Paris After the Liberation_ 1944 - 1949 - Antony Beevor [80]
Such scenes were repeated many times. Louise Alcan, aged thirty-four, a survivor of Birkenau and Ravensbrück, described her own arrival: ‘Gare de l’Est. Eight in the morning. A crowd behind the barriers. We sing the Marseillaise. The people look at us and burst into tears.’
The few French Jews who returned from the death camps aligned themselves with their compatriots. Vichy had stripped them of their nationality and handed themover to the Germans, but they were no less French for that; they too sang the Marseillaise and the ‘Chant du départ’, that battle anthemof the French Revolution. Only a tiny percentage of almost 80,000 ‘racial deportees’ returned; over a quarter of the entire population of French Jews had perished. Vichy had also handed over another 40,000 foreign Jews who had sought refuge in France. In addition there were around 100,000 political prisoners and the 600,000 conscripts on forced labour, many of whom had worked and died while constructing factories underground to escape Allied bombing. Out of a total of 820,000 French deportees, some 222,000 are estimated to have died.
The first processing point was at the Gare d’Orsay. General Dixie Redman took his military assistant Mary Vaudoyer there, having told her: ‘You must see this, and you must never forget it.’ They stood looking out of a window into a huge space where hundreds of men were walking, completely naked, covered in delousing powder and DDT, such was the fear of typhus.* Their faces were cavernous, their heads bald, either shaved or with alopecia frommalnutrition, their eyes downcast. None spoke. Both Redman and his assistant were appalled that they should be obliged to undergo yet one more humiliation. When they were deemed to have been disinfected, they were dressed in surplus British battledress, coarse, hot and often several sizes too big for them, and heavy ammunition boots.
From the Gare d’Orsay, the deportees were taken to the Hotel Lutetia, which had been the Abwehr headquarters during the Occupation. The whole block was surrounded by relatives desperate for news. Newspapers were full of little advertisements seeking information on missing relatives, or announcements of deaths at last confirmed. Such was the confusion and the scale of the task that some families had to wait several more months.
Marguerite Duras’s husband was saved by a miracle and by determination. François Mitterrand, the leader of Antelme’s Resistance group, was part of a semi-official French mission sent to Germany. He managed to get into Dachau, which had been sealed off by the US army to prevent the spread of typhus. A voice called out, ‘François!’ He did not recognize the living corpse. It was his companion who recognized Robert Antelme, and then only by his teeth.
Mitterrand rang Duras in Paris. He told her to send two members of the group to his office, where he had organized passes and three uniforms. Using a car and petrol obtained by Mitterrand, the two friends drove through the night, reaching Dachau the next morning. They dressed this virtual skeleton in the spare uniformwhich they had smuggled into the camp and carried him out, held upright between them, past the guard post. Fortunately, the American sentries were so afraid of infection that they all wore gas masks and could not see very clearly. Antelme was laid on the back seat of their car and driven back to Paris. The return journey took three times as long. None of themexpected him to survive it. But when they finally reached the rue Saint-Benoît, he was still alive. Despite all the