Authors: Lynn H. Nicholas
bodies everywhere. Hundreds and hundreds. Men, women, children, old people. Against a wall, a mortally wounded woman, holding in her arms a child of about two, its head split completely open. At her side, two children of about three and five who are crying. The scene is horrible. The station is in ruins. A train of refugees has been savagely bombed and machine gunned.… Dead, everywhere dead.
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The trains did not stop running, but much of the fleeing populace, which could not, in any case, be accommodated in the jammed cars, took to the roads. Mainly on foot, but also in elegant cars and peasant carts, on bicycles, and even in baby carriages, all loaded with grotesque mounds of possessions ranging from chandeliers, fur coats, and mattresses to sugar beets, they went in a human flood some six million strong across the center of France. Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, looking down from his plane, likened the processions to ants leaving a destroyed anthill. The exodus built on itself; as towns were eaten empty and sucked dry of gasoline, their inhabitants too, exhausted by aiding those who had already passed, joined the stream. Not everyone gave in easily to the need to leave. In Metz, school authorities refused to cancel the hallowed Baccalauréat exams until the last moment. In nearby Nancy the examinations went ahead and were not called off until frantic parents came to the examination hall en route to the station to extract their children.
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The roads were not safe either. German planes strafed them frequently, scattering families, who leapt into roadside ditches, or ran for whatever other cover was available. But many never had a chance. A Belgian family, driving past the scene of such an attack saw “near one car … a small girl, eyes wide with fright, beside the bodies of her parents.” Not knowing what else to do, they took the child with them, soon discovering that she spoke only Russian and that her name was Masha. For three days she traveled with them, occasionally calling for her mother at night. Completely by chance they found the representative of a colony for Russian émigré children and took Masha there. When the matron spoke in Russian “the little girl ran into her arms, and looked around only long enough to say goodbye to her rescuers. She never saw them again.”
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Children died too, and sometimes it was too much to bear. One exhausted mother lost her reason when her ten-year-old son, whom she had protected from twenty previous attacks, was killed in a roadside ditch.
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Tens of thousands of children were separated from their parents in the chaos of stations or air raids. Lost-and-found reports poured into the authorities and filled long columns in newspapers:
Jean Leroy, born 29 June 1939 and Jean Olivier, born 17 July, 1939: found in the same packing case. Near them a name: Mme Hareng of Cotenoy.
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Three-year-old boy, giving the name Jean Tavares, was found alone in a wheat field at Ides, morning of June 18. His parents please communicate.
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History does not record if the three little boys got home as 90,000 others eventually did, but many thousands did not.
The French too had immediately begun massive internment of foreigners, especially those of Axis and Eastern European nationality and suspect political background, such as Social Democrats and Communists. This was nothing new; like the Dutch, the French had, since early 1938, begun to keep track of where foreigners who might be a problem were living and by November of that year had decided to lodge some in “special assembly centers,”
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just as the wave of Spanish Civil War refugees exploded into the south of France. By September 1939, some 15,000 male aliens, of whom half would be released by the end of the year, were in such camps. In May 1940, many of the aliens were detained all over again. This time women and an estimated 5,000 children were included.
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In these roundups, simultaneous with the general chaos of fleeing millions, distinctions of status and any protests, no matter how valid, were obliterated. Thousands were held for days in the huge stadiums at Roland Garros, now site of the French Open tennis tournament, and the Vélodrome d’Hiver in the outskirts of Paris. Families were split up and groups, constantly augmented by other refugees coming from Belgium and Holland, were moved about arbitrarily, unable to communicate their plight or whereabouts to anyone. The squalid camps set up for the Spaniards, by now half-empty, were filled up again.
By September 1940, a German commission searching the holding pens for political dissidents to take back to prisons in the Reich listed forty-six such camps in France.
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The number held is unclear, but certainly amounted to nearly 250,000 persons, of whom 60 to 70 percent are estimated to have been foreign Jews, a figure that was increased by the dumping of further thousands from the German provinces of Baden, the Palatinate, and the Saar. Conditions in the camps, according to many with firsthand experience, were worse than in those run by the Nazis, such as Dachau. Hundreds of internees, guilty of nothing more than being in a
state of exile, would die in these places of dysentery, hunger, and exhaustion before any welfare agencies could get to them.
There was no dearth of agencies. In addition to the numerous and very humanitarian French ones, numbers of such groups had been sent in by other countries. These, which included the Oeuvre de Secours aux Enfants (OSE), the Russian Student Christian Movement, the American Friends Service Committee, Czech Aid, the American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee, Swiss Aid, and the Red Crosses and YM/YWCAs of several nations, had been dealing with various waves of refugees for years and even decades.
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Most would first be deeply involved in helping the refugees fleeing Nazi forces: the Unitarian Service Committee found several carloads of canned milk in Portugal and, with the help of many other groups, was able to distribute it in the south of France soon after an armistice with the Germans was signed. The Catholic Church and French health agencies set up homes for abandoned babies and orphans.
As the native refugees gradually returned home, the foreign agencies focused their attention on the foreigners in the camps. It was soon clear to all involved in this work that more coordination would improve efficiency, not only in the field, but also in dealings with both the Nazis and the Vichy government. In early November 1940, therefore, about two dozen agencies of all denominations banded together into the Coordinating Committee for Relief Work in Internment Camps, commonly known as the Nîmes Committee, whose extraordinary board included an abbé of Jewish origins, an exiled Russian princess, several rabbis, and an array of Quakers, Swiss, and Swedes. Funds came from a plethora of sources, many illegal, and entered France in strange ways. No bank accounts were maintained; most of the money was kept in suitcases under the beds of the workers. Involvement in politics was strictly avoided. The focus was on improving food and the physical condition of the detained; on keeping up morale by setting up libraries, schools, cottage industries, and entertainments; and on facilitating emigration out of France.
