56. Women At War 4: The Résistante (Jacqueline Marié)

by Diana S. |

We are going underground.

― Jacqueline Marié

It’s the continuation of my 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.

While our last episode focused on Coco Chanel and other French men and women who eagerly collaborated with the Germans, a number of brave men – and, particularly women – risked their lives to fight back. This week, we’ll focus on the women of the French Resistance.

Episode 56: “Women At War 4: The Résistante (Jacqueline Marié)”

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Jacqueline Marié: Heroine of the French Resistance

Jacqueline is incredible – and I don’t mean to spoil the ending of the miniseries with that verb tense, but YES, that’s RIGHT, she is STILL ALIVE and kicking butt and writing her memoirs. If you speak French, here are some incredibly precious videos of Jacqueline telling her own story.

Jacqueline Marie, heroine of the French Resistance
Jacqueline and her brother, Pierre

Transcript

Bienvenue and welcome back to The Land of Desire. I’m your host, Diana, and this week I’m continuing my series about life during the German Occupation: Women At War. Each episode, I’m examining one specific woman’s life during this extraordinary time. The series is roughly chronological, so I’d recommend listening to the series in order, as it traces the way that women’s circumstances changed over the course of the war. In episode one, we began with Elisabeth Kauffman, a 16 year old Jewish refugee from Austria, as she watched Paris fall to the German army before she hit the road in the epic French Exodus. In episode two, we met with Berthe Auroy, a retired schoolteacher struggling to make her way back from the Exodus to her home in Paris, and then building a new life under the eyes of an occupying army, as food grew scarce, homes grew cold, and the population got restless. In episode three, we took a look at France’s dirty little secret, the collabos who benefited from the Occupation and wholeheartedly supported the Nazi regime. Specifically, we focused on the fashion designer Coco Chanel, whose right-wing conservativism and rabid anti-Semitism encouraged her to spy for the Gestapo. However, not every French woman took a position of “wait-and-see” or outright collaboration. There were a few women – much fewer than the French would perhaps like to admit – but there were a few women of tremendous bravery who viewed the German Occupation as a call-to-arms. These women risked their freedom, their families, and their lives in order to fight the Nazis, and after the war they were almost entirely forgotten or scrubbed out of the history books by their own leaders. One such woman was Jacqueline Marié, another 16 year old girl on the front lines, who risked everything to free her country from German occupation. Hers is an epic war story: intrigue, espionage, sabotage, imprisonment, torture, liberation, abandonment, and eventually, over time, perhaps a sort of victory. Join me for today’s episode, The Résistante.
 
“We are going Underground.”
 
It was October 24th, 1940 when 16 year old Jacqueline Marié reached her breaking point. From the moment Germany declared war against France, Jacqueline and her family were ready to fight. Gathered around the radio, Jacqueline and the Marié family listened in disbelief as the President of France, Philippe Pétain, announced a new partnership with Nazi Germany. Sitting in an old railway car with Adolf Hitler – who was real big on conducting important meetings in railway cars, like you do – the conqueror and the conquered worked out a plan for the future. In the four months which had passed since Hitler’s troops rolled right over the French army and into the capital, Germany had been busy setting up shop in Paris. Going forward, President Pétain explained, France would be split in two: in the north, there would be Occupied France, run by the Germans out of Paris, and in the south, there would be the French State, run by the French out of the spa town of Vichy. As the President of the French State, Pétain announced that he had voluntarily chosen to enter “honorably onto the path of collaboration.” That was it. Anyone holding out hope that the Armistice of that summer was just an opportunity for the French to buy time and regroup had to face a terrible truth: the French state had given up. The fight was over. As President Pétain and Hitler shook hands and posed for photographs together, Jacqueline and her family sat in disbelief of what they had heard. “I didn’t understand how Pétain, who had been a great soldier, could have compromised himself by shaking hands with Hitler. There are times when you cannot accept anything.” Living in Versailles, right outside Paris, in the heart of the Occupied Zone, the Mariés would now be expected to support their conquerors. But that same night, Jacqueline made a promise to herself. Unbeknownst to her, the rest of her family members were making similar promises to themselves as well. They would not cooperate. They would not support their conquerors. They would not surrender. They would never, ever collaborate. As Jacqueline put it, “In my family, we know what it means to resist.”
 
Jacqueline and her family spent the 1930s on the front lines of Europe’s unfinished business. As a child, Jacqueline was raised in the geopolitical hot potato of Alsace. The victim of a brutal game of tug-of-war since the Dark Ages, Alsace had switched its national allegiance from France to Germany, then from Germany back to France, all in the last fifty years. The last time France and Germany had fought over Alsace had been World War One, during which time Jacqueline’s grandfather had been captured as a prisoner of war, an experience from which he would never recover. After recapturing Alsace, France spent the 1920s and 30s building the doomed Maginot Line across Alsace. Thousands of French soldiers were stationed along the Maginot line, including Jacqueline’s father. Young Jacqueline and her siblings grew up in the aftermath of that war, and when they weren’t commuting to school next to abandoned trench lines, they were learning fluent German. Living just behind the forts of the Maginot Line, Jacqueline had a front row seat to Germany’s mobilization in the 1930s. By 1937, as fascism was rising in the east, Jacqueline’s father was transferred to Versailles. Just outside the capital, Jacqueline and her family now came into regular contact with three of the most significant new populations in France: communist refugees fleeing the Spanish Civil War in the south, Jewish refugees fleeing the Nazis in the east, and right-wing conservatives, viewing both of these groups with rising dismay. Though she didn’t know it at the time, Jacqueline found herself surrounded by the three groups which would constitute the core of the French Résistance. Before long, she would join their ranks.
 
