Occasionally she took them to a barber for a haircut or for walks around Paris, disguising them as best she could in old French clothes and forbidding them to speak. Once she brought her friend Sylvia Beach, the bookshop owner, to amuse them; on another occasion she had to reprimand a young American lieutenant who was behaving badly, reducing his Parisian host to tears. Drue reminded him that these not very well-off Parisians, paid a paltry sum by various resistance groups as it was difficult to get money to them from abroad, were risking their lives every minute of the day and night for him, and she threatened to turn him out into the street to fend for himself if he didn’t show more concern and gratitude. Why did the women do it? According to Jeannie Rousseau, those who resisted were ‘almost powerless’ because they were responding to ‘an inner obligation to participate in the struggle’.
Denise Dufournier, a colleague of Elisabeth Barbier and Jeannie Rousseau, had, like them, been involved in resistance activities almost from the outset. ‘You either did something or you were a collaborator’ is how Denise’s daughter explains her mother’s viewpoint today. ‘She had a very strong moral compass.’ Born in 1915 into a family of artists, doctors and intellectuals, Denise was educated at the Lycée Molière, a leading Paris girls’ school of the day where many of her friends were Jewish. This made her keenly aware of the increasing injustices, once the German Occupation began. But her parents died when she was just thirteen and her brother sixteen, forcing self-sufficiency on her from an early age. By the time war broke out, she had qualified as a lawyer and, with her brother working in Lisbon as a diplomat, was an unusually independent young woman who was also a published novelist. With few male barristers still working in Paris, she was in great demand. In addition to her day job, she was running enormous personal risks to help Allied airmen forced to bale out over France and keen to get out of the country. But on 18 June 1943 she and Elisabeth Barbier and Elisabeth’s mother were all betrayed by their new courier, a man who called himself Jean Masson but was actually a Belgian conman and traitor, Jacques Desoubrie. Denise later recognized him as her betrayer at her first interrogation when he entered the room and sneered at her.
Dufournier, like de Jongh, was questioned first at Fresnes for six months, but she did not break. Fresnes was now a place of terror, where by this time ‘the Germans are shooting hostages or people who have been convicted … every day’. Jean Guéhenno, citing a source, ‘V’, wrote in his diary:
the order goes from cell to cell through the gutters, the toilet pipes, the water pipes: ‘six o’clock for cell thirty-two’ and at the appointed time the whole prison begins to sing the Marseillaise or the song of departure. The prisoners have broken all the windows so the victims can hear their farewell song as they cross the prison yard. The Germans have forbidden all singing. They are going to make examples, torture and execute. Uselessly. The prison continues to sing.
Denise was familiar with Fresnes, as many of the young clients she had been helping to defend had been sent there. She knew she could survive it, and she did. After six months, Denise and Elisabeth Barbier were transported to Ravensbrück, where a new form of torture began.
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Vera Leigh had by 1943 become a true Parisienne, having lived all her adult life in Paris, working in fashion. But, by virtue of having been born in Leeds in 1903, she was also a British citizen, so she decided she should now get herself back to England where she could be more actively involved in the struggle against the Nazis. Leigh never knew her birth parents because she had been adopted while still an infant by an American businessman and racehorse trainer called Eugene Leigh and his English wife, who took her to live in France. Thanks to the Leighs, Vera grew up around the Maisons-Laffitte stables, where Eugene kept horses. As a child she had wanted to be a jockey, but instead she worked in fashion, first as a vendeuse with the milliner Caroline Reboux.