Odette Fabius was revolted by what she saw happening in Paris, not just M. Rochas crossing the street to avoid his former Jewish clients but shop windows along the Champs-Elysées displaying grotesque, giant-nosed caricatures of Léon Blum and Georges Mandel. She was torn between looking after her elderly widowed father, who refused to move from his Parisian apartment, and looking after the property in Biarritz which had been in the family for generations. In addition there was her daughter Marie-Claude’s schooling and safety to consider. In spite of the movement prohibitions against Jews, Odette repeatedly crossed the country from 1940 until the spring of 1942, buying a fake Ausweis whenever she could at a cost of 500 francs each. On one occasion she negotiated an extra four for her Sections Sanitaires Automobiles Féminines (SSA) friends Daisy de Broglie, Marie-Louise de Tocqueville, Claude de Peyerimhoff and Colette Schwob de Lure, a policy which landed her in prison for a week in 1941 when she was denounced. She was released, as she learned later, ‘because Sylvia de Talleyrand heard I was arrested and went to the Ritz Hotel to see her friend, the German tennis champion Gottfried von Cramm, who in turn told Otto Abetz … and I was freed.’ It was only thanks to the intervention of courageous friends with good networks that Fabius was released. But she never knew the name of the person who had denounced her.
Nonetheless, Odette’s experiences meant that she discovered an exaggerated form of patriotism which had little to do with the fact that she was Jewish. ‘I just felt extremely French with a strong line behind me … I had been brought up to be proud of my descent from the Furtado family who came to France in 1680.’ She never wore a yellow star because she refused to accept that she was different. She was French and that was her prime motivation in taking on an increasingly dangerous amount of resistance work. After her first spell in prison she went back to the south of France and tried, vainly, to persuade her father to join the family in Cannes. On one of her train journeys she met up with a childhood friend involved in the Alliance resistance network. At first all he asked her to do was deliver a letter. ‘I was both seduced by wanting to do it and anxious.’ Odette’s brother had by now left for London, where he joined de Gaulle’s Free French. But that was not an option for her, thanks to her duties as mother and daughter, but she urgently wanted to do something. Although she and Robert were barely living together, he was the father of her child so she had to ask his advice. He was not keen: ‘There are fifty million other French people who can do it, why you?’
‘Why not me?’ she replied.
Robert’s view, according to Odette, was that because they were Jewish they had to stay in a corner quietly if they wanted to survive. ‘If we didn’t have the right to travel then we needed to find another way of surviving.’ So she embarked on her resistance career regardless of what Robert thought and soon undertook her first mission in Paris, collecting an urgent letter and delivering it to the south (there was no post between the free and the occupied zones), and combining her visits to Paris with seeing her father. Thus began what she later called the richest period of her life. She worried about her ten-year-old daughter, all too aware that she was not seeing enough of her, so she placed her as a pupil in a Catholic boarding school just outside Vichy, rationalizing that this was the safest place as no one would bomb the provisional capital. Some 60 per cent of the pupils were Jewish, but religion was never mentioned.
Working for Alliance, she was given the codename Biche and reported to Marie-Madeleine Fourcade, known as Hedgehog, a woman no less strong than her and the only woman to head a major network. Odette was engaged in transporting letters, plans and even people across the line. Once she shared a compartment on the train with a German officer who was drinking champagne and toasted the Third Reich. Occasionally Marie-Claude travelled with her, and she risked more than once putting documents and false papers in her daughter’s case.