Let Us Now Praise Famous Women
A book, a film, and an oral history tell a story of extraordinary heroism and generosity in the closing days of World War II.
“There comes a time when you realize that everything is a dream, and only those things preserved in writing have any possibility of being real,” James Salter, the late American novelist, wrote. Salter was explaining what drove him as a writer. But his words remind that as each generation and its unrecorded memories disappear, what passes for history is no less ephemeral. A book, a film, and an oral history of one woman’s life testify to the universe of stories yet to be told.
A 2019 documentary, Chichinette: The Accidental Spy, chronicles the exploits of Marthe Cohn, an extraordinary centenarian who spied behind German lines for the French army during the closing days of World War II. Behind Enemy Lines, Cohn’s 2002 autobiography, provides fine-grained details. But thanks to the US Holocaust Memorial Museum, her oral history is the most poignant. In 1996 she recounted her life as a French Jew and later intelligence officer. Touching as well as gripping, her narration is as compelling as any tale of espionage and heroism.
Chichinette: The Accidental Spy follows Cohn, at the time 96, traveling the world with her husband to describe how she survived as a Jew in occupied France as well as her intelligence work. For sixty years Cohn kept her secrets, including from her family. Twice decorated with France’s Croix de Guerre as well as its prestigious Médaille Militaire and Legion of Honor, she vividly narrates the film, unfolding her perils in 1945 when she crisscrossed the German countryside alone posing as a nurse, armed only with her wits, blonde hair, blue eyes, and fluent German.
The intelligence Cohn collected defines success. Her daring produced vital information on the Wehrmacht’s withdrawal from the heavily fortified Siegfried Line as well as warned of a German division in the Black Forest poised to ambush advancing French forces. Challenges didn’t only come in German uniforms. Despite later accolades, resistance leaders had rejected Cohn when she tried to join their network. Cohn also had to overcome the prejudices in a French army that welcomed neither Jews nor women, not to mention those who were barely five-feet tall.
Recorded in 1996, the Holocaust Memorial Museum’s oral history, like the film, captures a vivacious, poised and self-effacing witness to history. Born in Lorraine—along with Alsace, a border region warred over and traded between France and Germany over the centuries—Cohn describes her family’s world in Metz, its fortress city and industrial center, as the looming war upends their lives. Evacuating to Poitiers 400 miles away where she, her brothers and sisters do what they can to aid others in flight and the local resistance, Cohn loses her fiancé, a résistant shot by the Germans, and a beloved sister, arrested and deported to Auschwitz.
Fleeing into Vichy-controlled France with her family in 1942 Cohn finished nursing studies in Marseilles, albeit still under the Nazi threat bearing down on Jews as the Germans took over the unoccupied zone that November. Later working as a nurse in Paris, the city’s liberation finally presented the opportunity to join the French army. There, after a chance encounter revealed her fluent German, the door opened to intelligence. Training in espionage, a cover story, and 14 failed attempts to infiltrate the Reich followed. The rest, as her medals show, is history.
And what of a diminutive blonde haired, blue eyed woman behind enemy lines? Hollywood’s superheroes pale by comparison. A bicycle, false papers, letters and photos from a fabricated German soldier-fiancé; weeks of traveling snow-covered roads noting troops, equipment, locations; rides hitched on Wehrmacht convoys, soldiers describing their massacres and murders on the Eastern Front, an SS sergeant on the make inviting her to visit his unit after touting his skill at spotting Jews; nights in spare beds proffered by German families to a lovelorn nurse, some suspicious, others not; perilous crossings into Switzerland to relay her intelligence and then return for more.
Asked how she handled the risks, Cohn explained, “I have a sixth sense for danger. And I’m lucky, that’s why I’m alive.” To be sure, luck had its role, as did wits, experience, and drive. “Survival is a very strong instinct,” she said. “So is revenge.” But Marthe’s story is rich in more than evidence of her courage and commitment. It’s also a tale of her gratitude and recognition for those who risked themselves and their loved ones to help her and her family survive.
From the stranger, a poor man, who prepared their false papers and refused any payment, her nursing professors, all Catholic nuns, and fellow students who knew and protected her Jewish identity, and the neighbors who warned of roundups and hid them from arrest to the farmers who knelt in prayer for Marthe, her mother and grandmother as they passed on the road to escape across the demarcation line into unoccupied France, Cohn also offered more than thanks. “Everything they did for us,” she said, “was always at the risk of their lives.”
“Let us now praise famous men,” Ecclesiastes prescribed two millennia ago. “There are some of them who have left a name …. And there are some who have no memorial, who have perished as if they had not lived… But these were men of mercy whose righteous deeds have not been forgotten….’
When asked about her view of religion, Cohn put it this way. “There is not just one view of things. There is only a human view.” Still, in spreading her mantle of heroism, Marthe, the granddaughter of an orthodox rabbi, just might have had the Old Testament’s book of moral teachings in mind.
Nicely done, Kent!
What a compelling review. I am ordering the book now.