Introduction

“Anne Sebba has the nearly miraculous gift of combining the vivid intimacy of the lives of women during The Occupation with the history of the time. This is a remarkable book.” ?Edmund de Waal, New York Times bestselling author of The Hare with the Amber Eyes

New York Times bestselling author Anne Sebba explores a devastating period in Paris's history and tells the stories of how women survived?or didn’t?during the Nazi occupation.

Paris in the 1940s was a place of fear, power, aggression, courage, deprivation, and secrets. During the occupation, the swastika flew from the Eiffel Tower and danger lurked on every corner. While Parisian men were either fighting at the front or captured and forced to work in German factories, the women of Paris were left behind where they would come face to face with the German conquerors on a daily basis, as waitresses, shop assistants, or wives and mothers, increasingly desperate to find food to feed their families as hunger became part of everyday life.

When the Nazis and the puppet Vichy regime began rounding up Jews to ship east to concentration camps, the full horror of the war was brought home and the choice between collaboration and resistance became unavoidable. Sebba focuses on the role of women, many of whom faced life and death decisions every day. After the war ended, there would be a fierce settling of accounts between those who made peace with or, worse, helped the occupiers and those who fought the Nazis in any way they could.

Editorial Review

No editorial review at this time.

Excerpt

Prologue

Les Parisiennes

Paris, mid-July 2015, and the city is swelteringly hot. By July 19, thunder is in the air. I am sitting on a temporary stage, waiting for the rain, enraptured by an unremarkable woman in her late eighties telling a most remarkable story. Annette Krajcer is one of the few surviving victims of the most notorious roundup in French twentieth century history. When she was twelve she and her mother and sister were arrested by French police and taken in French buses to a sports stadium, the Vélodrome d’Hiver, along with 13,000 others including more than 4,000 children. After three days held in disgusting conditions with almost nothing to eat or drink and totally inadequate sanitary facilities, they were crammed into cattle cars and taken to another camp, Pithiviers, which was just a little better as they slept on straw-filled bunks and were given some meagre rations. But, after two weeks here, their mother was taken away and the sisters never saw her again. Abandoned, they were now taken back to Drancy, a holding camp in Paris. Most of the children who returned with them on this occasion did not survive much longer as they were now shipped to Auschwitz and gassed. But Annette and her sister Leah were, miraculously, saved. A cousin who worked as a secretary in the camp, saw their names on a list and managed to organise their liberation. They spent the next three years in hiding but at the end of the War were reunited with their father, who had been a prisoner of war working on a German farm in the Ardennes.

Today Annette is recounting those events to an audience of Parisian dignitaries, journalists and mostly elderly people. Her disturbing story is especially distressing because the mention of lists is a reminder of how the Jewish community itself was forced to compile names and addresses of its own members. She cannot, she says, pass a day without thinking of the other 4,000 children who did not have such useful cousins.

Also telling a story that oppressive morning is Séverine Darcque, a 33 year-old teacher who owes her existence to Pierrette Pauchard, a farmer’s widow from Burgundy recently declared a Righteous Among Nations. ** the official term used by the state of Israel to describe non-Jews who risked their lives during the Holocaust to save Jews from extermination by the Nazis Pierrette was among those French who put their own lives in danger to help Jews survive and Séverine’s dramatic story shows how courageously many ordinary French people behaved. Pierrette saved at least five Jewish children who grew up alongside her own, one of whom was an abandoned 18 month-old baby named Colette Morgenbesser. Séverine is Colette’s granddaughter but thinks of herself as a descendant of Pierrette too.

The stadium no longer exists but this ceremony is now held annually on a nearby site in the shadow of the Eiffel Tower following President Jacques Chirac’s ground breaking 1995 speech when he officially recognised French culpability for the 1942 round up. The Vichy government, then headed by Pierre Laval, agreed to help the Nazi occupiers by delivering up all the foreign Jews, and their children born in France who were therefore French. The numbers of those who lived through the events being commemorated diminishes each year but some of their children now attend to honour their parents’ memory. In less than an hour, the two women making formal addresses have revealed some of the myriad narratives which make up the complex patchwork of experiences in France during Les Années Noires. In different ways they have both shown that ‘the past’ is not yet ‘the past’ in France. But above all they demonstrate how harshly the burden of decision so often fell on women, usually mothers, and how murky was the range of choices.

