by Philip Short
A train awaited us . . . Each of the wagons was supposed to hold 40 men, and we managed that without too much difficulty. We knew by now how to sit cross-legged, at what angle the knees should be bent, how to lie side by side . . . how to use our haversacks as seats, backrests, pillows . . . To keep us out of temptation, the sliding doors were chained shut, but to allow in air and daylight they let us open the shutters . . . We squeezed in without any argument: formalities, disturbances, comings and goings, discomfort no longer made us lose patience. Our elemental social state had ended such distinctions. All the same, I was astonished at how easily men become accustomed to living the life of the herd, these same men who used to show off so proudly their qualities as individuals . . .1
Mitterrand was among the lucky ones. His wagon had the standard load – ‘8 horses or 40 men’ – not 70 or 100 as some of his fellow prisoners endured. The doors were opened once a day for a few minutes for the men to get out and empty their bladders and bowels. No one in Mitterrand’s group suffered from raging diarrhoea in a wagon without sanitation, or, if so, he suppressed the memory: others were less fortunate. Nor was he in a convoy which stopped for days on end in the full heat of the sun, the men inside tortured by thirst, on its way to a distant camp in eastern Prussia or Poland: his destination was Stalag IXA at Ziegenhain, near Kassel, in the centre of Germany. Even so, deportation was for all of them ‘a moral martyrdom . . . one of the harshest trials of captivity’.
By comparison with the journey, the camp itself was almost a relief. In an account written the following summer, he recalled the night of their arrival:
Stiff and dazed from the monotony of the hours spent at the bottom of the wagon . . . we marched mechanically and in silence the four kilometres to the camp . . . We felt little of the emotion that is supposed to mark the first impressions of exile . . . The only thing in our minds was sleep: to fall into a sleep unencumbered by legs and a mixture of other men’s breath, by that clinging fraternity which smells of wet greatcoats. We had so many sorrows, so many hopes and so much weariness to forget, so much of ourselves to bury that first night in Germany, that beginning of a very long night.
When we woke, the sun was already striking obliquely the roofs of the tents . . . The other side of the barbed wire . . . the fields, the woods, the villages were repeating the gestures of yesterday and everyday. People were harvesting, binding the sheaves and setting them up in stooks. Life was playing its game, a game from which for the first time we understood we were excluded.2
That first day all the prisoners were searched and deloused. ‘Their [personal] effects were put in bags to pass through a disinfection oven before being returned to their owners. The latter, naked, were sent in groups to a room where their heads and pubic hair were shaved, their bodies smeared with a delousing product and then, after a communal shower, they waited, still naked, for their clothes to be brought back.’ Mitterrand wrote of it later as a day of ‘anxiety’ marked by ‘displays of misplaced curiosity’. The phrase is intriguing: throughout his life he was prudish, and so disliked nudity that he refused to walk barefoot, even on the beach.3
After the preliminaries were completed, they were given their camp numbers. Mitterrand was No. 21176 IXC.4
In June 1940, Ziegenhain had held 3,000 Frenchmen and 12,000 Poles, all living under canvas. By the time Mitterrand arrived three months later, the number of prisoners had almost doubled. They were put to work building wooden barracks, and by the end of that year the last tents had disappeared. Life was monotonous but predictable. ‘We all wore the same patched and torn clothes, we all ate the same soup,’ he wrote. ‘We all followed the same daily routine. There was nothing to distinguish between us.’ At one level the anonymity was reassuring; at another, he found himself in the midst of an utterly unfamiliar world:
Life in the camp was my first real experience of the social fray. I became acquainted with types of people about whom I knew absolutely nothing; I discovered class reflexes which were foreign to me; I saw the world of my youth fall apart . . . How could it be otherwise when you saw company directors, well-known professors, members of the upper middle classes, going through piles of refuse to lick pieces of dirty paper where a trace of jam or cheese had stuck? . . . At night, when we got back from the worksites, we sat on our pallets and talked till curfew while digging out the lice that congregated in the folds of our clothes. At first the promiscuity overwhelmed me. I felt it marked our final degeneracy. Then I got used to it, as I got used to the open-air latrines, immense trenches disinfected with cresol, at the bottom of which there was sometimes a dead body. We philosophised, cracking lice between our nails, losing ourselves in a dream of the future which compensated our shared misery.5
The first weeks had brought other problems. ‘The Germans were not brutal,’ Mitterrand recalled, ‘but they paid no attention to what happened among the prisoners.’ Gangs formed. ‘It was the rule of the strongest – government by the knife.’ Anything of value was extorted. ‘It became an achievement to keep . . . your watch or your pen.’ At the once-daily food distribution – swede or barley soup, doled out from huge basins, except on Sundays, when there was meat – the gang leaders ‘served themselves first, and the rest had to await their pleasure to get a bit of dirty water to survive’. If anyone objected, the knife would be put to use. ‘In the early mornings, under the big tents where we slept, there would be a few corpses.’
