by Tania Szabô
Huguette says she remembers Violette’s arrival perfectly, two days after her solitary confinement began. One afternoon – this would have been the afternoon of Saturday 10 June 1944 – the dreaded footsteps stopped outside her cell. This pounding of boots governed the prisoners’ lives; they were always on the alert for them. What a relief when they moved on, ‘Phew! It’s not for us!’
When the stamp of military steps came to a halt and the door opened, Huguette got up and turned to the wall, looking down. That was the rule. This humiliating stance had become a conditioned reflex. In the crack of the half-opened door, Huguette could glimpse a navy blue skirt. She says she almost collapsed with fear, expecting insults and blows from the navy-uniformed guards. But no, the door had already closed again and she heard someone say, ‘Bonjour, I’ve just been arrested by the Gestapo’. The SS and the Gestapo were twin servants of horror and both names were used by those outside the occupation forces quite indiscriminately.
‘I’m Magda,150 and who are you?’
Huguette had great difficulty hiding her emotions. A pretty young woman held out her hand. She wore a dark blue skirt, Huguette said, and added that Bob Maloubier would be pleased to hear that detail on clothing as he had completely forgotten it.
Huguette was so relieved it was not the fearsome Panther151 but this new young woman she would soon be calling Vicky and become a real friend to. The navy suit that Violette wore was of very light material, under which she wore a white shirt. She did not wear stockings but peep-toe slightly wedged sandals. Huguette remembers them as flat-heeled and that it had rained. The two women immediately sat side by side on the bedstead and started to get to know one another.
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The door soon opened again, but without the awful warning from the boots. This time it was Satan in person who came in; black-uniformed, perhaps an officer – Huguette was not sure. This was, in fact, SS-Hauptsturmführer Aurel Kowatsch,152 who had returned from overseeing the ninety-nine hangings selected by SD official Walter Schmald and carried out by the Pioneer platoon of SS-Panzer Aufklarungs Abteilung 2 in Tulle the day before.153
Without saying a word, he planted himself in front of Violette, who remained seated. For an endless moment, they measured up to one another with a stare. Huguette says she was terrified, how could she make ‘Magda’ understand that she should stand up, not remain seated? Huguette was hypnotised by the enormous revolver the officer carried on his hip. The scene was so intense that it is still just as clear to her today as it was then.
He leaned towards Violette with a sardonic smile, that of the victor before its prey. Very proud, seemingly very calm, Violette never moved a millimetre away; she seemed to defy him. After this incredible and silent confrontation, he left, as he had entered, without a word.
Huguette muttered, ‘Oh, I’m so scared … for you. You’ve to stand when they come in, otherwise they just hit out.’ Her new friend simply shrugged her shoulders and smiled at her without comment, but Huguette felt the pressure of Violette’s hand on hers. During Huguette’s moments of discouragement and fear, Violette always gave her that comforting touch of the hand. It was more eloquent than any words could be.
A little later, a fat young woman came in – as wide as she was tall (la Bonbonne154) – full of jokes, seemingly delighted to be there. Her totally relaxed attitude was so surprising in such a place that she was immediately suspect to Huguette. She had, the woman said, been arrested for no reason in a street in Limoges. She then questioned them rather clumsily so Huguette knew she was a mole. No doubt Violette was of the same opinion.
Almost immediately, laughing, with her loud vulgar voice the fat woman burst out, ‘Hey girls, have you been raped yet? No? That’s a surprise! Girls like you! You’re going to be put through the wringer. All the women are, at the Tivoli. Do you know about the Tivoli? It won’t be long.’ She did not get the tiniest response from Violette, even though she persisted. The horror and panic she instilled into Huguette clearly delighted her.
