Americans in Paris_ Life and Death Under Nazi Occupation - Charles Glass [128]
Sylvia recalled being driven ‘to a remote railway station, where a train of miserable third class cars were awaiting us. Our destination was not mentioned. The cars were sealed up, we started on a journey lasting all day and into the middle of the night.’
Drue, Gladys Delmass, Elsa Blanchard and five other women shared a compartment in a filthy third-class carriage that had not been cleaned from its last load of prisoners. The train headed east, reaching Nancy that night in the midst of Allied bombing. The German guards locked the American women into the train and ran for shelter. When the raid ended, German Red Cross nurses distributed hot coffee to the soldiers. The Americans asked for some, but the nurses ‘took pleasure in throwing the dregs from the empty cups in our faces’. One German soldier gave Drue water from his canteen. In the morning, the train arrived in Vittel.
Vittel was a luxurious spa town in the Vosges Mountains in eastern France. An enterprising lawyer from Rodez, Louis Bouloumié, had transformed the village into a resort with lavish hotels, casino and thermal baths shortly after he bought its Fountain of Gérémoy in 1854. The bounty of hotel rooms had made it an ideal locale for interning British women in France in 1940. The camp was a large fenced-in area where most of Vittel’s hotels were grouped around a beautiful park. Only barbed wire in the storm-fences and Nazi flags signalled that Vittel was a prison rather than a resort. Red Cross inspections in 1940 and 1941 reported that Frontstalag 194 at Vittel was the best German camp in Europe, although most other camps were so horrible that comparison was meaningless. Inmates lived in hotels. They did their own cooking and ate in their rooms. They received mail, monthly visitors and packages of food from their families and the Red Cross.
The new internees, apart from a few invalids who were taken in ambulances, walked from the train station through Vittel to Frontstalag 194. ‘As we marched along,’ Drue wrote, ‘weary and dispirited, the Englishwomen who had been interned since 1940 hung out of the windows of the hotels where they were quartered and gave us a wild reception. They cheered, shouted greetings to us, and sang.’ Like Drue, Sylvia remembered that the British internees ‘cheered us as we arrived. We were to join them in what, thanks to their genius for colonizing, was a model internment camp.’
The somewhat squalid Hôtel Central was being renovated for the Americans, but it was not ready. The Swiss Consul explained in a report for the US State Department, ‘The haste with which the arrests were made did not permit the authorities to prepare a building where the Americans might be placed upon their arrival.’ Until the Hôtel Central was ready, the British women had to make room for their American allies. ‘While awaiting the opening of the Hôtel Central the director of the camp placed the new arrivals in the Grand Hotel where they were temporarily assigned to the large rooms already occupied by two or three British internees,’ wrote the Swiss Consul. ‘Additional beds were placed in these rooms so that altogether four persons were accommodated. Each of these rooms had a private toilet and bath … Everywhere the conditions of sanitation and ventilation were perfect.’
Frontstalag 194 already housed 1,123 women, mostly British, and 282 mainly older men, who had been released from the Saint-Denis camp to be with their wives. Married couples stayed in the Hôtel des Sources, and most of the British women lived in the five-storey