Hungry for normality, the native population had quickly accustomed itself to freedom once more. On 17 August Drancy and its sub-camps, including the Lévitan and Bassano sorting centres, were liberated. Those returning from prisons or deportation, still only a trickle in 1944, were soon to recognize that Paris was not prepared to welcome them. It was a situation that was to deteriorate dramatically in 1945 when most of the deportees wearily straggled home.
Irène Delmas, codenamed Maryka, was one of those released in 1944 who started visiting the families of other prisoners, trying to reassure them, and she soon realized the enormous need for a welfare organization to help newly released female prisoners, many with multiple illnesses and physical disabilities compounding the emotional. By September 1944 she had an official organization under way which sent out 700 invitations to former resisters. More than 350 women attended the first general assembly on 14 October 1944, unanimously approving the by-laws and electing an administrative council headed by Delmas. As they came to appreciate the uniqueness of their circumstances and to see that their wartime activism had been little understood or accepted, their conviction grew that no one would speak for them if they did not do so for themselves.
Even as de Gaulle was marching down the Champs-Elysées on 26 August to wild cheers, the artistic épuration sauvage was also well under way. That day saw General de Gaulle acclaimed as President of the new provisional government of the French Republic, as agreed by the Allies. De Gaulle would lead a national unity interim government whose most urgent task, until elections could be held, was to continue the war against Germany and deal with the aftermath of four years of Occupation. Almost immediately, in an attempt to halt indiscriminate revenge attacks, it introduced an offence of indignité nationale. Those found guilty were reduced to a class of second-rate citizens, deprived of election rights and banned from government service, trade unions, mass media and executive appointments in semi-public companies, as well as, after 30 September 1944, confiscation of property. Such punishment could last for any period from five years to life, to be decided by each court individually. Those who had done more than simply perform and had flaunted their German friends, lovers and contacts were prime targets, and the opera singer Germaine Lubin, who was preparing to sing Gluck’s Alceste, was one of the first to be arrested. She had frequently sung Wagner, sometimes at special performances for the Wehrmacht, and had a long-time German admirer, Captain Hans Joachim Lange, whom she had used to arrange the release of her only son, a prisoner of war captured in 1940. Now she was held in prison for most of the next two years without formally being brought to trial. Her treatment reveals the fixation with punishing women who had openly consorted with German men, yet her prison diary, which makes for graphic reading, displays an arrogance and a total failure to understand why she was being detained, an attitude which goes some way to explaining why she was a target.
On 8 September she wrote:
Eight days ago I was arrested for the second time. For ten hours I waited on a leather bench with no back surrounded by dirty men with week-old beards, concierges, laundrywomen, prostitutes. In the corners, garbage was mixed with the hair of women who had had their heads shaved the night before. During the course of the day another four were shaved completely bald except for one on whom, for laughs, they had left a tuft in the middle of her head which hung down like the mandarin’s pigtails – so dreadful as to make one shiver. After the fourth woman was shaved I began trembling in uncontrollable fear of being suddenly delivered into the hands of one of these fanatics and ending up bald.