Jacqueline Marié exaggerated her youth by wearing white ankle socks and carrying her tracts in a school bag. Similarly, Geneviève de Gaulle considered ‘it was an advantage that I looked only about sixteen. Once a German official offered to carry a suitcase for me, not knowing that it contained arms. Another time I took hold of the boy I was with and pretended to kiss him, just to look innocent,’ she recalled.
But on 20 July 1943 her luck ran out. The then twenty-three-year-old niece of the exiled French leader was picked up by the Gestapo at a bookshop on the Rue Bonaparte where she regularly delivered false identity papers. Like the others, she was transported first to Fresnes, then to Ravensbrück, one of eighty arrested over the next few days, fifty of whom, like her, were young people working for La Défense de la France. Jacqueline Marié still remembers the terror she felt that July when scores of members of various resistance groups were arrested, including some she knew. But she continued with her work, trying to be more careful. There was no alternative.
As the Gestapo discovered more names and addresses they tightened their grip everywhere, and fear spread throughout the country. Families who had moved to Marseilles from Paris thinking themselves safe suddenly found themselves endangered but unable to move. Children especially, constantly on the move and changing schools, experienced the fear of their parents without being able to express their emotions, possibly for years. ‘It was something so heavy, even if you didn’t know what was going on precisely it was so terrible and you had no power over it. It was breaking you,’ explained Paris-born Claude Kiejman, whose family moved south in 1940.
Odette Fabius was now involved in a passionate love affair with the Corsican socialist Pierre Ferri-Pisani and, working closely with his resistance network, was inspired to undertake increasingly dangerous activities. Secret action was something of a drug, she confessed, and she delighted in the opportunity to meet people whom she would never have discovered without war if confined to her own society. Writing about Pierre after the war, Odette admitted that the extreme danger and the uncertainty about what would happen the next day heightened their passion. She ran the love affair alongside the resistance work, one feeding off the other, and although she maintained later that it was a ‘wartime love affair’, she also recognized that at the time ‘we took it to the limit, intensely aware that we had to live in the present and were threatened by the future as one or other of us was likely to die before victory. We dreamed and planned our post-war lives … we loved each other so deeply … we said to each other that at least this absurd war had the merit of helping us find each other.’
Other than their shared patriotism and ‘strong souls’, they could not have been more different. The war enabled them to put their differences aside. Try as they might to be discreet, all Pierre’s associates were aware of the affair. Odette was engaged in various missions in early 1943, but, having just been to Vichy to collect her daughter for the holidays, was hoping that Easter that year would be spent quietly with Marie-Claude at their rented house at Le Lavandou. However, on 23 April she learned that Pierre and some of his team had been picked up. She went immediately to warn the network of eight ‘mailboxes’ – the courageous people whose houses couriers used for passing on messages collected throughout France to be sent on to London – that they were being watched. Telling twelve-year-old Marie-Claude to wait for her in a cinema while she did this, she set off, promising to return as soon as she could. But at the eighth stop, a coal merchant, the Gestapo were waiting for her. She tried to bluff her way out, saying she could come back another day, the coal was not urgent as it was hardly winter. But it was useless; she was seized and taken to the local prison. Long after the film was over, Marie-Claude eventually gave up waiting for her mother and decided to make her way to family friends where her father, in due course, came to look after her.