Two Tales from Wartime Paris

This year’s VE Day commemoration, marked as always with a public holiday, a ceremony at the Arc de Triomphe and moving events in towns and villages all over France, seemed especially poignant. It is exactly 80 years since the end of World War II in Europe and each year, fewer and fewer of those whom the French Ministry of Defense referred to as “the last surviving witnesses of the war” are in attendance.  We must accept that soon, there will be none at all. We will have to rely on the memories they have written down or recorded to understand what happened and what life in those turbulent times was like for ordinary citizens.   

Two recently published books, based on true stories from the period and both set mainly, although not exclusively, in Paris, add much to our understanding. The Paris Girl by Francelle Bradford White tells the story of Andrée, just 19 when war broke out, who was gradually drawn into a Resistance group, eventually playing such a key role that she would be awarded two of France’s highest honours, the Croix de Guerre and the Légion d’Honneur.  Star Crossed by Heather Dune Macadam and Simon Worrall focuses on the love between two young people, one Jewish, one Catholic, during the Nazi occupation, a relationship set against family opposition and the horrors of persecution.  Both books provide much fascinating period detail and both tell gripping human stories.      

The Paris Girl 

In May 1939, 19-year-old Andrée Griotteray started work at the Préfecture de Police in Paris. A year later, as Paris was occupied, German officers took over the building and she began small acts of defiance which gradually turned into a full-blown involvement in a resistance network. The teenager who had written an excited diary entry in May 1940 describing her “beautiful new hat … a stunning navy-blue color,” was, on September 15th that year expressing her disgust at seeing German soldiers all over Paris and writing resolutely that “Hitler has to be stopped.” This book, written by her daughter Francelle, tells the remarkable story of Andrée’s war, based on the diaries she kept, on her later reminiscences and on Francelle’s in-depth research in French archives and interviews with people who lived through the events alongside her mother.   

Andrée began by stealing blank ID cards from her office, already a risky act given that it was full of German officials. They could be handed on to Jews and others trying to flee Paris. Soon, she was helping her brother Alain by going into work early and typing up material for the underground newspaper, La France, which he had founded and taking dictation from Resistance sources over the phone, typing it up and delivering it to secret drop-off points. Descriptions of her slipping clandestine material out of her typewriter when German officers passed through her office and politely refusing their invitations to dinner reveal her sang-froid, something which was later to save her life.

Andrée agreed to act as a courier for the Resistance network Orion, crossing France by train, at first with intelligence material sewn into her suitcase and later with gold coins sewn into her girdle.  It all fed into the network’s creation of an escape route over the Pyrenees, which allowed French citizens intending to join the allied forces, Jews and pilots who had been shot down to flee France.  Andrée understood the dangers she faced and had pragmatically sewn a cyanide pill into her bra in case she was captured.  When she was arrested one day in Bordeaux, it was her quick-thinking which saved her: she calmly advised the Gestapo officer to phone her office in Paris and ask her German bosses to vouch for her. 

The Paris Girl is full of descriptions of everyday life in occupied Paris, of curfews and rationing, of swastikas flying from official buildings and German soldiers greeting each other with Heil Hitler and it will interest anyone who wants to delve into World War II history in Paris. But it is Andrée’s personal story, her bravery and resourcefulness in such dangerous times, which make the book unique.  The young woman who received a letter from Charles de Gaulle days after the Liberation, awarding her a Croix de Guerre, remains an inspiration 80 years on.      

All the proceeds of The Paris Girl will go toward Alzheimer’s Research.  

Star Crossed 

This is the story of the love between a young Jewish art student, Annette Zelman and Jean Jausion, student, aspiring poet and son of an eminent Catholic doctor. It was pieced together by the authors from letters, archival sources and an interview with Annette’s younger sister Michele, conducted in 2020 when she had reached the grand age of 92. It takes us back to Paris during the war years, beginning just as Annette had been accepted as a student at the prestigious École des Beaux Arts and was spending her leisure time in the cafés of the Latin Quarter, getting to know Sartre, de Beauvoir and Picasso at the Café Flore and falling in love with Jean. 

Both families opposed their relationship and the arguments they had with their parents were upsetting, but much more worrying was the growing persecution of the Jews in German-occupied Paris. That made life increasingly dangerous for Annette and her family and it made the idea of a Jewish girlfriend for their son more and more unwelcome to the Jausion parents. The authors spell out how Annette and other Jewish students were forbidden to attend lectures, then how curfews and other restrictions were introduced and synagogues were bombed. After that, came the round-ups and deportations and however familiar you are with this dark history, it will hit you anew when it involves people you have come to know through reading their story. 

The description of Annette’s arrest on May 22nd, 1942 is heart-rending. As she sits alone in a flat on the Boulevard de Strasbourg on the night before her wedding, the Germans arrive to take her away. The authors quote the chillingly matter-of-fact memo sent by SS Captain Theodor Dannecker ordering her arrest. He had learned that “the Arian, Jean Jausion” was to marry and wrote, “I have therefore ordered the arrest of the Jewess Zelman and authorized her detention at the Tourelles camp.” Annette and Jean never saw each other again. Neither of them survived the war.  The closing chapters of the book recount what happened to them, revealing the “terrible secret” of how they came to be betrayed.        

As World War II recedes from living memory, the history books can still provide the facts, remind us what happened and prompt reflection at a time when there are rumblings of conflict in Europe and we know that antisemitism has not been fully defeated.  But books like these two, relating how ordinary people were impacted by the extraordinary times in which they lived, make it all so much more real.  Andrée stands for all those brave enough to resist tyranny.  Annette’s story replaces a statistic with a human being as, nearly eighty years after her murder, she is mourned by her sister who asks ‘How could such a beautiful, creative girl die like that?’  To read either book is to understand a little more about one of the 20th century’s most important stories. 

The Paris Girl by Francelle Bradford White, Citadel Press 2024 

Star-Crossed by Heather Dune Macadam and Simon Worrell, Citadel Press 2023