La Plume de la Resistance

La Plume de la Resistance

Six nights a week, shapely, 36-year-old Lydia Lova takes her third-from-the-left place in Paris' famed Folies-Bergere chorus line, prances onstage dressed in not much more than a few sequins, a plume, and her smile. Unknown to most Folies patrons, Lydia Lova is in reality 2nd Lieut. Lydia Danuta de Lipski, one of France's greatest Resistance fighters. Last week the French government prepared to add the Legion of Honor medal to the Croix de guerre with bronze star awarded her by General Charles de Gaulle in 1945.

All her life Lydia wanted to dance. Even before her family moved to France from Poland when she was seven, she was already attending the Warsaw Opera Ballet school. Ten years later when the Nazis overran France, Lydia's father Wladimir became a Resistance chief for the French underground's F-1 foreign-born unit, and the 17-year-old Lydia became an invaluable spy. Each day she played the role of an ingenuous, admiring schoolgirl watching Nazi troop movements; at night, from the Lipskis' Pigalle apartment, "Cipine" radioed her findings to London. Handy with pen and brush, Lydia, by 1941, was F-1's chief cartographer. When the infamous female double agent "La Chatte" betrayed the Fi, Lydia began a grim tour of Nazi prisons, ending in Ravensbrueck concentration camp, where, nearly dead from torture and disease, ravished by her guards, she was at last freed in 1944 by the Swedish Red Cross.

Making her way back to their Pigalle apartment, Lydia was soon joined by her father, who had also survived German internment (her mother had been shot by the retreating Nazis on their last day in Warsaw). In Paris, father and daughter picked up the pieces of their old life. Lydia enrolled in a dancing school in 1948, two years later was among the few chosen from hundreds of applicants for the Folies chorus, has been there ever since. Says Lydia: "It's not the Warsaw Opera Ballet, but I love it." Asked where she would pin her Legion ribbon, Lydia answered: "I'll wear it at work only for a State visit to the Folies--which is unlikely."

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