A Train in Winter (8 page)

Women who had never before engaged in any activity outside their own homes were soon turning out angry articles about food shortages and the German expropriations. They wrote them in short, clear, declamatory sentences. While Vichy preached devotion, modesty and abnegation, Danielle called for activism and rebellion. The Germans became
les boches
and
les brutes nazies
. There were references to Joan of Arc, La Pasionaria and the women who stormed the Bastille in 1789. The first street demonstrations, organised by Danielle’s local committees—women occupying food shops where the best produce was reserved for the Germans—passed off peacefully; but the women were getting angrier and more militant.

A student protest in Paris in the 1930s. Danielle Casanova is fourth from the left

From the first, the JFdeF had been naturally drawn to the world of clandestine printing. As secretaries and office workers, many of its members already knew all about stencils and roneo machines. The offices where some of them were employed proved the perfect place from which to steal dwindling stocks of paper and ink. Some of Danielle’s colleagues were journalists and were happy to turn their hands to exhortatory flyers and posters. Under the library of the Sorbonne, the warren of cellars and corridors acted as storerooms for the university. Here, among the boxes and books, young university teachers printed news-sheets, laying the wet pages on the shelves to dry, later to be carried away by students in shopping baskets and knapsacks. Concierges in office buildings and apartment blocks, for whom the come and go of postmen was a daily occurrence, became letter drops. Queues turned out to be the perfect places for passing on orders and messages. Prams were ideal for hiding papers; and, later, weapons.

Danielle, meanwhile, had made efforts to lose some weight and to dress more fashionably, telling friends laughingly that the Germans were far less prone to stop women who looked pretty and well turned out. Her husband Laurent was a prisoner of war in Germany, and to cover her tracks she had taken to moving constantly round the city, seldom sleeping in the same place twice. Maï Politzer and Marie-Claude Vaillant-Couturier were naturally elegant and when the three met in the fashionable cafes of the Boulevard Saint-Germain to discuss strategy and pass on information, they looked like any group of high-spirited women friends, enjoying each other’s company. Over tea in the Galeries Lafayette, Danielle recruited young women to run the JFdeF in other parts of the capital. By now she was working closely with both Betty, liaising through her with the PCF, and Cécile, who was turning out to be an extremely efficient courier. By the end of 1940, twenty-five of the thirty women on the national committee of the JFdeF were active members of the Resistance.

Not surprisingly, the
ceinture rouge
, the red belt of communist communes which surrounded Paris, home to many of the industrial workers, proved an excellent recruiting ground for new members. It was in Ivry, in the suburbs to the north of Paris, that Danielle found Madeleine Doiret, known to her friends as Mado, the daughter of a former groom who now ran a small lime and cement factory. Mado, who was the eldest of five children, interrupted her studies for the baccalaureate to learn shorthand and typing. With the declaration of war, however, so many male teachers had been mobilised that she became a temporary teacher in Yonne. Mado, like Cécile and Betty, had been drawn into politics by the Spanish Civil War. Having fled Paris in May 1940 during the great exodus to the south, she returned to Ivry and offered her services to the Jeunesse Communiste.

Delighted with her secretarial skills, they asked her to type texts on to stencils, which were then printed by her father at night in the hidden cellar of their house on an electric mimeograph. Both she and her father were immensely proud of their machine, which was one of the first of its kind in Paris. In the evenings, with the help of her brother Roger, who carried the packets in a rucksack, Mado dropped off the tracts at various distribution points in Ivry, ready to be picked up by other young resisters.

Early in 1941, Danielle asked Mado to go underground and work for her full time. So she moved out of her parents’ house in Ivry and into a small flat in the 15th, where she lived under a false name, and composed articles calling on workers to engage in acts of resistance against Vichy and the occupiers, cast in the form of posthumous letters written by men executed by the Gestapo. Mado was just 20. Her work with the Resistance meant breaking off all contact with her family and her friends. At night, alone, having spoken to no one she knew all day, she sometimes lay on her bed and cried from loneliness.

Mado was not, of course, alone in believing that opposing Vichy and the Germans was worth making sacrifices for, even though at this stage of the war it was sometimes hard to see precisely what was being achieved. Nor was she alone in making these sacrifices. As the winter of 1940 wore on, several of the women working full time for the Resistance decided to send their children to live with grandparents or foster families, to keep them safe, and to feel freer themselves. Maï and Georges Politzer, constantly fretting about the dangers of their clandestine life, had already sent their son Michel to live with his grandparents away from Paris.

