Simone Fontaine
1920-2014

Simone Fontaine passed away quietly on Tuesday, Nov. 18. Most Napa Valley residents knew her from her years teaching French at Napa Valley College from 1953 to 1980.

However, she distinguished herself most dramatically in Paris at the age of 24 when she saved the lives of a French Resistance captain and his colleagues. Fontaine warned them away from a meeting place where French collaborators of the Nazis were waiting for them and as a result, she herself was captured and taken in a cattle car to Ravensbrück.

Ravensbrück was a secret, but now notorious, women’s concentration camp during World War II, located in northern Germany, 56 miles north of Berlin near the village of Ravensbrück. The camp was constructed under the orders of the infamous SS leader Heinrich Himmler and was unusual in that it was designed as a work camp primarily for women and children. But, “Simone always called it ‘an extermination camp,’” said longtime friend and colleague Jan Molen, of St. Helena.

Incomplete Nazi records include the names of 25,028 women who were sent to the camp between 1939 and 1945. More rigorous estimates place the number much higher. Those estimates, created by the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, document that more than 130,000 female prisoners passed through the Ravensbrück camp system. Around 40,000 were Polish women and 26,000 were Jewish. A smaller number of about 9,500 were French, according to extant records. The Nazi Gestapo categorized 87 percent of the inmates as “political,” and Fontaine’s offense would have placed her into that category.

Fontaine was put to work in the fields and also used as a subject for medical experiments. The German electrical engineering company Siemens & Halske is said to have also employed many of the inmates as slave labor. Ravensbrück prisoners were liberated by the Red Army on April 30, 1945, and according to Soviet liberation records, only between 15,000 and 32,000 of them survived.

When Fontaine was liberated she was taken to Sweden for rehabilitation. In 1946, she was awarded a silver medal by the French Minister of the Interior and authorized by President Charles de Gaulle. After the war, she told friends that her only desire was to flee all reminders of the conflict. She immigrated to America despite knowing no English.

Fontaine had previously earned a baccalaureate degree from the Sorbonne University in Paris in 1939, and had been working as an elementary school teacher when captured. In the U.S. she gradually made her way to California where — because of her education and nationality — she was hired by Napa Valley College to teach her native language. In 1960, she earned a master’s degree in French at UC Berkeley while on sabbatical.

Born just south of Paris in Auxerre, France, on April 12, 1920, to Amicy Chevalley and Edmond Fontaine, she outlived her four younger siblings: Jean, Edmond, Paule and Jacqueline. Both her marriages ended in divorce.

Molen — a colleague at Napa Valley College — was a fond friend of Fontaine. “She was the bravest person I ever met,” she said. “In 2001, I helped her apply for and receive $7,500 in reparations from the German government for her year of slave labor.”

Another friend, Reg Harris, said, “For me she was more than Simone. She symbolized another era, kind of a living window into an important part of our past, a part we need to honor and remember. Now I feel like that window has closed.”

A lifelong supporter of good causes, she generously supported many worthwhile organizations, among them Doctors Without Borders, the Humane Society, Hospice of Napa Valley and the NVC Foundation.

Any contributions in her honor should be sent to NVC Foundation, 2277 Napa-Vallejo Highway, Napa, CA 94558. There will be no funeral services.