In the spring of 1943, 20-year-old art student Josette Molund was certain of two things: one, that she was making a good living designing for Lyon’s silk weavers, and that the German occupation of her country was untenable.
She joined the resistance. Forging false papers and passing them off for the notorious Dutch-Paris underground network made him unconvinced. But it was dangerous.
Less than a year after being captured by the Gestapo, Ms. Mulund lived through the hell of Nazi exile and Nazi camps for women, at Ravensbrück and elsewhere. He tried to escape, organized a rebellion against his guards, was severely beaten and lived on insects and “what was under the bark of the tree.” But she somehow survived and made it back to France.
“I was supposed to live happily for the next 50 years,” Ms Molund said in a privately published autobiography, “Sof de Vere” (“Thirst for Life”) in 2016. But during the following decades he also told his own story. French officials say only a dwindling number of officially recognized Resistance members are still alive – 40 of the original 65,000 who were awarded the Resistance Medal.
She died at 100 on February 17 in a nursing home in Nice, according to Roger Diller, who helped her write her memoir along with another friend of Ms Molland, Monique Musselmans-Mellenand.
The kind of horrors that Ms. Mulund endured – crammed into packed cattle cars, arriving at the camp in Halychan to find a young woman hanged in the yard as punishment, a series of beatings for helping a fellow prisoner, which was destroyed (“Luckily I only got 25 blows; 50 meant death”) – already reported by other camp survivors. And like other victims of the Nazis, she often spoke French in schools.
But Ms. Mulund’s testimony stands out for its visual appeal. Years after returning from the camps, she worried that her story wasn’t coming true, so in the late 1980s, she created a series of portraits of her life, depicting her life as a stark, folk art. Shown in the style of – 15 in total.
She took the paintings with her so that the students could understand. In his writings, he described some of his works as follows:
“The great search: in front of the whole camp, a woman, naked on the table, a ‘nurse’ searches all her private parts, she finds a gold chain and a medal.
“On Sunday, 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, because their clothes must be used by others. In the autumn of 1944, typhus killed many people in the Holstein camp.
“I use them in schools to explain to young people what the human race is capable of, hoping that my testimony will awaken their consciousness and motivate them to act every day, so they don’t have to live like this.” “What I did,” Ms. Mulund said in her autobiography.
The paintings, like the description he wrote for them, are clear. Little is left to the imagination. There is no emotion, and the faces are almost expressionless. It is pure imagery, as simple as it is powerful in its fairy tale.
Ms. Mulund’s account of how she was caught up in the storm of resistance is completely random.
One evening in the spring of 1943, after class at the Ecole des Beaux-Arts in Lyon, where she was a student, Ms. Molund was met by a young Dutch woman she knew as Suzie.
Suzy asked Ms Molund to join her resistance network, which had an impressive record of smuggling Jews, resistance members and Allied airmen across the border into Switzerland. “I accepted immediately,” he said, “in fact, for a long time, I felt guilty because I wasn’t doing anything.”
Ms Molund was flown to Amsterdam to meet a network boss, who told her, “You’re in danger of death.” He replied, “I know.”
With her skills as an artist she had a valuable job.
“I immediately started making false papers,” he said. “I’ve made rubber stamps from city halls, provinces, I’ve made them to passAnd I would give them, carefully, to Suzy during our night classes. Follow the mission by train to distribute the documents.
Then it was the morning of 24th March 1944. At six o’clock, “at Hullablow Landing,” Ms. Mulund reported.
“Boom boom boom!” open up! Police!”
Two Gestapo agents and, along with his dog, a member of the French auxiliary Gestapo unit, Millais Francais, burst in. They immediately found his fake rubber stamps.
She and her friend take Jane to Gestapo headquarters, presided over by the dreaded “Butcher of Lyon” Klaus Barbe, who personally tortured prisoners and was responsible for the death of resistance leader Jean Moulin in 1943. (In 1987, Barbie was convicted of crimes against humanity in France and died in prison four years later.)
The two went down a flight of stairs. Jane is let go, and Ms. Mulund’s mother, unaware of her daughter’s resistance activities, pleads with Barbie to free her, to no avail.
Barbie was in the process of dismantling the Dutch-Paris network.
Ms. Mulund was abused but “never talked about it,” Mr. Diller said.
On August 11, Ms Molund was loaded onto a train with 102 other women – destination Ravensbrück. Punished for attempting to escape during the voyage, she was chained at the ankles and thrown onto a charcoal pile.
The rest of his narrative is told in the same clear, matter-of-fact style as his paintings.
“It was iron discipline” in Ravensbrück, he said. “We were surrounded by a multitude of soldiers and guards.” She meets Suzy, fleeing the violence, who reveals that he had inadvertently betrayed her and others in the network.
Transferred to Holiesin, a forced labor camp in what is now the Czech Republic, Ms Molund promptly organized a prisoner strike when it was discovered that the work consisted of making ammunition for the Germans. “If we all refuse, they can’t kill us all!” He told them. “They are very much needed by our work force.
As punishment they had to get up in the morning and stand for hours in meditation. If someone fell, she was immediately shot.
The guard assigned to the women was a common-law prisoner — not, like Ms. Mulund, a political one — who had been convicted of killing her family. “She was the power of life and death over us,” Ms. Mulund recalled. He got the good grace of the guard by painting his picture.
On May 5, 1945, just days away from German occupation, members of the Polish resistance entered the camp. The Germans lined up in front of the wall. By inmates who were designated “sluds” – bastards – they were shot dead.
The French women sang “La Marseillaise”, the Americans arrived, distributed food and loaded the women onto trucks, all to be put on trains for France.
Ms Molund was reunited with her mother in Lyon.
“What I lived in the camps, I can’t even describe it,” he said in his memoirs. “Unthinkable.” If you haven’t done it, you don’t understand. Every day we think will be our last.
Josette Molland was born on May 14, 1923 in Bourges, France, the daughter of Gaston and Raymonde (Joyard) Molland. His father owned a hardware store in Lyon.
After returning from the camps, Ms Molund set up a small clothing shop in Lyon, moved to England with her first husband, a Polish officer, and later settled in Nice, where she married Sergei Elinsky, an exiled Russian prince. , who painted the buildings. .
She returned to her first love, painting, and helped her husband restore the Russian Orthodox basilica in Naas, creating many icons.
Josette Molland-Ilinsky – she added her husband’s last name – was buried in Nice with full military honors on February 28 in a ceremony presided over by the mayor, Christian Estrosi.
Ms. Mulund was not spared. A brother died a few years ago, Mr. Diller said.
At his funeral, the “Marseilles” and “Chant de Partisans”, the anthem of the French Resistance, were sung.
Mr. Diller remembered him as smiling and friendly, but also as “a fighter.”
“She was a very tough person,” he said.