Life under oppression, whether at Ravensbrück, in Vichy or in Paris, revealed what women were capable of in extremis. ‘Indignation can move mountains,’ declared Germaine Tillion. ‘France in 1940 was unbelievable. There were no men left. It was women who started the Resistance. Women didn’t have the vote, they didn’t have bank accounts, they didn’t have jobs. Yet we women were capable of resisting.’ Jeannie Rousseau took the path of resistance, Elisabeth de Rothschild took another, Renée Puissant a third. Yet few people at the time saw themselves as having choices or making decisions, neither résistantes nor vegetable-sellers who needed to be paid in order to live; nor black-marketeers who saw opportunities waiting to be seized; nor Jewish mothers who gave their children away; nor women of le tout Paris who had lunches and bought fine clothes; nor singers, dancers and prostitutes who continued with the work they were trained or accustomed to do. Many of the latter maintained that even had the French denied social contacts to the Germans during the Occupation, nothing would have been different, and arguably daily life would have been more painful for the French. Life had to go on. Indeed, to deaden Paris in that way risked punishing Parisians more than Germans, they believed. Most just tried to get by however they could.
But what seems so clear today is that there were choices. Writers, artists and performers had to submit their work to German officials for permission to show it. Inevitably this meant submitting to compromise and collaboration in varying degrees. Silence or leaving the country was, for some, an option; performing but not socializing after the performance was another; turning a blind eye to behaviour of which they disapproved was the easiest. For some women the choice involved little more than a decision to wear an outrageous hat or to walk out of a restaurant. For others it involved making a deal or a sexual exchange. But surviving in occupied Paris for many women demanded some sort of choice, some sort of decision, about how they would accommodate living with the Germans. It is not for the rest of us to judge but, with imagination, we can to try to understand.
* And that history is still being made as in 2012, following publication of Sinclair’s book 21 Rue La Boétie, the building’s current owner organized a marble plaque for the fa?ade bearing Paul Rosenberg’s name and that of the artists whose works he exhibited there (Anne Sinclair, conversation with the author 28 October 2013).
* The first number of Témoignage Chrétien (in 1941) was the work of Pierre Chaillet, a Jesuit priest trained in Austria and Rome who was shocked by the apathetic response to the Occupation of most French people, including many Catholics.
* They were Berty Albrecht, Laure Diebold, Marie Hackin, Simone Michel-Lévy, Emilienne Moreau-Evrard and Marcelle Henry.
* And sometimes it is those close to survivors who turn to suicide, such as the younger brother of Marceline Rozenberg who never got over the murder of their father and, at the age of forty-three, killed himself.
* According to the Mémorial de la Shoah the figures are a synthesis of the latest estimates by historians at the Yad Vashem memorial in Jerusalem and the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington.