Authors: Caroline Moorehead
But that was in the early days. As the weeks passed, and the fort grew colder, the women pushed their bunks together and slept head to toe, sharing their blankets, their political differences forgotten. The confrontational debates softened and a sense of real solidarity took shape among them. It was forged at least in part by the fact that most of the women had known and recognised the risks they had been running in the Resistance, and that shared knowledge, with all its attendant misfortunes, provided a bond that proved far stronger than political allegiances. ‘We weren’t victims,’ Madeleine Dissoubray would later say. ‘It wasn’t like the Jews or the gypsies. We saw the German posters, we read about the penalties, we heard about torture. We knew what we were doing. It was our choice, and this gave us a strong emotional link.’ By the time Dr Adelaïde Hautval joined the other women, a few weeks later, she found a truly ‘generous and sisterly community’. Of no strong political convictions herself, she did not feel an outsider.
Nor did the most aristocratic of all the women in the group, Francine Rondeaux de Montbray, though in background, education and money she could hardly have been more different. Francine was a tall, outspoken, confident woman in her early forties, whose first cousin was André Gide. She had grown up, surrounded by nannies and tutors, in a château in Normandy. She was divorced, and had a young daughter, and was one of the very few practising Catholics among the women. After the defeat of the French army and the arrival of the German occupiers, Francine had transformed the ground floor of her house in Paris into a secret hospital for wounded Allied airmen, whom, once they recovered, she helped to escape across the demarcation line, along with Jewish families. Patrician contempt for the occupiers had proved her undoing. Regularly she drove to Normandy to collect food for her patients and one day crashed her car into a Wehrmacht vehicle. Arrested and taken to a police station, she might easily have been released, had she not slapped a sergeant who jostled her.
However, there were in Romainville three women who did feel themselves to be outcasts, and with some reason. These were the
délatrices
, informers, suspected by the others of having caused the arrest of considerable numbers of resisters. Antoine Bibault was reported to have turned people over to the Gestapo in exchange for a reward; instead of paying it, the Germans arrested her. Jeanne Hervé was a disgruntled, sharp-tongued woman who had denounced not only Jews but her neighbours, and would have denounced one of the women in her cell in Romainville had it not been for the intervention of Josée. Twenty-year-old Lucienne Ferre was said by the women from Bordeaux to have been in league with Poinsot’s men. All three were cold-shouldered by the others.
Perhaps most important for the cohesion of the women, a desire to learn, and to teach, spread around the dormitories. To fill the long days, to keep at bay memories of what had happened and fears for the future of children, an informal series of classes started up, each woman contributing her own experiences and skills. Viva Nenni gave Italian lessons; Marie-Claude took political history; Maï, remembering the long conversations with Georges, discussed aspects of philosophy. Danielle gave briefings on the daily news. Charlotte, whose excellent memory and long years with Louis Jouvet had filled her mind with entire scenes from plays as well as with Jouvet’s meticulous and obsessive stage directions, recreated evenings at the theatre.
Seventeen-year-old Poupette Alizon, whose own education by the nuns had been limited and in any case truncated by the war, arrived at Romainville from almost eight months’ solitary confinement in La Santé and Fresnes, in a cell five paces wide and eight paces long, to discover a whole new world of learning and friendship. It was, she thought, like going to university; each day, she learnt something new, each day opened worlds she had never dreamt of. As she would say later: ‘Usually people learn about life through their own personal experiences: I learnt it through the stories of others.’ In her long and lonely months in La Santé, Poupette had only caught a glimpse of Marie. Now she was overwhelmingly relieved and happy to be reunited with her sister, and they spent hours talking to each other. Once again, Marie fell into the role of older sister, protecting Poupette. In Romainville there was now a group of very young girls, some of whom had never been away from home and were little older than children. They missed their mothers, and the older women did their best to care for them.
A few of the women had managed to bring books with them—Simone had a book of geography her father had been reading before he was executed—and these they shared around. Others they borrowed from a small library put together by one of the prisoners, Julien Caen, former administrator at the Bibliothèque Nationale, arrested in 1941 with the resisters of the Musée de l’Homme. Caen had a little trolley, and wheeled his books along the corridors.
