Also telling a story that oppressive morning is Séverine Darcque, a thirty-three-year-old teacher who owes her existence to Pierrette Pauchard, a farmer’s widow from Burgundy recently declared one of the Righteous Among Nations (the official term used by the state of Israel to describe non-Jews who risked their lives during the Holocaust to save Jews from extermination by the Nazis). Pierrette was among those French men and women who put their own lives in danger to help Jews survive, and Séverine’s dramatic story shows how courageously many ordinary French people behaved. Pierrette saved at least five Jewish children who grew up alongside her own, one of whom was an abandoned eighteen-month-old baby named Colette Morgenbesser. Séverine is Colette’s granddaughter but thinks of herself as a descendant of Pierrette too.
The stadium no longer exists, but this ceremony is now held annually on a nearby site in the shadow of the Eiffel Tower following President Jacques Chirac’s groundbreaking 1995 speech when he officially recognized French culpability for the 1942 round-up. The Vichy government, then headed by Pierre Laval, agreed to help the Nazi occupiers by delivering up thousands of foreign Jews, and their children born in France who were therefore French. The number of those who lived through the events being commemorated diminishes each year, but some of their children now attend to honour their parents’ memory. In less than an hour, the two women making formal addresses have revealed some of the myriad narratives which make up the complex patchwork of experiences in France during les Années Noires, the Dark Years. In different ways they have both shown that ‘the past’ is not yet ‘the past’ in France. Above all they demonstrate how harshly the burden of decision so often fell on women, usually mothers, and how murky was the range of choices.
Echoes of the past continually resonate in modern-day France, because what happened here during the 1940s has left scars of such depth that many have not yet healed. There is still a fear among some that touching the scars may reopen them. Nearly eighty years after the conflict ended, I am frequently warned as I plan interviews and research for this book to bear in mind that what to me is history is still the highly sensitive present for many; some people may not talk to me. Nowhere was this more evident than in today’s Vichy, the spa town which became government headquarters after the fall of France in 1940. The hotel which housed Marshal Pétain and many other government officials for four years now serves as the town’s Tourist Information Office, yet the young staff working there when I visited were unable to confirm any details of life in the town in the 1940s, a period about which they apparently knew nothing. My request to see the plaque, located inside Vichy’s opera house, which declares that it was there that on 10 July 1940 the National Assembly voted full governing powers to Field Marshal Philippe Pétain, thus ending France’s Third Republic, was turned down. Bizarrely, the plaque states that eighty députés, elected members of the National Assembly, or Parliament, voted to ‘affirm their attachment to the Republic, their love for freedom, and their faith in victory [over Germany]’, not that 569 members did not affirm their attachment to the Third Republic. Indeed, they condemned it, thus paving the way for the Vichy regime, which governed the defeated country during the Occupation.