by Paige Bowers
The women, she said, were less divided by politics than the men were, all the while recognizing their differences. After helping each other get back on their feet, they believed it was their duty to testify about what they had seen and personally experienced.
ADIR offered weekly teas in its six-story headquarters so women could meet and talk about what they were facing, and after that it staged talks and concerts in the building’s foyer “to give our meetings an elevated character.” Special guests sang Mozart, performed harp recitals, and spoke about the real meaning of liberty. It was a pleasant distraction for the women and drew them back for more camaraderie.
“We sought out other camp survivors because we spoke the same language,” Anise said.
All around them the language could be confusing because many of them were unaccustomed to navigating the government ministries that administered their benefits. Through ADIR they were kept apprised of the laws and policies that pertained to their resister benefits and received guidance on how to submit the necessary paperwork that would allow them to obtain such aid. Once again the women found themselves united in a common cause.
That first summer after the war was a busy one for returning deportees, whether they were convalescing, figuring out how to navigate the paperwork they’d need for veterans’ benefits, or capturing their memories of the camps for future posterity. In Geneva Geneviève was introduced to a group of French resisters at a dinner that her father hosted. She sat at one table while a young, black-haired man with mischievous eyes sat at the other. His name was Bernard Anthonioz and he was an editor at the Swiss resistance journal Cahiers du Rhône. A Frenchman born in Geneva, he was educated in Catholic schools, where he learned at a young age about the dangers of Nazism. When Bernard’s father died, Bernard began working as an editor and gym teacher to support his family. He entered college in Lyon but returned to Switzerland after the war broke out in 1939. There he led something of a triple life. He helped Jews escape into Switzerland, passed messages and forbidden manuscripts into France, and unearthed provocative works that he could edit and publish in Cahiers du Rhône. He was always going somewhere, doing something, meeting someone. At this dinner he met Geneviève and asked for her help putting together testimonies for a coming special issue he was doing on Ravensbrück.
She immediately thought of enlisting Germaine Tillion for one of the chapters because of the work she had already done to document the camp experience. Her article, as well as the narratives, poems, and drawings that accompanied it, was among the first writings about the concentration camps. The work was a good distraction for Germaine, who was not only still heartbroken by her mother’s death but also devastated to find her home looted and her grandmother dead once she returned to France. It was important to get these memories down, and she built the article into a larger edition of Ravensbrück, which Bernard helped her get published in Switzerland during the summer of 1945. Finishing that work was no small feat for Germaine, given her reliance on memories and coded notes. The Germans had burned most of the Ravensbrück archives fifteen days before the Russians arrived, but some Polish prisoners were able to take some of the remaining papers, among them a camp register that showed how many French women had been gassed.
Geneviève, meanwhile, continued to give stirring speeches about her time in Ravensbrück. Anise Girard, who had been convalescing in Switzerland after struggling with her health, accompanied her to her talks.
“We went to churches and Protestant temples and spoke to youth groups,” Anise recalled. “Geneviève had an innate talent for speaking. She told people what we had been through. Then at night, she and I would share a room. After the camps, we could not sleep at all. We began to tell each other our life stories. It did not take very long, because we were in our twenties and there was not much life that we had lived. But we became very close and forever linked.”
Geneviève’s efforts helped raise enough money to provide five hundred prisoners with free rest home stays. The women were welcomed in chalets and villas that were near lakes or high in the mountains. In these beautiful, quiet settings, former deportees were treated well and allowed to rest until they were able to regain their strength and health. Geneviève visited the women in the homes to check on their progress, and her kindness was always appreciated among those who were losing hope.
“A look shared, a hand held, some memories recalled together; this is the thread of our camaraderie in both the present and the past,” she later wrote about the return. “It is our strength. . . . We now need to be able to give and receive in order to be worthy of our new humane task.”
Geneviève returned to Paris on October 21, 1945, when she joined other French women who headed to the polls to vote for the first time. The goal: to elect a constituent assembly and determine the scope of its powers. It was a record turnout, where women held their children and shopping bags as they stood in lines of people who waited to decide whether the new assembly would draft the country’s new constitution and be limited to a seven-month tenure. General de Gaulle appealed to the public, asking them to vote yes on both questions and added that he might withdraw from public life if the assembly was granted unlimited power. Crowds gathered outside of General de Gaulle’s residence, hoping to see him vote, but they saw Geneviève and her aunt Yvonne head to the polls instead. Eighty-five percent of the nation cast ballots that day, and most of those voters supported left-leaning candidates affiliated with the resistance and General de Gaulle’s political agenda.
General de Gaulle sought to forge a unity government that was focused on offering “something new, but something reasonable.” By all accounts the assembly seemed primed to offer France something fresh. It was the youngest council in the country’s history, and it was mostly composed of different faces on the political landscape, among them eighty-six professors and teachers, sixty-one lawyers, fifty-nine white-collar employees, fifty-one laborers, forty-seven businessmen, forty-three journalists, thirty-six farmers, thirty-two doctors, seven officers, three clergymen, two architects, and two nurses. Of the 522-person assembly, 32 members were women.