To hear Charles de Gaulle tell it, the French Résistance was every man, woman and child, fighting bravely against the Nazis. In truth, of course, only a small proportion of the population ever fought back against their oppressors. The vast majority of people in France acted like Berthe Auroy. As the historian Robert Gildea put it, “Most of them muddled through. Their horizons narrowed, they limited their gaze to their family, their neighborhood and their means of livelihood and kept going until help came.” So who were these brave individuals, going where their neighbors did not? Who exactly were “the Résistance”?
 
First, we have to answer a critical question: what does it mean to resist? Ironically enough, considering his claims that the Résistance was a universal movement, de Gaulle himself had a very narrow definition of Resistance work. To him, Resistance work was one thing and one thing only: work which helped get the French army to kickstart the war against Germany again. To de Gaulle, the only real Résistance work was military in nature: official espionage, for example, or sinking German ships, or efforts to convince the Allies to liberate France. Anything else was simple troublemaking, or foolhardy distraction. Since – spoiler alert – de Gaulle emerged as the winner, his definition won out for most of the 20th century. Those who participated in the military effort against the Germans were considered Résistance fighters, with all the benefits, rewards, and appreciation that entailed. Conveniently enough, that meant most Résistance fighters were people like Charles de Gaulle himself: older military men, specifically white men. Men like General Leclerc, who led the Free French army into battle were Résistance heroes, while the Free French army he led, 65% West African conscripts, were absolutely not. These older, white military men made up a crucial segment of the Résistance, but they were only one part. In order to consider the rest, we must expand our definition of Résistance work.
 
First, let us consider those whose work was defined by protest but not necessarily military conflict. Were you in the Résistance if you ran an underground anti-Nazi newspaper? Were you in the Résistance if you organized strikes at occupied munitions factories? Were you in the Résistance if you were a courier for British spies, hiding top secret files in your handbag and sneaking across checkpoints? Were you in the Résistance if you led protests against the Germans in your town? All of the men and women who did this kind of work were in utter danger: any of these offenses were enough to get you shot, tortured, or deported to concentration camps. But they weren’t acting on behalf of Allied forces, they weren’t wearing a uniform. I think most of us would consider this Résistance work now, but this was very much a product of the 1950s and 1960s, and most of those who did this work and were lucky enough to survive weren’t included in postwar celebrations. 
 
Second, let us consider those whose work was not defined by defeating the Germans but by saving lives. Were in you in the Résistance if you fed and shelted British pilots in your home? And most critically, were you in the Résistance if you fought to save Jewish people? What if the Jews you saved weren’t soldiers? What if they were babies? What if you were saving yourself? If the Nazi army is squarely focused on killing you, isn’t it an act of resistance just to survive? As Gildea put it, “A clear definition of resistance has long been sought by historians, but in a word, it meant refusing to accept the French bid for armistice and the German occupation, and a willingness to faire quelque chose – to do something about it – that broke rules and courted risk.” In this episode, I’m using this expansive definition, because I think it gets at the heart of the Résistance project: to fight back, to refuse to submit, to reject what your government, your neighbors, even your own family were telling you, even at great personal cost. Using this broader definition, we certainly don’t see de Gaulle’s vision of a “France that liberates herself” but we do start to see the emergence of many, many more French heroes. To de Gaulle’s great annoyance, these heroes were just the kind of people the older, white military men disdained: they were Communists, they were Jews, they were teenagers, and above all, they were very often women.
 
Just like Elisabeth Kauffman, Berthe Auroy, and Coco Chanel, Jacqueline Marié and her family participated in the Exodus of June 1940. As the Germans marched towards Paris, Jacqueline’s father reported for duty, while her mother squeezed the rest of the family into the car. Unlike the neighbors, Jacqueline’s mother made sure to locate the family pets and shove them into the backseat as well. Surrounded by millions of other panicked French families, they crept along at low speeds for a few days, heading towards the countryside. After a few weeks, the Mariés tried to return home, but their car was requisitioned. Forced to take the train back, they left behind all the family pets except one, a beloved family dog. When they finally made it back to Versailles, their hometown was unrecognizable. The new neighbors were hard to miss: flying high over the palace of Versailles was a gigantic swastika flag, “the first sign of the occupier,” Jacqueline remembered. The family was back in town, but life was hardly back to normal. For the first year of the war, Jacqueline and her family didn’t have time to entertain thoughts of resistance: their focus was survival. 
 
When the Mariés returned home, they found an empty shell of a house. German soldiers requisitioned the Marié home, before looting and pillaging it. Pantry empty, in desperate need of new housing, the Mariés had to say goodbye to a beloved family member: their last remaining dog. Without any food to spare for him, Jacqueline hoped he would survive on his own eating wild animals. Homeless and lonely, at least everyone was still alive – now that the dust was settling from the invasion, Jacqueline and her neighbors were only now learning who had died or been captured at the Maginot Line. Jacqueline counted her blessings that her father had been stationed at home, rather than the front lines, but his luck was about to change. After that fateful meeting between Hitler and Pétain in the railway car, there were two Frances: the one which contained Versailles was to be guarded by German soldiers only. Any French soldiers lucky enough not to be dead or captured were needed for the other France, the so-called “Free” France. Sure enough, Jacqueline’s father soon received his new assignment guarding the capital at Vichy. As winter set in, and food disappeared from the shelves, Jacqueline’s father shipped out, leaving her mother in charge of the family’s survival in the dark days ahead.
 