Huguette brought up this detail, she says, because she thinks rape is the worst possible sort of torture. It is possible that such a ‘mole’ was inserted to do exactly what it did to Huguette but on the surface failed to do to Violette. Courage, after all, is the defeat of fear, and Violette had proved many times she was very good at that. Huguette wanted me to understand why she believed, the evening Violette came back later than usual, that she had been subjected to that very cruel assault. Violette never told her that, Huguette said. Huguette then begged my forgiveness for having recently revealed this to someone who then betrayed her confidence.155
She went on to say that the fear of sexual violation was why the sound of the boots made the female prisoners’ hearts leap into their mouths. If what Huguette has written to me in all the above seems obscure or vague it is because she did not wish to admit, even in writing to me, that Violette might have been sexually violated, raped, on her forced visits to the Gestapo headquarters sometimes twice a day, sometimes for the entire day. It would have been unusual had she not been subjected to some sort of sexual humiliation. As Cookridge said, ‘Women were not exempted from torture. Usually upon them the tortures were most odious.’
One night Huguette was lay awake waiting for the mole’s snoring, then she gently shook Violette. Violette was deeply asleep and woke up with a jump. It was the only time Huguette saw fear in her eyes. ‘She’s a mole, you talked too much,’ said Huguette.
Violette replied, ‘I know.’ She shrugged her shoulders and went back to sleep.
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The next day this fishwife, as Huguette called her, left and Violette surprised Huguette by revealing, ‘I didn’t tell her anything that the Gestapo don’t know! They know perfectly who I am … there’s a traitor in the circuit!’ She sat down next to Huguette in the corner, which became ‘her’ corner.
‘I can still see her there. Like that, we were almost face-to-face’ Huguette said to me. When Huguette was taken back to the cell in recent years for a television interview about Violette, she said she could see her so clearly in her imagination, sitting there in ‘her’ corner, that Huguette broke down and cried.
Violette told Huguette that she had been on a mission, accompanied by two men. She had been going as far as Pompadour. When she saw the ‘traction’156 at the T-junction she immediately understood that they had been expected. The three of them jumped out, she said to Huguette. The two men fled on one side. She started shooting and went on shooting. She had to protect them and hoped they’d been able to get away.
Huguette learned years later through Bob Maloubier that Violette’s ankle had been injured and therefore forced her to capitulate. Violette, Huguette says, ‘never told me, she never complained, yet she must certainly have been suffering. The cell was so narrow that you could hardly move around in it so I had never seen her walk.’
Bob Maloubier may not have known that Violette’s ankle had been severely damaged at Ringway when she was practising her parachute jumps. It was so severely injured that she had to convalesce in Bournemouth in a wheelchair. That ankle gave further trouble when she landed at Le Clos on the night of 7 to 8 June, but it was not too severe so she was able to hide it. It was this ankle that let her down as her foot went into a hole running across the field.
Huguette listened to her. She often saw Violette deep in thought, taking her head in her hands and murmuring as if she were convincing herself, ‘There’s a traitor in the circuit.’ On one of the days, Huguette says, Violette confided that she had travelled around in Corrèze with the identity of a pharmacist from Tulle: Madame Valetas. Huguette knew the chemist’s shop well, but not the chemist. ‘I’d really like to know if I look like her,’ Violette said.
After the Liberation, when Huguette had been freed, she made a point of going into Tulle and, of course, to the chemist’s shop. Madame Valetas was dark haired, but she did not look like Violette. Huguette said she should have asked the pharmacist, ‘Do you know Magda? Or Louise? Or Cor
inne? Or Violette?’ But she did not dare. Everyone was still very circumspect, said Huguette, and so they remain today.
In their prison cell the women were woken at dawn by shouts from a loudspeaker. They were meant to get up immediately but they obeyed the call only when they heard the pounding of boots stop before their cell and the first bolt drawn. After the warder had passed, they got back on the bed and went back to sleep.
They shared the same bed (the mole’s palliasse had disappeared with her); a bedstead for one person. They slept back to back against one another, forced to sleep on their side. Huguette only realised much later that Violette probably had the worst place, between Huguette and the wall, where it was impossible for her to stretch out to relieve any stiffness.
