Resistance - book

RÉSISTANCE, by AGNÈS HUMBERT (Bloomsbury, NY, 2004)

This book first appeared in France in 1946. The subtitle describes it very well, A Woman’s Journal of Struggle and Defiance in Occupied France. It is an extremely interesting book for a variety of reasons.

When the Nazis marched into Paris in 1940, Humbert was a respected art historian with a good job in a museum, a divorced mother of two sons, a left-wing intellectual and 43 years of age. She was comfortable and not what one would consider a likely candidate for the French resistance movement. But almost instantaneously she helped found one of the first resistance movements in the country, rounding up nine others of similar persuasions. This group began meeting in secret and published leaflets and a small newspaper to counter the Nazi propaganda that was rampant. She helped compose and typed these illegal documents and delivered them around Paris, sometimes keeping them rolled up in her stockings. Her group soon learned of other similar groups and a large resistance movement was formed. Unfortunately, after only 10 months she and the other members of her group were discovered by the Nazis, arrested, and sentenced, some to death, and Humbert to five years in prison. This book is her account of these years, written as a journal or diary it recounts her experiences founding the resistance group and her four years in various Nazi prison camps.

During the early phases of the occupation, women like Humbert were not sent to concentration camps but, rather, to work camps where they were forced to perform labor of various kinds. While there were no gas chambers, life in these camps was not much better than life in the concentration camps when it came to food and treatment in general. The women were always hungry, dressed in rags, forced to perform hard labor ten or more hours a day, under extremely adverse circumstances, and lived in dormitories with little in the way of sanitation or other comforts. There is no doubt they suffered terribly. Humbert herself was eventually nicknamed “Gandhi” as she had lost so much weight during her awful experiences. She recorded these experiences, not always on a daily basis, but often, and in a prose style that makes you feel at times you were right there with her. She had a fine eye for detail and a remarkable ability to register fairly objectively the horrors of unreasonable brutality as well as occasional acts of unusual kindness. Being moved several times from one camp to another, she was often thrown together with women from several countries, sometimes murderers, prostitutes, petty thieves, the wives of Jews, and, of course, many women of the resistance. At times they were also able to communicate with male prisoners as well, and somehow they managed to get at least some news of how things were going in the war. They also managed to communicate with each other by speaking through the cracks under their cell doors, through the ventilation systems, and whatever means they could invent. By and large the prisoners helped each other and many became fast friends for life. Through it all they waited patiently, knowing that someday the allies would be triumphant and things would return to normal. Humbert never ceased her resistance as even when forced to work in a rayon factory she found a means to sabotage the spools she produced, and later, when forced to make wooden crates, she weakened the nails so her crates would soon fall apart. She absolutely refused to do anything to further the Nazi cause even at great risk to herself.

As you read further and further into this account of human misery, brutality, and inhumanity you begin to wonder how it could have been that Humbert was able to keep such a journal going, as it became obvious that most of the time she had no paper or pens or even time for such an endeavor. As the entire journal is written in the first person and the present tense, and is so realistic as to completely captivate you, it is somewhat of a surprise to learn that much of the book was written after the fact. This of course raises the question of memory and accuracy and makes you wonder if perhaps much of it was simply made up after the fact. Perhaps it glorified her role, or the roles of others, perhaps her anger led her to extremes of subjectivity and mischaracterization. It is my impression that she remained remarkably objective and reported things and events pretty much as they must have occurred. Humbert was obviously a very intelligent woman with a fine memory. She began writing this account almost as soon as she was freed and back in Paris. It must have still been fresh in her mind, and the experiences she recounts are not the kinds of things one would be likely to either forget or make up. The first ten months of the resistance were written at the time, and her experiences at the very end of the war were likewise documented mostly as they occurred. She also somehow had managed to keep a book of Descartes with her during her ordeal and made some occasional notes in it. It is the actual period of her incarceration that she reconstructed. But she did this with considerable precision, with the actual names of the people she encountered, the towns and prisons she passed through, even the occasional glimpses of the outside, the flowers, spring, the fresh air, the joys of survival and friendship, and so on. There is little to indicate any form of fabrication or dishonesty. She is exceptionally modest throughout, especially at the end of the war when she was put in charge of organizing some towns and, more importantly, an anti-Nazi investigation, for which she was later given commendations. If anyone believes the French did not resist the German occupation they should read this account of these remarkably brave and dedicated French women who simply refused to give up.