The General's Niece

by Paige Bowers

  “When he was just a toddler, my oldest said to me ‘I wasn’t afraid during the war because I hid in your tummy,’” Anise said. “So he sensed something. But it went away. Why bother telling them about it?”

  Geneviève decided she would take Anise’s little-by-little approach with her own children too. She wasn’t sure how to tell them about her past. All she knew was that she wanted them to be happy.

  Meanwhile her uncle Charles disbanded the RPF in September 1955, and Geneviève tried to comfort him as he bemoaned the fact that France seemed to be going into some sort of decline. Special-interest groups held tremendous sway in the country’s politics because they interacted directly with parliament, which held more power than the chief executive. There was also chronic governmental instability, continued economic hardship, and France’s humiliating defeat in Indochina, which led to the former colony’s independence.

  Then came Algeria. Months after France’s defeat in Indochina, a revolt broke out in Algeria that the French could not quash. The French government granted independence to neighboring Tunisia and Morocco, hoping to contain the rebellion, but it was less inclined to grant the same freedom to Algeria, which was home to more than one million Europeans—or colons—whose families had been there for generations. Socialist prime minister Guy Mollet tried to achieve peace with Algeria through negotiations, but when he arrived in Algiers, colons pelted him with tomatoes and said that Algeria should remain French. Mollet reversed course and sent in five hundred thousand troops to keep the peace, but that only served to worsen the conflict. Both sides committed acts of terrorism and torture. Two successive governments fell during the turmoil, and the army began to feel that their security was at risk without steady leadership. France’s morale began to suffer.

  Germaine Tillion, meanwhile, had returned to Algeria, the country she once studied, to see how it had changed. When she left it in the 1940s, it was a place where the locals were happy and full of virtue and could expect some mutual aid from their neighbors. By the time she returned in 1955, she saw that much was different. A minority of the residents were living a life of ease, while nine out of ten families were living day to day.

  Fifteen years earlier, she said, she was interacting with the same people and saw none of these problems. The French presence, according to Germaine, offered the locals a lot of promises without follow-through. There were schools with no teachers, and there were no doctors or nurses. Roads were empty, and there were no signs of civilization. The population had become five times larger than it was in the previous century, and there were not enough resources to support that growth. The economy was collapsing, and Algerians were under assault. Three-quarters of the population were homeless and without a job.

  There was fighting now, she said, and even worse the French were using torture against their opponents. Germaine shared this information with Anise, who believed that ADIR should condemn the acts because of what the Nazis had once done to the French. When she presented her case to her fellow members, she was told that ADIR couldn’t take such a stand because the issue was too complicated and too political. Geneviève didn’t want to engage the membership in a debate about torture because she didn’t want to seem like she was against the French government. Anise didn’t see it the same way. When the Nazis used torture against them, they could easily consider it wrong. What was the difference? She was disgusted by the group’s lack of courage, but they told her it was important to preserve the group’s unity because that was what gave it its strength.

  Anise maintained the need to take a stand. It wasn’t just for the prisoners, but as a “moral safeguard” against the young French men who were being trained in that form of combat. She was told that moral and humanitarian issues couldn’t be separated from political ones. Anise saw that too few people wanted to enlarge the group’s activity and too many would never change. She told the membership that taking a stand on this would be resuming the combat of the real resistance. Finally, unable to change ADIR’s position, she resigned from the leadership council in disgust but would remain a member because the group was dear to her heart. Geneviève, who was now president of ADIR, accepted her resignation. She saluted Anise as a fighter and said they should all meditate on what she had to say.

  As Algeria threatened to tear France apart, once again the French looked to Charles de Gaulle to become its savior. On May 15, 1958, the sixty-seven-year-old general stepped out of political hibernation to announce that he was ready to take charge of the country, but he would not do it by force.

  “The degradation of the state inevitably brings with it the estrangement of the peoples of our territories, trouble in the fighting army, national dislocation and the loss of our independence,” he said. “For 12 years France, at grips with problems too harsh for the regime of political parties, has been engaged in a disastrous process. . . . I hold myself ready to take over the powers of the republic.”

  He played things carefully throughout the month of May, and by the end of the month, President René Coty threatened to resign if Charles de Gaulle was not permitted to return to power. On June 1 General de Gaulle stood before the National Assembly, which elected him the last prime minister of France’s Fourth Republic. The assembly granted de Gaulle the power to rule by decree for six months and authorized him to write a new constitution that would be brought to a vote. In that constitution he would make good on his quest for a government headed by a strong executive leader. Four days after his appointment, he was in Algeria, pledging that the country’s Muslim population would have absolute equality with the French.

  Anise said that Geneviève quietly passed all of Germaine’s reports from Algeria to her uncle.

  “Germaine had spent six years there and she knew a lot of people,” Anise said. “And she was very well informed. So Geneviève would pass this on to her uncle and because he was very close to his niece, he had a lot of confidence in what she had to say. If Geneviève told him, ‘Germaine is telling the truth here,’ he would believe her.”

