Authors: Caroline Moorehead
Germaine Pican, reaching the Lutétia, stood in the lobby, searching with her eyes among the crowds for some member of her family. There was no one. She caught sight of a journalist she had known before the war. She asked him if he knew where her father was. ‘He’s dead,’ the man told her. However, her two daughters were alive and waiting for her at home. André, her husband, had been shot by the Germans, a fact that she had known in Romainville but that she now had to come to terms with, to make a new life for herself and the girls. But first she needed to find where André was buried and she spent her first weeks back in France checking through the records in different municipalities. She recognised the body that was eventually dug up by the jacket, a lock of hair and a gold tooth.
Germaine Renaudin, also standing in the lobby of the Lutétia, did not recognise the tall young man who approached her. The boy who three years earlier had been a slender child was now an adult, and when the telegram informing the family that Germaine was alive had reached the farm where he was working, Tony had borrowed the train fare from the farmer, walked 12 kilometres to the nearest station and gone to Paris to wait for his mother. Germaine seemed to him lost and distracted, her body curiously swollen and blotchy from the typhus she was still not quite free of.
Together, they took part in a parade of returned prisoners of war and deportees on 1 May, marching with many of the former concentration camp inmates wearing the striped clothes in which they had come home. Then they took the train home. The whole village turned out to welcome Germaine, and there was a chair waiting for her in case she felt tired during the speeches. She said very little. In the months that followed, her hair went entirely white; but in time it grew back black.
And so, in ones and twos and little groups, the forty-nine women came home. The last to come was Marie-Jeanne Bauer, repatriated from Auschwitz via Odessa. No one was waiting for her. Her building had been bombed, her apartment looted, and she learnt that her brother had been executed. She was dazed, exhausted and had lost the sight of her right eye; she was still testing positive for typhus. Her strongest feeling was that everything they had been through, she and the other women, all their sacrifices, had been for nothing.
Fourteen of the forty-nine returning women were widows, their husbands shot by the Nazis or dead in the concentration camps. It was on reaching France again, the war over, that the deaths finally hit the women. Hélène Solomon knew perfectly well that Jacques was dead: she had said goodbye to him in Romainville, before he was taken to Mont-Valérien and shot. But without really realising it, she had clung to the idea that he would somehow be there waiting for her if ever she did manage to return. Now, suddenly, the full force of his loss overwhelmed her. ‘I thought I would go mad,’ she said later. ‘For a long time, I was hardly able to speak.’
Sixteen of the returning women—among them Lulu, the two Germaines, Marie-Elisa and Cécile—had children waiting for them, and twenty-two children were now reunited with their mothers. But fifty-three mothers had failed to come home, and they left seventy-five orphans between them.
Seven-year-old Michel Politzer would not see his mother again, nor three-year-old Pierre Zani, nor Claude Epaud, whose mother Annette had run L’Ancre Coloniale in La Rochelle, nor Yvonne Noutari’s two young children, whom she had talked about with such love and longing in Birkenau. In Saint-Martin-Le-Beau, 12-year-old Gisèle Sergent kept waiting and hoping. Had her mother not promised she would come home? One day, standing in the village grocery, she overheard a stranger tell the owner that Mme Sergent was dead. Even then, she found it hard to believe. Her mother had returned twice from the German prisons: why would she not do so again? And Rosa Floch’s parents would never see their young daughter again; her mother’s last glimpse of her was finishing the washing up before going off to school on a cold December morning in 1942.
Louise Loquet’s daughter, who at the age of 15 had helped her mother with the spelling of the tracts for the Resistance, returned to the Lutétia day after day, hoping for news. She showed every returned deportee her mother’s picture, begging them to try to remember something. It was only in December 1946, happening to meet Marie-Claude, that she heard that her mother was dead; and even then, no one had seen her die.
And it was not only children who stood and waited. Yvonne Noutari’s mother went to the station in Bordeaux every day for many weeks. The last news she had heard was that Yvonne had survived Auschwitz. She was quite sure that her daughter had simply been delayed. It was only much later that she learnt that Yvonne had been killed during the bombing of Amstetten, just six weeks before the German surrender.
