Women of Valor (29 page)

Jacotte cried for days after returning to Paris, but there was no getting around it. Her father was ill and her mother needed her to come home and help support her two younger sisters. A division officer recommended her to the Ministry of Defense, and she went to work there as a bilingual secretary. She wanted, more than anything, to go to Indochina and continue as a Rochambelle. “We had had an adventurous life, we slept anywhere, ate anything. To return to the fairly rigid framework of office, family, office … I thought I was going to be ill having to work in an office,” she said. “It was physically difficult.”

As partial remedy, Jacotte walked down the Champs-Elysées to the officer’s mess for lunch through the grass and weeds rather than on the sidewalk, just to have contact with the natural world. She had been living more or less outdoors for nearly two years, and she felt like an alien next to other civilians. At the same time, she was removed from her friends in the division, from relationships built on daily contact under often terrifying conditions. “Those friendships are totally unique and cannot be understood in civilian life,” she said. Her friends were not just the other women drivers, but also the division soldiers. “We represented their family. They had no mothers or sisters around, they had us, Crapette and me,” she said. “We went through the same difficulties, we took the same risks. And we took away with us those friendships.”

Jacotte worked at the Defense Ministry for eight months, and then transferred to the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD), which eventually was assigned to oversee Marshall Plan aid to rebuild Europe. She spent her career there, and rose through the ranks to become secretary to the secretary general. She never married, and neither did her two sisters. She lived with her youngest sister Yvonne, and after Yvonne died, her sister Suzanne moved in with her. In 2005, at the age of ninety-five, Jacotte’s health was fragile, and her hearing and vision were fading, but her mind remained as acutely sharp as ever. And she could still do a fine imitation of the sound of an incoming mortar. Whisssstle, thwack!

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Danièle Heintz, after recovering from bronchitis, was sent to the First French Army’s medical group in Germany in May 1945. There she met her future husband, Jacques Clément, a biologist working as an army pharmacist. They were married in 1952, and went on to have three sons. After returning to France, Danièle earned a degree in nursing, and then worked with her husband in a laboratory. She also studied for and received a law degree, and continued on to doctoral work in law, but did not finish the program. She combined her knowledge in law and medicine by working with biological laboratories, helping them sort out the new postwar rules for analysis and security. She said that the transition to civilian life would have been difficult without her studies to focus on.

Danièle also said she felt that her six months’ tour of combat, from the Battle of Caen to the Colmar Pocket, had strengthened her character. “We had to confront fear and exceptional circumstances. That certainly gives a firmness of character and a toughness that one wouldn’t have had, otherwise,” she said. “It is the kind of experience that if you can do it without falling down, it gives you a resilient character.”

At the time, Danièle did not feel her individual existence was of overriding importance. And like many of her generation, she felt her national identity deeply. “Life has no price, no value, without freedom,” she said. “It was all the same to me if I died. There was a spirit in that era that does not exist today.” Young people have told her she was lucky to have lived during those years, to have experienced the passion and sacrifice of World War II. She responds that they must find their own luck, build their own adventures. She donated her uniform to the World War II Memorial at Caen, where it is displayed with those of British paratroopers and U.S. infantrymen, and titled simply “Uniform of a Rochambelle.”

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Marie-Thérèse Pezet also left the Rochambelles and went home to Paris to try to return to her normal life. She had been working at the Ministry of Foreign Affairs in 1938 and 1939, and had taken an extended leave of absence when the Vichy government was installed. When she reported back to the ministry’s personnel department in January 1946, the personnel director was pleased to inform her that she had just missed the deadline for recouping prewar posts. She told him she had been in the army. “He told me no one had forced me to join,” she said. The personnel director had worked under the Vichy regime, and petty revenge was all that was left him. The war was still going on, on certain levels.

