Voices from the Dark Years (63 page)

Bouchou’s widow (front row right in the group above) returned from Ravensbruck concentration camp broken in health and spirit, unable to smile even at her daughter’s wedding. (Reproduced by permission of Cathérine and Robert Hestin)

Their journey to hell began at the Gestapo HQ in Castillon-la-Bataille, where torture drove some to suicide.

Hidden by a man who never returned home to reveal their hiding place, the airdropped weapons were found by accident in 1998.

Collaboration took many forms. Joseph Darnand (left) directed the murderous activities of the Milice and escaped at the Liberation with Vatican help.

French police chief René Bousquet (facing camera, right) took his orders directly from SS-Brigadeführer Karl Oberg (back to camera, right).

Victor Faynsylber (right) lost a leg fighting for France. He sent this photograph to Marshal Pétain, pleading for his wife to be exempted from deportation, but they and their children were murdered at Auschwitz.

On 16 July 1941 Paris police rounded up 12,884 men, women and children (below) for the SS to kill in Auschwitz.

De Gaulle’s political representative in France was Jean Moulin (left), who was tortured to death by Klaus Barbie (right).

Moulin’s military counterpart was General Delestraint (left), who was shot in Dachau after using his real name in a hotel register. Renée de Monbrison (right) spent four anguished years keeping her children out of Barbie’s clutches. (Bottom-right image reproduced by permission of Françoise de Monbrison-Blanchard)

German heroes? Yes! Kriegsmarine Feldwebel Heinz Stahlschmidt (above left) proved his love for his French girlfriend by saving 3,000 lives in Bordeaux. General Von Choltitz (above right) defied Hitler’s order to destroy Paris, through which German troops had been parading daily for four whole years (below).

Shatta Simon (with her son above, left) saved the lives of several hundred children after the town council gave her a house for them in Moissac (above, right). (Top-left image reproduced by permission of Jean-Claude Simon)

Prefect François Martin (left) broke the law by giving them genuine ID cards.