Sadie Rigai, now the French dancer Florence, posing in front of Berlin’s Brandenburg Gate while on a controversial performance tour of Germany in 1943. On the far left is her dancing partner and fellow resister Frédèric. Edith Piaf is 3rd from the right
When ‘Florence et Frédéric’ were invited along with the singers Charles Trenet, Edith Piaf and Maurice Chevalier to tour four French prisoner-of-war camps in Germany, Sadie was advised to accept or else she would draw attention to herself by her refusal. She did not believe the German promise that 500 prisoners would be released if they went, but nonetheless managed to use her trip to help in a small way by filling her suitcase on her return with illegal letters from prisoners to their relatives in France. Before they reached Paris, the French artists stopped in Berlin, where they were caught in an Allied bombing raid. In the bomb shelter, the musicians played jazz, causing a debate among the Germans in the shelter. Piaf, Trenet and Chevalier were among many artists who felt compelled to perform to German audiences, trips for which after the war they were viewed as collaborators.
However, as Sadie’s decision clearly shows, nothing was straightforward: Trenet, whose song ‘Douce France’ was performed in front of French prisoners in Berlin in 1943, felt especially vulnerable as a homosexual, while Chevalier, dangerously, was married to a Romanian Jewish actress, Nita Raya, and lived with her in a comfortable villa near Cannes. In 1942 she had brought her parents there to protect them. They survived, but the marriage did not. Nonetheless Chevalier would be forever tarnished by photographs showing him performing in Berlin, though those same photos failed to show that he performed only for French prisoners of war.
Edith Piaf, born Edith Giovanna Gassion, according to legend on the pavement in the Belleville area of Paris, was the child of an impoverished acrobat father and a mother who was a singer. Abandoned by her mother at birth, Edith was for a time looked after by prostitutes in a brothel run by her grandmother. Performing and pleasing men was all she knew. She became a mother herself at seventeen, but when her daughter, Marcelle, died aged two from meningitis, she was apparently so short of money that she had to sleep with a man in order to pay for the funeral. Edith had been ‘discovered’ in 1935 by nightclub owner Louis Leplée, who dressed her and drilled her, and encouraged her to use the stage name Piaf – the word was Parisian street slang for sparrow – because of her tiny, waif-like appearance which was in stark contrast to the powerful and dramatic projection of her voice.
During the Occupation, Piaf’s career in nightclubs and cabarets frequented by Germans flourished. She undertook to register with the German propaganda department, had her lyrics checked (as did all performers) and deliberately maintained good relations with the Nazis, who enjoyed her performances. But she used her popularity to help friends of hers in difficulty and took a number of risks which might have landed her in trouble. One of her most successful hits was a song called ‘L’Accordéoniste’, originally performed by the Jewish musician Michel Emer, whose escape to unoccupied France she helped pay for, just as she had helped the Jewish pianist Norbert Glanzberg, briefly her lover, who had worked as a jazz musician with Django Reinhardt in 1930s Paris and who was taken in by Lily Pastré to live in her chateau at Montredon for months. Both Glanzberg and Emer survived in hiding until the Liberation. By 1942 Piaf was earning enough to live in a luxurious set of rooms, with heating, in the 16th arrondissement above L’Etoile de Kléber, a well-known nightclub and brothel close to 84 Avenue Foch, the building used by the SiPo-SD to interrogate and torture. The apartment belonged to Madame Billy, also known as Aline Soccodato, a brothel-owner who hid a number of Jews and resistance fighters and whose secretary, a resistance worker called Andrée Bigard, moved in with Piaf under the pretext that she was employed to help the singer.