Echoes of the past continually resonate in modern day France, as what happened here during the 1940’s has left scars of such impenetrable depth that many have not yet healed. There is still a fear among some that touching the scars may reopen them. Nearly eighty years after the conflict ended, I am frequently warned as I plan interviews and research for this book, to take into account that what to me is history is still the highly sensitive present for many; some people may not talk to me. Nowhere was this more evident than in modern day Vichy, the spa town which became Government headquarters after the Fall of France in 1940. The hotel which housed Marshall Pétain and many other government officials for four years now serves as the town’s Tourist Information Office, yet the young staff working there when I visited were unable to confirm any details of life in the town in the 1940’s, a period about which they apparently knew nothing. My request to see the plaque, located inside Vichy’s opera house, which commemorates that it was there that on 10 July 1940 the National Assembly voted full power to Field Marshal Philippe Pétain, thus ending France’s Third Republic, was turned down. Bizarrely, the plaque states that eighty members of the National Assembly voted to “affirm their attachment to the Republic, their love for freedom, and their faith in victory [over Germany],” not that 569 members did not affirm their attachment to the Third Republic. Indeed, they condemned it thus creating the Vichy regime, which governed the defeated country during the Occupation.

On one occasion in Paris I found myself caught up in a demonstration as thousands of French had chosen that day, Mother’s Day in France, to protest the recent legalization of gay marriage. The events, bizarre in a modern nation renowned for its tolerance, resonated in a strange way for me as ‘Journée de la Mère’ became a political matter of national importance for Vichy France. Pétain used such occasions to bolster the moral and cultural conservatism of his authoritarian regime, which glorified the family where the man was head, and the woman occupied a place on condition of being a mother. France’s low birth rate had been a concern for many years and, ironically, one of many reasons for welcoming thousands of foreign Jews to France in previous decades had been to help counterbalance this. Under Pétain, teaching housekeeping, where girls had to learn how to make simple clothes, do laundry, bleaching, ironing, cookery, nutrition and other aspects of domestic hygiene for one hour minimum per week became obligatory in all lycées and collèges until the age of 18. * *La Loi du 18 Mars on L’enseignement ménager familial. For alongside the World War was an attempt at a National Revolution, creating a society that would turn its back on republican values. The demonstration that I witnessed was largely peaceful, with the police estimating that about 150,000 people took part. But for me it was clear evidence of the persistence of the past in present day France. Even today there are significant financial advantages for mothers of three or more children.

During the last few years, several people I tried to talk to about their memories, or of how their family survived, simply refused to answer my emails or phone calls. Almost all who did agree and who had lived through what are often called ‘The Dark Years,’ began by telling me: “Ah, c’est très compliqué…” Very often, once we start speaking, it becomes clear that the choices they made during this decade had much to do with what happened to them or their parents during the previous conflict, World War One, or the War of 1914, as it is called here. Memories of that war were often ‘cultivated,’ preserved artefacts became relics as photos of battlefields and devastated towns acquired almost holy status and there remained deep seated mistrust of their German neighbour. Naughty French children in the twenties and thirties were often reprimanded with the refrain: ‘if you don’t behave, the Boche (offensive slang meaning a German soldier) will come and take you.’

But then, as the second war progressed, and Paris became a strangely empty city with few Frenchmen to be seen, other factors came into play. Many women in Paris responded positively to German men who were usually polite, often cultured and sometimes offered the only source of food. Many women, including intellectuals and resisters, played on their femininity to get what they wanted or needed sometimes using sex, sometimes being used for sex, and at all times concerned with their appearances and appearing fashionable. Melting cutlery in order to have a fashionable brooch, or buying leg paint to simulate stockings, occasionally took precedence over finding food.

