The Bitter Road to Freedom: The Human Cost of Allied Victory in World War II Europe (46 page)

were paying a stiff price for the moral and political fail- ings of prewar France and the defeat of 1940, and that only through hard work and shared sacrifice could the prisoners, and France itself, be redeemed. The plan was a disaster. Only 90,000 of the 1.8 million prisoners taken in 1940 were released through the relève, but it made the prisoners appear complicit in Vichy’s policy of collaboration with Nazi Germany.
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For the moment, these difficulties were forgotten, and the return of the POWs became the great national event of the year. The liberation of Paris had come and gone nine months earlier, yet millions of families still anxiously awaited the promise of reunion with long- separated loved ones. For the politicians, of course, the prospect of a new constituency of over a million grate- ful returnees meant that their return would be given special attention. Henri Frenay, the director of the repatriation effort, and François Mitterrand, the man delegated to handle veterans affairs, worked to trans- form the return of the prisoners into a grand national fête, an acclamation of their suffering but also their sacrifice. They were to be held up as courageous men whose struggle was no less valorous than the men of the Resistance who fought the Germans inside France. That explained the trappings that greeted them in the train stations: the flags, the posters, the military bands.

It also explains why the French government, despite the pressing priorities of reconstruction, spent large sums on the returning men. About 20 percent of the state’s budget in the year 1945 was devoted to spend- ing on the returning prisoners. By law, each prisoner was to receive a thousand francs upon arrival, and an- other thousand upon demobilization. Depending on his rank, he was to receive some of his back wages, and a month of paid vacation. He was also eligible for state aid in clothing, food, medical treatment, and job place- ment. A nation with few heroes, France now looked to the prisoners of war to fill out the roll of honor.
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It did not all go quite so smoothly, however. Despite the apparent largesse of the state, most POWs felt their reception, while warm, left much to be desired. They felt the financial rewards to be laughable—a few thou- sands francs in exchange for five years’ imprisonment. One suit of clothes cost about ten thousand francs, so the money was soon exhausted. Nor could the POWs hope to buy anything on the thriving and expensive black market, the only source of many foods and luxu- ries. Despite Frenay’s best efforts, the prisoners were simply too numerous for all of them to be adequately clothed, fed, and housed, in a country itself still suffer- ing from wartime privations. They were obliged to wait in lengthy lines, fill out paperwork, and face the delays

of an inefficient bureaucracy. What is more, it was obvi- ous to the men that despite the government propagan- da, the real heroes of the moment were the men of the Resistance, especially the Gaullists who had declared their loyalty to the General and fought at his side since 1940. They were the men who had entered into govern- ment; no place had been reserved in the political life of the nation for the prisoners themselves.
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Predictably, the French Communist Party was willing to make use of the prisoners’ grievances, and staged a series of protest marches and public denunciations of Frenay and the entire repatriation effort. For days on end, some prisoners stood beneath Frenay’s windows in his ministry, shouting “Food! Clothing! Shoes! Down with the black market! Out with Frenay!” On June 2, twenty thousand former prisoners marched from the place Maubert to the Arc de Triomphe in Paris demand- ing better treatment from the government. Communist papers around the country blared out headlines de- nouncing the repatriation effort and the lack of basic supplies offered to the returning men.
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Frenay in his memoir was probably right to blame this on the machi- nations of the Communists, who sought to embarrass him politically. “ The walls of Paris and the provinces,” he wrote, “were plastered with posters denouncing me. All over France meetings were organized to indoc-

trinate our exiles as they arrived home and to escalate their demands for clothing (of which I disposed of only a very small store), bonuses, and discharge pay.” But the grievances were real. In the eyes of the prisoners, the promises of a great national welcoming on which these men had nourished themselves during the long years of captivity had not been kept.
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Far more awkward than the return of the POWs was the return of the racial and political deportees—that is, Jews and résistants who had spent time not in POW camps, with the advantages of official status, packages from home, government oversight, and the comrade- ship of other POWs, but in the death camps. Their re- turn could not be transformed into an exercise of pa- triotic unity and celebration. For these deportees were victims not only of the Germans but of their French compatriots as well. Vichy turned 76,000 Jews over to the Germans, and deployed a ruthless French-staffed police force to hunt down, arrest, torture, and shoot members of the Resistance. The return of the survivors could only be a painful reminder of France’s shameful wartime policy of collaboration. The Gaullist provi- sional government hoped that their return could be in- corporated into the general homecoming of the POWs themselves, thus averting much discussion of the par- ticular tragedy of the deportees; de Gaulle, eager to

