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many of the industrial workers, proved an excellent recruiting ground for new members. It was in Ivry, in the suburbs to the north of Paris, that Danielle found Madeleine Doiret, known to her friends as Mado, the daughter of a former groom who now ran a small lime and cement factory. Mado, who was the eldest of five children, interrupted her studies for the baccalaureate to learn shorthand and typing. With the declaration of war, however, so many male teachers had been mobilised that she became a temporary teacher in Yonne. Mado, like Cécile and Betty, had been drawn into politics by the Spanish Civil War. Having fled Paris in May 1940 during the great exodus to the south, she returned to Ivry and offered her services to the Jeunesse Communiste.
    Delighted with her secretarial skills, they asked her to type texts on to stencils, which were then printed by her father at night in the hidden cellar of their house on an electric mimeograph. Both she and her father were immensely proud of their machine, which was one of the first of its kind in Paris. In the evenings, with the help of her brother Roger, who carried the packets in a rucksack, Mado dropped off the tracts at various distribution points in Ivry, ready to be picked up by other young resisters.
    Early in 1941, Danielle asked Mado to go underground and work for her full time. So she moved out of her parents’ house in Ivry and into a small flat in the 15th, where she lived under a false name, and composed articles calling on workers to engage in acts of resistance against Vichy and the occupiers, cast in the form of posthumous letters written by men executed by the Gestapo. Mado was just 20. Her work with the Resistance meant breaking off all contact with her family and her friends. At night, alone, having spoken to no one she knew all day, she sometimes lay on her bed and cried from loneliness.
    Mado was not, of course, alone in believing that opposing Vichy and the Germans was worth making sacrifices for, even though at this stage of the war it was sometimes hard to see precisely what was being achieved. Nor was she alone in making these sacrifices. As the winter of 1940 wore on, several of the women working full time for the Resistance decided to send their children to live with grandparents or foster families, to keep them safe, and to feel freer themselves. Maï and Georges Politzer, constantly fretting about the dangers of their clandestine life, had already sent their son Michel to live with his grandparents away from Paris.
    Not far from Mado in Ivry lived a good friend of hers, Georgette Rostaing, who had worked for the transport police before the war, and who now began to help her 18-year-old brother Pierre recruit members for the Jeunesse Communiste and the JFdeF. Georgette, too, had been drawn into the web by the civil war in Spain and she too knew Danielle and Marie-Claude, and helped out at the JFdeF. She was a single mother, not an easy position for a young woman in Pétain’s France.
    One day Pierre, who was on the wanted list of young communists, fell into the hands of the police. Georgette did not hesitate. She left her little girl, Pierrette, who had just turned nine, with her mother and took over her brother’s job as liaison officer and distributor of clandestine material; and, later, of explosives and detonators. She was a sunny, good-hearted young woman, like Danielle rather overweight, with a mass of dark hair and a fringe, and she could be seen tottering around Ivry on very high heels.

    Georgette Rostaing, who loved to sing

    Pierrette, Georgette’s daughter
    Even as a small child, Pierrette was taken to meetings of the JFdeF, to listen to Danielle and her friends make plans about acts of Resistance against the Germans and she was never sent out of the room when members of the Resistance came to the house. One of them taught her to tell the time. As Georgette would say, ‘we are in this all together, as a family’. Instinctively, Pierrette