Daily life felt strange and unreal. German soldiers requisitioned Jacqueline’s high school, so she attended classes in the army barracks. Local authorities began pressuring Jacqueline’s brother, Pierre, to join the local scouting group, which essentially functioned as a pipeline for Nazis-in-training. Unsure how to behave, Jacqueline and Pierre took their cues from their mother, who maintained her composure at all times. For the first year of the war, the Mariés kept their heads down like their neighbors. But throughout the country, the very first resistance networks were coalescing in the shadows. These incredibly brave men and women organized their resources and established delicate lines of communication, laying the groundwork for those who would join in the future, like Jacqueline and her family. These early resistance network leaders were far from de Gaulle’s idealized vision of old-fashioned, salt-of-the-earth French soldiers. Those types of resistance fighters were trying to sneak out of the country, to join up with de Gaulle in London. The resisters working on the ground, meanwhile, were de Gaulle’s worst nightmare: intellectuals, artists, liberated women, Jews…and Communists.
 
Unless you’re a historian or a big fan of Hemingway, odds are, you haven’t spent much time learning about the Spanish Civil War. Even as a dedicated history buff who’s read more Hemingway than she’d care to, I’m constantly surprised at the fact that I was taught so little about a war which set the stage for basically the rest of the 20th century. So allow me to talk a little about Spain, because I promise it’s more relevant than you think.
 
From 1936 to 1939, Spain was split in two by a civil war between two extreme sides. The right wing, led by General Francisco Franco, consisted of fascists, monarchists, conservatives, Catholics, and most of the military. The left wing, led by Communists, included socialists, anarchists, non-Catholics and anybody who wanted to ditch the monarchy once and for all. The two sides were such perfect representations of the big Isms of the age that the rest of Europe joined in, giving arms and soldiers to “their side”. Big surprise, the right received aid from Nazi Germany and Fascist Italy. The left received aid from the Soviet Union and Mexico. Everybody else, including France, sat on their hands. Nobody wanted to fight on the same side as Hitler, but nobody wanted to give guns to Communists either. Since the military had gone over to the right, the Communists needed more soldiers on the ground, and they reached out to the world for help. “Our fight is your fight. Our victory is the victory of Liberty. Men and women of all lands! Come to our aid.” France was ready to help: with 350,000 members, the French Communist Party had the numbers and the resources to organize a response. In the autumn of 1936, a recruitment center opened up in Paris for a new group: the “International Brigades” – volunteer armies made up of recruits from around the world, who wanted to spread communism, or who simply wanted to fight fascism. France became the jumping-off point for those making their way into Spain, and ‘underground railways’ sprang up to help volunteers cross the Pyrenees. Across Europe, an entire generation of passionate young people were asked to choose sides and put their money where their mouth was. As WH Auden wrote in a letter to a friend, “I shall probably be a bloody bad soldier. But how can I speak to or for them without becoming one?” Whether writing about the war or fighting in it, people like George Orwell, Ernest Hemingway and his future wife, the great war correspondent Martha Gellhorn, the poets André Malraux and Paul Éluard, the American singer Paul Robeson, the French philosopher Simone Weil, and 35,000 other volunteers took part to fight back against fascism. In 1939, General Franco and his fascist forces won, and all of a sudden, hundreds of thousands of left-wing Spaniards and allies fled for their lives. The underground railway reversed course, and communists from around the world began crossing the Pyrenees into France. Half a million men, women and children crossed the border into France in a two week span alone. A year later, when France fell to the German army, these refugees suddenly found themselves on the front lines of the war against fascism again. Like Jacqueline and her family, these men and women knew from day one that they would never submit to Nazi ideology. Unlike Jacqueline, however, these men and women had military experience, first-hand knowledge of cruelty and oppressive regimes, and perhaps most important of all, they had nothing left to lose.
 
There were, of course, two other communities who saw the German army as not only an occupying force but a threat to their very existence. As the historian Robert Gildea notes, there are three great international forces acting on France in 1940. One, as we’ve discussed, was the rise of Communism, culminating in the Spanish Civil War. Second was an enormous wave of immigration during the 1920s. World War One left France with a massive labor shortage, so millions of working class men and women from across Europe poured in to fill the void. As Gildea notes, “many of these economic migrants were also political exiles.” Finally, there was the arrival in France of persecuted Jews. Millions of Central and European Jews fled persecution by the tsar, and then by the Bolsheviks. Then, following the rise of fascism, Jews fled from Germany and Austria, including Elisabeth Kauffman from part one of this series. Of course, these three groups intersected and overlapped frequently. For example, a young Jewish man, forced to flee Poland with his family in the 1920s, might jump at the chance to fight back against fascism in the International Brigades. What these three groups had in common was extreme vulnerability. From the moment the Nazis arrived, they began keeping tabs on Communists, foreigners, and Jews. But if you know you already have a target on your back, and that there’s nowhere for you to hide, what can you do but fight back? It was the privilege of white, Catholic, French-born men and women to disappear into the woodwork, like Berthe Auroy, or Jacqueline and her family. While Jacqueline, her brother, and her mother struggled to adjust to their new normal, all around them, Communists, foreigners and Jews were planting the seeds of the resistance.
 
