By Anne Sebba, 2016

After my post of November 2020, it seemed to me the rewards of writing about books were not commensurate with the effort, and I felt I was finished with blogging. Just getting through the day in fairly good cheer has used up a lot of my energy throughout the pandemic, as it has for many others.

In spite of not having great energy for the last two years, I always have a couple of books on the go. Subscriptions to The London Review of Books, The New York Times Book Review, and The Literary Review ofCanada seriously cut into my time for reading anything else. These journals do give me something in the mail box and make me feel somewhat connected to the world beyond my home and my neighbourhood, and they are much more than just fill-in reading. Some of the articles are works of art in themselves, for example, Patricia Lockwood’s review in 6 January 2022 LRB of The Morning Star by Karl Ove Knausgaard.

Whether reading book reviews or browsing in book stores, I am always on the hunt for new books. A couple of months ago, I found Les Parisiennes in the sale section at the Chapters on Calgary Trail, and I felt compelled to share my excitement. The book deals with an under reported and misrepresented subject–the role of women in war. Too often they are presented as quietly keeping the home fires burning, when in fact they usually do much more when confronted with violent conflict they have probably not chosen and have little control over.

When the Germans invaded Poland in September of 1939, most Parisians, men and women, paid little attention, secure in their confidence in the Maginot Line fortifications left over from World War I. The Jews of France, many of whom had already fled the Nazis or earlier tsarist pogroms, were less sanguine in their attitude.

After the city was swiftly overrun in June and July of 1940, the initial impression of many Parisiennes was that the occupiers were better dressed and better mannered than their own men, most of whom were dead, in hiding, or prisoners of war in Germany. In the beginning it seemed that normal life would continue, although perhaps in a more orderly fashion than when French people had been in charge. Over time the screws tightened with Parisians becoming colder and hungrier and more aware of the true nature of Nazism, of its vicious anti-Semitism and ambitions for world domination. To the occupiers, Paris was a plum posting because of the quality of the cuisine and art work and other objects to be plundered, and because of the perceived looseness of its women.

As the Germans were advancing and then occupying the city, more than half of its five million inhabitants fled south with whatever they could carry. Most cars and trucks had been requisitioned for the war effort, so the refugees were on bicycles or on foot, pushing carts or baby carriages. They hoped to get to Spain or Portugal or at least to the part of France that was not yet occupied. This flight from Paris is wonderfully evoked in Irene Nemirovsky’s posthumous novel Suite Francaise.

Eventually most of the refugees who did not die on the road from exposure or being strafed by German planes returned to Paris, resigned to making whatever accommodations were necessary to survive the occupation. The accommodation was such that by the summer of 1943 about 80,000 French women were requesting support for the children born of their unions with the occupiers. Some of these relationships were no doubt love matches, as women have always shown an ability to love their oppressors and the children born of oppression, although for many the German lovers were at least initially a means to feeding themselves and their families.

After the initial shock of the occupation the great jewellers and the great couture houses kept on functioning, with German women—and their German husbands and lovers—now their main customers. In the case of these and other businesses owned by Jews, ownership was transferred to non-Jewish staff if not taken over by Germans. In July of 1942, more than 13,000 Jews, about a third of them children, were rounded up and confined for five days in the velodrome near the Eiffel Tower under appalling conditions before being shipped to Auschwitz. Irene Nemirovsky and her husband were among them; she died of typhus weeks after arrival. It was only in 1996 that Jacques Chirac made July 16^th a national day of remembrance.

Born in Kyiv, Nemirovsky had come to France in 1919 with her parents to escape the Bolsheviks. She saw herself as absolutely French while looking down on the uncultured recent Jewish arrivals. She wrote for two anti-Semitic journals, perhaps in an effort to conceal her Jewish origins. Her early novel David Golder, about a grasping, rich, uncultured Jew, was used in anti-Semitic propaganda.

The survival of Nemirovsky’s children is indicative of how complicated collaboration and accommodation were. The French policeman who took Nemirovsky and her husband away said he would be back in the morning for the girls, thus giving their governess time to save them. As girls, they were easier to pass off as non-Jewish than circumcised boys. The governess had the presence of mind to pack what the daughters thought were their mother’s diaries, but which they realized years later was the manuscript of Suite Francaise. The rescue of Jewish children, by hiding them in convents, monasteries, orphanages, and private homes, is one of the positive aspects of the Nazi occupation of France.

Nemirovsky had hoped until the end that her highly placed French friends would save her. Over time others among the famous and about to be famous found their own methods for staying safe.

Simone de Beauvoir signed a declaration that she was neither a communist nor a Jew and thus was able to go on teaching. Sartre took over a teaching position formerly occupied by a Jew. He and de Beauvoir remained well fed while others starved because Sartre’s mother’s maid spent long days in food lines, and because de Beauvoir’s work at Radio-Paris, a job she could not have held without some ability to look away from what the Germans were doing, gave her access to the black market.

Edith Piaf and Maurice Chevalier were judged harshly in some circles for entertaining French prisoners of war in Germany. However, a photograph of Piaf with a bunch of prisoners enabled the identification of the men in the picture, giving a measure of comfort to their loved ones who had not known where the men were or even if they were alive. One could see Piaf’s posing for the photo as an act of collaboration or as a brilliant act of sabotage from within the hyena’s mouth.

Coco Chanel made anti-Semitic pronouncements and openly went about with her German lover; after the war she gave away so much Chanel No 5 perfume to GIs that she escaped prosecution. Colette kept a low profile, living in terror that her Jewish husband would be carted off. Picasso stuck close to home and to his studio, to which Germans fascinated with his “degenerate” art made clandestine visits.

