53. Women At War 1: The Exile (Elisabeth Kaufmann)

by Diana S. |
Watercolor of the Exodus from Paris by Elisabeth Kaufmann

“We decided to take only precious items. But what did we have that was precious?”

― Jackie DeCol, Parisian refugee

I’m excited to announce the launch of a new miniseries on a subject extremely near and dear to my heart: Women In War! For the next few weeks I’ll be focusing on the experiences of women in France during World War II: fighting the resistance, collaborating with the Nazis, keeping children alive against the odds, and trying to figure out the right way to live in a world that seemed upside down. The idea of this series first took shape before I even began this podcast, and I’m thrilled to bring it to you now.

We’re beginning at the end – the end of the Third Republic, that is. The Nazis have made it to the gates of Paris, and a 16 year old girl named Elisabeth Kaufmann must decide to stay or flee. 

Episode 53: “Women At War 1: The Exile (Elisabeth Kaufmann)”

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Transcript

Bienvenue and welcome back to the Land of Desire! I’m your host, Diana, and a few weeks ago, there was a strange sight taking place in the streets of Paris. A group of firefighters unfurled a massive French tricolor across the Arc de Triomphe, while men and women dressed in ancient military uniforms and old-fashioned dresses walked down the city streets in parade formation. Like something out of a dream, the procession began at the Porte d’Italie, the city’s southern entrance in the 13th arrondisement, and then slowly made its way north towards the Hotel de Ville and, eventually, towards the Hotel Meurice, singing “La Marseillaise”. The French are not nearly as prone to historical pantomime as Americans, with our Renaissance Faires and Civil War reenactments and so on, but this was no ordinary roleplay. August 25th marked the 75th anniversary of the liberation of Paris, the most triumphant moment in the history of twentieth century France. It had been a long war, and for Parisians, a unique one: they’d experienced a sort of twilight war. For four years, the streets of Paris filled with German soldiers, the French government decamped to the countryside and washed its hands of the capital, and Parisians were faced with an incomprehensible landscape. What was right? What was wrong? The world had turned upside down, and moral clarity was hard to find. 
 
But there’s another aspect of the Occupation of Paris which is usually overlooked: most Parisians experiencing this upside-down existence were women. With almost all French men away fighting with the Free French, working in factories or locked up in prisoner-of-war camps, most of the era’s choices, compromises, and acts of charity, cowardice and bravery were taken by women. Women occupied a totally separate sphere of society in pre-war France, which left them especially vulnerable during the Occupation, but also offered them unique opportunities. Bereft of legal rights, financial resources and military status, Parisian women had to get creative to help themselves and their children survive. Some women chose to collaborate, some women chose to resist, and most women weren’t sure where one ended and another began. 
 
Most of this feminine experience was covered up after the war. Often times, women’s actions were hidden away to protect the bruised masculinity of French men, still stinging from their defeat by the Germans. Other times, women’s actions were hidden away by the women themselves, out of shame or a simple horror at what they’d been forced to do. The dreadful narrative that seemed to emerge from the end of the war was: men resisted, women collaborated. It’s misogynistic tripe, which does a tremendous disservice to the women whose stories have been intentionally or unintentionally buried over the past 75 years. Even for a history obsessive like myself, there are so many stories I’d never heard – many of which have only come to light in the past few years. So, in the weeks to come, I’ll be sharing these stories with you. I’ve gathered together a number of women whose experiences represent a wide spectrum of wartime behavior: the good, the bad, the heroic, the cowardly, and the desperate. Each episode will focus on a particular woman’s experience of the Occupation. Taken together, I hope this series will provide a greater appreciation for the importance of – and the variety of – women’s actions during the war. World War II was a total war, and distinctions between combatant and civilian existed only on paper: women – and often children – were arrested, imprisoned, tortured, tempted, bribed, given positions of power over the weak, left to the mercy of the strong, sent to the front lines, sent behind enemy lines, and sent to their deaths. Sometimes, they were villains. Just as often, they were heroes. This week, I’ll begin my series on Women in War by recounting the moment when everything fell apart: the fall of Paris.
 
