Women and War in the Twentieth Century

Enlisted with or without Consent

Nicole A. Dombrowski, Nicole A. Dombrowski

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2004
• ISBN:
  9781135872847
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Histoire
• Subtopic: Histoire du monde

First published in 2005. This volume documents women's 20th century wartime experiences from World War I through the recent conflicts in Bosnia. The articles cross national boundaries including France, China, Peru, Guatemala, Germany, Bosnia, the U.S. and Great Britain.. The contributors of these original essays trace the evolution of women's roles as victims of war while also showing how they have been increasingly incorporated into battle as actors and perpetrators. These comparative studies analyze war's disruptions of daily life, its effects on children, rape as a war crime, access to equal opportunity, and women's resistance to violence.

Part II
1940–1945

Figure 6. Distressed mother searches for her lost children. Gea Augsbourg.

SIX
Surviving the German Invasion of France
Women’s Stories of the Exodus of 1940

Nicole Ann DOMBROWSKI

We saw something very strange happening to Paris. A very dark fog began to pass over the city.

—Jackie De Col

The black fog and the sirens’ blarer, triggered by the passage of German bombers, delivered an ominous message to the people of Paris. An end to the “funny war” neared as German troops advanced and French troops retreated.¹ For the civilians of Paris who had feared the German arrival since the inception of the invasion on May 10, 1940, the day of reckoning had arrived. A city of cafe philosophers and fashion icons would have to decide to stay and greet the invading forces or to flee.

On June 10, exactly one month after the start of the blitzkrieg, Parisians and members of the French government joined the retreating masses of Belgian refugees, French civilians from the Champagne and Ardennes regions, and French troops in a mass exodus to southern France. Among the fleeing civilians, women, children and elderly struggled to rescue themselves and their loved ones from an army rumored to have cut off the hands of children during World War I. Even France’s literary treasures, such as Joseph Kessel, Simone de Beauvoir, and even the aging Colette, descended with the masses into the abyss.

Jackie, then an unremarkable young Parisian schoolgirl, age 17, observed the shadows cast in the sky and lived to recall how the darkness of the war encroached not only on the future of her country but on the rest of her life. Jackie’s story of survival of the Battle of France in June 1940 recaptures the fear and excitement of the inaugural days of World War II and the German occupation. In the retelling of her war story, 50 years after the event, Jackie unleashes the power of personal and collective memory and offers the contemporary reader a clear view of history at the intersection of personal and public experience. Her memoir captures the civilian side of battle, enriching our understanding of how the military defeat engulfed civilians and cleared the way for the establishment of bureaucratic structures that conditioned the daily struggles for survival during the German occupation.

By June 10 most civilians and French army units had evacuated the northeastern region of France. In an intermingled dance of children and soldiers, the French eiuded the German invaders, hoping to make a stand at the Loire River. Many of the Parisians who had evacuated the city at the beginning of hostilities in September 1939 displayed an initial reluctance to displace themselves again. But by late afternoon on June 10, the government led by example. It made its way to Bordeaux to establish operations. Rumors ran wild through Paris nearly as quickly as the Germans rode through the Ardennes forest. “Paul Reynaud [the Prime Minister] had fled with his mistress,” one such rumor reported. Others repeated the story that “the British have surrendered” and reactivated the stereotypes of the “Boches” of World War I.

This atmosphere of fear propelled Parisians from their sedentary positions. In a six-floor walk-up in the Marais district, Jackie and her family consulted with neighbors about whether they should stay or leave.² “I don’t want my daughter to serve as a welcome mat for the Germans,” decreed Jackie’s neighbor, who showed concern about the safety of her 20-year-old daughter. Jackie’s family, the DeCols,³ contemplated their neighbor’s fear. Contact with German soldiers might well bring rape or death. After a brief debate, the family decided to split up. Jackie, her mother, then 38 years old, and her grandmother, nearly 68, would join the flood of refugees. Jackie’s father and uncle would stay and enlist in the civil defense forces (la defense passive) to participate in the anticipated defense of Paris.

