**Warning—this post contains spoilers for SISTERS OF THE RESISTANCE**

When I first learned about Catherine Dior’s role in the French resistance, I was sitting on a train, scrolling through Twitter. A tweet with a link to an old article on Jezebel.com came up and I froze. Christian Dior’s sister was involved in the French resistance? How had I never heard this before?

Despite being in the middle of writing THE JULIET CODE, I simply had to find out everything I could about Catherine Dior’s resistance work. It was frustratingly little.

Catherine, christened Ginette, was the baby of the five Dior siblings. Born on 2 August 1917, she was twelve years younger than Christian, but he loved her dearly and was probably responsible for her nickname, as St. Catherine was his favourite saint. Later, her nickname morphed again into “Caro”.

The Diors, a wealthy bourgeois family who owned fertiliser factories, lost their money in the Great Depression and their circumstances changed dramatically. After Catherine’s mother died in 1931 they moved from their large house in Granville, Normandy to Callian in Provence near Grasse, the flower-growing capital of France.

War came, and Catherine met a man in a radio shop in Cannes. His name was Georges Papillault, Baron des Charbonneries (known as Hervé) and he worked for the F2 section of the British-sponsored Franco-Polish resistance. Operating mainly in the Massif Central region of France, the section reported intelligence gathered in that region to the British. Catherine officially joined the section on July 1, 1943. She gathered intelligence, typed up reports and acted as a courier, a very dangerous role which might have led to her arrest at any time.

In Paris, Catherine would stay with Christian at his apartment on the rue Royale. There are reports of people coming and going at all hours from this apartment, and acquaintances who had stayed there mentioned that they only realised later they might have been implicated, unwittingly, in Catherine’s resistance work. The truth of these reports has been disputed because Christian Dior himself was never suspected of aiding the resistance, even when Catherine was arrested.

Whatever the case, Catherine went to the Place du Trocadero at 5pm on 6 July 1944 to meet a female contact and was met instead by French gestapistes who had been deputised by the Nazis to round up resistance workers. Her entire circuit had been betrayed. The head of her circuit was the legendary Jean Desbordes, code name Duroc, who was brutally tortured and killed by those same gestapistes. Incidentally, Desbordes was a former lover of Jean Cocteau, who was a close friend of Christian Dior’s.

I was shocked to learn that Catherine was not arrested by the Sicherheitsdienst, the official branch of the German SS responsible for counterintelligence work in Paris. The Nazis had deputised a gang of criminals known as the rue de la Pompe gang, giving them powers of arrest, search and seizure. The gang was self-funded—they were permitted to set up a collection house, and established their own branch of the black market with goods they stole or confiscated from Jews and dissidents.

The rue de la Pompe gang, minus its leader, Friedrich Berger, was brought to trial in 1952. Witnesses gave evidence of extreme torture and every kind of assault, particularly the use of the bath torture, plunging victims naked into icy water and almost drowning them, beating their necks with rubber hoses over and over until they confessed. What shocked people the most was that a woman, Denise Delfau, had calmly sat on the side of the bath taking notes of these confessions. Her participation, albeit mostly passively, seemed to eclipse that of the men in the eyes of the reporters of the day.

The gang arrested and interrogated Catherine under torture at an apartment on rue de la Pompe. She must have suffered protracted and excruciating pain but witnesses said she refused to give up the names of anyone else in her circuit. It was perhaps fortunate that rue de la Pompe was overflowing with prisoners because Catherine was then sent to a more conventional prison. From there, she was put onto one of the last trains out of Paris before the Allies marched on the city. The train was headed for Ravensbrück concentration camp.

In the meantime, Christian Dior was beside himself, trying to get news of Catherine and pleading with influential friends for help. A tip that the Swedish consul, Raoul Nordling, was negotiating the release of political prisoners led Christian to appeal to Nordling to help Catherine.

Nordling’s intervention was almost successful. On 18 August 1944 the consul was to arrange for the authority to release Catherine to be phoned through to the train commander at Bar le Duc, where Catherine’s train, after painfully slow progress in sweltering heat and appalling conditions, had stopped. Due to bad phone lines, the consul missed the departure of Catherine’s train from that station by mere minutes. Catherine was lost to them and there was nothing more that could be done.

Catherine was taken to Ravensbrück, and then sent to Torgau where she was forced to make explosives under very volatile conditions. According to Prosper Keating in his article, The Courageous Life of Catherine Dior, she also went to Aberode, a Buchenwald satellite camp and to Anton Kommando which was located in a Prussian salt mine.

On 4 April 1945, the Americans liberated Leipzig where Catherine was working at an aircraft parts factory. After two weeks of trying to make her way home on her own, Catherine was rescued by American soldiers near Dresden, and hospitalised for a month. She eventually returned to Paris in late May 1945 and was met by a very shocked Christian at the Gare de l’Est. A poignant story of Christian eagerly saving up rations to make his sister a soufflé upon her return is heart-wrenching. Catherine had been so starved while in the camps, she couldn’t even manage to eat soufflé.

Catherine Dior was awarded the King’s Medal for Courage in the Cause of Freedom by the British. She also received the Croix de Guerre, Cross of the resistance volunteer combatant, Combatant’s Cross and was made a Chevalière of the Legion of Honour

It must have been a slow and painful recovery after her harrowing ordeal. Eventually, Catherine returned to the family home in Callian to be with the love of her life, Hervé, the man who had drawn her into the resistance those years ago. Catherine was granted a coveted government license as a Mandataire en fleurs coupées which allowed her to deal in cut flowers internationally. Christian’s death in 1957 was a great sorrow to Catherine, but she lived a long and fulfilled life in the south of France, among the flowers she and her brother both loved. Catherine herself was never a fashionista or terribly interested in sharing the limelight with her brother, but she was fiercely proud of Christian and protective of his legacy.

Catherine Dior died in 2008, but it wasn’t until the House of Dior referred publicly to her resistance activities in 2011 that more people became aware of her role in the French resistance. I hope that with SISTERS OF THE RESISTANCE, I can do my small part to amplify this message and to celebrate the courage and sacrifice of this true heroine of France.

Selected further reading:

The German Trauma: Experiences and Reflections 1938-2001 by Gitta Sereny

Christian Dior: The Man Who Made the World Look New by Marie-France Pochna

Les Parisiennes: How the Women of Paris Lived, Loved and Died in the 1940s by Anne
Sebba

Gender and French Identity after the Second World War, 1944-1954: Engendering Frenchness by Kelly Ricciardi Colvin

Tortionnaires, Truands et Collabos, La bande de la rue de la Pompe 1944 by Marie-Josèphe Bonnet

Sauver Paris, Mémoires du consul de Suède by Raoul Nordling

Dior by Dior: The Autobiography of Christian Dior

Coming in September 2021, Miss Dior: A Story of Courage and Couture by Justine Picardie

Novels

The Designer by Marius Gabriel
The Paris Secret by Natasha Lester