In the autumn of 1940, right around the time that Jacqueline and the Marié family returned from the Exodus, young men were returning from the front lines to resume their studies in the Latin Quarter of Paris. As one student later recalled, “Four fifths of the Resistance in France was made up of people who were under thirty…The people over thirty who surrounded us were afraid for their wives and children. They also feared for their property and positions, which made us angry.” Two of these students, Philippe Viannay and Robert Salmon, immediately began plotting how to fight back against the Germans. Together, the two young men perfectly demonstrated the ideological split within the Resistance. Philippe was a conservative Catholic who supported Marshal Pétain. Like most of de Gaulle’s followers, he wasn’t necessarily against the kind of changes the Germans were advocating, he just didn’t want the Germans carrying them out. He was convinced that with enough help from a network of resisters, Pétain would pick up where he left off and restart the war against Germany. Robert Salmon, on the other hand, was a Jewish intellectual who disdained Pétain and hated right wing extremism. Yet the two were united in their mutual hatred of the German occupiers, and all they needed was a final push. That push came in the form of Hélène Mordkovitch, a Russian Jew studying at the Sorbonne across the street. When she met Philippe Viannay, she had already begun writing anti-German flyers and distributing them around the neighborhood. When Philippe suggested, “What would you say to an underground newspaper?” Helene’s eyes lit up. Over the next year, the three began recruiting young men and women and acquiring the necessary tools for an underground printing press. While Philippe and Robert wrote most of the articles, a team of women managed the logistics: for one thing, they were the only ones who knew how to operate a typewriter. Charlotte Nadel, another Sorbonne student, operated the printing press. Many female students worked part-time as secretaries, so they were the ones stealing paper, ink, and tools. Women managed security, deciding how much information was shared with new recruits and scheduling rendezvous. As these men and women organized, Hitler gave them an unexpected gift. On June 22, 1941, Hitler invaded the Soviet Union, opening up an eastern front of the war. As Eddie Izzard likes to say, “Ooh, Hitler never played risk as a child!” Not only did the move divide Germany’s attention between multiple fronts, it also freed French Communists to act. For the past year, the German-Soviet agreement meant French Communists had official guidance from Moscow to welcome their new occupiers as ‘friendly soldiers’ – but of course, this never happened. Split between Communist guidelines and their own anti-fascist passion, the biggest left-wing party in France had been sitting on its hands. Suddenly, everything had changed – with Germany at war with the Soviet Union, French Communists were ready to take up arms – and bundles of newspapers – at last. The networks of Defense de la France swelled with new recruits – and not a moment too soon. Less than a year after their first meeting in the Latin Quarter, the first issue of Defense de la France was ready to hit the streets. 
 
In August 1941, Jacqueline and her family reached their breaking point. It had been a long, hot, hungry summer. For over a year, the Germans had plundered Versailles, requisitioning houses, food, weapons, cars, and anything that wasn’t bolted down. They marched up and down the streets and recruited children for Nazi youth groups, while harassing any Jews, foreigners or Communists they encountered. One day, Jacqueline and her mother were walking across town when they came upon an induction ceremony for the Legion of French Volunteers Against Bolshevism. It was a grand spectacle, attended by not only Germany officials but Vichy leaders, including the leading collaborationist Pierre Laval. For the first time since the war began, Jacqueline’s mother cried. Jacqueline writes, “The desperate look of my mother at the sight of these young Frenchmen, equipped with the uniform of the occupier, makes the spectacle even more distressing. We are ashamed, so ashamed.” They weren’t the only ones. Also in the audience that day was Paul Collette, a veteran of World War One and the Battle of Dunkirk. Pulling out a pistol, Collette fired five bullets and injured five people, including Laval, saved by a lucky cufflink. While Collette spent the rest of the war in prison, Jacqueline was inspired. “For us, this patriotic act is the first manifestation of the courage of the Resistance. It is a sign of hope, as those around us in Versailles, like the rest of the country, continue to rely on Vichy’s directives, listen to Radio-Paris or, even worse, join the collaborationist movements, turning into informers for the German police and accomplices of the local militia.”
 
After a year of outrage, Jacqueline was ready to fight back. But how? “Around us, we hear little about the Resistance. How could it be otherwise? A lead curtain has fallen on the country.” But little does she know, thin strands of the Resistance already surround her. Jacqueline began taking private lessons with her favorite literature teacher. As Jacqueline’s mother escorted her to her teacher’s house, the two women fell to talking. “Through small conversations,” Jacqueline later recalled, “the two women concluded that they shared the same point of view about the occupants: namely, that they should be cleanly and neatly rejected.” Jacqueline’s teacher, Yvette, began suggesting ways in which Jacqueline might become involved. “Little by little, Yvette offers me a fw specific actions. It’s about getting information from different places. I remember being dispatched to collect some documents from a man’s home in Paris. Nobody tells me the purpose of the mission or what to report.” Before long, 17 year old Jacqueline was a Résistance courier. 
 
