A Train in Winter (46 page)

There was, however, no avoiding the fact that the deportees had to be acknowledged and rewarded. Arriving home, each man and woman—providing they could prove that they were French, which excluded the many thousands of non-French Jews, Polish resisters, Spanish refugees, all those who had made France their home and fought in the Resistance but never taken French nationality—received 5,000 francs, extra food rations and a long paid holiday. But there were acrimonious debates about who precisely was a
résistant
and much squabbling over the relative entitlements of
politiques
and
raciales
. It was not until 1948 that two statutes, one for each category, with different degrees of recognition and pensions, depending on sickness and invalidity, were finally made law; even then, the
politiques
, deemed fighters and not victims, fared better.

Of the 40,760
résistants politiques
who came home, 8,872 were women. It said much about the way that the women’s role in the Resistance was perceived in France that of the 1,053 people eventually made
Compagnons de la Libération
—the highest honour—only six were women. In keeping with de Gaulle’s image of a heroic band of fighters, true resisters were portrayed in the public eye as armed men, carrying out acts of sabotage or engaging in combat with the enemy. The parts played by women—messengers, couriers, printers, distributors of banned literature, providers of safe houses—did not seem quite heroic enough. And among the women themselves there was a tendency to belittle what they had done, to say that it had been no more than what they always did, as women. Returning to France, most of them slipped back into the shadows.

One of the few who was not forgotten was Danielle Casanova, quickly celebrated as a new Joan of Arc, a martyred communist heroine, the supreme patriot and symbol of resistance. Babies and streets were named after her and her picture put on to medallions and posters. For a while, it was thought best that her husband Laurent should not confess to having married someone else, but appear as devoting his life to the cult of his dead wife.

Even before they left the camps, some of the French deportees had discussed the formation, when they got home, of
amicales
, associations which would bring survivors together and lobby for their rights. Marie-Claude and Madeleine Dechavassine took leading roles in starting an Amicale des Déportés d’Auschwitz, Birkenau et des Camps de Haute-Silésie, and by October 1945 a Fédération Nationale des Déportés et Internés Résistants et Patriotes had been formed, with rooms in the rue Leroux in Paris where the Gestapo had once had offices. Many of the concerns revolved around the health of the deportees, who suffered from what became known as the
syndrome des déportés
; this included chronic exhaustion, digestive problems and depression.
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The people left out from nearly all the deliberations, however, were the Jews, of whom only a fraction of those deported returned. In part because so few came back and in part because the extermination camps of Poland had been largely destroyed by the departing Germans, and in any case now lay within the Soviet zone of occupation, the early stories of the death camps were written not by the Jews but by the communists. But it was more complicated than this. Simone Veil, deported as a Jew with her family, would later say that the surviving resisters were quick to scorn and marginalise Jewish survivors. ‘They, they had fought against the Nazis. We, we were nothing.’ Neither de Gaulle nor anyone else was keen to admit that much of France had not only tolerated anti-Semitism and xenophobia but actually anticipated German wishes in identifying and deporting Jews.

It would be the early 1970s before there was any serious re-evaluation of what were called
les années noires
, the black years. Max Ophuls’s four-hour film of life under Vichy,
Le Chagrin et la pitié
, with its clear message that there had been few resisters and many collaborators, was made for television at the end of the 1960s, but not shown on it until 1981. By then Beate and Serge Klarsfeld had published their monumental study on the deportation of the Jews from France, listing every name and every train; and Claude Lanzmann was at work on
Shoah
, his nine-hour film about Germany and the Jews. It would take a foreign historian, Marcus Paxton, to publish the first authoritative work on Vichy and the Jews, and many years before Vichy was judged guilty of crimes against humanity.
^*

For the time being, in the austere winter of 1945–46, the French were more concerned with food, politics and the weather. Women had failed to win the vote after the First World War, but 1945 brought female suffrage and some small improvements to their economic and social rights, though they were for the most part folded back into the French family, along with other vulnerable groups like children. Laws on abortion and contraception were in fact strengthened. Women were enfranchised in time to help vote into power de Gaulle as President in November, but, as Marie-Claude had feared, there were deep divisions between the political parties. The Communists won 159 seats and were now the largest party in France but de Gaulle remained extremely reluctant to give them ministerial posts. The eventual compromise would last just a few months. Unable to unite the country behind him, de Gaulle resigned as head of government in January 1946, but went on calling for national reconciliation, saying that the Communists were to blame for the growing sense of political disillusionment.