 
On May 29, 1940, sixteen-year-old Elisabeth Kauffmann couldn’t take it anymore: it was a beautiful day in Paris, and here she was, cooped up in a library. To Elisabeth, the charms of Paris were still new and fresh. For half of her life, Elisabeth and her Jewish family had been on the run, from one European capital to another, staying one step ahead of political and religious violence. First, they’d relocated from her native Vienna to Berlin, where Elisabeth’s father, a journalist, could document the economic crisis of the Weimar Republic. Then, in 1933, Adolf Hitler took power in Germany and promptly blacklisted Elisabeth’s father, for criticising Hitler’s putsch and for being Jewish, forcing the Kauffmann family back to Vienna. But home was no longer a safe haven – Austria was falling under Hitler’s spell, and before long Elisabeth’s father headed out for Paris. It took years for Elisabeth, her mother, and her brother to join him, as the Third Reich closed the border to Jews. They were trapped, until Elisabeth’s mother managed to trade her jewelry for French visas. In November 1938, the Kauffmann family settled in Paris, and at last, they felt safe from Hitler’s reach. But the peace didn’t last long.
 
“A sleeping Paris, prepared for everything, her guns close by, breathed softly in the darkness.” So wrote the novelist Irene Nemirovsky, during the so-called “phoney war” of the spring of 1940. Though the Germans and the French were technically at war, following Germany’s invasion of Poland, there wasn’t any evidence of this fact to the average Parisian, who figured that, whatever the Germans chose to do, they’d be sheltered by the strength of the Maginot Line. The Maginot Line – those “guns close by” – represented 20 years of French defensive strategy, the totality of its war preparation, and a complete and utter failure of imagination.
 
“Generals always fight the last war.” It’s an old chestnut, and a profound warning. In the 1920s, a France still reeling from World War I determined that the mistakes of the Great War could never happen again. The French minister of war, André Maginot, built up the most advanced line of fortification the world had ever seen, able to withstand anything the Great War could have thrown at it: aerial bombings, tanks, chemical warfare and supply line disruptions. By the end of the 1930s, the Maginot Line was an incredibly dense network of forts and defensive structures, some small and strategic, some huge and intimidating. As one newspaper announced confidently in April 1940, “The Maginot Line is the most effective barrier against the attacker, it will fulfill its function for as long as may be necessary up until the day that the progress of the war shall dictate for us the form of words imposing final defeat on the enemy.” Wherever French territory touched German lands, the Maginot Line was impenetrable – until you reached Belgium, that is. Since Germany was the main target, the French-Belgian section of the Maginot Line just sorta tapered off, halfheartedly scattered. Some modern day scholars think the Maginot Line was never really intended to stop a German invasion at all, it was only meant to push the Germans into invading Belgium, which would presumably buy France enough time to get its affairs in order. Depending on the purpose you believe, the Maginot Line was either France’s greatest military failure, or its most profound moral failure.
 
Whatever the case may be, for most native Parisians, it was enough to help them sleep soundly at night, even as the German army moved its way from Poland into Belgium. But Elisabeth and her family weren’t native Parisians, and the war was hardly “phoney” – immediately after France declared war against Germany on September 1, 1939, France began rounding up German nationals into internment camps, including Elisabeth’s father and brother. Now, like so many of their neighbors, the women of the Kauffmann family were left to their own devices. Paris was becoming a city of women. Whether they were the 18,000 men rounded up into enemy alien camps, or the 2.5 million men called away to the munitions factories or the famous, doomed Maginot Line, the men of Paris were gone. On the day Elisabeth grabbed her bicycle, she rode through a city of women, children and the elderly.
 
“The broad avenues, with their beautiful parks and homes, give me a special delight, and since the traffic here is not so heavy, I can look at the lovely homes, the well-cared-for palaces, and observe the faces and dress of the passersby. At the Place de la Concorde, I decide whether I want to ride through the busy Rue de Rivoli, where businesses since the war have suffered heavily because the luxury items meant for rich foreigners, the English, Swedes and Americans, no longer are there to be sold. Other stores must close ‘pour cause de la mobilisation’…The Jardin des Tuileries reflects the unusual wartime conditions. The lawns, usually so well kept, look like a meadow and the stalks of grass are long and dried out. Instead of the tulips that usually are magnificent there is earth waiting to be turned.”
 
