AN INDOMITABLE LADY

We were at the restaurant

For three years from 1941 Marie* received a visit from the postman on Saturday, but the letters she received were not ordinary letters. They contained news about the Resistance: scribbled reports of actions and details of the occupying German forces.  It was her job to turn these manuscripts into a newsletter and then to take the typewriter from beneath her bed and to type them onto a stencil.  This she put in an envelope and delivered on Sunday evening. 

In all other respects she was a model citizen.  Born in 1920, she worked in a bakery and ever since France had fallen and the seaside town where she had grown up had been invaded, she had seethed with resentment.  She joined La Résistance.

Her work went on, week in week out, for three years.  Then, in the spring of 1944, the Gestapo came knocking.  Her little cell had been betrayed.  She was carted away roughly, her hands bound, and thrown into the interrogation prison. 

She learned her contacts had been arrested too. As she had no information Marie was released after a few days to a French prison where life was austere, but bearable. She wrote a letter home to her parents.  A letter which she still has.

Then came D-Day and the decision to remove all Resistance prisoners to camps in the east.  The Germans put her, and thousands of others, on overcrowded trains that rattled north and east.  No-one knew where they were going.

After an eternity they arrived in Berlin.  The station signs said so.  She could see German civilians on the platforms, waiting for their trains. But no guard came to unlock the doors.  Seeing her behind the bars of her carriage, a youth drew his finger across his throat and smiled.  She was still only 23.

Eventually they arrived in a camp in Czechoslovakia, a camp infinitely worse than her French prison.  A camp into which inmates were supposed to walk but from which they were not supposed to return.  Rations were designed to keep a fit person alive only for nine months.  Being small, Marie survived ten.

She lost her name and became a number: 384450.   Marie had to learn to say her number in German and to understand commands, but she resolved never to accept the German language, never to speak it.

After a few weeks an orderly issued the prisoners with pencils, paper, envelopes. They could write home, he said.  Of course, she fell to with a will, letting her parents know she was alive and would someday return.  She handed the letter to the grey-clad orderly with thanks in her eyes.

A month went by, two months, then Marie and a few other prisoners were called out to stand in the prison yard in the drizzling rain, shivering in their thin prison rags.  Eventually the commandant came out on a balcony. “I have good news for you” he said. “We have received a delivery of mail.” 

The joy she felt could be imagined.  But it was short-lived.   The letter she was given seemed familiar.  It was the one she herself had written two months before, which had never been posted.  The Germans had played a trick. “To undermine our morale, make us give-up,” she said.

Then it was winter, cold and grim in the heart of the Continent.  Marie became emaciated, but somehow she survived the starvation rations. The days lengthened, the grass grew again, leaves appeared on the trees - and then, suddenly, she and her fellow prisoners saw the Germans had left.  No helmets sat behind the guns in the watchtowers.

Hours later a jeep pulled up at the gates.  She heard American voices.  She rushed forward and threw open her arms.  She wanted to speak, to speak in French again, or even to say ‘Hallo’ in English.  But no words came.  Her throat, her mind, seized. As though the Germans wanted to leave her with one last humiliation the only sound she could make was the hated German word ‘Wilkommen.’

She was speaking to me in French and as the memory came flooding back as vivid today as that day 67 years ago, a tear rolled down her ninety-one year old face. “J’étais très vexée,” she said.  I was very cross with myself.

I laid my hand on hers and we resumed our meal in the restaurant by the sea.  She had just consumed a large plate of ‘fruits de mer,’ as vigorously as a woman half her age, and now had embarked on an enormous confection of dessert.

“You may be small,” I said, “but you have an indomitable soul.”

I was a guest at a family party and we sat looking out across the beach and to the sea and the rocks beyond.  I had eaten the best sea bass I had ever tasted and was now eating profiteroles, filled with ice cream, and covered with a lush sauce of dark chocolate.   Marie’s experience in the starvation camp heightened my appreciation of the food.

“I did what I did for love,” she said later. “Love of my country, love of freedom.  I was lucky.  I returned.”  And afterwards she gave me the kisses and the bear hug that only someone who knows that she is lucky can really give.

*I have changed her name.