Rosie's War

by Rosemary Say

  The Kommandant came out of his office with a look of fury on his face. ‘You have been chanting Mendelssohn’s name,’ he said to us quietly. ‘You know perfectly well that he cannot be played. He was a Jew.’

  ‘But we have British-born Jews here and we’d like to hear Mendelssohn,’ said a small woman who occupied the dormitory next to ours.

  ‘This is not a holiday camp!’ the Kommandant suddenly screamed. He had been goaded too far. ‘You will do what I and my officers say. I will not have these disturbances. There is much to be done besides listening to the Jew Mendelssohn.’ He stormed back into the office.

  We felt a tiny frisson of the sort of fear that must have been felt in so many homes in France. We were only in the camp by chance of our passports. How far those documents would carry for the British-born Jews we didn’t know. We wisely shut up and dispersed.

  That night a blackout was imposed on the camp. It continued throughout our time there and was to leave us shivering and miserable. The Germans had originally felt it was unnecessary to take blackout precautions, reasoning that the RAF would not bomb British women and children. They had therefore taken the opportunity to billet senior officers and strategic bureau staff around the perimeter. They were correct in that the RAF didn’t bomb the camp but the problem unforeseen by the Germans was that the Caserne Vauban was a landmark. It was perched by the loop of the Doubs River with the snow-capped Jura Mountains behind it. The RAF were consequently briefed to guide some of their sorties to Germany over this isolated blaze of light in a Europe that was largely blacked out.

  Once the Germans had realized their mistake, the Kommandant ordered us to cover every inch of light, although we were given no equipment to do so. We had no curtains and had to make do with any spare bit of material we could find to cover the windows. But for a while we were one window short, so we had to use a blanket as a blackout curtain. It was left to Christine to draw up and enforce the rota that meant that each night someone had to give up one of her precious blankets during that freezing winter.

  Perhaps the Kommandant’s outburst over the Mendelssohn episode should have been a warning to us that we could not push him too far. For all his amiable exterior he was still a German officer who was answerable for his actions. He had little patience with any activities that overstepped the mark, as we found out over the Christmas and New Year celebrations in the hall.

  Christmas came just a couple of weeks after our arrival. I remember that I had pushed the thought of the festivities to the back of my mind, expecting nothing. One evening I was finally able to scrounge a battered old toothbrush from one of the French prisoners. I had by this stage become desperate, lying in bed each night, running my tongue around my goofy, furry teeth and imagining that they were rotting away. He excitedly told me that his compatriots had been given permission to have a celebration and concert on Christmas Eve provided they were finished before midnight mass.

  ‘You will come, Pat?’ he said as he handed me the toothbrush. ‘And your friends in the room?’ I nodded my assent. I had a slight crush on him but I guessed that he had his eye on the beautiful Marie.

  We made ourselves as presentable as we could in our large blue overcoats and turned up at the hall on Christmas Eve. I don’t know what the others were expecting but to me it was a wonderful shot in the arm. The French had obviously been saving up for ages. It looked like a real Christmas feast. The tables were decked with meat, cheese and wine. There were even cigarettes, courtesy of their Red Cross parcels.

  About a hundred of us (mostly French prisoners) sat down to certainly one of the best Christmas meals I have ever had. Afterwards the tables were pushed away and someone set up a gramophone and we started to dance. Numerous gatecrashing internees joined us. The dancing got wilder and wilder as more and more couples took to the floor. A couple of Bluebell Girls even went into their stage routine, kicking their legs and swinging around together in perfect time, much to the delight of the men. As the party wore on, one girl jumped on a chair and gave a resounding rendition of ‘It’s a Long Way to Tipperary’. When she finished we all stood up and with great solemnity sang ‘God Save the King’. Not to be outdone, the French finished the evening with ‘La Marseillaise’.

