Geneviève de Gaulle was also married in 1946 to a man she had met while recuperating in Geneva: Bernard Anthonioz, a publisher from Lyons, a friend of Louis Aragon and André Malraux and a fellow resister. General de Gaulle was a witness at their May wedding and the couple subsequently had four children. One month later in June, ADIR published its first newsletter, Voix et Visages, in which Geneviève de Gaulle Anthonioz, as she insisted on being called from then on, wrote to remind fellow déportées of the ‘virile, effective total’ friendship that had sustained them in the camps, ‘as it would again as they undertook their new humane tasks’. Initially, the newsletter was devoted to recording fallen comrades but during the following months and years it published a bewildering array of relevant laws and policies concerning the rights and benefits that were due to resisters.
Often more important than the newsletter was human contact, and the organization’s Rue Guynemer headquarters provided conversation and companionship for those who called in for the regular Monday afternoon teas. It also helped women to find work or housing, offered advice in dealing with the various government ministries charged with administering benefits, and provided urgent medical care which was often crucial and which the state was not equipped to do. Many of the returning women suffered from a range of illnesses including undiagnosed tuberculosis, typhus, gangrene, dysentery and various infections and digestive ailments. ADIR provided its members with the services of seventeen doctors free of charge, it bought screening equipment for TB, and twice weekly the association’s medical personnel offered unlimited consultations and referrals to its members. In addition it subsidized long-term care in convalescent homes, where possible in France and Switzerland. By January 1947 more than 500 women had spent time in one of their homes, sometimes for as long as a year, and by the end of the decade more than a thousand women had benefited from this initiative. Even so, for some this was too late. Among the approximately 40,000 surviving racial and political deportees, nearly 3,000 died within a couple of months of their liberation. And by October 1954, less than ten years after their return, roughly 35 per cent of the deportees had died as a direct consequence of their injuries or maltreatment.
One of those victims was Malka Reiman, the Jewish mother rounded up in the Vél’ d’Hiv rafle with her two daughters, whose extraordinary courage, resourcefulness and ingenuity had enabled all three of them to escape the camp at Beaune-la-Rolande. Having found a hiding place for her adolescent girls in Vend?me in 1942 with a relatively impoverished Christian family, the Philippeaus, located thanks to her local postman, she then had to find money to pay them, and returned three times to occupied Paris to recover pieces of jewellery and linens that she had hidden. For two years Malka hid in a variety of places, making clothes and food for herself and others to get by. At the Liberation she hoped that her husband Abraham would return, and went endlessly to the Gare de l’Est and the Lutetia, scanning lists, trying throughout 1945 to discover his fate. When she heard that the policeman at Pithiviers, who had shown her family such kindness while her husband was incarcerated there, was now himself facing trial for collaboration, she went to testify in his favour.
But by January 1946, aged thirty-nine, she knew without doubt that Abraham had been murdered at Auschwitz, and from then on she lost the will to live. She stopped speaking, collapsed in the street and suffered ever worsening headaches, unable to contemplate a future without Abraham, her childhood sweetheart. ‘She died of a broken heart,’ as Arlette Reiman described it. ‘I wanted her to live for us, but she was too ill. Her last words were “I need to see Papa. Tomorrow we will be together again.”‘ From now on the two girls were orphans: Madeline, at fifteen, was sent to work, Arlette, thirteen, to boarding school in a village in north-west France near Le Mans where she started her life again as ‘la petite orpheline Parisienne’.