After casting her vote Geneviève delivered a few speeches in the French capital. At one talk she spoke simply, calmly, from the heart. She had a presence, some people said, adding that in “that fragile body, with its tired voice, there was a mysterious force of character, will, and above all, soul.”
She was extraordinary, the crowd believed. A heavy silence fell over the room as she spoke for a half hour of the dead, of martyrs, of the enormous spirit of France that united its people and inspired them to resist in their darkest moments.
“We believed in that camp, that in defending France, that it was mankind that we were defending too,” she said.
The crowd was in tears. When the host rose to thank Geneviève for her talk, he struggled to speak, knowing that anything he had to say would pale in comparison.
* * *
When it came to getting what he wanted, Bernard Anthonioz was like a bull in a field. He charged at his target headlong, determined. Nothing was impossible for him. As he got to know Geneviève, first over dinner, then through Cahiers du Rhône, then on her subsequent visits to Switzerland, he learned how much they had in common. They were fervent Catholics who had lost a parent at a young age and, as a result, became old souls in young bodies. Their ideas about the world and humanity drove them toward the resistance, and now that the war was over, they were still imbued with that call to do something for others and for their country as a whole. There was a spiritual closeness between them, some quiet understanding that they were united in thought and deed. They were falling in love.
Germaine came to Switzerland to visit Geneviève, and they stayed in a chalet loaned to them by a friend. They played in the snow and caught up with each other over long talks that lingered into the night. When Bernard joined them at the chalet, Germaine felt their strong attraction to each other, so she told them she was going skiing and would be back in a cou
ple of hours. When she left them Germaine remembered she did not know how to ski at all.
Geneviève’s aunt Yvonne had other ideas on romantic partners for her niece. She tried to fix her up with a former resister who had become part of the postwar government and another who had become a promising young historian. Her efforts to find a suitor for her niece failed. Geneviève’s thoughts always drifted to her visits with Bernard. When Geneviève returned to Switzerland, she asked a friend of hers what she thought about Bernard. Her friend told her, “You could do worse.” Geneviève was certain of that. She asked Bernard to marry her, and he took three days to consider her proposal before telling her yes. Geneviève told him to go file their civil paperwork right away.
Their next steps were a little more cautious. Geneviève’s father, Xavier, was an old-fashioned man who would have expected his children to present their potential spouses to him or ask for his blessings with their marriage. When his son, Roger, didn’t follow those protocols, Xavier refused to pay for his wedding. Mindful of this, Geneviève and Bernard were more careful with Xavier. Bernard bought butter-hued gloves, a jacket, and a hat to make a good impression on Geneviève’s father. He was taking no chances. He and Xavier met for three hours, during which Bernard told him who he was, what he did, and what he hoped for his future with Geneviève. Bernard left Cahiers du Rhône in December 1945 to become a Paris-based arts correspondent for another publication. He had also begun editing art books for another publisher, in part because of his renewed interest in architecture and sculpture. His job was bringing him into contact with luminaries like the sculptor Alberto Giacometti and writer André Malraux. It excited him, and he had great hopes for whatever might be ahead. By the time he was done introducing himself, Xavier told Geneviève, “Now I understand why you’ve chosen this man.”
Death hadn’t stopped haunting the women of Ravensbrück, but they began new lives anyway. Jacqueline d’Alincourt became engaged to resistance fighter Pierre Pery, and Geneviève served as maid of honor at her wedding. Most of the people who attended or stood for the bride and groom had survived concentration camps and were eager to put the horrible memories behind them. Jacqueline, for her part, left for the United States soon after her nuptials. Months later Geneviève received a telegram from her, saying that she had given birth to a little girl: Violaine, Jacqueline’s wartime alias.
“It was crazy [to give birth] considering my health, but it was an affirmation of life,” Jacqueline said. “It was wonderful. On the one hand, you’ve struggled to live, but then you have a child and it’s a miracle.”
Another miracle: During the war, a young man named André Postel-Vinay had heard of a beautiful, young, blonde prisoner who was being held nearby in Fresnes Prison. It was a shame they were arresting people that were so young, his cellmate cried. André didn’t know it at the time, but the young woman who had captured his cellmate’s imagination was Anise Girard. In another part of Paris, Anise’s mother was volunteering for a women’s group that assembled packages to send to prisoners. She stopped for a minute to read a letter that she had just received from Anise. When she was done reading the note, a woman exclaimed, “Oh Madame Girard, this letter shows that your daughter is exactly the type of girl who should marry my brother.” Her brother was André Postel-Vinay. “Don’t worry,” the woman continued. “They’ll both return and we’ll marry them right away!” Anise liked to joke that those plans were ripped straight from a nineteenth-century novel. But they both returned, and André’s sister invited them over for dinner one night, seating them at opposite ends of the table. As dinner drew to a close, Anise realized that she would have liked to have been sitting much closer to André than she was. Before she could do anything about it, André had to leave immediately after the meal. It would not be the last time they saw each other.