Couriers were the lifeblood of the Résistance. With Nazis listening on every telephone line and radio frequency, if information was going to get from one person to another, it would have to be delivered in person. Sometimes couriers delivered coded messages, sometimes underground newspapers, sometimes guns, sometimes people. At first, women performed this work because there simply weren’t enough men around – either tied up at the front lines or in a prisoner of war camp. As Résistance hero Germaine Tillion later said, “At the time of the great French collapse in June of 1940, there were no men left. Right away, there were a million prisoners and the men who weren’t prisoners were mobilized, or dead, or in hiding. When they were in hiding, it was women who hid them, placing them in cellars and giving them clothing. In 1940 women took control of the entire situation because theoretically every man was a prisoner of war. And if he wasn’t a prisoner of war, he was about to become one and was therefore forced to hide, to camouflage himself. Men were camouflaged by women and replaced by women. Women had to respond immediately to the situation.” Women weren’t just more numerous, they were less suspicious. Many of the German occupying forces were, essentially, country boys. They were often dazzled by glamorous Parisian women, or charmed by young French schoolgirls, never suspecting that either could be smuggling a stick of dynamite in her purse. Female couriers hid guns in baby carriages, smuggled top secret paperwork in their bras, and flirted with checkpoint officers to get to and from Vichy France to Occupied France. One day a female courier might be asked to hide a radio. The next day she might be asked to hide a radio operator. As Colonel Rol-Tanguy, commander of the Free French forces, said just after the Liberation of Paris: “Women? You must know that without them half our work would have been impossible. The only liason agents I have had have been women.”
 
Having proven herself as a courier, Jacqueline officially joined the Defense de la France resistance group. Together with one of her best friends, Andrée, the pair would travel up to Paris to collect copies of the group’s underground newspaper and bring them home to distribute around Versailles. “This is how it all begins,” Jacqueline writes. “The newspaper is printed in several hidden places in Paris and Lyon. I go several times to one of the depots which holds the copies, in Montparnasse. It is a secret location, not a shed with floor-to-ceiling newspapers, but a simple room in an apartment. We must follow our instructions to the letter: avoid contact as much as possible, don’t take the same train to avoid getting arrested together.” There are all kinds of authorities Jacqueline and Andrée have to avoid: German police patrols, French police patrols, and of course, the dreaded Gestapo. “Danger is everywhere. At the sight of certain uniforms, each time our hearts start racing. We have to be as unnoticeable as possible. Fortunately, with my white socks, I look like a high school girl. I hide the newspapers, pretending to be a complete innocent, trying to stay invisible.” Often times when making their way back to Versailles, police sirens or alerts would go off, at which time the Métro trains would ground to a halt. “Countless times, I ran the route between the Concorde and Saint-Lazare stations on foot, making my way through the dark tunnels. We had to run to make sure we caught one of the few regional trains back to the suburbs. For safety, Andrée and I have to travel separately on the train, without heat or light. We are terrified by the thought of getting caught out after curfew.” Later that year, the first arrests in Versailles took place, as two fledgeling networks were broken up, arrested, and deported. “So now, we truly realize the danger. Now, we understand the infernal acts of the Gestapo, the methodical organization of the Germans, and the dramatic consequences that our actions can take.” Jacqueline was only 17 years old, but she knew she was involved in life-or-death work.
 
From Helene Mordkovitch editing Defense de la France, to Charlotte Nadel operating the press, to Jacqueline Marié distributing copies in the streets, by the end of 1941 women made up the core of a bourgeoning Résistance which was slowly but surely making itself known to the general public. 
The events of the year ahead would be a turning point which would swell the numbers of Résistantes – and fuel the rage of the Nazi regime.
 
In 1942, Jacqueline and her friends were convinced they were on the cusp of a breakthrough. Developments in the war seemed to drive momentum in their favor. First, the Allies invaded North Africa. Rather than welcoming the Allied forces as a chance to throw off the German oppressors, the way Philippe Viannay and millions of others hoped, Marshal Pétain denounced them as invaders. This was a crushing blow to those who hated the Nazis, but hated the Communists more. Who would lead them? It is in 1942 that Charles de Gaulle emerges as a flag around which Resistants on both sides could rally: a conservative and a military man, yet one whose hands were clean, untainted by collaboration or Nazism. The emergence of a real figurehead encouraged many to seek out resistance networks, or at least turn a blind eye to resistance activities in their vicinity. But this inspiration was nothing compared to the rollout of the dreaded STO program.
 
After the dreadful decision to invade the Soviet Union, Germany found itself running short on laborers – it was all hands on deck at the front lines, and the factories were falling behind schedule. The new head of government, Mr. Lucky Cufflinks himself, Pierre Laval, announced a new plan to bring our boys back home. The plan was simple: French men would volunteer to work in Germany, and for every three volunteers, Germany would release a French prisoner of war. I bet Pierre really thought he had something here. Well, the plan went over like a damp firework, and nobody volunteered as tribute. Fine, then, Laval figured, if you won’t volunteer to do it, we’ll make you go do it. On September 4, 1942, Marshal Pétain and Pierre Laval signed a new law which required that all able-bodied men aged 18 to 50 and all single women aged 21 to 35 be “subject to do any work that the Government deems necessary.” A new organization called the STO would conscript young men and assign them to work duty in Germany whether they liked it or not.
 
