The Germans had not picked up all the young Parisiennes working for the resistance. Marie-France Geoffroy-Dechaume, now hiding out with her group in her small house on the coast, was actively engaged in planning night-time operations which involved laying mines or planting bombs both on railway lines and by roadsides in response to information they received about German manoeuvres, about what they were transporting and, crucially, about when they would be passing. She learned to make homemade bombs on the kitchen table and sometimes would bicycle around with gelignite strapped to her chest, having secretly fetched the ingredients from elsewhere, then brought them back to the house to assemble into a bomb, all the time looking to any German soldier every inch the innocent country girl. As her daughter recalled, she rarely talked about these activities, but ‘I think she relished this role of looking or playing the innocent, knowing all the while that she had the means to blow the Boches sky high!’
The group planted their bombs under cover of night and, after months of inaction and waiting, there was a deep sense of satisfaction verging on euphoria when they saw their targets successfully blown up, a feeling that they were finally doing something positive to help their country.
Later, when it was clear that the Germans had been defeated, there were still small groups of German soldiers straggling along the country roads looking weary and defeated. Marie-France and her gang lay in wait and then ambushed some of these; the soldiers all too readily flung their arms in the air, shouting hopefully, ‘Camarade!’ She had been instructed to disarm rather than kill them and never forgot the look of humiliation on their faces – to be disarmed by a woman!
The Paris all these women had left behind was increasingly a place of terror, consumed by shortages and despair. In the spring and early summer of 1944, even though the Allied invasion was imminent, only a handful of trusted people knew the precise details. But the constant rumours of a coup to remove Hitler fed Nazi paranoia, and in January 1944 Helmuth von Moltke was arrested and sent to a special prison section at the Ravensbrück camp. He was treated reasonably well at first and got to know prisoners such as Carmen Mory, whom he described to his wife Freya as someone who ‘told splendid stories’ and was ‘a magnificent source of information for me’. Geneviève de Gaulle, during the time she was held in solitary confinement, was also aware of his presence there, but did not know why he was being held.* But the volatility in Paris of random shootings and reprisals intensified into terrifying chaos after 20 July, when the Claus von Stauffenberg plot to kill Hitler failed. As a result hundreds of conspirators and anti-Nazis, who had thrown in their lot with Hitler’s opponents, were now rooted out and punished.
And there were summary executions, on all sides, of those thought to have been betraying secrets or people. On 26 April, Violette Morris, the lesbian former athlete and collaborator, was gunned down at the wheel of her Traction Avant on a country road in Normandy with two other collaborators in the car as well as the collaborators’ two young children, all killed in a hail of bullets fired by members of the Maquis Surcouf. Violette was fifty-one and was thought to have been responsible for numerous infiltrations of SOE networks and other resistance groups.
Of course the fear and deprivation felt by women in the capital queuing for food were as nothing compared to the suffering experienced by those in Ravensbrück. Nonetheless, alongside the tension there was a genuine sense of hardship in Paris itself because most of the women there had no concept of how much worse it was for the women imprisoned in the camps. Violette Wassem, a young secretary who had worked in Paris throughout the war, said that after four years of Occupation the low point of deprivation came in 1944 when gas and electricity often failed.
As I was ‘Mécanographe’ [early electric-typewriter secretary] at that period, I worked during the night. In order to do that, I took the last underground at 9–10pm and returned by the first at 6–7am. We would be given a ‘casse-cro?te’ [snack] at midnight made of a dish of white beans boiled in water (eugh!) and this, for five or six weeks. The newspapers had only a page, perhaps a half. No white machine-paper, but an inferior pink sort … Altered or forged coupons were sold for a great price and to increase the value in weight of the bread coupons, for example, one of our employees was scratching out figures and drawing others all day long. I bought some for us, for my family in the countryside and even for a baker friend so as to satisfy his clients and his miller!