The Half-Forgotten Heroine

A Half-forgotten Heroine

The grim granite stone implanted in the village green was simply the half-mile marker in a stumbling jog every morning from our house in Normandy. For days I didn’t slow down enough to notice it was a memorial tablet; it took weeks longer for me to notice that the Edmond Robert was not Edmond but Edmone: a rare name, a rare woman it seemed.

Memorial stone to Edmone Robert in the village square

Sparse and dramatic, those words inspired me to discover more, especially in this the 60th anniversary year of the Battle of Normandy; all the more so since this is now my home, and because I am a teacher too.

Sometime later, I bumped into a middle-aged woman in the doctor’s waiting room. I remembered her from the village fete. She had been the schoolmistress until her retirement in 1990. Yes, she would love to talk to me about Edmone Robert and would I telephone her the next week to fix a date.

Meanwhile I researched through books and the internet looking for any trace of Edmone Robert. I found references to resistance cells of different political persuasions in the area and the story of a Gisele Guillemot who also was a resistance worker. She mentions her friend Edmone Robert because they were imprisoned and deported to Germany together and spent 200 days in labour camps and on forced marches together. Gisele survived to tell her story in her memoirs, but Edmone did not.

When I came to ring the retired schoolteacher, I had forgotten her surname, so I phoned the mayor of St Aubin as I knew he would know her. Of course he did.

Monique Binet was a fascinating woman to interview. She was the village teacher for more than thirty years from 1956 until her retirement in 1990, when the school closed down. She was the sole teacher in charge of the education of twenty to thirty children, aged from five to eleven. There was not even a secretary in the school. She used the traditions of the countryside and people around her as resources, but initiated “classes de neige” and “classes de mer” when she took all the children to the mountains for lessons, or to the seaside. She is proud to have been the first in the area to install a computer in the classroom in 1980. Her working life has been dedicated to the education of the village children and her home was the schoolhouse attached to the school. I talked with her about her memories in her lovely, half-timbered Normandy house, near a little wood at the edge of the village.

When Monique arrived fresh from college in Caen in 1956, she had never heard of her predecessor of some twenty years before, but little by little, as the war became safely relegated to history, she realised she had a heroine on her doorstep, indeed, in her own home. Edmone Robert, like Monique, had lived in the schoolhouse and taught the one-class school on her own.

Over the years, Monique’s interest in the war-time teacher grew. She became aware of the unusually placed locks in the schoolhouse where Edmone had concealed resistance workers. In the attic, Monique found a copy of a letter sent by Edmone to the Mayor of St Aubin in 1940. The letter made pointed enquiries about the ration-tokens for shoes for children. Edmone had known that there were tokens to be had at the town-hall and yet some of her schoolchildren had no shoes. Edmone had scribbled on the copy “ No Reply”

On the occasion of the centenary of the school, Monique decided to campaign for a monument to Edmone Robert, and permission to name the school in her honour. However, in 1984,the mayor of Cambremer — St Aubin being dependent on the bigger village of Cambremer by then - stone-walled the application. His off-the record remark to Monique was “Elle avait fait de grosses erreurs”. These grave errors could only have been the fact that Edmone had been a member of a communist resistance cell, which, around these bucolic conservative parts, raised eyebrows. So, in the early 1990s, when there was renewed interest in the Normandy Landings, Edmone’s story was being overlooked.
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Edmone Robert

In 1937, the twenty five year-old Edmone Robert was appointed schoolmistress of St Aubin sur Algot, a tiny scattered community of some 170 souls. She was already a member of the communist Front Populaire and committed to opposing fascism and Nazi expansion. In 1940, after the collapse of the French Army in face of the advancing Germans, she joined the Organisation Speciale in collecting weapons and munitions abandoned by the surrendering army. Later, Edmone was a member of the Francs Tireurs and the Partisans Francais. She concealed resistance workers in her schoolhouse (after the explosion and derailing of a train at nearby Airan, she hid the main protagonists) and researched information for resistance activities.

Edmone’s brother worked in the sous-prefecture in Lisieux and was a sympathiser to the cause himself, but he worried constantly about his courageous but headstrong sister. He knew she passed on documents and co-ordinated a part of the resistance movement in the Calvados. He was powerless to protect her on that fatal day.

On 21st December 1941, the Special Police Brigade marched into the isolated village schoolroom and arrested Edmone in front of her pupils. Edmone panicked and slipped some incriminating documents into a pupil’s satchel. The pupil’s father happened to work in the Town hall in Cambremer with the mayor, who was a staunch Petainist and aggressively anti-communist. He sent the documents to the authorities. Her fate was sealed.

She was taken to Caen prison, where she remained until May ’43. Along with Gisele Guillemot, another resistance worker, she was taken to Fresnes, to the north-east of Paris, where a total of sixteen resistants were condemned to death. The fourteen men were summarily executed but the two women had their sentences commuted to deportation. There followed eighty-nine days of forced march, moving from one prison to another, or between transit camps and police stations until they reached Lubeck in Eastern Germany, passing through the notorious Dresden prison where political prisoners and homosexuals were routinely subjected to inhuman treatment including torture, “experimentation” and execution.

In April 1944, Edmone and Gisele were separated. Edmone was taken to Jauer camp, south of Berlin, where she was put to work in a Siemens factory making winding equipment for delayed-action bombs. There she met Helene Prunier, who was to take the place of Gisele as her friend and helpmeet. The living and working conditions at Jauer were atrocious, and it wasn’t long before Edmone caught tuberculosis. She had to continue working of course. Worse was to come when the Germans, on the retreat by January 1945, evacuated the camp and attempted to transfer the inmates on foot as the Allies were approaching. It was during this “death march” (which killed many young and old people) that the allies eventually picked up the group of bedraggled prisoners. Edmone was too weak to continue. In the ambulance at Karlsruhe near the border with Eastern France, Helen tried to rally her friend, who responded by asking for a sip of French wine. Helene somehow managed to give her some, but Edmone was very near death. Edmone’s prison-camp clothes were so threadbare that she was almost naked. Helen took off her own dress and put it on her friend. The death was not recorded until they had safely reached Strasbourg on French territory.

Until 1997, Edmone’s name was one of many on the war memorial in the churchyard at St Aubin, with only the words: Victime civile de la guerre. Only the persistence and dedication of Monique Binet, the last schoolmistress of St Aubin, brought the name of Edmone Robert to the forefront and culminated in the memorial ceremony, on 22nd June 1997. A monument to Edmone Robert was placed on the square for future generations and the square was renamed Place Edmone Robert. Sadly, the school was never given her name. Classes had been moved into Cambremer, where Monique finished her teaching career.

The present mayor of St Aubin conducted the ceremony. He had been one of the pupils of Edmone Robert during the war and had witnessed the police entering the school. It was he I had rung to ask if he knew the retired schoolteacher’s name. At the ceremony, the two women who had shared Edmone’s sufferings in exile, Gisele Guillemot and Helene Prunier, spoke of her immense courage and the ideals for which she died.

« Savais-je donc qu’il me faudrait mourir
Moi, la petite institutrice,
Pour empêcher la France de périr
Pour que, plus belle, on la chérisse…. ? »
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“ How was I to know that I, would have to die,
The little village schoolmistress,
So that France would not perish altogether
But that, more lovely still, might be cherished….?”

(G. Hugue, local poet)

1495 words
© Vivienne M. Barker 2004
FBSR

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