But then, he wrote later, ‘A few bold men stood out from the mass, and with the support of the others put in place the beginnings of an organisation. The violence ended . . . The law of the knife had been curiously replaced by a new law, based on the exactitude with which food was shared out.’6
Two of those men took Mitterrand under their wing, winning his lifelong friendship, gratitude and admiration. Roger-Patrice Pelat was two years younger but knew a great deal more of the world. The son of a washerwoman and a soldier disabled during the First World War, he had started work at fourteen as a butcher’s boy. From there he joined Renault as a factory worker, became a member of the Communist Party’s youth movement and fought in Spain with the International Brigades against Franco. At Ziegenhain he was in charge of the delousing ovens. ‘Without him,’ Mitterrand said later, ‘I would not have survived.’ Bernard Finifter was a Jewish tailor of White Russian origin who had been born in Dnepropetrovsk in the Ukraine and fled with his family to Poland and afterwards Germany to escape the pogroms. In Berlin, in 1933, he had earned a living, improbably, as a boxer. After Hitler assumed power, he fled again, this time to France, where he joined the Foreign Legion. He spoke four languages, including German, and was one of the camp interpreters. Mitterrand and he arrived at Ziegenhain on the same day. As they stood next to each other in the queue to register, Mitterrand noticed that in the space for religion, Finifter had written, ‘Jew’. He looked at him and said: ‘You know how they are here?’ Without missing a beat, Finifter replied: ‘I know, I’ve lived here. When they ask me if I’m a Jew – I am. So?’ Mitterrand found the Germans respected him. ‘He spoke their language perfectly, with a slight Yiddish accent. Reversing the roles, he talked to them high-handedly. He did as he liked.’fn1
Speaking long after the war, Mitterrand described his months in captivity as the beginning of a fundamental change in his social attitudes:
Captivity was a great revelation . . . Life within the [prisoner] community marked me deeply. I enjoyed it – I, who am so profoundly individualist! But the biggest shock was when I suddenly realised that the natural hierarchy . . . the society in which I found myself, that of a prisoner-of-war camp, bore absolutely no relation to the hierarchy I had known in my youth. That is when I started to doubt . . . The hierarchy of decorations, diplomas, money, is worth nothing. The scale of true values is different.7
Elsewhere he wrote sardonically that ‘the old order did not resist swede soup!’ It was left to his friend, Georges Beauchamp, to fill in what was between the lines: ‘He realised,’ Beauchamp said, �
��that those from his own class – the notables, the bourgeoisie – often did not behave very well, and that those with humbler origins behaved better.’
But that was with the benefit of hindsight. At the time he was less explicit, simply noting that among ‘prisoners united by misfortune, all classes and social differences [were] abolished’.
The PoWs were divided up into ‘a multitude of small groups of seven or eight individuals who shared everything – food parcels, chores, the work schedule’. Mitterrand’s group included a high-school teacher, two Jesuits and two priests. After the first few months, the Germans realised that if the prisoners were to be kept manageable they would have to be allowed their own activities. Accordingly they authorised a chamber orchestra, a theatre troupe, led by a former luminary of the Folies-Bergère in Paris, and the ‘Ziegenhain Temporary University’ which organised evening lectures. A library was also opened containing several thousand volumes ‘requisitioned’ from a French bookseller in German-occupied Metz.8
French prisoners, like British and Americans, were treated in accordance with the Geneva conventions. For Russians and Serbs, it was different. When they began arriving in the camp, Mitterrand remembered, ‘they were so exhausted, starved and ill-treated that we tried to smuggle them food. The Germans forbade [it] . . . and beat with rifle butts those of us who disobeyed . . . It soon became quite usual to find corpses on the pathways through the camp – there were so many that we were drafted to load them on to carts . . . In my memory I still see those stiff, light bodies which we grabbed by the arms and legs and threw up over the sides, on top of a pile of their comrades.’
