Initially she did not intend her diary to be published, but wrote it rather as a message for Jean, who eventually decided to leave, via the Pyrenees, for England to join the Free French Forces of de Gaulle. Her brother and sister also managed to cross into unoccupied France but she took the firm and conscious decision to stay, initially to support her parents but later as a moral decision on its own, not to abandon the Jewish children she was helping under the auspices of the various Jewish relief agencies. Her choice was to do the right thing, which she did not yet realize would mean certain death because many of the homes were run by the controversial Union Générale des Israélites de France, the organization intended to help Jews but which in the end facilitated their capture and death.
The leaden atmosphere in Paris during the early summer of 1942 provided ample warning of what the full force of the Gestapo could do when it felt threatened. Marie-Elisa Nordmann was a brilliant young chemist who came top of her year when she graduated from the Institut de Chimie de Paris in 1931 and then spent a year in Germany to improve her language skills. She had wanted to be a doctor, a career her protective Jewish mother had not deemed suitable for a young lady, so when fellow chemist Paul Rumpf proposed, she was tempted into marriage at the age of twenty-two, hoping this would give her the independent adult lifestyle she craved but which was hard for a single woman from her milieu to enjoy. But the marriage was unhappy almost from the start and, soon after the birth of their son Francis, the couple divorced. By 1939 Marie-Elisa was living in an apartment with her widowed mother Hélène and her baby, moving in anti-fascist circles, already convinced she had to persuade more of her countrymen about the need to fight the Occupation. She undertook to distribute flyers urging resistance, but she soon realized that something more active was required. So, in spite of the enormous danger and risk to her young son, she agreed to supply mercury from her laboratory for explosives. She was arrested in a round-up of seventy people, many of them women, on 16 May 1942 and taken to a variety of prisons including La Santé, then Romainville and finally, in January 1943, to Auschwitz. She was part of the notorious ‘Convoi des 31,000’, a series of cattle trucks that took 230 women from a variety of backgrounds and ages whose strength was to be their support for each other. Only forty-nine of them would survive. Insisting that she was a political prisoner, Marie-Elisa managed to hide the fact that she was Jewish, not always possible for men who were caught and it was discovered they had been circumcised. She had learned in August from a secret message hidden inside a packet of cigarettes, just a few weeks after her own arrest, that her mother, devotedly looking after her grandchild Francis, had been taken to Drancy as a civilian hostage and then sent to Auschwitz and gassed, once it was discovered she was Jewish. Francis survived the war, looked after by his uncle and aunt Philippe and Paule Nordmann, as did Marie-Elisa.
In June 1942 all Jews over the age of six in occupied France were ordered to wear a yellow star with the word Juif in black inside the star on their outer garments at all times. The procedure for collecting these three cloth badges – which used up one month’s worth of textile rations – involved queuing at local police stations and, after signing for receipt of the stars, giving various other pieces of information including an identity card number and home address. Wearing the star enabled all the other punitive laws against Jews to be more stringently enforced, such as not being allowed to go to the theatre, cinema or certain shops until late in the day by which time all the produce had been sold, or to use public phone booths and public parks. In addition, Jews were now restricted to the last carriage of the Métro, but this order was issued by the Préfet of the Paris region with the rider that ‘no announcement was to be posted and no information given to the public’. Hélène knew nothing about the rule when she ran for her train on Friday 10 July and was shouted at: ‘You there! In the other carriage …’ By the time she had moved, ‘tears were pouring from my eyes, tears of rage and of protest against this brutality’.