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Christian Dior is basically a household name, having risen to global success following his debut 1947 New Look collection, which aimed to transform women into flowers after the brutality of World War II.

Alongside this collection, he also released the all-time favourite fragrance, his first perfume, Miss Dior, still very much a bestseller today.

While Christian has much to be celebrated for, the story of his young sister, a stoic and brave woman that endured more than any person should, is full of inspiration and fascination.

Catherine Dior was also her brother’s muse for the Miss Dior perfume, described as “the fragrance of love”, but which The Telegraph‘s Justine Picardie recognises will also be “forever emblematic of freedom, too.”

Picardie tells the story of Catherine’s life because, despite her story being woven into that of her brother’s, she deserves recognition in her own right:

…her wartime courage as a dedicated member of the French Resistance convinced me as a writer that she should be celebrated in her own right, rather than relegated to an incidental footnote in [Christian’s] biography.

Catherine was born in 1917 and Christian in 1905, a sizeable 12-year-age gap, but they were apparently the closest of the five siblings in the family and had a bond that stretched across the years.

They started with a privileged bourgeoisie upbringing in a town along the coast of Normandy, but things started flipping upside down following the Wall Street Crash, along with their mother’s death by septicaemia.

Here are the Dior children, starting with Catherine on the left, followed by Bernard, Jacqueline, Christian, and Raymond:

In 1936, Catherine and Christian lived a decent life together in Paris, her selling accessories while he was beginning his career as a freelance fashion illustrator:

…they discovered the pleasures of bohemian life in Paris in the late Thirties.

“Paris had rarely seemed more scintillating,” wrote Christian in his memoir. “We flitted from ball to ball… Fearing the inevitable cataclysm, we were determined to go down in a burst of splendour.”

Then, another knock came with the fall of France in 1940, when the two siblings made an escape to their father’s small farmhouse in rural Provence.

Although, they had roses and a veggie garden, so life wasn’t too bad, yet.

Things really started revving up when Catherine fell in love with a man from the French Resistance named Hervé des Charbonneries.

He was a part of an intelligence network known as F2, and Catherine chose to join him, becoming one of 400 000 activists in the movement.

In 1944, she moved again, this time back in with Christian at his Paris apartment, after receiving a coded message urging her to continue her work for F2 in the big city rather:

…[the apartment] was just across the street from Maxim’s, the fashionable restaurant where German officers dined alongside French collaborators who had enriched themselves through their support for the Nazis.

Swastikas flew above the nearby Eiffel Tower and Arc de Triomphe and the Gestapo had seized some of the most prestigious properties in central Paris.

In fact, shortly after the move, Catherine was arrested and tortured by the Rue de la Pompe Gestapo, which included French collaborators, many of whom were even women.

But the worst of them all was Friedrich Berger, the leader, who had “a background in espionage and extortion, and possessed of a psychopathic capacity for cruelty.”

She would be tortured for information at his command, some of which she describes in a witness statement:

“When I arrived in the building, I was immediately subjected to an interrogation on my activities for the Resistance and also on the identity of the chiefs under whose orders I was working. This interrogation was accompanied by brutalities: punching, kicking, slapping, etc. When the interrogation proved unsatisfactory, I was taken to the bathroom. They undressed me, bound my hands and plunged me into the water, where I remained for about three quarters of an hour.”

But she didn’t give any information away, saving her brother and comrades, despite the “nightmarish system of torture” that she had to endure.

The worst of it was far from over, as Catherine was then forced to move between several concentration camps for women, described as places that seemed as if “God had remained outside.”

If it wasn’t death by gas chamber, the 130 000 women imprisoned at Ravensbrück would die by “extermination through labour”, which combined relentless work with starvation and beatings:

Catherine endured this punishing scheme, first at Ravensbrück, with its Siemens armaments factory on site, and then at the sub-camp of Torgau, where she was forced to toil in another munitions plant, dipping copper shell cases into deep trays of acid.

The 12-hour shifts were exhausting, and the sulphuric fumes damaged Catherine’s lungs; yet even there, she and her companions engaged in secret acts of resistance by sabotaging the machinery, so that every so often it broke down.

It was only during “the death march” led by SS officers in 1945 that Catherine managed to escape and fulfil the only wish that got her through all those days of horror: to return to the family home she had left in Provence.

Christian and Hervé were waiting at the railway station to welcome her home and did not recognise her at all when she stepped onto the track:

The stoicism she displayed at work, and her commitment to rebuilding her life after the war, are all the more remarkable in the context of the physical injuries and grave psychological trauma that resulted from her imprisonment in Germany.

Christian thrived with her home, too, but died before she did, at the age of 52 in 1957 by a heart attack.

Catherine, as his “moral heir”, never boasted about her achievements, and lived until the age of 91.

She is a truly remarkable woman behind the Dior brand.

Read her story in full here.

[source:telegraph]