No doubt something of the tension of those days always remained with her, and her stunning if disturbing beauty not only made her the ideal actress for Claude Lelouch’s Un Homme et une femme of 1966 but also equipped her for the central role of a Jewish woman coming to terms later in life with her time at Birkenau as a teenage prisoner in the 2003 film La Petite prairie aux bouleaux (The Little Meadow of Birch-Trees). This was based on the real-life experiences of writer-director Marceline Loridan-Ivens, formerly Rozenberg. The film historian Ginette Vincendeau has written that Aimée’s films ‘established her as an ethereal, sensitive and fragile beauty with a tendency to tragic destinies or restrained suffering’. In recent years, having converted as an adult to Judaism (her mother was not Jewish), Aimée is often referred to as an icon for world peace and reconciliation, but she has not revealed details of her own childhood. At the 2003 screening of the Birkenau film she simply spoke about the importance of documenting this chapter of Jewish history.
Summer 1947 was, according to a young British would-be writer trying to disentangle herself from an unsuitable love affair, ‘a summer that will never end, a golden summer of unbroken heat and unclouded blue skies and sunshine: timeless’. Emma Smith had grabbed an opportunity to escape to Paris following a chance encounter in London with one of the five Geoffroy-Dechaume sons. Claude, a jeweller, explained that his family was based in a large, rambling and rather derelict house at Valmondois, north of Paris, and was trying to make ends meet in the difficult post-war climate by taking in English and American students. They needed someone to help with chores such as bedmaking, vegetable-peeling and fetching the early-morning milk and baguettes. Was she interested in such an unpaid post in return for her board and lodging? Emma accepted and moved to Valmondois where she found her new existence basic – her room was illuminated by a single dangling light bulb, had shutters but no curtains, an uncarpeted floor plus bed, chair and table – but more than adequate.
Immersed in this intensely French Resistance family, Emma fell in love not with one son but two: both Denis and Jean-Pierre, the two youngest. After all, both brothers were ‘Heroes of the French Resistance’, she wrote later of her youthful adoration, ‘bravest of the brave, young men who hid up in the hills and fought alongside the gallant Maquis and by their indomitable courage saved the whole world from wicked German fascism. I am bound – am I not? – to adore them both.’
Antoine, the eldest son, the musician friend of Vivou Chevrillon, had, he told her, survived Nazi torture by playing in his head Bach’s harpsichord music, while his mother, Mme Geoffroy, had embroidered over the hole in another son’s shirt where he had been shot in order to commemorate the wound. Emma was to hear many tales of derring-do that summer, such as how Jean-Pierre had hauled his wounded brother out of hospital minutes before the Germans arrived to take him into captivity. Marie-France, their sister, a heroine decorated by de Gaulle for her work escorting downed airmen to freedom and for cycling with guns concealed beneath onions and gelignite under her coat, passed through Valmondois that summer on her honeymoon with Dermod MacCarthy, a British paediatrician. Sylvie, the youngest of the five daughters, who had also worked in the south with the Maquis (not yet married to the President’s nephew, Bernard de Gaulle) was the same age as Emma and became her special friend as they worked together in the kitchen. ‘I remember being permanently hungry and thin and feeling there was never quite enough to eat,’ said Emma. But the overriding memory of that summer as she immersed herself in French post-war life was the fun she had smoking pungent, wispy Gauloises Bleues cigarettes and drinking ‘un petit coup de vin blanc’ at the village bistro, while thinking Jean-Pierre was the handsome prince she had been waiting for. But then, after three months, she was suddenly dismissed. Fran?ois, the second son who worked in the diplomatic service but was effectively the head of the family, told her she was an extra mouth to feed and the Geoffroy-Dechaumes could no longer afford one of those. Distraught, Emma went home and that autumn, goaded to succeed, wrote her first novel.