... one of his in-house team for much of the time was also one of the great philosophers of that epoch - no, not Sartre, not Camus, not Bachelard, not Simone de Beauvoir... Simone Weil
*
Next, and likewise for a short while in Dorset Square, Lucie Aubrac (born June 29 1912, died March 14 2007), Lucie
Bernard when she was born, Lucie Samuel when she married, but the memorials all honour her by her
nom-de-guerre, which was Lucie Aubrac.
Simone Weil's story is all about her brain, which was far more active
even than the people she was advising could cope with - her recommendation to
send unarmed nurses to the front, for example, was rejected by both de Gaulle and the Americans - Lucie Aubrac is all about the active life, and all too often the life made
inactive by others. She inherited that from her father, a Burgundy winemaker who
went missing soon after his enlistment in World War I, and was eventually
found, totally amnesiac, in an asylum in Lyon in 1921.
The assumption throughout her teens was that she would become
a teacher, and even got a place at teaching school. But at seventeen she
changed her mind, went to Paris instead, joined the Communist Youth, and read
history, then took a job as an au pair in Germany so she could learn that
language. Pre-Hitler, and she wasn't Jewish, but anti-semitism doesn't generally make these
distinctions, and her name sounded Jewish, which was quite enough for the men
with fists.
In 1938 she moved to Strasbourg, Associate Professor of
History at the university there, and met husband Raymond. Raymond Samuel - definitely Jewish; his parents are on record as having been deported to
Auschwitz in convoy 66 on January 20 1944. It was he who chose the name "Aubrac" that both
would use as their code-names (it means "high plateau"; I have no
idea why he chose it; he also used Vallet, Ermelin and Balmont at different
times).
When war broke out he was conscripted as an Army Engineer, and
followed her dad into missing-land. Officially anyway - for what he was
actually doing, click here; though
it should be obvious. Unofficially the couple had moved to Lyon, where she taught
at the Edgar-Quinet High School for girls in the city, until she got fired when
her views on Vichy became known. Together they set up "Libération Sud" as one of
the eight parts of the "armée secrète" which is the subject of the
link, above: the The Unified Movements of the Résistance named at the top of this page. Lucie became a staff writer for the movement's newspaper "Libération",
which was a useful cover for her real activities, running a group which specialised
in helping prisoners escape from the Germans. Ironic in the extreme. When Raymond got captured, with Jean Moulin and the leaders of the other seven secret groups, in a Gestapo-organised
raid in Lyon in June 1943, Lucie was left alone, because the Gestapo had no interest in mere journalists!
He was held in Sarrebourg, fifty miles north-west of
Strasbourg, and sentenced to death. But now the tale gets complicated.
According to the Aubracs he "managed to convince" Klaus Barbie, chief of the Lyon Gestapo, to release him; but a month later
he was re-arrested in that Gestapo raid. Possibly an early manifestation of
amnesia? Other witness accounts only have him arrested that one time, and
insist that it was Lucie who worked on Klaus Barbie, convincing him to give her access to her husband one last time before he
died, then taking her team of liberators to attack the German truck that was transporting
the prisoners back to the Gestapo command. Active, as I said. Very active.
And now on the death list herself, because Barbie was not a happy man. For several months she and Raymond lived in hiding,
moving around France whenever a better hiding-place became available. Then,
organised by Moulin who was already there, they left for London as guests of the RAF on
February 8, 1944, and arrived just in time for the birth of daughter Catherine,
their second child.
Or maybe the
eye-witness accounts are as false as the Aubracs'. On trial as “the Butcher of Lyon” in the 1980s, Barbie claimed that Raymond had indeed been captured twice, but released
the first time on condition that he double-agented, his proving mission being the
capture of the senior résistance leaders in Lyon. The French press and the
couple themselves furiously denounced this "slander", but as worrying
inconsistencies were spotted in Lucie’s
story, doubts emerged that have never quite gone away.
When the Allies began the liberation of France, Lucie went with them (so did my dad, but I don't think he met her), one of the creators of the "Comités de
Libération"; later she served on several of the consultative committees of
the French Republic's Provisional Government, and had the special joy of being a
juror at the trial of Maréshal Pétain.
