In 1992 a new edition of Denise Dufournier’s book La Maison des mortes was published with a ‘reflection’ by the author, prompted partly by the number of letters she had received from mothers of the pilots whom she had helped to escape, young men who were often killed on their next sortie. The women wanted to thank her for looking after their sons when they needed help. But she was also motivated by what she perceived as a lack of comprehension, especially in England, about how much women like her had done. ‘It would be so nice if the English could understand that we did run massive risks.’ Like many women who resisted the Occupation, Denise Dufournier went for many years without official recognition of those risks. In her own case, marriage to a British diplomat precluded her from receiving a foreign award until he retired, whereupon she was, finally, made an Officier of the Légion d’honneur. But others did not receive official recognition until the closing years of the last century or even into the twenty-first. Pearl Witherington, one of the most famous of the SOE women, who actually commanded her own réseau, the Wrestler network amounting to almost 3,000 men at one point, rejected the offer of a civil MBE with an icy note pointing out that ‘there was nothing remotely “civil” about what I did. I didn’t sit behind a desk all day.’ She later accepted a military MBE and in 2004 was presented with a CBE by the Queen, who told her at the ceremony: ‘We should have done this a long time ago.’ Finally in 2006, more than sixty years after she parachuted back into France, Witherington was awarded her parachute wings, an award which she considered a greater honour than either the MBE or the CBE.
One of the most painful controversies I encountered throughout the research for this book is the distinction between Parisiennes deported because they chose to resist, who were therefore decorated by the state on their return, and Parisiennes deported because they were Jewish, and were therefore victims. Vivette Samuel volunteered for the children’s organization OSE during the war and subsequently for the deported women’s organization ADIR. She wrote sensitively of the great love and admiration she had for the women she met at ADIR, but also of the misunderstandings she encountered. ‘Because they had fought in the resistance network I heard them express only contempt for the racial deportees. I had nightmares about it but … at the end of my three-month probationary period [at ADIR], I decided to stay.’ But, as my interviewees constantly reminded me, ‘C’est très compliqué,’ and sometimes the divide even fell within families, as it did in the Jacob family. Denise, later Vernay, although Jewish, worked as a résistante and was deported to Ravensbrück; but Simone, later Simone Veil, along with her mother and her other sister Madeleine, were all taken to Auschwitz-Birkenau as Jews. Mme Jacob, the girls’ mother, died of typhoid in March 1945 after surviving the death march, while Madeleine survived the camps but was killed in a car crash in the 1950s. Vernay, on returning from Ravensbrück, was made Commandeur of the Légion d’honneur and awarded numerous other medals including the Grand-Croix of the Ordre national du Mérite, the Croix de guerre 1939–1945 avec palmes and the Médaille de la Résistance avec rosette. Veil, however, although she had a glittering political career, best known for her determination to legalize abortion in France – the law was finally passed in 1975 after bitter debate – was awarded the Légion d’honneur only in 2012, albeit the Grand-Croix, the highest level. ‘We were only victims and not heroes,’ she complained in 1993. ‘What we experienced mattered little, something people did not fail to tell us in a brutal way, even those belonging to the associations of former resisters.’ Veil also faced virulent personal attacks comparing the legalization of abortion to the Holocaust; one parliamentary député asked if she would agree to the idea of throwing embryos into crematorium ovens.And, as historians weigh up the tally of what exactly France is responsible for, it needs pointing out that while the Vichy government deported a shocking number of Jews living in France – 76,000 out of a population of 330,000* – to their deaths between 1940 and 1944, on the other hand the proportion of Jews – approximately 25 per cent – deported from France was much lower than that deported from Belgium, Norway or the Netherlands, where it was as high as 73 per cent. This disparity, often described as the French paradox, is often used to defend the Vichy State as well as the French population, which undoubtedly worked hard to rescue many thousands of Jews. But in a sense that misses the point, which is that had Vichy and its accomplices in the French population not collaborated so actively, thousands of Jews would not have been sent to their deaths, especially in 1942, when the Germans alone did not have the resources to do this effectively.