Elisabeth was supposed to be studying for her end of year exams on the day of the bicycle ride, but perhaps it’s for the best that she seized the opportunity – she wouldn’t be able to ride her bicycle through Paris much longer, and anyway, those exams would never happen. Only a few days after this carefree joy ride, the news would begin trickling into Paris – news that wasn’t reported by the official radio broadcasts, news that wasn’t shared by the French military, news that no one wanted to believe.
 
At the beginning of that month, most Parisians would have shared the view of the Canadian General Leo LaFleche: “You cannot imagine such fortifications. We were greatly impressed. Men or tanks could never cross that barrier of steel – rows and rows of steel rail protruding from the ground in series and unending rows – like powerful teeth that tear the heart out of an engine. Jungles of barbed wire. The men are comfortable, warm, well-provisioned. Nothing like the old days.” Indeed, World War II would be nothing like the old days. For one thing…the Germans had airplanes.
 
On May 10, 1940, the Germans had invaded, not France, but Belgium. Within 24 hours, they’d bombed 83 of Belgium’s 179 airplanes. The morning of Elisabeth’s bicycle ride, Paris woke up to the shocking news of a Belgian surrender. It had only been two weeks! Elisabeth notes, “there are newspaper articles that this is the greatest betrayal in memory.” But this isn’t enough to shake the city’s confidence. “I don’t really believe that there are so many Allied troops in Belgium that the damage will be all that great. This can all be overcome. It is unthinkable that the Germans will win in the long run.” 
 
But the Germans had figured out the obvious solution to the Maginot Line: if you can’t beat ‘em, go around ‘em. For 20 years, France did everything it could to prevent Germany from rolling across the eastern border. Instead, the Germans simply went…over it. Only a few weeks after crossing into Belgium, the German army crossed the northern border into France. With the French government keeping a tight rein on the news, Parisians were kept in the dark about the particulars, and they scrambled to piece together updates from the BBC and, most importantly, the German propaganda radio channel, Radio Stuttgart. Now, the capital began to worry if maaaybe the city was underprepared. Oh, the Metro stations had been turned into half-hearted air raid sirens, and the grassy untended Tuileries gardens that Elisabeth had bicycled past were about to be turned into a vegetable garden, but otherwise the city was totally unready for serious conflict. French overconfidence in the magical Maginot Line meant Paris was fortified with nothing more than 2 battalions of Senegalese soldiers, the city police, the riot police and a few tanks. Every day, the German army rolled south towards the capital, and panic was growing. Again and again, the French government refused to give accurate reports to the public, fearing a panic. Rumors spread like wildfire around the city, and Radio Stuttgart, realizing that the Parisians were listening, began broadcasting fake news to confuse the enemy. To calm everybody down, someone in the French military had the bright idea of holding a mass at Notre Dame, calling on the nation’s most beloved saints for help. If you can believe it, seeing your country’s military leaders praying on their knees for heavenly intervention did not inspire confidence. The air was filling with smoke, pouring out of government chimneys as civil servants used sensitive paperwork to stoke fireplaces burning in the late summer heat. On the edge of the city, just ahead of the Germans, the first refugees from Belgium began trickling in, grief-stricken and shocked. As one Canadian journalist, Gladys Arnold, witnessed: “First came the chauffeur-driven, but within days all kinds of vehicles were moving across Paris…soon they were arriving on foot. Their stories were horrifying…Our minds were not equipped for the tales they poured out, in spite of what we were seeing and hearing with our eyes and ears.”  Nevertheless, the presence of these initial Belgium refugees conveyed a truth which no amount of radio propaganda could overcome. As Gladys wrote down, “The human river stretched across the road. What will remain forever in my memory…was the slow, uneven shuffling and the awful silence.”
 
