Les Parisiennes: How the Women of Paris Lived, Loved, and Died Under Nazi Occupation

After the war, she went to live in Czechoslovakia, the birthplace of her adored Jewish husband Artur London, with whom she had shared so much over the previous decade. Having survived Mauthausen, he wanted to return to his native land and became a successful communist politician in a Soviet-backed government. However, he fell from grace, was arrested in 1951 and, accused of being a Zionist traitor, had to face a Stalinist show trial. Eventually freed and ‘rehabilitated’ in 1956, following Stalin’s death, he and his family moved back to Paris, where Lise continued to work for left-leaning, progressive causes. In 1970 a play written by him called The Trial was made into a film, starring Simone Signoret as Lise and Yves Montand, who had to lose more than thirty pounds in order to resemble the half-starved Artur. The play was based on notes which Lise had managed to smuggle out of his Soviet prison. She was a loyal and brave wife who remained passionate about justice in general and defiant to the end. According to her son, Michel, she rarely mentioned the Nazi camps. But in 2005, after Artur’s death, she decided to take her family to Mauthausen. ‘It was very emotional for her but she didn’t lose her composure. She showed the grandchildren the barracks, the ovens and the striped pyjamas as if it were the most natural thing in the world.’ In her final interview she said she was still a communist, ‘but not in a political sense any more: I tore up my membership card. I remain a communist out of loyalty to all those comrades who shared our dreams, and who died for freedom.’


But among the plethora of volumes published in recent years, not all enhanced reputations. Bernard Ullmann, the journalist son of Lisette de Brinon by her first husband, waited until 2004 when he was eighty-two to publish a disturbing book about how his Jewish mother had survived the war married to a leading anti-Semite such as Fernand de Brinon. Lisette, born into an assimilated family of bankers, became a hostess of enormous sparkle and superficiality in pre-war Paris, and converted to Catholicism shortly after divorcing her first husband, Claude Ullmann. She always believed that, although anti-Semitism existed in France, ‘it couldn’t reach people like us’. Ullmann vividly describes how, the day before he was smuggled out of France in 1942 in the trunk of his mother’s car so that he could fight in North Africa – a ploy part-organized by his stepfather – he watched the deeply anti-Semitic film Jew Süss and was then taken for dinner at La Tour d’Argent by de Brinon. When de Brinon rose to prominence under Pétain, he protected Lisette and her two sons as long as they remained out of sight, but it was protection of which Ullmann grew deeply ashamed: ashamed of himself and his good manners in never facing up to the man who was his mother’s husband; ashamed that this was the man to whom he owed his life. In 1947, Ullmann had the good grace to visit de Brinon in prison as he prepared for his trial for treason, days before he was executed by firing squad. Lisette, who had herself been briefly held in Fresnes, always remained loyal to her husband’s memory, continuing to call herself the Marquise de Brinon as she socialized in Paris with friends from Vichy until she died, broke, in a Paris nursing home in 1982.

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