What each of the survivors was now faced with was the question of how they would remake their lives, and how they would convey to their families what they had been through. Auschwitz and Ravensbrück, as Marie-Claude had remarked, were so extreme, so incomprehensible, so unfamiliar an experience, that the women doubted that they possessed the words to describe them, even if people wanted to hear; which, as it turned out, not many did.
Long before the end of the war, the French government in exile in Algiers had been planning for the return to France of those deported or made prisoner by the Germans. Henri Frenay, founder of one of the main Resistance movements, Combat, had been appointed head of a Commissariat aux Prisonniers et Déportés, men and women he grouped together under the words
les absents
. At that stage, neither he nor anyone else knew just what to expect. He had figures for prisoners of war, put at 950,000, and numbers for those who had been sent as part of the Service de Travail Obligatoire to work in Germany—650,000—but he had no idea at all as to how many resisters, Jews, gypsies, homosexuals or people deemed hostile to the Nazis had been put on trains and deported to the east. When asked for a figure, he would say that it probably lay somewhere between 40,000 and 160,000. What worried him more was a repeat of the chaos that followed the First World War, when liberated prisoners of war coming home brought with them the Spanish flu, which by the time it spent itself had killed more people across Europe than the war itself.
As it happened, Frenay’s figures for those deported from France were not far out. But what made them so terrible was what they soon revealed. Of France’s 75,721 deported Jews, the
déportés raciales
, not many more than 2,500 came home. The
politiques
had fared somewhat better: 40,760 of 86,827, a little less than half, returned. All, to some extent, were in a bad way. Though reports of conditions in the camps had been reaching France for many months, they had been largely suppressed, not least in order not to alarm families. And though the photographs from Bergen-Belsen, liberated by the British on 15 April, did just precede the men and women in their striped clothes who disembarked at the Gare de l’Est or got off planes at Le Bourget, there had been very little time to take stock of what they had been through. The reality, with its new vocabulary of persecution, proved profoundly shocking.
Among those greeting the first concentration and extermination camp survivors at the Gare de l’Est was Janet Flanner, recently returned correspondent for the
New Yorker
. ‘Their faces,’ she wrote, ‘were gray-green, which seemed to see but not to take in.’ Others spoke of bald heads, waxen complexions and shrunken faces ‘reminiscent of those little human heads modelled by primitive tribes’. Some were too frail to stand up. The crowds welcoming them home had brought with them spring flowers to present to the skeletal, wary men and women; when the bunches of lilac fell from their ‘inert’ hands, they left a purple carpet on the platform and ‘the perfume of the trampled flowers mingled with the stench of illness and dirt’. The returning deportees sang the Marseillaise in low, croaking voices; some of the onlookers wept.
It was, however, all considerably more complicated than simply repatriating these particular
absents
and looking after them. The question was how what they had been through should be acknowledged and, most crucially, how France should deal with the collaborators responsible for what had happened to them, and to France itself. Who was actually culpable? How many French men and women had spent the four years of occupation in Primo Levi’s ‘grey zone’ of ambiguity between victims and persecutors? Who was to be punished? The French police who had carried out the Germans’ bidding, implementing anti-Semitic ordinances, rounding up and torturing suspects before turning them over to the Nazis? The French judges who had presided over the courts sentencing resisters to death? The French train drivers of the SNCF who transported the deportees on the first stage to the camps? Their bosses, who charged the German occupiers so much per head for every person carried? The 700, 000 members of the civil service, without whom France could not have continued to function under German rule? The cleaning ladies who had worked in the German administrative offices? And what about those who had gone over to the Resistance only in the final months of the war, the
résistants de la dernière heure
? Millions of French men and women had far exceeded the ‘correct manner’ towards the occupier as laid down in the terms of the armistice: were they all to be punished?