If you’ve ever studied the French Revolution and the history of the corvée, you know that there is nothing – nothing – that French men hate more than being conscripted to do some manual labor for his ovrlord. Nothing the Vichy government could have done could possibly have radicalized so much of the otherwise law-abiding public so fast. It was one thing to wait and see, it was another thing to be shipped to another country to build bombs for your occupier – in factories which were getting bombed by the Allies. Young men took to the hills – literally – and began living in the forests. Eventually, these men formed guerilla militias called maquis, and they’d make life hell for the Nazis in the years ahead. Meanwhile, the women of France had truly, finally had enough. It was bad enough to lose a husband or a son in battle, but there was at least tradition and honor in that. To lose your husband to a German rubber factory in the middle of an RAF bombing raid? It was unspeakable and shameful, and across the country, hundreds of thousands of women took action. In Caen and Rouen, where conscripted workers were loaded onto trains due east, women began marching. In the town of Montluçon, women laid down on the tracks to prevent the trains from departing, while others overtook the guards. Of the 300 workers scheduled to leave for Germany, all but 30 managed to escape into the woods. Meanwhile, resistance groups dissuaded women from factory work, since that might free up French men for deportation to German factories instaed. “Not one French woman for the Reich” went the phrase. Women had Resistance newspapers of their very own, with one historian estimating that between 70-100 Resistance publications targeted women specifically. These papers had titles like “Women’s Voices” or “Women in Action” or “The Paris Housewife” and encouraged women to view themselves as part of a long tradition of protest, stretching back to the bread riots of 1789. Is it any wonder that Defense de la France reached a circulation of 250,000 copies that summer?
 
With more than enough couriers willing to distribute newspapers around town, Jacqueline and her brother Pierre were ready to move onto more serious Résistance activities. That summer, Pierre used his fluency in German to work as an interpreter at the office of the STO. In fact, half the office staff were in the Resistance, which is how one day, whoopsy daisy, the STO’s central archives mysteriously went up in smoke one day. Jacqueline joined the Mithridate surveillance network, which helped provide the practical materials of the underground: fake ID cards, forged papers, and ration books. That summer, Pierre and Jacqueline had unexpected company in the Résistance: their parents! “Mama brought the radio technician of the Mithridate network into our home. She started working in a resistance group’s office, and offered up our apartment to resistants on the run from the Gestapo. I had to give up my own bedroom to one of these resistants, and was put in charge of finding food for them.” 
 
Conditions in France were spiralling out of Germany’s control. Unconvinced that the Vichy government could manage its people, or protect its coastline from Allied invasion, that winter the German army rolled into Vichy the way it had once rolled into Paris. No longer needed, having been replaced by German guards, Jacqueline’s father returned to Versailles at last. No sooner than he arrived than he joined a local resistance network. “Little by little,” Jacqueline writes, “all the members of our family, working independently of one another, joined those who had chosen not to resign, those who had said ‘NO’ to a France crushed by the Nazis. We decided to fight: my mother, my brother, my brother and me. It was in our genes to fight.”
 
Unfortunately for the Marié family, the dramatic increase in French Resistance activity caught Hitler’s attention as well. Following a decree from the Fuhrer called “Night and Fog” German authorities pursued a strategy of political disappearances. Not only did German authorities begin arresting greater and greater numbers of political dissidents, they refused to share their whereabouts with family, or even whether they were still alive. Across the country, in cities and country villages, resistants began slipping into obscurity, here one day, gone the next. They’d be smuggled into prisons, and then eventually into trains, with nothing to indicate their fate but a sinister “NN” next to their name in the paperwork. The Nazis called these prisoners “vernebelt” or “transformed into mist.” “Night and Fog” served multiple purposes: it kept residents of the occupied territories in terror and paranoia. It prevented foreign governments or international relief organizations from accusing them of mistreating specific foreign prisoners. Finally, it let Germans pretend they didn’t know what was happening, since soldiers couldn’t speak about their prisoners to friends and family at home. By the beginning of 1943, just as men and women of the Resistance began transforming into mist, Jacqueline took on her bravest challenge yet.
 
In 1942, the Nazis began planning for a British invasion by building what they called the great Atlantic Wall. This wall was actually a series of forts and barricades, ironically similar to the Maginot Line they had so effortlessly passed back in 1940. Never one for small ideas, Hitler imagined a line stretching from northern Scandinavia all the way to neutral Spain. The Nazis couldn’t shut up about their big wall, and the French hated it – after all, they were the ones building it, nearly one million of them, against their will. By 1943, the Nazis set up an office in the Chateau de La Maye, right in the middle of Versailles. Once the home of Edward, the Nazi-loving Duke of Windsor, and his new wife, Wallis Simpson, the chateau was now home to a million panicking bureaucrats, coordinating all the blueprints and paperwork for the Atlantic Wall. One day, Jacqueline’s brother, Pierre, managed to steal those blueprints. Impossibly cool under fire, Pierre handed the plans over to his sister, who reached out to a crucial network of women to handle what came next. One woman owned a restaurant, and offered her back kitchen as a workstation. Two other women joined Jacqueline in the kitchen, where they all did the grunt work of copying the documents. “This is how we copy the plans of the Atlantic Wall: on small pieces of tracing paper. We have to be as precise as possible, to the millimeter.” Jacqueline would joke later, “If only I’d had a photocopier!” The women’s work isn’t done. “Once our work is done, my brother takes the plans to Mrs. Stewart’s house. She’s an English woman running the Berlitz school in town. Through her, the plans will fly to London, along with other information we’ve been collecting about telephone networks and local airports.” It was a monumental achievement for the Mithridate network, signaling a move into more active espionage and sabotage.
 
For Jacqueline, this meant radio work, especially scouting out potential broadcasting spots. “It is dangerous to transmit for a long time from the same place…resistants put in charge of radio transmissions show extraordinary courage, and many are stopped and regularly executed on the spot. We sometimes broadcast from home or from the homes of patriotic friends who sometimes pay with their lives for this hospitality. For several months, we work in the attics of the nursing school, or even under the roofs of the girls’ high school. Few of us are prepared for this life in the shadows, but circumstances compel us to learn all the codes and reflexes.” Unfortunately for the Marié family, their shadows were about to transform into mist.
 
