceful arguments, Ferriday could not bring about a change in the German position. For nearly twenty years she fought and wrote articles about them and invited them to stay with her at her beautiful family home in Bethlehem, Connecticut. In 1959, nearly fifteen years after the end of the war, thirty-five of the women came to the United States for medical treatment, Ferriday having played a crucial role in convincing them to travel as well as helping to raise the funds. In the early 1960s, following a series of articles in US newspapers which Ferriday helped orchestrate, the West German government bowed to international pressure and full indemnities were finally granted to 136 of the most severely handicapped survivors, while the rest received partial compensation.
Life under oppression, whether at Ravensbrück, in Vichy or in Paris, revealed what women were capable of in extremis. ‘Indignation can move mountains,’ declared Germaine Tillion. ‘France in 1940 was unbelievable. There were no men left. It was women who started the Resistance. Women didn’t have the vote, they didn’t have bank accounts, they didn’t have jobs. Yet we women were capable of resisting.’ Jeannie Rousseau took the path of resistance, Elisabeth de Rothschild took another, Renée Puissant a third. Yet few people at the time saw themselves as having choices or making decisions, neither résistantes nor vegetable-sellers who needed to be paid in order to live; nor black-marketeers who saw opportunities waiting to be seized; nor Jewish mothers who gave their children away; nor women of le tout Paris who had lunches and bought fine clothes; nor singers, dancers and prostitutes who continued with the work they were trained or accustomed to do. Many of the latter maintained that even had the French denied social contacts to the Germans during the Occupation, nothing would have been different, and arguably daily life would have been more painful for the French. Life had to go on. Indeed, to deaden Paris in that way risked punishing Parisians more than Germans, they believed. Most just tried to get by however they could.
But what seems so clear today is that there were choices. Writers, artists and performers had to submit their work to German officials for permission to show it. Inevitably this meant submitting to compromise and collaboration in varying degrees. Silence or leaving the country was, for some, an option; performing but not socializing after the performance was another; turning a blind eye to behaviour of which they disapproved was the easiest. For some women the choice involved little more than a decision to wear an outrageous hat or to walk out of a restaurant. For others it involved making a deal or a sexual exchange. But surviving in occupied Paris for many women demanded some sort of choice, some sort of decision, about how they would accommodate living with the Germans. It is not for the rest of us to judge but, with imagination, we can to try to understand.
* And that history is still being made as in 2012, following publication of Sinclair’s book 21 Rue La Boétie, the building’s current owner organized a marble plaque for the façade bearing Paul Rosenberg’s name and that of the artists whose works he exhibited there (Anne Sinclair, conversation with the author 28 October 2013).
* The first number of Témoignage Chrétien (in 1941) was the work of Pierre Chaillet, a Jesuit priest trained in Austria and Rome who was shocked by the apathetic response to the Occupation of most French people, including many Catholics.
* They were Berty Albrecht, Laure Diebold, Marie Hackin, Simone Michel-Lévy, Emilienne Moreau-Evrard and Marcelle Henry.
* And sometimes it is those close to survivors who turn to suicide, such as the younger brother of Marceline Rozenberg who never got over the murder of their father and, at the age of forty-three, killed himself.
* According to the Mémorial de la Shoah the figures are a synthesis of the latest estimates by historians at the Yad Vashem memorial in Jerusalem and the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington.