The Secret of the Blue Trunk (6 page)

On September 3, 1939, around ten o’clock in the morning, the village bells and sirens announced that we were at war. Mother Superior sent for us again to explain what was happening, while trying to keep us from panicking.

The leaders of our community avoided talking about the war with the young sisters. They tried to spare us the horror this global conflict might create. Every day, they strengthened the protective shield around the mother house, while warning us of certain dangers hanging particularly over the “little Canadians.” England had declared war on Germany after Hitler invaded Poland. As a result, we Canadians, being British subjects, became Hitler’s enemies.

When I left the nun’s office that day, I was in a state of shock. The tone of her voice as she uttered that last sentence resounded in my head. It suddenly struck me that I had become an outlaw and absolutely had to hide. A sense of urgency gripped me; I wanted to go back to my country.

I asked to see Mother Superior again. She received me in her office. I shared my fears with her and said I wanted to return to Canada. She replied that she had already been trying for some time to have us repatriated, but the travel documents had so far failed to arrive. Five months had passed since her first request. She was very concerned and couldn’t foresee what would happen to us. She ended our conversation by promising she would let me know as soon as she found out more.

The mood in the monastery of the Eudist fathers grew tenser by the day. I still worked in the laundry, and we were afraid the Germans might decide to come and get us. They now occupied the town. We didn’t go out anymore. When we caught a glimpse of a group of soldiers passing our windows, we hid immediately. We jumped at the slightest noise.

There was nothing we could pin our hopes on. Our papers still hadn’t arrived and Mother Superior was becoming quite guarded. The five other Canadians and I all felt that something serious was going to happen.

I
t
was around eight o’clock in the morning, December 5, 1940, when German soldiers knocked on the door of 31, rue d’Antrain, the residence of the Eudist fathers. They asked to see me immediately. The nun who let them in hurriedly sent someone to warn the sister in charge, in the absence of the superior sister, before going to get me at the laundry where I worked.

When I stepped into the entrance hall, breathless and terrified, the sister in charge was already there. She took me firmly by the arm to support and comfort me, while, in heavily accented French, one of the soldiers read out the document they had come to deliver to me.

As of now, you must consider yourself a prisoner. You must not leave your apartment; we will come to get you. You must take warm clothes.

Any attempt to evade this order will result in the death penalty.

The soldier added that they would come back for me in a few days. Before leaving, they clicked their heels, raised their arms into the air, and shouted,
“Heil Hitler!”
I flinched and felt my blood run cold. I didn’t grasp what was happening. I stood there, paralyzed. The nun in charge had to take me by the arm and lead me to my little room. Mother Superior would be back in a few hours, she said. She would be able to help me understand my situation. I splashed my face with cold water to bring myself back to reality. I couldn’t believe my ears: the soldier really had mentioned the death penalty! I read the document they’d given me. My hands wouldn’t stop shaking.

The words “prisoner” and “death penalty” were well and truly there. I could die, then, simply because I was a Canadian citizen! That didn’t make sense. My crime was being a British subject. It was all so abstract for me since I had never even set foot in England! My allegiance to the British crown was limited to having seen a few pictures of the king and queen. There had to be some other purpose for my arrest…where were the Germans going to take me? I wondered. Perhaps they simply wanted to send me back to Canada. I hoped so.

The superior sister arrived at last and I was brought to her office. By way of reassurance, she told me that the other Canadian nuns had received the same notice. She explained that England refused to become Germany’s ally and Hitler had therefore given orders on November 16, 1940, to arrest all British subjects in the occupied zone.

My knowledge of political matters was extremely limited, so I couldn’t understand why I was being threatened with the death penalty. I panicked. I summed up my predicament: If I didn’t obey orders, I would die merely because I was born in a country that was protected by another country that didn’t want to fight for Germany. Really! It was unbelievable I would be killed for that reason! I wouldn’t even be entitled to a trial, wouldn’t even be able to defend myself. The superior sister replied calmly, “My dear child, we must submit. Those are the facts and there is nothing we can do about it.”

I cried for hours. I didn’t want to live anymore. I barely ate. My mind conjured up the worst possible outcomes. To get rid of these morbid thoughts, I tried to convince myself that the Germans only wanted to repatriate me to Canada.

The fateful day arrived. I was asked to pack my bags and take enough provisions to last me for forty-eight hours.

Three nuns of our community had been arrested: my cousin Thérèse Martel, who had become Sister Saint-Jean-de-Brébeuf, Éva Tremblay, who was now Sister Marie-Wilbrod, and I.