She also got her teaching license back, taking a post in Enghien-les-Bains,
a northrern suburb of Paris, before branching out with a position in Morocco,
and the last years of her career in Rome, after which she spent her time touring
secondary schools across France as a witness to the atrocities of the Second
World War, while simultaneously campaigning for both Amnesty International and
the Women’s Network for Parity.
During those same years Raymond found himself (I can't list
all of them, just the really major ones) appointed by Charles de
Gaulle as Commissaire de la République in
liberated Marseille; then to a senior post in the Ministry of Reconstruction where
he mostly oversaw mine clearance. Later Henry Kissinger recruited him as a means of making
contact with the north Vietnamese. Why him? When Ho Chi Minh went to France to negotiate Vietnam's independence in 1946, a task that took
him several months, he stayed in the Aubracs' home in Paris and godfathered their third child Elisabeth.
And why did Lucie take that teaching-post in Rome? Because Raymond had just been appointed Director
of the United Nations' Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO), a post he held
from 1964 to 1975, and it was based in Rome. Ditto Morocco, where he was sent as
a "technical adviser" to the government - it had just obtained
independence and could use some positive assistance. His last position of
eminence was with UNESCO, which he joined in 1978 to work on a range of "cooperation
projects". Active, as I said. Both of them. Very active.
Lucie died on March 14 2007, 94 years old, a "Grand Officier"
of the French Légion d'Honneur, and the author of two books, "Outwitting
the Gestapo" (1984) and "A Demand For Freedom" (1997); she was
honoured with a military ceremony at Les Invalides in Paris. Two films, "Boulevard
des Hirondelles" (Jose Yanne, 1993) and "Lucie Aubrac", do what
cinema always does, which is rather more "based on" than
"biography". Raymond died five years later, aged 97, and was honoured with a state
funeral (making him, as far as I can find out from the archives,
only the third French Jew ever to receive that honour: the others were fellow
homme de la résistance Jules
Isaac (click here)
and former Prime Minister Pierre
Mendès France (click here)
Suzanne
Buisson
Place Suzanne Buisson is it's name, though she wasn’t born here, never lived here, and has no other known association with the square than the need of the authorities to place her plaque as prominently and as centrally as possible, so as to make clear how greatly she is valued - and where better than adjacent to the statue of that Christian martyr?
In fact, though born in Paris, she grew up in Dijon, to which her parents had moved before she was old enough to be aware of it, and stayed there for the next sixteen years. Back in Paris as a seventeen year old she earned a paltry living as an employee in a store, and regularly attended meetings held by two still young and unknown men who would be among the leaders of France when the First World War began a decade and a half later, René Viviani (Prime Minister) and Albert Thomas (Armaments Minister); the meetings convinced her to become both an active Socialist and a Socialist activist - the first is pure theory, the second requires engagement - campaigning for the absolute equality of men and women, convinced that people like her could only earn a decent living if the current capitalist system were either radically transformed or completely overthrown, replaced anyway by Socialism. In 1905, the year of the failed Socialist revolution in Russia, she joined the French Section of the Workers' International.
Move forward two decades, her child with her first husband now grown up, her second husband the union leader Georges Buisson (who would be elected three years later to the most important position in the Socialist world in France, that of adjunct secretary of the General Confederation of Labour), herself the editor of "La femme, la militante", a weekly column in the Socialist newspaper "Le Populaire. And in her spare time serving, first, as Secretary of the National Committee of Socialist Women, then, from 1924 to 1936, on the Executive Committee of the national Socialist Party (national with a small "n", unlike the Nazi variety), nominated by another of the future great names, Léon Blum; a position of such significance that she served as a delegate to the Socialist International Congress in Vienna in 1931.
By 1938, she had aligned herself very publicly with the partisan groups forming an advanced opposition to Hitler. From 1941, when the partisans had failed to prevent the Nazi occupation, and Vichy rather than Viviani led the government, she used her new position as Treasuer of the Socialist Action Committee to travel the country, distributing Résistance literature, joining protests against the arrests of other Socialist activists. In March 1943 - her sixtieth year - she was given a seat on the SAC's political bureau, with responsibility for its relations with the Communist Party.
