Jacqueline was a young widow, her husband having died suddenly in 1941 while he was held prisoner in Germany. Tall and willowy, she had an inner strength partly derived from watching her widowed mother courageously bring up a family of seven. Resentment over her husband’s premature death, and anger when she saw a child forced to year a yellow star in Paris, had helped overcome her fear of the enemy. ‘Should one resign oneself to bow one’s head in submission? I knew that I would rather die. The shock gave me a resolve that nothing would destroy, for the enemy is powerless over him who has no fear of death.’ She started work encoding messages to be despatched to London, ensuring that secret agents sent from England had lodgings, some form of professional cover, false papers and ration cards, as well as finding ‘mailboxes’ where illegal messages from all over France could be transferred. One fellow agent was a friend called Josette, ‘a public relations director for a celebrated couturier, highly esteemed by German officers’ wives. Thanks to the comings and goings of many women on the fashion house’s premises, our couriers passed unnoticed. No one could conceive of resistance activity going on in the heart of this grande maison frequented by the upper crust of the army of occupation.’
After her arrest Jacqueline was imprisoned first at 11 Rue des Saussaies, the Gestapo headquarters where prisoners were chained, interrogated and tortured, then at Fresnes and eventually Ravensbrück. Not surprisingly Claire, who guessed but could not know what torment Jacqueline was suffering, concluded that now she too must commit fully. ‘This work had become my chief interest in life.’ She resigned her job, moved apartments and went underground, living clandestinely as Christiane Clouet. She could no longer see her parents as to do so would endanger them all.
‘For me the strongest memory of that time is not fear, but solidarity, which was stronger than fear,’ recalled Vivou.
When we heard that one of our friends had been arrested we felt we must do something. We didn’t feel the drama in the same way that of course our parents did. The most dangerous thing I did was when my friend (and fellow musician) Antoine Geoffroy-Dechaume was arrested and imprisoned at Compiègne camp just outside the city. I wanted him to know we were aware of what had happened and were doing all we could for him. So I went with Antoine’s sister, Marie-France, intending to walk around the camp playing a tune on my violin that he would recognize and know it was me. Unfortunately the SS officer outside the camp, a very Aryan type, warned me: ‘I do not advise you to do that.’ So we went home, but not defeated.
At the same time André Chevrillon, Vivou’s uncle and Claire’s father, an esteemed member of the French Academy, wrote to René de Chambrun, who he had heard was hoping for a seat in the Academy, and pleaded ‘in the name of French music’ for Antoine’s release – but to no avail. Antoine was deported to Buchenwald on 20 January 1944.
Antoine and Marie-France Geoffroy-Dechaume were part of a family emblematic of the deep-rooted French patriotism that was stirring now, a countervailing force to those dealing on the black market, buying expensive clothes and contributing to the image of normality in Paris. Nominally Catholic, they were both outward leaning, towards England, and fiercely defensive of a certain idea of what France stood for. Their ancestor Adolphe-Victor Geoffroy-Dechaume, born in Paris in 1816, was a sculptor who believed that the Middle Ages were France’s golden age, and whose best-known statues adorn the pier of Notre Dame Cathedral. He was buried at Valmondois, an ancient French village just north of Paris on the River Oise, where the family subsequently made their home. Charles, his grandson, a painter, lived in England before the First World War, and became close friends with Winston and Clementine Churchill and their circle. But, having lost a leg in action during that war, Charles decided after his marriage to return to the comfortable old house at Valmondois. Here he could bring up his ten children in an unusual musical, artistic and creative community. The family sometimes performed Bach chorales or sang small-scale operas.