Sacha Josipovici, born in Egypt and travelling, she hoped, also to a place of greater safety with her child on false papers, from Nice to La Bourboule in central France without her husband, had decided that if the train was stopped ‘and I was asked to account for myself I would most probably, despite my papers, say that I was Jewish. I felt that even though it would mean leaving you [her three-year-old son] with strangers, it was something I would have to do. There aren’t many moments like that in life but I felt that this was one of them.’ In the event she did not have to make that choice. Other women, travelling on false papers, hid compromising documents in their children’s bags. I have met those children and would not like to say the actions were without consequences.
‘You were not given the choice,’ insists Jeannie, Vicomtesse de Clarens who, as Jeannie Rousseau, began her opposition to the Germans as soon as war was declared. ‘I don’t even understand the question,’ she says with a rare clarity when asked why she risked her life. ‘It was a moral obligation to do what you are capable of doing. As a woman you could not join the army but you could use your brain. It was a must. How could you not do it?’ Other women were brutally honest in admitting that there was a ‘taste for danger that drove us on … but above all it was the joy, the thrill of feeling useful, the camaraderie of battle in which all our weapons were born of love’.
And of course there were constantly lesser choices that had to be made. Was it collaborating to buy food on the black market if your children were thin, ill and vitamin deficient? Was sending your children to a cousin with a farm in the countryside acceptable? Was it a choice to walk out of a café or a restaurant if German soldiers walked in, or was that deliberately courting danger given that behaving disrespectfully could have fatal consequences? Were those who made up lists and saved children of relatives before they saved the children of strangers culpable? Or should one blame only those who forced them to create the lists in the first place?
I want the pages that follow to avoid black and white, good and evil, but instead to reveal constant moral ambiguity, like a kaleidoscope that can be turned in any number of ways to produce a different image. Such a multifaceted image is far from grey. Was everyone who remained in Paris, who carried on grinding the gears, pressing the buttons, stocking the shops and performing in theatres or nightclubs, in some way complicit in the German adventure of keeping Paris alive and alight? The unreal situation of ‘occupation’ is itself a perverting one, arguably more difficult morally than the predicament presented by war. Of course there are fewer casualties, but fear, shame, anger and the terrible feeling of powerlessness, together with the compulsion to do something and a complex and often heady mixture of hate and perhaps self-interest – not to speak of individual love affairs – confuse any straightforward response. I want to explore, with as little hindsight or judgement as I can muster – after all, we British did not suffer occupation so what right have any of us to judge? What were the possibilities? Here is one absolute: I think I would go to any lengths to save my children. A handful of women went to extraordinary lengths to save other people’s children. But these are extremes and not all situations in the pages that follow are extremes offering absolute choices. The life that most of us engage in is a muddle, and that is what is so compelling for any writer or historian looking at France between 1939 and 1949, especially through the eyes of women. Turn the kaleidoscope one way and see women destroyed by the war; turn it the other and find women whose lives were enhanced with new meaning and fulfilment.