  General de Gaulle found Germaine’s work very interesting and invited her to his office for a meeting. They discussed the situation in Algeria for two hours, during which she denounced the use of torture by the French. He seemed to be thinking about the seriousness of her viewpoint but ultimately said that he would not intervene because he did not want to risk having his decision interpreted the wrong way. He encouraged Germaine to keep up their dialogue and then added, “What we do to humans will end, perhaps with our death,” as he escorted her out the door.

  Charles de Gaulle turned his attention back to the country’s new constitution, which would be approved in a referendum held that September. Then he focused on putting together his new government after he was elected president on December 21, 1958. He recruited André Malraux, who created France’s first Ministry of Culture. The writer enlisted some of his closest friends to work with him on his goal to democratize access to all forms of art, and he asked Geneviève and Bernard to join his cabinet. Geneviève also liked that André aimed to provide creatives with governmental help, but she knew it would be a major task to sell this project to the French people. Bernard was put in charge of the mission and became a champion of young artists, who dined regularly at the Anthonioz house. Bernard worked hard to get them access to workspaces and, in some cases, permits so they could work in the country. Geneviève, meanwhile, was placed in charge of the scientific research section. She created the Delegation of Scientific Research, the nation’s first Scientific Council, and its first Secretariat of Youth and Sports. But it was a struggle for her.

  “I had a life that was a little complicated at this moment,” she recalled. “I was passionate about what I was doing in the ministry, but it was taking up a lot of my time. My children suffered from all of my occupations, I was 37 years old, with four children and it wasn’t easy to do everything.”

  But she soon found a new cause that made her very eager to try.

  13

  No
isy-le-Grand

  Geneviève had answered her uncle’s call to resistance in 1940, but by the late 1950s she was answering another persuasive man’s call to action.

  Although many of the French were experiencing a certain level of prosperity, that fortune did not to extend to everyone. In the brutally cold winter of 1954, a three-month-old infant froze to death in a bus that served as the family’s home, and a woman was found dead on a Paris street with an eviction notice clutched in her frozen hand. The French Parliament had just failed to pass a law making such evictions illegal, as well as another that would have funded temporary housing for the indigent. In Paris alone some two thousand homeless were braving the five-degree weather without food, shelter, and, in some cases, adequate clothing. Across the country some five million French men and women faced the same predicament. Outraged by this, a former resistance fighter-turned-priest named Abbé Pierre took to the airwaves on February 1 to decry the situation and plead for help. The priest had been helping the homeless since the war’s end, when it became clear that the country had a serious housing shortage. Known for his trademark beard and beret, he had begged for alms and organized groups of so-called ragpickers to sift through dumps to find used items they could sell. The proceeds were used to build emergency shelters for the poor, but as the weather became more forbidding, he knew that he needed more help and fast. So he scribbled down his appeal and rushed to Radio Luxembourg’s offices, where he persuaded station management to put him on the air.

  In a four-minute broadcast, the priest poured out his heart:

  Tonight, in every town in France, in every quarter of Paris, we must hang out placards under a light in the dark, at the door of places where there are blankets, bunks, soup; where one may read, under the title “Fraternal Aid Center” these simple words: “If you suffer, whoever you are, enter, eat, sleep, recover hope, here you are loved.” The forecast is for a month of harsh frosts. For as long as the winter lasts, for as long as the centers exist, faced with their brothers dying in poverty, all mankind must be of one will: the will to make this situation impossible. I beg of you, let us love one another enough to do it now. From so much pain, let a wonderful thing be given unto us: the shared spirit of France.

  Minutes after his appeal millions of francs poured in from across the nation, overwhelming the telephone operators tasked with handling donations. Blankets, heaters, overcoats, and even furs flooded in too, and it took several weeks for volunteers to sort, stock, and distribute the gifts. Newspapers called it an “uprising of kindness,” and wealthy women were so stirred by the preacher’s appeal that they helped him expand his assistance across the country. By October the American actor Charlie Chaplin donated almost $6,000 to Abbé Pierre so he could build interim lodging for the poor on a marshy plot of land the priest had purchased east of Paris in the suburb Noisy-le-Grand. Some two thousand people already lived there in tents, and with Chaplin’s donation they would soon live in simple cement dwellings with roofs of curved sheet metal.

  “I hope this is the beginning of a war,” Abbé Pierre told reporters after receiving the check from Chaplin at the Hôtel Crillon. “Not a war with bombs made to destroy, but with checks used to help the unfortunate.”

  The homes, which became known as igloos due to their curved shape, were meant to be a temporary solution. But they became a permanent fixture once private donations slowed and the government turned its attentions to fighting in Indochina and growing tensions in Algeria. As Abbé Pierre began replicating these camps around the country and then the world, the residents of the Noisy encampment grew more and more cut off from French society and were ultimately forgotten. Living conditions deteriorated.

  A priest named Father Joseph Wresinski was sent by his church to evangelize and minister to the camp. He decided to live among its inhabitants so he could have a better understanding of the daily challenges they faced. “With him, it was different,” one camp resident said. “He was closer to us and he was like us.” Because of that, he knew their main task was survival. One thirteen-year-old boy who arrived at the camp with his family looked around at the cold and rounded barracks that would become his home and wondered whether he had arrived in a Nazi prison camp. The child’s daily hell would become a “not to miss” stop on local bus tours full of curious onlookers who couldn’t believe there were people living like this, in these peculiar structures, this close to Paris. It was a world apart. A local grocer even cashed in on all the curiosity, selling postcards of the community in his store.