MEMORY AND HISTORY

Jackie’s memory of her departure from Paris cannot be separated from the knowledge of the events that followed. Indeed, for Jackie the exodus marked the beginning of the end to a way of life she and her family had taken refuge in. Once before the DeCols had fled. In 1925 her father and paternal grandparents “were chased out of Russia,” as she remembered.

“My father began his life in Odessa, traveled for 15 days before reaching Paris with his family, and ended his life in a camp at Auschwitz,” she recalled. For Jackie, the exodus symbolizes something larger than Frances defeat. It marks a watershed in her own life, and a revision of her identity from française to française d’origine juive. This transformation of consciousness took place on the roads of France in the summer of 1940.

In this essay I want to draw upon Jackie’s memories of the exodus of 1940 in order to re-create a sense of how the horror of defeat took shape in the mind of a child and survived as a symbolic marker throughout the life of a private individual and a citizen of a larger collectivity, the French nation. By retracing the past through the life of one individual, I hope to gain a clearer perspective of the way in which the national catastrophe of military defeat spilled over into the lives of individuals and families. What we learn is how the war shattered families and communities. Government and German military policies thus intervened to structure their means of survival during the occupation. We also gain an understanding of how postwar national histories about defeat and occupation are integrated into, challenged by, and also transform the documenting of individuals’ private memories, themselves enriched and edited through the oral transmission of postwar family discussions.

I have chosen Jackie’s oral history because it is representative in detail and in its broader scope of many of the oral histories I have taken of French men and women who at the time of the exodus ranged in age from 9 to 25. Her narrative is also somewhat distinct in that she was half Jewish, a label that held practically no meaning for her at the time of the war or before, but came to be a living category of experience through the ideological transformations brought about by Nazi and Vichy racial policies. Therefore, Jackie’s narrative tells not only a story about the different paths that some French Jews stumbled upon, but also the story that Jackie, a non-practicing French Jew, tells herself about her relationship to her own Jewish identity both at the time of the war and in its aftermath.

For Jackie, as for me, the exodus cannot be separated from her family’s quest to find a place of security and happiness amidst the historical turbulence of twentieth-century Europe. Her own consciousness of that struggle only dates from her family’s reintegration into occupied France following the exodus of the summer of 1940. The following narrative recreates and examines the trajectory of one family who left Paris as Parisians in 1940 and returned later that summer as European Jews.

The details of the DeCols’ journey create a sharp image of individuals’ plight in the tidal wave of world historic events. Furthermore, the details tell of how gender and race constructed the survival strategies of French refugees. In the first days of the exodus a general pattern emerged: The women left and the men stayed behind to finish business, enlist in defense initiatives, and settle family affairs. Women defined the immediate task as one of shepherding themselves, children, and grandparents to safety and salvaging family valuables. Often their first question was not so much where to go, but what to bring.

FAMILY FORTUNES LOST AND FOUND

“We decided to take only precious items. But what did we have that was precious?” Jackie recounted, laughing.

“Boots! New boots and books. I brought along my favorite book, La joie des moeurs.” She shook her head to think that a book was the most valuable possession she owned at age 17. Of course, her mother held up the practical end and like most women on the road packed up a portable kitchen.

Like many Parisians following the flow of civilian foot soldiers, the bifurcated family of women left through the Porte d’Orleans. The women followed the path that overpasses the Seine River and carried them past Versailles, through Rambouillet, and across the wheat fields that extend toward Chartres. Other cars and pedestrians routed themselves south through the Porte d’Italie or through Ville Juive. What all the refugees shared in common was the absence of a firm sense of where they would actually end up at the end of the day’s long and sun-soaked walk.