bind up the fractured country, had little desire to en- courage national introspection and debate about the recent past. Yet by papering over the fate of the deport- ees, the government failed adequately to prepare the public for their return. By the spring of 1945, detailed reports had begun to reach France of the full scale and nature of the camps, but even so, these reports coin- cided with other major news events, such as the death of Roosevelt, the suicide of Hitler, the fall of Berlin, and the collapse of Germany itself in early May. The im- ages that are so widely known nowadays of emaciated prisoners and piles of bodies had not yet been widely disseminated. The great majority of the French public simply had no idea what the Jews and the resisters had experienced, nor was the public eager to know more.
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This explains the almost comic incongruity between the condition of the returning prisoners and the atmo- sphere they encountered upon their arrival in France. The transit centers where deportees were processed were designed as if the returnees simply needed a rustic retreat and a comfy chair after a long vigorous walk in the countryside. The center at Mulhouse, for example, boasted buildings decorated with “paintings of French home life; the exterior of the area is sur- rounded with beds of colorful flowers. Music is con- tinually broadcast through a loudspeaker and a motion

picture theater is in operation. There are also comfort- able lounges and recreation rooms where newspapers, magazines, games, etc., are available for amusement…. A large bar for liquid refreshments and sandwiches is open at all times.”
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In the Paris train stations, well- meaning officials had laid on bunting and flags, brass bands, sandwich tables and drinks, and set up paint- ed tableaux depicting liberty, freedom, family, and so on, designed to celebrate the return of “les Absents.” Stirring and repeated renditions of “La Marseillaise” greeted each arriving trainload. The assumption was, as one government official, Olga Wormser-Migot, later acknowledged, “that after the formalities, [the deport- ees] would return to their homes and resume normal life.” Instead, “the preparations for repatriation and welcome of the deported were not, could not be, ad- equate for the dimension of the tragedy that the lib- eration of the camps had revealed.”
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The veteran New Yorker reporter, Janet Flanner, witness to the arrival in Paris of a trainload of deported women on April 14, bril- liantly captured the essence of this awkward gap be- tween expectation and reality:

These three hundred women, who came in exchange for German women held in France, were from the pris- on camp of Ravensbrück, in the marshes midway be- tween Berlin and Stettin. They arrived at the Gare de

Lyon at eleven in the morning and were met by a nearly speechless crowd ready with welcoming bouquets of lilacs and other spring flowers, and by General de Gaulle, who wept…. There was a general, anguished babble of search, of finding or not finding. There was almost no joy; the emotion went beyond that, to some- thing nearer pain. So much suffering lay behind this homecoming, and it showed in the women’s faces and bodies…. One woman, six years ago renowned in Paris for her elegance, had become a bent, dazed, shabby old woman. When her smartly attired brother, who met her, said, like an automaton, “ Where is your lug- gage?,” she silently handed him what looked like a dirty black sweater fastened with safety pins around what- ever small belongings were rolled inside. In a way, the women all looked alike: their faces were gray-green, with reddish-brown circles around their eyes, which seemed to see, but not to take in. They were dressed like scarecrows, in what had been given them at the camp, clothes taken from the dead of all nationalities. As the lilacs fell from inert hands, the flowers made a purple carpet on the platform and the perfume of the trampled flowers mixed with the stench of illness and dirt.
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From the train stations in Paris, deportees—if they were not met by family members—were sent to the Hôtel Lu-

tétia, a grand hotel in central Paris that became the set- ting for some of the most bitter memories of the return. Located on the boulevard Raspail and formerly used as offices for the German military occupiers, Lutétia was commandeered by Frenay’s ministry for processing de- portees. Here the new arrivals were again told to fill out documents, then given a meal, a thousand francs, a bed (often of straw) for the night if they needed it, a cursory medical examination, and sent on their way. The halls of the first floor had been set up with large lighted pan- els, of the kind used for billboards on the sidewalks of the boulevards. These had been hauled indoors where they now held hundreds of photographs of missing men, women, and children, placed there by anguished family members searching for lost loved ones.

