A Train in Winter by Caroline Moorehead

hundreds, to denounce Jews, gypsies, black marketeers, and neighbours keeping pigs in their gardens. It would later be said that over half of the three million denunciations received during the years of occupation had been motivated because of the rewards offered, 40 per cent by politics and 10 per cent as acts of revenge.
    A war of posters had been declared. For every message put up on the walls of Paris by resisters was to be seen a German counterpart, promising generous rewards to those who reported ‘paid agents of foreign powers’ and ‘hidden Jews’. On Christmas Eve 1940, Parisians woke to a message, in bold red and black letters in both French and German, telling of the execution of a 28-year-old engineer called Bonsergent, shot for jostling a German officer in the street. The posters were soon torn down, and the places where they had hung were marked by little bunches of flowers. Daily, it was becoming harder to feel high spirited about defying the Germans.
    In this battle of words, the French right, supported and nurtured by Abetz, was coming into its own. Jean Paulhan, the former editor of the prestigious Nouvelle Revue Française , at the centre of the French literary world for over three decades, had departed (and gone to help the Underground press). His job had been given to the Germanophile Nietzschean Drieu la Rochelle, who vowed to put an end to its ‘Jewish and bellicose’ tone. A pro-Vichy former philosopher and politician called Marcel Déat was running L’Oeuvre , and the pro-Fascist Robert Brassilach was editing Je Suis Partout: both explored themes of decadence caused by Jews and Freemasons, and extolled the virility and adventurousness of the Nazis. Emerging from years of controversy, Jacques Doriot’s virulently anti-communist Parti Populaire Français, and Colonel François de la Rocque’s Croix de Feu were becoming popular with those young royalists and Catholics who liked these parties’ Hitlerian style.
    For all this, the resisters were holding their own. The months of relative tranquillity had allowed the PCF to regroup and the Underground magazines to flourish. Georges Politzer, who declared that he would henceforth regard writers in occupied France as belonging either to ‘legal literature’ or to the ‘literature of treason’, was hard at work on a reply to a particularly hateful speech given in Paris by Alfred Rosenberg, author of some of the main Nazi ideological creeds, on the subject of race and blood. L’Université Libre , in the hands of the Politzers, Hélène and Jacques Solomon and Charlotte and her husband, was doing well.
    The Musée de l’Homme had brought out the first number of its new paper, Résistance , in which its energetic young editor, the polar ethnographer Boris Vildé, wrote: ‘To resist, is already to preserve one’s heart and one’s brain. But above all, it must be to act, to do something concrete, to perform reasoned and useful actions.’ There was only one goal, Vildé declared, a goal to be shared by all resisters, regardless of their political beliefs, and that was to bring about the ‘rebirth of a pure and free France’. Here and there, as the freezing winter began to ease, the first acts of armed resistance, of the sabotage of trains and the blowing up of German depots, were being planned. What the occupiers most feared, the transformation of isolated and spontaneous gestures of rebellion into concerted acts of hostility, was just about to start. And in these, acting together or on their own, women of all ages and from all over France, such as Betty and Cécile, Charlotte, Hélène and Maï, generous-spirited and tough-minded, were about to play a crucial role.
    Away from Paris, France itself was slowly turning into a police state, on the German model, a country of small internment camps, in Sarthe, Maine-et-Loire, Charente, Pyrénées-Atlantiques, Loiret and Doubs, dirty, unheated, unhealthy places in which, in the extreme cold of