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By Root 2574 0

Most of the women, including Toquette Jackson, had their heads shaved. Virginia d’Albert-Lake was one of the lucky few whose hair was left. They were then issued camp uniforms–baggy trousers without belt, a pyjama shirt and a loose robe. Veteran prisoners warned the new arrivals not to drink the water, which was infected with typhoid. It would be better, they said, to drink the foul-tasting but boiled ersatz coffee. Their daily ration, apart from a quarter litre of pseudo-coffee, consisted of a half litre of soup made from swede and beetroot, 30 grams of margarine and a slice of bread. It was insufficient even for women who were not doing manual labour; the diet could not sustain women doing manual labour through twelve-hour days in factories. Ravensbrück was not a death camp, where prisoners were gassed or shot en masse. It was a place where the Third Reich’s enemies were made to die by starvation, overwork and disease. The prisoners from Romainville were sent into quarantine for two weeks, while they pleaded for any news at all from France. Maisie Renault remembered, ‘With a sort of devotion, they repeated, “Soon, France [will be] liberated”.’ Paris was nearly free, thanks in part to women like Toquette Jackson, Virginia d’Albert-Lake and Maisie Renault. They, who had done the most to set Paris free, faced, not liberation, but slavery.

South of Paris at Rambouillet, Charles de Gaulle pondered how ferociously the Germans would crush the uprising and defend Paris from the Allies. His French Second Armoured Division commander, General Jacques Leclerc, was ready that morning of 24 August to invade Paris and save the insurgents. Leclerc’s real name was Philippe François Marie Leclerc, Vicomte de Hautecloque. He had adopted the nom de guerre ‘Leclerc’, when he joined de Gaulle in England in 1940, to protect his wife and six children in France. It did not work for long. The Vichy authorities discovered his identity, seized his chateau and evicted his family. Leclerc had fought in West and North Africa, leading his division of French and African soldiers across the Sahara to connect with the British Eighth Army for the Tunisia campaign, and also in Italy.

As commander of the French Second Armoured Division, whose tanks had just liberated Alençon and Argentan in Normandy with General George Patton’s Third Army, Leclerc had been assigned to lead the first Allied force into the city. It was a tarnished honour. The United States had made certain that Leclerc’s division expelled all its African colonial troops before it left Algeria via England for France. General Walter Bedell-Smith, Eisenhower’s Chief of Staff, had advised, ‘It is highly desirable that the [French] division should be composed of white personnel, which points to the second armored division, which has only one quarter native troops and is the only French division which could be made 100 per cent white.’ Most French units had large numbers of African troops, but the American racism that had prevented Eugene Bullard from transferring from the French to the American army in the First World War had not vanished in the Second. The American armed forces segregated their units by race, and they expected the same of the French. De Gaulle was proud of the African soldiers, who had fought honourably for France and suffered bestial treatment as prisoners of the Nazis. Although he saw no reason to exclude them from the liberation of Paris, he acceded to pressure from his stronger ally. Only white soldiers, French and Republican Spaniards, came with Leclerc to liberate Paris.

Clara de Chambrun rose at six o’clock on 24 August. The French police who usually guarded the Palais du Luxembourg were gone, and her sedate quarter had given way to insurrection: ‘This guerrilla warfare was directed against small enemy detachments, isolated trucks and motor cars.’ The skirmishes irritated Clara as much as they did the Germans. At nine o’clock, a friend called to urge her to leave at once. The caller ‘was credibly informed that in an hour the Senate buildings would be blown up and that