Based, of course, in Lyon, where all The Unified Movements of the Résistance were still based despite what happened to their leadership in June 1943, their locations now kept very secret - except that the SFIO's got found out, and on April 1 1944 the Gestapo marched in. Suzanne was among the arrestees, at first locked up and tortured in the Montluc prison in Lyon, then transferred to Fresnes in Paris on May 12, but transferred again on June 28, and this time to Drancy - so they must have known, or worked out, or maybe she told them, that she was Jewish, because Drancy was exclusively the deportation camp for Jews - where she stayed just two days before the next convoy of cattle-trucks set out for Auschwitz.
Léon Blum paid homage to her in the February 2 edition of "Le Populaire", in 1946:
"She was the accomplished, exemplary activist of whom the party could ask anything, who never shirked her duties, but on the contrary could be relied upon to fulfill them with absolute devotion and without self-interest. In the everyday workings of the party, she hesitated before no task; in clandestine struggle she recoiled before no danger."
You can’t really ask for higher praise than that from what would be, later on, a 3-time French Prime Minister. The quote in full, and in French, reads:
“Avant la guerre chacun dans le Parti respectait et admirait Suzanne comme un modèle. Elle était la militante accomplie, exemplaire, à qui le Parti peut tout demander, qui ne recule jamais devant aucune charge, qui d’ailleurs est apte à les remplir toutes par le caractère vraiment absolu du dévouement et du désintéressement. Mais des crises comme celles de la déroute et de la résistance agissent sur les êtres avec un étrange pouvoir de révélation. Chez des hommes que l’on croyait forts et purs on a vu apparaître la faiblesse ou la bassesse. Chez cette femme exacte, laborieuse, méthodique, modeste jusqu’au scrupule, une véritable héroïne s’est levée soudain. Parmi les noms qu’aucun socialiste de France n’aura le droit d’oublier jamais, car ils sont liés à la résurrection de notre parti en même temps qu’à la libération de la patrie, celui de Suzanne Buisson figure au premier rang. Dans la vie normale du Parti elle n’avait hésité devant aucune tâche ; dans la lutte clandestine, elle n’a reculé devant aucun danger. Le dévouement s’est haussé jusqu’à la plus téméraire intrépidité ; le désintéressement jusqu’au plus pur sacrifice. Et c’est bien par un sacrifice volontaire, en s’exposant sciemment pour avertir à temps un camarade d’un piège tendu par la Gestapo, qu’elle a finalement donné sa vie.”
Join me in her square in Montmartre by clicking here; and read the tributes to her, on the official SFIO website here, with the illustration below at L'Ours here
Charlotte
Delbo, or known by her married name as Charlotte Dudach, and by her tatoo number as 31661 (born August 10 1913; died March 1 1985): famed now for her
memoirs of her time as a prisoner in Auschwitz, the trilogy "Auschwitz et après" ("Auschwitz
and After"); famed in her lifetime for her
activities as a member of the French Résistance. The women of Convoy 31000 here; her collected writings and bio here.
A child of the First World War, she grew up a committed Marxist, Joining the Young Communist League
in 1932, and marrying Marxist intellectual Georges
Dudach in 1934. But she was also a committed thespian, and was on tour with the "Theater de l'Athenee" in South America when France fell to the Nazis. Georges had joined the Résistance, and she was determined to do the same; even more so when news reached her that one of her close friends, the
architect and Communist activist André Woog, had been arrested by French authorities and guillotined for
possession of anti-Fascist propaganda materials. She found a circuitous route home, to make sure no one could trace her, met Georges on the Franco-Spanish border, then parted again so that they could return to Paris more safely separately, arriving on November 15 1941.
In Paris she produced anti-German leaflets, constantly changing home address in hope of avoiding capture. But capture was the outcome nonetheless; it happened at noon on March 2 1942, arrested in their apartment, incarcerated in different prisons. On the morning of May 23 she was escorted to his cell at Mont-Valérien prison, given permission to say farewell to him before he was taken outside to be executed by firing squad. He was twenty-eight years old.
