In the spring of 1943, 20-year-old art student Josette Molland was sure of two things: that she was making a good living creating designs for silk weavers in Lyon, and that the German occupation of her country was dire. Bear.
She joins the resistance. Forging documents and transporting them to the famous Dutch-Parisian underground network freed her from her guilt. But this is dangerous.
Less than a year later, Moran was captured by the Gestapo, and she lived a hellish life in Nazi deportations and Nazi concentration camps for women in Ravensbrück and elsewhere. She tried to escape, organized a rebellion against the guards, was beaten, and lived on insects and “what’s under the bark.” But she somehow survived and returned to France.
“I lived a happy life for the next 50 years,” Ms. Moran said in her privately published 2016 autobiography, “Soif de Vivre” (“The Desire for Life”). But in the decades that followed, she also told her own story: He was one of a dwindling number of officially recognized Resistance members still alive, French officials say — one of 65,000 initially awarded the Resistance medal. There are about 40 people.
She died on February 17 in a nursing home in Nice at the age of 100, according to Roger Dailler. Deller helped her write her memoirs with Monique Mosselmans-Melinand, another friend of Ms. Moran’s.
The kind of horror Ms. Moran experienced – being transported to the Holesen concentration camp in a cart full of livestock and finding a young woman hanged in the yard as punishment, beaten for helping a fallen inmate ( “The happy thing is that I only received 25 blows; 50 would have meant death”) – other concentration camp survivors have told this before. Like other victims of the Nazis, she often gave lectures in French schools.
But Ms. Moran’s testimony was striking for its visual form. Years after returning from the concentration camps, she worried that her story was not being known, so in the late 1980s she created a series of paintings in a naive folk art style depicting her time in Ravensbrück and Holle Shin’s life. — 15 in total.
She carries the drawings with her to make sure the students she talks to understand them. In her own writings, she described some of her work this way:
“Big search: In front of the entire camp, a woman lies naked on a table and a ‘nurse’ searches her most private parts. He discovers a gold chain and a medal.”
“On Sunday, these gentlemen were bored: they invented a game to distract themselves: throwing slices of bread from the balcony. A fight ensued. For the older women, there was nothing.”
“The dead were collected at night: they were naked because their clothes had to be used by others. In the autumn of 1944, typhus claimed many lives in the Holleischen concentration camp.”
“I use them to explain human capabilities to young people in schools, hoping that my testimony will wake them up and encourage them to take action every day so they don’t have to live like I did,” Ms. Moran said in her autobiography .
The paintings, like the descriptions she wrote for them, are candid. There is not much left to our imagination. There was no emotion whatsoever, and there was almost no expression on his face. It’s pure depiction, fairytale-like in its simplicity and power.
Ms. Moran’s account of how she became caught up in the whirlwind of resistance is equally unvarnished.
One evening in the spring of 1943, after Ms. Morin had finished her classes at the Ecole des Beaux-Arts in Lyon, she was approached by a tall, young Dutch woman whom she called Susie.
Susie invited Ms. Moran to join her Resistance network, which had a stellar record of smuggling Jews, Resistance members, and Allied pilots across the border into Switzerland. “I accepted it immediately,” she said, adding, “In fact, for a long time I felt guilty because I didn’t do anything.”
Moran was taken to Amsterdam to meet a network boss, who told her, “You’re risking death.” She replied, “I know.”
With her skills as an artist, she became a valuable newcomer.
“I immediately started forging papers,” she said. “I carved rubber stamps from city halls, counties, I made pass, I would carefully hand them to Suzy during night classes. ” A delegation was then sent by train to distribute the documents.
Then came the morning of March 24, 1944. At six o’clock, “there was a commotion on the landing,” Ms. Moran recalled.
“Boom, boom, boom! Open! Police!”
Two Gestapo agents and his dog, a member of the French Auxiliary Police Unit (French Gestapo Auxiliary Unit), burst in. They immediately discovered her fake rubber stamp.
She and her friend Jean were taken to Gestapo headquarters, presided over by the terrifying “Butcher of Lyon” Klaus Barbie, who personally tortured prisoners and was responsible for the death of resistance leader Jean Moulin in 1943 responsible. Barbie was convicted of crimes against humanity in France (in 1987, when she was arrested) and died in prison four years later. )
The two are kicked down a stairwell; Jean is released, and Ms. Moran’s mother, unaware of her daughter’s resistance activities, pleads in vain with Barbie to release her.
Barbie is destroying the Dutch-Paris network.
Deller said Ms Moran was tortured but “never talked about it”.
On August 11, Ms. Moran packed into a train with 102 other women, destined for Ravensbrück. She was punished for trying to escape during the journey by having her ankles chained and being thrown onto a pile of charcoal.
The rest of her narrative is told in the same candid, matter-of-fact style as her paintings.
At Ravensbrück, she said, “it was ironclad discipline.” “We were surrounded by a large number of soldiers and guards.” She met a tortured and heartbroken Susie, who revealed that he had unintentionally betrayed her and others in the network.
Ms. Moran was transferred to Holleischen, a forced labor camp in what is now the Czech Republic, and immediately organized a prisoner strike after discovering that her work included making ammunition for the Germans. “If we all say no, they can’t kill us all!” she told them. “They need our labor so badly.”
As punishment, they had to get up at dawn and stand at attention for several hours. If anyone fell, she would be shot immediately.
The guard assigned to the women was a common-law prisoner, not a political prisoner, as was the case with Ms. Moran, who was convicted of killing her family. “She had life-or-death power over us,” Ms. Moran recalled. She drew a portrait of herself and won the favor of the guard.
(On May 5, 1945, just days before the German surrender, members of the Polish resistance entered the concentration camp. The Germans were lined up against the wall. Those designated by the prisoners as “salauds” (illegitimate children) were shot.
The French women sang “La Marseillaise” and the Americans arrived, distributed food, and then took the women away in trucks and loaded them all onto a train bound for France.
Ms. Moran reunited with her mother in Lyon.
“I can’t even describe my life in the refugee camp,” she said in her memoir. “It’s unimaginable. If you haven’t experienced it, you can’t understand it. We thought every day was the last.”
Josette Molland was born on May 14, 1923 in Bourges, a city in central France, the daughter of Gaston Molland and Raymonde Molland. Her father owned a hardware store in Lyon.
After returning from the refugee camp, Ms. Moran opened a small clothing store in Lyon, moved to Britain with her first husband, a Polish army officer, and later settled in Nice, where she married an exiled Russian aristocrat Sergei Ilinsky, who was responsible for painting the building.
She returned to her first love, painting, and helped her husband restore the Russian Orthodox cathedral in Nice, creating numerous icons.
Josette Molland-Ilinsky – she added her husband’s surname – met the mayor of Nice, Christian Estrosi, on February 28 He was buried in Nice with full military honors.
Ms. Moran did not survive. A few years ago, a brother died, Mr. Deller said.
At her funeral, “La Marseillaise” and the French Resistance’s national anthem, “The Song of the Partisans,” were sung.
Deller recalled her as smiling, friendly and a “fighter.”
“She has a very strong character,” he said.