Charlotte had never directed a play herself, but having sat in the wings watching Jouvet, she knew exactly what to do. She soon discovered, among the other women, some with acting talents, others who could sing, others again who could make costumes. Jacqueline had a particularly sweet voice. Together, the women began to put on plays. Charlotte, who was able to draw on the many hours spent with Jouvet, memorising and recording his notes and stage directions, could recall many of the lines of the classics, while others improvised scenes that were missing. Cécile, a skilled seamstress from her days sewing furs, did the costumes. For
Le Malade imaginaire
, she had her mother bring in an enormous old blanket, which she cut up and made into an invalid’s costume. What they called ‘les après-midis artistiques’, the theatrical afternoons, took place on Sundays after lunch, in the courtyard, and they were attended not only by the prisoners but by the German guards. For a while, having been told that the male prisoners could not be present, the women announced that they would suspend their performances; but then Trappe relented and the whole prison turned out to watch.
On Sunday 13 September, a series of
tableaux vivants
of historical incidents across the centuries was staged; the twentieth century came in chains. ‘I am absolutely not to be pitied,’ wrote Raymonde Sergent to her daughter Gisèle. Though there was no work to be done, there was any amount of ‘culture, physical activities, dance, theatre, singing… There are not enough hours in the day to do all the things we want to do.’
On Trappe’s orders, no contact of any kind was permitted between the men and women held prisoner in Romainville. But ways were found to hide notes in the cracks in the brickwork in the exercise yard, and to pass letters via a priest, who was allowed to visit the fort from time to time, or the prisoner who acted as doctor in the infirmary. By offering to do the men’s laundry, it was very occasionally possible for the women to exchange a brief word or a note of encouragement, slipped among the clean clothes. The women were sometimes able to watch as the men exercised; on these days and on the theatrical Sunday afternoons they saw their faces and noted how they looked. Fourteen of the women had men in the hostage pool, and they lived in a state of dread. One of these was Betty, whose companion Lucien Dorland had been described in his Brigade Spéciale report as an extremely dangerous ‘fanatical communist’, from whom it had been impossible, under interrogation, to extract any information whatsoever. To her mother, Betty wrote that her main ‘consolation and joy is to see him sometimes from my window’. Lucien, like the other men, had been tortured.
On the evening of 20 September, Betty and a number of other women were told that they might have a few minutes with their men. They were not particularly worried, for there had been no news of any armed attacks by the Resistance on the Germans. Betty was taken to Lucien’s cell carrying with her a pair of woollen socks she had knitted for him. When the German guard who accompanied her remarked, ‘Where he’s going, he won’t need them’, she and Lucien agreed that what he probably meant was that the forty-six men in Romainville who had been told to prepare themselves for departure were going to be deported to a factory somewhere in Germany, where they would be provided with all the clothes they needed. ‘
Au revoir
, my beloved little wife,’ Lucien wrote to Betty after she was taken back to her dormitory. ‘I think it will be Compiègne and then deportation… We mustn’t give up hope … events are moving at a giant stride.’
None of the women knew that on the evening of 17 September, just before ten o’clock, two bombs had gone off in central Paris by the Rex cinema, which had been requisitioned in 1940 by the Wehrmacht. Ten Germans had been killed and nineteen wounded. Oberg had immediately issued orders that 116 hostages were to be shot. They should all have come from Romainville, but the fort was low on hostages, having provided 88 for a mass execution in August, after which their places had not been filled. To the 46 available would be added 70 from the Fort du Hâ in Bordeaux. What this effectively meant was that men would be executed who had not only been in prison 600 kilometres away at the time of the attack, but who knew nothing at all about it. Those chosen in Bordeaux included the farmers from around Cognac who had been arrested in July by Poinsot’s men. Aminthe Guillon’s husband and son, Prosper and Jean, were among them, as were Elisabeth Dupeyron’s husband, arrested with the Guillons at Les Violettes, and Marguerite Valina’s husband Lucien, with whom she had sheltered resisters from Poinsot’s men. Lulu and Carmen’s 19-year-old younger brother, arrested not long before and brought to Romainville, would have been among them, but he was in the infirmary with impetigo.
