The Bitter Road to Freedom: The Human Cost of Allied Victory in World War II Europe (47 page)

Returnees could also be met with a certain degree of suspicion, for the authorities feared that Germans or their Eastern European collaborators might well try to sneak into France, to escape justice back in their own countries. Isidore R., liberated from Belsen by the Brit- ish, managed to steal a British soldier’s uniform in or- der to flee Belsen and get back to France as quick as he could. He made his way to Lille, where he went to the town hall to get aid and something to eat. But a French- man in a British uniform struck the authorities as odd, and they questioned him suspiciously. “I showed them my number [the tattoo on his arm] but they said that would be easy to replicate. I was arrested by the police! They locked me up in a cell.” He spent three days in the cell, until being released. “I was not happy. They gave me a package, 1,000 francs, and told me which train to take. They had treated me like a criminal.”
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For others, the problem of the return was the lack of in- terest or sympathy shown by their compatriots for what they had endured. Charles B., a survivor of Auschwitz, a death march to Dachau, and five months of hospitaliza- tion after his liberation, went to visit his aunt one day after the war. She nattered on about her own wartime travails, saying “My dear Charles, if only you knew how hungry we were here!” “ When I heard that, I didn’t say anything. That was the end of my efforts to talk about it.” Alexandre Kohn, an Auschwitz survivor who had returned to France via Odessa and Marseilles, said that “when we got back, we started to tell about everything

that had happened to us. But there was a general indif- ference.” And also some disbelief. Mary-Rose Mathis- Izikowitz was released from Ravensbrück on the ini- tiative of the Swedish Red Cross on April 23, 1945. She recuperated in Sweden until early July, when she was flown back to France. She had been well looked after by the Swedes, and was nicely dressed and not as feeble as many returning deportees. And thus eyebrows were raised. “People said, ‘ Well, well, who are these nice la- dies coming back?’ No one believed we had been in a camp.”
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Charlotte Delbo, a member of the Resistance who had survived Auschwitz, captured the awful para- dox of the return in a few lines of a poem:

You don’t believe what we say Because

If what we say were true

We wouldn’t be here to say it.
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Throughout the many testimonies of return, these themes reappear. The returnees were treated with of- ficiousness, or as suspects; they were met with some degree of scorn, as if life in wartime France had been harder than survival in a German camp; their stories were brushed off as incredible, exaggerated, and in

any case inappropriate now that the war was over and the time of restoration had begun. “ This return was so different from what we had dreamed of,” said another survivor. “ We were starved for tenderness, for human warmth. We were thirsty for pure air, for freedom, for a France that was more beautiful, glorious, washed of its shame—we had paid dearly—but all we got was a sandwich and a glass of wine flavored with a few drops of pity.”
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A curtain was drawn over the war years; the fewer war stories, the better. They were urged to start life over again. But as one of Charlotte Delbo’s fellow camp survivors put it, “ To start life over again, what an expression.…If there is a thing you can’t do over again, a thing you can’t start over again, it is your life.”
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* * *

“

WE BEGAN BY being lost in the middle of a Ger- man forest on a night in late July, 1945.” That frank assessment by Kathryn Hulme, a forty-four- year-old American who worked as the deputy director of a large DP camp in Bavaria, might stand as an apt summary of the early days of UNRRA’s DP operations. Hulme, in her stunning memoir of her two years work- ing in the Wildflecken Camp, captured the essence of the UNRRA project with that vignette: a small multina- tional group, UNRRA Team 302, made up of willing but

unprepared volunteers, stuck on a road in a wheezing army surplus truck in southern Germany, lost, com- pletely unsure of what lay ahead. They had received orders on July 21 to proceed into Germany from their training center in France, and were assigned the job of supervising a camp for displaced Poles. They thought there might be two thousand camp residents under their charge. When at last they arrived at their new destination, they were thunderstruck: Wildflecken was no small temporary settlement of nomads. It was a for- mer secret SS training facility in the Rhön mountains of Bavaria, forty-three miles north of Wurzburg. Its eighty-seven well-built stone buildings spread out in a vast fan, and contained a dozen kitchens, five hospital wards, and a bakery capable of producing nine tons of bread each day. The perimeter of the camp measured seven miles. Within it, 15,000 Poles had already gath- ered, and more were on the way. “ Wildflecken means ‘wild spot,’” Hulme wrote home to her family. “A per- fect description for this end-of-the-world place.” It was to be her home for more than two years.
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In the late summer of 1945, after the Russians and Western Europeans had been repatriated, there re- mained in Germany about 810,000 Poles, anxious enough about conditions in their homeland to resist immediate repatriation. The Army referred to them as

the “hardcore” DPs. They believed that staying in the relative security of a DP camp was a far better alterna- tive than returning home to a Communist-run Poland whose borders had been so extensively rearranged as to place thousands of square miles of their country inside the Soviet Union. Rather than jump on board a boxcar heading east, they hunkered down in camps across Germany, facing an uncertain fate and worsen- ing relations with the armies that had freed them. The largest of these Polish DP camps was Wildflecken. It was chosen by the Army as a DP center because it was large and had a railhead just a mile from the camp— a station with the capacity to handle two hundred rail cars and the thousands of SS troops that had been in training at the camp. Yet it had always been intended as a transit camp, a place where Poles could get a delous- ing and a meal before being reloaded onto boxcars and shipped home. Hulme’s small team of UNRRA officials, then, faced two challenges: how to care for the largest single assembly of Polish DPs in Germany, and how to persuade them to go home.
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The team’s director was French: Georges Masset, an experienced international businessman, well-spoken in English and German, and a man who had spent the war years in the French Resistance. Hulme fondly re- called that he was “as full of emotions as a Paris taxicab

driver and not ashamed of a single one.” He received praise both from his own staff and from G-5 inspec- tors—a rare achievement. One report called him “emi- nently qualified,” a man who “understands the things which must be done. His team works in complete har- mony and agreement.” Hulme, the deputy director, was something of a peculiarity: from 1943 to 1945, she worked as a welder at Kaiser Shipbuilding in Rich- mond, California; before that she ran a travel agency and did a good deal of travel writing; she knew Ger- man and French very well, and the daily language of the team was French. The team’s supply officer was a forty- six-year-old Belgian named Rouwens, who before the war had been an accountant. The welfare officer, whose job was to provide educational, cultural, and construc- tive amusements, was a twenty-three-year-old French woman, Germaine Jourde. About a dozen other staff members filled out the ranks.

