Berthe's Prison Diary
Hanna Diamond discovers the journal of an alleged woman collaborator in Toulouse that throws light on the fate of prisoners in a vengeful post-war France.
In August 1944, during the liberation of France, many people were arrested by the Resistance for alleged crimes of collaboration during the Occupation. Among them was Berthe A., the director of laboratory research in the Faculty of Science at the University of Toulouse. A decade later she wrote an account of her experience of being interned for almost a year in the form of (retrospective) diaries entitled Ma prison and Mes barbelès (‘My barbed wire’). These are now held at the Municipal Archives in Toulouse, donated by her lawyer in 1988 in accordance with her wishes.
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