Experience and Expression: Women, the Nazis, and the Holocaust

Seven. Paths of Resistance: French Women Working from the Inside

SEVEN Paths of Resistance: French Women Working from the Inside Judith Greenberg Scholarship about the French Resistance has paid less attention to the efforts of women than those of men. Why has this been the case? Renée Poznanski attributes some of the neglect to the definition of resistance as a military and political phenomenon.1 Since women were more often involved in the social infrastructure, recognizing their contributions demands a shift in thinking about the nature of resistance. A broader definition has been offered by Brana Gurewitsch: “any act or course of action taken between 1933 and May 8, 1945 that directly defied Nazi laws, policies, and ideology and that endangered the lives of those who engaged in such actions.”2 According to this definition, men and women, Jews and non-Jews, engaged in acts of resistance. An understanding of resistance that takes into account these insights allows scholarship to incorporate oral history and stories of women who worked not in the military but from the “inside”—domains of hiding spaces, clandestine routes, and alternate “homes” created to sustain lives. The invisibility of scholarship about women coincides with the larger tendency to recognize actions privileged by the dominant, male culture. Once we begin to explore the question of silence around women, we engage complex issues of gender and representation. The absence of women in the discourse of resistance history reflects what Luce Irigaray refers to as the invisibility of “woman”—her position outside phallocentric discourse. We thus face the challenge of rethinking resistance discourse to recognize the significant contributions of women during this horrific period of history. 131 132 Judith Greenberg I will discuss the “inside” activities of two women, one Jewish and one Protestant, who worked actively as resistants in France—Denise Siekierski (aka Colibri) and Madeleine Barot—highlighting instances in which gender affected their narratives. Denise Siekierski worked first for the EI (Éclaireurs Israëlites) and the Sixième, Jewish volunteer youth organizations that helped hide and support refugees, and then for the Group for Action against Deportation (Groupe d’Action Contre la Déportation), informally known as the “Service André,” a Jewish resistance organization headed by Joseph Bass (aka Monsieur André). Madeleine Barot was the secretary general of the CIMADE (Comité Inter-Mouvements auprès des Évacués), the Inter-Movement Committee for Refugees from 1940 through the end of the war which began as a collection of many Christian youth groups involved in social service and eventually turned its focus to the rescue of Jews in France. Both women risked their lives and committed themselves fully to saving others. I will describe some of their activities, using their own accounts as much as possible, and examine the ways in which gender affected their roles as resistants. These are only two of many women involved in resistance work in France. Their stories illuminate aspects of women’s resistance that often go unnoticed: the attention they gave to children and “undesirable” women such as prostitutes, the patriarchal as well as the tyrannical power structures they needed to subvert, and their vulnerabilities to—and abilities to manipulate—conventional thinking. Their narratives help us reconsider how we define resistance, elicit more stories of women’s bravery, and, hopefully, direct our attention to areas where women can and do continue to help others. It may be tempting to point out that gender does not appear as the primary focal point in either woman’s account of her activities. Some scholars argue that the suffering of the Holocaust was “beyond gender .”3 Indeed, the commitment to saving and helping people joined rather than divided men and women working in resistance movements. And both of these women worked closely with and in similar capacities as men. For two years, Denise Siekierski worked directly for and with “Monsieur André.” Madeleine Barot was in frequent contact with Pastor Marc Beogner, the president of the French Protestant Church, and although their approaches and philosophies differed, they often coordinated plans together. Indeed, focusing on the role of gender in resistance is a slippery project. For one, we want to avoid making totalizing claims about women ’s resistance based on these two narratives. Further, gender itself is not a simple concept. Judith Butler makes us aware that: Paths of Resistance 133 If one “is” a woman that is surely not all one is; the term fails to...