Marie-Thérèse joined the Finance Ministry instead, and then, in the ever-shifting sands of the Fourth Republic, worked for various government ministers, finishing her career at the Labor Ministry as chief of staff to the minister. In 1948, she was sent to a meeting at Colmar for the Ministry of Health. General Koenig was there, and placed her at his right to review a military parade of Second Division veterans. Upon learning that she had the citation for the Croix de Guerre, but not the actual medal, he sent for one and pinned it on her himself.

The local prefect noted that if she was with the Leclerc division in the war, then she had been in Alsace. “I said, like all Leclerc’s soldiers, I left part of my heart in Alsace,” she said. He asked if there was anywhere she would like to visit in the area, and she remembered Ostheim, a village she had driven through many times during the battle for Grussenheim, and had used the same three landmarks to find her way: a church steeple that had been bombed and was half falling off, a tall chimney with a stork’s nest, and the body of a dead German in a neighboring field. The prefect took her to Ostheim, and as they rounded the corner, she saw the chimney with the stork’s next, and the church steeple being rebuilt, and she suddenly began to cry. The emotion of those intense days only came to the surface long after the fact.

In 1950, Marie-Thérèse married Ivan Tarkoy, a Hungarian diplomat. He had arrived in Paris in 1946 and did not return to his homeland. They managed to get his parents out of Hungary after five years and they also came to Paris and lived with them. They had no children.

One afternoon, Marie-Thérèse was at the Second Division Association House, a restaurant and club for veterans, when a nurse called her over to a table where a group of veterans were sitting. The nurse asked her to speak to one of the veterans. He had been accosting every Rochambelle he met, looking for the one who saved his life. Marie-Thérèse approached the table, facing the soldier in question, and he described how and where he had been wounded. She realized he was the one they had taken to Lunéville against orders, the soldier hemorrhaging so badly they were sure he had died. She was very pleased that he was alive, though she could see that he had lost both arms. He was delighted to find her, thanked her for saving his life, and asked if she would give him a kiss. She came around the table toward him, and as she leaned over, saw that he was sitting in a round buoy-type cushion to hold him up in the wheelchair, as he had no legs. “I almost fainted,” she said. “I said to myself, what have I done? Maybe I should have let him die. We disobeyed orders, and who is punished, but him! He was only twenty.” The young man seemed happy just to be alive, even in his reduced state. It took her a long time to stop feeling sick at heart over him, and to let go of the guilt. Her job had been to drive an ambulance, not to make judgments on life or death. And she had done her job well enough to earn three citations for bravery, as well as the Military Medal, the Croix de Guerre with palm added for extra valor, and membership in the Legion of Honor.

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Christiane Petit also left the Rochambelles, and worked in social services for veterans for about a year before she married an ex - army officer in 1946. They had three children in four years, and then separated. Christiane and the children moved to the south of France to her parents’ home, and she worked at a series of jobs, including that of librarian. With her children grown and her parents gone, she moved back to Paris in the 1960s, and Marie-Thérèse helped her get a job as librarian at the Labor Ministry.

Of her time as a Rochambelle, Christiane kept her Croix de Guerre with palm, her Military Medal, and her pair of brown leather, lace-up army boots. She received the Legion of Honor medal from President François Mitterand at the 1995 ceremony of the fiftieth anniversary of D-Day, the only woman among seven veterans.

“I don’t regret anything. It was a marvelous time, it brought me many things,” she said. “I prayed a lot for France, and Providence put me on that path. With the things I did with the Second Division, I saw the sign of God. I have always been guided by God.” Faith was Christiane’s support during the war and has remained so afterward. Faith, along with work, marriage and children, helped her make the transition to civilian life.

