The Forgotten Nine

The BBC ran an interesting story about the forgotten heroines of the French Resistance (FR) .....

T: Clockwise from top right: Zinka, Nicole, Josée, Zaza
M: Hélène Podliasky
B: Clockwise from top right: Jacky, Lon, Mena and Guigui

 .... most, if not all of whom were almost totally forgotten about after the war ended.

The concentrated on the story of Hélène Podliasky and her friends aka 'The Nine', who were part of the fifty per cent of the French Resistance who were women ... a fact ignored by France after the war, where of the 1,038 Compagnons de la Libération medals handed out by French President Charles de Gaulle, to those he considered to be the leaders of the Resistance, there were only six for women (four of whom were already dead) included. The award was created in 1940 to "reward persons or military and civilian communities who have distinguished themselves in the work of liberation of the France and its Empire".

The order was closed to new recipients in 1946, and only 1,061 companion crosses have been awarded, with 271 awarded posthumously, including 60 people who were not French ... the last recipient, Hubert Germain, who was 101 when he died on the 12th of October 2021, would be eligible, should his family want it, to be buried in the crypt of the Memorial to Fighting France, where a tomb was set aside for the last Companion ... his death ended the order, and so the role of the brave women from France, Spain and the low countries (Belgium, and the Netherlands) who joined the FR will never really be as well recognised in France as it should have been.

The BBC story is essentially a brief description of the capture, imprisonment and then brave escape of nine resistance companions, from a forced 'death march' from the Ravensbrück concentration camp, where they had been forced to work in a labour camp in Leipzig making armaments. Whilst in the camp they were regularly starved, tortured, stripped naked and forced to stand in the icy snow for inspections ... but after allied bombing in April 1945, the 5,000 women inmates were to be marched further East (even though the war was totally lost, and in fact by April 1945 Berlin was already on the point of being surrounded by the Russians, many SS guards continued to treat prisoners appallingly).

Realising that the march was intended to kill many of them either by exhaustion, cold or starvation, the nine friends vowed to escape, and whilst on the march they waited until they were passing ditches with piles of corpses and they all jumped in, lying very still. They were so ragged and emaciated that the guards didn't spot them and the poor women's death march continued eastwards without them. After many days bravely crossing Nazi Germany, starving and with many injuries, the nine all made it to the allied lines and were saved.

Only, like nearly all the other women who had fought for France in the Resistance, to then be forgotten and ignored ... expected to retreat in to the background and resume their old lives. Not unnaturally many suffered deeply from this, but silently tried to recover from their psychological and physical wounds, with no one in France apparently caring to tell their story. In fact it took American author Gwen Strauss, who lives in France and for whom Hélène was her great-aunt, to take up the story of just these nine of the many women of the French Resistance.

Its rather sad that the French failed to publicly recognise the role of the women who fought for its liberation between 1941 and 1945 .... so perhaps this post and the BBC story, and the Gwen Straus book will do a little something to redress the balance.

The Nine: Author Gwen Straus ISBN: 9781838772079