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Content My Encounter
with Him in the
Summer of 1940
T H E
D E V I L
I N
F R A N C E
U S C LI B R A R I E S UNIVERSITY OF SOUTHERN CALIFORNIA
L I O N F E U C H T WA N G E R
“Enemy Number One”: Lion Feuchtwanger and the Literature of Exile
A Visions and Voices event series organized by the USC Libraries
The USC Libraries are home to the papers and library of historical novelist Lion
Feuchtwanger, who escaped his native Germany after Adolf Hitler rose to power in 1933.
An outspoken critic of the Nazi Party, his books were burned, and propaganda minister
Joseph Goebbels declared him “Enemy Number One of the German people.” The libraries
recently published a new edition of The Devil in France, a memoir of Feuchtwanger’s
internment and escape from Vichy France in 1940. His story reveals the struggles faced by
artists who speak truth to power and endure exile from their native countries.
In conjunction, the USC Libraries and Visions and Voices present:
Panel Discussion
Wednesday, September 29, 12:00 p.m.
Friends of the USC Libraries Lecture Hall, 2
nd
floor
Doheny Memorial Library
In honor of Banned Books Week, join us for a panel discussion about censorship,
political repression, and writing in exile with Feuchtwanger Fellow Christopher Mlalazi
of Zimbabwe—a playwright and poet under government surveillance for writing critically
about the Mugabe regime—professors Michelle Gordon (English) and Wolf Gruner
(History) of USC College; and Cornelius Schnauber, director of USC’s Max Kade Institute.
Marje Schuetze-Coburn of the USC Libraries will moderate.
Tour and Performance at Villa Aurora
Tuesday, October 26
Busses leave campus at 5:15 p.m.
RSVP required
Get an intimate look at Lion Feuchtwanger’s life in exile by visiting his former home
in Pacific Palisades, where he hosted figures like Charlie Chaplin, Thomas Mann, and
Arnold Schoenberg. There, he and other émigrés exchanged ideas about art and politics,
read from works in progress, and debated their relationship to Southern California, the
United States, and Europe. After a welcoming reception and tour, enjoy a reading of letters
between Lion and his wife Marta Feuchtwanger from the 1930s and 1940s.
www.usc.edu/visionsandvoices
Lion Feuchtwanger (1884-1958) was the celebrated author of Jew Suess
(1925), The Oppermanns (1933), This Is the Hour (1951), and numerous
other historical novels, plays, and essays. He was a fearless critic of the Nazi
regime, writing many articles for European newspapers in the 1930s and
exposing their ideological bankruptcy in his novel Success (1930). After
escaping Europe in 1940, he and his wife Marta settled in Los Angeles,
where many other German émigré artists and intellectuals gathered during
World War II. Villa Aurora, their former home in Pacific Palisades, is now an
international artists’ residence.
The Devil in France is novelist Lion Feuchtwanger’s memoir of exile and
internment during World War II. Published in 1941, his account blends
vivid descriptions of the Les Milles internment camp with reflections about
humanity and survival. He recounts the cosmic apathy of the French officials
and the absurdity of his situation. A well-known critic of the Nazi regime,
he was first imprisoned because of French fears about German aggression.
This meant he was interned at Les Milles along with Nazi sympathizers
and spies. Vivid in Feuchtwanger’s memoir are the physical world of the
camp—a hot, dusty, abandoned brickyard—and the wit and optimism
that enabled him to cope with the uncertainty and seeming hopelessness
of his plight.
www.usc.edu/libraries/devilinfrance

T H E D E V I L I N F R A N C E
My Encounter with Him in the Summer of 1940
Lion Feuc ht wanger
U S C LI B R A R I E S UNIVERSITY OF SOUTHERN CALIFORNIA
USC LIBRARIES
Published by Figueroa Press
840 Childs Way, 3rd Floor
University of Southern California
Los Angeles, CA 90089-2540
© Aufbau Verlag GmbH & Co. KG, Berlin 1997, 2009
All rights reserved
No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner without written permission from
the publisher, except in the context of reviews.
Every reasonable attempt has been made to identify owners of copyright. All historic photographs
are from the collections of USC’s Feuchtwanger Memorial Library. Cover illustrations appear
courtesy of USC School of Architecture students Marcos Carrillo, Alex Hagentorn, Lillian Lin,
Nicholas Tedesco, and Kevin Yan.
ISBN-10: 1-932800-66-2
ISBN-13: 978-1-932800-66-1
Library of Congress Control Number: 2010925617
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Feuchtwanger, Lion.
The devil in France: my encounter with him in the summer of 1940 / Lion Feuchtwanger.
Translated from the German by Elisabeth Abbott. Edited by Bill Dotson, Marje Schuetze-Coburn,
and Michaela Ullmann.
p. cm.
Includes The escape / Marta Feuchtwanger. Translated from the German by Adrian
Feuchtwanger.
1. Feuchtwanger, Lion, 1884-1958. 2. World War, 1939-1945—Prisoners and prisons, French.
3. World War, 1939-1945—Personal narratives, German. I. Feuchtwanger, Marta—The escape.
II. Feuchtwanger, Adrian tr. III. Abbott, Elisabeth, tr.
The first English language edition of The Devil in France—which did not include Marta
Feuchtwanger’s “The Escape”—was published by the Viking Press, New York, in 1941. Mexico’s
El Libro Libre published the first German edition under the title Unholdes Frankreich in 1942.
Book and map design by Howard P. Smith
Contents
Foreword | Catherine Quinlan 7
Introduction | Marje Schuetze-Coburn 11
The Devil in France | Lion Feuchtwanger 17
The Bricks of Les Milles 17
The Ships of Bayonne 99
The Tents of Nîmes 173
The Gardens of Marseille 261
The Escape | Marta Feuchtwanger 265
Timeline | Michaela Ullmann 279
Acknowledgements 291
Map of Europe Inside Back Cover
7
FOREWORD
Catherine Quinlan
8
CATHERINE QUINLAN
When the USC Libraries published Against the Eternal Yesterday in
2009, we took an important step in our commitment to preserving and
carrying forward the story and stories of Lion Feuchtwanger. Published
in partnership with Villa Aurora and the International Feuchtwanger
Society, that collection of essays explored the cultural, historical, and
academic context of Feuchtwanger’s work and supported the active
community of inquiry that thrives around his legacy.
We are now proud to present a new edition of Feuchtwanger’s
memoir, The Devil in France: My Encounter with Him in the Summer of
1940. This is the first updated, English-language edition since Viking
Press issued the original in 1941. We invite the USC community,
Feuchtwanger scholars around the world, and new generations of
readers to rediscover or explore for the first time this exceptionally
personal story set against global upheaval and impending atrocity.
When Feuchtwanger writes in The Devil in France that his
interest in history lures him “into thinking out loud of how a writer
of the year 2000 will…express what a journalist of the year 1940 is
saying now,” he is expressing curiosity about how we tell and retell
stories. He is asking how the evolution of language complicates
the documentation of human experience and the comprehension of
history. He is wondering—as he does once more when invoking the
words of German philosopher Theodor Lessing—how writers in
the next century will “give meaning to the meaningless” through
acts of creativity.
Great libraries like ours share Feuchtwanger’s concern for the
continuity of knowledge, and reissuing The Devil in France is one of
the many ways we are acting on that concern. With this new edition,
we are helping readers of 2010 understand what compelled a writer
of historical fiction to tell a true story—that of his internment at Les
9
FOREWORD
Milles in 1940. We are protecting a unique articulation of a personal
history. We are preserving a valuable intellectual resource that will
inform research yet to be conducted and inspire stories yet to be told.
As home to the Feuchtwanger Memorial Library, we have been
able to supplement this edition of The Devil in France by drawing
upon our extensive collections relating to Feuchtwanger and the study
of German exiles. We have created a detailed timeline and map to
provide more biographical and geographical perspective; we have
included as a postscript Marta Feuchtwanger’s account of the couple ’s
escape from Europe; and we have consulted the German-language
manuscript to refine the original, 1941 English translation.
I am grateful to our partners at Villa Aurora and USC Visions and
Voices, with whom we are collaborating to build a series of events
around this memoir. Much as we have sought to enrich explorations of
this narrative by adding context, our events will encourage members
of our community to discover Feuchtwanger’s story through diverse
and challenging experiences.
Programming such as performances, readings, and inventive online
experiences have the potential to inspire meaningful engagement with
many aspects of the USC Libraries’ collections, and so this publication
and related events also serve as a pilot project for introducing a one
campus, one book program to USC. Beginning this fall with The Devil
in France, we will hold annual events that support the perseverance of
vital stories like those of Lion Feuchtwanger, and that demonstrate
the essential role of libraries in preserving individual voices amid the
tumult of history.
Catherine Quinlan
Dean of the USC Libraries

11
INTRODUCTION
Marje Schuetze-Coburn
12
MARJE SCHUETZE-COBURN
Lion Feuchtwanger’s memoir The Devil in France: My Encounter with Him
in the Summer of 1940 is unique among the author’s extensive writings.
With this work, Feuchtwanger shares his personal thoughts and feelings,
blending his observations with the chronology of events during his time
behind barbed wire. At the time of its publication, Feuchtwanger’s fans
knew and loved him for his historical fiction—his long, dense novels
filled with rich descriptions and details from the past. This work, a
dramatic departure written in the first person with Feuchtwanger as the
protagonist, recounts the true story of his internment and close escape
from capture by Nazi forces.
Lion Feuchtwanger (1884-1958) was an early and outspoken critic
of the National Socialist Party. In his novel Success, published in 1930,
Feuchtwanger exposed Nazi barbarism to the world. His fictional
depictions—along with anti-Hitler statements published in European
newspapers—secured Feuchtwanger’s place among the prominent
intellectuals whose German citizenship was revoked in 1933.
As soon as Adolf Hitler was appointed chancellor in early 1933,
Feuchtwanger and his wife, Marta, had no choice but to live in exile:
first in southern France and later in Pacific Palisades, California.
Feuchtwanger’s seven years in France were surprisingly productive, and
the author developed a false sense of security living in the remote fishing
village of Sanary-sur-Mer.
His memoir chronicles Feuchtwanger’s experiences during a three-
month internment by the French after Germany’s invasion of France in
May of 1940. Feuchtwanger recounts how he was torn from his beloved
home in Sanary, with its view of the Mediterranean and ready supply of
books. He had felt completely at ease there, describing how it filled him
with a “deep sense of harmony, communion, happiness.”
On May 21, 1940, at 5:01 in the afternoon, Feuchtwanger entered
13
INTRODUCTION
the internment camp at Les Milles. From that point onward, he lost his
freedom, and his identity became synonymous with his number, 187. In
The Devil in France, Feuchtwanger depicts the terror and uncertainty he
and hundreds of men faced during their captivity by the French. They
feared being handed over at any moment to the Nazis, which would have
meant certain death in the concentration camps.
Feuchtwanger acknowledged that he like everyone else had no real
understanding of what caused the war. Instead of outlining the reasons,
he set out to describe what happened to him as sincerely, as personally,
and as subjectively as possible with “no pretence of detachment.”
Although Feuchtwanger’s account of his agonizing internment
details the poor conditions, lack of hygiene, and apathy of the French
officials, his descriptions lack bitterness, and he remains a rational
observer. Feuchtwanger notes the absurd paradox in which he found
himself—a well-known anti-Fascist whom the Nazis called their “Enemy
Number One”—being held captive by the French because of their fear
of Germans and their possible connections to the National Socialists.
This meant that Feuchtwanger, along with hundreds of anti-Fascists,
was interned alongside Nazi sympathizers and spies.
The physical world of the camp—the thousands of bricks
surrounding the internees, the dust from the bricks, harsh sunlight in
the day, darkness at night, and lack of space—oppressed and exhausted
Feuchtwanger with its relentlessness and constancy.
He observed that while the dust and dirt of the camp made everyone
look more and more alike at first glance, each man wore his individual
personality as though it was stamped on him. Each person’s essential
character shone through the grit and grime with every action or word.
During nearly ninety days of internment, Feuchtwanger had time
on his hands to observe and contemplate humanity in all its forms. As
14
MARJE SCHUETZE-COBURN
a respected public figure, he became a magnet for other inmates, who
brought him their questions, problems, and fears. He explained that
early in life he learned from wise teachers about the art of listening.
Feuchtwanger described himself as a man of contemplation rather
than action. He explained that, while he considered himself fearful of
physical danger, his fellow internees considered him courageous, since he
withstood the hardships and uncertainties with stoicism. Feuchtwanger
countered that his moral courage provided his internal strength. He
always spoke his mind, even when this put him at risk. His continued
public critique of the National Socialists attested to his drive to express
his views about the world regardless of the implications of his words.
Feuchtwanger vividly depicted the mental games he played to avoid
being consumed by fear and worries. As a writer and scholar, he drew
upon his knowledge of languages, poems, and memories of past events
to distract himself from the reality of his situation. Feuchtwanger
defined memory as the “most singular function of the human spirit.”
Memory became paramount during this time when Feuchtwanger lacked
his books and friends to confirm his recollections.
The devil that Feuchtwanger blamed for his incarceration—the
one responsible for the sloppy indifference of the French officials—
was not motivated by maliciousness but rather by thoughtlessness.
Feuchtwanger explained that the French themselves had a phrase for
this type of lackadaisical behavior—je-m’en-foutisme—that found
expression through a lack of care or attention. While the results were
disastrous for many of those interned, the motivation was not to harm or
punish. While this may seem a minor distinction, the observation helped
Feuchtwanger cope with the dire circumstances and remain optimistic
about the outcome of his detention.
Throughout the book, Feuchtwanger discusses his beliefs regarding
15
INTRODUCTION
fate and chance. He observes that we have a fundamental urge to explain
why things happen to us by looking for causes one at a time, since we
are often unable to comprehend complex networks of causes and effects.
Although Feuchtwanger understands the foolishness of this endeavor,
he, too, finds himself looking for “a secret law that determines the course
of my life.”
As a keen observer of life and humanity, Feuchtwanger provided an
unusual blend of fact, observation, and insight about a terrifying period
of twentieth-century history. Feuchtwanger’s wit and optimism were
his true strengths, helping him cope with the uncertainty and seeming
hopelessness of his plight.
Marje Schuetze-Coburn
Feuchtwanger Librarian and Senior Associate Dean of the USC Libraries

17
THE DEVIL IN FRANCE
Part One
The Bricks of Les Milles
Lion Feuchtwanger
18
LION FEUCHTWANGER
And the Egyptians made the children of Israel to serve with rigour: and they
made their lives bitter with hard bondage, in mortar, and in brick. And the
children of Israel built for Pharaoh treasure cities, Pithom and Raamses.
I have no very clear picture of those treasure cities, and I do not know
whether Biblical historians have unearthed any information as to
conditions existing at Pithom and Raamses. What I do know is that for
me those two exotic, hostile, richly melodious names have acquired a
meaning—a meaning that no historical reconstruction, however well
documented, will ever be able to change.
It came about in this way. At the outbreak of the present war, political
exiles from Germany, Austria, and Czechoslovakia, who were living in
southeastern France, were ordered by the French authorities to report for
internment at Les Milles, a town near Aix-en-Provence. The internment
camp was a huge brickyard that had long been out of use. There were
more than a thousand of us, but the number varied: sometimes we were
as many as three thousand. Most of us were Jews.
In that brickyard a brick building was our shelter, and bricks were
otherwise to become the distinguishing feature of those days in our lives.
Brick walls, reinforced with barbed wire, shut off our enclosures from
the beautiful green fields beyond. Broken bricks were heaped in piles on
every hand. We used them as seats to sit on, as tables for our meals, as
partitions to separate our straw piles, one from another. Brick dust filled
our lungs and got into our eyes. Brick racks made of laths lined the walls
of our building and took away even more of the meagre space and the
meagre light. We were often cold, and at such times many of us would
have liked to crawl into one of the great kilns, now empty, that had once
been used for baking the bricks, in order to enjoy a little of the warmth
that the word “kiln” suggested.
19
THE BRICKS OF LES MILLES | THE DEVIL IN FRANCE
Work was given us. We were obliged to move the bricks about, piling
them up now here, now there. We trundled them around in wheelbarrows
and then, at the command of a sergeant, tossed them from hand to
hand and stacked them up in neat rows. The work was not really hard.
What irritated and angered us was its utter fatuousness. There was no
reasonable purpose behind the order—the authorities intended simply
to keep us busy. We knew that the next day or the day after or at the
latest on the third day we would be directed to tear down the beautifully
ordered pile of bricks and build it up again somewhere else.
Then, all of a sudden, one day while the bricks were flying from hand
to hand under the sharp commands of a sergeant, while we professors,
lawyers, physicians, agronomists, artisans, instead of busying ourselves
with books, legal papers, diagnoses, weather forecasts, machine parts,
were making piles of bricks that we would be ordered to unpile the
day following, that verse from Exodus came into my mind, the verse
in which the children of Israel are forced to bake bricks for Pharaoh of
Egypt to build the treasure cities of Pithom and Raamses. My mind ran
on into all sorts of disconnected and even incongruous reflections. Our
forefathers doubtless had been worse off than we: they had been obliged
to labour under the whip of a slave-driver. But no—in another respect
they were better off than we: their labour at least had a purpose. Then,
too, I mused, the slave who was forced to help build one of those treasure
cities for Pharaoh was, in all probability, more or less indifferent as to
whether he was performing a useful task or a useless one. After a time I
gave the question up. But, mechanically, as I caught my brick and tossed
it to my neighbour, the words rang in my head: Pithom—Raamses—
Pithom—Raamses.
So, from that day, the verse from Exodus has had for me its definite
colouring, its definite undertones. It will always be associated in my mind
20
LION FEUCHTWANGER
with the thought of brick dust, blistering sunshine, barbed wire; with the
thought of a bored sergeant in a red fez, rhythmically counting in a gruff
voice: “Un, deux, un, deux;” with the thought of men in shabby, tattered
clothes and with listless, dust-streaked faces, men who were there tossing
bricks to one another, but who not so long before had been well-dressed
gentlemen working at significant occupations.
Pithom—Raamses—Pithom—Raamses.
As I look out of the window of my hotel in New York over Central
Park, with its lines of skyscrapers to right and left, as I look out over this
great, throbbing city bustling with the pursuits of peace, I ask myself
again and again: Can this be real? Am I really here? And, if so, how?
Nine years ago I was sitting in my house in the Grunewald in Berlin.
I had my books around me. From my garden a peaceful little pine-grove
sloped gently down to a peaceful little pond. I was content. I had not
the remotest idea of ever moving from that house. Six years ago I was
sitting in my tranquil, white-stuccoed house in Sanary, in the South of
France. I had my books around me. Olive-groves sloped down to a deep,
azure sea. I was content. I had not the remotest idea of ever moving
from that house.
I could, of course, marshal a hundred sound reasons to show why,
from the beginning of the First World War down to now, things had to
happen exactly as they have happened; and also why I, too, a victim of
that course of events, had to suffer exactly what I have suffered. I could
produce a hundred plausible explanations to account for my internment
at the beginning of the First World War in a French prison in Tunis;
to show why, later on, I was thrust into a German uniform; why I was
sucked into the vortices first of the short-lived German revolution, then
of the long-lived German counter-revolution; why thenceforward I
21
THE BRICKS OF LES MILLES | THE DEVIL IN FRANCE
made up my mind to look at the world as a mere spectator from my study
desk in Berlin; why, in spite of that resolve, I was driven into exile in
France; and why, finally, I had to spend the earlier portion of the Second
World War in an internment camp in France. Of course! There are as
many rationally adequate explanations as one may wish for the particular
course of my own trifling experiences no less than for the issues of
greater moment on which they depended. Ingenious minds stand ready
to enumerate those reasons—economic reasons, biological, sociological,
psychological reasons, reasons deriving from one or another of the
philosophies of the universe. I myself, for that matter, could write a
book on the subject, sharpening my wits to find logical concatenations.
Deep down in my heart, however, I know that I have not the slightest
understanding of the causes of the barbaric turmoil in which all of us
are writhing. I am like a savage from the jungle who suddenly comes
upon a line of telephone wires and has no idea at all of why it has been
set up, what it is for, or how it works. I know, furthermore, that no one
in the world, not even the best-informed statesman, can comprehend the
whys, the hows, and the wherefores of this present war. Some day, one
may guess, “all the documents” will be available. But what of that? At
the most we shall know only a little more about the immediate causes
and consequences of this or that particular fact. The judgment we pass
on the course of events as a whole will still be a matter solely of the
interpreter’s temperament and throw light only on him. Thousands of
expert historians offer ingenious and persuasive reasons to show why
the Roman Empire perished, why Christianity replaced the pagan world,
why the French Revolution occurred, and why it all had to happen just so
and not in some other way. But the reasons differ in every case. “History
is the art of giving meaning to the meaningless,” said a brilliant German
professor (who was later killed by the Nazis).
22
LION FEUCHTWANGER
When, therefore, I set out to tell in the following pages what befell me
in France during the present war at the turn of my fifty-sixth into my fifty-
seventh year, I shall not try to force upon the reader any interpretation of
the ultimate reasons why this particular man, the writer, Lion F., became
involved in that particular situation. The reader may call those reasons
what he will—accident, fate, Divine Providence. I shall not importune
him with any opinion of my own as to why I, at bottom a contemplative
soul asking nothing better than to live in peace and to be able to read
and to write, have been condemned to lead such a stormy existence so
fraught with upheavals. I shall confine myself to describing just what I
have been through, as sincerely as possible; in other words, as personally,
as subjectively, as possible—I make no pretence of detachment.
It all began one evening toward the middle of May, just after
sundown. Dusk was gathering in the little room on the ground floor of
my house in Sanary where I kept my radio, but it was still not so dark that
I had to turn on the light.
I was alone, listening to the news reports. Things did not look good,
either in Belgium or in the Netherlands. Lying on the sofa, with my
eyes closed, I was pondering the scanty items, lending half an ear to the
public notices that succeeded the news proper. Suddenly the following
came: “All German nationals residing in the precincts of Paris, men and
women alike, and all persons between the ages of seventeen and fifty-five
who were born in Germany but are without German citizenship, are to
report for internment.” Dates and names of places followed.
I did not stir. I simply lay there. To myself I said: “No panic, now!
Let’s think things over quietly. Very probably the regulation will apply
only to Paris. It will certainly not be applied to the South of France. That
23
THE BRICKS OF LES MILLES | THE DEVIL IN FRANCE
part of the country is not threatened by the war.” But an inner voice told
me that these purely rational considerations were utter nonsense. From
the first day of the war it was one’s worst fears that had come true, not
the good things one hoped for.
The radio went on to other matters. I lay there on the sofa, with my
eyes still closed. Finally I got up and noticed, to my surprise, that night
had fallen. All of a sudden a great fatigue came over me. I stepped out
into the garden. I strolled about among our flower-beds, climbed our
little terraces, came down again, my dazed thoughts drifting from one
thing to another.
It was simply infamous. There I had been for three-quarters of a year
caught in that mousetrap of a France, unable to get permission to leave
the country. Now, for a second time, I was to taste the pleasures of an
internment camp.
The landscape around my house was beautiful, filled with a deep
peace. Mountains, sea, islands, a magnificent stretch of coast, olive-
groves, fig-orchards, pines, a few scattered houses! A great silence
reigned. A light breeze was blowing. One of our cats was capering
playfully around me. She would run ahead, dash back to turn, and run
ahead again, mewing insistently. I bent over and stroked her back. She
purred. It was not a warm night, yet one could not call it cold. All the
same I felt a sudden chill.
I hurried back indoors and looked for my wife. The large house
was empty. But then, I reflected, the married couple that worked for
us probably had the night off. I went on into the kitchen and there, in
fact, my wife was preparing supper for the cats. She nodded without
looking up.
“Something more to drink?” she asked. “There’s grapefruit juice.”
“Thanks,” I answered. “Later on, perhaps.”
24
LION FEUCHTWANGER
She followed with some remark of no great moment, the fact that
Léontine, our maid, was always putting too little rice and too little milk
with the cat’s meat, or something to that effect. I sat down on a kitchen
chair, gazed at her as she moved about, and wondered: “Shall I tell her at
once? People in the village will have heard too. If I don’t, Léontine will.
I had better tell her myself.”
She poured the food into a large plate and set it down on the floor.
The cats made for it and began eating greedily, pleased, purring. We
watched them.
“So,” I mused, “her great worry now is whether the cats should not
be getting more rice and more milk. Well, I’ll leave her with it for this
one minute more…and then this one…and then this last.”
I told her.
She looked at me, and I at her. Finally she said: “We must write to
Paris at once, or better wire.”
“Of course,” I said, “the first thing in the morning. At least,” I
added, “the frosts are over.”
French internment camps were not heated, and in winter it had
happened on occasion that an internee would lose a finger or a toe
from freezing.
W e had had our supper, but I was suddenly conscious of a great hunger.
“Please,” I begged, “something to eat.”
I was eating when a knock came first at the one door, then at the other.
Most unusual! At that hour we rarely had callers save by appointment.
“Who is there?” we called.
It proved to be neighbours of ours, a German artist and his wife. We
had seldom seen each other, having had nothing particular in common.
Now we found it quite natural that they should have come.
“Have you heard?” the artist asked.
25
THE BRICKS OF LES MILLES | THE DEVIL IN FRANCE
We discussed the order from various angles. There could be no
conceivable reason from the military point of view for interning those
of us who lived there in the South. We had been investigated time and
again. The government had made certain that we were enemies of the
Nazi regime. But had even the Germans in Paris been interned because
they were considered dangerous? More probably the government was
proceeding against them simply to give the French public the impression
that something was going on. If this were the reason, how could Germans
in the South expect any different treatment? We could find but one point
of comfort, and it was a small one indeed: given the slipshod methods of
French officialdom, it would take a long time before the necessary papers
reached the South.
How I spent the next few days I do not really know. I kept a diary
during those weeks in France, but my notes are not at present with me,
and I cannot say whether I shall ever recover them. Without them I am
wholly dependent upon my memory—an advantage, perhaps.
Memory, of course, is a tricky thing. My mind, like the minds of
most people, oftentimes refuses to retain things I should dearly like
to remember, remembering of its own accord things to which I am
altogether indifferent, thrusting important matters into the background
and unimportant ones to the fore. My memory follows rules that my
conscious being cannot explain, though they may have something to do
with my subconscious being.
On the whole, I consider this wilfulness on the part of memory a
benefit to a writer. It holds him to that uncompromising sincerity which
is the prerequisite of all literary composition. It prompts him to keep to
sensations which are really his own. In this particular case, the loss of my
diary, the lack of factual notes, obliges me to stick to only those matters
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LION FEUCHTWANGER
which touched me spiritually. As a result, from the strictly external
point of view, many essentials may be lacking, but from the personal,
the subjective viewpoint, my narrative will be sincere, artistically true,
not cramped by documents, by the minutiae of reality. Whether I like it
or not, the loss of my notes will oblige me to give a picture, not a bald
photographic record.
Is it presumptuous of me to confess that I am glad of this? Is
it presumptuous of me to believe, as a matter of principle, that a
photographic, factual account of an experience contributes very little
to an understanding of its essential character? It is nevertheless my
considered opinion that an experience often changes in physiognomy
according to the capacity a person has for experiencing. Yes, I am
unalterably convinced that the translation of an experience into words
depends more upon the temperament of the man who has lived through
it than upon its actual content.
Fewer people are capable of experiencing things than is commonly
supposed. The average person is too much under the influence of the
evaluations that are commonly made by the people about him. He feels
called upon to consider certain things significant or important, other
things trifling or unimportant, because “competent judges” have applied
those measures to similar cases. The emotions, quite as much as the
conduct of the majority of people, are prescribed now by convention,
now by fashion. The plain man can catalogue his experiences only with
reference to a few familiar norms, norms that are hammered deeper and
deeper into his brain by radio, film, and press, so that his own particular
capacity for hearing, seeing, feeling, and evaluating becomes more and
more restricted. The plain man’s powers of experiencing are slight, the
range of his sensations narrow. Occurrences in which he may be directly
involved leave him untouched, make no impression upon him, fail to
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THE BRICKS OF LES MILLES | THE DEVIL IN FRANCE
enrich him in any way. Whatever quantity of a liquid one may try to
pour into a small pitcher, the pitcher can hold only so much.
A man of imagination has an advantage over other people, in that an
actual experience is almost always less intense than his expectations of it.
An actual misfortune is almost always less painful to him than his fear of
it, just as, of course, his actual experience of joys is almost always less
stirring than his hopes and anticipations of them.
How I spent the last days in my beautiful house in Sanary I cannot,
as I have already said, describe in detail. But this I know: they were not
pleasant days. Everything that I saw, heard, said, thought, or felt during
those days was framed in uneasiness.
During the seven years of my stay on the shores of the French
Mediterranean I drank in with all my senses the beauty of its landscape,
the gaiety of its manner of living. Whenever I returned from Paris on
a night train I would catch sight in the morning of the azure coast, the
mountains, the sea, the pines, and the olive trees climbing the hillsides,
and as I would sense again about me the expansive geniality of my
Mediterranean neighbours, I would draw a deep breath and thank my
stars that I had chosen that sky to live under. Then on the drive from the
station, I would climb the little hill to my white, sunlit house, traverse
my garden, which lay in its deep peace, enter my spacious, well-lighted
study, look out through the windows at the sea, at the coast with its
whimsical indentations, at the islands, at the endless distances beyond,
and, with my beloved books about me, I would cry inwardly, with all the
intensity of my being: “This is where I belong! This is my world!” Or
again, after a good day’s work I would relax in the evening quiet of my
garden, a silence broken only by the wash of the sea or by the gentle call
of some bird, and my soul would be filled with a deep sense of harmony,
communion, happiness.
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But the moment I was obliged to consider the possibility of being
interned a second time, the landscape lost its colour for me, my whole
life its relish. There was nothing definite, to be sure, but I knew in my
heart that it was all settled, and the painful expectation of what was to
come ruined my capacity for enjoying what was still to be enjoyed. I
went on with my work, of course. Decades of arduous training had
taught me how to concentrate on the work I had in hand whatever might
be happening. When I am working on a book not only the hours at my
desk but my whole life is engrossed by it. Everything I see, hear, read, or
experience I automatically apply to it. Now, however, the moment I left
my desk my book passed completely from my mind, to be replaced by
anxiety as to what was in store.
I often used to watch my cats eat. They chewed and swallowed
greedily, but they were always on the alert, never free of an inherited,
an instinctive feeling that dangers lurked all about them. Deep down
in all of us no doubt lies a similar sense of constant menace; only we
humans have learned how to banish it from our minds, and so have grown
unaccustomed to fear. During those days of waiting, I felt the way my
cats felt. If a car drove up the little hill, if a caller knocked at the door, my
thought would be: “Now they are coming! Now they are coming for me!”
My secretary could not help lamenting: “Oh, why didn’t we go to
America while there was still time!”
Ordinarily I detest such remarks, whimperings about what one
should or should not have done. They lead to nothing. All the same,
as I had to admit, in our particular situation outbursts of that sort had a
certain justification.