The whole atmosphere at the Hôtel Lutétia left a lasting impression on the returnees, and this first moment of arrival back in France stands out in almost all the nar- ratives of the return. Jacqueline Fleury, who had served in the Resistance along with her parents, had been ar- rested and imprisoned in Ravensbrück. Her first taste of liberated France came at the transit center in Nancy, where she found the doting female volunteer workers irksome. “I was very shocked. We had come from an- other planet, and among those who received us were these simpering painted ladies, who seemed to us in

poor taste.” She was transferred to Paris at the end of May, and sent to the Hôtel Lutétia: “ There, we submit- ted again to more interrogations. And once again we were shocked by the ambiance of these decked-out la- dies. To be sure, it had been almost a year since France was liberated. We were the ones coming home late. But for us it was hard: these people could not comprehend what we had endured. There was a divide between us.”
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The officials at Lutétia were overwhelmed, and carried out their work with a certain officiousness that clearly struck the returnees as insensitive. Papers had to be filled out, exams submitted to. Esther S., a survivor of Birkenau and a death march to Belsen, couldn’t bear the peremptory tone of the nurses at Lutétia. She was “in rags,” she recalled, “without a hair on my head.” But when ordered to go to the hospital for recovery, she refused, saying “I am not a dog; I am no longer in Auschwitz.” She needed the medical attention, of course, but resisted being told what to do.
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Lutétia was also a setting for exchanging news about loved ones. In the halls of the hotel, anxious relatives scavenged for any word of their family members. The new arrivals were besieged, with photographs pressed into their faces—had they seen this one, or that one?

Did they have any news? Louise Alcan, a survivor of Drancy and Auschwitz, recalled that as she got off the bus at Lutétia, “we were assaulted by dozens of people holding photographs, some large, some small. They were photos of men, women, children, of families on vacation, of married couples. These people stretched their hands to us, their faces in agony, their eyes brim- ming. Look, they said, have you seen him? Did you per- haps know him? He was strong. He seemed young for his age. Where did you come from? Where were you? Auschwitz-Birkenau? Then the silence set in. It be- came heavier and heavier, as if these photographs were tombstones.” Sometimes the returnees did have news to report. Max L. sadly recalled his duties as messen- ger for one family. Amid the crowds at Lutétia, “a family named Kimmel arrived and asked me if I had seen their relative. I knew him very well. He did not have the will to live and he threw himself against the barbed wire— he killed himself.”
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Of course, many of the returnees themselves also re- ceived heartbreaking news. Amanda S., a survivor of Ravensbrück and Mauthausen, encountered a school- mate who reported to her that while she had been in Germany, her father too had been arrested and de- ported. “ There was no trace of him left.” Liliane Lévy- Osbert, returning to Paris from Auschwitz, was not met

by anyone at the train station or at Lutétia. She made her way to the apartment where she had lived with her family. “I arrived at the rue de la Tour d’Auvergne,” she recalled. “My heart was pounding. In a few moments, I would finally know…. I went up, then came down again. No one. I crossed the street and went into the baker’s. She recognized me. I asked the question. The blow came, brutal, tragic, irreversible. Almost casually, naively, she said, ‘But the Germans took them.’ I was alone.” Her sister and parents had not survived the camps.
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For many returnees, arrival in Paris meant readapting and even relearning social codes and behavior that had been stripped away in the camps. Jacqueline Fleury recalled that she and her mother—they had both sur- vived Ravensbrück together—were given a metro ticket by the officials at Lutétia and sent home, since they had an address in the Paris suburb of Versailles. They were told, “’All right, ladies, please go back to your home.’ We took the metro to Saint-Lazare, and then the train. I can see us now, tired, exhausted. As we had the habit of living on the ground, and I was very tired, the curb alongside the gutter looked very appealing to me [as a place to rest]. I said, ‘ Wait, Mama, I want to sit for a moment.’ And I can still hear her reply: ‘But my child, we are in Versailles; you cannot do that.’”
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