Blood in the Snow, Blood on the Grass (39 page)

The family photographs in the sitting room of Marie-Rose Dupont
¹
date back to the late 1940s, with no earlier images in sight. They show her as a stunningly beautiful young woman who matured into a fashionably dressed and extremely attractive middle-aged lady with a very handsome husband, now deceased. In her mid-eighties she is still a very attractive and elegant widow with a face strangely unwrinkled that gives away nothing of the trauma she lived through.

Her parents were poor peasants scraping a living off a small property near Valence in the Tarn-et-Garonne
département
of south-west France. When Marie-Rose was only 14 her mother, desperate to be rid of a mouth to feed, tried to engage her to a well-off older man. For the first time in her life, the daughter refused to obey her parents. Since the alternative to marriage was to earn her own living, she left school to start work as a hairdressing apprentice. Hard work and a talent for the job saw her opening her own salon in Valence two years later in 1936. Marriage to a work-shy alcoholic husband who sold off all her possessions prompted her to divorce him in 1939, leaving her the single parent of their 12-month-old son.

After the defeat in June 1940, she was relieved to find that the regular customers still came to have their hair done regularly and some apparently penniless refugee women seemed able to find money for this small vanity. Apart from the difficulty of procuring shampoos and hair dyes, which could only be found on the black market, life had never been better for Marie-Rose. The problems of being a single working parent were alleviated by her parents’ help looking after her son in the daytime and she was able to spend all her Sundays with him. Her parents were pro-Pétain Catholics, so when the marshal came to Valence and addressed a full house in the local cinema Marie-Rose was present to hear him repeat the phrase: ‘
J’ai fait à la France le don de ma personne
’ – ‘I have given myself to France’.

She felt like weeping. Around her, many people did shed tears. This was the Messianic side of Pétain.

Although the salon was prospering, the country was in mourning – for the defeat, for the 1.6 million POWs languishing in Germany, for its own self-esteem – and public displays of gaiety were frowned upon, especially dances. Since they could not be organised publicly,
les bals clandestins
took their place – private dances organised by word of mouth. Friends whispered of a rendezvous in a house with a room large enough for a dozen or so couples to dance to the music of a portable wind-up gramophone and, for an hour or two, the occupation was forgotten in the arms of one’s partner.

Marie-Rose was not only beautiful, but also professionally made-up and coiffed. As owner of her own salon, she could always swap a free permanent wave or hair-do for an article of clothing, so she was also well dressed. But she turned down all propositions for more than just a few dances. Given the total non-availability of contraceptive devices for civilians, casual sex was out of the question and she was certain that she never again wanted to be tied to a husband.

For a single mother coming from a peasant home, she had good reason to feel pleased with her life – and no thought of what the future might hold. Why should she, when the only interference from Vichy was the visit of a gendarme on 27 March 1942, bringing her an extract from the
Journal Officiel
obliging her and all other salon proprietors to collect hair clippings for mixture with rayon fibres in a specialised factory in Calvados that produced up to 40,000 pairs of bedroom slippers a month?

Valence was well inside the Free Zone and even after November 1942, when the Germans occupied the zone in response to the Allied invasion of North Africa, few soldiers in field grey were seen on its streets. Having been brought up by her father, who had been a POW in Germany in 1914–18, to think of
les Boches
as the enemy, Marie-Rose was shocked on visits to big towns like Montauban and Toulouse to see uniformed German soldiers walking arm in arm with French girls.

One busy morning a Frenchman in civilian clothes entered Marie-Rose’s salon, flashed a Gestapo ID card and asked her to step into the apartment behind the salon, so they could talk in private. She explained that the apartment was let, without saying that her tenants were a Jewish refugee couple. The
gestapiste
refused to talk in the street, because it was ‘too public’, and said he would return when she closed at noon. She could not imagine what he wanted, unless it was in connection with her black-market purchase of essentials for running the salon. When he returned at midday there was still one elderly lady under the dryer.

‘Get rid of her,’ he ordered.

‘I can’t,’ Marie-Rose explained. ‘Her hair’s still wet, but she can’t hear anything with the blower on. What can I do for you?’

He showed her a list with four names on it. Realising what was going on, the woman in the chair pushed the dryer hood back and shouted at the top of her powerful peasant voice, ‘Why are you bothering my daughter? Go away and leave her alone!’

To Marie-Rose’s astonishment, the
gestapiste
blushed and fled in confusion, leaving the list of names on the cash desk.

‘That’s the way to treat those swine,’ observed her client, calmly pulling the dryer back over her head.

One of the names on the list was of a man working in an office opposite the salon, so Marie-Rose hurried across the road to warn him. He disappeared that afternoon, and presumably so did the other three, but she never knew what that was all about.

One of her more affluent clients named Madame Delmas, whose husband was a POW in Germany, owned a smart hotel and restaurant in the centre of town. When 2,000 Waffen-SS troops straight from the Russian front were posted to south-west France to regroup and refit, she organised
diners dansants
for the SS officers on Friday evenings. Each Friday afternoon she came to have her hair done in Marie-Rose’s salon, so as to look her best that evening. Food and alcohol could always be found on the black market; her problem was finding sufficient attractive girls to amuse the clients. Several times, she invited her beautiful young hairdresser to come along and have a good time, promising that the food was excellent and the officers’ behaviour always very correct.

‘Nobody’s going to make you do anything you don’t want to,’ she promised. ‘So where’s the harm?’

In the salon, Marie-Rose frequently heard women discussing girls who went with Germans; it was hinted darkly that they would ‘have to pay for it’ after the liberation. It was not that which held her back, but rather that she did not want to get involved with the very manipulative Madame Delmas. One Friday evening in April 1944, her demanding client telephoned just before closing time to say that she had been unable to get away that afternoon for her hair appointment. The plea ended, ‘Couldn’t you, just this once, come to the hotel and comb my hair out? I’d be so grateful.’