The UNRRA team worked closely with the DPs’ own elected representatives, who had formed a vigorous- ly political camp committee. Its president, Zygmunt Rusinek, had been a deputy in the prewar Polish par- liament and an economist. (The UNRRA team nick- named him “ Tak Tak Schön,” because when he was pleased, he nodded his head and said the Polish words for “yes, yes,” and the German for “fine.”) Nine Polish

military officers were stationed in the camp as liaison officers, assigned to interact with and offer help to the DPs, but they seemed bored by the assignment and the DPs viewed them with deep suspicion. The overall command of the camp was held by a series of obviously fed-up and frustrated American officers from the 79th Infantry Division of the Third Army; two dozen U.S. Army soldiers, living outside the camp, were detailed for security. A large number of Polish DPs were enrolled into a police force, though as they were unarmed their enforcement powers were limited. Camp inmates were not fenced in, but twenty-five guardhouses surround- ed Wildflecken and DPs were required to have a pass to leave the camp. As of early September, 14,353 souls inhabited the camp—really a small city, complete with births, deaths, marriages, prostitutes, a black market, and elections. Virtually everyone in the camp was Pol- ish, and 1,428 of them were under twelve years old.
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Kathryn Hulme readily acknowledged that whatever rudimentary training this small UNRRA team had re- ceived left them hopelessly unprepared for the reali- ties of running a camp of this size, inhabited by people who had faced such extraordinary hardship. In Wild- flecken, Hulme wrote, the UNRRA team learned “what it really meant to be displaced, to have been removed abruptly and totally from your homeland, not by the

hand of God but by a human conqueror in one deliber- ate scoop that had swept up the grannies, the babies and the cripples as well as the young and able, since slavery has no selectivity and every body that breathed was deemed fit for labor until it stopped breathing.” Day after day, more DPs arrived at the rail station. These people, six years earlier, had started their long tormented journey on just the same kinds of boxcars when they were shipped into Germany to toil on be- half of the Nazi war machine. With the war finally over, they were again herded into unheated, overcrowded cars under armed guard. Hulme got her first look at the massive scale of the human crisis just days after her ar- rival at the camp, when a trainload arrived carrying al- most four thousand DPs. She and her small team stood on the station platform, agape:

The cars slid slowly by us, each car door decorated with wilted boughs which framed a still life of haggard faces shawled, bonneted, turbaned, or simply wrapped around with shreds of old blanket wool, each car door framing the same tight-packed composition varied slightly here by the addition of an infant at the breast, there by a crying child slung clear to ride on a man’s shoulders, or at intervals by a graybeard or granny to whom chair space had been allowed in the precious footage of the open door. I stared at the composite face

of human misery, unsmiling, stoic and blue with cold.

She learned from the exhausted American GI who had commanded the train that they had been in the rail cars for five days, and had run out of food a day earlier. The travelers—including pregnant mothers, babies in filthy five-day-old diapers, and fainting elderly—poured out of the cars, bewildered, drained, ashen. Not enough trucks were available to transport them; hundreds just curled up on the ground at the train station, built fires from railroad ties, and slept.
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In tackling this and many subsequent challenges, the UNRRA team frequently fell afoul of the U.S. Army. These two institutions simply did not understand each other: one had been successful at defeating the Ger- man army but was still feeling its way from wartime operations to the tasks of civilian governance. The UN- RRA team, by contrast, was strong on people skills— they had empathy in abundance—but often had little conception of the logistical difficulties inherent in the occupation of Germany and railed against the Army for failing to provide sufficient supplies to the DP camp. When Hulme needed trucks and truck drivers to haul four hundred DPs from the rail junction to the camp late one rainy night, an American lieutenant in charge of a truck detail simply refused to rouse his men, say-

ing in a southern drawl that “his men were ‘tahred.’” That was that—the Poles spent another night on the ground, in the rain. “ This is the first time in my life I have been ashamed of the American Army and I’m so god-damned ashamed I could sink into the ground as I stand here,” Hulme shouted at the bored lieuten- ant.
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It was a typical encounter. Director Masset bom- barded the UNRRA district director, J. H. Whiting, with twice-weekly requests for supplies: he needed trucks to haul firewood; his five hospitals had only one UN- RRA doctor; the camp had no DDT powder for delous- ing; clothing for women and children was nonexistent; and his skeletal staff had trouble supervising the four hundred DPs the camp employed in sewing, warehous- ing, driving, cooking, cleaning, and so on. The Army rarely complied with such demands but found time to send officers to the camp to conduct lightning in- spections. After one such inspection on September 13, a Third Army entourage, led by one Brigadier General Williams, left orders that the camp be militarized so as to enforce improved sanitation: armed guards must enforce cleanliness, a new prison must be erected for incarceration of slovenly and recalcitrant DPs, the Pol- ish camp committee must be disbanded, examinations of every DP for venereal disease were to be undertaken (although there was only one UNRRA doctor), and forc- ible repatriation of Polish DPs must commence. As one