Josette Molland, who told about life in Nazi camps through art, dies at the age of 100
In the spring of 1943, Josette Molland, a twenty-year-old art student, was sure of two things: that she was making quite a good living creating designs for the silk weavers of Lyon, and that it was intolerable that the Germans were occupying her country.
She joined the resistance. Manufacturing fake papers and transporting them for the famous Dutch-Paris underground network relieved her of guilt. But it was dangerous.
Less than a year later, Mrs. Molland was captured by the Gestapo and lived in the hell of Nazi deportations and Nazi women’s camps, in Ravensbrück and elsewhere. She tried to escape, organized a rebellion against her captors, was severely beaten and lived on insects and ‘what was under the bark of trees’. But somehow she survived and returned to France.
“I had a happy life for the next fifty years,” Ms. Molland said in 2016 in a self-published autobiography, “Soif de Vivre” (“Thirst for Life”). But over the ensuing decades, she also told her story as one of a shrinking group of officially recognized resistance members still alive — about 40 of the original 65,000 who received the Resistance Medal, French officials say.
She died on February 17 at the age of 100 in a nursing home in Nice, according to Roger Dailler, who had helped her write her memoirs along with another friend of Ms Molland, Monique Mosselmans-Melinand.
The kind of horrors Mrs. Molland endured: being transported in overcrowded cattle trucks and arriving at the camp Holleischen to discover that a young woman had been hanged in the courtyard as punishment while she was being beaten for helping a fellow inmate who had collapsed (“Luckily I only got 25 blows; 50 meant death”) – have been told before by other camp survivors. And like other victims of the Nazis, she often gave lectures at French schools.
But Ms. Molland’s testimony is notable for the visual form it took. Many years after her return from the camps, she feared that her story would not get through, so in the late 1980s she created a series of paintings depicting her life in Ravensbrück and Holleischen in a naive, folk art style. – 15 in total.
She carried the paintings with her to make sure the students she spoke to understood. In her own writing she described some of her works as follows:
“The great search: in front of the entire camp, a woman, naked on the table, a ‘nurse’ searches her most intimate parts, he finds a gold chain and a medal.”
“These gentlemen were bored on Sunday: they came up with a game to distract themselves: throwing pieces of bread off the balcony. A fight ensues. Nothing for the older women.”
“The gathering of the dead at night: they are naked, because their clothes are to be used by others. In the fall of 1944, typhus killed many in the Holleischen camp.”
“I use them to explain to young people in schools what the human race is capable of, hoping that my testimony will awaken their vigilance and encourage them to take action every day so that they don’t have to live like I did. ” Molland said in her autobiography.
The paintings, like the descriptions she wrote for them, are candid. Little is left to the imagination. There is no emotion and the faces are virtually expressionless. It is pure representation, powerful in its fairytale simplicity.
Ms Molland’s account of how she was swept up in the whirlwind of resistance is equally sober.
One evening in the spring of 1943, after a class at the École des Beaux-Arts in Lyon, where she was studying, Mrs. Molland was approached by a tall young Dutch woman she knew as Suzie.
Suzie asked Mrs Molland to join her resistance network, which had built a brilliant record of smuggling Jews, resistance members and Allied pilots across the borders into Switzerland. “I accepted it immediately,” she said, adding, “I actually felt guilty for a long time because I didn’t do anything.”
Ms Molland was taken to Amsterdam to meet a network boss, who told her: ‘You risk death.’ She replied, “I know.”
Her skills as an artist made her a valuable recruit.
“I immediately started creating false papers,” she said. “I have stamps cut out from city halls, from prefectures, that I made laissez-passer, and I would discreetly give them to Suzie during our evening classes. Missions by train followed to distribute the documents.
Then came the morning of March 24, 1944. At six o’clock, “a commotion on the landing,” Mrs. Molland said.
“Boom Boom Boom! Open the door! Police!”
Two Gestapo officers and, with his dog, a member of the Milice Francaise, the French auxiliary Gestapo unit, rushed in. They immediately discovered her fake stamps.
She and her boyfriend Jean were taken to the Gestapo headquarters, presided over by the dreaded ‘Butcher of Lyon’. Klaus Barbiewho personally tortured prisoners and was responsible for the death of the resistance leader Jean Moulin in 1943. (In 1987, Barbie was convicted of crimes against humanity in France and died in prison four years later.)
The two were kicked down a stairwell; Jean was released and Mrs. Molland’s mother, who knew nothing of her daughter’s resistance activities, begged Barbie to free her, to no avail.
Barbie was busy erasing the Dutch-Paris network.
Ms Molland was tortured but “never talked about it”, Mr Dailler said.
On August 11, Ms Molland was packed onto a train bound for Ravensbrück along with 102 other women. Punished for trying to escape during the journey, she was chained by the ankle and thrown onto a pile of charcoal.
The rest of her story is told in the same frank, matter-of-fact style as her paintings.
“It was iron discipline” in Ravensbrück, she said. “We were surrounded by a large number of soldiers and guards.” She met Suzie, broken by torture, who revealed that she had accidentally betrayed her and others in the network.
Transferred to Holleischen, a forced labor camp in what is now the Czech Republic, Mrs. Molland immediately organized a prisoner strike after discovering that the job involved making ammunition for the Germans. “If we all refuse, they can’t kill us all!” she told them. “They need us too much for their workforce.”
As punishment, they had to get up at dawn and stand at attention for hours. If anyone fell, she was shot immediately.
The guard assigned to the women was a common-law prisoner — not, like Ms. Molland, a political prisoner — convicted of murdering her family. “She had the power of life and death over us,” Mrs. Molland recalled. She earned the guard’s favor by drawing her portrait.
On May 5, 1945, when the German capitulation was just days away, Polish resistance members entered the camp. The Germans were lined up against the wall. Those whom the prisoners labeled as “salauds” – bastards – were shot dead.
The French women sang ‘La Marseillaise’, the Americans arrived, handed out food and took the women away in trucks, all to be put on trains to France.
Mrs Molland was reunited with her mother in Lyon.
“I can’t even describe what I experienced in the camps,” she said in her memoir. “Unimaginable. If you haven’t lived it, you can’t understand it. Every day we thought it would be our last.”
Josette Molland was born on May 14, 1923 in the central French city of Bourges, the daughter of Gaston and Raymonde (Joyarde) Molland. Her father had a hardware store in Lyon.
After returning from the camps, Mrs. Molland set up a small clothing store in Lyon, moved to England with her first husband, a Polish officer, and later settled in Nice, where she married an exiled Russian nobleman, Serguei Ilinsky, who painted buildings . .
She returned to her first love, painting, and helped her husband restore the Russian Orthodox Basilica in Nice, creating numerous icons in the process.
Josette Molland-Ilinsky – she added her husband’s surname – was buried with full military honors in Nice on February 28 at a ceremony presided over by the mayor, Christian Estrosi.
Mrs. Molland leaves no survivors. A brother died several years ago, Mr. Dailler said.
At her funeral, the ‘Marseillaise’ and the ‘Chant des Partisans’, the anthem of the French Resistance, were sung.
Mr. Dailler remembered her as smiling and friendly, but also as “a fighter.”
“She had a very tough personality,” he said.