On 27 August a detachment of the French 2nd Armoured Division, which had just been involved in the Liberation of Paris, captured the train led by a young lieutenant, Alexandre Rosenberg, son of the exiled art-dealer Paul. The soldiers banged on the boxcars’ doors (holding fire in case there were prisoners inside), and out straggled some old German soldiers who had been assigned to accompany the booty to Germany. Lieutenant Rosenberg found his own family’s paintings on the train which he had last seen in their apartment in Paris.
While this was going on, Valland herself was briefly held captive by Free French troops and liberators who suspected her of collaboration. With a machine gun held to her back she was forced to open the storage areas in case she was hiding Germans there. When it was seen that there were none, they released her and she continued with her work. On 24 November the Commission de Récupération Artistique (CRA) was created and Rose Valland named its Secretary, effectively its head. She elected to go to Germany to find the art that had been stolen from France, and for the next five years was a vital liaison officer between the CRA and the French government.
On 20 March 1944 de Gaulle’s provisional government had announced that they would, for the first time, allow women to vote once the whole of France was liberated. Before elections could occur, a consultative assembly was created and the General appointed Lucie Aubrac to join as a resistance representative. Aubrac, a daring résistante who had organized the escape of her husband, Raymond Samuel, from a Lyons prison by pretending she had to marry him – the man who had made her pregnant – thus became the first woman to sit in a French parliamentary assembly. She too was keenly aware of the gendered response to Liberation as France enjoyed its new-found freedom, and she was determined that the country should resist falling for the simplistic notion that the women had collaborated while the men had fought. She insisted it was women who had given the resistance its breadth and depth – the women who had been the essential mailboxes because they were at home, the women who had become couriers because they looked less suspect carrying suitcases, as well as the women who had daringly used weapons. Not everyone in Paris was ready to hear her voice – most were preoccupied with trying to resume normal life. As the year ended, any rejoicing was muted by the cold, the shortages of food and fuel and the knowledge that at least three million men and women were either dead, missing or still in German prisoner-of-war camps. In the flurry of books, magazines and pamphlets printed as the Liberation was unfolding, one image stands out: a photographic view over the rooftops of Paris, taken on Christmas Day, 1944, during one of the coldest winters of the century, stretches with clarity to the distant horizon. There is no smoke coming from any of the chimneys to mar the view.
* After the war she volunteered to bring camp survivors suffering from typhus back to France but contracted TB herself and died in 1950 aged twenty-seven.
* This was an impressive achievement as British women reporters were not being given official accreditation to report on front-line battles. It was easier for American women, but some, like Martha Gellhorn, still had to resort to ruses to ensure they got to report on front-line action, not just from hospitals, on the post-battle bomb damage.
* See here.
* Wodehouse was never really forgiven in Britain, however, and in 1947 the couple left France for America.
1945
PARIS RETURNS
On 1 January 1945 the factory at Torgau fell silent. One day’s respite. The women forced to work at Torgau, the munitions factory in eastern Germany used as a sub-camp of Ravensbrück, sometimes believed they could take no more. Jacqueline Marié felt she was immersed in blackness. ‘We were so cold: it was minus 20°C outside! Snow covered everything. We were terrified. Fortunately we had no mirror. But I could see my mother and it hurt me to see her legs reduced to bones, sticking out miserably in her ridiculous galoshes that were so heavy. She maintained an incredible serenity, lavishing affection on our young companions. She was also very lucid and, having so many memories of the war of 1914–1918, warned us about the end of the war, and the most dramatic period we might yet have to endure.’