Female performers who had worked in occupied Paris faced the most difficult transition of all, but those whom the public adored and needed were indulged. Although Arletty was forgiven, her wartime liaison was never forgotten and affected her ability to find work. Her first postwar film was not until 1949. When she met Hans-Jürgen Soehring in Paris for the last time that year, she realized that their love affair had ended as he was now married to a German woman with whom he had two sons, and was forging a successful career in the German diplomatic service. In 1960 he was appointed Ambassador of the Federal Republic of Germany to the newly formed Republic of the Congo. Shortly afterwards, during a family outing to the supposedly safe River Congo, he went swimming with his eldest son and disappeared under mysterious circumstances, presumably drowned. His body was never found. Arletty, deeply shocked, went to visit his widow and children in Bad Godesberg. But her own health was not good. Suffering for some time from deteriorating eyesight, by the time she died aged ninety-four in 1992 she was blind. She outlived her lover by thirty-two years.
Although in 1947 Sadie Rigal was declared a ‘privileged resident’ of France for her resistance activities, she left Paris soon afterwards and started a new life in the United States. She and Frédéric, not merely her dancing partner but the man who had saved her life, toured the United States together in 1948 as ‘Florence et Frederic’. (He dropped the accents from his name here.) This produced an emotional visit from the two sisters whom she had helped escape from Paris to Marseilles and eventually to New York, and who now sought her out to thank her. And while performing her routine at the Copacabana Club in New York, she met and fell in love with a young actor, director and academic, Stanley Waren. She trained a new ‘Florence’ for the act, remained in New York and married Stanley in 1949. She went on to enjoy a varied career on Broadway and in television, choreographing shows which Stanley directed in Africa, Taiwan and China. For another decade, from approximately 1973 until 1983, Florence Waren was Professor of Theatre and Dance at New York’s City College and a dance panellist on the New York State Council on the Arts. It was not until 1996 that, for the first time, she visited her parents’ graves in Johannesburg but was nonetheless still reluctant to talk about how she came to be a dancer in Paris and about her daring activities in the 1940s. Eventually in 2003, her son, Mark Waren, directed an award-winning documentary about his mother entitled Dancing Lessons. Thus finally did the world learn of her early life in the resistance, when she danced to please German officers quite unaware of her Jewish roots. She was just twenty when war broke out and she chose the path of active resistance. She could have returned home to a peaceful life in South Africa, as her father had urged her to do. Her son said he thought she was often ‘very scared. But I don’t think it was something she thought much about. It was simply what one did.’ She died, aged ninety-five, in 2012.
Edith Piaf became a national treasure; she belonged to Paris, or a certain part of it. In 1961 Janet Flanner described how, at one of Piaf’s final Paris performances, the singer shuffled on to the stage, walking with difficulty after a series of accidents and much ill health, dressed in an old black shift looking like a withered tramp, and ‘when the thunderous applause strikes her, she mostly acts as if she did not hear it’. Her trademark song, ‘Non, Je Ne Regrette Rien’, had been released only the previous year, in 1960, but it immediately resonated with many French people who saw it as ‘their’ song; they had done whatever they had needed to do to survive. Piaf, who was never precise about the number of fake identity papers she had taken with her on tours to Nazi Germany and never spoke about her relationships with the German officers she knew when she lived above L’Etoile de Kléber, died of liver cancer, aged forty-seven, in 1963, predeceasing by one day her friend Jean Cocteau. She was buried in the Père Lachaise cemetery in Paris, next to her two-year-old daughter.