On 31 May 1944, 22-year-old Marianne Cohn, one of the first couriers for the organisation of Jewish scouts, was arrested by a German patrol as she was smuggling 28 Jewish children across the border from France into Switzerland. In prison earlier she had written what would become one of the defining poems of the Vichy years: “I shall betray tomorrow, not today. / Today, pull out my fingernails, / I shall not betray. / You do not know the limits of my courage, / I, I do ... ” On the night of 8 July, the Gestapo took Cohn and five other members of the resistance to an isolated spot and beat them to death with spades. She could have been rescued, but she refused, fearing repercussions against the children.
Cohn’s story perfectly illustrates an important aspect of Robert Gildea’s new history of the French resistance: that there were many extremely brave women and many Jewish ones, that the risks they took were enormous, and that for the most part they have not been sufficiently recognised. Had it not been for her poem, it is unlikely that anyone would have heard of Cohn. Of the 1,038 people made Compagnons de le Libération after the war, just 0.6% were women. It was only in May this year that Germaine Tillion and Geneviève de Gaulle, two of France’s most admired resisters, were honoured by symbolic reburial in the Panthéon in Paris.
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