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By Root 2391 0

the divide from hell to paradise.’ Eighteen-year-old Miriam Wattenberg, whose mother had been born in the United States but moved to Poland as a child, was one whose US passport brought her to Vittel that winter morning. Her mother Anglicized the children’s names to make them sound more American, and Miriam Wattenberg became Mary Berg. The teenager wrote in her diary that the Germans did not tell her, her mother and sister where they were going. They and other US passport holders had been in a camp at Pawiak, where she wrote, ‘While we are waiting here we can see transports of people being sent out of the Pawiak to the Oswiecim camp. Is that where the Nazis intend to send us, too?’ By then, young Mary had seen 300,000 people marched off to Oswiecim, the Polish town that the Germans called Auschwitz. It was only when the train taking her from Pawiak headed west that she realized her family’s destination was not to be the infamous death camp. Crossing the frontier into France and seeing Vittel for the first time, the sensitive and thoughtful teenager wrote, ‘Not a trace of the snow that covered Warsaw. Here everything is sunny and spring is in the air.’

After five days in the camp, Mary Berg met ‘a number of American nuns, handsome young girls’. Mary, whose English was fluent, told them she had come from Poland. They asked whether she had received Red Cross parcels there.

When I told them that for six months I had been starving in prison, some of them gave me chocolate tablets. Then they asked me to wait a moment while they went back to their rooms. Soon they rushed out again, their hands full of canned food and sweets. I did not dare bite into the chocolate tablet I held in my hand. One of the sisters, seeing my confusion, broke off a piece and put it into my mouth. It was the first chocolate I had had in four years.

Mary met Dr Jean Lévy, who had done so much for Drue Tartière and other women at Vittel. ‘His wife and child are in a camp near Paris, whence transports are constantly sent to Poland,’ she wrote. ‘He keeps asking us whether all that is said about Treblinka is true. He refuses to believe that people are killed there by the thousands with poison gas and steam.’ She was pleased to discover the camp had a Resistance movement and a secret radio: ‘It seems that the Germans suspect something of the kind, for yesterday they searched the hotel, but they could not find the radio. It is said that while the Germans carried on their search someone was walking in the park carrying the radio in a suitcase. ’

Some of the American internees became pregnant. A YMCA inspector observed after a visit on 8 February 1943, ‘A problem which concerns the International Red Cross more than us was laid before us: How are the necessary layettes to be secured for the 21 babies expected in the next few months?’ More than layettes, some of the women needed husbands. Sylvia wrote that German soldiers respected expectant mothers so much that they found the fathers and told them to marry the women. ‘Resistance was overcome and weddings with the bride in white veil and orange blossoms almost like in peacetime,’ Sylvia wrote. Some of the brides, though, ‘were pale as they had suffered considerably with nausea’.

Sylvia Beach was desperate to leave Vittel as her sixth month of captivity began in February 1943. The camp, however comfortable, meant the denial of the companionship, mainly of Adrienne Monnier, and freedom she needed to survive. Mary Berg, coming from Poland, discovered freedom in Frontstalag 194. ‘There is no more wonderful feeling than freedom,’ she wrote in her diary for 24 February 1943. ‘In Vittel I have a taste of it for the first time in three years. Although I can see the barbed wire and the Nazi guards a few steps away, I feel myself under the protection of the American flag.’ Yet the protection of her mother’s flag and passport did not stop her mind from roaming back to Warsaw. ‘The internees try to make the time pass by organizing all sorts of entertainments, dramatic circles, sports clubs, education groups, etc.