Vivou Chevrillon, a young music student, went to play her violin outside the walls of the Nazi concentration camp at Compiègne, hoping that her friend inside would recognise the tune and take heart. She found herself “on an immense material and moral garbage heap… among odious people, nauseating smells, coffee tasting like soup from the night before”.īut other women, faced with the German occupiers, chose different, riskier paths. The Wagnerian soprano Germaine Lubin, Hitler’s favourite, who had sung to German audiences at Bayreuth and the Paris Opera, was imprisoned for three years for “national indignity”. With shaven heads, they were forced to parade semi-naked, admitting their sin. In 1945, France purged its uneasy feelings about the Occupation in general by making scapegoats of these collaborateurs horizontales. Historians estimate that between 80,000 to 100,000 Franco-German babies were born during the war. Expecting monsters, many girls succumbed to the charm of the Nazis – who exercised bare-chested, “like Lohengrin”, as one Parisian teenager wrote in her diary. French women, on the other hand, let the side down. French men, except for a “miserable fistful”, all resisted. The myth of the French Resistance goes something like this. The Parisiennes who survived told Anne Sebba why history forgot them De Gaulle gave a thousand medals to resistance heroes – but only six were women.
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