Of course, Elisabeth and her mother recognized the plight of the Belgian refugees completely – they’d been in the same position twice in the past six years. Elisabeth’s mother began making arrangements to get her daughter out of the city, but scheme after scheme fell through. Finally, on June 3rd, Elisabeth’s afternoon was pierced with the sirens of an air raid. Heading down into the shelter with her neighbors, she listened to the planes dropping bombs overhead. Located far from the action, the first German assault on Paris itself felt unreal. She was lucky. Standing just outside Notre Dame Cathedral, Gladys Arnold, the Canadian journalist, remembers watching two straight rows of little girls, accompanied by their nuns, crossing in front of the cathedral. It would have looked like a scene out of Madeleine, except that the nuns were running, driving the girls into the Cathedral, calling out to Gladys to “Run! Run! Faster, faster!” Peering through stained glass, the shadows of hundreds of German planes passed overhead towards the Bois du Bologne and the factories nearby. One young boy living near the Bois de Bologne crawled up to the rooftop of his air raid shelter and saw “German Stukas swooping down towards me with an ear-splitting roar with gripped my guts and made me shake so much I had to lie flat down on my belly, with my hands over my ears.” Within one hour, 200 planes dropped 1,000 bombs, decimating the Renault and Citroen factories, killing 234 adults and 20 children. The rest of the German army hadn’t yet arrived, and the planes were only an advanced guard – a preview. “The war now becomes personal,” Elisabeth wrote that night.
 
Unbeknownst to them, Parisians were experiencing their last week of freedom. Even after the fall of Poland, even after the fall of Belgium, even after the raid on western Paris itself, the city was in denial. “It is acknowledged indifferently that the Germans are barely a hundred kilometers from Paris,” Elisabeth wrote a few days after the raid. “For several days now, cannon fire could be heard. Yet people have become used to it even though the air during the day is shattered by the resounding noise…The days are warm and lovely. The evenings are long and clear. I often sit at the window in the dark to enjoy the night air…They are fighting even at night.” At the time of this entry, the British army was trapped on the beaches of Dunkirk, retreating across the Channel. 
 
The next day, June 9th, reality set in. The French government knew time was running out. Without warning the city residents, the French government secretly began evacuating Paris along a pre-planned flight route to the city of Tours. They weren’t the only ones leaving town that day – just as in Belgium, the well-to-do were first out the door. While the rich called on their chauffeurs, Elisabeth considered her own, limited options. “It would be impossible for me to find work in a resort town, especially given the attitude toward foreigners and with so many French people who would be available to do the kind of work I would do. How would I live? Evacuation is for those with plenty of money or for those who own property.” Working-class Parisians had another ace up their sleeve – most families were only one generation removed from the countryside. Having migrated to the city in the glamorous 1920s in search of work, they now migrated back to the country in search of safety. Yet even those with country cousins faced the same questions as Elisabeth: what would they do for money? How would they live? And most importantly, how would they get there? It is little wonder than even as late as June 9th, then, so many Parisians adopted the same attitude as Elisabeth: “I am not afraid of the bombings. That may only be because I lack imagination. I cannot imagine that something would fall on my head. Paris is probably well defended, the Germans are not yet in the city, and there is no panic.”
 
But the next morning, Elisabeth and the rest of Paris woke up to find out that during the night, the French government had moved out and the Germans had rolled in. After weeks of reassuring statements and radio broadcasts and newspaper articles to the contrary, the French government was on the run, the Germans were in the streets, and the Parisians? The Parisians were on their own.
 
“All the world is leaving Paris.” So wrote Elisabeth on June 10, 1940, 24 hours after writing that the city was far from panicking. “The Germans are said to be in St. Germain. The newspapers have stopped. My bag is packed. Not all the Parisians are leaving. What are Mother and I going to do?” All over the city, women conferred with one another about what to do, where to go, what to bring, and what on earth were they going to do about the children? It was boiling hot outside – should they wear summer clothing to avoid heat stroke on the road? How long would they be gone – should they wear everything they could, including valuable furs they could trade for food? Would they be faster in a car, or would they be stuck in traffic clogged with refugees? What if a friend with a car had only 1 seat available – should they give it to their child, to get them to safety faster? What if it was a stranger with a car? What dangers would they face on the road? What dangers would they face by staying? From the city of Tours, whichever government officials had arrived safely declared Paris an Open City. No resistance would be offered to the German army, in the hopes that they would enter the city peacefully. It was a devil’s bargain – giving up any hope of victory, in the hopes that the Germans would leave the city and her inhabitants more or less alone. As the news race around the city, Parisians knew it was now or never.
 
