Agnes Dorothee Humbert (1894-1963)

Agnes Dorothee Humbert, daughter of French senator Charles Humbert and English writer Mabel Wells Annie Rooke, was born in Dieppe, France on 12 October 1894. She was an art historian and ethnographer.

In January 1916 she married Georges Hanna Sabbagh with whom she had two sons: Jean and Pierre. Agnes and Georges divorced in 1934.

A few days after the fall of Paris on 14 June 1940, having fled Paris to be with her mother at the house of a cousin at Vicq-sur-Breuilh, she heard an appeal on the BBC by General de Gaulle who encouraged the people of France to continue the struggle against the occupying Germans and Vichy government. 

It was offensive to her when books were removed from her library and replaced with works by German authors. Then, on August 6, a notice was fixed on the gateway of the Palais de Chaillot, ordering free entry to German soldiers, and she wrote in her diary that she told her colleague Jean Cassou, "I feel I will go mad, literally, if I don't do something!" So, with Boris Vildé, Anatole Lewitsky, Jean Cassou and Yvonne Oddon she formed the Groupe du musée de l'Homme from members of the Museum. It was the first resistance movement in occupied France. 

In a few months they built a highly diffuse underground network. Their action spread rapidly with the creation of a clandestine newsletter, Résistance, which had only five issues, between 15 December 1940 and the end of March 1941, with editorials holding no illusions regarding Pétain and the Vichy government. This group went on to feed information to the British.

After leaders of her Resistance cell were betrayed and arrested in April 1941, Agnes recruited Pierre Brossolette to lead the group. All of them were arrested and sent to the harsh Cherche-Midi prison before ending up at Fresnes. They were tried by the Wehrmacht in February 1942. 

Agnes was then transferred to the Prison de la Santé where conditions were improved. She was visited by her mother and son Pierre who told her the men had been put to death by firing squad (in their last moments, singing "Vive la France").

The women were sentenced to five years slave labor and deported to Anrath prison in Germany. Agnes was made to work in appalling conditions at the Phrix rayon factory in Krefeld where workers died, went blind and developed horrible skin conditions. After four years, in June 1945 she was liberated by the Third United States Army.

From the fall of Paris to her first arrest and interrogation by the Gestapo in April 1941, Agnes kept a written diary. Apart from a few scribbled notes, she didn't resume writing in it until her liberation from prison in April 1945. She wrote about taking part in the Nazi Hunt at Wanfried in 1945, setting up soup kitchens for refugees (and expressly stated that everyone was to get a share, even the German civilian) and later helping to start the denazification process.

After the war, Agnes refused to return to work at the Museum. Though her health had been affected by her experiences, she continued to write books on art. She published her diary under the title Notre Guerre in 1946. This was later reissued and translated into English (by Barbara Mellor) under the title Résistance. In 1949 she was awarded the Croix de Guerre with silver gilt palm for heroism. She spent her final years with her son Pierre in the village of Valmondois and is buried in the cemetery there.

Marie-Claude Vogel Vaillant-Couturier (1912-1996)

Marie-Claude Vogel, daughter of magazine editor Lucien Vogel and fashion photographer Cosette de Brunhoff, was born in Paris on 3 November 1912.

She chose to be a photographic reporter, at the time when the trade was uniquely male, and earned herself the nickname of “the lady in Rolleiflex”.

In 1934 she joined the Communist Youth Movement of France. That year she married Paul Vaillant-Couturier, founder of the Republican Association of Ex-servicemen, a communist and chief editor of L'Humanité. She entered into it's photo service and later took responsibility for it after Paul's mysterious disappearance in 1937.

Attached to the magazine's Vu team, she went to Germany where she took part in an investigation into the rise of Nazism. It was two months after the accession of Adolf Hitler to power when she reported on the stereotypes of the concentration camps of Oranienburg and Dachau.

The Hitler-Stalin Pact in September 1939 resulted in prohibitions on L'Humanité and influenced her change of activities. She joined the Resistance and participated in the publication of leaflets such as l'Université Libre, Georges Politzer's pamphlet Sang et Or (Blood and Gold) and a clandestine edition of L'Humanité with Pierre Villon, who she married in 1949. She strengthened the connection between the Committee of National Front Intellectuals and the military resistance (OS, later the FTPF).

On 9 February 1942 Marie-Claude was arrested in a trap set by Marshal Pétain's police with many of her companions, all of whom were shot at Fort Mont-Valérien. She was interned until 15 February at the Dépôt de la Préfecture and La Santé Prison from March 20 to August, when she was transferred to Romainville, an internment camp under German authority. From there she was sent to an internment camp in Compiègne before deporting to Auschwitz-Birkenau via the Convoi des 31000 of 24 January 1943. Singular by its composition, this covoy inincluded 230 female Resistance members, communists and Gaullist wives of Resistance members. Only 49 of the 230 women would return from the camps after the war.

For 18 months, Marie-Claude was kept in Auschwitz where she witnessed the genocide of Jews and Gypsies and took part in the international clandestine resistance committee of the camp. In August 1944, she was transferred to the Ravensbrück where she was assigned to earthworks before being transferred to Revier (the camp infirmary) because of her knowledge of the German language.

Though Ravensbrück was liberated on 30 April 1945 by the Red Army, she didn't return to France until 25 June 1945. During that time, she devoted herself to the patients' repatriation. An article in Le Monde on 16 Jun 1943 read, “Each day, this magnificent Frenchwoman makes the rounds, uplifting courage, giving hope where it is often but illusion. The word 'holiness' comes to mind when one sees this grand sister of charity near these men and these women who are dying every day."

A leading member of the National Federation of Resistant Deportees and Internees and Patriots since its creation in 1945, Marie-Claude became its vice-president, then co-president in 1978. She was also one of the first presenters of l'Amicale d’Auschwitz. A witness at the Nuremberg Trials, she said later, “by telling of the sufferings of those who could not speak any more, I had the feeling that, through my voice, those who they had tortured and exterminated, accused their torturers.” However, she returned from the trials “shocked, worried,” “exasperated by the procedure,” dissatisfied, in particular denouncing the absence, on the dock, of the leaders of the firms Krupp, Siemens, IG Farben, firms which had largely taken part in the economic exploitation of the deportees. But in spite of these insufficiencies, she underlined later how much the definition crimes against humanity was “progress for the human conscience”.

In 1964 Paul Rassinier, a holocaust survivor and critic of the trial verdicts, accused her of having survived only by dispossessing her companions. Marie-Claude took action against these accusations and the lawsuit against Rassinier made justice of the charges. Geneviève de Gaulle-Anthonioz declared to the bar of witnesses, “We entered the infirmary buildings not to hide, but because we needed courageous German speaking comrades. … When we gave back this ration of bread deducted from our own ration, this bulb, we knew that she would give it well to those who needed it most and without any political appreciation … I know few women as courageous as Marie-Claude, who always gave the feeling that her own life was nothing if she wasn't with the company of her comrades.”

The manager of the extreme-right magazine Rivarol and Rassinier were condemned. During December of the same year, she defended in front of the French National Assembly the concept of imprescriptibility of the crimes against humanity, thus opening the way with the ratification, by France in 1968, of the Convention of United Nations on the imprescriptibility of these crimes.

In 1987, she called all the civil parties to testify against Klaus Barbie. During the creation of the Foundation for the Memory of the Deportation. In 1990, she was unanimously designated President, then President d' Honneur until her death on 11 December 1996.