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The Story of Hélène Vagliano
Large dark eyes look out,
under arched brows, from an oval face. The look is serious, but the
subject of the photograph could not have known what life held in
store for her. She is Hélène Vagliano and her story should not be
forgotten.
Hélène’s parents were
part of a large and respected Franco-Greek background of bankers and
merchant ship owners with strong links to England. There is a
Vagliano tomb in West Norwood cemetery in London. Hélène was born in
Paris in 1909 but the family, her father Marino, her mother Danaë,
Hélène and her two brothers, moved to England, living at The Grange
at Ascot near Windsor, where they had one of their elegant houses
and admired gardens. Much later, in very different circumstances,
Danaë Vagliano would remember these gardens and the lake ‘on which
floated swans, as white as snow’.
In 1924 Hélène’s parents
moved to Cannes, in the south of France, and Hélène (always Elaine
to her English friends) became a boarder at St. George’s School in
Ascot. At this private all-girls school, she was successful and
popular. Her serious expression in her photograph belies her high
spirits and mischievous sense of humour. She was a model pupil, a
prefect, a promising pianist and played goal in the 1st
lacrosse team. She spoke French fluently but, as the result of her
schooling, would always speak it with a pronounced English accent. A
fact which would count against her in the future. Once in Cannes the
Vaglianos bought land in the Californie district and here they built
the impressive Villa Champfleuri, where Danaë created a garden of
such importance it is now under a preservation order. Here there
were flamingos on the small lakes, rather than swans.
In 1927 Hélène left her
school in Ascot and joined her family in Cannes, where her parents
had already settled comfortably into expatriate life. Hélène’s
father, Marino, was a champion golfer and President of the
prestigious Golf Club at Cannes-La Napoule (during the German
occupation in the last months of the second world war, this golf
course would be planted with around 2,000 land mines). Danaë became
captain of the French Ladies’ Golf Team, and the international
Vagliano Trophy still exists in her name. From here, living the life
of a typical, privileged, young Riviera girl of the 1930s, Hélène
regularly sent news of her escapades to the Alumni magazine of her
old school in England. She bought herself a speed-boat ‘it’s
tremendously thrilling, especially turning corners’, skied and
mountaineered with her brother which ‘gave the guide many white
hairs’. She trained tortoises ‘one gets almost breathless chasing
them’ and generally enjoyed herself thoroughly. In the midst of this
gaiety she also translated articles into Braille for periodicals for
the blind.
All this would change
with the declaration of war in September 1939, followed by the
dreary months of the Phoney War or Drôle de Guerre. The
expatriate community along the coast, particularly in Cannes, sprang
into action. Numerous aid programmes were launched and their letter
headings sport the names of many of the great and good of the
Riviera at that time. Hélène and her mother joined the committee of
the Military Canteen at Cannes station, set up to provide
refreshments for the troops being sent to defend the frontier with
Italy. But, several months later, as the German army breached the
border from Belgium and swept across France, the vast majority of
these expatriates fled the Riviera.
By July 1940 France had
capitulated, making a prisoner of war of one of Hélène’s brothers,
and the south had fallen under the yoke of the Vichy government.
Firmly anti-Nazi and anti-Vichy, the Vaglianos stayed, wisely
keeping a low profile. By 1941 Hélène had become the local organiser
for the Social Services Department of the Maison du Prisonnier
in Cannes – a prisoners’ aid organisation which cared for the
families and orphans of lost and imprisoned soldiers. As the war
progressed, and virtually everyone became permanently hungry, Hélène
would, each week, take groups of the children to restaurants where
they could have a rare good meal. She was recognised as being as
generous with her money as with her compassion and known never to
doubt the final victory of the Allies.
In 1943 the oppression
in the south increased as the Allies swarmed into North Africa,
Italy capitulated and the German Army occupied totally the ‘Free’
Zone of Vichy France. For Hélène aid work was now not enough and,
unknown to her parents, she joined the Resistance. All her physical
and intellectual energy had now found a cause. Although her mother
would say later ‘she worked with the English’, Hélène is not on the
list of agents of the Special Operations Executive. However, she
seems to have been involved with more than one scheme to help the
Allies. As well as working with a local Resistance group or
reseau, which helped the hunted to escape from France through
Spain, she became an agent for the
Bureau
Central de Renseignments et Action
(BCRA) operating out of London. This was an organisation created, at
the request of Winston Churchill, by De Gaulle’s Free French
government-in-exile,
to inform the Allies of
enemy movements and prepare for liberation. Hélène’s group, led by
Dr Paul Schmierer, was Tartane-Massena working on the
Riviera, and in it her code name was Veilleuse. She also
became a ‘letter box’ for the Allies and, equipped with a radio,
sent and received messages and kept her control informed on the
activities of the German Army, for by now the Gris-Verts (called
after the colour of their uniform) were anticipating an invasion
along the coast. The slightly built Hélène was frequently to be seen
on her bicycle in and around Cannes, with messages hidden in the
handlebars and sometimes, rather recklessly, her radio camouflaged
in the rear basket.