Of course, it had not been in my power to leave the country after
the outbreak of the war. The French government had not permitted me
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THE BRICKS OF LES MILLES | THE DEVIL IN FRANCE
to do so. But far in advance I had seen the war coming. In February
1938, shortly after the annexation of Austria, I had thought seriously
of emigrating to a country that offered greater security than France.
My secretary was now quite right in bemoaning the fact that I had not
carried out that intention.
But what, really, had kept me in France? Well, in the first place, this:
back in 1933 I had publicly declared: “Hitler means war. Without war
we shall never be rid of the Nazis.” Now at last my war was in sight,
and I had my share in it if anyone did. Could I then, with any decency,
simply take to my heels, make for some safe spot? No, I had to stay. I
thought seriously that I might help. After all, I had had a million readers
in Germany. Many people there still listened to what I had to say; many,
in spite of the danger, were still getting messages out of Germany to me
and wanted advice. I thought that it was more especially in time of war
that I could be of use to Hitler’s enemies.
Then again I had been held by a writer’s curiosity. All my life long
I had made it a principle, not exactly to seek adventures, but at least not
to avoid them. There had been still a third consideration: I was loath
to interrupt work on my novel Paris Gazette by an inconvenient change
of residence.
At the very beginning of the war, to be sure, I came to know what a
grave mistake I had made. The French not only refused any co-operation
from us German anti-Fascists, they locked us up. Protests in England got
me out of the internment camp after a few days, with apologies from
the French government, explaining that my detention had been due to a
misapprehension among subordinates. All the same, the exit visa which
I had asked for after that unfortunate experience was withheld from me.
At this point I must interpolate a confession or, rather, two confessions.
First confession: As I think back today to what kept me in France
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LION FEUCHTWANGER
in the year 1938, I find that there were probably reasons different from
those I have just given, reasons more personal, more deeply rooted in
my character. What held me was the pervasive comfort of living in
Sanary, the beauty of the place, my well-furnished house, my beloved
library, the familiar frame of my work that suited me and my methods
down to the last detail, the hundred little nothings of our life there that
had become dear habits which would have been painful to give up. As, I
believe, I have said already, I am always being torn against my will from
environments which I have thoughtfully, lovingly moulded to my tastes
and my needs. Again and again I have surrounded myself with things
that I enjoyed owning; again and again I have set up a very ample writing
table at a place from which I could look out over a beautiful landscape;
again and again I have ranged a few thousand books about me; again and
again I have reared a number of cats and each time thought they were
devoted to me for my own sake; again and again I have bought a number
of turtles and watched their slow, antediluvian movements; again and
again I have put by a few bottles of choice wine in an air-conditioned
room. And however often circumstances over which I had no control
compelled me to forsake abodes that I had furnished with so much
solicitude, I never learned my lesson. I would always begin building over
again, then cling spiritually and literally to what I had built, confident
that this time I must surely be able to keep it. Beyond any doubt it was
also my love for my house in Sanary and for everything in and around it
that kept me in France. In other words, without too many evasions, what
held me was my fundamental laziness, my attachment to my comforts,
my lack of imagination.
Second confession: I am very shy of public officials. The clerk in a
public bureau is an agent of the State: he represents millions of people.
How am I, a lone individual, to cope with him? This shyness of mine
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THE BRICKS OF LES MILLES | THE DEVIL IN FRANCE
may be an inheritance from the days when my forefathers trembled
before German officials in German ghettoes.
Reasons of this sort undoubtedly played their part in preventing me
from securing a passport for immigration into the United States at the
proper time. I rested content with a visitor’s permit. The procuring of an
immigrant’s visa I pictured to myself as an exceedingly difficult matter.
One day, in Paris, however, I plucked up courage and actually made a
start. Finding myself in the neighbourhood of the American Embassy, I
strode boldly in with the idea of getting information as to the required
procedure for obtaining the visa in question. I had in my possession
letters of introduction to the American consul, and on occasions I had
also met the American ambassador socially. Nevertheless, a mixture of
pride and shyness kept me from approaching either of those gentlemen
directly. I turned in preference to a nameless table where I saw the sign
“Information.” An indifferent young woman, speaking in an indifferent
tone of voice, gave me a few hasty instructions from which I gathered
that if I applied for an immigrant’s visa, my visitor’s permit would
automatically lapse. In truth, such information was the very thing I
wanted. I felt myself excused from taking any further annoying steps. I
accepted the words of that indifferent young woman as a sign from fate
that I should be satisfied with a visit to America and not try to make my
permanent home there.
So, after all, I am prone to call myself a believer in fate, but that, I
fear, is merely a way of cloaking my love of ease becomingly.
No, my fatalism is yet not as primitive as that. It is rather the logical
outcome of unfortunate experiences with the consistent application
of intelligence. I have too often seen in myself and in others how the
best-calculated devices not seldom have results directly opposite to
those desired. My wife and my secretary, for instance, had insisted
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on our taking precautions in the matter of safeguarding our money.
Through curious twists of chance the measures they proposed could
not have proved more disastrous. I kept depositing money in countries
that seemed safest from war—Sweden, Holland, Canada. Those were
the very countries where my funds were either confiscated or frozen.
My friend Brecht chose Sweden as a safe place to live. At the outbreak
of the war, events seemed to indicate that he had made a very shrewd
guess. But as things turned out the “safe Sweden” proved to be a trap for
him. My German-born secretary seemed lucky in obtaining her Swiss
citizenship. The only result was that the French continued to regard her
as a German and shut her up in an internment camp, while the Americans
considered her safety sufficiently assured by her Swiss passport to refuse
her an emergency visa.
In view of such experiences I can hardly blame myself for letting
my bark drift once in a while without trying very hard to steer it. I am
not very much impressed when people say to me: “You see, I always
told you you should do this or that. Why didn’t you do it?” I know that
in times like the present there are exactly as many reasons for doing a
thing as there are for not doing it, and “all omitting and committing” has
become a mere game of chance. So I only shrugged my shoulders when
my secretary wailed: “Oh, why didn’t we go to America while there was
still time!” I had no regrets. Nor did I have any when at last it became
certain that I had to return to the internment camp.
The person to bring me the confirmation was our maid Léontine.
She entered the room, excited, important. The notice, she said, was now
posted at the town hall. More than that, I was to appear at the camp at Les
Milles again. The notice, she went on, specified all persons of German
birth but without German citizenship who had not reached the age of
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THE BRICKS OF LES MILLES | THE DEVIL IN FRANCE
fifty-six on the first of January.
I have been called upon to listen to a good many pieces of bad
news in recent years and have developed a certain technique on such
occasions, a way of switching off my emotional engine, so to say, and
thinking coldly and calmly. The news was no great shock to me. I had
been expecting it. I began wondering whether, as I was going to be fifty-
six in a short time, there might not be a way of escaping the order. I
am quite certain that, even as Léontine talked, I was counting up the
days still lacking until I should be fifty-six. It must then have been the
eighteenth or nineteenth of May. I would be fifty-six on July 7. I am quite
certain also that I took mental note of the mixed emotions that were
apparent in Léontine’s manner, in her facial expression, in her choice of
words, in the tone of her voice, in the movements of her body. Léontine
was a plumpish, pretty girl approaching her thirties. Like her husband,
she had worked for us for six years. I am certain they were both devoted
to us and probably still are. Léontine’s face expressed honest regret, but
at the same time a certain delight at being the one to bring us the news,
then curiosity as to how I would receive it, anxiety as to what might
become of her if my wife and I were sent to camp, and, finally, in spite
of all her loyalty, just a suggestion of malicious satisfaction that now I
too, her employer, her “master,” would be getting my taste of the war’s
bitterness—and even a worse one than she.
I had forty-eight hours left for my preparations. One could take sixty
pounds of luggage. Judging by the experience of my first internment,
I knew that the first essential was that my things be easy to carry—one
had to look forward to carrying them oneself and sometimes over long
distances, marching in line. That is what had happened to me the first
time. Lively debates began as to what I had best take with me. The most
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LION FEUCHTWANGER
important item was blankets for nighttime, and hardly less important was
a little folding-chair, for the camp provided no seating conveniences. As
to suits and underclothing it was best to take the toughest and roughest
one possessed, for clothing went to pieces in no time. Books? Size and
weight were more important than subject matter. Handy, thin-paper
pocket editions were the most practical. I decided on a thin-paper Balzac
that contained six novels in smallest compass.
The next day I was ordered by telephone to report at the town
hall where a pass for my trip to the camp would be issued. We non-
Frenchmen were forbidden to stir from our places of residence without
special permits, and such papers were required even for the trip to the
internment camp.
The clerk at the town hall was a man with whom I had had frequent
dealings during my years at Sanary. He was obliging, not to say
solicitous. At the same time, like most of the natives, he showed a certain
embarrassment, a mixture of curiosity, genuine pity, and wariness about
getting too deeply involved with people whom his government was
putting under lock and key and who, thus, must be dubious characters.
He applied himself industriously to drawing up the papers. Ordinarily
two weeks were required to obtain a permit to go to the town eight miles
away, say to see a dentist. This time the sergeant at the nearest police
station reported promptly by telephone that he was ready to come over
at once and take charge of the necessary scrivening.
Three other Germans from Sanary had also been ordered to appear.
We waited in a room on the ground floor of the town hall, which
commonly served as a temporary detention place for criminals until
the police came to take them away. The veterinarian also used the room
when he made his weekly call to treat the town’s sick cats and dogs and
other small fry. Now it was our turn to wait there—four of us who would
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THE BRICKS OF LES MILLES | THE DEVIL IN FRANCE
start off on the morrow for Les Milles: my neighbour, the artist R.; his
son, who had just turned seventeen and so also had to pay the penalty;
myself, and finally the writer K., who had fought in Spain on the side of
the Republic.
We stood about and waited. We had all thought things would be
quite different when we first came to France. The words Liberté, Egalité,
Fraternité, were painted in giant letters over the door of the building
we were in. We had been celebrated on our arrival some years before.
The newspapers had published editorials of cordial and appreciative
welcome. Government officials had explained that it was an honour for
France to receive us as her guests. The President of the Republic had
given me an audience. Now they were locking us up! We accepted our
fate with a sort of bitter indifference. The years that had passed had
displayed vividly before our eyes the fickleness of human attitudes.
We indulged in no complaining, but kept to essentials—the best way to
reach Les Milles, how much money we should take with us, and the like.
At long last the police sergeant appeared. He had picked up a vagrant
on the way. The vagrant was drunk. The sergeant himself was drunk.
He had been promoted during just those days, an event which he simply
had to celebrate, he said. The vagrant and the sergeant slapped each
other on the back. The sergeant slapped us on the back. He had nothing
whatever against us, he gave his word. The room reeked of hard liquor.
The blank forms were detailed and complicated, as are all official
papers in France. The French apparently could not let us pass unless they
knew the full names of our fathers and mothers. The drunken sergeant
found the maze of questions quite beyond him. He had managed to
understand from our certificates that two of us were father and son. But
he wanted me, a man of fifty-six, to be the son of the artist R., a man of
forty-eight. He could make neither head nor tail of our relationships. He
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LION FEUCHTWANGER
could make neither head nor tail of anything. He was at his wit’s end.
Finally we called the Mayor’s secretary to the rescue.
The next day we drove to the camp in a taxicab.
I have an exact remembrance of my unsentimental leave-taking from
my wife. At the moment we were as busy as could be stowing the luggage
in the old, ramshackle vehicle. My wife said she had to get more paper to
make a better wrapper for something and ran into the house. Things of
that sort took up our last moments.
We were halted by police at one point along our way and had to show
our papers. In answer to the question as to the “purpose of the journey”
the secretary and the drunken sergeant had written: “Government
business.” The police looked at us, looked at each other, divined what
sort of government business it was, and exclaimed sorrowfully: “Aha!”
Then they saluted with embarrassed sympathy and wished us good luck.
We reached Aix. We reached Les Milles. We drove straight through
the village and then along the low walls of the brickyard that was to
swallow us up, and finally stopped on the dusty country road in front
of the high gate. Just inside the grating was a small guardhouse, with
soldiers in uniform standing or lolling about. I paid the chauffeur and
gave him an affectionate message for my wife.
The clock on the main building of the brickyard pointed to one
minute past five. I noted the fact mentally. So, the first minute past five
on May 21, 1940, was my last minute of freedom in France!
I picked up my luggage and started to carry it across the yard to the
receiving office. I am not very apt at such things: I simply could not
see how I was to carry the big valise, the little valise, the blankets, and
the folding-chair, a distance of seventy-five to a hundred yards. I tucked
the folding-chair under my left arm, the blankets under my right arm.
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THE BRICKS OF LES MILLES | THE DEVIL IN FRANCE
Then I reached down for the big valise with my left hand and for the
little valise with my right hand. The blankets slipped. I set everything
down and got the blankets in place again. Just when everything was in
order, down came the folding-chair. Grave, dull, unmoved, the soldiers
looked on.
“Let’s get going,” said the sergeant. “Allez hop!”
That was at two minutes past five, and I was desperately unhappy.
At three minutes past five I was very happy instead.
Coming toward me across the yard I saw two young men whose
names I could not remember, but whose faces seemed familiar. They
had been there at Les Milles with me the first time I was interned.
“Get back there!” the sentry shouted. “Get back there!” They were
not intimidated, nor did the sentry seem to take the matter seriously.
“Hello. You really here again?” one of the boys said. “We would
never have dreamt of such a thing!”
They fell upon my luggage and carried it to the receiving office.
There came another round of papers, whereupon our luggage was
searched—with no pretence at thoroughness. The lieutenant in charge
of the office was a manufacturer from Lyon, a well-groomed man with
greying hair, habitually wearing a somewhat tired expression on his face.
He greeted me courteously, invited me into his office, asked me what I
thought of the political and military situations. He expressed regret that
circumstances had forced the government to intern us again, and hoped
that this time our detention would not be of long duration.
Returning to the receiving desk, I was asked how much money I had
with me. I hesitated a second.
“Don’t be afraid,” said the sergeant. “Tell us the exact amount. We
are a sort of bank here. We will give you back whatever you want at any
time. In a camp like this there’s always a good deal of stealing. Your
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LION FEUCHTWANGER
money is safer with us than it would be on your person.”
I did as he suggested—a mistake, as the event proved. Small sums
were paid out to us on occasion, but only at long intervals, and after no
end of petitioning and manoeuvring of all sorts.
With all that out of the way I was given a number, Number 187; and
Number 187 I was to remain from then on.
Les Milles is an ugly little village, though the surrounding country
has its quiet charm: hilly fields with blues and greens, placid little streams,
old farmhouses, olive-groves, vineyards, some green grass (a thing rare
in that region), and, visible in the distance, an aqueduct, lofty, bold. In
the midst of that lovely country our brickyard lay, indescribably ugly.
The main building, wide, low-studded, was surrounded by bare
white yards. A smaller building to one side served as office, guardroom,
infirmary, kitchen, wagon-shed. The whole area was enclosed on two of
its sides by a brick wall, on the other two, by an earthwork or terrace,
all thoroughly fenced in with barbed wire and guarded by sentries. The
internees were in the habit of hanging their wash on the barbed wire in
the back yard. There it fluttered gaily in the wind while on the other side
the guards idled up and down, bored. It was a strange sensation to gaze
out from there upon the lovely, rolling, soft green fields, so near yet so
far beyond our reach.
Looking into the main building from the yard through one of the
great doors, one saw nothing but a huge black hole. Every time one
entered one had to accustom one’s eyes to the dark. Especially on the
ground floor one was always stumbling over something. Dusky runways
that led past the openings intended for the brick kilns made the approach
to the straw piles on this floor particularly narrow. The whole place
reminded one of a catacomb.
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THE BRICKS OF LES MILLES | THE DEVIL IN FRANCE
A crude flight of wooden steps, narrow, shaky, covered with dirt, led
up to a second floor. There the room was more spacious, but because
of the danger from air raids the windows were partly boarded up and
the few panes left uncovered were painted a dark blue so that no ray of
light might make its way to the outside. As a result this second floor was
always in a semi-twilight, and such a thing as reading was out of the
question. At night there were a few very feeble electric bulbs that served
rather to emphasize the darkness than to relieve it.
The inside of the building seemed twice as dark as it actually was
because the yards outside lay, for most of the day, under a dazzling
sunlight. Brick dust was everywhere about the building. Thick layers
trodden hard underfoot made the floor uneven to walk on; bricks that
seemed to be crumbling to dust lay about in piles. Dust, dust everywhere!
We were obliged to spend a large part of our time on the inside of
this building. There we slept, there we had our meals. We depended on
those rooms whenever it rained or whenever, as happened frequently
in that part of France, the wind was strong and turned the yards into
one great dust cloud. Many of us would take refuge inside the building
even on calm, bright days, for the yards lay under a glaring sun without
a trace of shade, and the sun of Provence is unbearable for any length
of time in summer. We therefore spent a great deal of our time in dust
and darkness.
Space on the second floor was considerably reduced by racks made
of laths that lined the walls and jutted out into the room. The racks
themselves were too narrow to sleep in. We used them as places for
storing our belongings, but always with the greatest prudence, for
smaller objects fell between the laths and the compartments were too
low to accommodate anything sizable.
Aside from these racks the room was completely bare. We were
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LION FEUCHTWANGER
given a little straw for our bedding, and the rest was left to us. There
were no chairs, no benches, no tables, nothing but piles of defective
bricks. Out of these we tried to build seats and tables, but they would
always fall apart.
This second floor was only a great yawning, empty hole, but I was
pleased rather than not to be lodged there again; for that had been my
“residence” during my first internment. I knew every board across the
windows, every lath, every brick. Strange how soon a human being
becomes attached to his surroundings. He seems to share something of
himself with the inanimate objects about him so that they belong to him
ever after and become, so to say, a part of his being. The dark, low-
ceilinged room with its dust, its dirt, its straw, had no terrors for me. From
my once having lived in it, I had formed ties with the things about me:
this post that I kept knocking against was an enemy; that wide, bulging
corner had become almost a friend. The young men who had come to
my rescue at the gate helped me whenever they could. They hunted out
the lightest spot in the room, the one best protected from draughts—a
spot near the racks. There they made a straw bed and spread my blanket
over it. They unpacked my bags and stored in one of the racks whatever
they could cram into them. They gave me something to eat and I shared
with them what I had brought in the way of food. True, we had nothing
to drink. Water was scarce, and even the camp authorities considered the
water of only one faucet drinkable, and that too was suspect.
One of the young men who had helped me, an Austrian, Karl N.,
appointed himself my valet. A slow-moving, sleepy sort of fellow, he
was at the same time efficient, good-natured, helpful, and extraordinarily
devoted to me. His one interest in life was sport. Big, lumbering, lethargic
as he was, he fairly came to life when the talk turned on boxing, and
more so on swimming. He was an excellent swimmer himself. He had
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THE BRICKS OF LES MILLES | THE DEVIL IN FRANCE
once received a serious injury in a boxing match and it seems that that
must have altered his mental and temperamental processes. He expected
me to pay him, of course, but money considerations alone could surely
not account for his devotion and for the solicitous care he took of me.
By evening on that first day I was very tired and looked forward to
stretching out on my straw and blanket. But the little difficulties that
were to make up my life for the following months began just there. It is
not altogether an easy matter to undress and get ready for the night when
you have no chair, no bed, no table, no water, only a little straw, and
are thrown in with numbers of other people in a dark room. You don’t
know where to put your things; the floor all around is horribly dirty and
anything that touches it is at once soiled. What is one to do with one’s
watch, with one’s eye-glasses? The best place obviously is in your shoes.
But then where are you going to put your shoes? Karl did his best to help
me, but I could hardly have called it comfortable. A man of fifty-six,
who has been all his life accustomed to his own room and a clean bed,
does not find it very easy to sleep on the floor on a pile of dirty straw. He
simply cannot master the technique of the thing.
In the end the fatigue of the busy day won out over the little vexations,
and when the rising signal sounded at half-past five in the morning, it
woke me out of a deep sleep.
The next day a sort of roll-call was held for the first time, and we
were divided into groups. There must have been about seven hundred
of us in all.
The man in charge of the grouping was a sergeant, or perhaps
even of higher rank—I can never tell the differences of military rank.
Our guards wore red fezzes, but they were not Arabs. As they stood
on the rampart-like terrace, in their colourful headgear, with their
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gleaming bayonets, before them the glaring white yard and behind the
soft green of the Provençal countryside, they made a picturesque but
hardly a soldierly appearance. They were not soldiers, in fact. They
were peasants or else small rural artisans who had been thrust into
uniforms. The sergeant who called the roll was a stately individual
with a bushy moustache, a puffy face, and a powerful voice. But even
he, for all his military trappings, was merely a good-natured citizen,
not the least bellicose.
As a first step he divided us into three groups: Germans, Austrians,
and ex-Foreign Legionnaires.
Absurdly enough, not even Central Europeans who had served in
the Foreign Legion had been exempted from internment. Some of them
had served France in arms for as long as twenty or thirty years. Many
of them had been under fire for France, and several had lost arms or
legs battling for French interests. Almost all had military decorations.
There they were tramping grimly about, chests aglitter with ribbons and
medals, empty sleeves flapping limply around stumps of arms, wooden
legs clattering over the dirty floors of the main building and the ground
of the courts outside. Tough customers, not a few of them—not the sort
one would care to meet alone at night. Many had forgotten their German
altogether and spoke nothing but French. Even the guards expressed
their anger that France should be repaying such men for their services
in such a way.
So there we were divided into Germans, Austrians, and Legionnaires.
That meant that I had to be parted from my Karl and the other helpful
Austrian. We were then directed to line up in squads of twenty men each.
And this haphazard arrangement was to be decisive for the next weeks,
indeed even for the next months. Thenceforward the individual’s lot
was to be the lot of his squad as regarded lodging, distribution of food,
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THE BRICKS OF LES MILLES | THE DEVIL IN FRANCE
labour; in other words, as regarded his whole life by day and by night.
The members of his squad were his bedfellows, his messmates. They
were to witness all his bodily operations. He was dependent upon them in
a hundred little matters of daily routine. Yes, we were to be permanently
dependent upon one another, upon our neighbours, upon the members
of our squad, and the chance of that first arrangement sowed the seeds
of friendship and enmity for a long time to come.
The separation into squads finished, we were led back to the second
floor. On our first day we had been able to choose where we would spread
our straw; now each squad was assigned its own particular area. My
squad did not get a very pleasant location. W e drew the middle of the
room, where there was least light and where we were farthest from the
windows and the racks. Not only that, standing or lying down we were
in everybody’s way, and they all trampled on our straw bedding whether
they intended to or not. W orse yet, the space allotted to us was exceedingly
cramped: measuring it off, we found that each of us had a breadth of some
thirty inches at his disposal. There was no passageway between our straw
piles, so that we lay not only side by side, but head to head.
The men spread out their straw. My Karl was not in sight. He could
not leave his Austrians and they had been assigned to another room.
There was no more straw left for me. There I stood, quite helpless.
“Come here,” said one of the men finally. “Come over by me!”
That man was thenceforth my neighbour. He was a workingman,
a mechanic, a quick-tempered but good-natured little fellow in his
middle forties. He spoke with such a heavy Saarish accent that I had
difficulty at times in understanding him. He made a very pleasant
neighbour, resourceful, adaptable. At the very outset he helped me by
an advantageous use of my valise to erect a sheltering partition between
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LION FEUCHTWANGER
me and the man at my head in such a way that we would not bump our
heads together. The valise meanwhile provided a place for my shoes,
and in them I could keep my watch and my glasses at night so that they
would not get lost in the straw and broken. As time went on, my friend
from the Saar did me many another good turn. He was assigned to work
in the “workshop,” where the personnel was French. He got better food
than we did and would always turn up in the evening with some titbit or
other, not seldom wine, and also with news that he had gathered from his
French comrades. I could hardly have found a better neighbour. He had
only one unpleasant trait, and it was certainly not his fault: at night, after
his day’s work, he had a very bad smell.
Yesterday the rack where I kept my things stood me in good stead.
I had now been ousted from that particular spot and, according to our
unwritten law, had lost my right to use those shelves. However, the new
occupants of my former space allowed me out of hand to keep the part
of the rack that I needed. These men, like the majority of my squad
comrades, were men of the working classes. They treated me with
kindness and respect. They ripped a number of laths from one of the
racks—though that was quite against the rules—and from them devised
a sort of bench and table for me near the gable window. That gave me
a chance to sit down at a point directly in line with my sleeping place,
and, sitting down, to eat, to read, and to write. Before long my straw bed
and the niche opposite with my lath table and chair I came to think of as
“home,” my natural frame, something saturated with my being.
Among the workingmen in my squad and the squad adjoining were
four, Saarlanders all, with whom I particularly enjoyed talking. Many
among our number came from the Saar, for that matter—men who had
got into trouble by conspicuously siding with France in the days of
the plebiscite and then could do nothing but flee to France. France had
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THE BRICKS OF LES MILLES | THE DEVIL IN FRANCE
promised them special protection. She was now protecting them—in an
internment camp!
One of these four friends from the proletariat was a factory stoker,
another a furniture maker, then came my “straw-fellow,” a mechanic,
and finally another mechanic who had the place directly at my feet. All
four spoke French as their mother tongue; three of them had married
Frenchwomen. They were delighted to help me and did so with great
success, and they were always ready for a good chat. From them I
learned much about the lives of the working people in the Saar and in
the South of France.
Not far from me there was a jolly Saxon tailor. He was a great eater
and regularly reported for kitchen duty because in that way he could get
a bit extra to eat. Then came a hairdresser, as tiny as a dwarf, not a little
selfish and always on the look-out for an advantage. Finally I remember
a jovial, worldly-wise fellow who had kept a tavern in Toulon. Those
three made good company too, but unlike my Saarlanders they never
ventured a political opinion. They were concerned to appear more as
Germans living abroad than as refugees—Germans, to be sure, who
were not in favour of the Nazis, but who had left the Reich with their
papers in order and with the full consent of the government.
The tavern-keeper from Toulon was our squad leader. That post
carried no privileges with it; rather it involved much work. All the same,
there were several men in each squad who wanted to be leader. Some of
them proved flat failures and had to be discharged, whereat their feelings
were hurt. It was truly extraordinary how many men there were who felt
the need of organizing something, of being important.
Paris had by now extended its internment decree to include Austrian
and Czechoslovakian refugees, so in the days that followed hundreds of
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LION FEUCHTWANGER
new arrivals appeared in our camp. Many were delivered in police wagons,
usually two by two and handcuffed to each other. Strictly speaking, only
persons under fifty-six were to be interned, but the authorities were not
very particular on that point. A very reputable gentleman from Marseille,
for instance, born in the year 1882, was brought in in handcuffs. He had
shown the police his passport in proof that he had passed the age limit
for internment. The officer in question replied that his job was not to do
sums in arithmetic, but to make arrests.
The brickyard now became crowded; every inch of space in our
room on the second floor was occupied. There were men of every age
and every sort among us. Most of their names I have forgotten, but many
faces and individualities stick in my memory.
I am thinking among others of a manufacturer, also from the Saar,
a quiet, altogether decent person. He would sit most of the time with
a little typewriter on his knees, writing letters and compiling market
statistics. He managed to create an atmosphere of comfort about him.
In a thousand different ways he would get news reports, newspapers,
and extra food smuggled in to him, sharing everything generously
with others.
Then there was a man of very positive personality who always had
a little group about him listening to what he had to say. He was a dentist
from Monte Carlo, and, as it later proved, a Nazi. From the first he
struck me as very much the dictator, though I may have perceived the
authoritarian trait in him largely because, as it chanced, he was the only
person to have sleeping space apart from the others. His was situated
between two approaches to the racks. The man was neat to the point of
excess. He built a little wall of bricks around his bed. There, mornings
and evenings, he could be seen lying outstretched in his brick frame as on
a catafalque. It was most impressive.
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THE BRICKS OF LES MILLES | THE DEVIL IN FRANCE
Some twenty straw piles from mine slept the writer Walter
Hasenclever, one of the founders of German expressionism.
Also among us was a quiet patient fellow, a born philosopher. He had
been caught in India in the First World War and interned there for the
duration. He had brought a little folding-chair and was quite resigned to
sitting out this war too in an internment camp perched on his little chair.
A short, stocky man, middle-aged, merry, crafty, accommodating,
proved to have been for many years the proprietor of a cinema theatre
in Marseille. He was always lounging about in a pair of unspeakably
dirty pajamas that had once been white, wearing a tasselled cap on his
roundish head and, in open defiance of camp rules, leading a little dog
on a leash. The guards and the sergeants all liked this jolly little fellow,
and he oiled their palms so bountifully that they put up with his dog. The
dog slept next to him in the straw. Once in a while he would bark, and
everyone would do his best to induce him “for God’s sake to keep quiet.”
Let an officer draw near and twenty voices of guards and internees alike
would rise: “Weinberg, your dog! Get your dog out of sight!” The dog
would vanish as if by magic under Weinberg’s blanket, and the officers
always tried to look the other way.
In other circumstances I should never have come to know most
of the men who were in camp with me. If I had encountered them I
would either not have noticed them or have forgotten them immediately.
Now the character of our prison and the fellowship of our common
plight forced me to draw close to them. Each of them felt a need of
expressing himself, of telling his life story, of unburdening himself of
his hopes and fears, of receiving friendly advice. In the course of my
fifty-six years I have had dealings with thousands of men of all sorts and
conditions. I no longer have any curiosity about people. What I found
most difficult about the camp was the fact that one could never be alone,
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LION FEUCHTWANGER
that constantly, day and night, every act, every physical function, eating,
sleeping, voiding, was performed in the presence of hundreds of men,
men who were talking, shouting, moaning, weeping, laughing, feeding,
smacking their lips, wiping their mouths, sweating, smelling, snoring.
Yes, we did everything in the most public view, and no one seemed to
feel the slightest embarrassment.
But much as I sometimes wished to be rid of all that throng, I am not
sorry now that this exuberant “fullness of new faces,” to adopt Goethe’s
phrase, pressed about me. It enabled me to feel again and very deeply
how uniquely individual is every human face, even the plainest, how
uniquely individual each human being’s way of doing things.
Among my more or less close neighbours I must mention another,
an orthodox rabbi, slight of stature, bearded. He was always saying
prayers, and in orthodox regalia—phylactery and prayer shawl—
secluding himself as best he could from the public gaze by withdrawing
between the racks.
There were orthodox Jews in goodly number at Les Milles. They
adhered strictly to their observances, deporting themselves meanwhile
in a modest, inconspicuous manner. They had the camp authorities
assign places for their worship where they would cause no disturbance to
others. For that matter the French were very co-operative on this point.
During my first detention I had spent the most solemn of Jewish festivals
in camp, Yom Kippur, the Day of Atonement. With permission of the
camp authorities the orthodox Jews had built out of waste bricks a sort of
synagogue, an altar, the almenar, a shrine for the Torah scrolls, and a sort
of lectern for the cantor. As the long day drew to an end and the bricks
had to be taken down again, a number of internees insisted on having
their fun. They went up to a group of men who were suspected of being
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THE BRICKS OF LES MILLES | THE DEVIL IN FRANCE
Nazis and shouted: “Jew-baiters wanted, to destroy the temple!”