Spying and stealing right under the noses of the authorities, Pierre knew it was only a matter of time before the authorities came for him. The knock on the door arrived February 3, 1944. Jacqueline’s mother was hiding another resister in the house at the time. Caught by surprise, the resister was shot dead by the Germans, but by drawing attention to himself, he allowed Jacqueline’s brother to escape. Living life on the run, Pierre, like so many men of the Resistance, found himself relying on a network of women. For thousands of French women, the Resistance was one thing, but helping brave young men on the run was another. They might not lie down in front of trains or steal top secret documents, but these women put their own lives at risk by offering shelter to the Resistance. After the war, their efforts usually went unsung and unrecognized. “Pierre first found refuge with Ms. Domergue at the nurses’ home, then at a boarding school for young girls. Then, he passed on to Mrs. Gonce, a heroic woman with three children. Finally, he found shelter with a relative in Paris, Madame Corderoy. Another woman! My brother will often be protected by women. A clandestine should not stay too long in the same place. For my part, I liason with friends of the Network and acquire Pierre’s means of subsistence, since he no longer has an identity or ration tickets.” Finally, in June 1944, Pierre arrives in the village of Borcq. As Jacqueline’s cousin, Mauricette, told the family, “As far as the village knew, Pierre was just a very sick young man who came for a rest in the countryside. He set up his headquarters at my grandmother’s. A table served him as an office. There were plans, papers address books and a radio station. Each week, a young girl from Poitiers, whose name was Marie Bureau, brought him information. She came by bike and slept in my room. Perhaps she was in love with Pierre, because in those days he hid the photo of his fiancee Colette in a drawer. But they didn’t tell me anything.” A female cousin, a great-aunt, a young girl from a neighboring village: these are the female networks keeping Pierre alive. “Sentenced to death,” Jacqueline says, “Pierre is protected by a chain of solidarity and conspiracy – of the silence of ordinary people.”
 
A few weeks later, unable to find Pierre, the Gestapo returned to the Marié home. This time, they ransack the apartment and shove Jacqueline and her parens into the back of a sinister black car. The Marié family is headed to Fresnes [FW-EH-NNE] prison. “I can only take my toothbrush and one book. Back then I had the idea of a career working in the juvenile courts, so the closest book I could find was The Montessori Method.” Fresnes prison was where the Germans kept their political prisoners for interrogation before shipping them across the Reich. “In Fresnes, my mother and I are soon separated from my father, and we fear for his life. He is diabetic and has been taking insulin daily for many years. He will no longer be able to take his medication. I still remember the image of my father being dragged down the hall by two German soldiers. Where are you going Papa? I am worried I will never see him again.”
 
Jacqueline and her mother are placed into the isolation ward. “My mother’s cell faces the courtyard, and mine faces the outdoors. From my cell, I hear the voices of families of prisoners. My only contact with the outside is what they call Radio Fresnes…We tap on the plumbing pipes to transmit messages from one cell to another, communicating in Morse code the way we learned in our scouting days. In this way, I get to know my neighbor. I never see her face, but she becomes very close to me and her voice is familiar. When she comes back from interrogations, I hear her groans. I try to relieve her suffering by sending signals in Morse code. Tip…tip…tap.. “It will not last.” “Tip..tip..tip..tap” “We will get out of it, don’t worry!” Tip…tip..tap..tap. “We will beat them in the end!” To pass the time, Jacqueline reads her book on the Montessori method and sings to herself. Eventually, Jacqueline is transferred from isolation into general population, where she is squeezed into a cell with five other women in the stifling heat. On a routine basis, each prisoner gets stuffed into a van and driven to the Gestapo offices for interrogation and torture. Even now, Jacqueline tries not to remember these afternoons. “They want to know where my brother is. I will learn later that they told my mother, “It doesn’t matter, he was shot anyway” and left her to suffer in that knowledge. But my mother told herself, “Why would they continue to question me if they shot Pierre?” Jacqueline undergoes “The Bathtub” torture, which we call waterboarding today. “The slaps, the blows, the screams…I can’t bear to remember them. It’s a nightmare that still haunts me to this day. We’re like rag dolls. They can do whatever they want to us. We’re nothing. Wrecks. I tell them again and again that I’m only a kid, that I saw nothing, knew nothing…But you have to hold on, hold on forever. Do not cry. Never cry in front of our executioners. It’s our way of continuing the resistance.”
 
To keep their spirits up, the women of Fresnes bond with one another. They recite poetry, and pray together. They share memories and songs, and new arrivals bring updates from the outside world. When they hear of the Allies landing at the Normandy beaches, Jacqueline hopes the end of the war is near. What she doesn’t realize is that the approach of the Allies will only make the Germans more desperate, and more extreme. After a month and a half at Fresnes prison, Jacqueline and her cell mates are loaded onto buses. It is August 15th, 1944. One week later, most of the remaining prisoners will be shot. One week after that, unbeknownst to Jacqueline, the prison will be liberated by the Allies. Meanwhile, Jacqueline and the others are shuffled across Paris “in the early morning, under the gaze of passersby. We have the feeling that they are watching our parade with dread and sadness, and they mourn for us without saying a word.” At the train depot, the soldiers herd the women into cattle cars. “We are a convoy of over six hundred women, with men in the other cars. We are surrounded by so many soldiers and officers, that it’s as though the entire German army is watching us. About a hundred prisoners are piled up in each wagon, mostly resistance fighters. We have a large bucket of drinking water, but as you can imagine, it won’t stay full for long. We have a bucket for a toilet, for one hundred people – can you imagine? We will get used to it, as we will get used to everything, because we have no choice. Our dehumanization has begun.”
 