The plight of children in the huge camps was particularly grim. In the survival-of-the-fittest atmosphere that prevailed in these places, where finding the minimum amount of food necessary for survival involved constant intrigue, the terrible pressure on mothers with children is not hard to imagine. Odds of survival for orphans were not good. An OSE official, who took 100 children to a home in Limoges from the camp at Gurs, where clothes were so scarce that mothers were reduced to wrapping their babies in old newspapers,
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wrote that he had “seen hundreds of children
in Russia, Hungary and Poland after pogroms or famine, but none like these.… Passengers in the train that brought them were moved to tears by the sight of the starved youngsters. At Toulouse doctors forbade us to move them further, as the children were too weak to stand more travel.”
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Delivery of services to these victims within the large camps was logistically difficult, and although colonies like the one at Limoges, sponsored by many organizations and subsidized by the French government, were slowly being set up, thousands of children were still in the camps in early 1941. Concerned Nîmes Committee representatives were, with much effort, eventually able to convince the French government to create a special “family camp” at Rivesaltes, a former army base near Perpignan. It was not much of an improvement. Set once again on a dusty, treeless plain buffeted by either freezing or torrid winds, it lacked sufficient water and, as a horrified International Red Cross inspection team reported, the barracks, which lacked the most primitive amenities, were infested with fleas and rats, mortality was high, and most residents were clothed only in rags.
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Males over the age of fourteen were separated from the women, hardly a “family” situation. Assigned food rations and care packages were plundered by corrupt administrators, and women took to cooking greens gathered from the rocky landscape on little open fires. Children raided garbage cans for scraps, with resulting outbreaks of cholera. No plates or cups were supplied to the residents, so that children wanting to partake of the milk sent in irregularly by the American Red Cross presented a bizarre collection of usually filthy cans, pots, and basins to the distributors. They needed the milk desperately:
The children looked as though they could hold two quarts of milk instead of the pint given them; a boy who said he was twelve looked like a nine-year-old.… These were Spanish children, now in their third year in internment camps. Some had been born there … some had been orphaned when typhoid swept the camp at Argeles.… The Jewish children, interned less than a year before, were in notably better condition.
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This happy distinction would not last long. Despite reports in the American press about conditions in the camps and recognition of that fact by the pro-German French regime established in 1940 at Vichy, nothing changed. Indeed, things only got worse. In early October 1940, the Vichy government had given provincial prefects the right to intern foreign Jews at will, and their percentages in the camps rose steadily. Jews at Rivesaltes
were mixed in with everyone else at the beginning; but in April 1941, under the pretext of letting families celebrate Passover together, they were all placed in a separate part of the camp. Gypsies were thrown in too. Seemingly by chance, this sector had the most dilapidated barracks. There was no electricity, and the buildings were crawling with vermin. Food rations were smaller than those in the main camp, even for children, who soon were stricken with intestinal infections. Malnutrition of the little ones was magnified by the fact that the Jewish barracks were the farthest away from the milk distribution center, so that those who were sick could not make it there. A Swiss nurse, Friedel Bohny-Reiter, wrote in her journal that she was “frequently filled with immense rage at the sight of the way in which people are treated here. By what right??… It angers me that people are deprived of their right to liberty, that they are treated like … no, worse than animals.”
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It soon became clear to the foreign welfare agencies that the main way they could help the camp inhabitants was to get them out of the camps and, if possible, out of France. This was encouraged by the Vichy government in order to lower the cost of refugee care. German citizens were a problem. Each one had to be approved for release by Nazi agencies. It was also necessary to travel to the various consulates and agencies in order to secure visas and exit permits, a requirement made virtually impossible by the fact that internees could not leave the camps without the most elaborate arrangements. In all these matters the welfare agencies could be of assistance.
Release was far easier to achieve for children than for adults, since the Vichy government took a benign view when it came to the young. By mid-1941, dozens of farm schools, baby homes, and schools had been established, among them a school for 100 Czech boys and girls at Vence on the Riviera, and a Jewish trade school (ORT) for 150 boys. Not all the activity was aboveboard. CIMADE (Comité d’Inter-Mouvement Auprès des Evacués), a French Protestant youth organization, set up, among other things, a secret network that smuggled internees into Switzerland.
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In June 1940, the violence of war reached Great Britain as Göring’s Luftwaffe, possessed of bases nearer the Channel, began to soften up England in preparation for an eventual landing by German forces. The defeat of the Allied armies in France and the dramatic evacuation of many of their units from Dunkirk made an invasion seem plausible
indeed. A new series of evacuations were now set in motion in Britain. But the scenes taking place on the Continent led the British government to also consider sending their children overseas in order to protect them from both battle and occupation.
In Dover, closest to France, where bombing had been frequent, groups of children heading for evacuation trains moved through crowds of exhausted troops and shell-shocked civilians just rescued from the beaches of Dunkirk.
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By August, when coastal cities such as Southampton and Portsmouth were being hit with regularity, it became clear that the original evacuation plans were inadequate. Soon the bombing would reach London. After a certain numbers of days and nights of overwhelming noise and fear, people in Britain, like their continental counterparts, began spontaneous flight to anywhere else:
The sirens began to wail … then after that, all I can say is, all hell was let loose. The next half-hour was the noisiest I have ever known in my life. All the heavy guns were firing; the planes were screaming down because it was a dive-bombing attack, and the pompoms on the warships in harbor opened up.… I do remember hearing the bombs whistle down. My first reaction was: “Oh—they do whistle after all.”
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