On one basic question they were all agreed: the need for immediate, concerted material aid, and a commitee to organise it. With France itself hungry and on ever-diminishing rations, and the Allied blockade preventing deliveries of anything that might be useful to the enemy war effort, the problem was where to find supplies. A recent medical report drawn up for the Committee had found that while the population of Marseilles was down to an average of 1,700 calories per day, the internees were getting just 832. The YMCA accepted the task of coordinating the work and Lowrie took on the role of president. The Hôtel Imperator in Nîmes – which gave its name to the new body – was chosen as the most convenient place for monthly meetings. The American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee, the JDC or Joint, consisting mainly of liberal Jews in the US, had been supporting French Jewish welfare organisations – the OSE among them – for some years. It now set about raising money and funnelling it towards the internment camps, some of it by borrowing francs from French Jews, against promissory notes to be redeemed after the war. Other money came in from Switzerland, smuggled over the border.
Because foreign organisations wishing to enter the camps were denied passes by Vichy – which had little desire to see its dirty linen paraded before the world – once news of Madeleine Barot’s success reached Geneva, delegates from Swiss charitable groups became nominal workers for Cimade. In Geneva, a committee to coordinate funds and gather information was started at the World Council of Churches, under a German refugee called Dr Freudenberg. A ‘Miss Lieven’ turned up at the camp, bringing supplies in a Simca from the Quakers; she was in fact Princess Bernadotte of Sweden.
A ‘commission for children and old people’ was set up and arranged for deliveries of fruit, olives, jam, cereals, rice, milk products and, just occasionally, chocolate. A rota was established, providing extra meals to the most malnourished for a fixed number of weeks. Since the spot allocated for these meals lay at some distance from the children’s huts, small figures could be seen wading through the mud, clutching their blankets around their shoulders, carrying the tins that served them as plates. Secours Suisse started a vegetable garden, but rats got into it before anything could grow. Groups of people from the surrounding countryside came together to ‘adopt’ those most in need, to whom they sent food and clothes. The Quakers got hold of some wool and gave it to the female prisoners to knit. The OSE managed to install some showers. A drainage system was dug, and the barracks were disinfected and whitewashed. Money was found for bicycles and a piano. The YMCA sent in footballs, chess sets and ping-pong. Cimade opened what it called the ‘barraque de la culture’, where musicians could come to practise and books could be taken out on loan. Soon there were queues waiting for books every morning. Dr Cramer, who paid a return visit to Gurs, observed that ‘many are the internees who are here finding a reason to live and to hope’.
They found some of it in the determination and cheerfulness of the young women from Cimade and the OSE, who became as subversive towards the authorities as they dared to be and who were often at odds with the guards; they saw themselves as ‘civilian resistance’. They took to mocking the few nurses sent into the camp by Vichy as ‘little dolls, artfully made up, with brilliant red nail varnish’. For their part, the authorities complained constantly that the young women were disrespectful.
For the adolescents, life in Gurs was bleak and confusing. Many parents seemed to have lost all sense of how to look after them and spent the days either agitating for release or sunk in apathy, crouching on their filthy straw mattresses in the almost totally dark huts. To see their mothers and fathers so reduced, so frightened, so lacking in resources, was terrifying. Hanne, who was strong and healthy and had just turned 16, longed for distraction. Having been forced by the Nazi laws in Karlsruhe to leave school at 14, she craved an education. She haunted the OSE’s culture hut and volunteered to work in the camp office, where she ran errands and sorted the mail – the legitimate mail; the clandestine letters entered and left the camp with Jeanne or Madeleine, who wore loose-fitting clothes with baggy pockets.
It was in the office that Hanne met Max Liebmann, a studious 19-year-old from Mannheim, who had also arrived in Gurs on one of the trains bringing Jews from Baden, together with his mother and his aunt Jeanne. Passing through Lyons, where the French police were still desperately trying to make sense of this vast, unannounced influx from Germany, Max had acted as interpreter: his grandmother was a French citizen and he spoke both languages fluently. His father, who was a textile printer, had earlier been able to escape to Nice and had avoided the round-up.