The frail rabbi to whom I have referred, a quiet, unobtrusive man,
had the bad luck to have a most unpleasant straw-fellow, an elderly man
with an actor’s face, who had a fancy for imitating the calls of animals.
The moment reveille sounded at five-thirty in the morning, one would
be sure to hear his lusty cock-a-doodle-do. One would be standing,
lying, or squatting somewhere and suddenly one would hear the mooing
of a cow, the barking of a dog, the whinnying of a horse, the trill of a
nightingale, and then the man with the actor’s face would come walking
by unconcerned but inwardly chuckling at his good fun. For some reason
he bore a special grudge against his neighbour, the rabbi. He tormented
the poor fellow cruelly, not only mooing and whinnying in his ear, but
even cuffing and pommelling him, so that oftentimes bystanders felt
obliged to interfere.
Was the animal-imitator altogether in his right mind? One could not
say. Many of the internees had acquired a mental twist during their bitter
years of exile, and particularly during this first year of the war.
In the infirmary was a well-bred gentleman of charming manner who
exercised in the yard during the hours when the slightly ill were allowed
that privilege. He came up and spoke to me and told me his story. He had
been a sports instructor at one of the health resorts on the Riviera for
many years. He thought of himself as a Frenchman, but had neglected to
take out naturalization papers. During a first internment, he told me, he
had suffered a nervous breakdown and had been sent to one of the army’s
insane asylums at Marseille. He was finally discharged from there and
sent to the infirmary at Les Milles. The trouble was that he happened to
possess a very special faculty—a faculty for telling a person’s character
simply by smelling him. He could smell out the innermost souls of
people. During his first stay in the infirmary he had immediately smelled
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LION FEUCHTWANGER
out the fact that not less than eight of the thirty inmates were Nazis. He
asked to see the commandant at once and said: “There are eight Nazis in
this infirmary, sir.”
To which the captain replied: “Clear out! Back to the asylum
for you.”
This time, on his second internment, the doctors had clapped him
into the infirmary immediately on his arrival. And this time too he had
smelled out Nazis, four of them in fact. Now if he were to tell the captain,
the latter would send him straight back to the asylum in Marseille.
“How would it be if you were to go to the captain,” he asked me,
“and tell him about the four Nazis?”
An elderly Austrian among the internees, a scholar, formerly
a teacher in the Volkshochschule at Vienna, was a remarkably ugly
man, perhaps the ugliest I have ever encountered. A face with over-
prominent bones, a bushy beard always unkempt, glasses. Woebegone,
bedraggled, dirty beyond words, he was always chewing on something,
smacking his lips audibly, and when he was not munching, his lower
jaw sagged, leaving his mouth wide open. He walked with a stoop, a
pair of inordinately long arms dangling in front of him, and so far he
reminded one of an ape. But he hopped around with a nervous, unsteady
gait, and that suggested rather some aged, mangy bird. He was by
no means a fool, and not seldom came out with surprisingly shrewd
remarks, but he had lost all perception of bounds and limits, all sense
of realities. Doubtless the tortures to which he had been subjected in
the Nazi concentration camps had unbalanced him. He was learned to a
degree and had exact information on all conceivable subjects—in short,
a walking encyclopaedia. His head was crammed with details from my
books, for instance, things I myself had long since forgotten. He had a
beautiful voice—perhaps a trifle unctuous, for in the end it got on one’s
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THE BRICKS OF LES MILLES | THE DEVIL IN FRANCE
nerves. His habit was to discourse at length in long, rounded sentences,
taking part in every discussion, often importunately. On such occasions
he had a way of poking one of his huge ears forward as though listening,
and then coming out with something scholarly, polished, ready for print,
but not pertinent to the subject. He evidently thought of himself as
something of a Socrates, going about among the throngs, questioning
everybody, teaching others and himself. His discourses were to him
the centre of all things. He would point to some spot or other near the
latrines. “There,” he would say, pushing a bit of bread about inside his
mouth, “on the sixth of February at five o’clock in the afternoon I began
my memorable discussion with Professor K. on the ramifications of
Leibniz’s doctrine of monads in the thought of our day.” Among all the
denizens of the brickyard at Les Milles he was probably the happiest.
Inside that enclosure he could be certain of an audience. Many people
liked to listen to him, and a circle could often be seen gathered about
him. That they took him as a sort of clown did not in the least disturb
him—he even liked it. Just as long as someone was listening, so long as
they paid attention to him. His worst fear was that these happy days at
the camp might come to an end. On his release from his first internment
at the beginning of the present war he had flatly refused to leave the
camp. The soldiers had been obliged to set him on the road forcibly, after
which they passed his bundles out to him on their bayonets over the brick
wall amid jesting and laughter.
About this time I had a somewhat lengthy conversation with Captain
G., commandant at the camp, and asked him what my chances of an early
release were. The captain was a hat manufacturer from Paris, stout, with
a puffy, over-ruddy face that struck me as sly, secretive, stubborn. I
had found him invariably correct and courteous during my first stay at
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the camp, and so he was this time. He explained that he, as well as his
superiors, knew quite well who I was. I would certainly be set at liberty
soon, but the weeding-out process, the real purpose of our internment,
could not begin until all of us, absolutely all, had been brought into
camp. Would we have much longer to wait for that? I asked. He could
not give me a definite answer, he said, but personally he was assuming
that the time limit would expire within a few days.
“Within a few days.” That is what the officers kept assuring us. No
one really thought so, but we all clung to the hope. During those first
two weeks of our detention the main subject of conversation was: When
will “le triage” begin, that sifting, that weeding-out, of which we had
heard so many tales? And on what basis would the sorting be done? How
would the commission be made up? Where would it sit, at the camp or
elsewhere? These, and others of the same sort, were the questions that
exercised us.
The commission never arrived. The sifting process never began, and
even had events not come rushing in a deluge and rendered it impossible,
one may wonder whether it would ever have been undertaken.
The official version was that we had been interned for military
reasons, that a suspicion prevailed that Nazi sympathizers, members
of the Fifth Column, lurked among us Central Europeans, that it had
again been deemed desirable to have a sifting and a very thorough one.
Few among us believed that this was the real reason. We refugees from
Germany had been sifted ten times. From the first days of the war we
had been under strict and constant surveillance by the police. We had
not been allowed to leave the towns where we lived. No, the responsible
authorities knew perfectly well that the spies, the saboteurs, the Nazi
sympathizers, the leaders of the Fifth Column, were to be sought quite
elsewhere than among us, that they were sitting in very high places,
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THE BRICKS OF LES MILLES | THE DEVIL IN FRANCE
powerful, influential. We had been interned simply to put on a show for
the French people, to divert public attention from the men who were
really to blame for the French defeats and who could not be reached.
There was, I believe, no particular cruelty in the measure. Our
internment may have wrecked the happiness of many of us, it may have
cost the lives of many of us and broken all of us in spirit and in body, but
those consequences followed not from malicious intent but from pure
inconsiderateness. Of a man who was living well we Continentals used
to say that he lived “like God in France.” The expression conveyed a
feeling that God found life pleasant in France, that there people lived
and let live, that there life flowed along smoothly and comfortably. But
if God had a good time in France, in view of the slatternly conception
of life that prevailed there the Devil did not have a bad time either. The
French have coined a phrase for their slipshod indifference, their way of
letting things take care of themselves. They call it “je-m’en-foutisme,”
an attitude toward life that may be somewhat inadequately translated as
“I-don’t-give-a-damnism.” That is why I do not attribute our misfortune
to any deliberate intent. I do not think that the Devil with whom we
had to deal in the France of 1940 was a particularly truculent devil who
enjoyed practical jokes of a sadistic nature. I am inclined to think that he
was the Devil of Untidiness, of Unthoughtfulness, of Sloth-in-Good-
Will, of Convention, of Routine, the very Devil to whom the French
have given the motto, “je m’en fous”—“I don’t give a damn.”
Of course the manner in which our internment was carried out is
hard to understand if one assumes that government officials consider
the consequences of their measures before they order them. The
French authorities simply did not think ahead. W e asked ourselves, if
there was no intent to harm us physically, why did they hunt up for our
accommodation a dark and dust-choked brickyard where there was not
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enough water for washing and none at all fit to drink? To such questions
our French officers would reply: “Our soldiers at the front are no better
off.” They probably had no intention of treating us badly, of treating us as
enemies. They knew very well that ninety-nine out of every hundred of
us were definitely innocent, that we were friends of France who had come
to France with full trust in French hospitality, warmly welcomed by the
French people and their government, natural allies in the war on Hitler. If,
in spite of all that, we were given such wretched quarters and our health
was ruined through neglect of the most elementary rules of hygiene, it
was due to pure thoughtlessness, a lack of talent for organization.
Execution of the internment order was being rigorously pressed:
subordinate officials had evidently been instructed to lock up too many
people rather than too few. Not only were Germans, Austrians, and
Czechs being detained as the decree specified; we were getting people
from Luxembourg, Holland, Belgium, and Scandinavia. There was
no appeal. Once a man had landed in a camp—it made no difference
whether by an evident mistake on the part of the police or by an equally
evident abuse of their authority—he never got out again.
It was ridiculous to see the sort of people that were herded together
there on the pretext of their having possible connexions with the Fifth
Column. Among others was a man whose four sons were serving in the
French army. Another had a brother who was an officer on the French
General Staff. More than a dozen of us internees possessed French
decorations. Several were knights of the Legion of Honour. I myself
had been received by the President of the Republic. Leaflets dropped
by English flyers over Germany had quoted sentences of mine. I had
written books whose background portrayed the barbaric ways of the
Nazis, and they had been read by millions. The Nazis had denounced
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THE BRICKS OF LES MILLES | THE DEVIL IN FRANCE
me as Enemy Number One in not a few of their manifestos. To intern
so many people who had beyond any doubt proved themselves bitter
enemies of the Nazis was a stupid, revolting farce.
Meanwhile, instead of mitigating the severity of the internment
specifications, Paris stiffened them. The age limit was raised from fifty-
six to sixty-five—a mere transposition of figures, we jested bitterly, a
mistake of some clerk that had been ratified by the “higher-ups” in a
spirit of malicious “I-don’t-give-a-damnism.”
New internees poured into our camp. Ground floor and second floor
were now packed to the last dark corner. One’s every step tripped over
bricks, straw piles, men. We lay on top of one another, we squatted on
top of one another. Crumbling bricks came to be much in demand and
one was put to it to scrape together the four or five bricks required for
making something that would serve as a seat.
Among the older men who were now being brought in one noted
cultivated gentlemen of astounding knowledge. I remember one or
two in particular. They were Viennese and took things philosophically.
They had had the bad luck to get caught in the meshes of the French
military bureaucracy. To approach that machine with considerations of
common sense or humaneness was sheer folly. When one happens to be
caught in an earthquake does one try to reason with the falling walls?
These gentlemen preferred to sit on their little folding-chairs or their
little piles of crumbling bricks and chat intelligently of books, of music,
of the beautiful women of a day gone by, of the charms of an era that
was no more. In their discriminating discussion of Mahler, Schnitzler,
Gerhart Hauptmann, of the merits of this or that feminine beauty, or
of this or that restaurant, one perceived a soft, reflected glow of the old
days in Vienna, in Paris, in Cannes. Gentlemen in tattered suits that were
soiled with brick dust. But one walked with them in a dusty yard glaring
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white in the sun, elbowing one’s way through a milling crowd, jostled
and shoved about at every step; one sat opposite them on a little pile of
bricks—careful meanwhile that the barbs on the wire at one’s back did
not cut one’s skin—exchanging recollections of those lovely things that
had vanished from our lives, or debating as to whether James Joyce had
really introduced a new element into literature or whether the alleged
novelty had not been there before, as, for instance, in this or that story
of Schnitzler.
They were Austrians, as I have said. The distinguishing trait of the
Austrian temperament is, to my mind, a certain indolence, a certain
resignation that you might call wisdom or sereneness, or, if you will,
inertness, lethargy, shiftlessness. In that camp one could observe the
trait in most of the Austrians, in Jew and in Christian, in bank president,
manufacturer, and plain workingman, in Communist and Legitimist.
The Austrians were in general more sociable than the Germans, less
reserved, less formal, more adaptable, more talkative. At the same time
they were noisier and more irascible. There we were all stewing in
the same broth, but, foolish as it was, a silly national hatred between
Germans and Austrians often manifested itself. The Austrians made
fun of the discipline that the German room-chiefs and squad leaders
tried to maintain. The Germans were proud that the French sergeants
who made inspections found their quarters more orderly than those of
the Austrians.
The change in the age limit brought the last two Germans in Sanary
to camp, one of them a man of sixty-one, the other of fifty-six.
The latter, like myself, was a writer. He had just passed the age limit
at the time of the first internment order, while I came a few weeks within
it. He had felt a sincere regret that I had fallen victim to the decree.
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But he cherished a profound belief in himself and was positive that his
having passed the age limit, as it were by a hair, was a personal merit.
How normal it is for people, whether they admit it or not, to regard
good luck, when they have it, as a quality of character, though they
of course refuse to think of bad luck in anything like the same way.
Misfortunes they ascribe to the injustice of Fate or of God, and think
they are to be pitied because of them; if a stroke of luck comes, it is an
achievement of their own. The man who is lucky at cards likes to put on
airs and see in it a confirmation by Fate of his personal superiority.
Be that as it may, my poor neighbour, who had been on the top of the
wave ten days before, now walked around in the camp in a rage. Even
more furious was my other acquaintance from Sanary, the man of sixty-
one, an opera-singer still rather imposing to look at.
His luck had been particularly bad. He had been locked up like the
rest of us at the beginning of the war. But elderly people against whom
there were no specific complaints had, in general, been freed after a few
weeks. He had been detained. As later came out, there was something
special against him: he had very unfavourable papers in the police files.
He had been reported a number of times. The good people of Sanary
suspected that he was a German officer and had been sent to France by
the German Secret Service for shady purposes.
By that time the man had been living for years in France. He owned
a pretty house in Sanary, looked every inch the German, spoke French
wretchedly, and no normal mind could see exactly why the Nazis should
have chosen such an unsuitable person for their dark designs. On the
other side of his balance-sheet was the fact that witnesses from the native
population—French housemaids, gardeners, and the like—averred
positively that they had seen a photograph in his house which showed
him as a German army officer. He, the singer, averred just as positively
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that he had not served in the army in any capacity during the First World
War, and that he had been a soldier only in his early youth and for a very
short time. The fact that he thus disavowed his status as an officer during
the World War was in itself suspicious, and his record looked bad.
Closer investigation had shown that the photograph under suspicion
pictured the singer in the role of Don José in Carmen. But the suspicion
had now become documental, and the Devil in his French edition as
Shiftlessness and Bureaucracy held the man fast in an internment camp,
and he was not going to get out again.
Heretofore he had always felt young. Now rage and a progressive
desperation were eating him up. His hair turned white in three weeks’
time. He became an old man. One of his sons, a boy of about twenty, had
also been interned. He saw how the confinement was wearing his father
down and was eager to help him.
There was a way of doing it. The French officers hinted in
unmistakable terms that they would set the father free if, and only if,
the son joined the Foreign Legion. Now, service in the Foreign Legion
was considered especially severe. The corps had had exceptionally high
losses in the World War. Not only that, anyone who enlisted in the
Foreign Legion had to enlist for a term of years (this regulation was
later suspended). The boy found it difficult to make up his mind. Should
he, the youth, wreck his life for the sake of the few years his father
still had to live? The father for his part did not exactly demand the
sacrifice. He merely walked about the camp, silent, embittered, ageing
visibly from day to day. The sacrifice was demanded by the stepmother,
a woman of wealth on whom father and son were alike dependent. After
much arguing one way and another the boy finally gave in and enlisted
in the Legion.
He got a few days’ furlough before being shipped to Africa. Father
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and son took a walk one day along the streets of Sanary, the once portly
father now a mere shadow of himself. The good townspeople were in
tears for a whole week over the nobility of the son’s self-sacrifice and his
love for beautiful, big-hearted France.
Unluckily the son’s self-sacrifice proved to be in vain. The father was
now under lock and key for a second time.
As for the photograph that showed the singer in the role of Don José
and that played such an important part in his own and his son’s destiny,
the harm it did was bound up with the brainless routine of the whole
French Secret Service. The way the counter-espionage functioned in the
South of France was a sorry farce.
I may be allowed to relate my own experience with the French
military police. Colonial troops had been stationed in Sanary since
the outbreak of the war. They were not always the same troops; the
regiments frequently changed. Each detachment, however, brought its
own police with it, and each time the handful of foreigners in the place
were asked the same stupid questions over again: when and where their
fathers and mothers were born, when and where they were married.
Such data had been taken and written down any number of times. They
could have been found in a hundred different registers. Not only that, a
special agent had been detailed to Sanary to keep an eye on us foreigners.
(Sanary is a village of about four thousand inhabitants. At the outbreak
of the war about two dozen Germans, Austrians, and Czechs were living
there, along with many other foreigners.) The man whom the authorities
had entrusted with our surveillance had once been a clerk in the little
branch bank we had at Sanary. He knew us all and rather liked us, but
he felt that he had grown in importance now that the foreigners in the
little town were to some extent in his hands and he could give them—
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especially the women—quite a fright by appearing on the scene. He was
himself ashamed of the idiotic questions he was now and then obliged
to ask. However, his superiors insisted upon having his report on them,
he declared.
Why did my secretary type at night? The townspeople suspected it
might have something to do with secret information to the Nazis. When
my wife drove down to the village she was almost always obliged to pick
up soldiers who asked her for a lift. The police wanted to know why
she did that. People in town said she might be spying on the soldiers.
After that she refused to pick them up. Then the police wanted to know
why she did that—a manifestation of unfriendliness toward the French
army? The townspeople found it provocative. I was asked what proof
I had that I was a writer. I showed them French editions of my books.
That was not enough. I showed them articles about myself and my work
in the leading French newspapers. That was not enough. I received a
money order from my American publisher. The police made a long
investigation of the matter: where did the money come from, why was I
getting it, and what had I done to earn it? The townspeople suspected it
came from Hitler or from Stalin.
If one wanted to go to Toulon to do some shopping (Toulon was
eight miles away), one had to fill in any number of forms, supply
photographs, furnish data about one’s parents and the like. Then if one
had good luck, one got the permit in about ten days. The reasons for the
trip and its purposes were never seriously investigated. The requisites
were merely written or, even better, stamped papers of some sort. It was
a case of papers for papers’ sake. The official wanted to be protected by
a rampart of papers with writing on them.
I was called upon to suffer more than most people from the devious
ways of bureaucracy, and I am probably more sensitive to such things
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than most people. My common sense is always rebelling at the stupid
formalism with which the world is run. Oh, those everlasting regulations!
Oh, those “mesures générales!” In the vast majority of cases they leave
untouched the persons they are intended for and fall full weight upon
the innocent. How many of the things that official regulations compel
one to do are without the slightest rhyme or reason! What a part of my
life I have spent standing around in public offices, asking for something,
waiting for it, using a thousand devices merely to have it confirmed in
the end that I was born, and, to wit, in Munich, and in the year 1884.
Only in rare instances have investigations been made in earnest. Most
often it has been a question of exchanging one set of papers written out
and stamped for another set of papers written out and stamped—and of
paying money for it. I am a slow worker, but I could have written at least
two books more in the time that I have been obliged to spend waiting
around public offices and in the back yards of recruiting stations—
waiting unnecessarily for unnecessary things.
While I lived in Germany I was inclined to think that bureaucracy
was a typically German vice born of an excess of the German’s impulse
to have orderliness and sound organization. When I went to Soviet
Russia I saw that the situation was still worse there. But I had to go
to a free and liberal France to experience bureaucracy in a still more
intensified form, mitigated only by the inefficiency and shiftlessness of
those who administer it. Even in America I saw myself ensnared in a
tangle of endless red tape.
The fact probably is that the progressive mechanization and
rationalization of economic life has come to require a gigantic apparatus
of documentation. And the more firmly the principles of a planned
economy gain hold, the greater the danger that the life of the individual
will be smothered under bureaucratic complications. There will be
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the further danger that schematic regulations, well enough devised in
themselves, will work out in practice as a meaningless hindrance to the
individual, that common sense will evolve into nonsense and benefit into
sheer nuisance.
There is a remedy for this, it seems to me. The text of laws, of
regulations, should be required to have attached to them a statement
of the reasons for their existence and of the purposes they are intended
to achieve. Then the deciding judge, the official who administers them,
should have discretionary powers to enforce regulations prescribed by
the law only when they achieve their purposes and to waive them when
their application would obviously run counter to their stated aims. The
principle of relativity should be applied with due discretion in the field
of jurisprudence and governmental administration.
Prerequisite to this would be a careful selection and training of
officials. The French officials, for instance, were wretchedly paid and
anything but carefully selected. They could be bought and they failed
to deliver. Their indolence, their corruption, their empty routine were
among the forces that led to the downfall of France.
Our day at Les Milles was as follows:
In the morning at half-past five the rising signal—a pretty tune. The
trumpeter did not always get it right, but we knew it and straightway
many of us would take it up, whistling, bawling. Every morning, too,
at the same time came the inevitable and mighty cock-a-doodle-do of
the animal-imitator. Other regular features were a quarrel as to which
window should be opened, then from all sides a general chorus of almost
deafening grunts, groans, yawns, belches—all the possible sounds of
men who were stretching their limbs, stiff from sleep, unwilling to begin
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their joyless day. One always heard the same expressions—smutty jests,
gross obscenities. It was always the same boorishness.
So much for the second floor. As for the ground floor, meanwhile,
that dark, catacomb-like room was crowded with some hundreds of men,
most of them with some receptacle or other in their hands, waiting for
the doors to open. The moment the great wings were pushed apart, there
was a general rush out of the building, followed by a mad race across the
yards toward the washroom, the water-trough, the latrines. Everybody
ran, not a few quite awkwardly, for among our number there were many
older men who had had little physical training and made haste comically.
They came to a halt in lines in front of the toilets and the washing-places.
The standing line was one of the characteristic traits of the camp. We
stood in line in front of the office when we wanted to make an application
or an inquiry. We stood in line once every two weeks to obtain a small
part of the money that had been taken from us on our entrance. We stood
in line in front of the counter of the canteen. We stood in line when we
were ill and ordered to report to the doctor. We stood in line to get the
food that was provided by the camp authorities.
Lines stood in front of the latrines all day long. There were four
closets built of wood at one end of the enclosure, three at the other end.
At times up to a hundred men could be seen waiting in front of each
of these conveniences. There was no flushing. There was no avoiding
the excrement, no escape from the thick swarms of flies. One waited
for one’s turn, raging, jesting. Many men were ill; all became so. If one
failed to succumb to the food, infection from the toilets was inevitable.
That so many of us survived the internment camp at Les Milles is a
devastating refutation of current notions as to the necessity of proper
hygiene. “In fæcibus nascimur, in fæcibus morimur,” said St. Augustine.
Some melancholy wag had written the quotation out on one of the
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toilets, but completing it this way: “In fæcibus vivimus.” (In muck we
are born, in muck we die, in muck we live.)
Even today as I think back to my long waiting in those lines, a feeling
of depression, utter degradation, and indignation takes possession of
me. Certain details I must spare the reader, for the mere thought of them
turns my stomach.
Soldiers had priority over us as regards the toilets. If a soldier came
up, no matter how long the line was, it was his privilege to go to the
head of it. Once, when I was seventh or eighth in line, a man came and
placed himself at the head of the line. Another shipment of internees
had just been delivered. I thought the intruder might be one of the
new arrivals and did not know the rules. I suggested politely that he
go to the end of the line. At that he turned on me, red in the face and
with fists clenched, assailing me with lewd words of menace. It turned
out that he was a soldier. He had taken off the regulation tunic so that
there was no way of distinguishing him from the prisoners. I was in
great distress at the moment. The ridiculous misadventure depressed
me greatly and enduringly.
For that matter there could be consolations even in that repulsive
environment. One day, I remember, I was something like twentieth in
the line but those ahead of me all insisted that I should go in first. I have
had many honours conferred upon me in my time. This was the highest.
Courtesy was so much a matter of second nature with some of our
number that they did not forget the outward forms of politeness even
under those revolting circumstances. As they squatted there, grunting,
panting, one would inquire of the other, with all the German’s meticulous
attention to rankings and titles: “How are you today, Herr Professor?”
“How is your health this morning, Herr Geheimrat?” “Did you sleep
well last night, Herr Ministerialdirektor?”
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Near one of the toilet cabins was what might be called the urinal. But
there no lines formed. The men relieved themselves almost anywhere
in the neighbourhood, and this whole section of the yard was a most
forbidding quagmire. At just this point the yard was bounded on the one
side by an escarpment guarded by a patrol, on the other by a high iron
fence, with a second fence of barbed wire just beyond. A very pretty
park began just beyond the fence and one looked out across it upon a
lovely landscape. That was where we urinated.
We soon lost all sense of privacy in the camp. There was no effort
to conceal ugliness and deformity, whether of body or of soul. One saw
much that was ugly beyond words.
Some twenty minutes after the rising signal two men from each
group brought their comrades a bucket of coffee and the bread ration for
the day. Each man went and got his share of coffee in a tin cup, dipping
his bread in it. There was much complaining over the quality of the
bread. Doctors among our number declared it was the main cause of the
illnesses that afflicted us all.
At half-past seven roll-call was sounded. This ceremony took place in
a veritable hullabaloo, though good-humouredly as a rule and not at all in
a military atmosphere. A strong guard of soldiers would first march out,
some twenty middle-aged farmers and artisans in uniform. They stood
about yawning and terribly bored. Then two or three sergeants would
appear in their red fezzes. A lusty voice would roar: “Attention!” But no
one came to attention. The older men among us did not know how it was
done, and they probably considered the whole thing nonsense anyway.
The same command would be repeated three or four times: “Attention!”
The squad leaders would be reprimanded, but the thing just would not
work. A contributing factor in the trouble was that we had among us
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about a dozen men who were slightly insane. Our Austrian polyhistor,
for instance, was to be seen wandering about between the ranks at every
third roll-call after the command to come to attention had been given.
Voices would call out to him: “This way! This way!” but he could not
or would not understand. Finally he would turn to one of the French
officers and explain: “I am Professor P., Squad X. Where shall I stand?”
Other old men would be wandering around during the whole calling
of the roll. Half blind and half deaf, they could not adjust themselves.
Meanwhile behind the ranks of internees, or indeed between them,
Foreign Legionnaires would be going to and fro, carrying large barrels
of refuse from the latrines out in front of the camp, and they would never
fail to call: “Ice-cream! Get your ice-cream, please! Chocolate! Vanilla!”
Notices would then be read out and the day’s work distributed. The
first call would be for a certain number of specialists—electricians,
mechanics, tailors, shoemakers, cooks. There would be many applicants
to respond to each call—the day was long and lack of occupation
depressing. Whatever was asked for—a shoemaker, a tailor, anything—
the Austrian scholar would always volunteer. He had studied the manuals
of all the trades, he said. Some of the other eccentrics were equally
faithful in offering their services.
Next came the distribution of general tasks. These were done by
squads. Squad A, for instance, would be ordered to clean the yards,
Squad B the inside of the building, Squad C would have kitchen duty,
other squads bricklaying or trench-digging.
The cleaning of the rooms, like the cleaning of the yard, was a matter
of stirring up the dust. Two or three men would have been sufficient
for such room service as we had, but twenty or thirty were detailed to
it. Only those assigned to such duty were allowed inside the building
while the work was in progress. When intruders were caught there it
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was their practice to say that they were doing guard duty, making sure
that nothing was stolen. On one occasion I was found in the building
during the forbidden hour. When I explained that I was a guard, the
commanding sergeant observed: “There are four guards here already.”
“I am keeping an eye on the guards,” I replied saucily, with a presence
of mind unusual to me.
Kitchen duty came down to cleaning carrots, peeling potatoes, and
the like. So many men were assigned to this work that, putting it high,
one never had more than twenty potatoes or ten carrots to prepare. We
spent the time chatting.
Those who had not received any work, lay, squatted, or strolled
around the dusty yards when they were not standing in line somewhere
or waiting for something. Many tried to read, to learn new languages,
and so on. In fact, one could always see people walking about the yards
mumbling to themselves, with their fingers stuffed into their ears. They
were memorizing vocabularies or rules of grammar. Others would be
sitting about on piles of broken bricks, giving and receiving language
lessons. There was little profit in all such things, however, and most of
us soon gave them up. You simply could not get your mind to work in
all that sunlight, dust, and noise. Merely to sit by yourself and doze was
equally impossible. You were always disturbed; someone always had
something important to tell you or else felt an urgent need of advice. If
you got rid of one, another was sure to turn up. Even if you were not
molested for a moment or so, any concentration was out of the question
with the everlasting comings and goings all around you.
So there was nothing left but to talk the whole livelong day, and of
the same things always, the same little hopes and the same big worries.
Optimists were optimistic, pessimists pessimistic, and the in-betweens
listened to the optimists one day and to the pessimists the next. Always
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there were the same complaints at the senselessness of the whole thing,
the same execration of French inefficiency, the same boiling resentment
against a France that we had all loved so warmly at the beginning. There
were those, of course, who made an effort even in that situation to
understand and forgive the internment policy of the French, but there
were evident traces of strain.
Newspapers were barred; letters came at rare intervals and during the
first four weeks not at all—we were cut off from the outside world. The
result was an unending series of rumours both as to our own situation
and as to the political and military situation in general. They sprouted
in the early morning as we assembled in lines in front of the latrines.
They gained in strength and in substance as the sun rose higher. By three
in the afternoon they had blossomed out into facts. Around four they
began to fade. At six they were dead. At half-past six one man would be
denouncing another for having believed the rumour and passed it on.
Then the next day the same thing over again.
The man who caught a rumour fairly early before the others got hold
of it thought himself very important. That was probably why our two
interpreters enjoyed such great prestige. They had been chosen from our
midst—they were internees like ourselves. They had a hard job. They
acted as intermediaries between ourselves and the camp authorities.
They were the ones to make the commandant’s orders known. We had
to use their services when we wanted to see the commandant. The squad
leaders got our mail through them, and when anything went wrong
they were reproved by the officers and abused by us internees. On the
other hand—and this was probably their great compensation—they
were constantly being questioned by everybody as to the ever-shifting
prospects of the group as a whole and of the individuals in it. It was
taken for granted that they were always in close touch with the camp
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commandant and therefore learned about everything of interest at the
source. They were told nothing at all, of course. People would sometimes
tell me importantly that they had heard this or that from the interpreter,
who had it straight from the commandant, and I was always reminded of
an amusing story from the First World War, the story of Pierre, Marshal
Foch’s chauffeur. Pierre was always besieged by his comrades with:
“Pierre, when is the war going to end? You ought to know!”
Pierre tried to satisfy them. “The moment I hear anything from the
Marshal, I will tell you.”
One day he came.
“The Marshal spoke today.”
“He did? Well, what did he say?”
“He said: ‘Pierre, what do you think? When is this war going
to end?’”
The interpreters at any rate felt very important in their role as Pierres.