“Tomorrow we shall leave Paris on foot.” Elisabeth wrote. “Our intermediate destination with be Dad,” whose internment camp was 100 kilometers from Paris. After visiting the camp, Elisabeth and her mother planned to continue on to a family they knew in the countryside. “They are seven hundred kilometers away. The idea is fantastic – seven hundred kilometers on foot! If we walk on the average thirty kilometers a day it will be an uninterrupted march that will take twenty-three days…This afternoon I still took time to hurry through the Latin Quarter. Although excited I tried to fix everything in my mind, the houses, the plazas, and I asked myself for how long? Forever…or will it be for only a short time?”
 
In every home, in every street, in every arrondisement, the three million remaining Parisians – mostly women and children – made plans to escape. In 1939, French women weren’t just unable to vote – they were unable to open a bank account in their own name. Before the war, housewives received a regular allowance from their husbands, and most women lacked a checkbook. For the working class women scrambling to save themselves and their children, money became an impossible quest. The only women able to get their hands on money were those who had eschewed the banks and saved up their allowance in coffee cans and mattresses. In an age old story, women scrambled to find their one liquid assets: jewelry. Engagement rings, family heirlooms, everything was smuggled away or even swallowed, in the hopes that it would be bartered to keep the family alive. Even if women could prove that their husbands were fighting at the front, it didn’t matter – the banks were closing. So were the grocery stores and the bakeries, surrounded by empty streets and a chilling silence. Families who could no longer care for their pets let them run wild, or euthanized them. All over the city, French families began gathering up their belongings, strapping the mattress down on the car roof, whether to sleep on during the long journey, or to protect them from bullets and bombs from above.
 
All of a sudden, in a massive spasm, Paris emptied itself into the streets. While Elisabeth and her mother tied on their walking shoes, other women 
squeezed themselves onto the last trains leaving the city, holding their babies over their heads, standing up the entire journey south. There weren’t nearly enough bathrooms on board, so whenever the trains paused for fuel, women had themselves lifted out the car windows for a bathroom break, hoping desperately that they’d be able to get pulled back through the window before the train pulled out again. The trains weren’t even going anywhere in particular – they’d pulled out of the station without a listed departure, stuffed to the gills with Parisians who didn’t care, so long as it was going away. The refugees carried a bewildering assortment of provisions, unsure what would be useful or valuable on the road. Women stuffed valuable paperwork in their bras. Children ambled along carrying precious family treasures in their backpacks. Old women were carried along in carts, or even carried piggyback. As the women and children poured into the streets, they choked on the acrid air, filled with smoke. The last of the French government’s paperwork was still going up the chimney, and now the French army was burning its oil reserves outside the city, to prevent them from falling into German hands. Elisabeth and her mother stepped into streets and joined the biggest land migration in memory. Once on the road, they joined refugees fleeing from smaller towns and villages, and those whose cities had already fallen. In total, 1 in 5 French people hit the road in what was soon known as “The Exodus”. 
 
The Canadian journalist, Gladys Arnold, left Paris on the same day as Elisabeth and her mother. She records the scene that day: “It was impossible to imagine what we were seeing now. An endless river of people on foot, in carts, wagons and cars: animals and bicycles so tightly packed across the road and sidewalks that no one could move more than a step or two at a time.” Meanwhile, another stream flowed in the opposite direction: rural troops, trying to arrive in time to defend the capital. “I still see the gray and weary faces of the people. Here and there someone sat down suddenly, unable to go on. People offered water or help. Some simply refused to try another step. I wondered how far they had come.”
 
