Americans in Paris_ Life and Death Under Nazi Occupation - Charles Glass [129]
The fresh arrivals had to deposit their money with the Germans, who allowed them to keep 600 francs each and to draw another 600 francs monthly from their accounts. Drue hid an extra 3,000 francs and her medical certificate in a shoe. As soon as she could, she approached the camp’s commandant, whom she described as ‘a short, stocky German with a pleasant face’. Captain Otto Landhauser was in fact an Austrian, who had been a physical education and singing teacher before the war. Drue asked him whether she and her group of friends–‘Elsa Blanchard, Katherine Dudley, Princess Murat, Gladys Delmass and Noel Murphy’–could share a room. Landhauser and his assistant, an officer named Damasky who had lived in Canada for fifteen years and spoke English fluently, ‘agreed at once’. German officers inspected the women’s luggage for ‘paper, envelopes, flashlights, which were forbidden for fear of signaling to planes, and reading matter, which was returned after examination by censors’. Drue said to the Gestapo officer going through her suitcase,
‘There’s nothing in there that would interest you. Why bother?’
He looked up at me and smiled. ‘Gee, why the hell didn’t you go home?’ he asked.
‘How do you happen to speak English like that?’ I asked.
‘I worked in a sugar factory in Yonkers until the war started,’ he said. ‘Do you know Yonkers?’
Although a Gestapo officer, he planned to return to Yonkers as soon as the war ended. After the suitcases had been cleared, Senegalese men, probably prisoners of war, carried them into the hotel for the women. Drue and her companions found their room, where two Englishwomen were waiting for them with a pot of tea. One was an old friend of hers and her husband’s, Mary Walker. Mary had been suspected of working for British intelligence, and the Germans had held her for four months in solitary confinement at the Santé Prison in Paris. ‘She looked terribly broken in health and was obviously still suffering from the nervous shock resulting from her experience.’ The living quarters were better than anything Drue had expected: ‘Our big room had a balcony overlooking the Vittel parc and a valley of the Vosges. It was fine, rolling country, but fog often settled in the valleys and made the weather miserable. There were tennis courts, a bowling green, and even a maypole, and some of the women had brought along tennis rackets or managed to get some sent to them.’
Sylvia’s migraine headaches earned her a place in the hospital, which was run by English nuns, on the first night. Her friend Sarah Watson joined her. Sylvia ‘fixed up a kind of supper for us both on an electric plate’. The nuns let Sylvia serve breakfast to the other patients. Among them were two charwomen, ‘who were very pleased at having their breakfast in bed’. Another woman, also named Sylvia, had lived in the Ritz and did not regard breakfast in bed as anything less than her due. Sylvia called her ‘the Giraff’. This lanky grande dame had brought all of her jewellery, including a pearl necklace that she asked Sylvia to fasten around her neck when she delivered the breakfast tray. The ‘Giraff’ wore ‘dainty nightgowns, so sheer that the German doctor was shocked to see her so plainly through them’. Medical care was excellent, under the direction of a German, Dr von Weber, with five other physicians, four French and one Scottish.
Dr Donald Lowrie, the YMCA representative in Geneva, reported on 29 October 1942, a month after the American women had been installed at Vittel,
All the previous reports we have had from Vittel and conversations with women here who had escaped from there give a picture of a camp which has practically all the features of a regular resort which Vittel is–space in the summer for tennis and other games, besides extensive parks, all open to the use of the internees. To be sure there is barbed wire around all this and it is actually an internment camp where the inmates, as