She remained at Romainville until until January 24 1943, when the number 31661 was tatooed on her forearm, and she was herded, with two hundred and twenty-nine other French women, to you-know-where. But not to die, as she probably expected. Given slave labour, though of course Arbeit Macht Frei so it needs to be described as a "job opportunity", first at Birkenau, the women's section of you-know-where, then at the satellite camp at Raisko for a while, and finally, in January 1944, to the all-women's camp of
Ravensbrück. When liberation loomed and the Nazis were trying to buy self-saving points, she was amongst those released to Red Cross officials, who
transported her to Sweden to begin the process of physical and psychological
rehabilitation. Of that group of two hundred and thirty, most of whom were,
like herself, not Jewish, and had been arrested for anti-Nazi political
activities rather than biological inheritance, only forty-nine were still alive when the war ended.
In the years that followed she went back to the theatre, both as an actress and as a writer, and wrote, but did not publish for nearly twenty years, the three volumes of her memoires "Auschwitz et après": "Aucun de nous ne reviendra" ("None of us will return") finally came out in 1965, "Une conaissance inutile" ("Useless Knowledge") in 1970, and the final part "Mesure de nos jours" ("The Measure of our days") the following year. Why so long to make them public? "I am not alive. I died in
Auschwitz but no one knows it" was one of her first notes-to-self upon returning to Paris. Blood-jets of that level of eruption can take lifetimes to coagulate, especially when you are as determined as she was not just to recount events, but "to see the unthinkable", because "they" - the rest of the world who did not suffer what she had suffered - "faut donner a voir - must be made to see". Twenty years was actually remarkably quick.
What she produced - the depth and originality of her writing, the intensity of language, the constant search for appropriate forms - places her alongside Frida Kahlo in my Hall of Fame as one of the true role-models of trauma-overcoming, ever. But you will need to read the books to see and feel the artistry alongside the therapy: the way in which writing functions as a form of résistance, not to an outside enemy, but precisely to that inside trauma.
"Auschwitz is so deeply etched on my memory that I cannot forget one moment of it. So you are living with Auschwitz? No, I live next to it. Auschwitz is there, unalterable, precise, but enveloped in the skin of memory, an impermeable skin that isolates it from my present self. Unlike the snake's skin, the skin of memory does not renew itself. … Thinking about it makes me tremble with apprehension."
And even if you only manage volume one, please read right to the end, because only then will its key phrases have any chance of acquiring their full meaning and value, and that will be through your response, not hers. She names those closing phrases a "Prayer to the Living to Forgive
Them for Being Alive", and calls on all of us to justify our existences "because it would be too senseless after
all for so many to have died while you live doing nothing with your life."
Amen to that.
*
The group's official name was "Alliance": the Gestapo dubbed it "Noah's Ark" because its agents used the names of animals as their aliases - and clearly she enjoyed that dubbing, because she used it as the title of her memoir later on (click here).
And why "Hedgehog": tough little animal, unthreatening in appearance, but one that "even a lion would hesitate to bite" - so said one of her colleages. No other French spy network lasted as long or supplied as much crucial intelligence - including providing American and British military commanders with a fifty-five foot long map of the beaches and roads on which the Allies would land on D-Day. The Gestapo pursued them relentlessly, capturing, torturing and executing almost five hundred of the three thousand spies and agents under her command, a quarter of them women, one of them her own lover, Léon Faye.
And vital in the war-effort. To name just a few of the Alliance's achievements: detailed information on train operations, both of troops and of transports to the east; equivalent information from the main submarine base at Lorient (Jacques Stosskopf the agent); the first information about the testing of V1 and V2 rockets at Peenemunde (agent on this occasion Jeannie Rousseau); records of launch pad operations in north-western France; a detailed map of the Atlantic defences; that fifty-five foot map, showing German fortifications as well as surveying the ordinances, that made D-Day possible (Robert Douin, artist and sculptor, responsible for that one); the organisation of General Giraud's submarine departure from Lavandou on November 4 1942, heading for Algiers to facilitate the Allied landing there.
I have named those three agents deliberately; all three were captured in 1944. Rousseau did the full circuit of concentration camps, but survived and lived to be nearly a hundred. Stosskopf and Douin were both executed.