Max was a musician, like his mother and grandmother, both of them concert pianists; he had played the cello until he was deported, taught by a brave Gentile despite the edicts forbidding such things. He too had found work in the camp office, having discovered that it provided him with a pass to visit his mother, segregated in one of the women’s huts. One of Max’s jobs was to keep a tally of the dead. When their turn came round for extra rations, Hanne and Max went together to collect their halva, milk and cheese. Through them, their mothers had become friends. A string quartet had been started with the instruments brought in by Donald Lowrie, and through the winter of 1940 it played its way through Beethoven’s violin sonatas. One of the prisoners was the pianist Hans Ebbecke, the organist from Strasburg cathedral. He was a Christian, but had refused to be parted from his Jewish wife when she was interned.
On 6 January, Ella wrote again to her brother in America. This letter is full of lines that have been blacked out by the censor. ‘Hanne,’ she wrote, ‘is always hungry . . . If possible, could you send some clothes and underwear, and also aprons, stockings, a corset for me and above all soap and powder for washing . . . I am very depressed by our present situation and realise how desperately poor and unlucky we are.’ There were moves to obtain emigration visas, but Ella worried about who would pay for the tickets. ‘And now, I come to the saddest part of my letter. Our dearest mother is so feeble, so shrunken, so very weak. There is no real name for her illness, just general decline, great pain and no possibility of relief.’ She reported that she was able to visit Babette every day and that she had been bartering what little she had for some cognac and eggs. ‘Everything is so unspeakably sad, I can’t really describe it.’
The long, cold winter of 1940–1 was taking its toll. The rain never seemed to let up. A permanent smell of wet clay and urine hung over the camp. Early in the new year, Babette died. She had caught pneumonia, stopped eating and slowly starved to death. A nearby field had been turned into a cemetery and she was buried there, with Ella and her sisters and Hanne at the graveside. It had rained particularly hard the night before, and after the coffin was lowered into the earth, Hanne watched with horror as it came floating slowly back up again. Soon afterwards, Berta, whose untreated diabetes had been getting steadily worse, had a stroke that killed her. She was buried near her mother. The cemetery, on a gentle slope alongside the camp, with views across to the snowy Pyrenees, was filling up. In the five months since Hanne’s arrival, there had been 645 deaths.
The cemetery at Gurs, 1952
Still hoping that visas might come through for herself and Hanne, Ella begged her brother ‘urgently, not to desert us, but to help us out of this misery’.
All through that winter, a strong easterly wind blew through the camp for days on end, bringing flurries of snow from the Pyrenees. On the roofs of the barracks, the bitumen tore in the gales, letting in more rain. Unable to go outside, permanently damp, the inmates huddled close together; their faces were red and chafed, their hands and feet purple and covered in chilblains. Many had only cotton blankets. ‘It is cold by day, it is cold by night,’ reported one visitor, ‘with no hope of getting warm before the arrival of the spring and the first fine day.’ Scurvy, eye problems, diarrhoea, typhoid and tuberculosis spread around the camp. Doctors estimated that the inmates were receiving just two thirds of the calories they needed, and very few of the essential vitamins. Wh
en Jeanne Merle d’Aubigné did her rounds of the huts in the evening, after the lights had been switched out at eight o’clock, she could see the eyes of the people crouching along the walls shining like those of cats.
For those who had money, there was a black market in food, mostly run by the remaining Spanish republicans. The camp inhabitants would and did eat everything, including cats, dogs and rats, and the vegetable slops that normally went to pigs. When the rations shrank still further, Jeanne cycled frantically around the neighbouring farms in search of food. A local curé told her that he had nothing to give her. ‘You have authority,’ she said. The following Sunday he told his parishioners about the people starving in Gurs. The congregation gathered some food for the camp. Some of the the OSE girls were sent to Cannes and Nice to beg for money from the rich visitors to the grand hotels.
