The stories of Janine and Colette are real histories, touched by the myths that have gathered around the resistance over the past eighty or so years but based on actual experience and events. One of these women, Janine de Greef, died on 7 November 2020, aged 95. The other, Colette Marin-Catherine, aged 90, lives in northern France. Film-makers Anthony Diacchino and Alice Doyard made a 25-minute documentary about Colette’s recent visit to the site of the forced labour camp in Nordhausen where her brother died.
Janine de Greef was born in Belgium, the daughter of Elvire, a journalist, and Fernand de Greef, a businessman and linguist. Following the German invasion the family fled to south west France, settling near Bayonne, in 1940, where they became key figures in the operation of an escape line known as ‘Comet’ through which allied servicemen escaped the Nazis. The Comet escape line linked occupied Belgium with neutral Spain, and the teenage Janine — aged 14 at the time of the move from Belgium — became its youngest courier and guide . According to Megan Koreman, writer of Janine’s obituary (Guardian, 9 January 2021) couriers were often young women. Unlike men they would not be expected to be in uniform, and being away from their homes or from daily work would, apparently, tend to arouse less suspicion. The role included escorting servicemen across France and accompanying them by train and bicycle from Bayonne to the last safe house on the Spanish border. The obituary states that De Greef was a crucial link in Comet’s rescue of 287 servicemen and 76 civilians from occupied Europe.
During their time in south west France the de Greef family trod a very dangerous path. Fernand worked as an interpreter at the town hall and Elvire became involved in the black market, from the start ‘with an eye to more than supplementing the family rations’. The family put themselves at double risk of suspicion and exposure. The contacts and deals needed to smuggle goods, however, proved equally useful in smuggling people, as did acquiring the ‘dirt’ on some corrupt officials engaged in the black market themselves. Apparently Elvire didn’t stop at blackmail — again, a tool that must have been as dangerous as it was effective. From 1942 Comet started to help allied airmen who’d been brought down in occupied territory. The airmen were particular targets of German military intelligence, raising the stakes still higher. Elvire was in fact interrogated by the Nazis in 1943, but managed to convince them that the black market was her only area of activity. In 1944 Elvire took her children to Spain and then sent them on to Britain for the remainder of the war.
I finished reading this obituary with admiration not only for Janine but for her mother Elvire, who managed to combine devotion to the family’s survival with supporting the allied war effort, in a most audacious and perilous manner.
For the obituary go to: https://www.theguardian.com/world/2020/dec/13/janine-de-greef-obituary
In Colette’s story too, a powerful mother stands behind the daughter. She motivated her teenage children (Colette must have been very young indeed) to join the resistance in Lorraine during the occupation. The mother and Colette were in one network and her brother Jean-Pierre in another. (I assume the father was involved too: in the documentary there are photographs taken of Colette by her father, secretly, when they visited her brother in prison.) Jean-Pierre was arrested in 1943 or 44 and eventually deported to the Mittelbauw-Dora camp in Germany, where he became part of a group of slave labourers working on the production of V2 missiles. The work itself was very dangerous and many workers died in the course of their manufacture.
The 25-minute documentary shows Colette’s journey to Nordhausen to see the site where her brother was killed, aged 18, in March 1945. The trip is Colette’s first visit to Germany. The film interleaves some shocking wartime footage with the sensitive lens turned on Colette herself and on Lucie Fouble, a 17-year old history student from St Omer, who accompanies Colette on her journey. Lucie is working on a biographical dictionary of the many thousands of people deported from the region in the course of the war. The relationship between Lucie and Colette is touching. Lucie asks her questions tentatively but directly, and the two women, divided in age by over 70 years, form a close bond. The couple travel to Nordhausen by train and to save her walking for any distance Lucie pushes Colette around the town in a wheelchair.
The two women visit the camp; the tunnel where the slave labourers worked on production of the bombs; the location of the hut where her brother died, and the camp crematorium. At times the camera cuts out and at times it withdraws to a respectful distance, so as not to intrude on their emotions.