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Having a baby also helped Raymonde Brindjonc, who eventually became a mother of three. After the war, she followed her husband around army postings in North Africa, and worked as a secretary for an oil company before returning to France in 1962. She divorced in 1964 and reclaimed her maiden name, Jeanmougin. At a Second Division reunion in Strasbourg, she encountered Rosette Trinquet, now Peschaud, and her husband Philippe, who owned a petroleum transport company. The company offered her a job, and she kept it for twenty years. After retiring, she volunteered to work at the veterans’ association headquarters, the Maison de la 2e DB, serving as secretary general since 2003. The veterans’ association has been downsized over the years, from a mansion on Rue Grenelle to a two-story building on the Rue de Miromesnil, and most recently to a small office at the Jardin Atlantique, atop the Montparnasse train station. The circle of surviving veterans has been shrinking along with their office space.

Raymonde said that having a baby brought her focus back to the day-to-day existence of civilian life, and that without her role as a mother, she would have found the transition difficult. Among the characteristics she took from her experience as a Rochambelle was a new assertiveness and willingness to take risks. “It allowed me to go full speed ahead. Even if I didn’t know what I was doing, I knew I would get by. Maybe I had a little of that in me already, because I signed up [for the division],” she said. “You have to take chances in life.”

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Zizon Sicco decided not to go on to Indochina because she missed her family. She wanted to go home to Morocco, to her parents. But while waiting for an official discharge from the Army, she was sent to work at the General Staff headquarters in Paris. The Rochambeau Group was officially dissolved in September 1945, but some of its members still were not discharged from the Army.

One day, elegant in her fur coat, Zizon went with two friends to an Army demobilization office in Rambouillet and stood in a long line of men with discharge papers ready to be signed. She and her friends finally arrived in front of a desk where a gaunt young man sat, his clothes too large, one of his hands still and gloved. Zizon asked what happened to him. He said he’d been hit by machine gun fire in both arms and his heart. He had had a lot of nerve damage, among other injuries, and had spent a year in the hospital. One of her friends asked where he’d been wounded, and he said near Badonviller, a village called Fenneviller. The name clicked in Zizon’s head, bringing an image of a dying soldier and a doctor telling her she had wasted her time in bringing him to the treatment center. “You didn’t die!” she exclaimed.
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It was the soldier who said that he would never hold the hand of another woman, and he made his claim true by marrying her within the year. Zizon stayed in France after all and became a municipal councilor for the town of Boulogne-Billancourt, a western suburb of Paris, and then assistant to the mayor. She wrote her memoirs on the Ile d’Yeu during the summer of 1956, and her husband, Jacques Bervialle, had them published after she died in 1974. Toto wrote the preface, referring to Zizon as “that intrepid little silhouette.”

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Like Raymonde, Anne Hastings also declined service in Indochina and instead followed her husband in his work abroad, first to England and then to Saudi Arabia. They had three children, and she was happy to focus on them after the war. She said she didn’t think that the war changed her much, but added that her daughters have reminded her that her personal standard for what was a thrill was pretty high.

The Hastings eventually returned to the Cambridge, Massachusetts area and Anne began working with the Harvard University archaeology department, going on digs and writing about the discoveries. She didn’t return to her graduate studies after the war because “my heart wasn’t in it,” she said. She stopped going on excavations when she was about seventy, and her husband fell ill. They moved to Washington, D.C. to be close to one of their daughters, and her husband died in 1999.

Although her war experience was positive, Anne remained unenthusiastic about women in the military. “I was glad we were there, and Leclerc was very nice. We did all right, but I still don’t like the idea of women being in the war,” she said. “I don’t think we did any damage. But I still think it’s a little bit complicated to insert women into active combat units. Of course there were people losing their hearts to each other all the time.”

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Losing their hearts, and committing their lives. The postwar Second Division magazine,
Caravane,
ran an article in January 1949 poking fun at the division as matchmaker. “The Second Division is known all over the world for its qualities and performances that it would be too immodest to list here. But did you know that it also has been a quite brilliant matrimonial agency?” The article went on to list twenty Rochambelle marriages, noting that it was not counting the couples who were already married when they joined the division:
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1/ You Courou-Mangin m. Jacques Guerin

2/ Arlette Hautefeuille m. Georges Ratard