The winter was bitterly cold. The franc had plummeted and it was said that France was now eighty-four times poorer than in 1914. The economy was bankrupt and the country was being kept afloat on American aid and loans. There was very little to eat and the cost of rationed goods soared. Parisians complained that they were colder than at any time during the occupation. Because of a lack of plaster in the hospitals, there was nothing with which to mend bones weakened by years of poor nutrition and broken by falls on the ice.

Factories were idle, their equipment and machinery having been dismantled and shipped back to Germany by the occupiers; there was very little fertiliser, timber or coal. Seven and a half thousand bridges were down and the shortage of salt meant that pigs were not killed for
charcuterie
. The Allied forces, on their way across France during 1944 and 1945, had consumed scarce food, vandalised, looted and raped, and their destructiveness and rapaciousness was everywhere compared to that of the German soldiers. Caen, Le Havre and Saint-Lô had been reduced to rubble; five million people, many more than after the First World War, were homeless. In the
New Yorker
, Janet Flanner described the clatter of wooden soles on Parisian cobbles, and the way that the students in the Sorbonne went to their classes wrapped in thick ski clothes. But if the grocery shelves were bare, the theatres were packed. Edith Piaf, the singer so loved by Georgette Rostaing, was performing at Giro’s nightclub. A new lightness was in the air, a desire for pleasure and enjoyment, and people compared it to the heady days of the Directoire, after the bleakness and terror of the 1789 revolution. ‘Paris is not gay,’ wrote Janet Flanner. ‘It is restless, anxious, cantankerous.’ But, she added, it was ‘convalescent’.

There were many things that the forty-nine women found hard when they got home. There was, first of all, a feeling of guilt, that they should have survived when so many of their friends had died. This was particularly hard for Félicienne Bierge, one of the very few women from the Gironde or Charente to return, who felt it her duty to tell families how their dead mothers, sisters and daughters had died. There were eighteen calls and visits to make; Félicienne was a timid, reserved woman and found the task almost impossibly distressing.

Families had become strangers, children altered beyond all recognition and wary of these unfamiliar women who claimed to be their mothers. Marie-Elisa found her small son Francis well, but learnt that her brother had died in Bergen-Belsen and that her friend France Bloch, with whom she had made explosives for the Resistance in Paris, had been executed in Hamburg, her head cut off with an axe. She also received confirmation of what she had feared: that her mother, having admitted to being Jewish, had indeed been gassed in Auschwitz. Hélène Bolleau, whose broken leg was still mending, returned to Royan to find the city in ruins, her home bombed, her grandfather dead, her grandmother injured; she had watched her mother die from dehydration in Birkenau, desperately trying to get some water from the ruts in the earth left by a passing cart.

Many came home feeling that they carried with them what David Rousset, another camp survivor, would call ‘gangrene’, the whole terrifying, shocking ordeal that lived on to haunt survivors. ‘I no longer had the right to be unhappy,’ wrote one woman, ‘but there existed no pleasure or joy capable of compensating for the suffering I had been through. I came back bringing the camp with me, and yet I felt totally alone.’ Having survived the unsurvivable in order to return, the idyllic world of kindness and ease they had held and nursed in their minds quickly seemed little more than an illusion. Life was flat, empty. The women thought of themselves as travellers in another land, no longer quite like other people. Having so badly wanted to live, they found they no longer cared whether they did so or not. They had told themselves that in the camps they had endured the whole gamut of misfortune, and that now they were entitled to happiness. But happiness eluded them.

