Odette spent two months in the local Saint-Pierre prison, insisting she was a political not a Jewish prisoner – a denial which earned her, as an Aryan, the right to a one-hour walk every day. She longed to tell the other Jewish prisoners that, like them, she was Jewish but could not afford to do so ‘because I was engaged in an action which went beyond my personality.’ While there, by loudly singing ‘La Marseillaise’ she discovered that Pierre was in the same prison. Then to her great delight they were transferred to Paris together, enduring a three-day train journey in the same compartment. ‘In this sad situation here was a moment of unforgettable joy, even happiness, although the word may shock,’ wrote Odette.
But at Fresnes she was put into solitary confinement until in October she was deported to Ravensbrück via Compiègne. She did not know that in November her husband Robert was also arrested but he, by insisting that his wife was a Catholic, managed to avoid immediate deportation to Drancy. Instead, because the Germans knew of his expertise as an antique dealer, he was put to work in a camp inside Paris itself, based in the former department store Lévitan, where his job was to sort furniture and works of art stolen by the Nazis. According to his daughter, when he saw his own family’s silver pass through he did what he could to bend the cutlery to render it useless for the Germans to whom it was being sent.
Lévitan, at 85–87 Rue du Faubourg Saint-Martin, had been a well-known Jewish-owned furniture store in Paris but was requisitioned by the Germans in July 1943 and used for sorting, repairing and packing stolen items. There was another warehouse at the Austerlitz train station, one at the H?tel Cahen d’Anvers in the Rue de Bassano, one at the wharf in Bercy and another at the Quai de la Gare. Of these, the Lévitan furniture store in the heart of the city was the best-known, and detainees who worked there were usually those who had (not always permanently) managed to avoid deportation to Drancy and Auschwitz by virtue of insisting on some sort of special privilege, such as being the spouse of an Aryan, wife of a prisoner of war or a ‘half-Jew’. Only remarkable objects were sent to Germany. Furniture and small objects were mostly made available for Nazi officials to choose for their homes, while high-quality artworks went, if not to the Jeu de Paume, where more than 20,000 works of art stolen from Jews were recorded and stored, to the Palais de Tokyo and the Louvre.
It is, of course, impossible to estimate how many Parisiennes must have walked past or been aware of what was happening at Lévitan yet continued with their daily life as best they could. However, alongside the terror, so great that some people never dared venture out of their homes, Paris was also, as one German visitor to the city noticed, full of ‘elegant ones’ who still held sway over the street scene, causing not only men ‘but women who want to know what the fashionable ones wear, to glance in their direction … Their resourcefulness in remaining fashionable brought colour to an otherwise grey everyday life.’