Paris After the Liberation_ 1944 - 1949 - Antony Beevor [81]
Everything possible was done for the deportees at the Lutetia. By right of suffering, they were known as ‘the best of the French’. Nothing was too good for them: veal, cheese and real coffee, obtainable only on the black market, were produced. But often the best intentions did not effect the right treatment. Deportees needed the simplest food in tiny quantities. Their stomachs were so unprepared for the change that they were violently ill. They also needed peace and quiet, not the pandemonium around the Lutetia. ‘We really felt like Martians,’ wrote Pierre Daix.
Some had survived their ordeals in the most astonishing way. Among those flown in from Germany was the Comtesse de Mauduit, an American who had hidden Allied airmen in her château in Brittany until a maid denounced her. Bessie de Mauduit arrived from Ravensbrück ‘still dressed in the striped uniform of prisoners, yet still very elegant’. She told her story to Jean and Charlotte Galtier-Boissière: ‘I never cried once in two years of captivity,’ she concluded, with a proud smile, ‘but I cried on seeing Paris again.’ A few days later Galtier-Boissière learned that Bessie de Mauduit had managed to look so elegant in her camp uniformbecause a forewoman from Schiaparelli, a fellow prisoner, had refashioned it for her.
The resistants survived best in the long run, while ‘kapos’ and collaborators – with what might be seen retrospectively as moral justice – had the lowest survival rate. Those who had tried to obliterate their own individuality in an attempt to make themselves invisible to kapos or SS guards may have survived better in the short term; but turning off a psychological switch to become an apathetic automaton – they were known as ‘musulmans’ in the camps – made it almost impossible to recover afterwards. Altogether 6,000 deportees died soon after their return, of whom ‘musulmans’ made up a significant proportion.
The difficulty of returning to their old lives was common to all. They were unable to sleep in a soft bed. They suffered from nightmares and a lack of confidence. Worst of all, in a way, was the disappointment in homecoming: their families found it very hard to cope with their depressions, caused largely by survivor guilt. ‘Joy did not come,’ wrote Daix, ‘because we had brought too many dead back with us.’
Their whole relationship with the normal world had been completely distorted by their recent submersion in the nightmare of the ‘univers concentrationnaire’. Charles Spitz, a résistant-déporté who had worked in the Dora tunnel, found that the habits of the prison camp died hard. Two months after his return to Paris, his wife suggested they go and have dinner in a restaurant. ‘She had bought me the whole panoply of civilized man, including a wallet and purse. But, without her knowledge, I still kept in my pocket a little wooden box which a comrade from Dora had made for me. It contained some bits of string, pins, and other treasures which were precious in the camp… When it came to pay the bill, to everybody’s stupefaction, I automatically opened my box and emptied its contents on the table.’
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The prisoners of war were processed at the Rex and Gaumont cinemas. One prisoner, just arrived from Germany, when asked where his home was in France, replied that he was from Oradour. The person in charge of interviewing himfainted, unable to tell himthat the village and almost all its inhabitants had been destroyed by the SS Das Reich Division.
There were many tragedies awaiting them, both great and small. In a number of cases, a prisoner reached his apartment to be told by a neighbour that his wife had gone to live with another man. One arrived home to find a child of whose existence he had never been told. His wife was not there, having slipped out to the shops. The man’s jealousy exploded after five years of prison camp