Reshaping perceptions of the Second World War in France

New insights into the past

Professor Diamond completed her undergraduate and postgraduate careers at the University of Sussex. From there, she gained a highly sought-after Economic and Social Research Council scholarship to undertake her DPhil research in France. In 1992, she was awarded a History DPhil on ‘Women and the Second World War in the Toulouse region’.

After several years working in a variety of Parisian higher education institutions (Université de Paris III: La Sorbonne Nouvelle, Ecole Normale Supérieure de Fontenay-aux-Roses, Université de Paris X: Nanterre), she was appointed lecturer at the University of Bath in 1993. She took up a Chair at Cardiff University in September 2014.

“The way history is studied has changed a lot since I started out,” she says. “It used to be viewed as being all about facts and dates. But it’s moved away from facts to people and a greater interrogation of sources.

“I was studying just at the beginning of that change – where academics were beginning to focus on individual experience as a way of understanding the big moments in history. When you study people’s memories of events, they don’t always focus on the facts, and they misremember things. But that’s still their own truth of their lives.”

France and history are two subjects that have been of interest to Professor Diamond since she was a child. “Growing up in London, my mother was always keen to point out landmarks, showing how history was all around us. History has been part of my life for as long as I can remember.

“My parents were strong Francophiles, and I grew to love the country. I went on my first French exchange at 14. I spent time in Toulouse as an Erasmus student, where I would later carry out my DPhil research. I’ve learnt French along the way. I love the culture and feel a strong affinity with the people there. French friends have said I’m the most French British person they know.”

Professor Diamond’s postgraduate research, focusing on Toulouse, involved her interviewing women who had lived through the Second World War, as well as exploring local and national archives.

“Historians had assumed men and women experienced the Second World War in the same way – but they didn’t, and I wanted to show how that played out in people’s everyday lives,” she explains.

“To do this, I felt it was much better if I did the research as a local study, where I could go into detail and really drill down. I lived in Toulouse for two years and during that time felt very much part of the community and way of life there.

“Doing oral history and understanding how people talk about their lives has always been interesting to me. For this kind of research, you have to be a good communicator and be able to put people at ease.

“When I was a student people would joke, ‘Hanna loves to talk to people’s grandparents’. I was fascinated by the older generations’ experiences and what they had lived through, and would always end up striking up conversations.”

Later on, as an established academic, Professor Diamond expanded on her research further with her book ‘Fleeing Hitler’. It detailed the experiences of French people during the Second World War, and has sold 10,000 copies.

Its follow-up website allowed Professor Diamond to record even more stories and carry out additional analysis of that period.

“People who read my book wrote to me saying, ‘I’ve got a family story, are you interested in this?’. There was an outpouring as a result of the book. I didn’t know what to do with all these family stories. That’s why I started the website. After holding on to these traumatic experiences for so long, it was clear people felt a need for their stories to be recorded and recognised.”

Finding new audiences after COVID-19

“It was bitterly disappointing when the exhibition closed 10 days later due to COVID-19,” says Professor Diamond. “It was really hard because we’d put so much work into it. But looking back, I now feel lucky that we’d been able to open it at all.

“Just prior to the lockdown, as the worry about COVID-19 increased, many people left Paris, replicating some of the scenes of flight that took place in 1940. It certainly made the exhibition quite topical – and the media picked up on those similarities.”

Nevertheless, the exhibition continues to have an impact, with a film financed by the Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC), allowing viewers to revisit its highlights.

“Lots of French people who were able to come to the exhibition said how much it had resonated with them,” says Professor Diamond.

“I suspected these experiences had been recounted in piecemeal fashion, living on in the background as individual family memories that had been passed down. We were just pulling those stories together and saying, ‘here’s a part of France’s history that has been overlooked’.

“People who specialise in trauma say it’s a common reaction not to talk about something that happened if it wasn’t on historical record – and yet it was a huge event that affected millions of people.”