Josette Duval Work Link

Her most harrowing act came in June 1944. Three days after D-Day, as Allied forces pushed inland, a vengeful SS unit swept through Sainte-Mère-Église. They rounded up 27 villagers suspected of aiding the paratroopers. Josette was among them. They were marched to a field outside town, made to kneel before a ditch, and shot.

She never married. Instead, she rebuilt La Maison des Revenants stone by stone with her own hands. She resumed her work as the village midwife, delivering over 600 babies in the next three decades. But she was different. She spoke little. She laughed rarely. Her hands, once quick and gentle, now trembled when she heard loud noises—a car backfiring, a slammed door, the crack of a hunter’s rifle. The turning point came in 1958. A young Parisian journalist named Simone Delacroix arrived to write a story on “war widows of Normandy.” She expected a victim. She found Josette in her herb garden, barefoot, wearing a man’s coat, calmly strangling a rat that had gotten into the chicken coop. josette duval

Josette, then 19, did not join the armed resistance. Instead, she became something arguably more dangerous: a . Using her midwifery training, she began falsifying medical documents to exempt young Frenchmen from forced labor in Germany (the STO). She hid a Jewish infant, the child of a Parisian seamstress, in a hollowed-out confessional in the abandoned chapel on the hill. She treated wounded British paratroopers with poultices of comfrey and yarrow, lying to German patrols with a serene face that masked a heart hammering against her ribs. Her most harrowing act came in June 1944

She left behind no children. She left behind a small, leather-bound notebook filled with the names of every child she had delivered, every person she had hidden, and every friend she had buried. On the last page, in faint pencil, she had written: “Do not look for meaning in the ditch. Look for the hand that reaches in. That is all the meaning there is.” Today, La Maison des Revenants is a small museum dedicated to civilian resistance in WWII. The herb garden still grows. And every June 6th, someone places a single white rose on the mass grave outside town—not for the dead, who have enough flowers, but for the living who crawled out. Josette was among them

By 1939, she was an apprentice to the village’s aging sage-femme (midwife). She had a sweetheart, a carpenter’s apprentice named Henri Leclerc, who played the accordion off-key but made her laugh until her ribs ached. The war, when it came, was at first a distant thunder. Then, in 1940, the thunder arrived in boots. The German army requisitioned the Duval family’s home, forcing them into two rooms above the florist shop. Josette’s father, a man of quiet resistance, was arrested in 1942 for distributing underground newspapers. He died in a camp in 1944, two months before the liberation.