Not far from Mado in Ivry lived a good friend of hers, Georgette Rostaing, who had worked for the transport police before the war, and who now began to help her 18-year-old brother Pierre recruit members for the Jeunesse Communiste and the JFdeF. Georgette, too, had been drawn into the web by the civil war in Spain and she too knew Danielle and Marie-Claude, and helped out at the JFdeF. She was a single mother, not an easy position for a young woman in Pétain’s France.

One day Pierre, who was on the wanted list of young communists, fell into the hands of the police. Georgette did not hesitate. She left her little girl, Pierrette, who had just turned nine, with her mother and took over her brother’s job as liaison officer and distributor of clandestine material; and, later, of explosives and detonators. She was a sunny, good-hearted young woman, like Danielle rather overweight, with a mass of dark hair and a fringe, and she could be seen tottering around Ivry on very high heels.

Georgette Rostaing, who loved to sing

Pierrette, Georgette’s daughter

Even as a small child, Pierrette was taken to meetings of the JFdeF, to listen to Danielle and her friends make plans about acts of Resistance against the Germans and she was never sent out of the room when members of the Resistance came to the house. One of them taught her to tell the time. As Georgette would say, ‘we are in this all together, as a family’. Instinctively, Pierrette knew that what she saw and heard were not things that should be repeated. From his prison camp, her uncle Pierre sent her letters covered with little drawings of birds; when he came home, he told her, he planned to become an artist in glass. Georgette loved to sing. One day she took Pierrette to hear Edith Piaf, whose songs she knew by heart and sang at the top of her cheerful voice. Living in a world of secrets and high spirits was exhilarating for the little girl.

Another household which decided to put a small child into care in order to work for the Resistance was that of the Serre sisters. Lucienne, known as Lulu, was the eldest, born in 1917; then came Jeanne—known as Carmen—in 1919, followed by Louis and Christiane. Their mother, a formidable Algerian woman who had left their Catalan father and moved from the Marseilles docks to Paris, taking all four children with her, kept the family by working as a cleaner in a concert hall. She was illiterate, having left school at the age of seven to work in the fields, but she spoke five languages fluently and she was a charming and devoted mother. She too loved music and singing, and in the evenings the little flat in rue de la Huchette rang with arias from Rossini and with flamenco dances. Madame Serre made couscous and
îles flottantes
, spun of egg whites and sugar, for them all.

Lulu found a job as a secretary; Carmen and Louis worked in a metal factory. Christiane, the youngest at 11, was still at school, and their mother was adamant that she do well at her studies, rewarding her efforts with presents of books of history and politics, which she could not read for herself but longed to understand. After school, the little girl would be told to read the books aloud to her mother, who would then explain their meaning to her.

On reaching Paris, Madame Serre had taken in as lodgers former fighters in the International Brigades in Spain and it was thought perfectly right and natural for Lulu and Carmen to join the JFdeF and Louis the Jeunesse Communiste. Indeed, to do anything else would have been unthinkable. As Mme Serre saw it, resistance was ‘notre affaire’, our business, and it didn’t much matter who you joined as long as you did something.

Danielle Casanova

Lulu, who was married to a young communist, Georges Thévenin, who was now a prisoner of war, had a new baby called Paul, but since food and milk were so scarce and the baby was not thriving, she sent him to live with a foster family in the countryside. It gave her more time, in the evenings, to work for Danielle. Carmen had become a liaison officer with Viva Nenni’s printing firm, and when the police seemed to be closing in, she could be seen hastening through the streets of Paris with a printing press, ink and paper loaded on to a wheelbarrow, searching for a better hiding place. When Mme Serre was arrested, the police having discovered boxes of clandestine papers in the flat, and sent by the Gestapo to the prison of the Cherche-Midi, Lulu and Carmen simply added her work for the Resistance to their own.

The Gestapo eventually decided that there was too little evidence against Mme Serre and let her go. After her release, she decided to take the two younger children down to Marseilles, paying a
passeur
, a guide, a kilo of dried bananas and 30 francs to take them across the demarcation line. In Marseilles, by now almost totally blind with glaucoma, she took a job with a grocer and used his horse and cart to distribute clandestine copies of
L’Humanité
to the dockers. For the Serres, resistance was more a state of mind than an activity. Surrounded by political convictions and a sense of duty, the four children, like Pierrette Rostaing, admired and loved their indomitable mother.