“During the occupation, they became symbols of how to resist with courage and energy a regime of evil and death.”

By Ronald C. Rosbottom

WALKING THE STREETS of Paris, I have occasionally noticed small plaques, often beflowered on national holidays, that remember those who were killed during the liberation of that city in August 1944. Their ages ranged between 17 and 25.

When I wrote When Paris Went Dark — a study of what it was like to live in occupied Paris from 1940-1944 — I kept running into stories about the male and female youth who had harassed the Germans, even when they knew they might be arrested or tortured or even executed.

I wanted to know more; the result is Sudden Courage – Youth In France Confront the Germans. I found a number of young people — boys and girls, women and men, Jews, Gentiles, including Catholic and Protestant, and communists — who had the courage and moral certainty to take up arms against their oppressors, both in reality and metaphorically. Most were still growing up while they were living clandestinely, passing through the same physical and psychological transitions that every adolescent does, yet constantly on the alert for the heavy hand of the Nazis and their collaborators.

Here are some of their stories.

Jacques Lusseyran

Born into a middle-class Parisian family, Jacques was totally blind from the age of seven. For 10 years he developed strategies to deal with his disability and succeeded academically while attending schools with sighted students. At the age of 17, he and a group of friends decided that they had to do something to confront the dark presence of the Germans on French soil. They formed a large cohort with other young people, printed a newspaper, and distributed it widely (even handing it to startled Germans on the streets and in the Paris Metro). To join this group, every postulant had to be interviewed by Jacques. He had developed a fine-tuned skill that allowed him to evaluate potential recruits. Jacques’s uncanny talent for analyzing voice patterns, their tenor, as well as sensing physical reactions, enabled him to predict what sort of resistance member the young person might be. He interviewed more than 600 individuals, and made only one mistake, one that would send him to prison, and then to the infamous Buchenwald concentration camp. He survived all these insults to his mind and body, and returned to Paris after the war, later to become a professor in American universities.

The confidence that he instilled in his peers and in those who were absorbed into their group—the Volunteers of Liberty—was of immeasurable benefit to their actions. His courage became a byword for other groups. If a blind boy can fool the Germans, then what excuse do I have for not resisting their presence?

Maroussia Naïtchenko

Maroussia was the daughter of a French aristocrat and a Ukrainian communist. Her father does not figure much in her story, but her mother, who had refused to be limited by her genealogy, supported this young girl’s desire to confront the anti-communist rigidity of the Third Republic (which ended with the French defeat in 1940). At just 12 years old (and lying about her age), Maroussia had joined the French Communist Party, and by 1940 had begun a clandestine life in espionage. Even in 1940 and early 1941, when Moscow forbade all communists to act against the Germans (because of the Soviet-German pact of non-aggression), she and her young comrades still managed to harass the occupier by passing messages, spying on their activities, helping to hide downed Allied pilots and more.

Once Hitler invaded the Soviet Union, the communists in France were instantly freed of any restrictions, and soon became the best organized resistance group in the country. Maroussia was called increasingly to be a message courier, to transfer weapons between resistance groups, to gather military information for London and the Free French, and to help build small but potent resistance cadres throughout the Parisian region.

Geneviève de Gaulle

The daughter of Charles de Gaulle’s brother, Geneviève, was just 19 years old in 1940 when she joined the Resistance. During one mission, she was asked to retrieve secret messages hidden in books at a bookstore. It was a trap; French police were waiting for her and others. When the officers realized that they had arrested Charles de Gaulle’s niece, they informed the Germans who immediately took her into custody. She was brutally interrogated and eventually sent to Ravensbrück, a concentration camp for women in Germany. There, she was billeted with other Frenchwomen, and forced to do hard labour. Whenever her name was shouted during roll call, cheers would go up across the camp. By then Charles de Gaulle, virtually unknown in 1940, had become the symbol of France’s resistance against the Germans. In October 1944, Heinrich Himmler, leader of the SS and Gestapo, ordered her removed from the camp and held in a special bunker, where he could use her as a bargaining chip in case the war ended badly for the Nazis. She survived her captivity and was freed in April 1945. After the war, she helped track German war criminals and spoke out on behalf of those who had been deported. In 2015, her remains were transferred to the Panthéon to lie with France’s “grands hommes” in the national mausoleum.

These are but three of the examples that I have used to represent what was an influential, courageous, and persistent array of young folks—many of whom never touched a grenade, bomb or pistol—who worked diligently for more than four years to harass, if not stop, German control of their nation. During the occupation, they became symbols of how to resist with courage and energy a regime of evil and death. Their insistent activity was not enough to chase the Germans from France, but their example served to keep the idea of resistance alive in France, and their martyrdom serves to remind us how much we continue to depend on youth to lead us to question authority.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR: Ronald C. Rosbottom is the author of Sudden Courage: Youth in France Confront the Germans, 1940-1945. A professor of French, European Studies, and Architectural Studies at Amherst College, he is a Chevalier de l’Académie des Palmes Académiques. His previous book, When Paris Went Dark: The City of Light Under German Occupation, 1940-1944, was longlisted for the National Book Award for Nonfiction. He divides his time between Amherst, Massachusetts, and Paris.