France was not alone in suffering an exceptionally severe winter that lasted from mid-December 1939 until March 1940. The cold centre was situated in the Netherlands and northern Germany but the extreme weather conditions were also felt in Finland, Sweden, southern Norway, Denmark, south-western England, northern France, Germany, Hungary, Yugoslavia, Romania, Poland, the Baltic countries and western Russia. Even in northern Spain, temperatures of 0 degrees Fahrenheit (–18 degrees Celsius) were recorded. Some people in France began to wonder if they were living in Siberia, from where the arctic air originated. The ferocious weather encouraged those who believed that the phoney war could not continue and were in any case trying to prepare for catastrophe; ordinary people, many of them housewives, stockpiling essential items such as sugar, flour and tinned food, were shocked to find that water in flower vases turned to ice. But there were also several not so ordinary women who saw the need to offer whatever help they could as quickly as possible.
Early in 1940, Odette Fabius was one of many women from the Parisian haute bourgeoisie who responded to the call for volunteers for a variety of medical and social support services. Odette remembered that during the First World War an entire floor of her family’s spacious townhouse had been turned into a temporary hospital while her mother, in starched white nurse’s uniform, tended the sick. Four-year-old Odette was encouraged to walk up and down the beds offering cigarettes. Odette Fabius, née Schmoll, was born into one of France’s oldest and most illustrious Jewish families, with roots deep in Alsace on one side, in Bordeaux on the other, and was descended from Abraham Furtado, a French politician and one-time adviser to Napoleon Bonaparte. Her father was a high-ranking lawyer who worked in the Palais de Justice, and she and her brother grew up lacking neither parental love and devotion nor material goods. Her golden childhood enabled her to see life as ‘a marvellous gift’ full of privileges regulated by a British governess called Alice Darling. Darling, who was still with the family in 1940 after thirty-two years’ devoted service, ensured that English was Odette’s first language. That they were Jewish was simply a fact and did not disturb their daily life.
Odette and Robert Fabius’s wedding in 1929
In 1929 Odette was introduced to Robert Fabius, an attractive man ten years older than her, whose family were antique dealers, or as M. Schmoll disparagingly described them, shopkeepers. It was a profession, however, that was ultimately to save his life. Odette and Robert were married the following year by Paris’s Grand Rabbin in a magnificent ceremony at the Grand Synagogue in the Rue de la Victoire, the same synagogue where forty years earlier Captain Alfred Dreyfus had married Lucie Hadamard. Odette, just twenty, wore a magnificent dress with a thirty-foot lace train made by Lanvin, her favourite designer, and was attended by numerous cousins and friends, including Renée, formerly Van Cleef, daughter of the jeweller. The lavish reception was held at the H?tel George V.
Within a year a daughter, Marie-Claude, was born and the family moved to an apartment on the fashionable Rue Meyerbeer with enough room for three staff, including an English nanny. But Odette was far from happy with a life that involved nothing more than dinners at the fashionable Boeuf sur le Toit or visits to cabarets, and a husband who, as she soon learned, drank, gambled and kept mistresses. The latter was hardly a surprise to her, since her own father had done likewise. But, in the way of the haute bourgeoisie, he had been discreet. There were few options in the 1930s for a young mother like Odette. Then, in 1937, her beloved mother died and, lacking anyone with whom to discuss how best to live her unhappy life, she visited a well-known psychoanalyst in Paris, Dr Démétrian. She continued the sessions until Dr Démétrian was called up, then suddenly ‘for me, life was about to begin’. Odette joined the SSA or Sections Sanitaires Automobiles (mobile health units) as a volunteer ambulance driver. Faced with shortages of both ambulances and drivers, the French Department of War had accepted an offer from the Croix-Rouge Fran?aise to help with transportation of wounded soldiers from the battlefield. A brief inaugural ceremony was organized on 24 April 1940 in the Cour des Invalides, following which some units went immediately into action. In fact, the role of these SSA women, many of them countesses and princesses from France’s best-known families, went beyond merely picking up wounded British and French soldiers and was also aiding refugees heading south out of Paris and sending much needed supplies to prisoner-of-war camps. It was dangerous and tiring work, allowing almost no sleep for days on end. Those units near the northern France front line, confronted immediately with casualties from fierce fighting in the area, had to undertake day and night driving, as well as the loading and unloading of the wounded, often under sustained German bombing.