Meanwhile Geneviève took the train to Paris to tell her uncle Charles about her engagement to Bernard Anthonioz. She shared her happy news with him during a long walk in the forest that surrounded the hunting pavilion he had been renting for the past several months. She told him about the special wedding ring Bernard was designing for her, which used diamonds from her late mother’s earrings to create an oblong cross. Then she asked her uncle if he would be a witness at their church ceremony. He said yes. When she finished telling her uncle about this new chapter in her life, Charles had some news of his own: he was stepping down as head of the provisional government. Although he wanted to believe France was above party politics and that he could forge a united nation after the war, partisan bickering had taken hold and he didn’t have the stomach for it. He would leave Paris and the public eye for his country home in Colombey-les-Deux-Églises, where he would write his memoirs and contemplate his next steps.
As Charles retreated from public life and got ready to attend his oldest niece’s wedding, he had no idea that the event would be the source of strife in his own household. Yvonne did not want to travel to Geneva because she was horrified that Geneviève had proposed to Bernard and not the other way around, which was what she believed to be appropriate. Furthermore she did not approve of the way her niece spoke in public and defended her ideas. Yvonne told Charles that if he wanted to take part in the ceremony, he could pack his own bags. He turned to his daughter Élisabeth and asked her if she would do it for him instead. She said, “But of course, Papa.” After that Charles turned toward his wife and said, “You see, my dear, no one is irreplaceable.” In the end Yvonne traveled to Geneva with him and attended the ceremony.
On May 28, 1946, Geneviève de Gaulle and Bernard Anthonioz had their civil marriage in Bossey, a village near the Swiss border. The next day they were married at Notre Dame in Geneva. Most of Geneviève’s companions from deportation were present, and Germaine was excited to meet General de Gaulle for the first time. When he met her he said, “I’ve heard a lot about you.” Germaine replied, “I’ve heard a lot about you, too.” In one wedding photo Geneviève and Bernard were flanked by Xavier on the right and Charles on the left, who gazed at the newlyweds with fatherly pride. A week after their wedding, Geneviève and Bernard cut short their honeymoon to attend the wedding of Anise Girard to André Postel-Vinay.
“She and her husband came to our wedding and Geneviève would always say ‘Don’t forget, Anise, we interrupted our honeymoon to come to your wedding!’” Anise said. “She had a little boy not long after her marriage and then I did too. And then she had a second son a few years later and then I did too. And then she had a little girl, Isabelle, and not long after that, I had a little girl. And then Geneviève had another little boy and then after that I did too. Me, I couldn’t do anything but imitate Geneviève. We always laughed about that.”
12
The Antidote
Geneviève was amazed to be pregnant. Most of the women who returned from the camps had been advised to wait a few years before trying to start a family, but the younger ones like Geneviève proceeded anyway, despite the physical risks.
Her first pregnancy was in progress just as the Ravensbrück war crimes trial began in Hamburg, Germany. Germaine Tillion was an observer at the trial, and she wanted Geneviève to attend too because it was their duty to remember, to speak up and clarify what had happened in the camp. When they arrived in Hamburg, Germaine was astounded that only twenty-two people had been accused of killing thousands of women and that Fritz Suhren and his second-in-command, Hans Pflaum, had escaped from the internment camp where they were being held three weeks before the proceedings began. Because of the controversy surrounding Suhren’s breakout, the trial’s start date was pushed back two days to December 5, 1946.
Three journalists were present in the small and brightly lit courtroom. On one side of the chamber was a raised bench for the judges. On the other side was a bench for the accused, which sat behind a bank of seating for their attorneys. To the right of the lawyers was a box for witnesses. To their left: a box for three interpreters. Behind the interpreters was wooden seating for about fifty obser
vers. In the mezzanine there was seating for the public. Everyone in the room rose from their seats when the eight judges entered the chamber. The magistrates were all in military attire except for the one who directed the debates. He wore a black robe, pince-nez, and curly wig. All the judges swore on the Bible that they would judge well, and then the interpreters swore to translate well too.
The defendants wore numbers around their neck and were told to be sure the number was high enough for all to see. Then the prosecutor began his accusation, before describing the camp environment. The judges looked moved. The accused looked nervous. One of the camp doctors looked annoyed to be in the courtroom. That afternoon a former prisoner testified at length about what she had suffered at the camp. After all the witnesses had given their testimonies for the prosecution, one of the lawyers for the defendants asked to quit. Later in the trial two of the accused committed suicide, and another suffered a heart attack. Of the fifteen who remained, eleven, including Dorothea Binz, were condemned to death. Two men were sentenced to fifteen years in prison, while two women got ten years. Some of the public who had witnessed the trial felt the verdicts were severe.
Tillion later wrote in ADIR’s bulletin Voix et Visages that they must have been the only group to care about the trial’s outcome. Geneviève too noted a “general indifference” about the trial. But Germaine also wrote that pieces of the truth were brought forward and that there wasn’t enough preparation and coordination between the attorneys. Still she believed that all parties did everything they could in good faith.
Still: the indifference.
“The indifference hurts us more than any of the atrocities,” Geneviève wrote. “Our comrades who are dead and no longer with us were entitled to more than that. . . . Justice!”