Publicity shot of Corinne Luchaire, the film actress who shot to fame as a teenager for her pre-war roles in Prison sans Barreaux and Le Dernier Tournant. After the war she was sentenced to ‘national indignity’ for her close connections with collaborators throughout the Occupation.
Bernard Herz, the pearl dealer whose financial and emotional support of Suzanne Belperron enabled her to flourish as a brilliantly original jewellery designer.
Refugee women and children fleeing Paris in anticipation of the German invasion. Some used babies’ prams or bicycles tugging trailers, while a few had cars, often with mattresses on top – but this group was reduced to walking, carrying only what they could hold.
After the Fall of France in June 1940 approximately 1.8 million French soldiers were taken as prisoners of war, most of them deported to Germany. Here, a month later, women scrutinize the first official lists of the wounded and captured.
German propaganda posters in French encouraged women to look upon the occupiers as helpful friends unlike the husbands who had abandoned them. ‘Abandoned populations, trust the German soldier!’
German soldiers chatting up French women outside the Moulin Rouge in summer 1940. Many Parisiennes commented how, for the first months of the Occupation, most were courteous and charming.
German auxiliaries, dubbed ‘Grey Mice’ by the Parisians, looking at a display of scarves in the department store, Printemps. A posting to Paris was highly sought after by men and women as it offered culture, charm and – in 1940 at least – luxury goods unavailable at home.
Dancers performing semi-naked to a sea of grey-green uniforms at the Moulin de la Galette, an historic tavern and music hall in Montmartre painted by several French artists including Renoir and Picasso.
Parisian women spent many hours queuing for basic foodstuffs, including bread, throughout the Occupation. The shortages resulted in food rationing and a black market as well as visits to country cousins living hours away from Paris who could supply some fresh produce.
A workshop set up to mend mesh stockings. As silk stockings disappeared, some women painted their legs with special iodine dye available in different shades.
As fashionable clothes became harder for ordinary Parisiennes to afford, at least new underwear remained a possibility with enough coupons.
(left) Béatrice Bretty, star of the Comédie-Fran?aise, in costume as Dorine in Molière’s Tartuffe. Bretty left the company in 1940 to support her Jewish lover, former minister Georges Mandel, imprisoned by the Vichy government and later assassinated by the Milice. (above) While Mandel was interned his Paris home was looted.
Rose Valland, French art historian who secretly recorded details of thousands of paintings being shipped to Germany and in 1945 was assigned military rank to work as a member of the Commission for the Recovery of Works of Art (CRA).
Jeanne Bucher, courageous gallery owner who continued to organize exhibitions of contemporary art in Paris despite Nazi prohibitions on showing work denounced as ‘degenerate’.
French Jews and foreigners arrested in Paris on 14 May 1941 – the first major round-up organized during the Second World War in France.
On 5 September 1941 the pseudoscientific propaganda exhibition Le Juif et la France (The Jew and France) opened at the Palais Berlitz in Paris. An estimated 200,000 people visited the exhibition intended to show the corrupting influence of Jews in all walks of French life.
* The pair were married after the war in 1947 and divorced in 1956.
* The owners of the flat, a Jewish couple named Panigel, sued the Countess after the war.
* The operetta received its premiere in Paris in 2007, when Tillion herself at 100 was too frail to attend but had at last agreed to its being staged.
? She did both. In June 1946 she married André Postel-Vinay and the couple had four children.
* Ironically, as Caroline Moorehead points out in her history of the Red Cross, although many of the women imprisoned were there largely for their work sheltering and aiding men, it was men on the committee who insisted on doing nothing and the single voice urging action was a woman’s (Caroline Moorehead, Dunant’s Dream: War, Switzerland and the History of the Red Cross, Introduction).
* Helmuth von Moltke was transferred from Ravensbrück to Tegel prison in Berlin on 11 January 1945, tried before the People’s Court on 23 January and executed in April. Freya, Caspar and Konrad von Moltke were evacuated to Czechoslovakia, and in the 1960s Freya settled in the United States.
PART TWO
LIBERATION
1944 ? (June–December)
PARIS SHORN