Even the special rations brought in for the most dangerously malnourished – hot chocolate, potatoes and turnips and sometimes a little meat by the Quakers; dates by the OSE; eggs by the Protestants; porridge and jam by the Swiss – seemed not to do enough to halt the steady daily decline in weight, though some of the children appeared to have lost their pinched and desolate look. Among the adults, the women survived longer, but what took everyone by surprise was the speed with which an apparently healthy man or woman could suddenly die. Fearing bad publicity in foreign newspapers, Vichy appointed a former prefect, André Jean-Faure, as inspector of camps – of which there were now 26 in the occupied northern zone, 15 in the Vichy south. He paid a visit to Gurs and came away appalled. Conditions, he reported, were atrocious. They ‘gravely impugned the honour of France’. (Somewhat more complacently, he observed that though it was indeed extremely cold in the camps, it was cold for everyone else in France too. He himself had caught flu in his own house, where temperatures had gone down to zero.) What was fast becoming clear to everyone was that, to save lives, people needed to leave Gurs.
Emigration was one obvious solution. The foreign Jews had lost their faith in France and longed to leave, preferably for the US or Palestine, but simply to get out of German-occupied Europe was enough. In principle, Vichy was pleased to see them go, but a combination of the extreme reluctance of other countries to accept them and a plethora of administrative complexities that made the much-derided bureaucracy of the Third Republic seem translucent in its simplicity meant that emigration became more and more impossible.
The British, pleading fears of alienating the Arabs, had all but sealed off entry to Palestine. The Jewish emigration organisation HICEM tried every loophole, drew up lists of possible candidates, helped individuals to take their cases to the foreign consuls in Marseilles, and gave people decent suits of clothes so that they would not look like beggars at their interviews. Anyone wishing to leave had to have an entry visa to a new country, a transit visa if passing through Spain or Portugal, and an exit visa from France, with a certificate of good morals from the police and a ticket paid for in American dollars. If going by ship, you needed to apply to the prefecture of the Bouches-du-Rhône for an allocated place; if heading to Shanghai, you needed a travel pass from the Ministry for the Colonies in Clermont-Ferrand. At every stage, the bureaucrats prevaricated. The prefect of the Bouches-du-Rhône did all he could to keep too many would-be emigrants out of Marseilles, while the individual camps dragged their heels about transferring people to Les Milles, the only camp in which they were permitted to complete the formalities. Since many of the affidavits, visas, passes and documents were only issued for a short time, the first had often long since expired by the time the last came through. Every day the rules seemed to change.
Even so, for a while at least, HICEM remained hopeful. Its director, visiting Gurs, spoke of ‘enormous possibilities for immigration’. While these were shrinking by the day, Hanne’s two aunts managed to get on the list for Cuba, and hoped to have their visas before too long.
An Emergency Rescue Committee had also been set up in New York in the summer of 1940 to help well-known political figures trapped in occupied France. With the intervention of Eleanor Roosevelt, 2,000 ‘danger visas’ had been issued. Auctions – ‘Who will bid me $500 for Marc Chagall?’ – were held to raise funds. Once a decent sum had been raised, a young reporter with Foreign Affairs called Varian Fry, who looked a bit like a scholarly academic and who was bold and imaginative by nature, was sent to Marseilles with a list of 200 names. Most were Germans; on the list were Max Ernst and Heinrich and Golo Mann. There were no communists, they being as unwelcome to the Americans as to the French. In Marseilles, Fry was deluged by requests. And though he did indeed succeed in spiriting out a number of people who would undoubtedly have been arrested by Vichy or the Gestapo, not everyone got away. At Portbou, on the Spanish border, having successfully made his way over the mountains with a new manuscript, the philosopher Walter Benjamin was stopped by the police and told that, because he lacked a French exit visa, he would be sent back to France. He committed suicide instead. Not long before, he had written of ‘the adventures of the external world, which, like wolves, appear at times’.
