Read Online A Train in Winter by Caroline Moorehead - Free Book Online

members were willingly tramping the streets of Paris with flyers in their rucksacks and, for a while at least, they were seldom stopped, neither the Gestapo nor the French police quite believing that such cheerful, healthy girls could have anything to do with the Resistance. As Danielle said, flirting a little with the Germans could yield excellent results. She was exceptionally good at inspiring others, making people feel that there was really no choice but to help.
    It was when rationing started to bite into the lives of families that older women began to join her ranks in a new organisation, L’Union des Femmes Françaises. Watching the queues outside food shops grow ever longer, Danielle saw just how the women’s discontent could effectively be harnessed to the cause. Astutely playing on their sympathies for hungry children, she persuaded some of them to contribute articles to her own clandestine paper— La Voix des Femmes —as well as to other women’s magazines not banned by the Germans.
    Women who had never before engaged in any activity outside their own homes were soon turning out angry articles about food shortages and the German expropriations. They wrote them in short, clear, declamatory sentences. While Vichy preached devotion, modesty and abnegation, Danielle called for activism and rebellion. The Germans became les boches and les brutes nazies . There were references to Joan of Arc, La Pasionaria and the women who stormed the Bastille in 1789. The first street demonstrations, organised by Danielle’s local committees—women occupying food shops where the best produce was reserved for the Germans—passed off peacefully; but the women were getting angrier and more militant.

    A student protest in Paris in the 1930s. Danielle Casanova is fourth from the left
    From the first, the JFdeF had been naturally drawn to the world of clandestine printing. As secretaries and office workers, many of its members already knew all about stencils and roneo machines. The offices where some of them were employed proved the perfect place from which to steal dwindling stocks of paper and ink. Some of Danielle’s colleagues were journalists and were happy to turn their hands to exhortatory flyers and posters. Under the library of the Sorbonne, the warren of cellars and corridors acted as storerooms for the university. Here, among the boxes and books, young university teachers printed news-sheets, laying the wet pages on the shelves to dry, later to be carried away by students in shopping baskets and knapsacks. Concierges in office buildings and apartment blocks, for whom the come and go of postmen was a daily occurrence, became letter drops. Queues turned out to be the perfect places for passing on orders and messages. Prams were ideal for hiding papers; and, later, weapons.
    Danielle, meanwhile, had made efforts to lose some weight and to dress more fashionably, telling friends laughingly that the Germans were far less prone to stop women who looked pretty and well turned out. Her husband Laurent was a prisoner of war in Germany, and to cover her tracks she had taken to moving constantly round the city, seldom sleeping in the same place twice. Maï Politzer and Marie-Claude Vaillant-Couturier were naturally elegant and when the three met in the fashionable cafes of the Boulevard Saint-Germain to discuss strategy and pass on information, they looked like any group of high-spirited women friends, enjoying each other’s company. Over tea in the Galeries Lafayette, Danielle recruited young women to run the JFdeF in other parts of the capital. By now she was working closely with both Betty, liaising through her with the PCF, and Cécile, who was turning out to be an extremely efficient courier. By the end of 1940, twenty-five of the thirty women on the national committee of the JFdeF were active members of the Resistance.
    Not surprisingly, the ceinture rouge , the red belt of communist communes which surrounded Paris, home to