On one occasion in Paris I found myself caught up in a demonstration as thousands of French had chosen that day, Mother’s Day in France, to protest against the recent legalization of gay marriage. The events, bizarre in a modern nation renowned for its tolerance, resonated in a strange way for me because la Journée de la Mère had been a matter of national political importance for Vichy France. Pétain used such occasions to bolster the moral and cultural conservatism of his authoritarian regime, glorifying the family as an institution in which the man was head and the woman occupied her place by virtue of being a mother. France’s low birth rate had been a concern for many years and, ironically, one of many reasons for welcoming thousands of foreign Jews to France in previous decades had been to help counterbalance this. Under Pétain, lessons in housekeeping, in which girls had to learn how to make simple clothes and undertake laundry, bleaching, ironing, cookery, nutrition and other aspects of domestic hygiene for one hour minimum per week, became obligatory in all lycées and colleges up to the age of eighteen. For while the world war was being fought, France was attempting a national revolution, creating a society that would turn its back on republican values. The demonstration that I witnessed was largely peaceful, with the police estimating that about 150,000 people took part. But for me it was clear evidence of the persistence of the past in presentday France. Even today there are significant welfare advantages for mothers of three or more children.
During the last few years, several people I tried to talk to about their memories, or of how their family survived, simply refused to answer my emails or phone calls. Almost all who did agree and who had lived through les Années Noires began by telling me, ‘Ah, c’est très compliqué …’ Very often, once we started speaking, it became clear that the choices they made during this decade had much to do with what happened to them or their parents during the previous conflict, the First World War, or the Guerre de Quatorze (War of 1914) as it is called here. Memories of that war were often ‘cultivated’ by the French, preserved artefacts became relics as photos of battlefields and devastated towns acquired almost holy status and there remained a deep-seated mistrust of their German neighbour. Naughty French children in the 1920s and 1930s were often reprimanded with the words, ‘If you don’t behave, the Boche [offensive slang meaning a German soldier] will come and take you.’
But then, as the second war progressed and Paris felt eerily empty with few French men to be seen and almost no cars, other factors came into play. Many women in Paris responded positively to German men, who were usually polite, often cultured, and sometimes offered the only source of food. A lot of the women, including intellectuals and resisters, played on their femininity to get what they wanted or needed, sometimes using sex, sometimes being used for sex, and at all times concerned with their appearances and with looking fashionable. Having family cutlery melted down in order to create a stylish bag or brooch, or buying leg paint to simulate stockings, occasionally took precedence over finding food.
I want to examine in these pages what factors weighed most heavily on women, causing them to respond in a particular way to the harsh and difficult circumstances in which they found themselves. M. R. D. Foot, historian of the SOE as well as soldier, was well aware of how many women, often young teenage girls, were heavily involved from the earliest days in helping men escape. ‘Evaders often found that they had to trust themselves entirely to women,’ Foot wrote; ‘and without the courage and devotion of its couriers and safe-house keepers, nearly all of them women, no escape line could keep going at all.’ Why did they choose to risk their young lives and their families? I will use the word choice – what choices they made – while recognizing that not all of them had a real choice as defined by anyone living through the war years. For women, choice often meant more than simply how to live their own lives but how to protect their children and sometimes their elderly parents too. One interview was almost abruptly terminated when I asked the noted playwright Jean-Claude Grumberg if he could understand how his mother had made what I considered the unimaginably brave choice to pay a passeuse, a woman who promised to take him and his slightly older brother to a place of greater safety in the south of France. As added protection, his mother was not allowed to know where the children were in case she was arrested and forced to reveal this information. Grumberg was silent at first and then stared at me disbelievingly.
‘La choix, c’est contestable,’ he replied eventually.
Anyone who used the word ‘choice’ in the context of the situation facing his mother could not have grasped the complexity of life for a Romanian-born Jewish woman in occupied Paris after 1942, a woman whose husband had been arrested, who could not speak fluent French, who was forbidden to move around freely or even, on a scorchingly hot day, to buy her Jewish children a drink in certain places at a certain time, and who was caring for a sick mother-in-law.
He repeated: ‘Choice? How can you ask me about choice?’ But I persisted, apologizing for any unintended offence, because choices, however heart-wrenching, were indeed made by women, especially by women.