Unable to sit down, the women roll across Europe in the boiling heat of the cattle car. As the train rolls on and on, the women wilt in the heat. “The train shakes us. The old railway equipment makes a dreadful noise, which mixes with the groans of the passengers. Dante could not imagine a worse scene…I hope with all my heart that my parents are not on the train. Where are you, Mama? What has become of you?” It is the middle of the night when the convoy finally stops. Disoriented, delirious with hunger and thirst, Jacqueline struggles to make sense of her new surroundings. “Plunged into darkness, we don’t know where we are. The Germans roar and the sounds of their boots pounding the pavement resound up and down the tracks. There is a smell of smoke in the air. The minutes pass, long, endless. We are running out of air. We no longer dare to speak. And suddenly, in the midst of this twilight silence, one of our comrades began to sing Ave Maria. We think we’re dying of suffocation, and this song, this beautiful voice holds us, for a moment, in life. For the rest of my life, I will remember this moment. We all listen to this marvelous song in a religious silence, which mutes the cries and the howls of our jailers. This voice gives us extraordinary strength.”
 
Soon afterwards, the German soldiers opened up the doors at last. Gasping for breath, Jacqueline and her fellow prisoners find themselves in the middle of an open field, at the entrance of a tunnel. Lined up in neat rows, the soldiers force them to walk. The sun rises. For mile after mile, the women pass through small villages. “The inhabitants look at us, horrified, handing us glasses of water and milk which we eagerly seize, dying of thirst..But those who offer us a drink are pushed back by the soldiers.” Those who make a run for it are executed. The march continues on, mile after mile, along the banks of the Marne river. Later, Jacqueline will learn that their march took place because the Allies bombed a tunnel along the railroad track. “We could all have been sent into the Marne. At least death would have seized us more quickly.” Finally, Jacqueline reaches the next station on the line. Standing on a platform in the middle of the station, Jacqueline can see the Third Reich collapsing around her. One one side of the platform, male prisoners line up, waiting for cattle cars of their own. On the other side of the platform, a train fills up with German soldiers, “gray mice” – that is, German women in uniform, and French collaborators, trying to stay ahead of the Allied invasion. Eventually, the women are herded onto another train and cross the border into Germany, at which point a few lucky prisoners are able to receive food and water from the Red Cross. “We still don’t know where we’re being taken. There are machine guns on the roof of the train. Hundreds of small papers flutter out of the top of the cattle cars, our last messages for our families, in the hopes that railway workers will find them and send them along. After more hours of travel, the trains stop, and the male prisoners are detached from the train. The women learn they are a few miles from Buchenwald prison. They call out to the men: “This is just a goodbye, my brothers!” Jacqueline and her passengers struggle for a last glimpse of the men. “Many of these brothers, like our sisters, will never return. For the moment, our comrades are waiting on the platform. Among them, though I won’t learn this until after the war, is my father.”
 
Before long, Jacqueline’s train rolls on to its final destination. After seven days and seven nights, the journey ends. The women are forced out of the cattle cars at the point of a gun, with the sick and the elderly thrown onto the ground. Female guards of the SS, wielding vicious dogs on chains, wait for the new arrivals. “Disoriented, frightened, arranged in our lines of five by five, we hit the road. Our convoy stretches out in columns of miserable limping women, tormented by hunger and worse still, by thirst. We pass through a large village with pretty houses. The streets are deserted, but behind the curtains, we can see the silhouettes of inhabitants watching us. We are reduced to zombies. Since our departure from Fresnes we have not stopped descending down the scale of humanity. When we left France, we were still female prisoners, now we are like animals on our way to the slaughterhouse.” Before long, Jacqueline and the rest of the train arrive at the gate of a large camp. They encounter bizarre women, bald, emaciated, dressed in oversized striped gowns. “At that moment, we still have some illusions. But they won’t last long.” On August 21, 1944, Jacqueline and her compagnons had arrived at the edge of the Baltic Sea, in a desolate stretch of infamous cruelty. Forced to shed their belongings and clothes in exchange for ill-fitting striped gowns and shoes ten sizes too big, Jacqueline and the others look at each other and nearly start laughing. “Have we just entered the antechamber of madness?” She wasn’t far off. Jacqueline had just entered the Nazis’ concentration camp for women, Ravensbruck.
 
Thanks for listening to the Land of Desire. The story of Ravensbruck deserves its own episode, so I will conclude this episode here. While the Nazi concentration camps are hardly obscure, Ravensbruck itself is often left out of those narratives. It is impossible to tell the story of the French Resistance without acknowledging the incredible cost that came with the espionage, the underground newsletters, and the sheltering of political dissidents. To diminish the story of women’s participation in the Resistance after the war, which I’ll discuss in a future episode, is also to dismiss the suffering those same women faced when they were captured. Their story deserves to be told. Until next time, au revoir.

Sources

My primary source for this week’s episode is Jacqueline’s own brand new memoir, Résistante. It’s only available in French right now, but it actually makes a pretty good read for language learners. Nearly the entire book is written in the present tense, so if you’re struggling with the plus que parfait (couldn’t possibly be me) this is actually a fairly manageable read. 

A few other terrific, highly recommended reads:

Further Reading:

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