  Meanwhile one autumn evening in a comfortable Paris living room, Bernard and Geneviève listened as their friend Marthe de Brancion talked about a formidable priest who was helping the poor in a slum outside of the capital. What made it remarkable was not that he was coming to their aid but that he was living among them so he could learn about their daily struggles. The idea, as he saw it, was that living among the poor and truly listening to them was the best way to help them solve their problems.

  His name was Father Joseph Wresinski, said Marthe, and she wanted Geneviève and Bernard to meet him. When Geneviève and Bernard arrived at Marthe’s house, they greeted a man in a long black cassock who had a friendly smile and modest face. He told them what he was seeing, just outside of Paris: the mud, the cold, the despair, the simple lack of hope. Many of the families had come to the area in search of jobs, but they were not educated, were ill qualified, and struggled to find places to live. All the grand postwar plans for construction and growth were either slow to come or failed to extend to the poor. No one seemed to be interested in what these people faced, he told them. Although there were aid organizations that were contributing material goods to help, there was nothing that could help these families improve their circumstances.

  He called them his people. After all, he had been born poor, so he knew what it was like.

  Marthe was one of the few people he knew who was willing to devote her time and energy to what he was doing out in Noisy-le-Grand. She helped him create a library full of donated books in the encampment. But he needed more people like her. Would Geneviève like to come out to Noisy and meet some of the families?

  He told her she could come whenever she wanted.

  That’s what she kept thinking about in the days after they met, despite what she called her inner “little voice of reason” that told her not to get mixed up in this. She was already spread thin. She had her four children to think about, and her spare moments were already divided between her work for ADIR and for André Malraux’s new Ministry of Culture. But she knew in her heart that she needed to honor the priest’s open-ended invitation. She bundled up one gray October morning to take the Métro and then a city bus to see him at his office in Noisy. When she approached her destination, she stepped off the bus and rushed toward the upper end of Jules Ferry Street, which was where Father Joseph said he would be waiting. She could have come with Bernard or any of her friends, but there was something about this that she felt she needed to do on her own. As she reached the entrance to the slum, Father Joseph greeted her eagerly, then led her up a muddy road full of puddles past a sign that read: “This hamlet of distress is in honor of those who, by their work and donations, helped establish it, and to the shame of a society that is not able to house its workers with dignity.”

  “This sign has been here for four years,” Father Joseph explained. “Four years already and nothing has changed. The families that live here are no longer considered priorities because they have a roof over their head, and the demands for housing mostly go to people who are in the street.”

  Geneviève looked down the long, muddy road at the simple igloos, which had no heat or electricity. The entire camp had three sources of water, and to get some for your household, you had to wait in a line. There were also communal bathrooms, inconsistent garbage service, and no mail. There were no boxes for letters anyway. And at this hour there were few families around for her to meet. Those who appeared on their doorsteps disappeared quickly. T
hose who remained watched her walk by them with empty-eyed, down-in-the-mouth stares.

  Nearby a small group of rosy-cheeked children roughhoused near the sewers. Father Joseph grabbed one of them by the ear and implored him to go to school. One family invited Father Joseph and Geneviève into their home, and the priest asked the couple for some coffee because it was so cold outside. Geneviève was horrified that Father Joseph would make such a demand of people who clearly had nothing. But the priest was not running a charity, and the inhabitants of the slum knew it. Father Joseph didn’t want to create dependent people. His goal was to equip the poor with the tools to solve their own problems. That meant no soup kitchens, no handouts. If you wanted something you had to pay a small price to get it, whether it was coal for your stove or used clothing for your children. And you could not pay without having some sort of income. Father Joseph hoped that by encouraging the poor to find work and pay their way, by building a small library of donated books and a simple preschool, he could ultimately help them out of the slums and into a better life. It was proving harder than he expected.

  As Father Joseph and Geneviève sipped their coffee, their hosts told them about their struggles to find work, keep the family healthy, and get the children educated. Despite this the couple believed things would get better. Geneviève thanked the couple for the coffee and she and Father Joseph left.

  Outside, the streets of the slum had filled with people who had spent the day looking for work. Father Joseph explained the conundrum of getting children to attend school regularly when there was no bright, clean, and quiet place for them to study at home. How could they have their friends over to play and not feel ashamed? How could their mothers ensure they had clean clothes to wear? How could their fathers have the confidence to seek employment, knowing what they faced at home?

  Geneviève half listened to his concerns as she watched the slow trickle of exhausted men and women return to their homes. Their faces were tired, humiliated, and hopeless. She had seen that look before on her Ravensbrück comrades, who trudged back to their barracks after a long, punishing day of work, fearful that the degradations would never end. Seeing this again, so close to home, ignited in her a familiar sensation: the feeling that there was a problem that needed to be solved. But at that moment she did not commit to do anything. She did not know where to begin. And Father Joseph only asked her to return when she could.