Indeed, the man who had just heard something from the interpreter
thought of himself as a sort of little Pierre and correspondingly
important. Many thought they would be losing prestige if they were
not the first to know everything. When they heard a new rumour, they
would declare, quite untruthfully, that they had known it all along.
So we stood around and talked the livelong day. Within a week’s
time everybody had told everybody else everything he had to say.
Nevertheless, there they were any number of them who scurried busily
around, earnestly inquiring whether somebody had seen somebody else,
for they had something of great importance to communicate to him.
Of course it could not be said that all the talk was equally empty. I
have previously alluded to my conversations with those very cultivated
gentlemen from Vienna on the subjects of painting, poetry, and music.
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But there were people from all walks of life with whom profitable
intercourse was possible.
I recall in particular Herr H. and his son. Herr H., a small man, gentle,
approachable, had been a reader in a Berlin publishing house. Neither
the First World War nor Hitler had operated to alter his temperament.
He had married a Frenchwoman. The eldest of his sons was an officer
attached to the French General Staff. Herr H. lived in the camp as
though it were the cosmopolitan Berlin of the year 1913. One could
never decide whether his smiling, head-bobbing sereneness indicated
profound philosophy or mere lack of comprehension. His younger
son had limped from childhood. He had been subjected to most trying
experiences at the beginning of the present war in a Paris internment
camp. In spite of his youth he was just as even-tempered as his father.
Both were agreeable souls, both thankfully enjoyed the thousand little
pleasures that brighten even the gloomiest existence—the fact, for
instance, that the bread seemed a little better today than yesterday, that
the water-ration was a little larger, that one could now buy cigarettes at
the canteen. It often struck me that father and son were trying to hide
their worries and anxieties behind the brisk, appreciative interest they
took in little things of that sort. The sufferings and humiliations of life
in the internment camp certainly took their toll on the father: he survived
only a few weeks after his release.
A man I especially enjoyed talking with was the writer R., who had
been born in Dalmatia. A tall, fine-looking man, he had always been a great
favourite with the women. Now in his fifty-second or fifty-third year he
was putting on weight and showing the effects of hard drinking. He was
a man of the world, spoke German, French, and English perfectly, was
at home in an incredible number of arts and sciences and passionately,
judiciously had read, mastered, and enjoyed all the great books of world
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literature. He was probably not a writer of any great importance. He
was a connoisseur with whom it was well worthwhile to talk. He drank
heavily, even in the camp. Heaven knows where he found the money or
the guile required for keeping so constant a supply of liquor. He was not
a strong man in any sense of the word. Tall and stately as he looked he
was inclined to avoid the final push, the courageous decision. One flash
of resolve and he could have escaped with us later on, but he lacked the
toughness and the decisiveness for such an adventure. He frittered his
intensity away in a sort of petty bustling that was applied to procuring
little comforts. He was, however, a man of knowledge, of taste and
charming manners. To chat with him was a solace and a pleasure.
For that matter I was almost always the gainer in conversations if I
could induce the person I was talking with to tell me something about
the work he had previously been doing for a living: a lawyer about his
cases, a physician about medical science and his practice, a real estate
dealer about land values. For a large part of what I know about people
and things I have to thank an art of listening which wise teachers taught
me early. Applying that skill in the camp, I learned all sorts of things—I
learned about the lumber business in France, about a certain brand of
fish food, of which one of my fellow-internees had a monopoly, about
sponge-fishing in Greece, about the effects conveyor-belt work has on
the workman, about the fireman’s technique of stoking in a large factory
boiler-room, about the human soul.
There were many painters there, painters of every sort and of every
degree of eminence—Max Ernst, for instance, one of the founders
of surrealism. There was also a portraitist of great reputation whose
dramatic style did not suit my taste. There were many doctors of any
and every school of medical thought. There were Catholic priests.
Dressed in their cassocks, with their round, fat Bavarian or Austrian
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faces, they looked like men in disguise. There were people who had had
dreadful experiences in the vast prison camp that the Nazis have made of
Germany and especially in the Nazi concentration camps. I listened to
them all with sympathy and with profit besides.
I am ever being tempted to write about the numberless different faces
and characters that one encountered in the camp. We were all living
under the same conditions and more and more as time went on we all
looked alike, thanks to the dust and the dirt, but each man’s personality
was visibly stamped upon him. We squatted side by side in a close pack.
We saw each other in every possible circumstance. Whether we liked it
or not we were involuntary witnesses to every man’s behaviour, to the
way he walked, the way he ate, the way he slept, the way he washed, the
way he put on his clothes. No one could hide anything from anybody.
We knew out of hand just what sort of fellow each person was—and
without asking him for his opinions. Everybody every day had to put up
with all kinds of little annoyances. The balanced man took them in his
stride, the irascible individual smashed his bricks, the quarrelsome and
dogmatic fellow insulted his neighbour, the good-natured soul tried to
help, the grab-all went on grabbing.
I remember an Austrian physician, a well-educated man who hid
his troubles behind a somewhat strained joviality. I remember another
Austrian, also a physician, very young, Dr. L., an especially agreeable
person, ever ready to help others, ever urging calm upon the impatient.
But on closer observation one recognized how nervously consumed he
himself was. Among the many writers was one who had proved himself
a good fighter in Spain and a good Marxist. He was constantly preaching
that the things that were happening, even the things that were happening
to us, were necessary and all contributed, in roundabout ways perhaps,
to progress. In spite of this conviction he was always having outbursts
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of black despair, devastating attacks of what the French call le cafard
and what Americans call “the blues.” I remember a young painter,
sophisticated, something of a spoiled child, but full of the joy of living,
who clung to every hope and every rumour even when everybody else
had abandoned them. I remember an architect in his late middle age,
obdurate, cantankerous, a congenital nihilist, a pessimist to the bitter
end about everything touching our own situation. He did his level best
to demolish every argument that a hopeful soul among us would put
forward; but let there be the slightest chance to do anything at all to
better our situation and he would be right on hand.
Such was our company by day and by night, and by day and by night
we talked and talked.
There was of course a good deal of political discussion. Workingmen
and peasants not seldom manifested considerable understanding in this
field, viewing things in a certain perspective. But I was being continually
astounded at the paltry, over-simplified motives to which most of the
other inmates of the camp attributed historic events, at the extent to
which their view of the whole was obstructed by their narrowly personal
interests, at their utter unwillingness to face the unpleasantness involved
in looking at larger causations even from a distance, let alone from near
at hand. “An experience opens many windows,” an Anglo-Saxon writer
once said. That seems to me only partly true. For my comrades in the
camp who came from the middle classes most windows remained closed
in spite of their experiences—those windows at least that afforded a long
view of the events of our time.
The midday meal came very early, about eleven o’clock. It was
usually a lentil or bean soup with some meat in it.
The food could not be called poor exactly. It suffered somewhat in
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flavour from the bromides that were added to it to lessen sexual appetites.
What annoyed me more particularly was the general hurly-burly
of the meals. We could not afford many eating utensils—there was no
place to keep them and no water to wash them. We had to use the same
receptacle for all the food we received, an aluminum cup that one could
never get entirely clean. The morning coffee tasted of the fat in the
evening soup, the evening soup of the morning coffee. Soup and coffee
were both ladled out of the pot that each squad had in common. They
were hot when we got them. The aluminum cup heated through instantly
and it was especially hard for my clumsy self to carry the hot cup safely
to my place. Most of the men sat on their straw piles on the floor. The
dust got into everything. A thin layer of it always floated over the soup.
“Dust shalt thou eat—and like it,” was an often heard quotation. There
was a quarrel somewhere in the room at every meal, someone contending
that he had not received his due share. It was all very unpleasant.
We had been promised a canteen from the very first, and in about ten
days it was really opened. It was poorly stocked and one could procure
things there only with difficulty. It was strictly reserved for members
of the Foreign Legion during the forenoon; we others could not apply
until twelve o’clock, and by that time as a rule nothing was left. The
Legionnaires had bought the place out with the idea of reselling at a
profit. If you had money, not only were you able to eke out the regulation
meals with food purchased directly or indirectly at the canteen, but soon
all sorts of food and drink were being smuggled into camp, especially
by the guards. The little village of Les Milles had a sudden and very
considerable spurt in business. But not only Les Milles. For the whole
region including Aix, our camp, which had now grown to two thousand
men, was a windfall. Underground trading grew steadily in volume.
Twice a week a farmer drove to camp to collect our garbage for his
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pigs—potato peelings and the like. The man brought pork with him,
cooked, sliced, and carefully weighed out into packages that were
wrapped in newspapers. We had to make our purchases furtively when
the guard had turned his back. There was thus no time for examining the
goods—we had to take everything on faith. The prices were high, but
the farmer was an honest man and what one found inside the newspaper
wrappings, though blindly bought, always corresponded in quantity and
quality to the price asked.
What I missed especially was vegetables. There were scarcely any
of any sort. Fruits, greens, lettuce were sadly wanting. Two dried figs
(or else plums) and two small leaves of lettuce once a week—otherwise
nothing but dried peas, beans, and lentils. Such a diet was not calculated
to improve one’s health. I suffered severely under it. On one occasion
my hankering for fresh vegetables drove me to a business transaction that
may seem surprising. One of the inmates had managed to procure some
tomatoes. I traded a can of lobster for one of them and we both were
content with the bargain.
As a rule my two “valets” kept me lavishly supplied with food. I say
“two,” for I had acquired a second servant meanwhile. He, like Karl,
was an Austrian. He had been a restaurant-keeper. Of his experiences
in the concentration camps of Buchenwald and Dachau he told ghastly
stories and exhibited scars from the maltreatment he had undergone. He
had occasional fainting spells and attacks of dizziness which could be
attributed to the hardships he had been subjected to. On account of them
he had come to expect a good deal of consideration; far too much, many
people thought. He was always talking of what he had gone through,
and before long when he would come and tell us that he had fainted for
the second time on a given day no one manifested any sympathy. He
deserved sympathy nevertheless, and when he begged me to take him on
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as a servant, I could not refuse. On the other hand, I did not want to give
up my Karl, so I invented ways to keep them both busy. They divided the
little chores of my daily living between them.
They could not endure each other. The restaurateur was always
expressing amazement at Karl’s inefficiency. How was it he found so little
food for me? Karl on his side would explain at length how thoroughly
the other man was trimming me by over-charging on the sugar, mineral
water, and other things that he was having smuggled in. Karl could not
understand why I did not put a stop to it, and he would make frequent
point of delivering to me in the other man’s presence something or other
that the latter had previously been buying, mentioning two or three
times, loudly, the much lower price that he had paid.
Between the two of them at any rate I had plenty to eat, with the
exception of fruit, lettuce, and other green vegetables. The food we
smuggled into camp had to be quickly consumed on account of the
inspections and on account of the rats.
I may already have said that there were six or eight café owners
among the internees and they were still doing business at, so to say,
their old stands. They had managed to procure—heaven knows from
where—supplies of tea and coffee, and they offered these beverages for
sale after the midday meal at various points about the camp. Salesmen
of theirs would circulate among us: “Coffee [or at other times tea] now
being served. Room Two [or Room Three] in the rack on the south side.
Get your cup right away. Inspection due at any moment.”
There would be watchers aplenty to warn of a guard’s approach.
The various café men carried on a sharp competition with one another
and spoke disparagingly of one another’s drinks. As in the establishments
they had formerly managed, they went about among their customers
welcoming with deep bows those who had honoured them with their
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patronage. “Good day, Herr Professor, everything satisfactory?” One
of them even received a smuggled newspaper which we were allowed to
peruse for a moment if we bought our coffee from him.
A cup of coffee was cheap, about two cents. Many people could
not afford coffee even at that price and went without unless invited
by others. Though we were all living under the same conditions,
differences between poor and rich soon became evident. The man who
had money to spend could procure no end of comforts that the poor
man had to forgo.
Noontime brought dreary hours. With our meal fixed at eleven, we
were left with three empty hours ahead before roll-call sounded again.
Most of the men tried to take a midday siesta. That was not my
practice; I was anxious to save all my sleepiness for the night. Even
had I wanted to sleep, I could not have done so. Our semi-dark room
was always in a hubbub, with people stumbling over one, with bricks
falling and breaking. Yet there were always those who did not allow the
discomforts of the room to keep them from playing cards. They would sit
on their little piles of bricks, slam the cards down on other piles of bricks
or on an unsteady board, shouting, wrangling. Cards were virtually
illegible from the dirt. Winnings and losses were settled with promissory
notes drawn against such times as the camp authorities should make the
small repayments from deposits. In one of the alcoves between the racks
a number of orthodox Jews squatted or stood, praying or “learning,”
their heads bent low over the Scriptures or the Talmud. And in all that
uproar men who were sick would lie on their straw piles and groan, and
men who were well would lie on their straw piles and snore.
Sometimes I tried to read, but that would not work. It was all too
noisy, too hot, too dusty. So I would spend the time wandering about the
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yard or else sitting on my bench in a half-doze, or I would squat with bent
back on a brick pile in front of the barbed wire in the vibrant sunlight.
Procedure at the two o’clock roll-call was the same as at the first. It
was if anything harder to keep us occupied during the afternoon than
it was in the forenoon. They had us move bricks around to no purpose
whatever, or else dig in the ground. But even at that only a few of us
could be provided for. The rest—and they were the great majority—
walked round and round the yard in a more and more industrious tedium.
There were four barbers among us, all told, some one of them
could be seen doing business almost anywhere. They were necessarily
not very clean—they had little soap and little water—but at any rate it
was a change to get shaved. Many men went to the barber’s daily, some
twice a day. You sat on a pile of crumbling bricks, with a crowd of men
standing around in a circle talking. With us as in all places at all times,
the “barber-shop” became the centre of gossip and rumour. Sometimes
as you squatted there the pile of bricks would give way under you, but no
one laughed at that by now; it was an old story. One merely stood around
talking, arguing, stimulated, earnest, but at the same time bored.
The call to supper sounded at five o’clock. The fare was scantier than
at eleven. Sometimes there was just a bit of dubious sausage, a bit of
cheese, and a sardine.
But the hour following was a rather pleasant time. It began to grow
cooler around six o’clock. The wind fell and it became possible to stay
out in the yards. The atmosphere improved. One felt more confident,
more hopeful. There was less anger in the air.
There chanced to be a good number of trained football players
among us and they would get up a game—as much of a game as the
grounds allowed. On one occasion the ball went over the wall. A soldier
was standing on guard with his bayonet fixed, watching the game. The
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players asked him for permission to go out and throw back the ball. The
soldier said that it was strictly forbidden, that he could not allow it, but
that if someone would hold his gun for him, he would climb over the
wall and bring the ball back. And so he did.
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THE FIRST NIGHT
A painful moment came when the bugle sounded: “All indoors!”
Black through the wide doors the interior of the building yawned.
Unjoyously the prisoners crowded in, urged on by the keepers, good-
natured fellows who, on this occasion, could become very gruff. Inside
the building one pushed and shoved first through the corridor of
catacombs on the ground floor, then up the narrow wooden steps to the
floor above. Here and there a weak electric light shone faintly, making us
only more conscious of the dark.
Preparing for the night was not a pleasant task. Karl was there to
help me. My valise, as I have explained, separated me from the straw pile
of the man at my head. On it I set my shoes, placing my watch and eye-
glasses inside of them (without glasses I am helpless).
Half an hour after the “All indoors!” signal, the bugler sounded a
second command: “Lights out!” In the interim we talked. My neighbour
on the right, the mechanic from the Saar, felt constrained evening after
evening to open his heart to me. He suffered from the confinement,
longed for his French wife, longed for his work. The firm that employed
him was making every effort to have him released, but it was getting
nowhere with the military authorities. The thought that he had to sit
there to no purpose whatever would not let him sleep.
My neighbour on the left also grew very eloquent in the evening.
He was a biologist. Slight of frame, of delicate health, he bravely made
the best of a serious case of asthma using a bitter, ironical humour. He
talked politics objectively, dispassionately, and I have to thank him for
much new and interesting information in his special field, the theory
of heredity.
So then: “Lights out!” We had to turn them off ourselves, and we
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were in no great hurry. Eventually one of the three anaemic lights in the
great room would go out, then a second. The last would go on glowing
until impatient voices finally demanded that it be extinguished. If the
delay were too long a harsh warning would come from the French
guards in the yard.
The darkness we dreaded would straightway be filled with quarrels
and bickerings as to whether the unbarred portion of a given window
should be closed or left open. Some would declare that they could not
stand the stench if the window were closed; for others it would get
too cold and too draughty if the window were open. “Window open!”
“Window closed!” It lasted a good quarter of an hour every night, and
the disputing grew increasingly vehement.
The window problem settled, there would always be a few dozen
people who would keep on talking in the dark. They would laugh, talk
business, exchange obscene jests. They had done nothing but talk all day
long; now they needed the night for more talk. A chorus of voices would
shout, implore, threaten: “Quiet! We want to sleep.”
But there was to be no quiet. Tempers were overstrained, people were
quarrelsome. Some kind of dispute was always going on. Someone had
jostled someone, somebody had stepped on somebody, somebody was
taking up too much room. Not seldom the wrangling would go too far.
Then from an entirely different quarter in the dark a brutal voice would
suddenly rise: “I’ll put an end to that now!” and one would hear someone
charging the whole length of the room over protesting sufferers toward
the wranglers.
There was no period during the whole night that could be described
as quiet. It was one round of complaints, oaths, insults from the trodden
as no end of treaders went stumbling through in the dark to or from
the toilets.
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It was indeed an adventure to get to the toilets in the dark. As I have
said, there was no light at all, on the whole second floor. One had to pick
one’s way through a narrow lane between the sleepers, then at the proper
point try to find a broader but very irregular lane that led to the right
between more sleepers to the wooden stairs up which a faint glimmer of
light forced a passage from the floor below. Going down the stairs one
made a left turn and on the ground floor followed a ray of light till one
finally came to the four indoor latrines.
These four latrines were kept strictly closed during the day. At night
they were icy cold. All night long men stood waiting in line before them.
We waded ankle-deep in excrement. The return trip was, if anything,
more perilous still. It required time, exertion, and nerve to grope one’s
way up the stairs in the dark to one’s own straw pile. I never could make
it at one try myself. I would inevitably land on the wrong straw pile, to
be thrust off by its startled and angry occupant. My neighbour on the left
tried to help me by holding out his raincoat as a sort of sign-post, but I
could never get my fingers on the thing. My neighbour on the right was
seldom asleep. Hearing me stumbling or creeping about, he would call to
me in a muffled voice: “This way, this way.”
During an attack of dysentery I had to make that trip several times
every night for a whole week.
Quite aside from this dreadful journey our nights were hideous
and even the hardiest among us were unable to get sound sleep. One
had a downright feeling that the room was peopled with tormenting
apparitions. Fears that one had managed to dispel during the daytime, by
use of common sense and will-power, towered before one again vapoury,
gigantic in the grunting, malodorous night. That was the experience of
the majority. If I whispered: “Are you asleep?” my neighbour on the
right and my neighbour on the left would whisper back: “No.” When,
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with the early dawn, the first rays broke through the cracks in the
wooden shutters, I saw the outline of my little proletarian side-partner
crouching wretched among his worries on his straw pile, while to my left
the biologist would be lying flat with wide-open eyes.
All night long the cold dark room was filled with noises of the snorers,
the flatulent. Here a cough that was more like a bark, there a gasp as
someone struggled for breath, there a groan, there someone cried out in
his sleep. Here a man groped toward another to console him, there a low
voice would be heard calling for one of the many physicians among us.
Many who could not sleep at all groped their way down into the
catacombs to stand around in the full light near the latrines. As many
as two hundred men would sometimes assemble there, and in case of
an inspection one could always say one was going to the toilet. There
was something weird, pitiful, ludicrous about those nightly gatherings
of men of all sorts in their tattered nightclothes, many of the older men
with funny nightcaps on their heads. Excitedly, but in whispers, they
debated questions that had already been discussed all day long. If voices
grew too loud, curses and threats would be sure to come out of the
adjoining corridor, where the Legionnaires were quartered.
My neighbour on the right, the biologist with asthma, groped his way
down to that company every night. The Dalmatian writer R. was also
usually to be found in the catacombs in the early hours of the night,
clutching a bottle of wine under his arm and inviting all his acquaintances
to have a drink. Not a little business was transacted down there. While
their comrades nearby lay cursing at our noise, Foreign Legionnaires
tried to dispose of the commodities they had snapped up in the canteen
in the forenoon. On the floor of that Bourse also the café men negotiated
with the kitchen workers to make sure of their supply of hot water for
the next day. Business was in the air everywhere in the catacombs.
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The real centre of the trading was an Austrian of some years. He had
been a barber and a barber of fame and repute. He had scraped the chins
of several archdukes and, I believe, of one emperor. He averred—and
seemingly on good grounds—that nothing human was alien to him and
that he knew all the ropes. In any event, he was able to supply a most
varied assortment of articles to anyone who could pay for them: small
folding-chairs, blankets, wine. He was boasting one night that he could
smuggle everything and anything into camp.
“Well, then,” asked the Dalmatian writer, “can you get a riding-
horse for me?”
“Of course,” said the barber, “but, you understand, a pound at
a time.”
I did everything I could to make sure of a good sleep at night. I
exercised all day long and sat down as seldom as possible. In spite of
that I often had to be satisfied with three or four hours’ sleep, and I could
get no more than five or six on my best nights. The rest of the time I lay
awake in the midst of all the snoring and grunting, within me an impotent
exasperation at the wretchedness and indignity of my situation. Reason
was of no avail. I could say to myself: “At this very moment, now, people
in every country in the world sit reading my books about the barbarism
of the Nazis, filling their hearts with wrath at those barbarians; but here
am I lying in wretched confinement, beyond the human pale, suspected
of being a confederate of those barbarians!” Anger at the senselessness
of my situation, at the stupidity of French bureaucracy, filled me to
the very pores. My intelligence failed to offer the argument that I was
dealing not with individual men but with a system.
I would try to invent distractions, strive to recast Latin, Greek, or
Hebrew verses in German, playing all those mental games that an older
generation used to call “exercises of the wit and intelligence.” I would
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try to figure out just when I had done certain things for the last time. I
am fifty-six years old and even before my internment I would sometimes
ask myself: “Is this the last time I shall do this?” In reading a book that
I liked, I would ask: “Is this the last time I shall read this book?” And
I would have the same habit with pictures that I saw, with clothes I was
taking out again to put on, with music that I heard, with people I met.
After all, unwittingly, unforeseen, we take leave of something every day
of our lives.
So now during my sleepless nights in the straw and the dirt of Les
Milles, I would ask myself: “When did I go bathing in the sea for the last
time? This woman, that woman, when was I with her for the last time?
When did I read Shakespeare for the last time?”
A camp comrade had told me that he had once seen a performance of
one of my plays. Though it had been long ago he still remembered every
detail of the plot and questioned me eagerly about certain incidents.
I could give him no information. I knew much less about the play
than he did. I had wholly forgotten even the plot sequence. The thing
preoccupied me and during those sleepless nights I made many tests to
see how far my memory could still be trusted.
In my younger days I had been made to memorize a great deal, some
of it useful, much of it useless. My memory was trained in every way.
Testing it now I came to see more clearly than ever before to what an
enormous extent it functioned arbitrarily, as by a will of its own. With
an alarming obstinacy it would refuse to share with me important things
which I knew perfectly well, while, spontaneously, importunately, it
would prattle to me about things that I did not care to remember at all.
A lifetime’s experience has failed to lessen my wonder at the
wonders of memory, the most singular function of the human spirit.
I can remember—and I dare say that is the way with everybody—my
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meetings with people who are quite indifferent to me so exactly that I can
specify every minutest detail. Faces that were dear to me have vanished
utterly from my mind. No psychological analysis, however thorough,
has explained the how and why of this.
During my sleepless nights at Les Milles my memory seemed to me
unusually despotic. All of us in camp had a feeling that our memories
were failing. We attributed the symptom to the bromides that were
mixed into our food.
In earlier and quieter times I had been amused rather than not when
my memory failed me on occasion. Now during those terrible nights
it drove me into an impotent fury. And my fury only increased at the
fact that there were no books, and especially no books of reference, to
fill in the gaps in one ’s balky memory, that one had to depend upon the
chance knowledge of one ’s comrades, especially on the learning of the
Austrian polyhistor.
It was amazing how soon we all adapted ourselves to circumstances
in the camp. Hard as it was for many to make the shift from their
ordinary manner of living to the primitive conditions that prevailed at
Les Milles, after a few days they were behaving as though they had been
there for years.
The fact is we all “went flat,” we were deadened. Discomforts and
indignities, our own or others’, that would have enraged us a short time
before we now accepted resignedly with a shrug of the shoulders. Before
long we were not even noticing them.
That had been the case also in the Nazi concentration camps. Many
of the men at Les Milles had made compulsory acquaintance with
those camps, especially the camps at Dachau and Buchenwald. They
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all agreed in assuring me that they had so often been forced to attend
executions, whippings, and the like, that witnessing such horrors finally
ceased to make any impression whatever upon them. With punishments
in progress before their eyes they had discussed petty details of their
everyday living, or exchanged funny stories. One man told me that a
prisoner died under the lash in his presence and that, though nearby, he
failed to notice it—he had been bargaining with the man next to him for
a piece of chocolate. How that could have been, he now failed to grasp.
But so it had been, and they all told the same story.
For my own part I have often experienced sudden changes in fortune
of extraordinary moment. When I think them over, I am unfailingly
astounded at the speed with which at times I have adapted myself to new
surroundings. In the camp at Les Milles I observed again in myself and
in others how very quickly the human being becomes acclimated.
Among us were men who had led pampered, fastidious lives, who
had gone into a fury if they could not get their customary bath salts on a
journey, who had thought it an iniquity of Fate if their favourite vintage
of wine gave out. Now at Les Milles they changed overnight. Their hopes
and fears narrowed in scope. They came to have the same exigencies, the
same enjoyments as the workingman at their side. I believe I have said
that individuals probably changed very little in basic character. All the
same, a detached observer might well have noted that we, the inhabitants
of the camp, all made up a single, unified mass, each of us very like the
other. We were each as different as could be, but we were obeying the
same laws and these made us more similar. An American physicist has
shown that the motion of the electron within the atom obeys laws other
than those governing the atom of which it is a part. In other words, the
atom as a whole obeys other laws of motion than the electrons of which
it is composed. That perhaps gives a picture of the relationship in our
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case of the individual to the whole of which he had become a part.
Proud or modest as we may have been, coarse or polished, dull or
brilliant, broad-minded or narrow-minded, all our thoughts revolved
around the same few problems of daily living, the wants and fears of
all of us were identical. “What’s the supper tonight?” “Is the sifting
commission coming to camp tomorrow after all?” “Will the canteen
soon be selling mineral water?” “When shall I ever get a newspaper to
read again?” “When shall I ever get a letter from my wife?” “No apple,
no lettuce—at any price?” “Oh, for a real wash!”
But that was just what one could not have. We grew more ragged
and dirty, and however much we may have differed in background or in
character, we ended up by being one vast homogeneous mob of ragged,
dirty wrecks.
We were not allowed to receive visitors. So far as the members of
our families were not French citizens, they could not come to see us
anyway, since a special permit to leave one’s town of residence was
required and could be obtained only in very special cases. We received
practically nothing through the post. Letters went by way of Paris for
the censor and were weeks on the way. Few of us had any idea at all
where our wives and children were. In view of what had taken place in
northern France we could only surmise that they too had been placed in
internment camps.
For many of those interned, their wives’ internment also spelled
financial ruin, since they had built up small businesses of one sort or
another which their wives were looking after. If they, too, were put under
lock and key all was lost. One man owned a fruit orchard. Harvest time
was coming on. What would become of the crop? Another ran a rabbit
and chicken farm. Who would look after his animals if his wife, too,
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were shut up? One could take an oath that neither the fruit-grower nor
the rabbit-breeder belonged to the Fifth Column. Such cases brought
the whole deplorable stupidity of the internment decree into a clear and
lamentable light.
Even for the well-to-do preoccupation with the ways and means of
keeping up a bare existence became a burning torment. Bank deposits
were frozen. Many men had drawn out money at the last moment and
given it to their wives for safekeeping. What were the wives to do with
it now? If they had been interned it would certainly be taken from them.
And wives who were sick, what about them? Many in fact were ill
or else run down through the hardships of exile. Would they be able to
stand the strain of detention? And what would become of the children?
Soldiers were saying that even the children had been interned at
Marseille. They were being quartered with their mothers in a suburban
hotel that had been turned over for the purpose by its owner. Later on
they would be transferred to the Pyrenees.
One of the men in camp had a child with diabetes. If the child were
not treated in a certain way, it would be lost. The man, an apothecary,
had a horror of French hospitals and recounted hair-raising stories of
filth and inefficiency. If his wife should keep the child’s illness secret in
order not to be separated from it, she would lose no chance of nursing
it properly. Were the child to be sent to a hospital it would be lost, the
father was sure. He was virtually insane from worry.
Those among us who were married to Frenchwomen were better off.
Such wives were not interned, nor were they subject to the annoying
“special regulations,” countless in number, which governed the wives of
the others. They could travel, they could even try to see their husbands.
Husbands of these French wives could not praise their devotion and
loyalty highly enough. They counted on their doing everything possible
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to get in touch with them, and for the most part were not disappointed.
These Frenchwomen came to Les Milles, almost all; from near and far
they came. But visits were strictly forbidden once and for all, and the
orders were sustained by such severe penalties that the guards did not
dare to permit meetings between husbands and wives.
So the women would appear, sometimes after long journeys, outside
the iron fence and the barbed wire. They would walk up and down
the hot, dusty highway hour after hour, day after day, only to catch a
glimpse of their husbands’ faces, perhaps for half a minute. Sometimes
they would be allowed to see one of the camp officers, sometimes they
were allowed to send in a message—after it had been carefully censored
and adjudged harmless. Often enough, perhaps four or five times a day,
one would hear someone call hurriedly, importantly: “Mr. X., your wife
is here!” Mr. X. would rush to a window to try to catch a glimpse of
her, or he would clamber up on one of the high stacks of brick (it would
keep falling down under him), or his friends would shove him up as high
as they could so that he could peer over the wall, which was a hundred
feet or more distant. If Mr. X. was so fortunate as to recognize his wife
and she him, he would be sure to shout something to her that she would
fail to understand. So they would go on shouting back and forth till the
guards came and shooed the wife away, and Mr. X. would be ordered
indoors from the yard. It was always a heart-rending scene.
On one occasion a good-natured guard smuggled a five-year-old
boy, the child of one of these French wives, into camp to see his father.
The latter had been a prominent resident of Marseille. Here he now
went around ragged and unkempt like the rest of us. The little boy,
very pretty, the picture of neatness, gazed at his father in astonishment.
Wouldn’t his father come home now, he begged. Mamma too was
waiting out on the road. The father thought up a rather far-fetched
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story: he was an officer there and had to keep an eye on us. We all joined
in and played the game, showing the father all manner of respect. The
child was partially comforted.