I want to examine in the pages that follow what factors weighed most heavily on women, making them respond to the harsh and difficult circumstances in which they found themselves, in a particular way. M.R.D. Foot, historian of the SOE as well as soldier, was well aware of how many women, often young teenage girls, were heavily involved from the earliest days in helping men escape. “Evaders often found that they had to trust themselves entirely to women; and without the courage and devotion of its couriers and safe-house keepers, nearly all them women, no escape line could keep going at all,” Foot wrote. (Stourton p78) Why did they choose to risk their young lives and their families? I will use the word choice - what choices they made - while recognising that not all of them had a real choice as defined by anyone living through the war years. For women, choice often meant more than simply how to live their own lives but how to protect their children and sometimes their elderly parents too. One interview was almost abruptly terminated when I asked the noted playwright, Jean-Claude Grumberg, if he could understand how his mother had made what I considered the unimaginably brave choice to pay a ‘passeuse’, a woman who promised to take him and his slightly older brother to a place of greater safety in the south of France. As added protection, his mother was not allowed to know where the children were in case she was arrested and forced to reveal his information. Grumberg was silent at first and then stared at me disbelievingly.

‘La choix, c’est contestable,’ he replied eventually. Anyone who used the word choice in the context of the situation facing his mother could not have grasped the complexity of life for a Romanian-born Jewish woman in occupied Paris after 1942, a woman whose husband had been arrested, who could not speak fluent French, who was forbidden to move around freely or even, on a scorchingly hot day, to buy her Jewish children a drink in certain places at a certain time and was caring for a sick mother-in-law.

He repeated: “Choice? How can you ask me about choice?”

But I persisted, apologising for unintended offence, as choices, however heart- wrenching, were made by women, especially by women.

Sacha Josopivici, born in Egypt and travelling, she hoped, also to a place of greater safety with her child on false papers from Nice to La Bourboule while her husband was in Paris, had decided that “if the train was stopped and I was asked to account for myself I would most probably, despite my papers, say that I was Jewish. I felt that even though it would mean leaving you (her three year old son) with strangers, it was something I would have to do. There aren’t many moments like that in life but I felt that this was one of them.” In the event she did not have to make that choice. Other women, travelling on false papers, hid compromising documents in their children’s bags. I have met those children and would not like to say the actions were without consequences.

“You were not given the choice,” insists Jeannie, Vicomtesse de Clarens who, as Jeannie Rousseau, began resisting in 1939. “I don’t even understand the question,” she states with a rare clarity when asked, why did she risk her life? “It was a moral obligation to do what you are capable of doing. As a woman you could not join the army but you could use your brain. It was a must. How could you not do it?” And yet her clarion call to resist may have caused the deaths of others once they were prisoners of the Germans in work camps. Other women were brutally honest that there was a “taste for danger that drove us on… but above all it was the joy, the thrill of feeling useful, the camaraderie of battle in which all our weapons were born of love.”(Ed Stourton p 192 quoting Dedée de Jongh)

And of course there were constantly lesser choices to be made. Was it collaborating to buy food on the black market if your children were thin, ill and vitamin deficient? Was sending your children to a cousin with a farm in the countryside acceptable? Was it a choice to walk out of a café or a restaurant if German soldiers walked in or was that deliberately courting danger as behaving disrespectfully could, as will become clear, have deathly consequences? Were those who made up lists and saved children of relatives before the children of strangers culpable? Or should one blame only those who forced them to create the lists in the first place?

