Odette Fabius

Odette Fabius (born Odette Schmoll on November 2, 1910 in Paris ; died on June 1, 1990 there ) was a French Resistance fighter and author. She survived the Ravensbrück concentration camp . She described her experiences in her 1986 memoirs.

Life

Odette Schmoll was born into an upper-class family in Paris, one of the oldest Jewish families in France, whose maternal ancestors go back to Abraham Furtado . Her father worked as a senior judge at the Palais de Justice in Paris. Odette Schmoll grew up with a brother, looked after by a British teacher, from whom she learned English as a second mother tongue. She attended the private class in a secondary school and, according to her own account, did her baccalaureate at the age of 17 . She then enrolled at the École du Louvre . In 1929 she married the anti-quality dealer Robert Fabius. The couple got married in the Great Synagogue on Rue de la Victoire. A year later the daughter Marie-Claude was born.

During the Second World War , she joined the “ Sections sanitaires automobiles féminines ” (SSAF) as a volunteer driver , an ambulance run by women that the Red Cross supported in rescuing injured soldiers. With the start of the German attack on France on May 10, 1940, the ambulance operations were often under the bombing of the Wehrmacht . When the SSAF was dissolved on September 12, 1940, many of the women joined the Resistance, including Odette Fabius. In Bordeaux she joined a group of the Réseau Alliance , a network that worked with the British secret service.

On April 23, 1943, the Gestapo arrested Odette Fabius in Marseille . She was initially imprisoned for two months in Saint-Pierre Prison, was then held in Fresnes Prison as a "dangerous terrorist" without contact with the outside world and on January 31, 1944 was taken to the Ravensbrück women's concentration camp. A drawing by Mopsa Sternheim , who was also interned in Ravensbrück, recalls the tortures Odette Fabius was subjected to after a failed escape. Fabius belonged to a group of women, including Geneviève de Gaulle in addition to Sternheim , with whom she remained friends after the war. Friendship and solidarity with one another helped them survive in the concentration camp.

Before Germany surrendered in April 1945, around 7,000 women from Ravensbrück were brought to Sweden as a result of the " White Buses rescue operation " . In one of the groups there were also Jewish prisoners who had managed to smuggle themselves among the non-Jewish, including Odette Fabius, whose Jewish identity had been hidden from the camp administration until it was denounced shortly before. The first Jewish women from Ravensbrück arrived in Malmö on April 28 and were received by social workers from the Jewish community and the American Jewish Committee . Sick and emaciated, Odette Fabius had to be cared for for months before she could return to Paris.

Her husband, who had been interned in the Lévitan camp, survived, as did her daughter, whom she had placed in the care of Henriette Pichon. Pichon ran a boarding school for girls in Bouffémont , where she protected several Jewish children from deportation during the German occupation of France in World War II and was honored as Righteous Among the Nations for this in 2010 .

In her 1986 book Un lever de soleil sur le Mecklembourg , Odette Fabius describes her experiences in the Ravensbrück women's concentration camp .

Trivia

During the German occupation of France, clothes and well-groomed appearance became an expression of their “stubborn pride” for Parisians of different social classes. Odette Fabius was known for her elegant and stylish demeanor, which she tried to maintain in the Resistance. This has also drawn the attention of the Gestapo from suspicious activities, writes the British author Anne Sebba. While Fabius was working all over France for the Réseau Alliance with forged ID cards, she dressed in a costume by her favorite designer, Jeanne Lanvin .

Awards

source

• Commandeur de la Legion d'Honneur
• Médaille militaire avec palm
• Médaille de la Resistance
• Médaille de la Déportation
• Médaille des évadés

publication

• Un lever de soleil sur le Mecklembourg. Mémoires. Albin Michel, Paris 1986, ISBN 2-226-02626-6 .

  Sunrise over hell. From Paris to the Ravensbrück concentration camp. Memories. Translated from the French by Ira and Gerd Joswiakowski, Verlag Neues Leben, Berlin 1997, ISBN 3-355-01489-3 .

Individual evidence

1. ^ Anne Sebba: Les Parisiennes. How the Women of Paris Lived, Loved and Died in the 1940s. Orion Publishing / Hachette, London 2016, ISBN 978-0-297-87097-5 , pp. 35-36.
2. ^ Anne Sebba: Les Parisiennes. How the Women of Paris Lived, Loved and Died in the 1940s. Orion Publishing / Hachette, London 2016, ISBN 978-0-297-87097-5 , p. 37.
3. ^ ^{A b} Portrait d'Odette Fabius, Ravensbruck, Allemagne, 1944. Musée d'Art et d'Histoire du Judaïsme.
4. ↑ Marie-Josèphe Bonnet describes this with the help of Germaine Tillion , Geneviève De Gaulle, Odette Abadi (Rosenstock), Simone Veil , Margarete Buber-Neumann and Odette Fabius in her book Plus forte que la mort. Survivre grâce à l'amitié dans les camps de concentration. Éditions Ouest-France, Rennes 2015, ISBN 978-2-7373-6649-9 .
5. ↑ Linde Apel: Jewish women in the Ravensbrück concentration camp 1939–1945. Metropol Verlag, Berlin 2003, ISBN 3-936411-03-4 , pp. 26/27.
6. ↑ Irith Dublon-Knebel (Ed.): Intersection of the Holocaust. Jewish women and children in the Ravensbrück concentration camp. Metropol Verlag, Berlin 2009, ISBN 978-3-940938-38-1 , p. 267 (academic volume accompanying the exhibition)
7. ↑ Sarah gene Burger: Essai de sociologie de la mémoire: le cas du souvenir of the camp annexes de Drancy dans Paris. In: Genèses. Volume 61, No. 4, 2005, OCLC 6889798156 , pp. 47-69. (Full text)
8. ^ Juste parmi les Nations: Henriette Pichon. Dossier Yad Vashem, at: AJPN.
9. ^ Anne Sheba: The forgotten women of the French resistance. In: The Telegraph. July 11, 2016.
10. ↑ Jenni Frazer: The women in WWII Paris who 'did what they had to' for survival. In: Times of Israel. September 2, 2016. Photo: "Genevieve de Gaulle (niece of Charles de Gaulle) and Odette Fabius (center), friends since their incarceration in Ravensbruck concentration camp, after Fabius was awarded Officier de La Legion d'Honneur 1971".