Humiliated by a Nazi officer as a teenager, she joined the French Resistance. By the time she was 20, she had killed a German soldier, survived torture and captured a supply train.
Madeleine Riffaud in 1945. After serving in the French Resistance in World War II, she had a career as a poet and journalist., Credit: via Private collection/RetroNews // New York Times
Madeleine Riffaud, a French Resistance hero who survived three weeks of torture as a teenager and who went on to celebrate her 20th birthday by helping to capture 80 Nazis on an armored supply train, died on Nov. 6 at her home in Paris. She was 100.
Her death was announced by her publisher, Dupuis. Ms. Riffaud went on to become a crusading anticolonial war correspondent.
She was propelled into the anti-Nazi guerrilla underground in November 1940 by a literal kick in the backside from a German officer. He sent her packing after he saw Nazi soldiers taunting her at a railway station as she was accompanying her ailing grandfather to visit her father near Amiens, in northern France.
“That moment,” Ms. Riffaud said in a 2006 interview with The Times of London, “decided my whole life.”
“I landed on my face in the gutter,” she told The Guardian in 2004. “I was humiliated. My fear turned into anger.”
She decided then and there to join the French Resistance.
“I remember saying to myself, ‘I don’t know who they are or where they are, but I’ll find the people who are fighting this, and I’ll join them.’ ”
Madeleine with her father, Jean Émile Riffaud, in about 1925. Mr. Riffaud, who had been wounded in World War I, was a pacifist. (Credit: Fonds Madeleine Riffaud // New York Times)
Ms. Riffaud connected with the Resistance in Grenoble, France, at a sanitarium, where she was being treated for tuberculosis. She had contracted the disease while studying midwifery in Paris.
She enlisted with the Francs-Tireurs et Partisans, the guerrillas organized by the Communist Party to sabotage the German occupiers. She took the nom de guerre Rainer, adopted from the Austrian poet Rainer Maria Rilke.
In 1944, Ms. Riffaud volunteered for a mission to kill a Nazi soldier. Retaliating for a German massacre of 643 villagers at Oradour-sur-Glane, a place she knew well from childhood, she bicycled along the Seine River carrying a stolen pistol. When she came upon a German soldier gazing across the river at the Tuileries gardens, she stopped and shot him twice in the head. “He fell like a sack of wheat,” she later wrote.
She was captured by a French collaborator, locked in a Gestapo jail, tortured and scheduled for execution. As she was being transported by train to the Ravensbrück concentration camp, she managed to escape, only to be seized again. But this time she was apparently freed in a prisoner exchange. Until then, her parents had thought she was dead.
When news of that episode spread, she was lionized as “the girl who saved Paris.”
“Hundreds of young women like me were involved,” Ms. Riffaud recalled. “We were the messengers, the intelligence gatherers, the repairers of the web. When men fell or were captured, we got the news through, pulled the nets tight again. We carried documents, leaflets, sometimes arms.”
Ms. Riffaud’s greatest wartime escapade was the capture of a Wehrmacht train in 1944. She and three comrades lobbed fireworks and grenades at the train from a bridge over the tracks, forcing the Germans to retreat into a tunnel. The four of them then persuaded a retired engineer to detach the locomotive, leaving the Germans trapped in the tunnel. Eighty Wehrmacht soldiers surrendered to her.
After the war, Ms. Riffaud overcame depression induced by “survivor guilt,” Keren Chiaroni wrote in “Resistance Heroism and the End of Empire: The Life and Times of Madeleine Riffaud” (2017). Ms. Riffaud married and became a poet and a journalist.
As a reporter and a committed opponent of capitalism and colonialism, she covered the insurgencies against French colonialism in Algeria and Vietnam for L’Humanité, the French Communist newspaper, and wrote several books.
Marie-Madeleine Armande Riffaud was born in Arvillers, near Amiens, on Aug. 23, 1924, the daughter of Jean Émile and Gabrielle (Boissin) Riffaud. Her father, who had been wounded in World War I, was a pacifist. Both her parents were schoolteachers, and she assumed that she would become a teacher, too.
Madeleine was 15 when the war hit home, finding herself among refugees being strafed by the Luftwaffe as they fled the Somme for the unoccupied southwest. In the Resistance, she rose to the rank of lieutenant. After the liberation of Paris, in 1944, she wanted to keep fighting but was deemed too young to join the French Army.
“I was a minor, I didn’t have my parents’ consent,” she said, “and I was a girl!”
A charcoal sketch of Ms. Riffaud made by Pablo Picasso in 1945. The artist, a biographer of Ms. Riffaud wrote, “drew the heavy eyelids of a woman who couldn’t forget” what she had been through in the war. (Credit: via Fonds Madeleine Riffaud // New York Times)
In 1945, she married Pierre Daix, a critic and Communist intellectual who had been imprisoned in a concentration camp. They separated two years later, and their daughter, Fabienne, was raised by his parents before she died of tuberculosis.
Ms. Riffaud has no known immediate survivors.
In Paris, she met the Vietnamese leader Ho Chi Minh and mingled with fellow poets. She met Pablo Picasso, who in 1945 drew her portrait in charcoal in Paris for her first book, “The Clenched Fist” (1945), a collection of poems written while she was imprisoned. In 1994, she published a memoir, “My Name Was Rainer.”
Ms. Riffaud was nearly blinded in a vehicular accident, for which she blamed the French nationalists in Algeria, where she worked as a correspondent during the 1950s and early ’60s. She later spent seven years embedded as a loyal chronicler with the South Vietnamese Communist insurgents, the Vietcong, and began a five-decade relationship with the Vietnamese poet Nguyen Dinh Thi. He died in 2003.
By the 1970s, when the Communists frowned upon relationships between Vietnamese and foreigners, she had returned to Paris. After working as a nursing assistant in Paris, she wrote “Night Linen” (1974), a nonfiction book that exposed the drudge work and poor pay of hospital workers.
Ms. Riffaud with the North Vietnamese leader Ho Chi Minh in Hanoi in 1966. She supported his fight against the U.S.-backed South Vietnam. ({hoto credit: Le Petit Journal // New York Times)Ms. Riffaud with the Vietnamese poet Nguyen Dinh Thi in an undated photo. The two had a relationship that lasted five decades. (Photo Credit: Le Petit Journal // New York Times)
Ms. Riffaud played down her acclaim as a hero of the liberation of Paris. “I refuse to be a symbol,” she wrote. “I was just a young girl caught up in history.”
“The essential was not to give in,” she once said. “When you resisted, you were already a victor. You had already won.”
In her book about Ms. Riffaud, Keren Chiaroni described how the young woman in that charcoal Picasso portrait had evolved.
“He saw a woman who was still a girl and yet who did not laugh or sparkle like a girl, for she was living with the shadow of what she had so recently experienced in the cells of the Gestapo,” Ms. Chiaroni wrote. “Picasso drew the heavy eyelids of a woman who couldn’t forget.”
Seventy years later, she observed, Ms. Riffaud had grown into a “passionate, vital person” who had “chosen to confront some of the political and social dragons of her day with effrontery and courage.”
“In this respect,” Ms. Chiaroni wrote, “she has grown into a very different person from the stunned, withdrawn young woman Picasso drew in 1945.”
[Sam Roberts is an obituaries reporter for The Times, writing mini-biographies about the lives of remarkable people. More about Sam Roberts]
