Ninette’s War by John Jay: My mother gave us cyanide to take in case the Nazis caught us
Ninette’s War by John Jay (Profile Books £20, 352pp)
In autumn 1939, 12-year-old Ninette Dreyfus was given a red leather diary embossed with her initials. Her first diary entry, on September 3, read: ‘At eleven o’clock, the newscaster announced war between England and Germany.
‘At five o’clock, France was at war, which gave me a strange feeling, it was very stirring.’ She continued writing her diary throughout the war years.
In between typical teenage musings on clothes, spots and crushes on boys, she chronicled the harrowing story of her family’s wartime experience and their dizzying fall from extreme wealth and privilege to homelessness, fear and hunger.
Ninette, which was a family nickname – her real name was Christiane – was born into a well-known Jewish banking dynasty and her family lived in a huge townhouse off the grand Avenue Foch in Paris.
She and her sister went to the best private schools, had riding lessons, trips to the opera and ballet, and spent holidays in their uncle’s chateau in the country.
Even as the Nazis began their rise to power, Ninette’s father Edgar was slow to see the disaster that was about to befall his family.
A patriotic Frenchman, he was reluctant to acknowledge the rampant anti-Semitism that lurked just under the surface of French society.
Yet even before the Nazis marched into France in May 1940, life for French Jews was becoming increasingly difficult.
Ninette – who didn’t even realise she was Jewish until her mother sat her down and told her – found herself being ostracised by her classmates and sometimes physically attacked.
Engaged: Ninette married David Montagu, 4th Baron Swaythling
On one occasion they tied her to a tree with skipping ropes and took it in turns to walk past her, spitting in her face.
In June, with the Germans closing in on Paris, the Dreyfus family moved to Marseilles.
Although Marseilles came nominally under the control of the Vichy government rather than the Germans, with each passing month Jews faced further restrictions, banned from fields such as medicine, law and teaching.
Soon, Edgar Dreyfus, once head of one of the leading banks in France, was told he could no longer work as a banker.
Ninette’s diary recorded that, even though they still had money, they were permanently hungry as food was so scarce; when her mother managed to acquire some eggs, ‘I don’t think I’d ever tasted something so good’.
News began to filter through of relatives who had been rounded up for deportation to camps. It was only after the war that they discovered they had perished in Auschwitz and Belsen.
Ninette as a young girl at home
The family moved again to Cannes, which for a time was under Italian control. Her parents, who still had access to some money, were able to pay for false papers which disguised their Jewish origin, yet on several occasions they narrowly escaped being arrested and deported, more through luck than good judgment.
Ninette’s parents still had access to some money and were able to pay for false papers which disguised their Jewish origin
Ninette’s mother, Yvonne, gave both her daughters cyanide powder to hide in their skirt pockets in case they were captured and tortured, and taught them a string of German insults so they would go down fighting.
With local informers being offered large bounties for every Jew they identified, the family formulated a plan to escape over the Pyrenees and into neutral Spain.
Edgar and Ninette’s sister Viviane were the first to undertake the gruelling 70km journey over the Pyrenees.
At the end of the first day, the lead smuggler invited Edgar into his house and asked him if he recognised him: he had been the Dreyfus’s butler in Paris. ‘If I had known Sir was Sir I would have brought out the silver,’ he told him.
Ninette and Yvonne made it to Spain two days after them. The family spent the rest of the war in Madrid, which was a thrilling place for a teenager – a hotbed of German and Allied spies which, according to Ninette, ‘made Rick’s Cafe in Casablanca look boring.’
After the war, Ninette married David Montagu – later Lord Swaythling – whose family owned a merchant bank, and she settled happily in London.
Having survived the war Ninette worked hard to get recognition for the French gentiles who had helped save Jews during the war
Author John Jay, who met Ninette when she was in her 80s, and was charmed by her, skilfully weaves extracts from her diary into a wider account of what happened to French Jews.
For all her adult life, Ninette, who died in 2021, worked hard to get recognition for the French gentiles who had helped save Jews during the war, but she never got over her horror at the speed with which the country of her birth turned against its Jewish population.
Ninette’s War is not an easy read, but at a time of rising anti-Semitism across the world, it is chillingly relevant.
Can we really say with confidence, ‘Never again’?