While I sympathize with those who did their best to live something like normal lives, and will never know for sure how I would have acted under the circumstances, it is those who actively resisted the occupation that I find truly admirable.

One of the most admirable of these resisters was a spinster art curator named Rose Valland. Before the war, in spite of her encyclopedic knowledge she had only been allowed to work as a volunteer; “…as a woman she was not eligible for a paid curator’s job.” With their mania for record keeping, the Nazis allowed her to catalogue all of the art works being shipped to Germany. Her phenomenal memory and secret—and extremely dangerous– copying of files led to her appointment as head of the commission charged with recovering the stolen art after 1945.

Jeanne Bucher, “a divorced grandmother in her mid-sixties,” ran an art gallery where she held under-the-radar shows by what the Nazis considered to be degenerate artists, never completely knuckling under and never flagrantly disobeying the rules. In the private area of the gallery she provided temporary hiding places for resisters on the run. One of these discovered with a shock that his bed was on top of a pile of Picassos and Bracques.

And then there were the young female resisters.

Most of them were communists in their late teens or early twenties and came from poor working class families. Many of them already had children who were either in the country with friends or relatives, or pushed around Paris in baby carriages that also transported leaflets, ammunition, and weapons. Their resistance activities were at first overlooked by the Nazis, because they were women who knew how to flirt, because as women they had a legitimate reason to be pushing a pram, and because the Germans had a low opinion of the capabilities of females. Early in the occupation the young women found shows at the couture houses great places to pass along messages, as the Germans simply did not expect this.

Eventually most of these young female resisters were transported to Ravensbruck, the concentration camp for women in Germany. They were assigned brutal work building roads whatever the weather on a terribly inadequate diet and without proper clothing or footwear. On pain of torture and death, some of the young French women refused to do any work to support the German war effort. Although mocked by Polish and Russian prisoners who had been there longer, many of the French resisters were deeply affected by the plight of the “lapins,” young Polish girls used for horrific medical experiments. As the Soviet army moved in from the east, the surviving prisoners from Ravensbruck were marched west, and upon reaching the Czech border, many of these exhausted and emaciated women were raped by soldiers of the Red Army. The soldiers cheerfully greeted them as their “sisters” while forcing them to lie down to be raped.

Agents parachuted into France from Britain by the SOE (Special Operations Executive) were another type of female resister. It was necessary for them to speak impeccable French and to have a believable cover story. Many of these women were also captured and tortured and sent to Ravensbruck. (An account of all the women of that terrible camp is found in Sarah Helm’s 2015 book If This Is aWoman Inside Revensbruck: Hitler’s Concentration Camp for Women.)

When the women from Ravensbruck arrived back in France, used to sleeping on wooden planks crammed together with other skeletal bodies, they found beds too soft and too spacious. With their shaven heads some of them were mistaken for the women who had stayed home and who had had their foreheads branded and their heads shaven for consorting with the German occupiers. The fact that the returned resisters were sometimes spat on and jeered at was made worse by the reluctance of most of their compatriots to hear about their suffering. Everyone had suffered, and few wanted to hear from someone whose suffering had surpassed their own. The female resisters spent the rest of their lives supporting each other, as there was little comfort from anyone else.

Genevieve de Gaulle, the daughter of Charles de Gaulle’s brother, was one of the women returning from Ravensbruck. Nevertheless, in his megalomania Charles de Gaulle perpetuated the myth that only he and male agents following his orders had liberated France. He refused to recognize the role that communists (not necessarily the Communist Party) had played. Most of the many male collaborators were guilty of economic collaboration, and de Gaulle and French society in general perceived their cooperation as much more acceptable than the “collaboration horizontale” of women. In the Cold War atmosphere of the 1950s and late 1940s, a large amount of truth stretching was accepted as long as the male collaborators were not communist.

The role of female resisters in France has been downplayed for a number of reasons. As noted above, many of them were communists. They were also mostly deemed not to have handled ammunition or explosives or weapons; in fact many of them did, in contravention of the Geneva Convention. And the most powerful reason was deep-seated misogyny just underneath the flirtatious sparkle and shine of French society. Women did not have the vote in France until after the war and could not have bank accounts in their own names. A law forbidding women to wear trousers was passed in 1800 and not repealed until 2013 ( in later years it was seldom or never enforced). As presented in this book, France in the 1940s and 1950s does not seem to have been less patriarchal than the irrigation country of southern Alberta where I attended school from 1954 to 1965.

The men of France had been emasculated by military defeat and by seeing women capably assume roles previously perceived as intrinsically male. Women became the scapegoats for male and female anger and guilt, and female achievements were downplayed or completely unacknowledged. After the war there was a strong desire to return to the world that had existed prior to 1939, the world where women knew their place was in the home or did menial jobs for little pay, a desire to turn back time.

This is the first book I have read by Anne Sebba, a British journalist, and I will be reading more by her.

A lot of the books that have deeply affected me in the past decade have been written by women journalists and historians, most of them British, and combine the personal with the political or historical in a way that most books by male writers do not. I am thinking here of Catherine Merridale, Anna Reid, Sheila Fitzpatrick, Anne Applebaum, Sarah Helm, and especially of another female journalist and her harrowing book about rape as a weapon of war. Our Bodies, Their Battlefield by Christina Lamb raises, in a visceral and disturbing way, many of the same issues as Les Parisiennes.

The Unwomanly Face of War: An Oral History of Women in World War II by Svetlana Alexievich, winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature in 2015, is on my list of books to read.