They kept their clothes on; Violette would take off her jacket but kept on her skirt and white blouse. They spread the only blanket over the bedstead; it was summertime and although the nights could be cold, they had the warmth of one another’s bodies to combat the chill.
They did not have the same tasks as the other prisoners, so they were very isolated. Huguette goes on to say that a jug was placed in a hatch in the door. They got four boiled potatoes a day delivered by the two ‘robot’ staff, who were wooden faced and silent. That was all they had to sustain them. They shared a bowl to drink from. One day they received an unexpected supplement: a sort of sticky greenish slice of bread. They tasted it, and it was utterly disgusting, inedible even for someone starving.
During one interrogation, Violette protested about their conditions. She had, she told Huguette, obtained a metal mug, some linen and soap. It was wonderful news. Huguette was already dreaming about soapy foam and a good scrub to get rid of the filth as she was terribly aware that she smelled bad and felt humiliated by it. She had worn the same clothes for three months. She did have a piece of cloth that her mother had torn off a shirt to use as a flannel. That simple rag was a precious thing; it allowed her to have the meanest of washes over her body. With no soap it had become yellow, dirty and smelly. Violette had a handkerchief to wash herself with. So as not to dirty the water in the jug, they wet their ‘precious rags’ over the lavatory hole, wringing them out carefully to spread over the jug’s top.
The day they were separated, they both received a quart –a sort of iron mug that army people carry on their belt – a piece of soap and a towel. When one of the ‘robots’ presented these longed-for items, the two girls immediately got undressed to use them, but were soon disappointed. The soap was like a beach pebble and the towel was coarse and hard. It was apparently a gift from the Red Cross.
Huguette had already noticed that, like her, Violette had a few red wheals – marks, she assumed, from the Panther’s riding crop. They simply said to one another, ‘You, too?’ That second feeling of emotion shared was powerful; it made them fellow sufferers. Huguette assured me that she had not seen any deep wounds or sores on Violette. On the other hand, Violette may well not have revealed how wounded or painful any particular part of her body was. She might have done this not only to appear brave and keep up Huguette’s spirits, but also because diminishing the importance or ignoring pain does make it more bearable. They were not allowed to join the circular walks in the yard. Huguette would have loved to catch sight of her mother, even at a distance.
In the afternoon, when the clicking of boots stopped in front of their cell, Violette pressed Huguette’s hand. ‘That’s for me. Don’t move!’ She said. She was standing even before Huguette could react, to minimise Huguette’s fear. Huguette just sat worrying until Violette returned. She followed Violette in her thoughts and could not help imagining the most monstrous of things. When Violette returned, she looked just as calm, still just as impenetrable and silent.
‘What did they do to you?’
‘They interrogated me.’
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Their long hours of solitude were filled with conversations, but also with long periods of silence, each of them isolated in their thoughts.
Violette never told Huguette that she had a daughter. That hurt Huguette’s feelings when she finally discovered that fact, when she saw me on a television programme. It made her feel that Violette had never truly confided in her. Poor Huguette, still a teenager, had not yet learned that some things were not for telling, that Violette was protecting her child and her family. She would have been remiss in telling Huguette too much, things that maybe the Germans did not know. All she told her were things the Germans already knew. But Violette would have been grateful to Huguette for her company during those six days of hell. Huguette thought that it may have been longer.
Huguette was unsure whether to recount the episode that follows. It was so unexpected but genuine, as unreal as it was.
One evening Violette was returned to the cell rather later than usual. Huguette had not waited for her to eat her two potatoes; she was just too hungry. As Huguette apologised, Violette put the remaining potatoes in Huguette’s hands, saying, ‘Take them, you can eat them without feeling guilty. I’m not hungry! Eat them …’ The offer was so tempting that Huguette readily admitted that it was difficult to resist. They decided instead to hide the two precious potatoes under the blanket for a time when they might really be starving. So as not to crush them while they slept, they put them in the bowl. The very next morning the potatoes became their breakfast and, of course, they shared, one each.