The plaque at St. George's School, Ascot
On 28 July 1944, at a
time when hope was beginning to grow into certainty for an Allied
invasion, a car drew up outside the building where Hélène worked. In
it were a group of Frenchmen, members of Jacques Doriot’s Legion
des Volontaires Français Contre le Bolchévisme headed, as was
usual, by a German officer. This organisation, virulently
anti-Communist and arch-collaborators, frequently worked cheek by
jowl with the local French Milice. The latter group, operating
virtually outside the law, was composed of Frenchmen dedicated to
hunting members of the Resistance. Denounced by an arrested woman,
whose son she had helped to escape, Hélène was taken away. Later on
the same day, at the Villa Champfleury, her parents were roughly
arrested as hostages, in a move designed to pressure Hélène into
betraying her fellow Resistants.
The torture of Hélène
began immediately at the Villa Montfleury, the notorious Gestapo
headquarters of Cannes. Over the next seventeen days, in different
places, it continued. In prison in Grasse, in the Villa Trianon at
Cimiez in Nice and then in a military prison in the same town, her
parents always being moved near to her in the same building to
ensure they were kept aware of her suffering. Prisoners were kept in
badly-lit, verminous cells where often there was no water to wash in
or to drink. Hélène was burnt on her body with a laundry iron and
repeatedly kicked and beaten, her only reply being always: ‘Je ne
sais pas’. This regime continued until the day when, unable to
bear the terrible conditions her parents were suffering and in order
to free them, Hélène signed a confession full of invented names and
addresses. As her mother was being released she had time to tell her
that she would: ‘Send them all over France, looking for people who
don’t exist’.
On the 15 August, from
her cell, Hélène heard a voice calling out in the street that the
Allies had landed along the coast at Frejus. Overjoyed, she
exclaimed to her cell companion, who later relayed it to Hélène’s
mother, that now France was liberated nothing else mattered and her
work was done: ‘mon petit morceau est fini’. During the
course of the same afternoon, on a Riviera bombarded day and night
by Allied planes, Hélène and twenty-three other prisoners were
collected together and driven in the direction of the Ariane quarter
behind Nice. The road to their destination was called the Chemin de
la Croix - the Path of the Cross.
On a piece of land in
front of a sheer rock face and bordered by a small river, the group
was lined up to face the water. Watched with horror from behind
closed shutters by a local farmer and his daughter, the Germans set
up their machine guns across the river from the prisoners. All
twenty-four died that day. On Hélène’s right fell a priest who had
been arrested for burying two Resistants shot by the Gestapo. On her
left, a young blonde girl who had acted as nurse to the Maquis.
Further down was Commandant de Lattre de Tassigny, a retired cousin
of the General de Lattre who would lead the French forces from the
beaches of the Riviera to victory in Berlin. The Commander’s son had
joined the Resistance and his father had been taken as hostage. The
son had already been captured and shot two days previously. Lying
beside Hélène was a little basket, which her mother had managed to
get to her, containing a piece of bread and a pear. It was her
lunch, for she had thought she was being taken to another prison to
be interrogated.
Six weeks after her
death, her body was brought back to the Town Hall in a liberated
Cannes, where a street would later bear her name. The coffin,
covered by the French Flag, the Tricolore, was laid on a
gun-carriage draped in white. All night long a guard of honour of
men and women of the Resistance watched over her. The crowds at the
funeral at the Russian Orthodox church the following day were
enormous, every Resistance group in the south was represented, the
men marching with their guns reversed. A singer sang Avé Maria,
for Hélène had died on the Day of the Assumption, and this was
followed by her favourite piece by Bach, Viens Douce Mort.
Maureen Emerson
Sources: Hôtes de la Gestapo by Danaë Vagliano
Archives of Cannes, France
Musée de la Resistance, Nice, France
The Dragon. The Alumni Magazine of St.
George’s School, Ascot.
Maureen Emerson is a member of
The Society of
Authors
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