I have already reported that bodily functions were necessarily
performed among us in the most public way without trace of
embarrassment. This compulsory lack of physical modesty may have
had something to do with the fact that many were not at all shy about
baring their souls as well. Even in quiet times many people are tempted
to let down the bars in the presence of a writer, thinking of him as a sort
of father-confessor. They like to confide to him their secret tribulations
and hopes, their hidden prides, private feelings of inferiority that they
normally conceal. Such people literally overwhelmed me in the camp
at Les Milles with confessions on all sorts of subjects, even the most
intimate. They usually coloured their experiences, making themselves
out now better, now worse than they had really been. At times these
distortions would reach the absurd.
The sojourn in the camp brought out another trait in many people—
an abnormal irascibility. We were crowded so close together and for so
long a time that friction was continual. The man who was your friend
today became your enemy tomorrow. Vanities were ever being ruffled.
People were prone to think they were being cheated, or that good turns
they had done were being poorly repaid. Quarrels in almost every case
had the most trivial causes. One man had borrowed another’s share of
water one morning on promise to return the favour the day following.
He had failed to make good. One man had given a slice of sausage to
another, counting vainly on a like courtesy in return. Altercations were
loud and shrill; then, twenty-four hours later, both parties would be
ashamed at the extravagant waste of words and emotions.
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Chief among the causes of dispute were bargains that were
concluded in the field of camp business. Every conceivable commodity
was bargained for. The daily food rations were bought and sold. Men
sold their places in the lines at the canteens or even at the latrines. Each
of us could post a letter every two weeks. You could buy that privilege
of another and mark your letter with his name once you were sure your
correspondent would recognize your handwriting.
Although newspapers were forbidden, a few were smuggled in by
bribes to the guards. Commercial talents would get hold of a copy and
rent it out ten, twenty, thirty times. So it would happen that for a paper
that had cost him a franc or a franc and a half a man could make thirty
or forty francs. A little knot of people would gather about a newspaper
in a corner, while a number of others would keep watch to give timely
warning of the eventual approach of an officer. The paper’s owner
would watch the clock to be sure his customer did not overstep the two
minutes bargained for. The customer would read aloud—probably to
the renter’s rage.
The wildest altercations were those in which one or more members
of the Foreign Legion participated. The Legionnaires were also the
wildest traders. There was not a little rabble among them, but when
one knew them better many of them were not at all bad fellows. And
it must have angered all of them that France should be treating them
in that manner. Later on the French guards were replaced with Arab
soldiers and indignation over the situation in which France had placed
these Legionnaires of hers became general. They had conquered those
Moroccans and now had to submit to being guarded by them as prisoners.
Many Legionnaires were coarse of speech. They boasted monstrously
in tales of their battles. They were greedy for money. But they were
also brave and, after their fashion, honourable. Two Legionnaires made
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a deal with an elderly gentleman whereby for a consideration of three
thousand francs they would help him to escape and to reach a certain
place. The man paid a thousand francs down and they gave him loyally
the promised aid, sharing the comforts and discomforts of the journey
with him. The thing went so far that on stealing a bag of gold coins from
a mail car they honestly offered him a third share. A noisy lot of insolent
bullies, these Foreign Legionnaires, brave, tough, boastful, predatory—
multi-coloured, in a word, like the many medals which the Republic had
pinned on their chests.
Noticeable as were the differences between rich and poor in the
camp, there was little class snobbery. The groupings into which we
automatically divided were formed with reference to other than property
criteria. They were made on the basis of special and formally legal
considerations, in other words, on the basis of the chances of release an
individual had as indicated by his papers. We fell into one category or
another according to the claim we had, in the opinion of those among
us who were supposed to know, to being set aside in the vaunted sifting.
On the lowest rung of the social ladder were the holders of German
passports; on the next lowest, holders of Austrian passports. Better off
were such as held German or Austrian passports with visas for overseas.
One rung higher stood those of us who had married Frenchwomen, with
special distinction for the fathers of French sons who were serving in the
French army. Men of the Saar were well thought of because France had
promised them protection in very solemn and ceremonious language.
The real aristocracy fell into two groups: first, the Foreign Legionnaires
and, second, we who were stateless, since we had been recognized by
France as political refugees and enemies of Hitler. The various groups
eagerly weighed their chances as compared one with the other. In spite
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of all our disappointments, the rumour would not die down that the
next day or the day after the much-talked-of sifting and releasing would
begin and that one group or another would be the first to be considered.
Members of the privileged groups looked down in scorn on the wretched
holders of mere German or Austrian passports.
One who has passed his life as an inhabitant of a country that has never
been shattered by domestic revolution, by war, or by foreign military
occupation, knows nothing of the role that an identification paper or a
rubber stamp can play in a man’s life. It is usually a ridiculous scrap of
paper and a still more ridiculous rubber stamp apathetically applied by a
nondescript clerk. Yet how many thousands, tens of thousands, millions
of human beings go chasing after just such scraps of paper, just such
rubber stamps. How many thousands of intrigues, how much money,
how much nerve, how much life are wasted by thousands and thousands
of human beings in getting possession of them. How many swindlers get
a living by purveying, now legally, now illegally, just such stamps, just
such scraps of paper. How much happiness, how much unhappiness may
come from the legitimate or illegitimate possession of them.
In the struggle for papers lawyers play a great role. It is assumed
that they are competent guides through the labyrinth of administrative
regulations. Lawyers played a prominent role in our camp too. They
would explain solemnly that our detention was illegal and contrary to
international guarantees that France had given at the Évian Conference.
Accordingly, they drew up a document that made formal protest
against our internment with reference to that treaty. When it was set
before me for my signature I could only comment with a loud laugh.
How in those days could a man in his right mind think of appealing to
international guarantees? I suppose the human being has to cling to
some hope or other.
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The urge to be somebody spurred a number of our lawyers to
activity. Still other petitions were circulated. Some few individuals were
always getting themselves appointed representatives of some category
of internees or other, such as the Saarlanders or the fathers of French
sons. Then they would stand around importantly in groups, argue the
draft, and finally make a ceremonious call on the commandant, who
would listen courteously, promise to hand the document on, and, when
they had gone, toss it into the wastebasket.
Our relations with the guards were always pleasant. They were bored
and liked to talk with us. They would tell us what they had seen in the
newspapers or what they had heard over the radio—unfortunately with
no great understanding as a rule.
They were sceptical in general, having no faith in their government
and regarding the whole war as a swindle designed solely to make a few
rich men still richer. They thought of themselves not as soldiers, but
as poor devils who like us had been caught in the wheels of a stupid
machine. They were peasants, or artisans from small country towns, who
had been thrust into uniforms and who wanted nothing more than to go
home to their wives, their children, their chickens, their acres. Especially
good were the relations between the interned workingmen or peasants
and guards drawn from the same classes. One could often see one of
our men at the barbed wire chatting with the guard on the other side—
two neighbour farmers gossiping across a fence. Without much to-do on
the point those Germans and Frenchmen knew very well that they were
stewing in the same pot.
Our relationship to the officers was a peculiar one. Many of us at
some time or other had had business or social relations with men who
were now officers in the camp. There were those who had been friends
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of the hat manufacturer, now our jailer, and of the silk manufacturer,
his lieutenant. The captain had been their guest at dinner or they had
dined with the lieutenant in one or another of the good but unpretentious
hostelries in Marseille. These French gentlemen adapted themselves
admirably to the new situation. They were friendly but they kept their
distance. They were less like army officers than government officials
whom the ministry had entrusted with an unpleasant duty, and they were
now fulfilling it as well or as badly as possible.
I may remark at this point that neither during my first internment at
Toulon and Les Milles, nor during my second at Les Milles and Nîmes,
did I experience or witness anything that could be described as cruelty or
even as mistreatment. There was never a case of beating, of punching,
of verbal abuse. The Devil in France was a friendly, polite Devil.
The devilishness in his character showed itself solely in his genteel
indifference to the sufferings of others, in his je-m’en-foutisme, in his
inefficiency, his bureaucratic sloth.
More and more clearly as time went on we came to fathom the nature
of that Devil. A Devil of that sort was worse than a cruel, wicked Devil.
Cruelty and malicious cunning would have been easier to deal with than
this red-taped routine, this sloth. A fluid, mollusk-like creature, this
Devil in France! Squeeze him and he offered no resistance. He merely
contracted, only to ooze out again at some other point. He was the Bøyg,
the shapeless, unconquerable creature of Peer Gynt.
Few of us may have seen this clearly. We all sensed it. We kept on
saying that the sifting commission would be coming, but no one counted
on that seriously. Secretly, rather, we assumed that our situation was to
last and were making our accommodations accordingly. We accustomed
our ears to the grunting and the cursing, our palates to the bromide, our
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noses to the effluvium of the latrines. Yet our hearts would rebel at times,
our hearts would not admit that this dull, senseless existence could go on
without end.
Uncertainty as to what they would do with us became more and more
of a torture. No letters, no trustworthy news. All we could be sure of
was that the political and military situation of France was growing worse
from day to day.
We told ourselves that with events piling one upon the other in that
fashion the officers responsible for us would certainly have no time to
worry about our fate or to come to any decisions regarding it. We had
a paralysing feeling that we had been forgotten by the outside world.
Many among us wailed that we would rot and die where we were and no
one outside would be the wiser.
That was not my feeling. I had an unwavering faith that my friends
out in the world of freedom would not forget me.

99
Part Two
The Ships of Bayonne
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Cursed shalt thou be when thou comest in, and cursed shalt thou be when thou
goest out….The Lord shall cause thee to be smitten before thine enemies; thou
shalt go out one way against them, and flee seven ways before them….In the
morning thou shalt say, Would God it were even! and at even thou shalt say,
Would God it were morning!
At the beginning of this book I mentioned the little room on the ground
floor in Sanary where I kept my radio. I had most remarkable experiences
in front of that receiver. It was my connecting link with Germany, with
my homeland, with my hometown Munich. Voices of people, whom I
had not seen for a long time but had not forgotten, had a strange sound as
they came in over the air—voices of actors who had once had parts in my
plays but could now be heard declaiming Nazi oracles, broadcasts from
places one knew so well but which were now the scenes of loathsome
Nazi mass meetings. There I lay on my sofa, in the security of France,
listening with mixed emotions as some minister or other, some Nazi
official, stormed senselessly against me.
Out of that radio—shortly before I was forced to exchange my
attractive house for the internment camp—news of the collapse in
Belgium was blared at me. The Nazis made the announcement barbarously
effective. First the usual broadcast of victories, then a request:
“Keep tuned in. In about five minutes we shall bring you a special
bulletin of great importance.”
We waited uneasily. Then after the five minutes:
“Special dispatch from Army Headquarters. German troops have entered
the Belgian city of Louvain.” Then came that vulgarly animated tune:
Give me your hand, your little white hand,
For we’re sailing, we’re sailing ‘gin Engeland—
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One of the falsest songs in the world, false in its aping of the heroic
spirit of the medieval Hansa, false in its use of the far-fetched archaism
Engeland for England, false in its mawkish sentimentality—the bomber
pilot or the submarine mechanic bidding good-bye to his sweetheart. As the
lively, mendacious war song died away, the announcer’s voice came again:
“Keep tuned in. In a few moments we shall bring you another
special bulletin.”
Another five or ten minutes of anxiety slipped by, then the same
cheap tune was played again, after which the voice:
“German troops have entered Brussels, the Belgian capital.”
“Keep tuned in,” we were told for a third time. “We shall soon have
another special dispatch for you.”
A brief and thoroughly uncomfortable pause followed. Then again:
“W e’re sailing ‘gin Engeland...” and: “German forces have taken the fortified
coastal city of Antwerp.” Then Haydn’s noble strains for “Deutschland,
Deutschland über Alles” followed by Horst W essel’s vulgar Nazi anthem.
All this was but one of the many baleful foretastes of what we were
to hear later on in the internment camp. There we heard of the capture
of Amiens and Arras, of the German advance everywhere in the North,
of the fall of Boulogne and Calais. There we heard that the King of the
Belgians had ordered his soldiers to lay down their arms. There we heard
of a speech by the French Prime Minister in which he accused a long list
of French generals either of incompetence or of treason and removed
them from their commands.
All that we heard but vaguely, in sketchy outline. The newspapers we
managed to get hold of were days old, and the censored official reports
glossed over real situations. But we listened eagerly for the little we
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could learn, weighing and debating every word, poring over such maps
as we had smuggled in. Not a few of us turned war strategists and told or
foretold whats, hows, whys.
One thing was certain: the Nazis were pressing forward, the Nazis
were threatening Paris. If they took Paris, what would become of us?
It was ghastly to sit there in camp, helpless, imprisoned, unable to take
any step against the disaster that was drawing nearer or even to get any
definite information about it.
We could measure the growing success of the Nazis by the conduct
of their sympathizers among us. These were a small minority and so
far they had kept quiet. Now they could scent the way the wind was
blowing. They opened their mouths wide and declared triumphantly that
Paris could not hold out under any conditions, that France was done for.
One of the Nazis kept a little radio hidden in his straw pile and sneeringly
shared with us reports of Nazi victories that he received.
Things looked black for us, and the countless rumours made them
look still blacker.
I, for my part, was convinced that whatever might happen in France
would not decide the war. I was convinced that however great a success
Hitler’s people might win for the time being they would never come off
with the final victory. The Germans had not been able to hold out against
the whole world in the first war, neither could they in this one—that
seemed to me mathematically certain. So I kept saying to my comrades
over and over again. Convinced myself, I convinced others, though the
doomsayers would have their innings again the next day and I would
have to begin all over again.
Great as the disasters in the North were, people in the South of
France—and we along with them—were probably more interested in
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what Italy was going to do. We were only half an hour by plane from the
nearest Italian airfield. If Italy entered the war what would happen to us?
So far, during the full nine months of fighting the districts of the
South had seen few traces of war. Now suddenly it began to get under
our skins. Our officers were going around the camp with set, anxious
faces; the soldiers scowled and looked worried. They did not know how
they could deal with this new scourge.
We internees were set to digging bomb shelters to protect us from air
attacks. The man in charge of these works was a second lieutenant who
had been a town clerk in civilian life. He had not the slightest idea of
how a bomb shelter should be constructed. He made us dig deep, zigzag
trenches in the camp yard. There was not much room, and the trenches
ran in large part close to the main building. Experts among the internees
adjudged the work in progress hopelessly amateurish. Anyone taking
refuge in the trenches during a bombardment would surely be buried
under debris from the falling walls. These criticisms were laid before the
town clerk-lieutenant in very deferential language. Gruffly he brushed
them aside—he had been ordered to build air-raid shelters, and orders
were orders.
The camp command wanted the work done in a hurry, so we began
working in shifts. The ground was hard and the trenches had to be deep.
It was not easy work, but we enjoyed it, most of us, and the best of order
prevailed. We were glad enough to have something to do after the long
period of forced inactivity. We turned to with a will. Off came coats
and shirts—even the sleek-cheeked priests threw their cassocks aside—
and with picks, shovels, wheelbarrows, we began roboting around with
naked backs that soon were burned red in the blistering sun.
There seems to have been a French airfield near our camp, not more
than two miles away. A first bombing came two days after we had begun
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work—not from the Italians but from the Germans. The attack was
severe and stray bombs fell very close to us. The camp commandant
must have shared the views of our experts. He did not send us into the
shelters during the bombardment. He had us herded into the building,
barring the great door behind us as at night and closing the windows
entirely with wooden shutters. There we were, two thousand of us,
huddled together helpless in that dark death-trap. We waited with tense
nerves, expectant, anguished. Bombs exploded in the far distance, then
nearer, then far off again. Those of us who were near the windows
peered out through the cracks in the shutters. The yards were empty. We
felt that we had been deserted. Some of us had been through bombings
before. We could tell from the sounds what sort of bombs they were and
how far away they were striking.
We were locked up for more than four hours, the hours that crossed
noontime. No midday meal was served. We were alone inside the
building; no French guards, only internees. Our anger began to grow
and the lawyers among us led the chorus. To shut us up there in close
proximity to a military objective, an airfield, was, they explained, in
direct contravention of international law.
During these hours only the four toilets inside the building could
have been available, but, as I have said, they were kept locked during
the day and the Command had forgotten to order them opened. That
probably was what angered us most. Finally they were broken open. But
then the Foreign Legionnaires intervened. The toilets, they contended,
belonged to their domain and they demanded an entrance fee from
anyone who wanted to use them.
We all drew a deep breath of relief when at last the great doors were
opened again and we could return to the sunny yards.
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A second bombing came during the night of the same day, but it did
not seem so bad to us. During the attack at noontime the dark building
into which we had been locked, helpless, had seemed to us like one vast
common grave into which we had been thrown alive. At night it made
rather the impression of a dormitory. Most of the men were asleep by
that time and were not even awakened by the exploding bombs.
The following day an officer of higher rank came to inspect our
air-raid shelters. He ordered them filled in again. The senseless back-
breaking labour of scooping out that hard earth and then shoveling it
back again was a symbol of the whole inane perilous life that we led at
Les Milles. Its sole result was that the ground in the yards was now rough
and uneven.
The Nazis in the camp claimed to have heard on their secret radio a
German announcement that the High Command knew that some good
Germans were confined at Les Milles and had therefore ordered their
flyers to spare the brickyard.
More bombings came during the days following. We now knew that
all northern France was in the hands of the Nazis. We read of the French
Premier’s desperate appeal to America to help, to help immediately or
France would be lost.
Those were glorious June days, not too hot, not too windy. We stood
about in our dusty yards and debated eagerly amid mounds of earth,
the remnants of our effort to protect ourselves from the bombs. When
would the Germans take Paris? The capital had already been declared
an open city, which meant undoubtedly that it could not be defended.
The Nazis were seventy miles from Paris, no eighty, no forty-eight. Our
guards, good fellows that they were, were suddenly set to drilling. They
marched out four abreast, armed. Machine guns were put into position
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all around our camp. Everyone made sarcastic jests about these moves.
Our guards declared angrily that if the Italians came, they intended to
go home.
They could well enough go home—but what about us? From the
north the Germans were coming, from the east the Italians, and there
we were, locked up, helpless. Even if we succeeded in breaking out,
we would find ourselves in a land of enemies, driven hither and thither
between the armies of still worse enemies.
We made jocular calculations as to our chances of getting out of that
ugly fix with our skins whole. We took into account the war reports, the
psychological state of the country’s inhabitants, and our own physical
and technological capacities. We reached the conclusion that at that
moment the chances of a fatal outcome for any one of us were sixty
percent, the chances of getting free forty. Or rather, no! That ratio was
probably optimistic. Perhaps our chances of getting free should not be
put at more than thirty percent. Besides, each case was different. The
man who had worked openly against the Nazis, who had been attacked
by their officials in their newspapers, or been sentenced by their courts,
had of course a far smaller chance of getting out safely.
The traffic in newspapers was now flourishing. They were rare and
expensive. A group could be seen in every corner going over some
much-thumbed paper. The men would pay their francs and then move
on to another group where someone chanced to be reading a different
paper aloud. An officer would come strolling by and the newspapers
would vanish, to be brought out again the moment he had moved on.
Even our Nazis were now charging and getting money for passing on the
news from their radio.
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Italy declared war. The Germans crossed the Seine. France
disappeared as a nation.
New shipments of prisoners were arriving every day at our
brickyard—for the most part, people who had been interned in northern
camps and were now being transferred to camps in the South. But there
were not only internees. We were also getting refugees from Holland,
Luxembourg, and Belgium. Dead tired, they would squat about the yards
for a time and finally be marched off to get something to eat, leaving
their luggage scattered about in the dust and the sun, the shabbiest sort
of luggage, all they had left in the world.
Strictly speaking, we were not allowed to talk to the newcomers. But
discipline, never very severe in the camp, was now less than nothing. We
ignored the rule.
What we learned from them was terrifying. Those who came from
internment camps in Belgium told how they had been transported across
France in sealed cars. No one had paid any attention to the trains and the
occupants had been left without food or water. Their Belgian guards had
robbed them of everything they possessed. Not a few people had died
of exhaustion in the cars and the others had travelled on with the dead
bodies beside them. All reported that millions of French people were
rushing south in headlong flight. Railway tracks and highways were
jammed with them. There was a mad scramble for means of conveyance
and no trace of organization anywhere.
The transports of refugees from Holland, Luxembourg, and Belgium
did not, as a rule, stay with us very long, those from internment camps
in the North somewhat longer. These latter told almost incredible stories
of privations. They had been sent off at the last moment. Then came
unending journeys with the people now packed together in freight
cars, now standing upright in motor trucks, all day long, all night long,
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without food, without water to drink, in the dust of the roads under a
midsummer sun.
They were hardly better off with us. They were quartered on the
third floor of the main building, which was even less suited for human
habitation than the floor below, being almost wholly occupied by racks
for storing finished bricks with practically no free space at all. The
newcomers had to get along as best they could. There was hardly any
straw left. Many slept on the bare floor in the alleys between racks. The
flooring was loosely laid, with wide cracks between the boards. Shafts
for brick lifts ran from the ground floor all the way to the top of the
building. Holes everywhere therefore, and through them bits of straw
and countless small objects kept falling down upon our heads below.
The stairway to the third story was closed off at night. There was
only one toilet on that floor and it was without water. As a result, those
above provided for themselves wherever they happened to be, causing
an uproar on our floor that lasted till the guards interfered.
Our camp was now changing in physiognomy from day to day,
hundreds arriving, hundreds going away. Workers in the kitchen cursed.
Soup and coffee, well and good—but for two or for three thousand?
Old men and boys were conspicuous among the new internees. From
Luxembourg, for instance, came a seventy-nine-year-old man with two
grandsons, one fourteen, the other fifteen. They were now sharing the
same luck, the same hardships, the same worries. One also noted several
midgets from a troupe that had been about to start for South America
when French bureaucracy broke it up by detaining male members of it
who were of military age. For that matter, as I was told, the midgets were
all Nazis and were not a little pleased at the German victories.
We old-timers at Les Milles now came into our own. We enjoyed
visible favouritism from the camp authorities. As our officers put it,
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they at least knew who we were, good enemies of Hitler, devoted to
the French and detained on a mere legal technicality, whereas the flood
of newcomers brought not a few real spies and an enormous amount
of rabble. Nobody liked the new situation: the officers and guards
complained because they had much more work to do, we because the
new arrivals took up our elbow-room and our food and were always
getting in our way. Most absurd of all was the fact that we, the “oldest
inhabitants,” the permanent residents, considered ourselves the
aristocrats of the camp and looked down in utter scorn on this flotsam of
strange faces that came drifting in.
The new internees had many stories to tell of rank bureaucracy. A
young German of a well-known family of exiles happened to be a Czech
citizen. Living in Switzerland, he had taken the advice of the Czech
consul and started for France for the purpose of joining the Czech legion
in Paris for the war on Hitler. Not only did he have all the necessary
papers; he could show a warm letter of recommendation from the
French minister in Berne. On presenting his papers at the French border,
he was arrested and interned. Since then he had been shipped from
one camp to another and had never been allowed to get in touch with
anyone outside the camps. A young engineer of some reputation from
Yugoslavia was born in a province that had been Austrian before the
First World War. A rabid anti-Fascist, he had given up a good position in
Yugoslavia in order to volunteer for the French army. He, too, carried a
letter of recommendation from a French minister. He, too, was seized at
the border, interned, and thereafter shipped from camp to camp.
Many of the prisoners newly delivered wore French uniforms,
having been volunteers in the French army. They were “foreign labour
soldiers.” The initials T.E. (Travailleurs Étrangers) were stamped in
large black letters on the backs of their tunics. Jauntily on their heads
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sat the twin-peaked cap of the French soldier.
For that matter, coats and caps of the French army now glutted the
market and many of us took advantage of the opportunity to replace our
tattered clothing with odd pieces of uniforms. Our comrade Weinberg
bought a cap and looked funnier than ever in it. Short, pudgy, pleased, he
was still going about the camp in his dirty white pajamas, but now with
the grey-green cap cocked on one side of his head and with his little dog
barking and yelping around him.
The whole South of France was filled with rumours and panic.
Would the French make a stand on the Loire? Had Verdun fallen?
One thing was certain: at Les Milles there was no safety for us.
The Nazis had overrun the ramparts of France. In no time at all, they
would be in the Rhône Valley, close upon us. If we were to find safety
anywhere, it would have to be in the Southwest, in the Pyrenees. The
chances of our getting out of our trap with our skins kept dwindling. We
were quoting our hopes now at twenty, then fifteen.
Obviously something had to be done about it. We could not simply
sit there and wait for the Nazis to seize the camp. The French might
well have the best intentions of saving us, but we feared the carelessness
of the French authorities, their devilish shiftlessness, their disposition
to let things take care of themselves. We had had experiences in plenty.
We knew French bureaucracy. The French officials who were directly in
charge of us would never dare to take any step on their own responsibility.
They would wait for instructions from higher up, the higher-ups would
do the same, and in the end the Nazis would be upon us before the French
had come to any decision. If we did not help ourselves, no one would
help us.
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With new contingents steadily streaming in and out of the camp, and
with the guards being constantly changed, camp discipline had fallen
off appreciably. We did very much what we pleased. We had not been
allowed to stand in the part of the yard that led to the commandant’s
office. We now gathered in just that spot, and in groups of hundreds,
by way of showing the commandant our anxiety and our indignation.
We shouted, we gesticulated, debated. The guards made feeble efforts to
drive us back, but we paid no attention.
We decided to force the issue with the commandant and urge our
very serious remonstrances upon him. We could count a number of
professional politicians among us, well-known ones, and famous lawyers
aplenty. Legalists, formalists as always, they were still bent upon pointing
out that what was being done to us was contrary to law. They grew much
excited over the fact that our right to be removed from the danger zone
was explicitly guaranteed by international treaties—we came under the
jurisdiction of the Red Cross or something of the sort. There was more
talk about the Évian Conference and the international agreements that
had been reached there as to persons recognized as political refugees.
Thereupon several of them sat themselves down on little piles
of bricks and brittle laths, scribbled away eagerly, drew up petitions,
formed committees, polished up what they had written and decided on.
A delegation was to wait on the commandant and present our demands.
Even at that moment, when it was a question of life and death, there were
those who wanted to seem important. The composition of the delegation
and just what demands should be presented were matters of vociferous
argument. The Saarlanders, the Austrians, the Czechs, those who had
been recognized as political refugees, Germans who had been deprived
of their German citizenship, the husbands of French wives, the holders
of overseas passports—all wanted to be represented on the delegation,
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all insisted on being represented on it. Who should represent whom, and
what, after all, should we ask for?
In the end an agreement was reached. We should demand of the
French military authorities that, with as little delay as possible, they
remove such among us as were in danger beyond the reach of Hitler’s
advancing armies. The delegation would be made up of ten people. I
was urged to head it, since mine was the only name that meant anything
to the camp authorities. I did not consider myself very well suited to the
purpose, yet I found it hard to refuse.
With a noisy crowd assembled in the yard in front of the commandant’s
windows, we, the delegates, sent in our names to him. He answered that
he would see me alone.
I entered the little office. The officers of the camp were there, eight of
them, seated. There was no chair for me. In that bare little room, between
the eight silent uniforms, I stood in my rags and tatters, ill at ease.
“What can I do for you?” asked the commandant.
I did not like the look of things at all. It did not strike me as very fair
that those French gentlemen who held power in their hands should sit
there eight strong and leave me standing alone. Two or three thousand
of my comrades were waiting outside to hear what would happen. All
their hopes rested in me. A good idea came to me suddenly.
“Captain,” I said, “I am here to speak for two to three thousand of my
comrades in a very important matter. I consider my French inadequate to
the situation. I would be very grateful to you if you would allow me to
call in one of my comrades.”
“Very well,” answered the captain. “Whom will you have?”
I thought fast. “Monsieur S.,” I answered. Herr S. was an elderly
man, cautious. He was sent for.
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Some minutes passed before he arrived, unpleasant minutes
for me. Nobody spoke. The officers sat there. I stood facing the
captain across his ugly little writing desk, uncomfortable, not very
representative, I fear.
Herr S. came in.
“What can I do for you?” the captain said again.
Then I spoke, explaining the dangerous situation in which we found
ourselves. Many of us were wanted by the Nazis and under prosecution
in Germany. Several of us had death sentences hanging over us. In the
Nazi newspapers and radio speeches many of us were referred to as the
ranking enemies of the regime. We were lost if we fell into the hands of
the Nazis. We might have been able to save ourselves or could perhaps
still do so were we not obliged to sit helpless in the camp condemned
to wait in inactivity. I wasted no words. I spoke plainly, to the point.
I suggested that it was the duty of those who had forced us into that
situation to get us out of it.
When I finished, the cautious Herr S. began. He qualified. We took it
for granted, he said smoothly, that the gentlemen of the General Staff were
aware of our whole situation and had doubtless made adequate provision
for our protection. But merely to allay the surely understandable anxiety
of our comrades we would be grateful to the captain if he could give us
some comforting message to take back with us.
“What do you think I should do?” asked the captain, somewhat
ruffled.
I answered. We might, I said, be given back our passports and our
money. Then, in the extreme case, we would be in a position to look out
for ourselves.
“That would suit you, wouldn’t it?” the captain retorted. “And me with
half the camp running out on me! While more thousands of people would be
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wandering around loose in the neighbourhood complicating transportation
and food problems still further! W ell! I can give you the comforting
reassurance you ask for. Of course! I do have my instructions in case of any
real danger. Tell that to your comrades and try to calm them down.”
It was all pretty vague. If we went back with that reply, it would
surely have anything but a calming effect. We stood there, hesitating,
trying to find the words for our objection. The captain was himself
aware of the emptiness of his reply.
“I give you my word of honour as an officer,” he said. “Arrangements
have been made for your safety. You will be taken somewhere else at
the right time. That is not such a simple matter as you may imagine.
Our rolling-stock is needed down to the last car. The lines are jammed.
Besides, we first have to find out how many of you, after all, are involved
in the transfer. We must have a sifting and find out just who is in danger
and who not. That takes time.”
We stood aghast. The sifting over again! No, we had to call a halt
there. With that sifting business, the famous triage, we had been made
fools of long enough. It was the triage that had got us into the fix we
were now in. If now we had again to go through a sifting by the French
bureaucracy before anything happened, we were lost. All France would
be in the hands of the Nazis long before the French authorities had come
to an agreement as to the basis for the sifting.
“Excuse me, Captain,” I said, “but isn’t there a very simple way to
find out who is in danger and who not? Anyone who feels safe with the
Nazis will scarcely risk the hardships of a transfer into the unknown.
We are all well aware that a transfer under the conditions prevailing
today will be anything but pleasant. Anyone who feels sure of himself as
regards the Nazis will certainly prefer to stay here at Les Milles and await
their arrival. I beg of you, Captain, simply ask who wishes to stay and
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who feels strongly they should be transported away.”
The captain hesitated, but my reasoning seemed plausible. “I’ll think
it over,” he promised.
What we said did make an impression on the captain, there could be
no doubt about it. Our comrades, alas, were disappointed. What did it
mean, the captain had his instructions in case of extreme danger? What
would be a case of extreme danger? Our guards claimed to know that
Lyon was already in the hands of the Nazis, in fact that they were already
thirty miles south of Lyon. Wasn’t that your case of extreme danger?
