Bluebell, the Irish dancer Margaret Kelly, now married to the Jewish pianist Marcel Leibovici, was finding life extremely tough. There was never enough food. In 1940 the Germans had taken her, with one child and pregnant with her second, to the internment camp at Besan?on. Eventually Count Gerald O’Kelly, the wealthy and influential Special Counsellor at the Irish Legation, extricated her by supplying documents declaring her a Catholic Irish woman, papers that were to prove invaluable in the next few months. Marcel Leibovici, meanwhile, decided to leave Paris for Marseilles, hoping to make life easier for his wife, but she was unwilling to work at the Folies Bergère given the attitude they had taken to her Jewish husband and, in any case, she disliked the way the largely German audience there regarded a visit to the nightclub as the high spot of Paris life. Instead, she put on a small cabaret of her own in the Chantilly, a small theatre in the Rue Fontaine, with just ten dancers on a tiny stage, including two British girls married to French men. But although her clientele here was not German, she attracted black-marketeers who liked to conduct deals over drinks, often hoping to mingle with the girls too. The German authorities clearly had an eye on Bluebell and on one occasion she was invited for an interview with a Colonel Feldman, who wanted her to tour her show in Berlin. She refused, a brave choice, telling him that as she had a British passport and had relatives who were fighting against the Germans, ‘I cannot for a moment contemplate entertaining your troops.’
But soon after she heard that Marcel had been arrested, having been denounced as a Jew, and was being held in the Gurs detention camp, by now being used as a transit camp for many Jews before deportation to Germany. She was terrified that the trail would soon lead to her as Marcel’s wife, and at six o’clock one morning was woken by two French policemen accompanied by a German in Gestapo uniform who searched her apartment. As they could not find anything incriminating, they did not take her for questioning. Then, news that was both thrilling and worrying; she heard that Marcel had managed to escape and make his way to Paris, thanks to help from a musician friend with resistance contacts who provided clothes and a false identity card for him. For the next two and a half years, Bluebell, effectively a single mother with a demanding job, kept her Jewish husband hidden in various attics and flats, without a piano because of the noise it would make and with only minimal amounts of food because she did not have a separate ration card for him. As he could not go out, he needed reading material and manuscript paper, and his washing had to be done secretly. Hiding a Jew was a crime sometimes punishable by death, and Bluebell daily risked her life on behalf of her husband.
But in the summer of 1943 she was again arrested, this time six months pregnant, and taken to 84 Avenue Foch. Unsurprisingly, the German officer asked where her husband was. In her own account of the interview she said that when she realized she was about to be asked, in English, if her husband would like to see his children again, she responded, via the interpreter, by asking her interrogator if he would like to see his. She was fortunate to get away with such insolent responses and the subject of her pregnancy was avoided. Had she been questioned, she had an answer prepared: that a German should not examine a girl’s morals in wartime too closely. Her own explanation for being set free was her ability to tell convincing lies. ‘I’ve never been shifty-eyed. I always looked them full in the face.’* On 22 October Bluebell gave birth to her third child, a daughter called Florence, but Marcel was not able to see his new baby.
When Bluebell was desperate for food she would visit Frédéric Apcar in Vaucresson, about an hour south of Paris, who kept her well supplied. Frédéric was now the dancing partner of Sadie Rigal, renamed Florence, the young South African who had met Bluebell when both were interned at Besan?on. Sadie had been released from the camp early in 1941 and allowed to return to Paris, but was required to sign in daily at her local police station. A resistance friend had picked her up from the train station, rented her a hotel room and bought her dinner. She was later to hide a revolver for him in return. Sadie began work again at the Bal Tabarin music hall, at first sleeping in the dressing room, since she did not have a pass that allowed her to be out at night. Later, when she had acquired a pass, she used it to assist others. It was at the Tabarin that she met Apcar, with whom she developed first a dance act, ‘Florence et Frédéric’, and then a relationship. The pair quickly became one of the top dance teams in France, and although the love affair did not last, they became part of an informal resistance network helping Jewish artists and musicians, including Marcel Leibovici. The Hungarian-born Gisy Varga, famous for dancing naked at the Tabarin, sheltered Gilbert Doukan, a Jewish doctor in the resistance with whom she was having a tempestuous love affair. These were passionate times, as one never knew who would be alive tomorrow. Sadie not only hid and transported weapons for the resistance, she also sometimes hid Jews, most of whose names she never knew, in her frequently changing apartments, and sometimes she accompanied nervous, fleeing Jews without papers when they walked from one hiding place to another.
Once back in Paris, Leibovici was occasionally walked by Sadie, trying to look relaxed, through streets where armed soldiers might suddenly appear – one of the most dangerous but necessary jobs to give air to those in hiding. On one occasion while Sadie was housing two Jewish sisters, escapees from a camp, a policeman followed her from her daily sign-in. As they stood side by side, looking out over the Seine, he warned her that her landlady had informed on her and that the apartment would be searched. Sadie walked the girls to a convent, witnessing on the way there a Nazi raid on an orphanage, in which Jewish children were savagely tossed from upper-storey windows on to the street. The two Jewish sisters eventually reached the south of France, made their way from there to New York and never forgot the woman to whom they owed their lives. The same anonymous policeman warned Sadie a second time, when she was hiding a gun in her apartment.