The notion that resisting was a visceral response was important to many of the résistantes who believed fundamentally that resisting the occupier was not for them an act of politics. Their behaviour was above politics, as Geneviève de Gaulle maintained. ‘Very few of us were anti-fascist before the war, my mother, Andrée Bès, a Ravensbrück deportee, always insisted,’ said Marie-Odile Tuloup, her daughter. ‘She could not accept standing by while her country was invaded and while Jews were taken away and murdered.’ In other words, it was an automatic response based on her instinctive moral values.
Jeannie Rousseau’s behaviour at Ravensbrück offers an insight into the deepest complexities of how good people ‘should’ react to evil. Not all the other Parisiennes in Ravensbrück felt the same certainty about how to respond to their jailers, and although the camp contained many examples of sisterly support and survival systems, there were, too, compliance with oppression, lying, stealing and cruelty. Faced with depravity, nobility was not always possible. The story of Anne Spoerry, a young woman training as a doctor to save lives, who joined the resistance at the beginning of the war, is particularly fascinating – and horrifying – as it reveals how easily good motives can, under extreme circumstances, all too easily become warped. Spoerry spent the rest of her life in Africa, searching for redemption.
Odette Fabius and Genevieve de Gaulle, friends since Ravensbrück, on the occasion of Fabius being awarded the Officier de la Légion d’honneur in 1971
The camps provided many Parisiennes with extreme circumstances which tested their moral reflexes. The author of a recent study of Ravensbrück, Sarah Helm, believes the camp has been marginalized for too long in histories of the war, ‘and yet it is precisely because this was a camp for women that Ravensbrück should have shaken the conscience of the world … Ravensbrück showed what mankind was capable of doing to women.’ It also shows what women are capable of doing for each other.
War, as always, is a catalyst which gave some Parisiennes, such as Lily Pastré and Odette Fabius, a sense of purpose which they could not always recreate in the postwar years, sometimes with disastrous consequences. It was the war which had brought the very different worlds of Odette Fabius and Pierre Ferri-Pisani to collide, while a sensation of risk fed their passionate relationship. In 1956 Odette and Robert divorced and seven years later, in 1963, Pierre put a revolver into his mouth and committed suicide. Like so many who had managed not to die in the camps, ultimately he was unable to survive in the world – whether from a sense of guilt, humiliation or helplessness. Odette was devastated. She went immediately to Marseilles where she met his son, Charles, a lawyer. He told her that three factors had precipitated his father’s decline and death: the first was undoubtedly the rupture with her, the second and third were political disappointments. He tried to regain his position as a powerful union leader, but, facing opposition from a younger generation, lost elections and was caught up in attempts by the CIA – who viewed him as little more than a Corsican gangster – to use him in the battle to control dockworkers in the fight against communism. Odette, removed from that side of his life, wrote after his death: ‘Now I realized I had lost not only an old love but the best friend I ever had on this earth.’
The suicide rate of Holocaust survivors is today generally accepted to be almost three times that of the general population.* As the world today is still struggling to try and understand the camps and the mass killings that became the defining events of the twentieth century, it may seem too obvious to state that nobody ever ‘got over’ the experience of the camps. For many survivors, this meant they had reached a point where they could not continue to live. The Austrian writer Thomas Bernhard explained: ‘We’re constantly correcting, and correcting ourselves, most rigorously, because we recognize at every moment that we did it all wrong (wrote it, thought it, made it all wrong) … that everything to this point in time is a falsification, so we correct this falsification, and then we again correct the correction of this falsification and we correct the result of the correction of a correction and so forth.’ Too often suicide became the ultimate correction.