On Monday 21 September, at seven o’clock in the morning, the women in Romainville heard the sounds of marching boots and of men’s voices singing the Marseillaise. Lorries with darkened windows were seen in the street outside the fort. Still wanting to believe that the men were on their way to the station at Compiègne, ready for deportation to Germany, the women were not unduly frightened. Six hundred kilometres away, the same performance was being enacted in the Fort du Hâ.
For several days, Romainville was full of rumours. The men’s luggage was spotted still piled up outside the bunkers, but the women kept telling each other that it was probably waiting to travel on separately by another train. But then one of Lucien’s friends was moved into the cell in which the forty-six men had spent the night of the 20th, and there on the walls he found, scratched in pencil, a single sentence: ‘We are 46 men awaiting death, without regret, with pride and courage.’ Asking a guard where the men had gone, he was told, ‘You don’t want to know… I’m sure you understand me.’
It was now that the woman learnt that the forty-six men had been taken in groups of five up the steep slope to the firing range at Mont-Valérien. Not one had agreed to have his eyes bandaged. After it was over, twelve bottles of cognac had been distributed among the members of the firing squad. The bodies had been cremated in Père Lachaise cemetery, with orders that the families were not to be informed. It was from a note hidden in a tube of aspirin and smuggled into the fort that the women discovered where the ashes were. ‘They were so remarkable, those who fell,’ wrote Marie-Claude in a letter smuggled out of the fort, ‘that one has the impression that a whole lifetime would not suffice to be worthy of them or to avenge their deaths.’ Only one of the 116 men executed in Paris and Bordeaux had actually been tried and convicted by a German tribunal for having carried out an attack on German soldiers. ‘Some days,’ wrote Danielle, ‘I think that I have reached the limits of horror.’
For her part, Betty, usually so resilient and robust, was silenced by grief and horror. She found out from Lucien’s friends that there had been another message written on the wall of the bunker by Lucien and addressed to her. ‘Courage,’ it said, ‘dearest friend, this is a painful moment you must get through.’ To her parents, she wrote short, despairing notes. ‘He was so good; my heart is breaking. I loved him so much… We are all widows now… These executioners must really hate the young French, and especially the intellectuals. They are barbarians.’ What she minded most was that she and Lucien had never had a child. She kept herself going by thinking of the moment when the war would be over and she would return to the house they had shared in Paris, and sit at the desk at which they had so often worked together. ‘It was so good living with him, with his bohemian temperament and all our books… I think of only one thing, and that is getting out to avenge his death.’
There were now fourteen new widows in Romainville. Their friends did all they could. There was not much to say, but they held them close, hoping that the warmth and physical contact might lessen the pain. ‘There are only widows here,’ Betty wrote sadly to her parents. Many years later, one of the women described her last moments with her husband. ‘When I was called that morning, something in me stopped, and nothing can set it off again, like the watch that stops when the wearer stops living.’ But though she wanted to die, she chose to live, to defy the Germans, and not to yield to anyone. ‘I had to hold fast to the end, and die of living.’
On 14 October, a new group of widows arrived to join them. Among the thirty women sent to Paris from Bordeaux were Marguerite Valina, Elisabeth Dupeyron and Yvette and Aminthe Guillon, whose husbands had been shot together at the Souge barracks on 21 September. With them came Madeleine Zani, the two sisters, Yolande and Aurore, and Annette Epaud, mother of Claude. None of the women had been permitted to see their small children before leaving.
A few hours before being taken out to be shot, Prosper and Jean Guillon had been given paper and pencils with which to write farewell notes to their wives. The pencils were blunt and the messages were scrawled unevenly on the rough sheets of paper. ‘You, my dearest wife, you must try to forget and to remake your life,’ Jean had written to Yvette. ‘Forgive me if I have ever caused you pain… Goodbye for ever. I am going to die bravely and for the cause for which I fought.’ Prosper’s letter was shorter. ‘I am going to die bravely,’ he wrote to Aminthe, ‘in spite of everything. Try to end your days as well as you can. My last thoughts are for you.’ What neither man had known was that their wives were not safely back at the farm but in prison; nor did each of them know that the other was to die at the same time.