The visit took place on the anniversary of the start of the Nuremberg trials and was prompted at least in part by Colette’s wish to encourage the young historian in her work. Before this approach Colette had vowed never to visit Germany. Colette’s anger is still evident, directed partly at the tendency to mythologise the camps, and the experience of resistance in general. She declares she has never been to the site of a concentration camp, not being a believer in ‘morbid tourism’. When Lucie asks her how she came to join the resistance, Colette replies: ‘it wasn’t like going into the bank and asking to open a resistance account.’ She is resolutely anti-sentimental, denying that she was close to her brother, or that his loss was the tragedy of her life; though with every reference it’s clear to the viewer that she idealised, if not idolised, him. He was, she declares, a genius, while she as a teenager was ‘an idiot’. She tells us that at his death her mother said that she wished it had been Colette who’d been killed. The pain of this recollection, so many years later, is plain to see.
In Nordhausen a welcoming meal is held in a restaurant where a former Mayor (born, I think, just after the end of the war) attempts a ceremonial but sincere apology to Colette, on behalf of his parents’ generation. Colette is unable to bear the speech and cuts it short, telling everyone to sit down. According to the Director, Anthony Diacchino (interview via the same Guardian link) Colette was given the last word on every step of the filming. If she asked for the recording to be stopped, it was stopped. It seemed to me that Colette was still engaged in her own resistance, that of resisting the packaging or resolution of the past, whatever the motives behind such attempts.
I’m grateful to Anthony Diacchino and producer Alice Doyard for making this film and for the opportunity to get to know Colette. She is an unforgettable character. The makers say that they hoped the experience might see Colette enter a new phase of her life. It’s a heartening thought. Alice Doyard comments on how the film speaks to contemporary times, saying that we can learn from Colette the importance of acts of resistance against tyranny, and from Lucie the importance of examining history to seek its truths rather than live on its myths.
In the film Lucie says she is working on the biographical dictionary because she wants these events to be remembered in France, and never repeated. Colette replies that she has spent 70 years trying to forget them. Clearly, at 90, she hasn’t yet succeeded.
And yet … I don’t quite believe that Colette has ever wanted to forget. I don’t think that she’s dishonest, or feigning emotion in the film, but as with her statements about her brother, something very different from her words comes across. Someone who wanted to forget would not wear her veterans’ resistance uniform with such evident pride, or turn with such biting, uncompromising intelligence on statements or behaviour she sees as falsifying the past.
These two stories of undoubtedly courageous, even heroic women, raise questions I’ve been asking myself for years, and which led in part to my attempt to write in my novel ‘Heartwood’ about an imaginary camp survivor. What about all the many thousands of survivors of the war, and of the death camps, who weren’t members of the resistance, and who either couldn’t, or chose not to place themselves in that category? Colette remarks in passing in the film that only one per cent of people in France were actively resistant to the occupation prior to liberation. She is not a disinterested source, of course, and you must always be sceptical about statistics; but elsewhere, particularly in reading about occupied Paris, I’ve learned about ‘the resisters of the last minute’. I’ve also heard of many instances of reprisals, sometimes amounting to massacre, visited on local populations throughout France by the occupying forces in response to resistance activities. What about the parents who were every bit as devoted to their children’s survival as Elvire and Madame Marin-Catherine, and for that reason did everything they could to prevent them from being involved with the occupier? Where did the lines of resistance cross those of collusion, and even collaboration?
In ‘Heartwood’ Irène is deported because of her Jewish heritage, but the novel is not a Holocaust memoir. It’s about a woman who loses everything: her home, family, her identity, and any sense of trust in humanity — and how, over time, she rebuilds a life. Irène continues to feel like an outsider, whether from the tight social circle into which she marries, or the world of artisans in which she works and from which she gains some pride and satisfaction. Hers could be the story of many women of her times, and of any.
Link to the Guardian documentary:
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