Although she constantly moved her headquarters, changing her hair colour, her clothing, her official identity, even taking her two young children with her as she moved about (eventually, reluctantly, she sent them to grandma in Switzerland for safe-keeping), she was captured twice by the Nazis. Both times she managed to escape - once by slipping naked through the bars of her jail cell with her dress clenched between her teeth so she could redress when she got out - and continued to hold the network together even as it repeatedly threatened to crumble around her.
After the war she was part of the support group for Charles de Gaulle's successful bid for the Presidency, but her main support structure was for surviving members of her network and their families as France rebuilt. She also served as a member of the European Parliament in the early 1980s, received a Croix de Guerre from Belgium as well as France, and was awarded what is described in the official documents as "one of the British government's highest honours", though which one is impossible to ascertain. When she died, on July 20 1989, she became the first woman to be given a funeral at Les Invalides, though her tombstone can be found at the equally important Père Lachaise cemetery in eastern Paris.
*
Hélène Victoria Mordkovitch, or Hélène Viannay when she married Philippe of that name, both of them students at the Sorbonne at the time they met, both specialising in physical geography, which would prove an extremely useful skill when war broke out and Paris came under occupation.
She was actually Russian by birth, her parents having met while mum was working there as a doctor, and dad a journalist; they emigrated to Paris in 1908, but some local political events of vague journalistic interest persuaded him to return to Russia shortly after Hélène's birth in 1917, and she never encountered him again.
Forty-five further editions would appear over the next three years, reaching a production acme of four hundred and fifty thousand by January 1944, and giving it thereby the largest circulation of all the clandestine newspapers published in wartime France. While Philippe took on the editing, Hélène ran the printing press, and just as a sideline organised the mass production of false identity papers for Frenchmen resisting deportation to the forced labour camps in Germany.
Then, in 1944, because what they were doing clearly wasn't enough to achieve Libération, despite the recent allied invasion of the Normandy beaches, the couple founded the Ronquerolles Maquis (see the monument in its honour at Belle-Église here), with him as leader (she still had a press to run); but he was wounded on an early mission, and so she found herself in charge of that as well. Not for long - Libération was only a few months away.
After the war they set up the "Centre de Formation des Journalistes"("Centre for the Training of Journalists") in Paris, still alive and flourishing as I write (its website here). Then, in 1947, "Le Centre nautique des Glénans" at Concarneau in Brittany, a convalescent centre for deportees and battle-weary Résistants, though when it was no longer needed for that purpose Hélène turned it into a sailing school, and managed it as such from 1954 until her retirement in 1979. A recipient of the Croix de Guerre, Philippe died in 1986, the same year in which Hélène was invited to take the Presidency of the Association d'Ancient Résistants de "Défense de la France". Five years later she used that position to incipit the the "Prix Philippe Viannay-Défense de la France", a prize still awarded annually to works promoting resistance to Nazism in France and elsewhere in Europe.
She died on December 25 2006, and posthumously received her own Croix de Guerre.
Big important people, leading movements, familiars with the generals and politicians; but there were also the very ordinary, the nobodies-really, because generals require front-line soldiers even if it is the generals who claim the glory... so, last but by no means least, a very ordinary woman who simply did the doing, of whatever was necessary and within her capabilities, because that is what you do in times like this; and I could list dozens I am glad to say, but let this one stand as representative of all of them:
Simone Segouin, nom de guerre Nicole Minet, born October 3 1925
"A teenager who bravely fought on the front lines against the German occupiers, and helped liberate the historic city of Chartres"
is how she gets described in the French memorials.
