In 1999 I met Mme Geneviève de Gaulle Anthonioz. She had just written her wartime memoirs, having been pressed to do so for years, and was being celebrated as the ‘Mother Teresa of France’ for her lifetime of work heading a major welfare organization for the homeless which she had helped found, the ATD (All Together in Dignity) Fourth World movement. The organization’s aim is to help those who are most marginalized escape the cycle of deprivation by their own efforts, and it therefore focuses on providing street libraries, workshops and training, rather than on handouts.
What was abundantly clear in the time I spent with her, a view reinforced since from meeting many other résistantes, is that what they had to endure during the war became the defining experience of the rest of their lives. This is not to say that they could not move on, nor is it simply a matter of who their friends were, but it defined how they lived and what they did. In all her subsequent work, whether for the deportees at ADIR or for the homeless on the streets of Paris, Geneviève de Gaulle clung to the reality of what had made her life bearable in the camps – several small tokens of friendship which enabled survival and hope.
In the course of our 1999 meeting, a still spritely Geneviève de Gaulle walked over to a chest and took out a large gold box once filled with chocolates. ‘Mes petits souvenirs,’ she said with a wry smile. ‘I do not show these to many people.’ Her hands shook slightly – the result of Parkinson’s, she told me – as she slowly opened the box and, one by one, pulled out the contents. There were false identity and ration cards, not the ones she was arrested with as she used several; a letter from her father, Xavier de Gaulle, the only one she ever received while incarcerated; and then items of almost unbearable poignancy: a doll with pink dress and beige lace that her friend Jacqueline Péry d’Alincourt somehow smuggled to her, a needle-case made from the stolen leather of a German tank commander’s beret, miniature playing-cards she made herself and the small embroidered cloth bag in which she kept her bread ration.
Geneviève suffered forced labour, beatings and semi-starvation during her year in Ravensbrück, as well as witnessing scenes that would haunt her for the rest of her life. She saw a female German guard severing a prisoner’s throat with a spade while screaming with hatred. And yet, on her release in 1945, she was determined to do something to improve the postwar world. Despite the obvious advantage of her name, she shunned the prospect of a political career. ‘Quite the reverse, I wanted to transcend politics. For me the most important goal in life is to combat misery and exclusion.’ In 1957 she was introduced to Père Joseph Wresinski, a Catholic priest working with the homeless and hopeless in Paris’s cardboard city. She explained that the expressions in the eyes of those she saw there reminded her so keenly of the haunting eyes of the Ravensbrück inmates that she felt compelled to devote the rest of her life to lobbying on their behalf and building up the ATD.
Jeannie Rousseau – still alive in her elegant nineties at the time of writing – was another whose story has had to wait. She chose to keep silent about her wartime exploits until the Washington Post reporter David Ignatius ‘discovered’ her at a party and persuaded her, in 1998, to give an interview. Realizing how extraordinary her account was, he deposited for posterity a lengthy recorded interview with her at the Washington International Spy Museum. But why wait until almost fifty years after the events? Was it a natural reticence, a question of moving on with life, or the sobering realization which came with age that several women had lost their lives at Torgau as a result of her hot-headed heroism? Jeannie, like many, so young when she first resisted, believes her refusal to accept death or to accept what was happening around her was partly because she was so young. When she finally agreed to talk about her wartime life she simply scoffed at that question. ‘I just did it, that’s all … it wasn’t a choice. It was what you did. At the time, we all thought we would die.’ As Ignatius put it: ‘And that’s her answer: Heroism isn’t a matter of choice, but of reflex. It’s a property of the central nervous system, not the higher brain.’