Violette had, it seemed to Huguette, lost a little of her usual calm that night. She shrugged her shoulders, ‘Something unimaginable happened to me! He was furious tonight, crazy and furious, unbelievably worked up.’ Violette only called him he or ‘the interrogator’. ‘He yelled, “I admire you, I admire you and I cannot stop myself liking you, but if tomorrow I get the order to execute you I will do it without any soul-searching.”’
By her quite extraordinary courage, by her heroic resistance and by her beauty, Violette had troubled a monster.
Violette never told Huguette what the officer did to her during those many interrogations. But women are always vulnerable in certain areas.
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At dawn one day, even before the loudspeakers called, they were roused from their sleep and dragged to the ground floor, pushed without ceremony up against one of the casements to look out onto the yard.
Suddenly, in the silence, steps rang out in the yard – marching soldiers. In the space of a second, Huguette felt irrational hope leap up, ‘They’ve landed. The Americans have landed!’ The hope that US paratroopers had landed in Haute-Vienne quickly dissipated.
Male voices sang the ‘Chant du Départ’157 ‘Do or Die’. Violette took her hand, holding it very tightly. In the same moment, wrote Huguette, they had both just understood what was happening. Silhouettes passed in the hazy gleam of dawn. Five Résistants were lined up against the wall. Five young people could just be made out in the gloom. In front of them, a machine gun. A soldier kneeling.
They cried out, ‘Vive la France!’
Huguette closed her eyes. An enormous explosion resounded from the spitting machine gun. This new and terrible image, impossible to erase from memory, shook them to the core. Even today, Huguette cannot bear the noise of firearms, or firecrackers or a car backfiring.
It was not their turn. They were returned to their cell. They never touched on what they had witnessed. No need for words to share the horror. But Violette held her hand.
One of the warders – who was from Lorraine, Huguette learned later – went off, muttering, ‘Frenchmen are killing Frenchmen – it’s not the Germans!’ Not all guards were German but the Nazis drafted Frenchmen from Alsace and Lorraine.
This was indeed the case. Some of the communists and Gaullists did waste life, energy and ammunition fighting each other. The preparations made by people like Charles de Gaulle, Passy, Jean Moulin, André Malraux and Georges Guingouin helped to bring the many different factions together in order to form a Gaullist government after liberation. Throughout the following years they had many tough political figh
ts with the communists. Here, in the prison yard, it was the French Garde Mobile or Milice executing their fellow citizens.
Three days, Huguette thinks, before they separated, Violette came back very subdued. She just dropped next to Huguette in her corner. Huguette asked the usual question, like a ritual,
‘What did they do to you today?’
Violette closed her eyes and passed her hands across her face.
‘It’s horrible! Tonight they found the way to make me talk. They tortured a young man to death. He was one of ours.’ She also said that she had so far not given any word of truth to her interrogators. Bob Maloubier does not agree. ‘She did not know anyone,’ he told Huguette. However, Huguette says she had written her account of this in the notebook that she wrote in December 1944. In that month, her memory was still very fresh; she couldn’t have fabricated this. It seems to me that this victim could so easily have been a young Résister like Michel. Violette did not need to know him personally, just that he was ‘one of ours’. There were so many like him, including Huguette’s own brother.
Bob was mistaken in saying that Violette did not know anyone. How could she not? Violette had had two days full of meetings with the Maquis in the surrounding areas. She knew not only her own team but also a couple of dozen Maquis members, and the Maquis reception committee.
Huguette recalls Violette saying, ‘They did not stop whipping him, hitting him with gun butts. They pulled out his nails. His face was streaming with blood. He no longer looked human, but his eyes were begging me. What were they telling me? “Speak, speak I beg you” or “Don’t speak”? I don’t know. I just don’t know.’