And why her? Back in 1982, when katyusha rocket season at my
kibbutz on the Lebanese border had just turned into the War of Peace for
Galilee, I was (when not chicken-farming or cow-milking) writing a novel about
the Jewish resistance movement in Poland and Latvia and Lithuania during
Hitler's War, and created Bernhard Aaronsohn, codename Argaman, as my central
character. To read about Simone Segouin, "a tomboy with three brothers who taught her how to fight" according
to one obituary, who joined the "Francs-Tireurs et Partisans" resistance
group "filled with love of her country and admiration for her veteran
father, who fought in World War 1" according to another obituary, I am drawn
back to some of the passages I wrote for Argaman. This one in particular:
Argaman went to the library at Bydgoszcz and tore a number of pages out of an encyclopaedia, an act of vandalism in peace-time, an act of sabotage in war-time, punishable like all acts of resistance by death. In the cellar Baruch had copies made of all the relevant pages, and distributed them: descriptions of rifles and revolvers to one group of teenage Edmund Tellers, technical information on chemistry to another group of infant Albert Einsteins. So they took their few guns apart blindfolded and put them together again. They blew their arms off trying to make bombs, and their heads off trying to construct mines. They developed the Molotov Cocktail (O Holiest Of All Holy Waters) with greater speed and less resources than the atomic tests at Los Alamos. They filled tin cans with nuts and bolts, wrapped them in newspaper, and trailed pipe-cleaners for a fuse. They exploded boxes of matches doused in paraffin in underground experiments, and the timber fall-out and the mushroom-cloud of peat-smoke left the cellar uninhabitable for a fortnight. They developed the bicycle as a high-speed bomber. They built up an entire munitions dump of kitchen knives. They extended the range of the elastic catapult.
It was the development of "the bicycle as a high-speed
bomber" that clinched it for me. Simone Segouin, or Nicole Minet by her nom de guerre "stole a bike from German soldiers and painted it to avoid detection. It
became her 'reconnaissance vehicle' and she used it to move around without
attracting notice so she could deliver messages and snoop around." But she
also knew how to use that gun, and "carried out multiple acts of sabotage against German targets, helping to
blow up bridges and supply lines".
That bike proved crucial when her lover, Roland Boursier, who also happened to be the commander of the resistance operation in her
hometown of Thivars, not far from Chartres, had to go into hiding after the killing
of several German troops in Thivars led to a hunt for the killers. She became
his courier, taking messages to the main Resistance group, until the coast was
clear, and the Thivars incident turned out to have been a mere rehearsal for
something much more significant: the liberation of Chartres itself, in August
1944. When it was achieved, General de Gaulle himself turned up to make a
speech at the city square, but it was "the sweet-looking girl eating a
baguette with jam – and carrying a machine gun" that got asked to do all
the interviews. She was presented in the papers, including the American "Life"
magazine, as "part of General de Gaulle’s security detail". The
accompanying photograph, the one at the top of this entry, was taken by no less a paparazzi
grandee than Robert Capa. Though I have to confess I like the one below much
more, in action rather than posed for the press, taken in a back street during the liberation of Paris, to participate in
which she had joined the Second Armoured Division as a fully-fledged soldier.
When the war ended, Simone was promoted to lieutenant and awarded the prestigious Croix
de Guerre, Roland asked for her hand in marriage, and six children later the
street they lived on in Courville-sur-Eure was renamed in her honour. She died on February 21 2023, aged 97.
I said eight at the start of this page, but only seven are actually listed. The other one is Danielle Casanova, who can be found on May 9
"Prayer to the Living to Forgive them for Being Alive”
You who are passing bywell dressed in all your musclesclothing which suits you wellor badlyor just aboutyou who are passing byfull of tumultuous life within your arteriesglued to your skeletonas you walk with a sprightly step athletic awkwardlaughing sullenly, you are all so handsomeso commonplaceso commonplacely like everyone elseso handsome in your commonplacenessdiversewith this excess of life which keeps youfrom feeling your bust following your legyour hand raised to your hatyour hand upon your heartyour kneecap rolling softly in your kneehow can we forgive you for being alive…You who are passing bywell dressed in all your muscleshow can we forgive youthat all are deadYou are walking by and drinking in cafésyou are happy she loves youor moody worried about moneyhow howwill you ever be forgivenby those who diedso that you may walk bydressed in all your musclesso that you may drink in cafésbe younger every springI beg youdo somethinglearn a dance stepsomething that gives you the rightto be dressed in your skin in your body hairlearn to walk and to laughbecause it would be too senselessafter allfor so many to have diedwhile you livedoing nothing with your life.
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