The DeCol women were not the only French to select their most valuable objects. As the young girl and two women tracked along the road to Chartres, they encountered a museum of items discarded along the road. To their great fortune the women found a three wheeled cart apparently abandoned by a magazine vendor. Grabbing the wagon and stocking it with their own valuables, the women lightened their load. Jackie was struck that items that refugees had deemed valuable at the moment of departure lost their value in direct proportion to their weight and the distance people had to carry them. Only the smallest and most useful objects maintained their value during the exodus. Even sentimental companions like puppies wandered abandoned along the road. Seemingly banal items like baskets, pots and shoes soared in value as refugees exchanged items between each other or with the road.

The cathedral town of Chartres, known best for its stained glass windows depicting biblical scenes in a colorful visual display, is about an hour’s ride on today’s train from Paris. The trip can be made in about 8 hours on bike. By foot, under the hot sun, the refugees moved at a slow, encumbered pace. After some time Jackie’s grandmother, like so many other elderly refugees, felt unable to continue the journey. The two younger women searched among the stalled cars, the jockeying bicycles, and the prodding pedestrians, trying to persuade a willing driver to accommodate an elderly person. The DeCols found a good samaritan, but for families less fortunate, the strain of the road forced younger generations to part with older generations, hopeful that the Germans would take mercy on the elderly fallen behind. Many narrators often admitted that the young represented the future and had to be saved before those of the passing generation. Other stories of selfishness and competition between refugees permeate refugees’ memories of life on the road. It is impossible to gauge whether generosity outweighed selfishness, but in many postwar narratives the selfishness of the French toward each other often is invoked as an explanation of why the Germans so easily defeated the country. The theme of selfishness transcends issues of practicality and serves as a kind of moral explanation of why the nation suffered the punishment of occupation. The theme of “just punishment” pervades refugee narratives and will be further discussed later in this essay. In the case of the DeCols, their efforts to find their grandmother transportation met with reward. At an early juncture in their journey, the grandmother took her place in the back seat of a slow-moving sedan. All three women said their good-byes and promised to meet up in Chartres. Jackie’s mother instructed her mother-in-law to check into a hotel room and to wait for them at the train station.

VIOLENCE AND DEATH SHATTER ILLUSIONS

“We had no sense of reality,” Jackie exclaimed. “We thought that we’d be able to actually find a vacant hotel room in the midst of the exodus.” The moment of illusion had nearly passed; however, the women did not expect what awaited them. They returned to their pilgrimage without delay.

“Soon we began to hear airplanes firing. Everyone said they were Italians, but I didn’t really know.” With excitement and horror Jackie explained the sound of the planes, still vivid in her imagination after a half century.

“The planes fired—tac tac tac—bombing these completely innocent refugees,” she said. According to Jackie, no soldiers lingered among the refugees to warrant such a blatant attack on harmless civilians. For the refugees, this first air attack unleashed the surreal sense of the situation and regardless of where refugees were on the road, they seem to universally have been at the same place when the Italian air strike occurred. Such is the Imprint of cultural lore on individual narratives. Confronted with the violence, Jackie lost all connection with her former world. Her narrative description of that moment in her flight changed, too. Rather than describing a scene from her own life, Jackie, like many others who remembered their encounters with violence, described their own story relying more on the tools of fiction.

“At the bottom of it all, I was excited by the adventurous aspect of the moment,” she remembered. Jackie likened herself to her cousins, who also had “fond” memories of being attacked.

“I found the experience exalting, like it was an astonishing and dangerous vacation, and I’m not some kind of idiot,” she proclaimed in self-defense.

What is remarkable and fascinating about civilians’ stories of their encounters with combat, especially young boys and girls, is that they resemble so much soldiers’ stories of combat adventure and bravery. They, too, hold on to the categories of casualties and survivors. For Jackie, the banal and the extraordinary combined in such a way that her own life seemed scripted by someone else. Of course, her life, along with the millions of other French and Belgian refugees, was being controlled by someone else, the German, and to a lesser degree, the French high command.

From the vantage point of the road, however, the responsible parties seemed very far away from the ...