I want the pages that follow to avoid black and white, good and evil, but instead to reveal constant moral ambiguity, like a kaleidoscope that can be turned in any number of ways to produce a different image. Such a multi-faceted image is far from grey. Was everyone who remained in Paris grinding the gears, pressing the buttons, stocking the shops and performing in theatres or nightclubs in some way complicit in the German adventure of keeping Paris alive and alight? The unreal situation of "occupation" is itself a perverting one, arguably more difficult morally than war. Of course there are fewer casualties, but fear, shame, anger and the terrible feeling of powerlessness together with the strong need to do something plus a complex and often heady mixture of hate and perhaps self-interest - not to speak of individual love affairs - confuse any straightforward response. I want to explore, with as little hindsight or judgment as I can muster - after all we British did not suffer occupation so what right have any of us to judge? - how I would have behaved, impossible of course since we were not put to the same test. One absolute: I think I would go to any length to save my children. A handful of women went to any length to save other people’s children. But these are extremes and not all situations in the pages that follow are extremes offering absolute choices. It’s the muddle of life that most of us engage in and which is so compelling for any writer or historian looking at France between 1939-1949, especially through the eyes of women. Turn the kaleidoscope one way and see women destroyed by the War; turn it the other, and find women whose lives were enhanced with new meaning and fulfilment.

When I began this book a male historian suggested I spend hours in the subterranean Bibliotèque Nationale reading the diaries of men like Hervé le Boterf and Jean Galtier Boissière. But, important though these may be, I have tried to find an alternative, often quieter and frequently lesser known set of voices. I have relied on interviews with women who lived through the events, of necessity as children, as well as diaries, letters, ration cards and memoirs of those no longer alive, both published and unpublished. I have watched intensely dramatic films, read hundreds of letters of denunciation, seen and touched hollow jewellery made with limited materials as well as cork or wooden-soled shoes, whose clackety clack provided the sound track to the Occupation. Some voices weave in and out of the story, occasionally in different locations, others disappear entirely from the narrative either through death or because they leave France entirely. It was always going to be hard finding women who admitted that they had worked for a German victory (although there are some) and so occasionally I have relied on a male account of a situation pertaining to women, or used historical records of women who betrayed.

It has been exciting and rewarding to discover that, unquestionably, women’s influence and activities during these years were both considerably greater than might be expected from the public roles they were allowed to play in society at that time. Before 1939 women in French society were often invisible, without a vote and needing permission from husbands or fathers to work or own property. Yet women were actively using weapons in the resistance, hosting evaders on the run, delivering false identity papers as well as all the old familiar tasks of cooking shopping and caring for their homes. Women were now in charge, looking after the elderly as well as the children, duties which often prevented their own escape, and sometimes holding down a job as well. Shortages and lack of refrigeration forced women to queue, often for an average of four hours a day, to gather enough to feed the family they were being encouraged to bring into the world. Some women resorted to collaborating and some were straight forwardly victims but others were simply bystanders, caught in the crossfire, and it is their role that occasionally proved crucial.

One more thing: the word ‘Parisienne’ may summon up to many the image of a chic, slim woman who wears fashionably elegant clothes and is alluring to men. Undeniably, women in Paris used fashion to defy the occupier in a small way perhaps by adopting culottes to ride bicycles when the fuel ran out or by making ceramic tricolore buttons. Yet this is not a book about fashion even though fashion was important both to les Parisiennes themselves as well as the German occupiers. But, while admitting that the glamorous description fits some of the women in this book - women who wore designer suits while risking their lives to deliver vital information, women who believed that wearing an outrageously large hat was a form of resistance - I am giving it a wider meaning. Many typically Parisienne women found themselves, through necessity, living or subsisting outside Paris, while others in this story, while remaining in the city were not Parisienne in the accepted use of word. If I had been in any doubt about using the term to describe a woman not living in the city, but imprisoned in a camp, wearing rags, with sores on her skin, scars from lashings and unwashed hair, I felt justified when I learned that, instead of eating the ounce or so of fat she was given daily, she massaged it into her hands concluding that these needed preserving more than her stomach. That seemed to me the reasoning of a true Parisienne. view abbreviated excerpt only...

Discussion Questions

Which of the women can you relate most/ least to?

What are your feelings about the choices some of the women were forced to make?

Which portions and/or people captivate you the most in Anne Sebba's presentation of Les Parisiennes?

Suggested by Members

by kt2342 (see profile) 10/19/16

Weblinks

»	Author's web site
»	Publisher's Book Info

Book Club Recommendations

Recommended to book clubs by 2 of 2 members.

Member Reviews

Rate this book