She had become, according to the Life reporter, ‘a haggard wreck’. Brigitte, her child, was placed for a time with a family who took in paying guests in Chatel, a village in Haute-Savoie. She went to school in the village and was seen occasionally on the ski slopes in winter. Those who knew who she was whispered about the mother, the Marilyn Monroe of her day. There were even those who sympathized. According to the French novelist and Nobel Prize winner Patrick Modiano, Corinne, or ‘my sister Corinne’ as he referred to her, doubtless with his own childhood and dubious father in mind, ‘was in a certain sense a victim of her father’s adventure … an adventure which was nothing in comparison to that of Rebatet or Brasillach’. Modiano, who has created several fictional characters based on Corinne, has pointed out that her father hailed from the political left and was surrounded by Jews in his close family: his brother-in-law Théodore Fraenkel was Jewish, as was his father Julien’s third wife, Antonina Silberstein.
He was led astray into collaboration through a weakness of character and taste for the easy life and a need for money – money which he shared as he was generous in intervening with the Germans to save lives. Fascists like Rebatet and Brasillach hated him and considered him pro-Jewish. Luchaire seemed to me representative of a certain atmosphere and troubled world of Paris in the Occupation, caught up in the black market and which my own father unfortunately was part of in the scheme of things. Luchaire paid for his thoughtlessness with his life.
While the trials attempted to offer justice for those who would never return, the women who had survived often needed more. Early in 1946 the young death-march survivor and résistante Jacqueline Marié married Guy Fleury, fellow resister, and her first child was born later that year. ‘I saw this not only as a sign of life but as a snub to the Germans. Of all the things that the Germans did, I can never forgive them for what they did to children,’ she said.
She and her brother, Pierre Marié, went on to have five children each, and today, as Mme Fleury, she has grandchildren and greatgrandchildren, not only a source of enormous pride but a critical part of her recovery. ‘When I first returned in 1945 nobody wanted to hear our stories. So after three attempts I stopped. But then I started speaking to my infant son and eventually (in 1961) I started going into schools and since then have never stopped talking about what happened.’ Never forget and always bear witness, the twin mantras which motivated many of those who, like her, became involved in the running of ADIR (she is, at time of writing, its President). But as Jacqueline d’Alincourt explained, it was difficult for most of them to talk because it was, quite simply, ‘an unspeakable experience. We had no words to express it. Little by little, however, the wall of silence that imprisoned us cracked. Some were bold enough to ask us what happened. The need to speak, to stave off oblivion, became obvious. I still hear the scream of a companion being trucked off to the gas chamber: “Tell it to the world!” Those words will forever echo in my mind.’