In the spring of 1943, Josette Molland, a 20-year-old art student, was sure of two things: that she was making a pretty good living creating designs for the silk weavers of Lyon, and that it was intolerable that the Germans were occupying her country.
He joined the Resistance. Making false papers and transporting them for the famous Holland-Paris underground network exonerated her of guilt. But it was dangerous.
Captured by the Gestapo less than a year later, Ms. Molland lived through the hell of Nazi deportation and Nazi women’s camps in Ravensbrück and elsewhere. She tried to escape, staged a rebellion against her guards, was severely beaten and lived on insects and “whatever was under the bark of the trees”. But somehow he survived and returned to France.
“I had a happy life for the next 50 years,” Ms. Molland said in a private autobiography, “Soif de Vivre” (“Thirst for Life”), in 2016. But during those next decades she also told the story her as one of a shrinking group of officially recognized members of the Resistance still living – about 40 of the original 65,000 awarded the Resistance medal, French officials say.
She died aged 100 on February 17 in a nursing home in Nice, according to Roger Dailler, who had helped her write the memoir with another friend of Ms Molland’s, Monique Mosselmans-Melinand.
The kind of horrors Mrs. Molland endured — she was transported with loads of cattle, arriving at the camp at Holleischen to find a young woman had been hanged in the yard as punishment, having received a beating for helping a fellow prisoner who had collapsed (“Fortunately I only accepted 25 blows; 50 meant death”) — have been previously reported by other camp survivors. And like other victims of the Nazis, he often gave speeches in French schools.
But Mrs. Moland’s testimony stands out for the visual form it took. Many years after her return from the camps, she was concerned that her story was not ending, so in the late 1980s she made a series of paintings depicting her life in Ravensbrück and Holleischen in a naive folk art style. — 15 in total.
She brought the charts with her to make sure the students she spoke to understood. In her own writing, she described some of her works as follows:
“The great search: In front of the whole camp, a woman, naked on the table, a “nurse” searches her most intimate parts, finds a gold chain and a medal.”
“On Sundays, these gentlemen were bored: they invented a game to distract themselves: throwing pieces of bread from the balcony. A fight ensues. Nothing for older women.”
“Collecting the dead at night: They are naked, for their clothes must be used by others. In the fall of 1944, typhus killed many in the Holleischen camp.’
“I use them to explain to young people in schools what the human race is capable of, hoping that my testimony wakes them up and encourages them to act every day so they don’t have to live what I did,” Ms. Moland said in her autobiography.
The paintings, like the descriptions he wrote for them, are honest. Little is left to the imagination. There is no emotion and the faces are almost expressionless. It is pure imagery, powerful in its fairy tale like simplicity.
Mrs Molland’s account of how she was drawn into the maelstrom of the Resistance is equally unadorned.
One evening in the spring of 1943, after a class at the École des Beaux-Arts in Lyon, where she was a student, Ms. Moland approached a tall young Dutch woman she knew as Susie.
Susie asked Mrs Molland to join the Resistance network, which had built up a brilliant record of smuggling Jews, members of the Resistance and Allied airmen across the border into Switzerland. “I accepted right away,” she said, adding, “Actually, for a long time, I felt guilty because I didn’t do anything.”
Ms Molland was flown to Amsterdam to meet a network boss, who told her: “You are in danger of death.” She replied, “I know.”
With her skills as an artist she was a valuable recruit.
“I immediately started making fake papers,” he said. “I dug up seals from town halls, from prefectures, I made them laissez-passer, and I would give them, discreetly, to Susie during our night classes.’ This was followed by train missions to distribute the documents.
Then came the morning of March 24, 1944. At six o’clock, “a humor on the landing,” recounted Mrs. Molland.
“Boom boom boom! Opening! Police!”
Two Gestapo agents and, along with his dog, a member of the Milice Francaise, the French auxiliary unit of the Gestapo, broke in. They immediately discovered her fake stamps.
She and her boyfriend Jean were transferred to Gestapo headquarters, headed by the dreaded “Butcher of Lyons,” Klaus Barbie, who personally tortured prisoners and was responsible for the death of Resistance leader Jean Moulin in 1943. (The 1987, Barbie was convicted of crimes against humanity in France and died in prison four years later.)
The two were kicked down a flight of stairs. Jean was let go and Mrs. Molland’s mother, unaware of her daughter’s Resistance activities, begged Barbie to free her, to no avail.
Barbie was in the process of eliminating the Holland-Paris network.
Ms. Moland was tortured but “never talked about it,” Mr. Dailer said.
On August 11, Ms. Molland boarded a train with 102 other women — bound for Ravensbrück. Punished for trying to escape during the journey, she was chained at the ankle and thrown into a pile of coals.
The rest of her narrative is told in the same honest, matter-of-fact style as her paintings.
“It was iron discipline” in Ravensbrück, he said. “We were surrounded by a crowd of soldiers and guards.” She met Suzie, broken by torture, who revealed that she had accidentally betrayed her and others in the network.
Transferred to Holleischen, a forced labor camp in what is now the Czech Republic, Ms. Moland immediately organized a prisoner strike after discovering that the work consisted of making munitions for the Germans. “If we all refuse, they can’t kill us all!” told them. “They need us very much for their workforce.”
As a punishment they were made to get up at dawn and stand under attention for hours. If someone fell, they were immediately shot.
The guardian assigned to the women was a common-law prisoner—not, like Mrs. Molland, a civilian—who had been convicted of murdering her family. “He had the power of life and death over us,” Ms Moland recalled. She won the guard’s good graces by drawing her portrait.
On May 5, 1945, with the German capitulation just days away, Polish resistance fighters entered the camp. The Germans were lined up against the wall. Those labeled “salaud” – bastards – by the prisoners were shot.
The French women sang “La Marseillaise”, the Americans arrived, distributed food and took the women in trucks, to put them all on trains to France.
Mrs Moland was reunited with her mother in Lyons.
“What I experienced in the camps, I can’t even describe,” she said in her memoirs. “Unbelievable. If you haven’t experienced it, you can’t understand. Every day we thought it would be our last.”
Josette Molland was born on May 14, 1923, in the city of Bourges in central France, the daughter of Gaston and Raymonde (Joyarde) Molland. Her father owned a hardware store in Lyon.
After her return from the camps, Ms. Molland set up a small clothing store in Lyon, moved to England with her first husband, a Polish officer, and later settled in Nice, where she married an exiled Russian nobleman, Serguei Ilinsky, the who painted buildings. .
She returned to her first love, painting, and helped her husband restore the Russian Orthodox basilica in Nice, creating numerous icons.
Josette Molland-Ilinsky — she added her husband’s surname — was buried with full military honors in Nice on February 28 in a ceremony presided over by the mayor, Christian Estrosi.
Mrs. Moland leaves no survivors. A brother died a few years ago, Mr Dailler said.
At her funeral, “Massaille” and “Chant des Partisans”, the anthem of the French Resistance, were sung.
Mr Dailler remembered her as smiling and friendly, but also a “fighter”.
“He had a very tough personality,” she said.
