A Return to the Land

The planting of the orchards

After a month in hospital in Theresienstadt, Suzanne made the journey back to France alone. On June 22, she was evacuated by a French military ambulance to Speyer, Germany, where she was cared for at the Diaconesses Hospital. "I weighed 32 kilos when I was liberated. I spent two months unable to walk. If it had lasted one year longer, I would have been dead long ago," she said sharply. "Now I weigh 69 kilos, which proves that humanity is capable of bouncing back," she told the students with a smile.

Her convalescence period was long. Suzanne was not repatriated to France until July 14, the country’s national holiday. After a stop in Strasbourg, she arrived in Paris and finally reached her native Brittany five days later. There, she discovered that the Germans had burnt Sainte-Geneviève manor to the ground in retaliation for the battles with the Resistance at Saint-Marcel. Her family had lost everything. Suzanne was taken in by her aunt in the village of Guer, where she was joyfully reunited with Annic. After the evacuation of the Neubrandenburg camp, her cousin had survived the death marches and was liberated by the Red Army. Both had escaped hell but now struggled to find their place in the immediate post-war period. "When we returned, we had a very hard time because we felt like we were returning to an extraordinary and extravagant world. People had already been liberated for nearly a year and had resumed their normal lives. We thought we were dreaming,” Suzanne explained. The war might have been over and France was slowly recovering. But for both deportees, a part of themselves never came home from Germany. "In 1945, I realised, like Suzanne, that I wasn’t alive but trapped in my memories," Annic wrote in her memoirs.

“I felt as though I was returning like a dead person to a world I no longer belonged to.“

It was then that Daniel, Suzanne's fiancé, hoped to pick up where they had left off, having waited for his promised bride. But the wedding never took place. The former resistance member had not forgotten his attitude during the battle on June 18. At the age of 27, she returned to teaching and became the director of a domestic arts school in Ille-et-Vilaine. In Saint-Marcel, her mother, Geneviève Bouvard, fought to obtain war reparations because the manor had been destroyed by the Germans. The main property was never rebuilt, but its outbuildings were renovated. Around the same time, Suzanne inherited about 20 hectares of the Sainte-Geneviève estate and felt called to work closely with the land. In 1950, she left teaching, returned home, and decided to plant apple trees there. After enduring the ordeal of the camps, she now saw life very differently. "I had lost my house, but so be it; I had found my loved ones again. I returned home with the idea that in life, there are essential things and there are secondary things. I didn’t mind not having a home – as long as I could walk down a path without being beaten or arrested, as long as I always had some bread to eat and could find shelter when it rained." For Suzanne, "the main thing is life”.

Thanks to her experience with the orchards, Suzanne understood the unique challenges facing women farmers, who had to balance farm work with family life. The women's sections of the agricultural outreach groups encouraged them to participate in managing the farm alongside their husbands, to acquire new skills, and to challenge traditions to achieve better living conditions. For Suzanne, this went beyond the simple framework of farming. "Accepting responsibilities as a group leader, meeting with other women to discuss shared problems, speaking in public, taking notes, reflecting on their living conditions, their profession, and their children's future has contributed significantly to many women’s personal development," she wrote in a report in 1968. As the leader of this movement, strengthened by her experience as a resistance member and deportee, Suzanne played a major role in advancing the emancipation of women in rural areas.

Having become a prominent figure in Morbihan, she was made a Knight of the Order of Agricultural Merit in 1967, then an Officer in 1975. Active in her community, she was elected twice to the municipal council of Saint-Marcel. As someone who had experienced hunger herself, she was particularly committed to ensuring that children received better meals at school. Indeed her traumatic past was never far away. In 1984, she worked actively to establish the Museum of Resistance in Brittany, located on the very site of the Battle of June 18, 1944. During its inauguration, 40 years after her arrest, Suzanne, in keeping with her reserved nature, remained succinct in a report broadcast on FR3: "We made a 12-day journey in a cattle car across France to Romainville. And then followed the path all deportees know: Romainville – Saarbrücken – Ravensbrück."

Although Suzanne sometimes struggled to recount her time in the camps, her comrades were never far from her thoughts. She was notably a member of the National Association of Former Deportees and Internees of the Resistance (Adir), where survivors could find both material and moral support. For decades, Adir was presided over by Geneviève de Gaulle-Anthonioz, the niece of General de Gaulle, who had also been imprisoned in Ravensbrück. Suzanne welcomed her to Morbihan in 1992 to introduce her to the museum.