Uneasiness in the camp increased. New groups everywhere, arguing
everywhere. Wild schemes for escaping were devised and propounded.
There were speeches.
We had a distinguished orator among us, Dr. F., a lawyer and
sometime member of the Reichstag, deputy from southwestern
Germany. He had been brought in with about two hundred others from
a camp in central France. A man of about forty, bearded, he made an
impressive appearance, fairly breathing brilliancy and magnetism. On
the way to Les Milles he had won not only the confidence of his two
hundred associates, but the friendship of the young French officer who
was in charge of the transfer. The thing went so far that the young
French officer vowed he would rescue the group entrusted to him under
any circumstances. He provided himself with identification papers
which showed that the bearers had been released from their former camp
by official order. The spaces for names were blank, but the papers were
stamped and signed. He was going to give them to his charges if worst
came to worst.
The brilliant Dr. F., lawyer and ex-deputy to the Reichstag, was
not at all pleased with the result of our visit to the captain. He called
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a meeting of his two hundred companions—they were soon joined by
others—and made a magnificent speech. What he said I have forgotten,
but I remember that it was a brilliant and an effective oration.
I am sceptical of speeches and speakers. That does not prevent me
from being swept off my feet every time by a good speech, but I am
swept off my feet, so to say, with reservations. I know how dangerous it
is to trust a speaker, and I have made it a principle to wait to see a speech
in print before forming a final opinion.
A man may have nothing to say and yet—possibly for that reason—
be an excellent speaker. Adolf Hitler is the best of speakers for his
particular public, yet he has never in his whole life expressed a thought
that was worth the printing. But no, that is perhaps going too far. A
few pages in Mein Kampf are indeed worth reading, the pages, I mean,
that relate to the orator and to the difference between the orator and
the writer. The passages on the orator and on propaganda were written
by an expert. They are worth reading and will always be. They spring
from the innermost being of a man born to nothing but to sway masses
of men, and in spite of themselves emphasize the risks that a man runs
in listening to a good speaker without taking the necessary precautions.
But here I must resist the temptation to go further into the case of
the born writer against the born orator. I must return to my story, to our
orator, lawyer, and ex-deputy, Dr. F.
He argued that we must take a very different tone toward the camp
authorities, a more vigorous, more threatening tone. We must set them a
very brief term, twenty-four hours at the most, and make clear to them
that if they do not transfer us by that time we will make our way out
forcibly. Should the French soldiers in the latter case fire on us—he did
not think they would—well, it were better to die under the bullets of the
French than perish under the tortures of the Nazis.
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Speeches of this sort naturally increased the unrest among us. Those
young Austrians who had come so effectively to my rescue on the day
of my admission to the camp called on me again, imploring me to wait
no longer, but to make my escape. They would help me to do so. Some
ten miles away, they said, in a modest farmhouse lived a farmer and his
family. The man was a friend of theirs and shared their political views.
They had made all arrangements with him through a soldier. He was
ready to take us in. I could hide for weeks in the house in perfect safety.
My two friends also had a plan for escaping from the camp already
worked out in detail. A sort of drain or sewer ran under the escarpment
out into the open country. For a few yards, but no more, the going would
not be very pleasant, they thought. It would be a tight squeeze on all
fours through slime and excrement—rather hard on the nose, probably.
With their help, however, I could certainly make it. There they stood,
young, strong, confident, inspiring confidence. All the same, the thing
did not appeal to me. I liked neither the few weeks in the farmhouse nor
the few yards in the drain.
Undoubtedly one might bribe the guards and get free in a much
pleasanter way. But what was the use? There was no sense in escaping
alone and on one ’s own. Without the energetic and effective help
of the French authorities there was no prospect of our evading the
advancing Nazis.
It took the guards a long time that evening to get us back into the
building, now by friendly persuasion, now by a gentle use of force; and
then inside there was no quiet.
When the last signal had been bugled and the lights were out, at
least half the camp forgathered in the catacombs. There we exchanged
worries and the latest rumours. Two officers appeared. It was of course
against the rules to stand around that way in the catacombs at night, but
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instead of sending us back to our straw piles they joined in the talk. Our
situation was perfectly well understood, they said, trying to calm us. But
it was altogether apparent that they were not quite at ease themselves.
The whispering, buzzing, arguing went on in the catacombs all
night, with frequent outbursts of bitterness against the slackness and
irresponsibility of the French. They had no idea even now how quickly
the Nazis were moving. We knew! We knew that they might well be
upon us within twenty-four hours.
One of our Austrians, a newspaperman, drew the picture with
masochistic gusto. The German officers would be all courtesy and
correctness toward the French. They would have the camp surrendered
and take it over with all due regard to forms. Even in us they would
manifest no particular interest at first. They would simply ask for the list
of internees, hold a roll-call, and make sure that we were all there. They
would not linger long on the names, even on names that they would be
tickled to see—Feuchtwanger, for instance. At the most the flitting of a
significant grin over their faces—and then they would read the next name.
Among those of us who were in serious danger, not one had the
slightest doubt that the best thing he could do in case the Nazis really
took over at Les Milles would be to end everything by killing himself.
But how was one to manage that? There was no great amount of rope in
sight. And even if you got a rope, where could you hang it—undisturbed,
that is? We appealed to the Austrian court-barber, the expert smuggler,
to lay in a stock of poison. He turned us down.
“Some of my competitors will promise to do it for you,” he said.
“They will even take your money and hand you any old white powder.
Try it, it won’t work. Humbug! Toothpowder! Now I’m an honest man.
When I promise, I deliver.”
Few of us got any sleep that night.
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The next morning squad leaders received orders to get the names of
men in their squads who wanted to be transferred and to have them in at
the office by two that afternoon. Such haste was a good sign, we thought.
It gave us confidence.
As soon developed, the preparation of the lists was not such a simple
matter after all. Many men could not make up their minds as to what they
ought to do, whether to go or to stay. Not that there were so many Nazis
among us. It was a question of old people and sick ones who explained
that they could not stand the hardships that such a journey would entail.
Whatever might happen they preferred to stay where they were and
take things as they came. Then there were a lot of poor devils who had
never concerned themselves with politics or aspired to anything beyond
saving their own lives and the wretched existence they had provided for
themselves and their families. They wondered whether the Nazis would
really do them any harm. If they were to declare themselves in danger
now and so get a transfer, would not the Nazis become suspicious?
In that case the Nazis might very well take their relatives at home as
hostages and confiscate what was left of their property. What were they
to do? It was a pitiable struggle for them. They laid their problems and
their doubts before one another—and before me.
Those of us who had everything to fear by remaining at Les Milles
waited hopefully for a transfer. We had no other choice. Escape on one’s
own had shown itself to be a hopeless recourse. Several men had tried
during recent nights. In no case had they gone very far. They had been
caught at the bridges across the Rhône when not earlier. It was better to
wait, we concluded.
In spite of the order for the hasty preparation of lists, our confidence
rapidly waned. Some of us were soon wondering whether the order was
not a mere feint to put us off and quiet us.
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The Nazis in the camp meanwhile were becoming more and more
assertive. It was now apparent that there were far more of them among
us than we had ever supposed. Hitlerites seemed to sprout more
numerously the nearer Hitler’s armies came. They were now teasing our
French guards and greeting one another publicly in the yard with the
Hitler salute.
All that showed, we thought, how great was their confidence, how
near they believed their protectors were. Would we be transferred in time,
would we be transferred at all? Bad signs increased in number. Stocks
of ammunition were being brought into the yards and more machine
guns set up. Our soldiers were suddenly reinforced with reservists and
gendarmes who stood around aloof and hostile and refused to talk
with us. Was this strengthening of our guard a measure of protection?
Hardly. Certainly they were there merely to prevent some desperate act
on our part.
Our mistrust and excitement grew. Once again we begged the captain
to receive us. We had to wait. Finally he let us in.
This time there were five of us. Captain G. assured us he was doing
all he could to save us. The General Staff had decided to transfer those
of us who were in danger. Actual arrangements for the transfer were now
the only matters left. Unfortunately many more desired to be transferred
than had been anticipated, and the lists were not yet closed. That made
the necessary provisions more difficult.
We listened with the closest and most anxious attention. Our faces
must have betrayed no great assurance; in fact, one of my companions
rather unfortunately asked whether we could not get our papers and our
money back at least. Angered at this manifestation of distrust, the captain
turned military and snapped gruffly: “That is my concern!” Just what
steps were to be taken in our rescue, he went on, were for the authorities
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alone to decide. Never had France betrayed the laws of hospitality, he
declared pompously.
Our interview had not ended when he was informed that a call from
Headquarters was on the wire. He stepped into an adjoining room. One
of his officers started to close the door behind him, but he ordered:
“Leave it open. These gentlemen are quite at liberty to hear what I have
to say”—a human gesture that has erased from my memory much of
the evil that the captain allowed to happen to our harm. We listened
anxiously. The question seemed to be whether we should be conveyed to
Marseille in lorries or whether the railway cars assigned to us could get
directly to Les Milles.
So then, one thing was certain. Marseille was actually getting ready
to make up a train for us.
That brought us some comfort. But, trustful as they had been
some hours before, our comrades were not now to be lifted from their
despondency. They had lost faith in any transfer. Not a few went so far
as to suspect that the captain’s telephone talk in our hearing had been
only make-believe.
What were our chances of rescue now? About twelve in a hundred,
we agreed; make it ten.
I was walking across the yard a half-hour later when the captain
stopped me. Speaking in the manner one would use to an old acquaintance,
he told me that he now had the lists, practically all. Some two thousand
men wanted to be transferred, twice the number the people in Marseille
had been expecting. He thought, however, that we would be able to get
away by the next day, or the day after at the latest. Meanwhile he would
do everything possible to relieve the nervous tension among the men.
Many of the internees, he added, had turned in to his office papers which
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were designed to prove their loyalty to the French cause. If such papers
were found by the Nazis after our transfer they might prove inconvenient
and provoke reprisals against members of our families who might be
still under German control. He intended therefore to return them to us,
leaving it to us what disposition should be made of them. He hoped that
I, on my side, would do all I could to calm the people down. With their
everlasting questions and delegations they were merely robbing him of
valuable time that he could better spend in our interest.
The captain’s very sensible and very humane decision was made
public forthwith. Lines formed in front of the office. In them we stood
waiting to recover papers on which we had once staked such great hopes.
In former days we had spent untold efforts to obtain them. Now we were
eagerly tearing them up and burning them.
I had formed the impression that Captain G. meant well by us and that
he would do everything in his power to put through the transfer. Others
were as mistrustful as before. Herr F., the lawyer and ex-deputy, made
a new speech. Many level-headed men joined me in making speeches in
rebuttal, but he succeeded in having a new delegation appointed to call on
the commandant, seven men this time, himself among them. An excuse
was devised to justify the dispatch of this new delegation. The night
before inmates of the camp, known to be Nazis, had attacked certain of
our number. A fight had taken place in the dark and there had been some
stabbing. It was feared that the same thing or worse would take place the
coming night. The delegation would ask that precautionary measures be
taken. Dr. F. of course was not much interested in all that. His idea was
that we spoke far too politely, too calmly to the officers. When it was a
question of life and death, one should strike a very different tone. Let
him come face to face with that captain and he would “touch a match to
the seat of his pants.”
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As things turned out, the commandant was the first to strike the
different tone. The Captain G. who received us now was not the Captain
G. who had talked with me that morning in the yard.
“What do you want this time?” he roared at us. “Kindly spare me
your everlasting cowardice and nervousness. I have already told you—
your train leaves tomorrow!”
On that occasion only three or four of the officers were present. We
were six or seven, including the ex-deputy Dr. F. The old gentleman
Herr S., tactful, propitiatory, was going to explain that this time we had
called in connexion with another matter. Dr. F. would not let the old
man get a word in. He took the floor himself in firm resolve to speak
plainly to the captain. Dr. F. spoke a marvellous French—let us hope he
still speaks it, that he did not leave his pelt in France. In his marvellous
French he opened for the prosecution with a brilliant arraignment.
France, he declared, had made us a most solemn promise of hospitality.
He pointed out that he and many others had volunteered for service in
the French army.
The application of heat to the seat of the captain’s pants did not have
all the success that Dr. F. had foreseen. The captain, furious, struck
back. We were a lot of neurasthenics, he said; we were not acting like
men! Then sounding an emotional note himself, he declaimed: “One
must even know how to die if need be.” Dr. F., in fine fettle, retorted
that we had all demonstrated our readiness to give up our lives in the
fight on Hitler. What we did not want to do was to die a senseless
death, as victims of a brainless French bureaucracy. We did not want
to die because the French government was too incompetent to organize
our transfer.
“Be silent! That will do!” thundered the captain, fiery red, imperious.
But Orator F. had begun and had no idea at all of halting. Slender, elastic,
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and imposing to look at in spite of his shabby suit, he towered before the
stout, red-faced, pug-faced captain in uniform and fanned the fire.
“It is all very easy for you, Captain,” he shouted. “When the Germans
come you will salute politely and the German captain will salute politely.
You will turn over the camp to him, take off your uniform, and go home.
And you ask us to do the dying!”
For a fraction of a second the captain tried to think of a reply. Then
he brought his riding-crop down upon the table. Fussy old Herr S. tried
to say something that would smooth things over, but before he could
open his mouth the captain strode into the adjoining room, slamming
the door behind him.
So there we were. Dr. F., the ex-deputy, was a great orator, but he
had patently done a very stupid thing. In our situation one could hardly
have done a more stupid thing than to alienate the man who held our
fate in his hands. Monsieur G. was the one man who had connexions
with the offices that could help us. Not only that, all that had been said
had already been said many times. The captain was right: negotiations
served only to deprive him of precious time. Sending delegations had
been nonsense in the first place and now Dr. F.’s fiery oratory had only
angered our well-meaning commandant.
All the same I must confess that Dr. F.’s procedure, unwise as it was,
delighted me. In the course of his speech I inwardly applauded every
word he uttered. So it was with the others. The whole camp was exultant
when word of Dr. F.’s “energetic” speech spread abroad. Devoid of
sense and purpose, nay, as harmful as it had been, we were all glad that
someone at long last had told those Frenchmen what we thought of them.
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THE SECOND NIGHT
The night that now followed was torture for most of us.
Even outwardly it was a different night from other nights. The fight
that the Nazis had started in the dark the night before was not the first of
its kind. An order was issued that thenceforward a few more electric bulbs
should be allowed, and French guards were posted inside the building.
They were stationed at the stairway and near the big outside door and
were relieved every two hours. They yawned and nodded good-night to
us as we went up.
That night there was more whispering, more anxiety and excitement
in the big room than ever. One had an almost physical sense of those
hundreds of men lying there on their straw piles, listening to the
whispering around them, of the hopes and anxieties of the day that
now in the dark were assuming gigantic stature and of the weighing,
weighing, weighing that was going on in every mind: Will we succeed?
Will we get out of here alive? Will the Nazis take us by surprise? Will
we be rescued?
I would be lying were I to say that I was spared all anxiety that night.
At the same time the coolness that I exhibited, quite to the amazement of
my comrades, was by no means feigned.
I believe I alluded to my fatalism in the early pages of this book.
I must touch on it again here, for my attitude during the happenings
that now become part of my story would be hard to understand without
taking account of these beliefs or, if you will, superstitions of mine. To
the two confessions that I made some pages back I must here add a third.
Most of the things that happen around us are determined by a great
multiplicity of causes. We are able to discern only a few of these causes at
the time. We see now one link, now another in their chain. We never see
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their sequence as a whole. We never learn anything about its beginning
or its end. It is therefore the wiser part for us not to single out particular
causes and think of them as the causes, but, however repugnant it may be
to our over-presumptuous intelligence, to ascribe to chance the leading
role in the lives of all of us. Einstein resignedly acknowledged that the
best explanation science can offer for things that happen in the universe
is that they happen as in a game of chance.
On the other hand, the human spirit is so constituted that it must
absolutely have its explanation of this unfathomable game of Life
and Fate. We cannot accept the fact that our lives should be governed
by chance, in other words, by laws that we do not know. Finding no
explanation that satisfies our reason, we seek one beyond reason, in
superstition, mysticism, religion. Unbeknown to himself perhaps
every man among us, however level-headed he may consider himself,
carries thousands of superstitious notions around with him. And at the
decisive moments in our lives more especially we are governed not by
our reason but by magical conceptions that we have inherited from our
primitive ancestors.
It amuses me to dig deep down into myself and uncover the magical
conceptions that may be determining my conduct. I try to catch
them by surprise just as they are pressing forward to the threshold of
consciousness. I am not ashamed of my superstition, I confess it, and
I do not consider myself more stupid on that account than people who
refuse to admit their own.
Knowing full well, moreover, that it is all nonsense, and laughing
at myself for what I am doing, I nevertheless assume that I have found
a line, a secret law that determines the course of my life. I know that I
am going to be continually tormented in my daily living by thousands
of little annoyances, by a thousand tricks of the world about me, but
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I believe that these little irritations are just the compensation that Fate
requires of me for the good fortune that I am certain to have in the big
things, the decisive things.
All my life long I have been and shall be afflicted with little and
not seldom ridiculous troubles. I am a person who loves orderliness
and security, yet for long years I have been obliged to live without my
proper legal papers. And precisely I, who particularly abhor dealings
with government officials, have always been battling with such people
for passports, certificates, permits. It has been much the same with
my finances. In the course of nearly two decades I have earned quite
reputably, by productive activity alone, enough money to have lived
very much as I pleased; yet wherever my earnings have been banked
they have never failed to be frozen or confiscated. My health has
followed similar laws. I have a tough constitution and it has enabled me
to survive serious illnesses. But my health is delicate—I am susceptible
to colds, my eyesight is poor, I have difficulty in speaking clearly, my
digestion is not as good as it might be and has played me unpleasant
tricks at important moments.
In a word, in whatever I undertake, in whatever sphere, I encounter
absurdly petty difficulties that most of my contemporaries are spared. A
publisher of mine failed to copyright one of my most successful books
and the greater part of my income from it went by the board. People in
my employ have committed offences for which I have had to assume
responsibility and pay out considerable sums. I have ever been called
upon to squander money, time, nerves, life, on unspeakably silly things.
I was always on the look-out for a good lawyer, a good doctor, a good
banker, for people who were better versed than I in such matters and
could take them off my shoulders. Well, I did find the right doctor, the
right lawyer, the right banker. The lawyer worked for me for half a year
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and then was killed in a railway accident. The doctor took care of me
for two years, then committed suicide on account of Hitler. The bank
handled my property for nine months, then it was seized by the Nazis.
Over against these little sufferings I can set a number of decidedly
fortunate circumstances. I experienced the First World War at an age
when I had not yet hardened and was still capable of developing. That
enabled me to recast my war impressions in forms of practical knowledge
that proved of signal value to my life and my work. I have written the
books I wanted to write, and though I may often have cursed the labour
they required of me, it gives me a satisfaction that I would not exchange
for any other. More than that: society is so organized today that it not
only allows me to do what I like to do, to write well, that is; it even
pays me for doing it. In short, I have had the extraordinary luck to be
successful albeit I am gifted. Add to it all that I have found the women
and the friends that I wanted and they have stood by me. All these
circumstances, taken together, incline me therefore to imagine that the
general line of my destiny is the one I have just described—good luck in
the things that matter, bad luck in non-essentials.
An atavistic, fetishistic conception I am well aware, something very
like the faiths of those who imagine that they are the special protégés of
God or of some saint. But after all I have this superstitious feeling and,
to tell the truth, I am rather satisfied that I have it.
That superstitious feeling is reinforced in me by a second superstition
which is a strange mixture of meticulousness and pride.
I have some few more books to write. More exactly, of the hundred
or so books that I have in my head, I have chosen a certain number that I
intend to write whatever else may happen. Fourteen books are haunting
me, fourteen books that I have to write, because I assume that only I
can write them and that they are highly important. I know of course
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that they are important only to me, but my self-complacency impels
me to assume that they are also important for the world. And I simply
cannot imagine that anything serious could happen to me—or even that
I should die—before completing those fourteen books. God, or Fate,
simply cannot allow it.
This feeling that after all nothing serious could happen to me
probably accounted for the stoicism that so astonished my comrades
that night, and if I felt less panicky than the others during those sinister
hours, it was because the same feeling sustained me.
Let it not be thought that my sense of security remained untroubled
the whole night. I remember this night very vividly, I remember many
details. There I lay on my straw pile, hearing the men around me, sensing
their nearness, thinking many different things, feeling many different
things. My worried intellect warned me not to take things lightly. It
coldly marshalled facts that justified the greatest alarm. The Nazis really
were pretty damn close. And even if the train did come, even if the
transfer were effected, the day when all France would be in Nazi hands
was only being postponed. Where would that day find us? Really across
the border? More than unlikely.
To bolster myself up I thought again of the fourteen books that I
was longing to write, that I was sure to write. But that heartening idea
was troubled by another, no less superstitious. Certain numerologists in
Germany had figured out that the number nine was fateful to German
artists. Beethoven, Bruckner, and Mahler each wrote nine symphonies,
Wagner nine operas that are still sung, Schiller, Hebbel, and Grillparzer
each nine plays that are still produced. Very clever people have discovered
that out of Goethe’s works only nine were really alive, from which it
would follow, in a manner of speaking, that he died not of his eighty-
two years but of the completion of Faust. Now on finishing the third
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part of my Josephus, I had completed exactly nine works that fulfilled
my purpose. The fact troubled me. I toyed in mock-melancholic fashion
with the thought of my death. I balanced accounts. What had I really
had in life? What had I failed to have? Had I led a full life? Had it been
a wise or a foolish, a happy or a wretched life? Had it been worth living?
I came to the conclusion that, after all, my fifty-six years had been
good, full, rich years. I would have been as reluctant to have missed
the bad they had brought as the good; for both the bad and the good
had enriched me. Without the seasoning of the bad I could not have
appreciated and enjoyed the good. “Welcome Good! Welcome Evil!”
a German poet once wrote, and ever since I was a boy I had repeated
an apophthegm from the Talmud in my mind. Of evil it said: “Gam su
letovo” (That too is all for the best).
With a certain obstinate meticulousness I tried to determine whether
among the various projects that had occupied me all my life I had really
executed the right ones. Should I not have written one of the fourteen
books I still have to write rather than the ones I actually chose to write? The
time I had spent on women and other pleasures, had it been well or badly
spent? With the same obstinate meticulousness, but striving for the severest
honesty, I tried to determine how much time I had devoted to worthwhile
things and how much to things and people that had not been worthwhile.
I was content. It amounted to this: everything had been worthwhile,
at bottom even the foolishness. Certain particularly foolish things that
I had done drifted through my mind and I rejoiced in the memory of
them. Lying on my straw, I smiled.
Day broke. The big doors were opened. There was the greatest
excitement. What about the train? The promised train, was it coming?
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From one point in the camp one could see a railway embankment
and on it a bit of track. Sharp-eyed people thought they could make out
railway cars on the bit of track. And cars in fact were there. Only a
few—the guards soon made it clear that they were not for us.
Our hopes sank. But then a report spread that out of practical
considerations the transfer would be made by squads and, in fact,
those of the men in Squads 26 to 50 who put their names on the lists of
prospective transferees received an order to form in line in the western
yard at two o’clock in the afternoon with their luggage.
Squads 26 to 50 were greatly envied. Some of them still had not made
up their minds whether to go or to stay. Two elderly men in particular
talked things over with me. They had no idea at all what to do and they
were desperately unhappy at being called upon to make so momentous
a decision. A little more and they would have said it was all my fault.
Was I not the one who had persuaded the captain to leave the decision to
individuals? Indeed they would have been better satisfied if the military
had disposed of them without asking any questions.
All in all, however, when the four hundred men from Squads 26 to
50 who had asked to go gathered in the yard around two o’clock, a mood
of happy excitement prevailed. They formed in line and waited, and we
others waited with them, almost as excited as they.
Ten minutes passed, a quarter of an hour, half an hour, another half-
hour. Then an order came: the men in line should disband. The train
would not go that day.
Disappointment and deepest despair. We were beside ourselves with
helpless rage. The French were making fools of us. They were letting us
sit there till the Nazis came. They were pretending that something was
going on just to dissuade us from escaping. Their idea was to hand us
over to the Nazis in order to gain a point of favour with them.
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My young Austrians again besought me to join them in the escape
through the drain. Perceiving that I did not take to the plan, they went on
and explained how in case the camp were seized by the Nazis the coming
night, I could jump out of a window and join them outside. A breakneck
project all around. I had them go over the scheme twice and, frankly,
could not grasp it. The plan certainly would not have succeeded.
What I wanted was to be alone. I had to have a few moments alone.
In a corner of the yard was a little storehouse, dark, close, musty, inside.
It occurred to me that I might go in there, sit quietly on the stone floor
for a while or even close my eyes and meditate.
On the stone steps in front of the little storehouse a small group of
men was gathered.
“Come and join us—do,” one of them urged me. “Cheer us up a
little. We are all quite down. You are always so optimistic.”
“Yes, my dear Feuchtwanger,” said another of the group—Walter
Hasenclever, the author. “We need bucking up today. What percentage
do you rate our hopes at now?”
We stood there in the sunlight; a gentle breeze was blowing—not
too much and not too little. It was wonderful weather all through those
days. But I had been bucking up so many disheartened people of late
that it was costing me some effort to keep my own chin up. My talk with
the Austrians had told on me. I could still see nothing but that line of
men standing there in the yard, full of hope, only to be sent back to their
straw piles again. The general depression had infected me.
“Our hopes? Five percent,” I answered and my voice must have
shown how gloomy, how weary, how empty I felt.
I should not have spoken that way. I should not have said “five
percent.” It was not my true opinion. It was wrong, objectively and
subjectively. I was known as an optimist. To make myself out such a
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defeatist instead of finding the cheering word was a piece of almost
criminal thoughtlessness. Presently I had to perceive that my answer
impressed the others.
“As low as five percent?” Hasenclever meditated. “I am afraid you
are right,” he said, answering his own question.
We again fell to discussing how best one could make an end of things
if the Nazis really descended upon us. Hasenclever had thought up
something new.
“You go up to one of the Nazi guards,” he suggested, “give him all
the money you have on hand and say: ‘Look here, comrade! I’m going to
make a try at escaping. Shoot straight!’”
Meanwhile the Austrian polyhistor had joined us. Listening, he
poked a big dirty ear forward and presently began to tell of the death
of Socrates, quoting a string of authorities from memory. I only half
listened. I regretted that I had said that about the five percent. But instead
of blaming myself I turned—for that is human nature—on the crazy,
innocent Austrian polyhistor. Everything about the man irritated me, his
filth, his unctuous voice.
“Listen here, Dr. P.,” I said. “Explain one thing! What, in your
opinion, did Socrates mean by that obscure utterance to his friends: ‘I
owe a cock to Asclepius; do not forget to pay it?’”
Not so long before I had read, among many forced interpretations,
one that struck me as plausible, but I had forgotten what it was. Dr. P.
had not seen the article. His bafflement afforded me satisfaction.
The afternoon wore on, bringing signs aplenty that our
discouragement was baseless, that the transfer would begin after all.
First we got our mail and that was not the usual day for it. (There
was no great amount of it. Only a few of the men received definite
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information as to what had happened to their relatives, but when we
pieced together odds and ends of news it began to look as though our
wives had been interned, almost all of them, in the great camp at Gurs,
in the Pyrenees.)
Then men assigned to work in the kitchen reported that tinned goods,
along with cheese, bread, and the like, had arrived in large quantities—
provisions obviously intended for the journey.
Furthermore, we were informed that anyone who wished could have
his money back, and for the last time an interminable line of waiting
men formed in front of the little window where the money was paid
out. Ironically enough, we had before our eyes as we stood there a large
placard admonishing us to “Give for France” and the same suggestion
was made to us orally by the lieutenant in charge.
It developed that many of the people who had been shipped to us
from northern France were not to get their money. The commandants
of the camps there had deposited the various amounts in local banks
and had found it impossible in the headlong haste of their departure to
withdraw them. Now the authorities were handing out vouchers to the
internees concerned to the effect that “Regiment X owes Bearer Y so
and so many francs.” What was an internee to do with such a voucher?
He tried to sell it to any Frenchman for any price he could get.
And then, finally, something fabulous happened! The commandant
announced by a posted notice that the train would leave Les Milles
station the following morning, June 22, at eleven o’clock. The notice
was affixed to one of the open wings of the main door that led from the
yard into the building. We stood there before the yawning black hole and
read the poster. We had it in writing, in black and white, in typewritten
letters. And there was the commandant’s signature, big, in his rounded,
flourished handwriting, blue—the colour of hope: “Goruchon.”
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There was a general rush to look at the poster. We all stood in front
of it for a long time. We looked at the poster, we looked at each other.
Most of the men were probably thinking that now at last it was true. But
they did not dare to express their thought.
When I saw the poster I, for my part, was certain that it meant what it
said. Yes, the train was going to go! We were going to escape the Nazis. I
was ashamed to have had so little faith for even so short a time.
Just then the theory that I had tried vainly to remember flashed across
my mind, the theory as to what Socrates meant when he besought his
friends to sacrifice a cock to Asclepius, god of the art of healing, god of
pharmacy. Perceiving that the potion was doing its work, so the theory
ran, he wanted to thank the gods for making the human mind inventive
enough to administer powerful drugs in the doses required for desired
effects. I was glad that my memory had not failed me after all, and took
it as a good sign.
An order was issued that we should be up at three o’clock the
following morning and fall in line at five, ready to march, with luggage
limited to the strictly necessary.
The camp hummed with preparations. Many of the internees had
brought their last worldly possessions with them. What should they
carry along, what leave behind? They would sort out their things, pack
up, tie up, change their minds, untie, pack up again, leave different things
behind. What was “strictly necessary?” They would have to begin over
and over again. Many were giving away what they could not take to
friends who were to stay behind. Many were trying to sell them, hawking
them about.
Numbers of people came and pressed me with questions. There
were those who even now did not know whether they ought to go or
stay. Others were doubtful whether they would really be taken along.
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Accommodations would be inadequate, that was certain. If there wasn’t
room for all of us, wouldn’t there be another muster? Then wouldn’t
they be the only ones left behind? The unfortunates turned to me. Was it
really enough merely to have one’s name on the list? Was it certain that all
on the list would be taken along? They could not reach the commandant;
I could. Would I not go to him and explain that they in particular were
in grave danger? I was obliged to give the same comforting reassurances
fifty, a hundred times.
That night, too, most of us got very little sleep. The most confident
nursed some faint misgivings, the most sceptical some ray of hope.
For my part I slept well during that short night at Les Milles, and
when reveille sounded it snatched me from a deep slumber.
There was an air of bustling animation all around. Everybody
was busy. One last review of the things we intended to take with us.
Everybody was getting his stuff together, a literal “clearing out.”
