The elusive adventures of Catherine Dior
hen Catherine Dior, one of the heroic French Resistance workers
captured by the Nazis, came face to face with her torturer at his trial
in 1952 and received the suggestion from his lawyer that it was a case
of mistaken identity, she burst out furiously to the judge: ‘I know what
I’m saying. This affair cost people their lives.’
This is one of the very few vivid glimpses we get of Dior in Justine Picardie’s book. The respected former editor-in-chief of Harper’s Bazaar
has tackled what is the most difficult subject for any biographer: a
person about whom virtually nothing is known. Claire Tomalin brought it
off in The Invisible Woman,
the story of Charles Dickens’s shadowy mistress Nelly Ternan. Catherine
Dior is almost equally undocumented, save for her testimony to the War
Crimes Commission.
So little is recorded about the sister of the great Christian that
Picardie has had to build up a picture of her life by relying on the
diaries and testimonies of others around her, or whose lives touched
hers, be it working for the French Resistance, surviving the horrors of a
Nazi concentration camp or in the rarefied atmosphere of French couture
salons. Pages often go past without a single mention of our heroine. In
fact this is a book largely about other people, some of them with
barely discernible relevance. What, for instance, has the well-worn
story of Edward VIII, Mrs Simpson and the abdication to do with either
life in Ravensbruck camp or Dior’s New Look?
But enough of this nitpicking. As Picardie tells the story, we plunge
almost straight into World War Two, when the Dior family found
themselves near Cannes, in the unoccupied Zone of France under Marshal
Pétain (by June 1940 Paris had fallen and much of the country was under
German administration).
At the end of the summer of 1941 Christian returned to Paris to seek
work in couture, the clothes sold to a few rich clients, to the wives of
Nazis or to black marketeers. Business soared. A new social world
evolved in the capital as certain hostesses entertained those Germans
they believed to be cultured and sympathetic. In these warm houses one
could be sure of every luxury, including champagne and superb food, in
contrast to the rest of Paris, which was cold and starving.
In Cannes a month or two later Catherine met Hervé des Charbonneries,
tall, glamorous, an early supporter of the Resistance and a married man.
This did not prevent her from falling in love, or working for him.
Picardie’s tireless research into archival material — ‘I am sitting at
my desk, surrounded by piles of photocopied papers’ — reveals that
Catherine both carried and hid intelligence reports for Hervé’s group in
Cannes, made more dangerous when the Germans took over unoccupied
France in November 1942. When several key members of the group were
arrested in the spring of 1944 it was time to flee; Catherine was
alerted by the coded telephone call from Hervé: ‘We will dine tomorrow
evening with your brother in Paris.’
In Paris Catherine continued to work for Hervé’s group until she was
picked up by the Gestapo on July 6 and taken to their headquarters. The
tortures she suffered are recorded in her witness statement to the War
Crimes Commission in 1945. Despite them, she refused to name her
associates and even, through quick thinking, saw that her unit’s
headquarters held no compromising material: ‘I had told them to remove
everything from the office if I wasn’t back a quarter of an hour after
the agreed time.’
In mid-August 1944 Catherine was deported, along with others, in the
last convoy to leave Paris. At the same time, with the war clearly
drawing to an end, many Germans were also leaving; a mere ten days
later, the German garrison in Paris surrendered. After a week,
Catherine’s train arrived at Ravensbruck. Picardie’s description of the
horrors of the camp is accompanied by a moving account of her own visit
to it (her father, as she tells us, was Jewish).
Catherine was one of the survivors, arriving back in Paris at the end of
May 1945 — so thin that at first Christian did not recognize her. By
the end of the year, she was well enough to start, with Hervé, who had
moved in with her, a business selling fresh flowers from Provence,
although her ordeal had left her with arthritis, injuries to her hips,
back and feet and kidney problems, not to mention insomnia, nightmares,
memory loss and depression.
Then comes a history of the Paris fashion houses, from Worth onward; the
story of Christian Dior’s rise to fame with the birth of the New Look,
the War Crimes Court at Hamburg and pages about the British royal
family. Finally we come to the trial of those who tortured Catherine and
here we meet her angrily giving the evidence that ensured their
execution.
On a visit to La Colle Noire, Christian’s house in Provence where
Catherine spent six months, Picardie writes: ‘The vestiges of
Catherine’s presence remain as a powerful reminder of the importance of
freedom, and why it is worth fighting for.’ There are few truer words.
Christian Dior’s house La Colle Noire in Provence, where Catherine spent six months during the war