  Inevitably, no one took any notice of the time. The doors suddenly opened and a procession of nuns and their congregation tried to enter for mass. For a while there was complete chaos as soldiers, nuns, dancers and worshippers struggled to carry out their own particular form of celebration. Elderly ladies were whirled around the floor by drunken French soldiers and the priest had to fight his way up to the makeshift bandstand. News must have travelled quickly to the Kommandant that a bacchanalian orgy was taking place. He soon arrived with the guards and they quickly cleared the hall of revellers. He said practically nothing but was unamused, to say the least. I imagine that he foresaw some very difficult questions from his superiors over the incident.

  The affair of the midnight mass was quickly followed by the legendary party for the Russian New Year on 14 January. Permission was granted for the sixty or so interned White Russian women to celebrate this in the hall. They got together some food and wine and somehow bought several bottles of vodka. The ensuing party could be heard around the camp. Unfortunately, when the Kommandant and his officers turned up to investigate, one of the women threw her arms around him and kissed him soundly on the lips. There followed a horrified silence. The Kommandant turned red and walked out. His guards quickly dispersed the party.

  There was no question of his turning a blind eye to this. He had been very lenient at Christmas but this was too much. We were informed the next morning that festivities in the hall would no longer be allowed. Worse was to follow, for he seemed hell-bent on a total purge. One evening not long after, as we were standing around in the courtyard talking, a group of soldiers in full battledress suddenly arrived and ordered us to our rooms. We were amazed. What was going on? We watched as the Kommandant led his troop of men through the stables and outhouses, dragging out dishevelled loving couples and marching them towards the German offices. The next day the French soldiers could be seen at one end of the yard playing boules or football while their girls waved and signalled to them from the other end, separated by a patrolling sentry. From then on our contact with the French prisoners was minimal.

  Much to our dismay the authorities also closed down La Cantine as part of this crackdown. Not long after the Russian affair, a woman got paralytically drunk there one evening and was carried out insensible. A group of Germans soldiers were waiting outside with Leica cameras at the ready. Someone must have tipped them off. We found out later that the ensuing photos were published in a German newspaper under the title ‘British Woman’s Debauchery’.

  The Barracks Yard, January 1941, by Frida.

  The place was closed down and reopened a couple of weeks later as a shopping exchange and mart. Food, wine and toiletries were sold at inflated prices. It had a large notice board where all and everything could be bartered: ‘Cigarettes Wanted – Warm Jumper in Exchange’; ‘Soap Offered in Exchange for Food’. This was perhaps more useful than a bar but certainly a lot less fun.

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  People, Post, Prayers and Prostitutes

  Our first few weeks at Besançon had produced a sense of near-euphoria, or at least of tremendous energy. We had been totally focused on the need to sort out how to survive in this new and hostile environment. But once the energy had dissolved many of us were left depressed; we felt useless. Our sense of isolation increased over the festive period. What were we doing in the foothills of the Jura Mountains in such foul conditions? With (as yet) no means of communication with home?

  One particularly low evening Shula suddenly grabbed a branch of wood we had collected for the stove. Brandishing it, she thrust it into the embers until it was glowing then soused it in water. As the smoke poured from it she climbed onto my bed and wrote across the long wall in charcoal: ‘Un pour tous et tous pour un.’


  How to deal with the nervous energy generated by hours of immobility and apprehension? Already it seemed that we were going to spend the rest of our lives in Besançon. We all used different ways to cope. Shula was left dispirited for several weeks after writing her defiant slogan. Like many others she would curl up on her straw mattress and turn her face away. Margaret, the sculptress, would lie in bed all day devouring every book she or anyone else could lay their hands on. For me, I needed to move: I ran, jumped, played ball and took part in every game that was organized.

  As those early weeks passed, rooms and dormitories closed in on their own circle of inmates and it was no longer as easy to make friends. We became very protective of our dormitory, Room 101. It was known as Les Arts et Métiers. I learnt from another woman that we were considered exclusive and unfriendly. We were not, but we were all young, healthy and quite selfish. We were determined to survive.