Most found they could not bear to sleep alone, and dragged a mattress into their parents’ rooms; unable to digest anything but bland food, their teeth missing or sore, they ate little mouthfuls out of teaspoons. They flinched if anyone made a sudden movement, as if to ward off a blow, and they avoided striped materials. They found they could no longer cry at funerals, having seen so many people die. They worried that they looked peculiar and behaved oddly, and were ashamed of their missing teeth. Brutalised and starved for over two years, they found it almost impossibly hard to relearn how to live in a world not governed by force and cunning. They felt irritable, distracted. A few were obsessed with the need to confront the men who had betrayed them. Germaine Renaudin and her husband went to Bordeaux to look for the two policemen who had tortured her in the Fort du Hâ. Both men had died in the war. Charlotte tracked down the men of the Brigades Spéciales who had arrested her and Dudach: she was told that they had both fought against the Germans during the liberation—
Résistants de la dernière heure
—and were thus immune from prosecution.

What all the women found almost hardest was how to find the words to describe what they had been through. Having imagined telling their families exactly what it had been like, they now fell silent. Often, as it turned out, the families did not really want to hear: the stories were too unbearable to listen to. ‘It wasn’t food we wanted,’ Cécile would say. ‘It was talk. But no one wanted to listen.’ When she returned to work for her former employer in the fur business, a Jew who had survived the Parisian round-ups, he made it clear that he wanted to hear nothing about the camps. Strangers asked questions, then quickly changed the subject and began to recount the hardships of their own war. At a village fête, soon after her return, Hélène Bolleau talked a little about the camps. A farmer interrupted. ‘It can’t be true. If it was, you wouldn’t have survived.’ She cried for three days; then she stopped talking. It was Hélène who later told the others that she had met a woman who, seeing the numbers tattooed on her arm, said: ‘Oh, is that where you write your phone numbers? Or is it the new fashion?’

Charlotte arrived back in Paris with the feeling that she had indeed survived, not as herself, but as a ghost, floating in a world that in some way did not exist. When she tried to read a book, she was filled with a curious sensation that she could see through the words to emptiness and banality. With all subtlety gone, there seemed to be no gradations of shade or light, and the world was stripped of all mystery. It was, she would say, a period of ‘prolonged absence’, devoid of taste, colour, smell and sounds. And then, very slowly, things gained definition. One day, she picked up a book and began to read again.

Poupette, acutely conscious that she had survived while her sister Marie had died, arrived back in Rennes to find that her father was about to remarry. She was 20 and felt inexpressibly old. Her new stepmother, not much older in years than herself, had assumed the two girls were dead and turned their bedrooms into extra guest rooms for the hotel. ‘It was only at that moment that I really realised that I no longer had a sister,’ Poupette would say. ‘Return was wretched, sordid, a pile of shabby details.’ Like the other women, she found the loss of the intense friendship and intimacy that had bound them together extremely painful.

Not feeling wanted, disliking her stepmother, she soon married one of the survivors of the Johnny network.
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She had two daughters, but nothing in her life seemed to work out and when her father died she sold the hotel—her stepmother had long since moved away—and went to run a small business in Buenos Aires. ‘For years,’ she would say, ‘I behaved as if all was well, but inside I lived in a fog of unhappiness.’ But she went on reading and learning, faithful to her promise to herself that if she returned alive, she would discover for herself all the things that Charlotte, Maï, Danielle and Marie-Claude had talked about. Later, Poupette would anger the other survivors by writing a memoir, in which she gave the names of five of the seven dwarfs to the women who had been with her in the salt mine in Beendorf. Cécile, whom she had never much liked, was called
Grincheuse
, Grumpy.

Simone, not yet 21 when she came home, learnt that of all the young men and girls who had picnicked and trained together in the Bois de Boulogne and fought alongside each other in the Battaillons de la Jeunesse, only one boy had survived. Simone’s younger brother Pierre found her curiously unchanged until she slept in the room next to his, and he heard her crying out night after night in her sleep. A first marriage, to another survivor of the camps, failed; a second brought a son and happiness. But Simone, the pretty, plump schoolgirl whose smiling photograph was taken in Romainville, came home physically broken. In the years that followed, she had seventeen operations. The dream she had had in Auschwitz, about being driven by hunger to cut a piece of flesh from a living horse, which then cried, continued to haunt her.