A strange tension had developed overnight in the relations between
those who were leaving and those who were to stay behind. We had
been so long together by now, welded to one another by the same
hopes and fears, by the same conditions of living. Now our ways were
parting, possibly—almost certainly—forever. Many were disappointed
that others they had come to consider close comrades, and whom they
had certainly expected to have with them, were to remain behind. A
strangely mixed feeling this that separated the two groups! The reveille
at three in the morning was only for those whose names were on the
lists; the others were free to go on sleeping. They did not choose to do
so. They rose when we did, picked their way among us, tried to make
themselves useful, helped us pack, carried our things down the rickety
stairs, gave us well-intentioned gifts to take along. Yet all along they
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had not the slightest doubt as to what the transferees were thinking: that
those who were not leaving assumed that they had nothing to fear from
the Nazis, that, in a word, they were “traitors.” Few of them, certainly,
were traitors. Serious sympathizers with the Nazis were very few in the
camp. The man who stayed either felt too old and too feeble to endure
the hardships of the transfer, or else was one of those poor devils who
did not know which way to turn but had finally decided that by staying
he had a better chance to save the lives of himself and his relatives.
They were hurt at our mistaken estimate of them. They made every
effort to convince us and themselves that they could not have decided
otherwise. When we waved them away with an “Of course,” or “That’s
all right,” they would not let go but stubbornly began over again with
their justifications. They kept doing all manner of little favours for us to
show that they felt they belonged with us and not with the others. But
the rift was irreparable. Most of us looked down on them with a mixture
of scorn and pity. The poor fellows had chosen the worst alternative,
of that we were certain. They would face far bitterer sufferings if the
Nazis came.
So we squatted around, stood around, ran around, drank our last cup
of coffee in Les Milles, got ready to clear out. At the height of all the
bustle I was changing the cloth tennis shoes I had worn the whole time
in camp for a regular pair when a young Austrian physician, who slept
several straw piles from me and was Hasenclever’s neighbour, came over
to me in the greatest distress.
“Come,” he said. “Come with me, quick. I’m afraid something has
happened. I can’t rouse Hasenclever. He won’t wake up.”
We went over to him. Four or five men were gathered around him,
two of them doctors.
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“He has taken some sedative or other,” they explained; “that is
certain. We must pump out his stomach, and soon.”
Walter Hasenclever lay there, stretched out at full length, motionless.
Hasenclever had always had something busy, something hurried about
him. There had been a nervous twitch, of late years at least, to his
pointed, mouselike face that was so intelligent, so animated, so alive. It
was hard to imagine him asleep. Now there he lay as heavy as a stone and
not to be awakened.
The previous evening, just before the lights went out, he had
dropped around to see me. I was deep in conversation with my
neighbour, the mechanic.
“May I have a word with you, Feuchtwanger?” he asked.
“Of course,” I answered. “Just a moment more.” I wanted to finish
something I had been saying to the mechanic.
“No, no. Nothing important. Don’t let me interrupt. So then,
good night.”
The thought of our talk the day before on the stone steps, in the
sunlight, weighed heavily on me. “Our hopes? Five percent.” “As low
as five percent?” Hasenclever had asked. And now there he lay and
we could not wake him. Had he come to think there would never be a
train? Or had he simply decided to have nothing more to do with the
everlasting, the revolting torments of this wretched, degrading life?
A stretcher was brought and on it the unconscious writer was
carried over to the narrow, dirty wooden stairs. He was to be taken to
the infirmary barracks to have his stomach pumped out. The steps were
crowded with people who were trying to get down to the yard with their
bundles. The stretcher bearers struggled forward. As the gloomy little
procession went by, a man was jostled and exclaimed bitterly: “They
might let him check out in peace!”
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But to have done that would have been against the laws of humanity
and of French hospitality.
We assembled in the yard. It was a question of dividing us into
new squads. The thing was done with the usual amount of confusion
and red tape, but we had plenty of time. The train was not to start till
eleven o’clock.
We stood around and waited. Those who were staying gathered
about us, stood at the windows, looking out, waited with us, as excited as
us, always finding one more thing to say.
Of the old Austrian gentlemen whom I have identified as cultivated,
only two had decided to go with us. The others sat on their folding-chairs,
courtly, majestic, threadbare, resignedly watching the preparations for
our departure. One of them secretly confided to me that he had managed
to provide himself with prussic acid—“Real prussic acid,” he said.
I went to the infirmary barracks to see Hasenclever. The infirmary
was a bare, dismal stone building. The patients lay on much-used camp
cots. There was a revolting smell in the place. The dying Hasenclever lay
screened off from the rest. His face was deep red, his throat swollen, his
tongue protruded, thick, bluish—an effect, I was told, of the stomach-
pumping. He was rattling loudly. A German and a French physician were
in attendance. Hasenclever was unconscious, they assured me, feeling
nothing, hearing nothing. The French doctor still had some hope, the
German none at all.
I called on the commandant. He listened impatiently—there was so
much to do.
“Yes, yes,” he said. “I know, the writer.”
“We can’t leave him here,” I said. “We can’t let the Nazis get him.
We must take him along.”
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“That is not for you to decide nor for me,” said Captain G. “The
doctor must say whether he can be moved.”
I went back to my squad. We waited. Then something great
happened. The train was there. There it was, all of a sudden. We could
see it. From the same place where we had discerned a few cars the day
before, we could see something that looked like cars now. But this time it
was our train. Our guards had seen it. They had already talked with our
new guards, who had come on the train. We looked and looked, our eyes
starting out of our heads, to see something that resembled cars. Yes, that
was it, the train so long awaited—our train.
W e waited some more. But the wait now was not so unpleasant. It was
only seven in the morning and therefore certain that we would really be
leaving by eleven o’clock, as the commandant had promised in his notice.
Even more than before they now talked at and questioned me. One
man kept at me: “Tell me truly now. Don’t you really think it is better for
me to stay here? Why should the Nazis do anything to me? Just because
I have a little lingerie shop in Nice and my name is Gustav Kohn? What
interest can Hitler possibly have in me? Don’t you think I ought to stay?”
And another implored: “You must go and see the commandant at
once and tell him that the train must go fast. They say we are to be four
or five days on the road. Then there’s no sense in the whole business.
Hitler’s sure to get us. Go to the commandant at once. Tell him that the
train must go fast.”
The talk about the four or five days started because of the large
quantities of provisions that had been distributed among us: tinned
foods, cheese, chocolate, and plenty of bread; enough, surely, for a very
long journey.
I went back to the infirmary.
“Could Hasenclever possibly travel?” I asked the French doctor.
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“The final decision rests with the staff doctor,” he answered, and that
officer had not yet come in. For his own part he did not think Hasenclever
was in a condition to travel.
Again I called on the commandant. “The doctor thinks he may not be
in a condition to travel,” I reported despondently.
“I told you as much,” the captain answered, striking his riding-crop
against his leg.
“Well, then, what is to happen, Captain? We can’t just leave him
behind this way.”
“Just what do you take us for?” asked the commandant.
“I give you my word of honour as a French officer, the man will not
fall into the hands of the Nazis. If we can’t manage any other way we’ll
slip the papers of a dead French soldier into his pocket.”
Around ten o’clock everything was ready. “Forward-march!” came
the order, and the first contingent was off. We proceeded in divisions of
two hundred to the station, which was not very far from the camp, and
from which it must have been the practice to ship the bricks.
I was in the second division. Karl was again separated from me and
I had to carry my luggage myself. A scant quarter of an hour perhaps,
but it was hot. I am not much good when it comes to carrying luggage
and before long I was the last man in my division. The guards who were
escorting us kept hurrying us along. “Allez hop!” they would shout the
moment I set down a valise. My straw-fellow, the mechanic from the
Saar, noticed my difficulties and tried to help me, but he had a load of
his own to carry. The sweat poured down from my forehead and covered
my glasses. I could hardly see a thing. It was horribly dusty, besides. I
stumbled over the rails, I puffed and panted, I tried to wipe the sweat
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away with my coat sleeve. The road to safety was a hard road from the
very beginning.
Then at last I saw it—the train. There it stood in front of us, close
enough to touch. A long train, as I became further aware in lugging my
things past one car after another. First passenger cars, a few of them,
outmoded ones, antediluvian. Then the freight cars, one, another, a
tenth, a twentieth, an I-don’t-know-how-manyth. They all bore the
inscription: “Eight Horses or Forty Men.” They seemed to be terribly
ramshackle affairs. All the same, it was a train. It stood on rails and the
rails led—they led away off somewhere beyond the reach of the Nazi
troops, they led to safety. Puffing, stumbling, sweating, prodded by
the soldiers, I hurried along the line of cars and as I passed each one
I thought: “This last bit and then you are in a car. Then you are safe.”
We reached the car to which we had been assigned.
“All aboard! Allez hop!”
It was easy to say that, but how aller hop? The car was terribly high
and there were no steps. A few spry ones among us clambered up over
the struts. The others pushed one another up. Lifting, shoving, we got
the luggage in. Strong hands reached down toward me too, strong arms
lifted me from below and behind. I was inside my car!
There were four walls, nothing more. A hole forward in the side
wall on the right, a second hole toward the rear on the opposite side.
They would probably admit very little light. For the moment the bright
sunlight was streaming in through the big, wide sliding doors which
were open. Not bad at all, taken as a whole. There were some thirty of
us there. The car was bare and much worn, but roomy.
What should we do with the luggage? All together in the middle or
in piles along the walls? In any event, the individual pieces of luggage
would have to be piled skilfully one on the other or one in the other if
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we were not to lose precious space. Once a piece was stowed away in the
pile, one could get it out only in case of extreme necessity.
Differences of opinion, harsh debates, but once we had our luggage
in order, angers cooled. Everybody was animated, in a good mood. We
sat or lay down on the floor with the sunlight streaming in over us. A fat
young fellow, a Hollander, had smuggled in his folding-chair. So there
we were in our train and in a half an hour, an hour at the latest our car
would be moving, taking us out of danger, out of the enemy’s reach.
There was a drop of bitterness in the cup of our joy—the thought
of Hasenclever.
The train was filling up. We observed with some anxiety how very
full it was becoming. How many were there in our car? Thirty-five of us,
but we would be having guards in addition. Suppose we say forty-two.
Sergeants were already calling in from outside: “How many are you
in here?”
“Forty-five,” we answered, prudently closing the door. But that shut
out the sunlight and our car suddenly became a dark cage.
“How many are you?” came the call again from the outside. “Doors
open!” a voice ordered and a sergeant clambered in and counted us. “Ten
more in here!” he commanded. We protested desperately, but in vain.
The ten were already clambering in upon us, disconcerted, bewildered.
We resisted, admitting only seven or eight. We blocked the door, fighting.
It was simply impossible, there was no room left for more men.
“Too much luggage in this car,” an officer declared, angry, perspiring.
“Out with those bundles,” he ordered.
We all protested. We had really brought only the “strictly necessary.”
For many those few bundles were the last remnant of their worldly
possessions. They had brought with them everything they still owned,
two suits, two pairs of shoes. But there was no help for it. They had to
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give it up. “Out with that baggage!” the officer shouted again. “Do you
want your comrades to stay here and croak so that you can take your
rubbish along?”
In an uproar of wailing, shrieking, and cursing, bundles were thrown
out, a quarrel developing over every piece of discarded luggage. Then
even when we stood pressed together as closely as seemed possible, some
few men were still wandering along the train unable to find places. Two
Algerian soldiers climbed aboard—Arabs in turbans, our guards—
and they took up still more space. And men were still wandering along
outside. And once more an officer climbed up over our struts. He could
not get in the car and held fast to the struts outside.
“Three more men in here,” he ordered.
“No more room,” we shouted back in despair.
“There has to be room,” he bellowed, and one man was shoved in
upon us by main force.
Packed shoulder to shoulder we stood there on our feet, sullen. Sitting
down was out of the question. The Algerian guards were friendly. One
of them was an oldish man with a beard, the other younger, about thirty,
a handsome fellow with the eyes of a gazelle. They spoke very little
French, but two of our number could manage Arabic. We offered them
cigarettes and we got on well together.
It is amazing how soon the human being adapts himself to every
situation, even the worst, and finds a way to make the very best of it. We
reorganized the luggage to take up still less space. As for ourselves, we
accepted our lot. That was the way our car was, cramped, repulsive, but
it would carry us to freedom.
And then—we held our breath—the train started.
Though it was against orders, our Algerian guards allowed us to
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open the big sliding doors again. A few lucky ones could sit in the wide
opening and let their legs hang. I stood toward the rear squeezed in
the crowd, but by rising on tiptoe I could look out. We were rattling
along—there was our building, there the yard. I could see the men who
had stayed behind. At a closed railway-gate stood a couple of soldiers,
two officers, and our commandant. He waved toward the train with his
gloved hand, pride on his face. He had done it. Probably he was glad to
be rid of us too.
The train bumped and rattled along. We were thrown against one
another. The luggage that we had packed away so artfully began to totter.
One piece came down, then another, finally the whole pile collapsed. But
we were happy, all the same—at least for the first half-hour. We were out
of Les Milles. We were not obliged to wait for the butchers any longer
with hands tied.
I looked at that carload of humanity that chance had jumbled together
about me. First of all my helpful straw-fellow, the mechanic from the
Saar. A friend of his was there too, a small manufacturer who had a son
with him. The father was a shrewd, worldly-wise man, originally from
Odessa. Beside them another father and son, also from Odessa. Strange
that these fathers and sons should both come from Odessa and meet
by chance in just that car. They had never seen each other before and
despised each other at first sight.
I have already alluded to our fat, phlegmatic young Hollander and
his little folding-chair. Obliged to stand on his feet, he held his little chair
clasped tightly to his paunch, indifferent to the curses of a neighbour who
kept on being poked in the ribs by the iron legs. Gradually he elbowed a
little room for himself and began happily unfolding his chair. The whole
car blew up. One of the men in the car was sick and the Hollander had
no choice but to be noble, helpful, good, and relinquish his little chair to
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him, which he did, but with a long face. Further on were two businessmen
of capacious circumference. Almost all their luggage had been thrown
out of the car, but they had salvaged a rolled-up mattress and they sat
down on it proudly when it came their turn to sit down. There was a
young man with a boyish face and an air of unassuming self-assurance.
Leadership in the organization of the car’s company fell automatically
to him without his making a move to obtain it. A fairly thankless task it
proved to be. It was he who requisitioned the Hollander’s chair for the
sick man, and the Hollander eyed him with the frankest and bitterest
antipathy thenceforward. All those people, whether liking or hating each
other at first sight, stood there on their feet in one press of humanity,
packed together, tangled together, inseparably tied together for as long
as the journey should last.
We rattled on, away from Les Milles, and we racked our brains as to
where they could be taking us. To the Pyrenees? To one of the camps
in the East Pyrenees? Or farther away toward the West? Maybe to
Gurs, where our wives were? Perhaps overseas to one of the colonies.
No matter where to, our first goal was the Rhône. Hitler’s armies were
headed down our side of the river. We would not be out of danger till
we had crossed.
We had to get over that bridge. But there were no bridges over the
Rhône south of Les Milles. We had to go north. North would mean
toward Hitler’s armies. We were anything but safe, then. Hitler’s armies
were nearby, they were fast. Who would get first to the bridge over the
Rhône, they or we?
The train was unbearably slow and stopped every other minute. But
at last, at long, long last, we came to Arles, and there was the bridge
across the Rhône.
But we did not cross the bridge. Our train ran through the Arles
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station and halted on a siding in the open country.
It was growing late in the afternoon and we were still on our side of the
Rhône. The train stopped and showed not the slightest intention of going on.
However, it was a chance for us to get out—we were allowed to.
We clambered down and there was green grass and a flowing brook,
and people came up, peasants, and they had something to sell—apricots,
sour, half-ripe apricots, bad ones, but we were thirsty and bought them
and they tasted good. A gentle slope, green with clumps of bushes and a
tall growth of new grass, led down to the brook. We had known nothing
but brick dust for so long! Now we sat down in the grass, stretched out
in it, breathed in its quickening fragrance and the freshness of the little
stream. It was wonderful.
The stop lasted two hours almost. We had risen at three in the
morning and had been on our feet all day, tense with expectation and
excitement. We were tired out. Most of us fell asleep there in the grass. It
was a good rest, but a dangerous one and every minute it lasted increased
the danger. Every minute brought Hitler’s armies nearer. Yet, after such
a long privation, the joy of lying on a greensward without a wall around
us, under a bright sky, overshadowed any anxiety we may have had. We
were almost sorry when we were ordered aboard again.
The train started and it began to cross the bridge. It was a long bridge.
We looked at it intently as we crossed. We could see that preparations
had been made to blow it up.
There, across at last. We were across the Rhône and safe—at least
for a few days.
We did not enjoy our new sense of safety as much as we had expected.
Our anxiety had lasted too long and our relief from it had come too
gradually. Night soon fell, besides, and its sufferings were to erase every
remnant of our sense of release.
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With the coming of dark our Algerian guards were afraid to let the
doors stay open in disregard of orders. They pulled them to and our cage
snapped shut.
Lying down was not to be thought of, but only a few of us could
find room to sit down. The young organizer with the boyish face found
a solution. Twenty of us would sit down for two hours and get what
sleep we could, then another twenty would take our places. There was
something quietly authoritative about his manner, and the telling off and
dividing were carried out expeditiously and without friction.
The two Algerian guards stretched out at full length athwart the
doors. The first twenty of us sat or at least squatted down along the wall
as best we could. Our best was not very good.
The others remained on their feet. The car filled with darkness, cold,
and stench. We rattled on, swaying now to one side, now to the other
with the jounces of the train.
We closed our eyes, we dozed—but one cannot sleep for any length
of time standing on one’s feet. It is torture to stand upright in the dark,
especially when one is dead tired and has had no sleep. You try one foot,
then you try the other. Any move you make disturbs a neighbour. You
rest your weight on the man in front of you, then on the man behind you,
and they do the same to you. A piece of luggage falls. One of the men
standing steps on the toes of a man who is sitting. The unending noise
wears down one’s nerves: curses, groans, snores, low at first then louder.
Rain had begun to fall and it was growing cooler. The car-boarding
was not tight. Water leaked through and wet the floor along the walls.
Those of us who were on our feet, packed close together, now swayed
en masse as the train lurched. The cursing from out of the dark increased
as one man now trod on another. One heard pleas, entreaties, bursts of
anger: “Get over there, a little, just a little!”
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Day broke at last. A grey, foggy light made its way through the
openings in front and behind and brought the whole wretchedness of
that carload of human freight into view. But the mere fact that it was
growing light seemed of itself to alleviate the horror. Yes, after all, in
spite of one’s exhaustion, in spite of one’s agony, one felt one’s spirits
rise. Comfort and misery are relative things.
It was growing light, and we stopped at a station. The side doors
were shoved open and we crept out on stiffened legs. There was nothing
in sight except rails and stones, no place to lie down anywhere, and it was
cold. But we could relieve ourselves. More than that, there was water,
water to wash in, water to drink. Besides, we could stretch our muscles,
swing our arms, kick out our legs, and sit down. A bit of sun broke
through the rain clouds and with it the hideous night was forgotten in
the happy feeling that we were free of Les Milles and that Hitler’s armies
were far away, on the other side of the Rhône.
We engaged in an exchange of thoughts and feelings, satisfactions and
cares. The main question was still unsolved: Whither were we bound?
No one could answer. The officers in command of the train declared that
they did not know themselves. The engineer knew that he was to take
the train as far as Toulouse; there he would be relieved by another man.
It turned out that we were in the seaport town of Cette. We weighed
seriously the chances of escape. There might be a ship in the harbour.
Guards told us that two large ships were docked there, waiting to take
on British subjects who were returning to England after the collapse of
France. Perhaps these English ships would take some of us along too.
Yet even as we considered the idea we knew how fantastic such
projects were. It would have been madness to give up a conveyance we
actually had, our train, in the remote hope that an English ship might
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take us aboard. For the time being at least we were safe where we were,
however wretched our train might be; and nobody tried to escape.
The sun shone warmer. We opened some of our tins and broke leaves
of bread. There was water to drink. We could sit down. We were alive
and glad of it.
Then, however, we had to climb aboard again and our joy took wing.
Now the officers saw to it that the cars were kept closed by day as well.
Air and light came in only through the small end windows. Our distress
of the day before was revived in every evil detail. However small we
made ourselves, we took space and air from our neighbours. We were a
torment to one another.
There was a stench in the car. Two men were suffering from
dysentery. A bucket was placed in the car for their use. They glared
defiantly around and the others glared furiously at them.
The rest of us, of course, could not attend to our needs inside the
car. We had to wait until the train stopped somewhere. It almost always
stopped in the open country. Then we clambered out or, if one had
sufficient practice, leapt out. I have already said that the struts were
very high and that there were no steps. Once outside, the men stood or
squatted on the tracks and attended to their needs. But we never knew
when the train was to start again. Sometimes it started off unexpectedly,
after only a few seconds. The squatters would then leap to their feet and
race after the train. There were old men among us. They ran, pitiable,
ludicrous, holding up their trousers, in great anxiety. They would rush
headlong, would try, painfully, to clamber up the high strut on their car.
One or the other would happen to get at the wrong car. The occupants
would beat his hands to drive him away; for the car was full, there was
absolutely no room for one more inside. But he had to get aboard; what
would become of him if he were left behind?
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There was an orthodox Jew in our car and he held fast to his practices.
For all the hellish crowding and the unbearable rattling of the train, he
got out his prayer shawl and his phylactery, took his bearings to find the
East, and then, facing Jerusalem and the Temple, said his prayers.
So we went on and on. We were all ill from sheer fatigue, bitter and
irritable beyond words. Some quarrel was always starting. Just who
belonged to the group whose turn to sit down had come? Weren’t the
sitters oversitting their time, and wasn’t the organization of the groups
all wrong, anyway? The calm and patient organizer had to interfere time
and again. Even the two rotund, peaceable businessmen could not get
along together on their rolled-up mattress. And in the midst of all the
wrangling, the sick groaned and complained, and the rain beat endlessly
down on the train.
We had but one wish now: at least to get there, wherever “there”
might be. To be out of that car, to be able to stretch our limbs—the next
internment camp would do, just so long as we got there.
I made one observation at this time which I shall not abstain
from stating: There were of course exceptions, but on the whole
the “intellectuals” among us withstood the hardships of the journey
resignedly and patiently. They proved to be tougher, quieter, more
uncomplaining than many men from other walks of life who were
physically stronger and physically better trained.
And the next night came.
During that night the business with the false teeth happened. The
man to whom it all happened must have been some forty years old.
He was a slightly built individual with palish eyes. Nothing about his
appearance suggested that he had false teeth. He had so far been very
gentle and inconspicuous, but now suddenly he began to shriek and yell,
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and there was no quieting him. It was this way: When it came his turn
to sit down he had taken out his false teeth, perhaps with the idea of
getting a bit of sleep, and placed them in his coat pocket. It appears that
in the dark someone stepped on them and the set was crushed beyond
repair. The man wailed and lamented. It was a piteous blubbering, for
he mumbled; he could not articulate a word with his teeth gone. Nobody
manifested the slightest sympathy.
We were running along the Pyrenees. It rained and rained and was
very cold. This time too it was some slight relief when the greying day
broke through our two small windows, but all of us were now done in.
Many remarked grimly that they could not hold out through another
such night.
Several of the men assailed me violently as the one responsible for the
whole wretched business. If it had not been for me, if I had not arranged
to have the choice left with them as to whether they should stay at Les
Milles or be transferred, they would probably still be sitting peacefully
in our camp. They cursed me, and they longed to be out of that frightful
train and back with the fleshpots of Egypt.
Whenever our train halted at or near a town a number of daredevils
would invariably try to get hold of some food. Our guards, French as
well as Arabs, were good-natured fellows, easy to strike a bargain with.
They did not restrain the daredevils. The region through which we were
now travelling, the Southwest of France, was flooded with refugees.
Food was scarce and shops were crowded with purchasers. The men
from our train did not, of course, tell who they were. Pretending to be
Dutch or Belgian refugees, they usually got what they wanted, afterward
reselling the victuals to the rest of us at a profit. Those who undertook
such excursions were usually of the poorer among our number. We had
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enough to eat on the journey, but we could never get anything hot. Great
was our longing for tea, coffee, soup.
Some in our car were well acquainted with the line we were now
following. They would explain to the rest of us where one went in this
or that direction, and excitement grew as to our probable destination.
Tension and curiosity mounted high whenever we approached localities
in or near which there were internment camps. Was this the one for
which we were headed?
By this time we were in the West Pyrenees and one by one we passed
the famous towns of that mountain country, Tarbes, Lourdes, Pau. Then
we drew in to the station at Oloron on the cross-line that leads to Gurs,
where many of us had concluded our wives were being detained. In
eager expectancy we waited to see whether we would be unloaded there
and were disappointed when our train moved on.
After that it was clear: we were on the way to Bayonne, the
southernmost seaport of France on the Atlantic.
Undeterred by the ceaseless rain, five or six of us were always sitting
in a closely packed line in the doorway of our car, dangling our legs over
the edge. We met trains as interminable as our own, and trains as long as
our own overtook and passed us. They were all crowded with people—
people sitting on the steps, people lying dangerously on the tops of
the cars. All France was on the move. All France was in flight, and in
all directions, madly, at random. All railway lines and all highways in
southern France were crowded with fugitives—Hollanders, Belgians,
millions of French from the North. There they were, plodding along
the roads in endless throngs, under the torrential rains, toward the
Spanish border.
What were they going to do with us? Heated discussions broke out
in our train. The once slight possibility now loomed up as a virtual
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certainty: we were to be shipped overseas, to the colonies, perhaps to
Morocco, perhaps farther south, to Dakar. Many liked that prospect,
regarding it as the one certain escape from Hitler’s armies. They were
ready to forgive the French for all the harm they had done us if, in the
end, they really brought us such perfect security. Others, instead, rose
in their wrath against any such deportation. No, they would not let
themselves be sent overseas. They would not be separated from their
wives and children for who could say how long, perhaps forever. They
would refuse to be shipped off into the utterly uncertain.
Gruelling tales of deportations came from the cars of the Foreign
Legionnaires. You were stowed away in the hold of some old tub or
other and lay huddled together there in the dark and stench, half under
water, with rats and vermin for company. Anyone with the slightest
tendency to seasickness was sick at once. In our particular case there
was the additional and ever-present element of danger. On such a
voyage one had to count on the chance of being sighted and bombed
by an Italian warship or plane. What it meant to await such an attack,
helplessly locked up in the dark, we knew from our experience during
the bombardment at Les Milles. No, such a voyage could not be any joke.
Many men declared that never under any circumstances would they let
themselves be sent away like that. They would rather try to escape,
rather fall into Hitler’s hands.
We were now getting very close to Bayonne. Already we could smell
the sea, already we noticed the salt air of the Atlantic. And look—there
were masts, there were ships.
The train came to a stop outside the station. A highway ran along
the track past our train, separated from us by a low railing. I could not
tear my eyes or my mind from that road, from the sight of the desolate,
hopelessly confused procession moving along it. Vehicles of every
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sort, from the most ancient pushcarts to the most modern motor
cars, all of them monstrously overloaded and jammed full; piles of
mattresses on every auto top, perhaps to protect them from attacks
from the air; in between the vehicles, crowded in a mad jumble, horses,
mules, people with bicycles, people on foot—all streaming toward the
Spanish border nearby.
Our stop lasted a long time. Finally the train moved, moved on to the
station at the waterfront. Our tension increased. Were they putting us
directly aboard ship? Another stop, interminable. We were not unloaded.
Then the train began to travel back towards the Bayonne station.
The train came to a stop at the same spot where it had stopped before.
The procession of refugees was still moving along the highway. A violent
argument started in our car. Anybody who did not want to be shipped
abroad could hardly have a better chance to escape than at that moment.
As we stood there waiting, the quiet organizer with the boyish face
walked over to me. “Listen,” he said. “You must go at once to the officer
in charge of the train. There is a report that Hitler’s troops will be here
in two hours.”
I stared at the man. How could the Nazis suddenly turn up at
Bayonne? Could he be possessed by one of the crazy rumours that
were now running wild through the country? But he was a well-
balanced fellow, immune to hysteria. According to the newspapers, the
Germans had gone no farther down the Rhône Valley, but had swung
west toward Bordeaux.
“Come along!” he urged.
We hurried forward along the train toward the captain’s car. Would
there never be an end to that string of cars? Finally we got there. Several
men had arrived ahead of us. The commandant was standing on the
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running-board of his car. Our men were staring up at him, terror-
stricken. Catching sight of me, he said: “Listen, Monsieur, tell your
comrades we have to go back. The Germans will be in Bayonne two
hours from now. Try to prevent a panic.”
“Prevent a panic;” that was easily said. I personally was calm. I forced
myself to be. But all about me was an uproar of wailing, shouting, angry
recriminations. Things had turned out just as we had feared they would.
As usual, the French were too late; we were too late. We had said that
from the very first. But after all, raving and raging got us nowhere. What
were we to do? The Spanish border was close at hand. Might it not be
wisest to join the stream of refugees and see whether we could get across?
A hundred different suggestions were put forward, a hundred precipitate
proposals. Ought we to go to the American consulate and ask for advice,
protection, help? To stay there in the train was madness. We would have
to get through on our own without the French. The French had failed
again and again, failed miserably. To count on them further was folly.
Absurd were the various projects for escaping. That at least was what
sane reason indicated, and the judgment was later borne out by the facts
when we were in a position to look back and view them calmly. It was
true that the Spaniards still had their borders open at that moment, but
they required papers and permits and allowed only French citizens to
pass. As for the American consulate, there was none in Bayonne.
To cut loose from our cursed train was certainly a temptation. But
what was there to gain by doing so? One might get along for two or three
days. But if the Nazis began looking for us and ran us down, what then?
They could be relied on to make the sifting that the French had never
been able to make, and when they wanted a man they found him.
And even from the French, from the civilian population, we could
expect only bad treatment if we went wandering about the country
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without papers. Only a few of us spoke French well enough to pass
as Frenchmen. To the French public in general, we were more likely
to look like Nazis who had gone astray, like enemies, in a word. The
proper papers were absolutely essential. We had to be able to prove to
the French that we were anti-Nazis and had a right to protection.
We went back to the captain’s car. Many of us, we explained, wanted
to make a try at getting through on our own.
“Well, go ahead,” answered the captain coolly. “Anyone inclined to
go it alone is at liberty to do so. But I advise against it. Separately and
on foot you will have a very slim chance of getting beyond the reach of
Hitler’s troops. For the time being I and my train still have the whole
machinery of the military authorities at our disposal. We have a chance
of getting you to a region which will not be in German hands when the
armistice is concluded.”
He spoke very quietly, still standing on the running-board of his car.
He appeared to be reliable.
“At least give us back our papers,” we begged.
“I have no authorization to do that,” he answered, and he went on to
observe sensibly enough: “But even if I had, in the short time we have
left it would be practically impossible to do so. Anyone who wants to
leave us does so at his own risk.”
We urged, begged, implored, threatened. He stood there, impassive,
on the running-board.
“Quiet now, quiet,” he counselled, persuasive. “I really have
something better and more important to do in your own interest.”
But we would not have it that way. We pleaded, we threatened.
Finally he lost his patience.
“No, I won’t!” he shouted and disappeared inside his car.