Only slightly further ahead of the women and children on the road, the French government ministers struggled to stay connected to the news and to one another. Like everyone else, they were relying on the BBC for the news. The President himself was “entirely isolated, without news from the Premier, without news from Supreme Headquarters, depressed, overwhelmed. He knows nothing.” As with every other part of French preparations for war, the government’s evacuation plan was poorly conceived. The ministers hadn’t expected the roads to be filled with fleeing civilians, and before long they, too, had been carried away in the human flood. Often unable to reach their rendezvous, or camping out at houses which lacked radio transmitters, even high-ranking government officials had to ask the refugees on the road for updates. With the unreliable news networks, there was no more better way to gauge the German army’s progress than to ask the refugees which home town they were fleeing. 
 
On their first day, Elisabeth and her mother walked forty kilometers (25 miles) to Rambouillet. Exhausted from walking, they’d found room for Elisabeth’s mother in a stranger’s car, allowing Elisabeth to travel on her trusty bicycle. With traffic at a standstill, Elisabeth quickly outpaced the car, and kept having to return back to check on her mother’s progress. “At the last moment, I remembered that I had no idea where the car was going” and she was able to get just close enough to the car to hear the driver shout out the destination. “As paradoxical as it may seem, I had come much farther with my bicycle than Mother had in the car.” With no predetermined meeting point, Elisabeth parked her bicycle and waited for hours, hoping against hope to catch a glimpse of her mother. When she finally spotted her mother at 9 PM, she ran towards her at full speed. Reunited, the Kaufmanns faced their next challenge together: finding a place to sleep. “We asked for a room at a hotel but were turned away by the owner as if we had asked for the head of his first born.” Finally, they found room on a stranger’s couch. That night, Elisabeth and her mother worked out a plan: they would travel separately, Elisabeth on her bicycle and her mother on whatever vehicle had room. They made up a list of towns to stop in along the way, and agreed to meet in front of city hall whenever they reached each checkpoint. It all sounded good on paper, the best that two women could do under such stressful conditions, but within 24 hours disaster struck.
 
“June 13, 1940, at night. This is an unusual place for writing my diary, at the police station. It is eleven-thirty at night and we are sitting on a bench at a long table. The light is poor. Across from us sits a man in his mid-thirties, well dressed, who wants to extract ‘my secrets’. “ How had this happened?
 
That morning, Elisabeth and her mother put their plan in action, deciding to meet in front of city hall in Chartres. Physically and mentally exhausted and alone, Elisabeth had a breakdown while waiting for her mother to arrive. “When I stood my bike against the wall, I suddenly collapsed and found myself seated on the floor…My knees were trembling, my hands and eyes hurt, and I could feel myself starting to cry…The others who were waiting hardly noticed me. Most of them were crying.” Eventually, Elisabeth’s mother arrived and they reunited as planned, only to hear the peal of air raid sirens. “Everybody into the shelter!” cried a voice, and they crawled into the closest cellar. After the air raid siren quieted, the two women emerged from the cellar. By now the women’s nerves were strained to the breaking point – and it was at that moment, that Elisabeth and her mother were grabbed by a pair of policemen and dragged to jail.
 
Elisabeth, of course, was Austrian. She and her mother were enemy aliens, and the town police suspected them of spying. Ordered to empty their purses, Elisabeth showered everything in her bag onto the table. Here was her diary, a book of German poems, and mementos from her boyfriend, Ernst, who was now fighting in the Allied army. The policemen interrogated the Kaufmanns all night, and threw them into a cell. “As if it is not bad enough to be chased on foot like that, poor and without a destination, and without a home! And then, to be accused of being a spy for now reason at all! As if someone with Austrian documents, with no proper authority, and with no passport would be a spy. What a dumb idea to make two Austrian refugees into spies, two women!” Little did Elisabeth know, the idea was no so farfetched.
 
