Who was Simone Touseau, the shaven-headed woman in Robert Capa's famous photograph?

BarcelonaThe French writer Julie Héraclès first saw when she was in high school the photograph that Robert Capa took after the end of the Nazi occupation in her hometown, Chartres. "Since I saw it, I've always kept it in mind. It has always intrigued me," she explains. The image shows Simone Touseau, a 23-year-old French woman, with her head shaved and a brand on her forehead made with a hot iron, holding her baby daughter in her arms and next to her mother, who had also been shaved. Both were publicly humiliated by a frenzied crowd on August 16, 1944. The photo is a symbol of the savage purge that took place in France after the Allied victory.

The story of Simone Touseau was told in great detail by historians Gérard Leray and Philippe Frétigné in La tondue 1944-1947 [The Shaved Woman]. Leray and Frétigné researched in archives, interviewed survivors, and even found the girl Touseau had with a German soldier who died at the front. In the novel No sabéis nada de mi (Golem), Héraclès opts for a different approach: she takes a historical event to create fiction and delve into Simone's mind, whose name she changes. "From Leray and Frétigné's book we learned that the woman in the photograph was a collaborator, but all aspects of her psyche remain unknown; I thought a novel could be a good way to try to discover her emotions, how she thought, and what motivated her," assures Héraclès. "I wanted to ask the protagonist why she collaborated, why she worked for the occupier, why the Nazi ideology fascinated her. This is the starting point of the book," she adds. The French writer undertakes a brave exercise, as she places herself on the side of those who decided to support the Nazis. The book, which received the Stanislas Prize 2023 for best novel, has stirred up a lot of controversy about the limits of historical fiction.

"I have investigated a lot, I have recreated an era, an atmosphere, a city", says the writer, who read the book by the two French historians and also "Journal à 4 mains", by Benoîte and Flora Groult, and saw films like "Une affaire de femmes", by Claude Chabrol, and the series "Un village français". She did not speak with witnesses because her intention was not to write a history book or a biography. "I wanted to write a novel", she states. She does it in the first person. "Doing it this way allowed me to give my protagonist a certain energy and, at the same time, although it may seem paradoxical, to distance myself from a toxic protagonist. It is she who decides to recount one event or another", says Héraclès.

Neither understanding her nor judging her

There is fiction in the novel because the author basically tries to imagine what weight circumstances had and how they converged with the force of convictions in Simone's case. "I wanted to understand the weight of the humiliations she suffered in her childhood, the social decline of her parents, her admiration and fascination for Hitler. I didn't want to understand or judge her, I simply seek to tell a story that seems plausible to me," she assures.

Simone Touseau – like the protagonist of Héraclès' novel – was a brilliant student who wanted to excel in German at school. In Le Monde, Frétigné and Leray wrote that "Touseau was not an ordinary shorn woman, nor another scapegoat, and even less an impressionable girl; she was an accomplice to a monstrous ideology". Héraclès admits that she has received some criticism: "I have been accused of wanting to humanize and even rehabilitate a woman guilty of collaborationism. That was absolutely not my intention. My intention was to tell a story and explore why certain decisions are made," says the author.

The humiliation of women with shorn heads in the public square continues to be one of the worst vexations of the Liberation. Historians estimate that 20,000 women suffered this summary justice. Half of them were accused of "horizontal collaboration", that is, of having slept with Germans. "When the novel was published, I realized that this period remains very sensitive in France. It is a truly shameful period because, after all, there was little resistance; most simply waited and saw. Today it is impossible to know what each of us would have done in similar circumstances," states the author.

In fact, Le Monde published the testimony of Arnaud Hée, who was 12 years old when, at his father Alain's family home, he opened a chest of drawers and took out a copy of the American magazine Life with Simone's photograph. "She was the one who denounced your grandfather," his father told him. Arnaud's grandfather and five other neighbors were arrested, accused of being informers for listening to the BBC, and were deported.

It is a delicate and eternal question: the licenses that fiction allows itself despite dealing with a real event and in the context of a painful historical moment that is still difficult to accept. The occupation of France was very rapid; Hitler's soldiers entered it in May 1940 and by June 14 they were already occupying Paris. It was not at all complicated to convince the French politicians to sign the armistice. Public opinion just wanted everything to end.

The novelist writes with an agile style and does not create a character that generates sympathy in the reader. Nor does she justify her nor does she try to understand her. She simply gives her a voice. Explaining a story from fiction is one of the objectives of the Golem imprint, which was born in May at the hands of the Pasado y Presente publishing house. The new imprint aims to help understand historical, political, and social issues through novels. Each book is accompanied by a prologue, in this case by Marta Sanz, and a bibliography that helps to introduce oneself to a sometimes little-known and little-understood chapter of our world. They are often stories starring women who have been left on the margins. The second book from the imprint is Internadas, by Suzanne Scanlon. The author interweaves her own experience as a patient in a psychiatric hospital in the nineties with the voices of Sylvia Plath, Virginia Woolf, Marguerite Duras, and Audre Lorde, among others. "It is a defense of literature as a lifeline against the stigma of female madness," assures the publishing house. In this case, the prologue is by Mar García Puig.

Héraclès brings his book to a close at the moment of the photograph. Simone Touseau herself and her mother were imprisoned. They faced the death penalty, but eventually left prison after two years. They left the town. It is known that Simone Touseau married and had two more children, but her husband retained custody of the children they had had together. She fell into depression and alcoholism, returned to her hometown, and died in 1966, at the age of 44. The daughter she had with the German soldier is still alive, but she does not want to talk about or remember her past.