  Many rooms were seriously overcrowded. A friend later told me that Room 13, for example, which should have had eight or ten people at the most, held eighteen women of an average age of probably seventy. There was one child of five there who lived with his mother. He hardly ever went out and used to leap around in desperately high spirits. A great deal of cooking went on over the communal black stoves which were supposed to heat the dormitory. Each old lady liked to cook her mush in her own way. An anti-fresh air league governed the room and it was always stiflingly hot. The windows were only ever opened when the heat and smell got too bad even for the grand-mères. Room 13 was also typical of the constant bickering that went on, occasionally breaking out into open warfare. We young women would laughingly refer to such spats as ‘The Battle of the Broken Basin’ or ‘The War of the Lost Teaspoon’, but even our mockery became tiresome after a while.

  I made two great friends while at Besançon. Shula was one of them. Although she was quite a few years younger than me, in many ways she seemed older. She had been working since the age of twelve to contribute to the family income and those early experiences had made her a committed revolutionary. She had already decided that what she really wanted was to be an artist. She was forever sketching and drawing, using any medium she could get her hands on: charcoal from the stove or pencils exchanged for cigarettes (an unusual transaction at the exchange and mart, as I pointed out to her).

  She had a thick bush of curly, black hair which always seemed wild, regardless of how much she combed it. Her features were large: big eyes, a wide mouth and a broad nose. With her Middle-Eastern appearance and total lack of English she looked even more out of place than most. As a Jewish person she had been saved from a deadlier camp by a chance of fate. Having been born in Palestine, she was the only member of her family to have a British passport. When she was released from imprisonment in 1944 she was to discover that the only other close relative alive was her small sister, who had spent the war hiding in a cupboard and emerged permanently deformed.

  My other great friend was Frida Stewart. One evening in January she arrived at our dormitory with her friend Ronka, one of the very few black women who were interned. Ronka came from Nigeria and the two presented a wonderful contrast: Ronka was tall, beautiful, haughty and silent; Frida was short, incredibly thin, with large, bony English features. She was earnest and voluble. That first day she came straight to the point.

  ‘We need to find a new place. We can’t stay in our room any more. It’s driving us mad.’

  I knew that they were in the terrible Room 13 but stayed silent. Ours was enormous; with the roof properly repaired it could easily have accommodated many more. There were only ten of us, now that the pregnant Austrian girl had been released. Our bunks were all huddled at the near end, this side of the stove and as far away as possible from the hole in the ceiling, which had only been roughly patched up by Marie’s helpers. The wind and rain still whistled or dripped their way into the room. Even so, like everyone else in the camp we were becoming very protective of our space. None of us wanted any new faces in our dormitory. It was Christine, as the chef de chambre, who took the lead.

  ‘Well, of course, there is room. But it’s freezing here, you know. And every few days you have to give up your blanket for the blackout curtain.’

  ‘Oh, that’s fine,’ said Frida, airily waving aside this objection. ‘It’ll make a change from our room. It’s so stuffy and overcrowded.’

  ‘What about the bugs?’ I ventured. ‘We’re overrun with them.’

  ‘They can’t be any worse than in our room.’

  I blushed. There was silence. Perhaps it was better to have girls we knew (and more or less of our own age) than to have some old battleaxes imposed on us at any time. But Christine still made one last and rather feeble attempt to forestall them.

  ‘I’m not too sure what the Schwester will say …’

  ‘Oh, don’t worry about her,’ Frida said cheerfully, moving towards the door. ‘I’ll speak to her and be back to you. Bye.’

  Her persistence had paid off. They moved in that evening. We quickly learnt that persistence was one of Frida’s main qualities. She was a committed Communist who took the war and the Nazis much more seriously than most of us did. Her arrival brought the wider world to our room. She was determined to find out what was happening and was not content simply to read and then ignore the German propaganda notices we were given. She would argue and probe out information from anyone and everyone. It was she who made us aware of the RAF raids, the fighting in North Africa and the German successes in Greece and the Balkans. Frida would spend hours talking to the guards, trying to gauge what ordinary German people felt about the war. She was an enigma to many inmates and considered by some to be suspect. Why would she insist fiercely one day on blocking any German initiative in the camp yet the next day spend hours in earnest conversation with our captors?