Even for the French, the wind could suddenly turn. A football match organised on Bastille Day ended in chaos when, without warning, German guards in a watchtower shot two prisoners who had left the crowd to relieve themselves and strayed too close to the barbed-wire perimeter.
At the ‘Ziegenhain Temporary University’ Mitterrand was a prolific speaker, most often on literary topics. Former prisoners remembered him giving talks on Lady Chatterley’s Lover, on Voltaire, and on more recondite subjects, like the lettres de cachet of pre-revolutionary France, which the King signed when ordering the imprisonment of suspected political opponents. He always spoke without notes, resting his hands on the table. His companions nicknamed him ‘the Professor’. One, Paul Charvet, noted in his diary:
He does not talk down to us. I find it admirable that so brilliant a mind can open so willingly to [the ideas of] others, which he takes in and analyses, thereby enriching his own thoughts. To me that is the mark of a generous intelligence. There are only two attitudes which are unforgivable in his eyes: spinelessness and vulgarity. Thus a coward is ‘a shoddy person’. He said that in my presence. The tone, the look, the movement of the lips were inflexible. [He shows] the same attitude, though silently this time, when someone walks by and announces that he is answering the call of nature. We all appreciate this constant elegance in the midst of promiscuity.9
To those who knew Mitterrand in captivity, there was something about him that was hard to pin down. ‘He inspired respect,’ one remembered, ‘and made it a point of honour to respect others and to be respected by them.’ The first impression was usually that he was ‘very cold, very distant’. In the camp newspaper, named, more in hope than expectation, L’Ephémère (The Ephemeral), which Mitterrand edited, an anonymous contributor likened him to Vautrin, the ruthless and mysterious benefactor of Balzac’s Eugène de Rastignac:
François Mitterrand, like Vautrin, is a man of multiple identities . . . and I suspect him to be in possession of the dreadful secret of a split personality. Like some new Janus, you see him here as the elegant editor of a newspaper, a man of letters, a perspicacious and subtle philosopher; and there as a meticulous, busy medical orderly [working in the camp clinic] . . . But whether [one or the other], we must not forget that François Mitterrand has a personal cult of all that is noble; that is to say, he is ceaselessly consumed by the flames of lyricism, beauty, high-mindedness . . . Make no mistake, he is both honey and sting, like the bee; an ironic wit and a tender heart . . . That allows [him], one might say, to go through life with rose-coloured spectacles . . . But Mitterrand is [also] wise and full of scepticism . . . and through those rose-coloured spectacles he sees everything in black.10
The high-flown style, neatly tailored to its subject, offered a perceptive glimpse of Mitterrand at the age of 23. The ‘cult of all that is noble’ which he affected, terming it an ‘elevation of thought which distinguishes the elite’, was noticed by others too. A cartoon in L’Ephémère depicted him as Dante with a crown of laurel leaves.
He was not always the reserved figure that some of these recollections suggest. Paul Charvet remembered him miming for his barrack-room comrades a skit ‘both comical and disdainfully ironic’ in which a prisoner went through the motions of sharing out some stolen bread while artfully contriving to keep the best bits for himself.
He was also a talented counterfeiter and during his time at the camp made a dozen or more sets of false papers, both for himself and for others, teaching his companions how to make copies of seals using a half-potato. For whatever else he might do as a PoW, one thing François Mitterrand was completely clear about: he had no intention of spending the rest of the war in Germany. His thoughts, from the first day, were focussed on how to escape.11
Military District IX, between the Rhine and the Elbe, included as well as the main camp at Ziegenhain a smaller camp, Stalag IXC at Bad Sulza, 130 miles to the east,12 and several dozen labour sites or kommandos, from which the prisoners were sent out to work among the local community.