Suddenly, at 4:30 in the morning, the police threw open the door to Elisabeth’s cell, tossed her luggage at her feet, and told her to grab her mother and run. “The Germans are coming!” Elisabeth and her mother fled into the streets of Chartres. It was pandamonium. Elisabeth hopped on her bike and pedaled away as quickly as she could. “It was the first time that I did not see Mother secure in a car.” In only a few days, Elisabeth’s life – her home, her plans, her family, her stability – had fallen away entirely. On June 9th, Elisabeth was confident that Paris was safe from the Germans, and determined to ride out the war in the capital with her mother. Less than a week later, she was a sixteen year old girl, fresh from a prison cell, riding her bicycle through unfamiliar land 100 kilometers from home, cut off from her entire family, with no plans except the immediate future. A few weeks ago, Elisabeth was riding her bike through a beautiful afternoon in the Latin Quarter. Now she was floating alone in a stampede of human desperation.
 
Unable to ride for even one more minute, Elisabeth climbed off her bicycle somewhere near Chateaudun, 130 kilometers from home. “A dirty bowl was placed in front of my nose and a woman poured a black brew with one hand while collecting two francs with the other. I had a headache, was afraid about Mother, the hard, narrow bench from last night still hurt. I drank with one gulp, first because I was hungry, second because other people were standing in back of me, and finally, because I had left my bike hardly secured for a long time. I arrived in Chateaudun at about three o clcok. I had to go to city hall where I am still sitting…and waiting…for Mother.”
 
 
As Elisabeth passed the long night waiting for her mother, another Parisian was watching the clock back within the city limits. The chief of police sat at his window, staring out at an scene which had seemed impossible only a few weeks ago. At 3:40 in the morning, he saw: “A German motorcyclist is crossing the Place Voltaire.” At 7:55 AM, he watched as “Several German officers arrive at the Hotel Crillon.” Finally, at 9:45 AM, Chief Rogeron recorded something out of a nightmare: “The Germans raise the Nazi flag at the Arc de Triomphe.”
 
On June 16th, the Prime Minister resigned. The next morning, a young brigadier-general named Charles de Gaulle hopped a plane to London, determined to carry on the fight. And on the afternoon of June 17th, 1940, only a few days after Parisians began to believe the Germans might really make it to the capital, the new Prime Minister, Philippe Petain, the nation’s most beloved hero of World War I, made a speech on the radio. “It is with a heavy heart that I tell you today that we must cease hostilities. The fighting must stop.” In just over one month, the Germans had broken Belgium, the Maginot Line, the capital, and the French nation. For those on the road, there was only shock and disbelief. 
 
Over the course of the next few weeks, France’s political and military leadership would give up the ghost. Without offering any particular structured form of resistance, most Parisians had no option but to return home. By the end of the year, the capital was about as big as it had been at the start of the year. Yet some families stayed away – in particular, Jewish families, immigrant families, and especially Jewish immigrant families like Elisabeth’s. Her story would take a different turn in the years ahead. But on the night of June 14th, Elisabeth had no idea the path her life would take, one month to the day after she wrote these words:
 
“It is difficult to say what I love most about Paris. Only one thing is clear, and that is that I love it. Whether it is the broad, generous and modern grounds of the Trocadero, the symmetrical avenues, the magnificent gardens, or the colorful Latin Quarter. I don’t know which – it could be all of that together, the multitude that affects me. […] Daily life continues, although diminished in every sense. However, the charm of Paris has not disappeared as much as it may have been reduced, and I have not become insensitive, although my feelings have been relatively dulled. Paris still gives me pleasure.”
 
Thanks for listening to the Land of Desire. As this series continues, I’ll be sharing a lot more information in the newsletter, including more information about the women featured, neat stories that I wasn’t able to fit into the episodes, and most importantly, a huge reading list for those who want to learn more! When it comes to women’s histories of World War II, so much is owed to the scholars and journalists who are even now looking for survivors to interview before it’s too late. I was especially impressed with Anne Sebba, whose book, Les Parisiennes, contains so much original investigative work conducted in just the past few years. Next month, I’ll share this content and more in my free quarterly newsletter. If you don’t want to wait that long, however, paid subscribers should keep an eye out, as the paid monthly newsletter will be hitting your inboxes soon! I can’t wait to continue this series, and until next time, au revoir!

Sources

The subject of women in wartime is especially overlooked, and so much amazing historical scholarship has come out even in recent years. I’ll be sharing my full reading list in the newsletter, but here are some of the most important sources for this week’s episode:

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