  Despite our different political views, I immediately understood and empathized with her. We came from the same English, middle-class world and had some London friends in common. Her father was the Dean of Trinity College at Cambridge University, where my brother had recently finished studying. I didn’t need her to tell me why she talked to the German soldiers. She was still in that academic world of enquiry and research. Her political beliefs were such that she felt that to challenge the German soldiers was in itself a political act. Like me, she had been arrested in Paris. She had been studying at the Sorbonne and had stayed on to sit her exams even as the Germans were entering the city.

  Rosie (left) at work in the Kommandant’s office, by Frida.

  Our real common interest was music. We both played the violin and requested instruments from the Red Cross as soon as their parcels started to arrive. We would challenge each other to faster and faster Scottish reels and duets, half the time playing just to keep warm. This would bring women from nearby rooms knocking on our door and asking us to ‘stop that racket’. The noise would intensify with Shula and Ronka dancing or pretending to fence to our music. The bugs would literally be dropping off the ceiling.

  The violins were one of the many lifesavers from the Red Cross. Parcels, letters and telegrams all began to arrive once a post office was established early in the New Year. We now had contact with the outside world. The British authorities were notified of our existence with names, details and next-of-kin. The whole of the British bureaucracy rapidly swung into action to include us with the thousands of soldiers caught up in prison camps. I had been so worried about my family. Until the end of January I had no means of contacting them. In fact, my father did learn before Christmas that I had been interned but I didn’t, of course, know this at the time.

  In the first letter to my parents, dated 30 January 1941, I did as much as possible to reassure them of my well-being. I wrote that I was ‘well fed and with lots of friends of my own age’. I did not lack for anything, I continued, given that Madame Izard ‘looks after me and sends me anything I need’.

  This light-hearted tone, which made the Besançon camp sound almost like a French versi
on of an Enid Blyton school, was to be present in all my letters home. In another I boasted of my superb ski suit sent from Paris by Lucile Manguin ‘in which I live all day long’. And in my last letter from Besançon I assured my parents that I was getting lots of food parcels from the Izard family in Paris. This was true, but it was followed by the blatant lie that I had put on at least a stone in weight, given the rich contents of these parcels!

  Early in February, after nearly two months of imprisonment, I finally received my first communication from home. It was a Red Cross telegram of precisely nineteen words. After reading this I dashed up to my own private hideout on the roof of one of the camp buildings. Tucked in among the chimney pots, I perched on the steep slates to read and re-read the words:

  ALL SAFE AND VERY WELL AT PATTISON. MUMMIE, DADDIE, DAVID JOAN BOBBY SEND LOVE. GOD BLESS YOU DARLING GIRL.

  I began to cry quietly for only the third time since leaving Avignon. I was no longer isolated. The feeling that my family was still there at the same address in North London and that we were part of the whole POW machinery was very comforting. My mood could not even be depressed by the German sentry below, who was shouting and threatening to shoot me unless I came down.

  The post office was great but it involved endless bureaucracy. Actually getting a letter was sheer luck, depending as it did on where your letter was in the vast pile waiting to be tackled by the German censors. On our side, we were all very clearly informed of the details of postal censorship. Letters had to be kept brief and each one was stamped with the reminder that ‘Brevity and Clearness in Writing Will Assure Greater Expedition.’ The war could not, of course, be mentioned. I spent long hours trying to think up meanings within meanings to write on the printed POW letterforms. I don’t think anyone, least of all my family, ever broke my complicated code. Not that they would have learned much more than that I was well and alive! But it was fun to feel that I had slipped something by the German censor.