In October 1940, two months after arriving at Ziegenhain, Mitterrand and others were moved to Bad Sulza and from there to a village called Schaala, near Rudolstadt on the banks of the River Saale. The kommando to which he belonged, No. 1515, was a heterogeneous group of about 250 men, known among the prisoners as ‘the intellectuals’ because nearly half were priests, teachers or students. Others had fought for the Foreign Legion, like Finifter, or the International Brigades, like Pelat. They stayed in an abandoned porcelain factory which was well guarded, though some of the sites where they worked during the day were not. The food was a little better than at Ziegenhain, but they were all constantly hungry.
For the first few days Mitterrand was employed as a gardener, raking up leaves at a military driving school. Then came two weeks as a road-builder. At other times he cleared snow from railway tracks, worked for a local carpenter, ‘cutting rafters, measuring laths and sawing planks’, and served as a medical orderly. In November, he was assigned to a team stacking hay for the winter.13 The section chief, Jean Munier, a farmer’s son from Burgundy, a year older than Mitterrand, seeing him sitting idly on top of one of the stacks, yelled at him to do some work. ‘If you did as I do,’ the younger man coolly replied, ‘none of this would be done at all.’ Munier was shamefaced: he had forgotten that aiding the Germans was not the prisoners’ goal. The two became fast friends.
Mitterrand planned to escape from the hay station. He had discovered that, at the driving school, large-scale maps of Germany were posted along a corridor wall. ‘I arranged to go along that corridor as often as possible, and each time I copied one or two square centimetres on to a scrap of paper. I traced an itinerary from Schaala to Schaffhausen on the land border [with Switzerland] . . . After I had pasted all the pieces together, I had a map showing the route to follow, 390 miles long and 12 miles wide.’ His comrades saved food for him; one of the Jesuits, who knew how to sew, made a rucksack; and he found an overcoat belonging to a German factory-worker which came down to his ankles, hiding what he wore beneath. In addition, he packed shoe polish – ‘because the Germans would have noticed dirty shoes’ – and razor blades, to shave.
On March 5 1941, Mitterrand and a companion, Xavier Leclerc, a parish priest from the Allier, in the Massif Central, arrived with the rest of the team at the hay station before dawn. The pair slipped th
rough the barbed wire, crossed a railway line and disappeared into the darkness. Munier and Finifter covered for them and the Germans did not discover their departure until the evening roll call. For three days, they walked across country. ‘We followed the trails made by wild boar, because the snow was so deep,’ Mitterrand wrote later to Georges Dayan, ‘and we slept in hollows made by deer.’ But the terrain was too difficult. So they decided to use the roads, walking only at night and hiding in the woods during the day. They started to hallucinate about food. Mitterrand became obsessed by a dish of duck with orange that he had had as a child. When Leclerc fell ill, he went to the nearest village and, pretending to be an Italian worker, used his few words of German to buy some medicine and bread.
After three weeks of rain, snow and mud, they reached the small town of Egesheim, 25 miles from the Swiss border. There they took a wrong turning. It was a Sunday morning, and the faithful were coming out of church: not the right moment for two strangers to be retracing their steps. Captured by villagers armed with staves, they were escorted to the town hall and thence to the district prison at Spaichingen. ‘At no other time in my life,’ Mitterrand said later, ‘did I feel so destitute and alone.’ A month later they were returned to Bad Sulza, where they were placed in the disciplinary section, tried by a military tribunal and sentenced to three weeks’ bread and water.fn2 After that, it was back to Ziegenhain,14 but under a stricter regime than before. Those who had escaped once were likely to try again.fn3
Mitterrand confessed much later that he had been desperate to escape ‘for a very personal reason’: Marie-Louise Terrasse.15 There were other considerations too. He missed France and resented being deprived of his freedom by a war the duration of which he was powerless to influence. ‘Liberty,’ he wrote later, ‘is like the air you breathe. I needed to breathe.’ But that was incidental. The overriding imperative was his separation from his fiancée.