Reluctantly, Marie-Rose agreed to help a regular customer in a fix and packed a few essentials in a bag. After arriving at the hotel, she was kept waiting by Madame Delmas until it was almost time for the guests to arrive. To escape after doing her hair, Marie-Rose used the excuse that she had to get home and look after her son, but Madame Delmas brushed this aside: ‘Let your parents take care of the boy. Stay just for a while and enjoy a good dinner. You deserve it.’

The food was well cooked and of such a quality and quantity that it had obviously been purchased on the black market. The atmosphere was very relaxed, with all the officers in their immaculate SS uniforms being very charming and attentive to the ladies. One of these, acting as interpreter for the officers who could not speak French, was a vivacious multilingual Jewish refugee from Latvia called Masha, whose ‘racial impurity’ did not appear to worry any of the SS officers. Several times Marie-Rose danced with a blonde, blue-eyed Austrian officer named Willi, who told her he was an engineer in civilian life. She was 23 years old, he three years older.

Good food, a glass or two of wine, the elegant atmosphere and the polite manners of the men smilingly chatting up the girls with champagne glasses in their hands in the moonlit garden behind the hotel, all put Marie-Rose off her guard. The only things she knew about Willi were that he was unmarried and came from Vienna. Yet when he asked whether they could meet again the following Friday, she blushed to hear herself say that she would like that.

It seemed a very long week. Two weeks after their second meeting they became lovers. Sometimes they met, not entirely by chance, on the street by the salon or on the beach where local families and the German soldiers went to swim in the River Tarn with an unspoken demarcation line separating the two groups of swimmers. Then they could only share a few glances, for romantic attachments were forbidden to an SS officer, even had Marie-Rose been prepared to ‘come out’ and let the neighbours know. Only among the regulars in Madame Delmas’ hotel could she and Willi openly be together.

At the beginning of June, he was due for fifteen days’ leave and tried to persuade Marie-Rose to travel with him to Vienna in order to meet his parents who, he was sure, would raise no objections to their marriage after the war. Whether it would actually have been possible for her to go there, Marie-Rose never found out because she told Willi that she could not leave her son. He therefore spent his leave in Valence, meeting her discreetly dressed in sports shirt and shorts after the salon closed in the balmy early summer evenings.

Masha earned her living by giving German lessons in Montauban and Toulouse. It was a boom market, with the number of German-language students at Berlitz schools in France rising from a pre-war 939 adults to 7,920 in 1941 and continuing to increase until D-Day.
²
On the morning of that day, she and Marie-Rose were driven by an Italian SS auxiliary to Montauban, where Masha was to give some lessons and Marie-Rose hoped to buy supplies for the salon. They arrived before midday, took an early lunch in the Sans Souci restaurant and then split up, having agreed to rendezvous back there at four o’clock.

Returning to the restaurant, Marie-Rose found Masha agog with bush-telegraph reports of the landings in Normandy. The Italian driver was nowhere to be found and all the German troops in Montauban were hastily departing, so the two women had to take a train back to Valence. The streets of the town were deserted, except for the last SS-men loading equipment on to trucks to head north. Willi was gone. Marie-Rose had no idea where until she received a letter from him explaining that he had been wounded fighting with his unit on the Normandy front and then been invalided back to the Reich. Thus began a correspondence that lasted two years.

A few days after the liberation of Valence by local FFI units on 20 August 1944, Marie-Rose was playing with her son in the garden of her parents’ home when four men carrying rifles and wearing FFI armbands drove up and ordered her to get into the back of their black Citroën. Neither then nor at any time later was she accused of anything, nor did anyone mention Willi. One of the men in the car was Albert Dumas, whose family were clients of the salon and all the others were known to her by sight. They drove her to the
collège
or middle school, which the FFI had made their temporary headquarters. There, she was locked in a classroom with twenty or thirty other men and women. Unable to look at the others, she huddled in a corner with eyes closed, praying to the Virgin Mary to let her be released so she could return to her son.

Two days later all the detainees were driven by the FFI to the Gendarmerie in Lauzerte, 25km to the north-west. Since there were far too many prisoners for the cells to hold, they were locked in an office where they had to sleep on the floor, suffering frequent verbal abuse for collaboration from anyone who felt like dropping in, but not otherwise maltreated.

Back in Valence after nearly two weeks’ confinement, Marie-Rose was interrogated by FFI men hunting a
collabo
who had gone to ground. Unable to tell them anything, she emerged with cuts to her body and severe bruising on her legs caused by blows with the butts of their rifles. On the following Sunday – exactly two weeks after the liberation of the town – she and three other female detainees were taken out of the
collège
and herded at gunpoint through the streets to the square in front of the main church, where a wooden dais had been erected. Praying that none of her family was there, Marie-Rose stared straight ahead as she was led through the large crowd waiting to see the fun.

A colleague of hers who ran a barbershop in the town was supposed to shave the women’s heads, but could not bring himself to do this to Marie-Rose, with whom he had been at school. Unable to look her in the face, he handed the clippers to one of the FFI men, who did not know how to handle them. Her public humiliation was thus both clumsy and painful as she tried to block out the ugly noise of the crowd’s insults by praying to the Virgin Mary. By keeping her eyes raised to the sky, she avoided looking at the people below or the other women on the dais, but she does recall that one of them was an 18-year-old prostitute from a local
maison close.
Presumably this girl’s crime was to have fallen in love with a German client. It is interesting that well-connected Madame Delmas, at whose
diners dansants
Marie-Rose had met Willi, was denounced neither then nor later.
³