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Today, at ninety-three years old, Madeleine Riffaud remains an icon of the French struggle against Nazi occupation. Operating under the code name “Rainer,” she not only acted as a liaison between partisan units, but carried out one of the Resistance’s most daring exploits: the assassination of a German officer in broad daylight in central Paris, leading to her torture at the Nazi secret police headquarters. In the postwar period, Riffaud became a journalist for Louis Aragon’s Ce Soir, as well as a renowned poet with her collection “The Clenched Fist.” She would later become a war correspondent, reporting on French colonial atrocities in Algeria, Vietnam, and even in the same prisons where she had herself been tormented by the Nazis. She is one of a dwindling number of living witnesses to the struggles of the Resistance period. The text below is an edited version of Emmanuelle Anizon’s article in the May 31 issue of l’Obs, reporting on a conversation with Riffaud at her home in Paris’s Le Marais district.

Madeleine Riffaud was twenty years old when she was arrested for assassinating a German officer. Back then, in 1944, she led a unit of the Francs-Tireurs et Partisans (FTP), a Resistance formation created by the French Communist Party. The aim was to liberate Paris from the Nazis; the order was short and sharp: “everyone get a German.” As she recalls, “I was the only girl in the group. It was easier for me to approach a soldier without arousing suspicion.” That sunny Sunday, with a culotte skirt and with her hair flickering over her shoulders, Madeleine pedaled in search of her target. At the Solférino bridge she picked out an officer, looking out over the Seine. “I waited for him to turn around — I did not shoot anyone in the back. He was killed instantly.” As passers-by looked on astonished, she just got back on her bike. A member of the Nazi-collaborationist milice chased her down, and ultimately handed her over to the Gestapo. Upon the liberation of France, Madeleine Riffaud was decorated with the garlanded Croix de Guerre and asked to attend countless commemorations and ceremonies in her honor. Most of the time, she turned them down: “I refuse to be a symbol — write that! I was just a young girl caught up in history.” She traces her trajectory back to one day in 1941. Then sixteen, she was headed back to her parents’ house in Amiens. German soldiers blocked her path. “I was cute with my little skirt. They wanted to play around with me — I was afraid.” An officer sent her packing with a kick up the backside. “The humiliation! I said to myself, we can’t let them stay.” The same year she set off for Paris to train as a midwife — only to join an FTP Resistance group. She became an agent linking together different partisans, transporting weaponry, and carrying messages. She took the pseudonym Rainer because she loved the poems of Rainer Maria Rilke, and wrote some herself. “A lot of the FTP were killed — there was a rapid turnover.” She was noted for her courage and soon promoted to a command post. A plaque in one Paris street today recalls the events of August 23, 1944, when she, together with what she calls a handful of “mates,” managed to stop a train and arrest eighty Germans. The plaque does not recount what happened next, with her descent into hell. Once Paris was liberated, the combatant Riffaud wanted, just like her male comrades, to get into the final fight through eastern France. She was rejected. “I was a minor, I didn’t have my parents’ consent … and I was a girl!” she recalls. “With the return to legality I was overwhelmed by misery. I found myself very alone. I had no work and had tuberculosis. Every morning I asked why I was still alive. I even thought about suicide.” How could she live in peace, when she lived with the war still inside her? How could she justify her existence? Madeleine is a survivor. She has survived her mates from the FTP, like the young violinist whose photo still presides over her writing-desk. She survived the Gestapo; survived a month and a half in the “House of Death” on the Rue des Saussaies in Paris’s 8th arrondissement. “They tried to make me go crazy,” she recalls. After torturing Riffaud, in a vain attempt to make her squeal on her contacts, the Gestapo tortured others in front of her. Such was the case of the young woman whose arms and legs the Gestapo methodically broke with an iron bar. Or the boy of “fifteen or sixteen, his face bloodied” who “shook his head to insist ‘No,’ I must not speak.” Riffaud says can still hear the officer whispering in her ear: “Don’t you like children?” “The words are what stays most clearly in the memory.” But Madeleine survived. She was meant to be executed on August 5, 1944, together with two other women. On the eve of the planned execution, in her cell in the Fresnes jail, she wrote a poem: … Seven steps long/In my cell/And four small ones/In width/She has matured — more light — /The window of my dungeon/And the door, it is locked. … Seven steps long/And then a wall/And the lock/They could stretch my hands/I never gave up your names/They’re meant to shoot me. Tomorrow/You’re very afraid, you say?/Yes or no? … Blindfolded eyes/The blue handkerchief/The clenched fist raised/The great farewell.

