Voices from the Dark Years Read Online Free

shearing, until the day she came into the salon and found her 8-year-old son sitting in one of the chairs with a pair of clippers in his hand, totally bald. She never spoke of her humiliation in September 1944 again until interviewed by the author in January 2006.
    Rodolphe Faytout was sentenced to hard labour for life, but pardoned by President Coty and released in the fifties. Forbidden to return to his home in Gironde, he nevertheless did so and kept a low profile for the rest of his life, treated with disdain but never attacked by his surviving victims or the relatives of those whose deaths he had caused.
    Lucienne Goldfarb was rewarded for her role as police informer by protection that continued after the Liberation during the years when she ran a highly lucrative brothel known as ‘10-bis’ on rue Débarcadère in the XVII arrondissement of Paris – during which time her professional name was Katia la Rouquine (Red-haired Katie). She sprang to fame again at the age of 74 – half a century after the deaths of Manouchian and his twenty-one comrades. Her friend Christine Deviers-Joncour, ex-mistress of Foreign Minister Roland Dumas, gave her 1 million francs in November 1997 ‘to look after my mother and children’ because Deviers-Joncourt expected to be sent to prison for her part in the petroleum bribes scandal that caused Dumas’ fall from power.
    Georges Guingouin was elected mayor of Limoges by its grateful population in 1945, the PCF leadership having done everything possible to undermine his election campaign. Labelled a Titoist deviant, he was expelled from the party in 1952 and thus deprived of its political protection. In the aftermath of the 1953 amnesty for collaboration crimes, many counter-accusations were levelled at former résistants. Guingouin was among those arrested for alleged assassination of collaborators during the Liberation. He survived a murder attempt in prison before being released in June 1954. Not until 1998 did PCF leader Robert Hué publicly apologise for the harassment of this renegade communist. Asked for his reaction, Guingouin replied, ‘I’ve reached the age of serenity. It’s a problem for the Party and no longer concerns me.’ 4
    Dr Josef Hirt, the collector of Jewish skulls from the Natzwiller gas chamber, is thought to have committed suicide in the Black Forest on 2 June 1945.
    Helmut Knochen was sentenced to death by a British court in Germany during June 1946 for a massacre of Allied aircrew. Extradited to France, he received a second death sentence, also commuted to life imprisonment. After serving seventeen years, he was released in 1962, returned to work as an insurance agent in Offenbach, married a second time and retired in Baden-Baden to die there on 4 April 2003.
    Charles Krameisen was at first disbelieved, until the bodies began to emerge from the wells at Guerry. Accorded French citizenship in recognition of his suffering, Krameisen may have spent time in an insane asylum, but his grandson communicated with the author in February 2014 to say that he led a normal life afterwards.
    Joseph Kramer was condemned and hanged by a British court at Hassel on 13 December 1945.
    Inspector Henri Lafont was, like Bonny, betrayed by Joanovici and shot at Montrouge on 27 December 1944.
    General Heinz Lammerding was never brought to trial, despite abandoning an alias to live as a civil engineer under his true name in Düsseldorf. He died on 13 January 1971 at Bad Tölz, Bavaria.
    Pierre Laval cabled the Spanish government on 17 April 1945: ‘It is neither the statesman nor the friend who is asking your help, but simply the man. I ask you in my own name, as well as in that of my wife and my faithful friend Maurice Gabolde, for permission to enter Spain and await better days. Today it is a tired and worn-out old man who is writing to you, and in memory of our long friendship, I thank you in advance.’ 5 Returning from Spain to give evidence at Pétain’s trial, he was tried