Denise Vernay

During autumn 1943, Denise, now 19 years old, was encouraged to become a full-fledged member of the French Resistance by joining one of its cells in Lyon. Adopting her old scouting nickname, she entered the underground movement as "Miarka", received training, and then began clandestinely transporting resistance messages by bicycle. After seven months of this work, she was urged to leave Lyon for safety reasons.[18]

Testifying in 1946 about her war-time experiences, she noted that her departure had been prompted by a wave of arrests of United Resistance Movement members. In an attempt to mask her appearance to facilitate her escape, she exchanged coats with one of her comrades, but preserved her sense of self by refusing to cut off her blonde braids.[19]

Arriving in Nice on 18 March, in time for birthday celebrations for her older sister, she enjoyed only the briefest of reunions with her family before returning to Lyon. Ten days later, her parents, brother and two sisters were arrested in Nice as part of a roundup of Jewish residents, and sent to the internment camp at Drancy and then on to the Auschwitz-Birkenau concentration camp. She learned of their fate from a letter retrieved from the Lyon post office.[20][21]

She then proceeded to immerse herself in the French Resistance as a member of Franc-tireur (not to be confused with the Francs-Tireurs et Partisans). The Franc-tireur movement had launched in Lyon as an outgrowth of a clandestine resistance newspaper established by Jean-Pierre Lévy. It was one of the major resistance efforts in the south of France at the time, along with Maverick, Combat and Liberation. As Franc-tireur and the other resistance efforts continued to expand in the south of France, their respective leaders decided to combine forces, and les Mouvements Unis de Résistance (also known as les MUR, "the United Resistance Movements") was born.[22][23]

Now I asked to fight with weapons. The United Movements of Haute-Savoie were looking for a liaison agent. I left for Annecy in early April. I became "Annie" instead of "Miarka", my alias in Lyon. I bicycled through Annecy and the department with its varied relief. The maquis were nearby.[24][25]

Inspired by the Allied landing on 6 June 1944, she chose, on 14 June, to serve as "an agent liaison for the Secret Army, which held the Glières Plateau with the F.T.P. (Francs-Tireurs et Partisans)".[26][27]

A parachute drop fell in Saône-et-Loire and it was necessary to pick up two radio transmitters and their equipment, a large amount of money, and two suitcases containing the personal belongings of the two men who had parachuted at the same time: the head of the Secret Army, "Cantinier", and an American observer, "Niveau." I volunteered.

Bicycling 240 km to Cluny on 14 June and then to the Saône-et-Loire maquis command post at Brançion on 16 June, she recovered the supplies, and took a taxi to a friend's home in Caluire. Moving on the next day, she headed for the Aix-les-Bains railway station, where she planned to drop the suitcases at the lost luggage area, but she never made it. As her taxi reached a "Feldgendarmerie roadblock between Bourgoin and La Tour du Pin, halfway from [her] goal," she and her driver were subjected to what, for most other travelers, would have been a routine search. When the police discovered what she was transporting, they arrested her.[28][29]

Montluc military prison, Lyon, 2011

Following her arrest at the roadblock, Denise Jacob was transferred to the custody of the Geheime Staatspolizei, the Nazi Secret State Police unit more commonly known as the Gestapo. At this point, she was still known by her alias "Annie."

I was handed over to the Gestapo in Lyon: a grueling interrogation (the bathtub) in Place Bellecour, 10 days in Montluc fort, 10 days of transit to Romainville fort and then Ravensbrück on 26 July. I was registered in convoy no. 46,800. On 2 March 1945 I left Ravensbrück for Mauthausen in a night and fog (N. N.) convoy that also transported gypsies.[30]

"The torture of the bathtub," according to historian Jacques Delarue, would have involved "plunging the patient into a bath of icy water ... hands handcuffed behind [the] back, and keeping [the victim's] head under water until [she] was on the point of drowning." Denise Jacob would then have been "dragged to the surface by the hair and, if [she] still refused to speak [would have been] immediately plunged under water again." Often, "when the patient was on the point of losing consciousness," he or she would be revived by the Gestapo agent with coffee or brandy before the torture session was resumed.

The methods employed to make the victims talk were always the same. They were forced to kneel on a triangular bench while a torturer climbed on their shoulders; they were suspended with the arms tied behind their backs until they fainted; they were kicked, thrased with knouts, or struck with the fist; they were revived by flinging a bucket of water over them when they fainted. Their teeth were filed, their nails torn out, and they were burned with cigarette stubs and on occasions with a soldering lamp. The electric torture was also practiced.... The soles of the feet were slashed with a razor.... Women were not exempt from these tortures, and it was usually upon them that the torturers used their most odious refinements....[31]

Prisoners' corpses discovered by U.S. soldiers, Mauthausen, May 8, 1945.

Despite this brutal treatment, she did not break, and never revealed the names of her Resistance associates. Her former supervisor, Georges Guidollet-Ostier, was so confident about her ability to withstand whatever her tormentors did to her that he declined to change his alias or address. Deported to Mauthausen with 2,000 other women under the secretive Nacht und Nebel ("night and fog") program, she was targeted for extermination. Before the Nazi Schutzstaffel (SS) could carry out her execution, however, she and other members of her group were saved by International Red Cross delegates who pressured camp personnel to free the women. Transported from the camp in white Red Cross trucks on 21 April 1945, they were taken to St. Gallen, Switzerland, where they were housed briefly before being moved to Haute-Savoie via Geneva and Annemasse.[32]

Denise Jacob (aka "Annie") arrived back in Annecy just as the war was ending. She was greeted by fellow Resistance member Adrien Galliot, who introduced her to Jean Massendes, France's new Secretary General. He and his wife, Odette, reportedly then welcomed her into their home. Afterward, she stayed at the Imperial Hotel on the lake, which had been requisitioned by the government as housing for former deportees. After rest and recuperation, she was able to locate an aunt and uncle, who told her that her parents and brother had been killed in the Holocaust, and that her two sisters, who had both survived Auschwitz and Bergen-Belsen, had contracted typhus, and were in extremely poor condition.[33]

Her sisters, Madeleine and Simone, who had been imprisoned initially with their mother at the Auschwitz concentration camp in Occupied Poland, had been separated from her when she was transferred to the Nazi's Bergen-Belsen concentration camp in Germany, where she died from typhus on 15 March 1945, just prior to that camp's liberation.[34] Their father and brother, who had been deported to Lithuania by convoy number 73, were never found.[35][36]

On 23 August 1946, Denise Jacob testified about her experiences. Roughly translated from the original French, she said:

The pain, the cold, the hunger, the thirst, the lack of sleep, the insurmountable misery that is overcome, the body, except serious sequelae, forgets them in an unconscious space. The images that will remain forever: Those of thousands of women lined up by tens, standing in the cold or the heat, planted for hours waiting for the end-of-call siren, images of the more and more emaciated bodies of our companions, the unknown dead, image of a face absent from view, image of the superimposed bedsteads with the youngest at the top, and the least mobile, older; downstairs, sharing two or three depending on the time a straw mattress 70 cm wide. There remain the faces, the silhouettes of those who have not returned. They have not aged with us. There are also the images of the immense sky beyond our interminable calls.[37]