Eleanor Roosevelt had also been using her influence to arrange for visas for children whose relations in the US were able to pay the ever-escalating costs of travel. In 1939, passage by ship to New York had cost $80; now it stood at $500. HICEM, the American JDC and the OSE were able to secure 311 more visas for children with no families in the US. But for children as for adults, progress was agonisingly slow. After an incredible bureaucratic effort by the OSE, a first group of 60 children were gathered in Marseilles by the end of May 1941. A three-day leave was arranged for their mothers to see them off, in exchange for an absolute promise that they would return to their camps. Later, a second group left, bound for Cadiz. What made these departures so heart-rending was that some of the smaller children, who had been cared for outside the camps for some time, no longer recognised their mothers when they came to bid them farewell. Their first language had become French, and the Yiddish of their childhood had been forgotten. They could not even talk to their parents. After they left, the mothers kept their word. They all returned to the camps. None survived.
Three of the 5,000 children interned in the camps
The internment camps now held some 47,000 people, 40,000 of them Jews. They would have been even fuller had Vichy not decided to start placing fit 15–60-year-old men in compulsory work battalions, the Groupements de Travailleurs Etrangers, where they were treated harshly, and in conditions often little better than inside Gurs, except for the absence of barbed wire. There were also several schemes run by the various charitable organisations, under which the internees, ‘on furlough, not to be released’, could be freed and settled in ‘assigned residence’ from which they were allowed to stray no further than five kilometres. That these might soon become deathtraps, no one as yet perceived. One of these schemes, started under the auspices of the Nîmes Committee, provided for men and women aged between 20 and 45, able to ‘resume normal life’ and work. Their keep was paid for by relations, and those with more money supported those who had none. Under a new Direction des Centres d’Accueil, homes taking 50 to 60 people opened; others were set up by the Service Social des Etrangers, and the Jewish scout movement. More could have been established but for shortage of money. The JDC, which was paying many of the costs, estimated that to free 1,000 people from the camps would have taken 40 per cent of their entire annual budget.
There was also, of course, the possibility of escape. Getting out of Gurs was not impossible, and some of the guards, increasingly revolted by the system they were forced to administer, could be persuaded to turn a blind eye. The problem, once outside the fence, was how to survive. What did you do next if you had no papers, no money and no French?
Early in 1941, there were estimated to be about 5,000 children under 15 in the camps, approximately a third of them Jews from Germany, Austria, Poland and the Baltic countries. Among the adults, there was a small number of Gypsies, a few Spanish republicans. Mos
t were suffering painfully from the extreme cold, the snow having lingered for many weeks on end; even in Marseilles, the temperature remained below zero well into February. To distract people from the horror of their daily lives, the all-pervading stench of urine and excrement, and their acute fears for the future, efforts were made in Gurs to lay on classes, and Hannah Zweig, a relation of the writer Stefan Zweig, started a theatre group. Vichy was supposed to send 80 teachers to the camps, but only four showed up.
Fearing what the mud, lice and despair was doing to the children, the Nîmes Committee suggested to Vichy that if they would not let everyone out and close Gurs down, then they should consider freeing at least the children, under the auspices of the welfare organisations, placing them where they could be properly cared for and yet remain on the police register. There was as yet no talk of hiding them, for at this stage they still seemed safe from Nazi hands. Not all members of the Nîmes Committee agreed, arguing that the money and time would be better spent on improving conditions in the camps; in Gurs, in 1941 alone, over 1,000 people had died.
The OSE became the leading partner behind the scheme, in the shape of an Alsatian doctor called Joseph Weill, and Andrée Salomon, a 31-year-old woman who had helped organise the main Jewish scouting movement in France, the Eclaireurs Israélites de France. Andrée looked a bit like a Gypsy, with long, untidy black hair and deep-set eyes that gleamed with defiance. She was much loved by everyone who came across her. The daughter of a Jewish ritual butcher from Alsace, she was trilingual in French, German and Yiddish. She was calm, smiled a lot, and possessed a strong nerve and a steely will. She did not give up, she would say about herself, and she did not cry. The OSE was already looking after 752 Jewish children, many of them orphans since the deportation of their parents, in homes and centres around the country. Andrée now set out around the various départements in the unoccupied zone to persuade the prefects to accept many more children, supervised by the OSE and placed in whatever school, convent or private home she could prevail on to take them. The OSE’s team of young women followed her on their bicycles in search of havens. The JDC promised to provide the money.
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