Head Over Heels Her death was officially reported on the radio. But in fact, the torturers had changed their minds at the last minute. On August 15, she was on the last train to the Ravensbrück concentration camp. She escaped, thanks to the help of women who wanted to “save the young one.” “They never came back from the camps. I spent a long time looking for them. That haunted me.” But the Nazis found her at the station, and it was back to prison. Three days later came Liberation. A meeting soon after changed her life. Madeleine took part in the partisans’ parade of November 11, 1944 and was introduced to the writer Paul Eluard as “the young poet who killed a German officer.” He looked at her: “That won’t do. Show me your eyes.” She began to cry. He set a meeting for the next day. She went to show him her poems. “You know how to write — you’re going to make it your craft.” He published a collection of her texts, “The Clenched Fist,” and presented her to Pablo Picasso (who drew her portrait) and Louis Aragon, at that time the editor of Ce Soir daily newspaper. “Eluard was always there for me,” she recalls. “When he lost his wife and things were going very badly for him, he would often ask me to go and buy him a rose. Just one. Because just one was enough.” Seventy years later, Madeleine still asks anyone visiting her to bring a single rose. She made a go of “normal life,” although only briefly. She married the communist intellectual Pierre Daix in 1945, after meeting him at the sanatorium. Daix had escaped the camps: “He told me about Mauthausen and I told him about the Rue des Saussaies. We mixed our hells together. That does not lead to the erotic.” A girl was born. “I was happy, but I passed on my tuberculosis. The hospital made me think I wasn’t able to cope.” In her head, her torturers’ line continued to ring out: “Madam, you don’t like children.” The attempt at a normal life fell apart, the couple divorced, and Madeleine ran away from being a mother: “You are in a paradoxical condition,” a psychiatrist explained. “You need to be in extreme situations.” So she became a war correspondent. In Algeria, Cambodia, and Vietnam, the reporter with her long brown plaits cheated death. With every conflict she immersed herself in places where most journalists didn’t, where she felt alive and most useful, as close as possible to soldiers and populations. Bodies fell dead all around her. She was one of the first French journalists to report on her country’s use of torture, in the pages of La Vie ouvrière in 1952. “The Algerians were being tortured on the Rue des Saussaies, in the very place that I had been! For me it was unbearable to find that my own country was doing that.” She made clandestine visits to Algeria and signed her reports with her old Resistance pseudonym, “Rainer.” But the far-right Organisation Armée Secrète would ultimately unmask her. In Oran, Algeria in July 1962, a big truck smashed directly into her while in her car. She sustained multiple fractures and a crushed hand and went into a coma. Rainer was hidden in a hospital for three days, before ultimately being snuck out. She laughs about it now. In the photos in Madeleine’s house, we see one man cropping up repeatedly. Nguyen Dinh Thi, in Berlin in 1951. At an international meeting of youth for peace this young — “and handsome!” — Vietnamese man came to see the French delegation and asked, “Do you know if Madeleine Riffaud wrote any other poems before being shot, apart from the ones published by Eluard?” Again, she laughs about it: “He thought me dead, even though I was there in Berlin!” The head-over-heels romance would last for fifty years. He lived in Vietnam, she in France. It made things simpler. She went to see him when she was covering wars. And she even moved in with him, when he was the Vietnamese equivalent of the Minister of Culture. The mixed, glamorous, media-friendly couple caused a stir. Riffaud recalls that Ho Chi Minh very much liked her but was forced to ask her to leave the country. Their tale continued at a distance. The poems that Nguyen Dinh Thi dedicated to her throughout his life made her an icon in Vietnam. The voice of this grand old lady, so imperious when she recounts the war, becomes more hesitant when she mentions him: “He was the love of my life. He died in 2003.” She had survived yet another one.