A truck picked us up and took us to the town hall of Rennes. The three of us made a point of staying very close together; I clung as tightly as I could to the two other nuns. We were told that, since the occupation began, this building had become one of the headquarters of the German army. Our documents were checked. Then we were informed of our destination. I still believed they had arrested the wrong person and I would be allowed to go home. I was handed a piece of paper that stated in German where I would be sent. Needless to say I didn’t understand a word of that language. I only recognized my name, my town, and my passport number.

As I waited at the police station, my fear grew and grew. The two nuns beside me were sure the Germans were going to send us to an internment camp. I then asked people around me what “internment camp” meant. They told me it was a place where those who were arrested were sent and forced to work.

At three in the afternoon, another truck came to get us at the town hall. The two other nuns and I seated ourselves on a wooden bench at the back of the van, as far away from the Germans as possible, so they couldn’t see us cry, as we said to each other. I was inconsolable. I trembled all over. My cousin and I held each other’s hand so tightly that our fingers went numb.

Suddenly a woman got up and tried to jump out of the moving truck. A soldier caught her by the arm and forced her to sit down again by striking her hard in the ribs with the butt of his rifle.

My trembling grew worse and I hid my face in my veil so as not to see anything anymore. Sister Marie-Wilbrod put her arms around my cousin and me and tried to quiet us down. She remained calm and wasn’t crying. I wondered how she managed to control herself while being confronted like us with an extremely violent act for the first time in her life.

The truck stopped on the way to pick up other prisoners, one of them a seventy-two-year-old Frenchwoman who was arrested because she had been married to a British subject, even though she had been divorced for a long time.

Most of them didn’t understand what was happening and seemed just as terrorized as we were. The soldiers kept their weapons aimed in our direction at all times and glared at us.

We arrived at the station, where a train was waiting for us. In the first car, whose door was open, an enormous machine gun stood on a platform. The doors of the other cars were sealed. The small air vents were blocked with barbed wire. The soldiers made us get into one of the cars. Then, at five o’clock, the train slowly started moving. I was overcome by despair and thought of my brothers and my father in the Saguenay. They knew nothing about my fate! But realistically, how could they come to my aid?

We travelled for five nights and four days. We had to change trains several times. Eventually we lost all sense of time and place. The soldiers continued to fill the cars with new prisoners.

Toward the end of our journey there were about seventy of us in our car, all crammed together in unsanitary conditions. Sometimes we travelled for more than twelve hours without being able to urinate. Finally the inevitable happened. Several people urinated right there. Others had diarrhea.

The train stopped at last, in the middle of the night, in what appeared to be a cattle station. No one knew what was happening. We heard cries and the sound of boots outside.

In the small hours we were ordered to get out. Six abreast, escorted by soldiers, we marched on each side of the road like a troop of sleepwalkers. We had hardly slept at all for several days. The few people we met on the side of the road seemed surprised to see us and murmured, “They’re even arresting nuns!” We finally learned we were going to the Vauban barracks at Besançon.

Most of the prisoners were Americans by birth. They had been arrested for that reason alone, although the war had only just been declared. There were also citizens of the Commonwealth, like me. I found out later that twenty-four hundred women, mainly of British extraction, including six hundred nuns, had been interned in the Vauban barracks at Besançon. The citadel, which comprised several buildings, was designed to accommodate soldiers, not women.

We were taken to building B, where we were able to find a place to sleep. Stretchers served as bunks and everyone tried to locate the cleanest and most respectable-looking one before covering it with a straw mattress, pulled from a stack at the building’s entrance.

Our group of nuns settled itself in a corner, apart from the others. We were all exhausted, but that didn’t stop us from reciting a hopeful prayer. I fell asleep immediately after.

In the morning, we were woken up by loudspeakers. We were ordered to go and get our food. There weren’t enough dishes for everyone. We managed as best we could by washing the few bowls we found in the drinking trough for the horses. In any case, we were only entitled to a watery liquid of a questionable colour, which bore no resemblance to tea or coffee.

At noon, they served us ice-cold vegetables, including potatoes and turnips. For supper, we were entitled to a sauce streaked with blood. There was no way of knowing what animal the blood was from. I felt a wave of revulsion when I saw that fare. My legs went limp, and I collapsed on the ground in tears.

Sister Marie-Wilbrod helped me up and did her best to comfort me, telling me to try to be brave and strong because our troubles weren’t over. No one knew how long we would stay in this camp. How could I keep my spirits up under such conditions until this torture ended?

