But while the Windsor reputation was suffering, Florence Gould managed to keep hers intact and, in spite of her success as a hostess entertaining well-known anti-Semites, to overcome taints of collaboration. She died in 1993 and left the bulk of her fortune to establish the Florence Gould Foundation, an American charity devoted to supporting the arts, especially Franco-American cultural exchanges. New York boasts a Florence Gould Hall and San Francisco a Florence Gould Theatre.
Many buildings in Paris, as much as people, were swiftly busy reinventing themselves. Just as the prison at Fresnes was used in 1945 to house collaborators awaiting trial, often holding prisoners in the same cells where resisters had been locked up before them, so Drancy too continued to function in the immediate postwar period but with different inmates. Then slowly, as 1940s France found itself confronted with an accommodation crisis, the buildings there, the La Muette complex, were returned to their original purpose: housing. Since 1976 there has been a large and powerful monument at the entrance to the buildings dedicated to Drancy prisoners and created by Shelomo Selinger, a former Jewish deportee of Polish origin. Just beyond is a symbolic freight car of the same type as those used to transport the deportees to their deaths. But visiting Drancy, so recognizable from photographs of the days when it was an overflowing sink of inhumanity, is a deeply disconcerting experience. When I asked a resident of the flats how he could live in a place of such sorrow and pain he looked at me strangely before replying, ‘But everywhere in Paris has a history. Mostly there are places where Germans lived. Surely this is better than that?’
Some battles, far from ending, were just beginning in the 1940s and dragged on for decades. The passionate Francophile Caroline Ferriday, who never married and devoted her life to helping those who had suffered in France, took on the fight for compensation for the young Polish lapins, the girls, now often deformed women, who had been the subjects of hideous experimentation by the Nazis in Ravensbrück. Informed of their plight by Jacqueline Péry d’Alincourt, who had befriended a number of lapins in the camps, Ferriday was horrified to discover that as the women now lived in communist Poland, with whom the West Germans did not currently have diplomatic relations, they were not eligible to be included in the compensation agreements for Nazi victims, which started to pay out reparations from 1952 onwards. They were abandoned and ignored in the postwar world, many of them requiring constant medical treatment for a range of chronic conditions including cardiac illness, hepatitis and cystitis, not to mention financial assistance. Yet, despite her forceful arguments, Ferriday could not bring about a change in the German position. For nearly twenty years she fought and wrote articles about them and invited them to stay with her at her beautiful family home in Bethlehem, Connecticut. In 1959, nearly fifteen years after the end of the war, thirty-five of the women came to the United States for medical treatment, Ferriday having played a crucial role in convincing them to travel as well as helping to raise the funds. In the early 1960s, following a series of articles in US newspapers which Ferriday helped orchestrate, the West German government bowed to international pressure and full indemnities were finally granted to 136 of the most severely handicapped survivors, while the rest received partial compensation.