Even before the Allied forces had crossed the Channel in June 1944 and embarked on the liberation of Europe, an
épuration sauvage
, a savage purge, of
collabos
had seen the summary execution by French partisans of 5,238 members of Darland’s Milice, informers, collaborators and over-zealous policemen. Some 20,000 French women, the
tondues
who were said to have become too friendly with the occupiers, had their heads shaved. The French government in exile, arriving to take over from Vichy, had been extremely conscious of the need for justice to be seen to be done, for the guilty to be punished and publicly humiliated. The Communists in particular, referring to themselves as
le parti des fusillés
, the executed, and claiming that 90,000 patriots had been shot by the Germans—the true figure was later put at around nine thousand—were demanding widespread purges.
But de Gaulle—anxious to see France reinstated as a major power, fearful of excessive American influence, conscious of the need for a united France and for the French, traumatised by four years of occupation, to put the war behind them—was reluctant to dwell too much on the collaborators and their victims. The time had come to celebrate heroes, not hunt down those he called ‘miserable specimens’. ‘Assez de cadavres! Assez de suppliciés!’, a publisher said to a survivor from Mauthausen, Maurice Delfieu, who proposed to write his memoirs. Thanks to the glorious exploits of the Resistance, the French, by their own efforts, had been rehabilitated. ‘Paris martyrisé!’, declared de Gaulle, entering the capital. ‘Mais Paris libéré! Libéré par lui-meme! avec l’appui et le concours de la France entière … la vraie France … la France éternelle…’ The days of tears were over; those ‘of glory’ had returned. Assuming control in Paris, the general and his colleagues decreed that the most guilty among the collaborators should rapidly be brought to trial and punished with the utmost severity, though not in a spirit of revenge; and that, soon afterwards, France should forgive and move on.
Working day and night under an avalanche of papers, prosecutors considered untainted by the occupation assembled dossiers on 311,000 suspected collaborators and presented them to various courts of justice. A large number of documents was conveniently found to have mysteriously disappeared. Sixty thousand cases were shelved. Of the rest, just over three-quarters of those charged were found guilty. Seven hundred and sixty-four people were executed and 46,145 sentenced to ‘national degradation’ which meant that they lost voting rights, were banned from membership of a union and from a number of professions and that they forfeited medals, decorations, honours and pensions.
Like other European countries, France had no adequate legislation to deal with the crimes of occupation. The charge, for many of those tried, was of having threatened the liberty and equality of the country by providing ‘intelligence to the enemy’, or of having committed a new ‘crime of collaboration’, something between treason and acceptance of the occupiers. France, divided and ambivalent, did not incorporate crimes against humanity into French law until 1964. It would be the 1980s before Klaus Barbie, the ‘butcher of Lyon’, was brought to trial. Both Maurice Papon and René Bousquet, responsible as secretary-general of the Vichy police for the deportation of many thousands of Jews from the free zone, lived until the 1990s as free men.
The forty-nine survivors of the
Convoi des 31000
arrived home in time for Betty Langlois to give evidence at the trial of Commissioner Fernand David, the Paris head of the Brigades Spéciales who had sent so many of the women to Auschwitz and so many of their husbands to their deaths. Charlotte, Cécile, Mado, Maï and Danielle were all among his victims; because of him and his men, Charlotte had lost her husband, Betty her lover. Looking at him across the courtroom, Betty kept wondering why he did not recognise her, when she had his features so indelibly stamped on her mind. In the dock, David argued that he personally had never seen anyone tortured, that he had only obeyed orders, and that if any one of his men had been a little rough, well, it never went as far as actual violence. The judge referred to him as the ‘Parisian Himmler’.
The jury deliberated for seventeen minutes; when they returned a verdict of guilty the entire courtroom rose up and clapped. On 5 May, David was shot, together with his dapper boss Lucien Rottée, whose position at the head of the Renseignements Généraux had been so lethal to the Resistance. Across France, five thousand policemen were suspended, and ten members of the Paris Brigades Spéciales were executed. But France needed magistrates and policemen, and many others avoided punishment. Rottée’s nephew René Hénoque, chief of the second Paris Brigade Spéciales, condemned
in absentia
for the deaths of 216 executed resisters, escaped and died many years later of old age in Brussels. Cécile, returning to the 11th arrondissement in Paris, was approached by the policeman she knew had given her away. He put out his hand and smiled. She turned her back on him.