My new address was Frontstalag 142. Several prisoners had grown weaker by waiting in long lines for our meagre sustenance. Every day, we needed to line up three times like that. There were on average fifteen daily deaths caused by malnutrition. We had to wait outside for hours while the dampness and chill went right through our clothes. I considered myself lucky to be wearing my nun’s garments, because they gave me some protection against the cold, which wasn’t the case for most of the other prisoners. Our headdresses had been tossed out, but we still had our veils and headbands.

Dysentery began ravaging the camp. The toilets had been set up outside, and there were many sick people who fell down on the stairs while making their way toward them, and sometimes they died on the spot.

In our building, the stretchers were all jammed up against each other. The women were embarrassingly close to one another. The prisoners’ smell became intolerable at times and made me nauseous. I had never thought I would be able to bear such a stench. We only had very little water at our disposal to bathe ourselves. Besides, the water that came out of the taps was terribly cold and, since there was no heating in the building, we didn’t dare get undressed to wash.

A few days after we arrived at the camp, we noticed that our straw mattresses were infested with bugs. Under those circumstances sleeping became practically impossible. Gloomily I kept wondering when this nightmare would end. As exhausted as I was, I took comfort in the thought that I was healthy and there were prisoners who needed me.

The soldiers assigned us certain tasks. Sister Marie-Wilbrod and I were ordered to deliver medicines to sick prisoners. So we assisted Dr. Gilet, a prisoner himself, in his duties, the doctor being unable to cope with the task on his own.

Every evening, we made the rounds of the buildings with our box containing pills for sore throats, liniment for aching muscles, and rhubarb pills against constipation. This job did me the world of good. It drove away my black thoughts. Night after night I waited for the moment when I finally felt useful.

Every now and then, as we did our rounds, German soldiers tried to talk to us. They showed us pictures of their children. Seeing nuns held as prisoners must have stirred up feelings of remorse in some of them. Immediately other soldiers would move toward us, and that put an end to the attempts to communicate.

One of them asked us at some point to treat his sore throat. Sister Marie-Wilbrod advised him to go and see a German nurse. She would have been able to help him, but was too worried about the consequences. “We can never be careful enough in our situation,” she warned me.

When we got back from our rounds, shortly before curfew, the Germans were counting the prisoners and searching our straw mattresses to make sure we hadn’t hidden any weapons in them. From time to time they brought us a bit of bread. They must have thought they were being generous. Although the bread was hard as a rock, ash-grey, and already mouldy, we ate it anyway. Hunger gnawed at us too much. The food parcels sent by our religious community rarely reached us.

Since I couldn’t stop myself from writing, I kept a diary, but was afraid the soldiers might find it. We were often alerted about searches by other women prisoners. Then I hid my notebook in a fold of my habit. Sister Marie-Wilbrod, my cousin, and some other women in the camp had already warned me against possible reprisals if my diary were ever found. They had witnessed all sorts of atrocities for acts much less serious than mine. But I disregarded their advice because writing, for me, was life itself.

One day, about fifty novices of the congregation of the Petites Soeurs des Pauvres entered the camp. The oldest one, who was in charge, pleaded with the commandant to let us have the services of a priest. A few days later, he sent us a priest, an internee himself. From then on, Mass was celebrated daily. This ritual was a great comfort to us and helped us endure captivity. We had set up a small chapel where we could go during the day to pray. Since the camp commandant was a Catholic, we were able to attend Midnight Mass on December 25, 1940. There were some soldiers present.

The Red Cross watched over us and even provided decks of cards for our entertainment.

From time to time, there were air raid warnings. Sirens would wail. The German soldiers immediately ran into the shelters, whereas we had to stay where we were. So we wouldn’t be too alarmed, we told ourselves that the Allies weren’t going to bomb us.

In January of 1941, the Red Cross of Geneva visited our camp. After meeting the authorities, it drew up an incriminating report about the state of the premises, denouncing the unsanitary conditions in which we were kept. To put pressure on the officials, Winston Churchill threatened to deport all Germans interned in Great Britain to Canada. This threat was taken seriously because two months later, luggage in hand, we left for a camp with better amenities, at Vittel, in the Vosges. The Germans had requisitioned several hotels, and we were taken to one of them.

Vittel was a holiday resort, renowned for its thermal springs. About two thousand people were interned there, mainly Americans, Russians, British citizens, and Polish and Austrian Jews holding obviously fake British and American passports.