She and Artur moved back to Paris, living under aliases with forged papers, and had another child together, a daughter, Fran?oise. Then in 1942 Lise helped to instigate a popular uprising against the Nazis in Paris. She had witnessed earlier, small-scale demonstrations in Paris where men had been shot but, as no women had yet been arrested, she was determined to ‘give confidence to women so they would want to engage with us … and to show that German repression would not end resistance’. Some of the women who joined in were part of organized communist committees but many others did so spontaneously out of desperation. The Rue Daguerre was chosen as it was a busy area with lots of food stores where many people came hoping to buy something to eat, however small; there were several warehouses nearby where products were stored before being sent to the front to feed German soldiers. In the weeks before the riot, Lise worked in secret with her colleagues producing leaflets about the intended action and organizing illegal broadcasts to be heard by other sympathetic groups. She said afterwards that the night before, she and Artur didn’t sleep. They made love until dawn. ‘We sensed that we weren’t going to see each other for a long time, maybe never again,’ she told an interviewer in 2011, aged ninety-five.
The disruption when it came involved hundreds of women, and although the Germans up until then had been trying not to shoot women, Lise herself was targeted and would have been hit had a comrade not spotted the danger and shot the German soldier first in the legs. The crowd then dispersed and, in the sniping that ensued, Lise escaped, only to be arrested eleven days later and condemned to death by a Vichy court – the only woman to receive this sentence. However, the fact that she was heavily pregnant with her second child, Michel, saved her from the guillotine. She gave birth in prison, but then had her baby taken away from her, and in April 1943 she was handed over to the Gestapo. Her parents, the elderly and frail Ricols, took care of their grandchildren, Fran?oise and Michel, throughout the war as Lise was later sent to Ravensbrück concentration camp and Artur to Mauthausen.
Since the German state was determined to ensure that its citizens would be the last in Europe to go hungry, it encouraged them to buy, or often simply take, everything in France that would keep. But when young German girls sent to Paris reported on how exciting it was to be there, the cause of their euphoria was mostly not the food. Ruth A. from Heidelberg wrote, ‘Yes, we had it good in Paris – soirées, dances, invitations, wonderful parties. We were simply lucky!’ The best part of Parisian life for the Grey Mice was the myriad opportunities for meeting eligible German officers, and Ruth A. met her own husband – a ‘charming Viennese’ medic – at a special meeting house in Paris run by the Wehrmacht. The couple were married on 10 July 1942, but not in Paris as they had hoped. The city was much too volatile, and in fact on that day a German officer was shot in front of the Madeleine church. But they were able to get travel permits for their families to travel to Lorraine, where her brother was stationed and where the marriage took place. However, Ruth’s story illustrates another problem: the auxiliaries quickly acquired a reputation as ‘Officers’ Mattresses’. In 1942, in order to encourage suitable young single women to sign up to work in Paris, the Germans started to publish propaganda texts which stressed the homely morality of German women compared with the urbane flirtatiousness of the French.
When French women board a train they are ‘painted and powdered. Suddenly we were overcome with such a feeling of unwashed stickiness,’ wrote Ina Seidel, a communications worker, adding self-righteously: ‘night-time entertainment seems to be the primary industry in the capital of France’. Seidel explained that the Parisian streets were empty at 6 a.m. but ‘we are eager to be at our post to relieve our comrades on the night shift and we enter the exchange with a fresh, happy greeting!’ What she did not say was that the night-time entertainment was in great demand from her male German colleagues.
Ursula Rüdt von Collenberg spoke without any conscious irony in a post-war interview about life in the French capital for a twenty-one-year-old German girl in 1942 ‘as the most wonderful and unforgettable time of my youth’. But then she did not have to wear uniform for her job in the French archives, working for the German historian Wolfgang Windelband and living in a huge room, with her own bath and telephone, at the H?tel d’Orsay. ‘I never lived so well anywhere,’ she recalled. ‘We went to the opera or the theatre, we saw Jean-Louis Barrault and Sacha Guitry and the Grand Guignol; we visited exhibitions in the Orangerie and the Musée de l’Homme.’