The train stood there and stood there. Another train pulled out,
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then a second, a fifth, a tenth, all of them packed to the last corner with
soldiers and civilians. Still our train did not move. Several of our people
made off, and they were followed by others in increasing numbers. They
went off without papers, many without money, for better or for worse.
The rain was falling in torrents. It was getting late in the afternoon.
Everything looked grey, hopeless.
My friends, the two young Austrians, came to see me. They begged
me to hesitate no longer, but to strike out with them. The South of France
was in utter chaos. One could just duck under and disappear without
danger or difficulty. We never would have a chance like that again. The
train was conspicuous. Hitler’s people would be sure to hear of it.
That was all true enough, but what the captain had said was also true.
We argued back and forth and finally came to a decision. We decided that
my young friends should postpone their flight. I would move over into
their car—several people there had already fled and I would find room.
Then, in the course of the next few hours, while our train was on the
way, if I decided to leave it and entrust myself to them, they would be
there and in readiness.
More trains pulled out. We, the Boches, were obviously being left
to the very last. No one now had faith in the idea of rescue. We were
all making individual plans for flight. Several tried to slip aboard other
trains, but only a few succeeded. The trains were full and people were
fighting for places everywhere. Heaven help the Boche who was caught
aboard one of those trains.
One story I heard later, but it belongs just here. A few elderly Jews
succeeded in slipping into a locked compartment of a military train that
was about to start. They sat there, waiting for the train to move, fearing
that they might be discovered and kicked out with scant courtesy. Surely
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enough, the compartment door did open. The old men’s hearts stood
still. But a voice rang out: “Chocolate, chocolate for the long journey.”
It was one of our own train companions. Fresh, ever alive, even in the
very midst of the general despondency, he wanted to do a little quick
business on the side.
Discipline had become a thing of the past in our train. Not only
internees but some of the guards had deserted. People were wandering
from car to car; friends who had hitherto been separated were getting
together again.
Only a brief negotiation was required to enable me to move over into
the car with my Austrians. Though three or four men had disappeared
from that car, it was still packed full and seating accommodations were
out of the question: it was worse than the car I had left. Three men in it
had dysentery and were provided with a bucket. A fat man with a crutch
was always complaining that someone had jostled or stepped on him.
The Austrian polyhistor, the half-cracked scholar, was also there.
The artfully erected luggage pile had been torn to pieces; for
whoever wanted to be ready for flight knew that he could take along
only what he could carry on his person. Those were the things the men
were now selecting. The dirty car floor was littered with articles of every
description. One trampled on them. There was no room. Certain of
the men would snatch up articles, the most valuable ones, and inquire
greedily of the erstwhile owners whether, if these had really decided to
flee, they could not safeguard their valuables for them.
During this last review of luggage a strange transformation took
place in our car, and it was much the same, as I later heard, in other cars.
While entraining at Les Milles people had fought tooth and nail to defend
and retain their luggage; now they threw it away without a murmur. Not
only did they not spare their belongings, they tossed them aside and
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trampled them destructively underfoot with almost sensual delight.
My young Austrians became infected with this mania for destruction.
They extracted from my luggage the things I was to take with me on
our eventual flight, then, quite unnecessarily, flung the discarded articles
helter-skelter about the floor and proceeded themselves to trample on
them as with deliberate purpose, despite Karl’s protests. Up to that
moment they had always struck me as lads with a special bent for
orderliness and tidiness. The fine leather binding, so light, so flexible,
on the beautiful thin-paper Balzac that I had been at special pains to
take along was now ruined too. It lay soiled and besmirched on the car
floor, ground into the dirt by heavy, filthy shoes. When Karl indignantly
recovered it, it was such a piece of foul rubbish that I did not care to
touch it.
Our train started at long last, but it proceeded slowly and within a
brief half-hour’s time came to a halt again.
At that point many gave up hope that rescue was to be found here.
Evening had come, it was cold, the rain was still falling in a torrent. But
they could endure our death-train no longer. They could be seen, nearly a
hundred of them, clambering down from the cars into the rainy, hopeless
dusk, old men some of them, men who could hardly get about under
the best conditions. It was heart-rending to see these men in their rags
and tatters tramping out into the rain-soaked fields, dragging themselves
wearily along under the relentless downpour, without luggage, without
extra clothes, without money, without papers, heading into the unknown,
in a friendless land which on the morrow, perhaps that very evening,
would be in the hands of their mortal enemies.
That was my last glimpse of many of the acquaintances I had made
in the camp or on the train, dim figures tramping across wet fields into a
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deepening night, into utter uncertainty. Among those who thus vanished
were the artist from Sanary and his young son, the imperturbable
organizer with the boyish face, the biologist who had been my straw-
fellow at Les Milles and had endured the camp and his asthma so bravely.
Those and others too I was seeing for the last time at a half-hour distance
from Bayonne and I have heard nothing of them since.
There too my young Austrian friends parted from me. They had dug
up a good map by this time.
“The train just stands here and waits,” they urged. “The Nazis will
surely overtake it. Anything is better than being nabbed here in one of
these cars.” And they served an ultimatum on me: “Are you coming or
are you not? We’re going now.”
Once more I weighed the pros and cons. The boys were certainly
right in that for the following hour, perhaps for the two or three hours
following, the danger was greater inside than outside the train. But if one
were thinking of safety beyond that space of time, it would be unwise
to give up the train. In the long run a person on his own was doomed
in Nazi-occupied territory. I thanked the boys, I thanked them from the
bottom of my heart—and I stayed.
I have not seen these young Austrians since then either.
The car in which I now was settled was still so crowded that sitting
down was out of the question. Greedy hands were constantly reaching
out for belongings abandoned by those who had fled, and the close
quarters made the scramble for booty still wilder.
The faint dusk darkened into night. It still rained. A damp chill
made its way under one’s skin. We were dead tired, worn out by
the tense excitements of the day. There was the fear, too, that at any
moment Hitler’s motorized columns might fall upon the train. Misery,
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anxiety, exhaustion made us ill-natured and irritable. Everybody hated
everybody else, disputed with everybody else. Never in my life have I
heard such obscene curses as during that night, and the broad Austrian
accent, ordinarily relished, made the curses seem even commoner.
The sick moaned, the well cursed, and there were those that snored;
and the car was filled with night and fear and appalling stench. We stood,
swaying hither and thither; some sobbed and were possessed of one
desire: “Oh, for the morning.” And as often as the train stopped, our
hearts stopped in fright: They’re here, the Germans.
Once the train halted in a tunnel. It was pitch-dark and the stop was
long. But that time nobody cursed, nobody groaned, not even the sick,
and nobody stirred. It was the silence of a tomb, no sound but the beating
of our own hearts. For on the top of the hill inside which our train had
halted a German motorized column was rumbling.
Then word came that the danger had passed and we moved on. It
rained harder and harder and the cold increased. My every muscle, my
every hair, ached from fatigue. But when it came my turn to sit down, I
could not get to sleep. My tortured, sleep-hungry weariness was pierced
by the clang of a voice that wailed monotonously the whole night
through: “God of my fathers. God of my fathers.” “Shut up,” cried one,
and: “Shut up, you dirty dog,” came from another. But the voice whined
on: “God of my fathers. God of my fathers,” and I could not sleep.
On we went through the hostile night. Our train moved slowly, and
along with it went our misery, the anxiety of our hearts, our malice and
our despair.
We had been in such a great hurry the day before to get to Bayonne,
within the range of Hitler’s armies. Now our train hesitated, wavered,
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made no progress. It was almost midnight when we were back at Pau
again at last.
Pau is an ample, comfortable watering-place. In our car was an oldish
man whose behaviour, thus far, had been particularly quiet and sensible.
He now suddenly went off the handle.
“I am well known here in Pau,” he declared. “I used to spend some
months here every year and always in the same hotel. I’m going to
get out of this train here and now. I’ve had enough! I want a sleep in
a regular bed. Money will certainly find a bed in Pau. If I do fall into
Hitler’s hands, I want at least first to have had one more sleep in a real
bed.” And he got off.
By daybreak we had gone no farther than Lourdes, and there again
we had a three- or four-hour stop. On the track next to ours stood two
enormously long freight trains, loaded with war materials. On the track
beyond them, and guarded by French soldiers, stood a train carrying
women internees, German women, our women. Again and again men
from our train tried to scramble over the bumpers of the freight cars
to reach the women; again and again they would be driven back by the
soldiers, who had the strictest orders. All we could do was to shout across
to the women from the platform along our train through the spaces
between the freight cars, and the women shouted back at us.
Notes and letters were sent back and forth. It developed that the
wives of almost all on our train were in camp at Gurs in the Pyrenees.
At Lourdes also we learned that an aged general had taken over the
government in France and that he and his Fascist cabinet had issued a
statement declaring that they were to cease fighting. They had asked the
Germans for an armistice. What would the German terms be? What
parts of France would they occupy? And where would we be when
the armistice was signed—in occupied or in unoccupied territory? A
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hundred rumours were about. One could learn nothing definite.
And we moved on, still covering the stretch that we had travelled
the day before. My resourceful, helpful young Austrians having gone,
there was no sense in my lingering on in their messy car. The passengers
of my original German car kindly invited me to come back to them. I
did so. There was more room in that car and better manners. It was like
getting home.
In the course of the day as we slowly, slowly retraced our way, many
of those who had fled rejoined us. They had recognized the hopelessness
of trying to get through by themselves. They had explained now to a
military official, now to a station master, that they had lost their transport
and so had been sent along after us. It was in fact no hard task to overtake
us. Most of the trains were being pushed on ahead of ours. Those who
had fled our train had had a hard time. They told of long tramps through
the night in the heavy rain. Few had found any shelter.
Also with us again was the gentleman who had left at Pau in quest
of a bed to sleep in. He had been disappointed. He had found his
bed, all right, but months of sleeping on straw and on hard floors had
incapacitated him for sleeping on a soft mattress. In the end he stretched
out on the bare floor. He was much incensed.
It now turned out that the Germans had not advanced on Bayonne
at all and were still not in the town. The fact was that our unhappy train
had provoked the most nonsensical rumours all along the line over
which we had travelled, until we ourselves had finally fallen victim to
a grotesque misunderstanding. We were now able to perceive exactly
how everything had fitted together. The territory which we had been
crossing was overcrowded with refugees, and food stocks were running
low everywhere. If for no other reason than to ensure warm meals for
himself and his soldiers the captain in command of our train had to give
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due notice of our approach. Commissaries everywhere grumbled, so he
had been obliged to telephone first to one place then to another.
“I’m arriving with two thousand Boches,” he would report. “Have
you food for us?”
Rumours of his telephone calls had spread abroad, and in that
disorganized, panic-stricken country it had finally been rumoured that
the Boches were on the way. The story had been taken seriously. We had
been scared into flight by our own shadow.
The sick man in our car had grown worse meanwhile. We called in
one of our doctors to have a look at him. The doctor pronounced it a
case of typhus and declared that for the man to continue the journey
would not only be a danger to himself but would expose us. He should
be sent to a hospital at the next stop. He, the doctor, would make that
request of the commandant.
But the sick man protested. He did not want to leave us, he did not
want to leave the car. Pale, emaciated, unable to help himself, he sat there,
with his back bent forward, in a terrible sweat, stubbornly repeating over
and over again: “No, I won’t leave this car.” He thought it would be the
end of him if he were ever separated from us. He could not speak a word
of French. He did not want to die alone and helpless in a French hospital
and, dead, be “shovelled into a hole like a dog” by the Nazis.
French orderlies finally removed him. He protested, plaintively,
despairingly. But the Frenchmen did not understand.
We learned definitely the next day that an armistice had been
concluded. We halted outside a largish station at the time—I think it
was Toulouse. Alongside our train stood a line of empty cars and a
charwoman was washing the windows.
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“Tell us, Madame,” we called across to her, “has the armistice
been concluded?”
The woman went on washing her window.
“Yes,” she said, “I believe so, yes.”
We managed to get a newspaper. It was bordered in black. An
armistice had been concluded.
We studied the paper. News items were meagre and their content
vague. But there was a map on which the territory to be occupied was
shaded, while the unoccupied was left in white. We were in the white
zone, that was certain.
I sat down on the running-board of one of the empty cars that the
woman had finished cleaning. Some of our men called to me. I paid no
attention. Armistice. This war was our war. Had we lost it? We had not
lost it. The French Fascists had sold out their country to our enemy. A
blow for us undoubtedly, but it by no means signified that the war was
lost. It did not prove so very much even as regards the military strength
of the enemy. It could hardly be called a military victory. It was only
one more symptom of a condition that we had known of all along: the
fact, in other words, that when it came to the point the Fascists in every
country stood ready without scruple to sacrifice the national interests of
their country to their private interests.
Not for a second did I doubt the final victory of our cause. To be sure,
I did not dare to conjure up for myself or others the special situations that
this war would bring forth. But I had known from the beginning with a
certainty that sprang from reason no less than from the heart, with a
certainty that nothing that happened in between could ever shake, that at
the end of this war National Socialism, Fascism, would be overthrown.
“En voiture, all aboard!” shouted the guards. In our car an animated
discussion began. Was the war over? Only a few thought so. The defeat
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of France in the field had become a fact the moment an inefficient corps
of generals, some of them Nazi or Fascist at least in their sympathies,
had let the enemy into the country. To a certain extent, therefore, the
armistice was merely a recognition of a fact that for a long time no one
had questioned. For us, the passengers on our train, the armistice could
bring only advantages as regarded the immediate present. We had been
forced to live through a war as the shackled, imprisoned, defenceless
victims of an unreasoning if not actually malicious military clique. The
war was now over, and whatever the outcome it could only be better than
the dreadful life we had been leading during those past weeks. Things
were still bad and uncertain; but compared with what had been it was
comfort itself. Our mood was therefore optimistic rather than not.
And then, too, the sun came out. The Hautes-Pyrenees with their rain
lay behind us. We became actually exuberant in our car. We squeezed
close together in the wide doorway, dangling our legs over the side,
waving to passengers in trains that passed, and they waved back to us.
After all, the French refugees aboard those crowded trains felt the way
we felt. The newspapers were edged in mourning, but conquered France
breathed a sigh of relief. So it is when relatives gather at the bedside of
a slowly dying man. He has been given up. They know they are going
to lose him, but his dying is a long-drawn-out and painful process. They
stand there, dead tired themselves, worn out by the long night vigils
and the other torments of a hard battle with death. The patient gasps,
rattles, still he does not die. But now he has gone, the doctor says so, and
the living draw a deep breath and feel almost relieved, heart-rending to
them as his passing may be. So it was with the French in those first days
of the armistice. Their France was dead, but the ghastly horrors of the
previous weeks were over.
Fighting was over. The sun was shining. Danger had ended. One’s
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life was no longer under threat, one no longer needed to dread a call to
rush to a cellar and fear that a bomb would send a house tumbling down
upon one’s head. Soldiers took it for granted that they would soon be
released from service, millions of refugees that they could now return
to their homes, mothers and wives that they would now be getting their
sons and husbands back again. The newspapers had black borders, but
the French people in the overcrowded trains that passed us did not have
sorrowful faces. Some were even singing.
We in our car were as pleased as they.
Though when all was said and done we did not know what was really
to become of us and certainly not whither we were bound. But this latter
question had ceased to be a question of life and death. We were in a
part of France that Hitler’s men were not to occupy. Indeed, we were
moving farther and farther away from Hitler’s men and the deeper we
went into the Southeast of France the more a feeling grew in us that
we were returning home. Internment in a camp in the West? That was
foreign exile. Internment in a camp in the East? That was going home.
And there we were once again at the sea. Not the Atlantic this time;
that cruel W estern Ocean lay behind us with the whole long chain of the
Pyrenees in between. The sea we saw before us was our sea, the Eastern
Sea, the Mediterranean. It lay in the sunshine, lustrous dark blue with bursts
of spray leaping in delicate white lines from the surface. Our spirits rose.
Had we had bitter quarrels over little things, sworn at one another,
cursed? How had that been possible? Well, it was past and forgotten.
It was not true. We thought kindly thoughts of one another. Some of
the men whose turn to sit down had come even started a game of cards.
That was not a simple matter. Cards could not be flung down on a table;
they had to be carefully balanced on the player’s knees and it was hard
to keep from seeing other hands. But one laughed at all that, and when
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there were disputes they were the good-natured twittings of doughty
burghers over their glasses of wine or beer.
A long, long way we had put behind us in going from Les Milles to
Bayonne. Now we had gone the greater part of the way, almost the whole
way, back again. The junction just ahead, the knowing ones declared,
would be the last. There it would become clear whither we were being
taken, whether to Les Milles or somewhere else.
We amused ourselves imagining the sort of face Captain G. and his
officers would wear, and our old comrades too, if they saw us turning up
at Les Milles again.
The train ran on. As the junction came into view our strain grew.
The train went on—not toward Les Milles, but toward Nîmes. A man
in our car lived in Nîmes and had a French wife there and children who
were French citizens. He intended to leave the train the moment we got
in. Then he would hurry home, see his wife and children, go to sleep
in a bed, his own bed at that, eat well, drink well. He was happy, beside
himself for joy. He slapped us on the back, flung his arms about us,
blustered, sang, invited us all, anyone who wished, to come to his house
and celebrate his homecoming.
Evening came on. The sun went down in a blaze of glorious colour.
Our train did not pull into the station, but circled the city and came to
a stop on a siding, a mile or two beyond the town. That would be our
last stop, we were given to understand; we would be disembarked the
next day.
So we had made that hideous, torturing journey, stood those terrible
nights (literally “stood” them), only to end up in the very locality,
almost, from which we had started.
We were standing in a great field strewn with stones. Anyone who
so preferred, we were told, might leave the train and sleep in the open.
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The day had been hot but, as is frequently the case in southern France,
it turned very cold with the coming of night. Many men nevertheless
clambered out of the train in defiance of the chilly prospect and found
places to sleep in the field. As a result there was more room inside the
cars, and one could sit down or even lie down.
It was possible to get water, milk, and even wine at a large farmhouse
nearby. So there we were for once stretched out full length, both those
inside the cars and those in the field. There stood the train, long, dark,
shabby. But this was to be our last night in it or about it. The morrow
would see its end.
I had chosen to sleep in the field. I twisted and stretched my weary
muscles, wrapping myself tighter in my blanket. Over my head was the
starry heaven. I fell asleep, happy.
THE SHIPS OF BA YONNE | THE DEVIL IN FRANCE

173
Part Three
The Tents of NÎMES
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LION FEUCHTWANGER
How goodly are thy tents, O Jacob, and thy tabernacles, O Israel!
The next morning we had to rise early and line up in the original
groupings, Germans, Austrians, and Foreign Legionnaires.
Then once more we had to wait. It was the usual endless wait and we
wondered why they had bugled the rising signal so early. For that matter,
the waiting was not so bad this time. We had a lot of sleep to catch up
with and many stretched out and slumbered under the good, ascending
sun. The rest lolled about and dozed. The sky was light, the air pure
and aromatic. Soft blue hills rose in a circle. The train, to be sure, that
spectral train that had housed us through all that wretched eternity, was
still standing there. But look: it too was rattling away. With a deep sigh
of relief we watched it lurch around a curve and disappear. And with it
went the bitterness of the most hideous journey of our lives.
We had no idea where we were to be taken. There were two or three
places in the environs of Nîmes that could be used for camp purposes.
Everything seemed to indicate that we were in for a fairly long march.
The march in itself did not frighten us, but what about the luggage? It
would be a task to carry it up into those hills.
Several elderly men made their way to the captain. This was a new
one, our former guard, officers, and men having departed with the
train. The new captain replied harshly that trucks were for the luggage
of the sick only; the well would be good enough to carry their bags
themselves. The old men grumbled. They had conserved the remnants
of their possessions through all the horrors of the journey and did not
care to lose them now. They had accepted the torments of the train
stoically; now at this trifling contrariety they boiled over. Excited and
grim, they declared that they were old men and unable now to lug
their duffle up those hills. The officer answered boorishly that in that
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case they would just have to do without it. And he muttered that at the
moment the Army Command had plenty to worry about besides the
underwear of a few Boches.
The first group marched off—marched is hardly the word. The men
broke ranks there in the field, each one going as he chose or was able. All
mixed together, guards, officers, and internees, we walked away along a
stony road. It ran through beautiful country: blue hills, much woodland,
growths of holm-oak. Valleys with brooks, heath, ravines, no cultivation
anywhere, finally a river, and over the whole a bright, light blue sky. The
road led uphill, in a gentle grade with wide-sweeping curves. Looking
back, I could see our field strewn with pieces of luggage of all sorts. Most
of the men had simply left everything behind, and I had done so, too.
None hurried. A sergeant, a couple of guards, would urge us along,
but perfunctorily. It was a pleasure to which we were entitled after that
wicked journey. It might be that we were heading toward some enclosure
such as the brickyard at Les Milles. We therefore savoured to the full this
walk under the open sky, stopping now and again to breathe deeply or
enjoy the beautiful view.
The road was long; for a hundred yards or so it joined the highway,
which was bare; there were only a few cars because of lack of fuel. A
crowded motor bus overtook us; it bore the sign: “Nîmes-Uzès.”
We had been going uphill for about two hours when I spied a narrow
path which at first led down into a hollow and then continued up a steep
slope to join our road again. I turned into it. Down in the hollow there
was a little brook with many tall yellow flowers. I sat down on a rock.
I was alone. For the first time in many weeks I was alone, and not only
alone, I was sitting in a spacious meadow under a blue sky, with rolling
country all around, misty blue hills, and the purest air.
I had been under lock and key for weeks; now I was basking in
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beautiful freedom. I saw the hills and the sky and the meadow; the little
brook trickled at my feet. Whether I sat there for long or only briefly I
do not know. I do know that it was enjoyable.
Slowly I made my way up to our road again. The climb was not hard,
yet it required some effort, and when I reached the road, I sat down again
on a milestone and rested.
Army lorries passed by. They bore our luggage. The rude officer had
not only had the bundles scattered on the field picked up; the trucks also
had orders to take on luggage that the men were carrying themselves.
Moreover, one of our number had scoured the town and rooted out two
or three open vans in which one could sit down. I rode the rest of the way.
We must have gone some fifteen miles in all when we came to
an old ornamental gate on which stood the name “San Nicola” in
weather-beaten letters. The gate led to a farm that seemed to have
been long unoccupied.
This farm and its grounds had obviously been selected for our new
living quarters. It comprised a manor-house and a number of smallish
outbuildings, all old-fashioned, primitive, but pretty to look at. The
officers and guards would probably be lodged in the house and buildings.
What was to be done with us?
There was nothing but open fields, a broad meadow planted with
mulberry trees, then woodlands all around, broken by more fields, the
whole very charmingly situated but hardly suited to housing people in
large numbers. We were very thirsty after our long tramp. The available
wells provided dubious water for about twenty people, certainly not for
two thousand. For the moment we got along with the mulberries.
More and more stragglers arrived. Townspeople were already
finding their way up to us. They brought cigarettes, chocolate, bonbons,
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for sale at prices that were very high because of the toilsome climb, they
explained. According to them, the trip from Nîmes was a hard one to
make. There was nothing along the road, not even water. You had to
bring everything with you from town. The city of Nîmes itself was short
of everything; it was swamped with refugees from Holland, Belgium,
and northern France. It had tripled in population.
We looked at each other anxiously. The needs of all those refugees
would have priority over ours. Who would bother about us? But we
shook off our apprehensions. The early summer was beautiful under the
open sky; ten times better than the brickyard at Les Milles, a hundred
times better than that cursed train.
And here, already, were the first trucks bearing supplies from the
army authorities. We crowded excitedly around them to see what they
might contain. Water? Provisions? Not water, not provisions, not even
boards for barracks, nor picks and shovels for digging trenches for
latrines. It was barbed wire.
While I, along with others, was loitering about the field, two young
men approached and, with serious expressions, said that they had
something to tell me, something that they did not wish to say before the
others. Would I not go with them?
We went to a little farmyard that was paved with large cobblestones
and separated from the field by a rail fence. On one side was an open
shed with a steep-pitched roof. We entered. The floor was covered with
straw. There was a manger, a long feeding-trough, an old hay-wagon.
I remember the place very well, for, in truth, the two young men had
“something” to tell me.
We stood in the shade. Soldiers were strolling or sitting about the
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sunny little yard, and a number of internees as well. Some of the latter
were at a well whose pump refused to work. Catching sight of me, a few
strolled up for a talk. But the two who had brought me here asked that
they be permitted to speak to me alone. They drew me deeper into a
shaded corner in an attempt at privacy.
They handed me a newspaper. “Read this,” they said. I did so. It was
a newspaper of that morning, from Nîmes, and it reported the terms of
the armistice. I remember exactly how I read, I remember the size of the
little paper, the order of the sentences in which the text of the armistice
conditions was printed. I read, with all my senses strained, slowly yet
rapidly, clause for clause. Clause One, Clause Five, Clause Fifteen,
finally Clause Nineteen. Clause Nineteen provided that the French were
to deliver over to the Nazis all Germans whom they, the Nazis, “wanted.”
My knees trembled. I read no further. “All Germans whom the Nazis
wanted.” For years past the Nazis had been calling me their Enemy
Number One in their speeches and newspapers. If they turned in a list
of “wanted” persons my name would surely be near the top.
“Thank you,” I said and handed back the newspaper. It was the third
time within a short period that I had felt death near at hand. The first
time was that night when the Nazis came nearer and nearer and our train
failed to arrive. The second time was at Bayonne, when it seemed that
the Nazis had surrounded me. And now they were making a third lunge
for me from close by, and those to whose protection I had committed
myself had agreed to give me up.
“What do you think?” my two companions asked. “What should
we do?”
“I am Tr—,” one of them continued. “Perhaps you remember.
Just after that stabbing affair at X— some time ago, the Nazis indicted
me for the murder of Party-Member Fischer. I was acquitted. But the
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Nazis, of course, regard me as the murderer.”
“What should we do?” they repeated. “We are in the same situation,
you and we. It is still easy to get away now. Tomorrow it may be too
late.” They spoke calmly, sensibly.
“Give me an hour to think it over quietly,” I requested. “I am always
slow in making up my mind. I have to weigh pros and cons all by myself.”
“Very well,” they said. “W e thought we would tell you because you are
the one who is in greatest danger. Do you want to keep the newspaper?”
“No,” I answered. “I know all I need to know.” We separated.
As I left the little farmyard Karl approached, smiling. “Your valise
is here,” he said, “and I have all your things together. I have something
for you to drink,” he went on proudly, “and I have found a place where
you can lie down and be comfortable. Should I bring you the blanket?”
“Please do,” I said. “Thank you, Karl.”
He had a little tea for me in a thermos bottle and I drank it. Then he
brought the blanket and led me across the field to a little slope that was
shaded by trees. As he spread the blanket on the ground, it caught flecks of
sunlight and shadow from the foliage above. I lay down and closed my eyes.
Comrades who had had occasion to observe me in the variously
wretched and dangerous situations of those months thought that I had
shown more courage and equanimity than most of us.
In evaluating courage, physical courage in particular, my views are
somewhat at variance with the average. I am a heretic in this matter
just as the philosopher Plato was and as Saint-Exupéry, the aviator, is.
Plato places courage in the lowest order among the virtues. The aviator,
famous for his personal bravery and presumably competent to speak
therefore, notes as a fact that courage, physical courage at least, is made
up of strivings, impulses, emotions that are of very doubtful moral
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worth, and specifically of unthinking fury, oftentimes, of vanity, of a
commonplace love of sport.
I may contribute to this point an incident from my own experience.
I have a brother who volunteered in the First World War at the age of
seventeen, went to the front, and performed many feats of heroism
there. He won the highest war decoration and was one of the very few
privates mentioned by name in a communiqué of the High Command.
When I asked him how he came to do such deeds, he answered in some
embarrassment and truthfully, one may assume, that “it would have been
too much of a bore otherwise.”
Physical courage is a fairly common trait in human beings. The other
war and this one even more so have shown that there is a far greater
quantum of physical courage in the world than has usually been supposed.
In both these wars men have been required on countless occasions to
perform feats of daring where the chances of succeeding have been far
slighter than the probabilities that the men who essayed them would lose
their lives. Everywhere and always thousands of volunteers have been
ready to carry out such enterprises.
In a great little book that he had the moral courage to publish during
the First World War, Sigmund Freud traces physical heroism back to the
fact that every man of intelligence knows that he must some day die, but
that no man, in his innermost soul, ever believes in his own death. The
experimental fact that all men must die has never worked its way deeply
enough into our subconscious being to keep that being from revolting
with all its might against the conception of a world existing without it.
Though physical courage is a common phenomenon in our day
and age, moral courage is a thing that is correspondingly rare. People
who have manifested the greatest physical courage, in actual fact, not
seldom fail when it comes to showing a little moral courage. I know as
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a matter of personal observation that men who have held their ground
in this war in the face of the greatest dangers, distinguished flyers, are
men who, at a cocktail party, would never have the courage to express
a conviction of theirs which was against the general trend of opinion
among the guests present.
As for myself, physical danger tenses my nerves at the moment when
I first perceive it, as when on a lonely road at night a couple of suspicious
characters step out of the dark and ask me for a light, or when, for
instance, during a period of political unrest, armed men raid my house
and threaten to arrest me. At such moments a horrible sensation seems
to move upward from the pit of my stomach and sweat breaks out on my
upper lip. I never feel quite comfortable when I see a man flourishing a
revolver even on the stage. If judging from my demeanour at moments
of danger my camp comrades got the impression that I was a man of
courage, it could only have been because as a rule my panics last but a very
few seconds and are hardly noticeable outwardly. My fatalism, that belief
in my destiny to which I have several times alluded, is certain very soon
to awaken in me. Perhaps also that superstitious self-confidence of which
Freud speaks may be specially active in my case, giving me an assurance
at every moment of crisis that nothing can or will happen to me.
I am inclined to think, therefore, that on the whole and to outward
appearances my physical courage is not all that it might be. I do believe,
on the other hand, that I have on very few occasions failed in what I call
moral courage.
The impulse to say what I think is deeply engrained in me. I cannot
keep my mouth shut, even when it is dangerous to have it open. If,
for example, I hear somebody, even an important and easily irascible
Somebody, say that Montaigne was born around the year 1600, I
simply have to open my mouth and declare: “You are mistaken, sir,
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Montaigne was born in the year 1533.”
This lack of talent for keeping my mouth shut at the right time has
made me not a few enemies and got me into plenty of hot water. On one
occasion somebody said in my presence that the Soviet government had
the hands of all Soviet citizens examined every year or so and then sent
people whose hands were soft and well manicured to work in the mines.
I could not refrain from answering that I knew a number of Soviet
Russians who had soft, well-manicured hands but had never worked in
any mine, and notably Alexei Tolstoy, the writer, Eisenstein, the film
director, and Joseph Stalin, Secretary of the Communist Party. The
gentleman in question no longer defended the opinion as to the basis on
which the miners of the Soviet Union were recruited, but since then has
not been able to endure me.
On another occasion an influential Somebody remarked in my
presence that the average American lived in luxury. I could not forgo
the rejoinder that, according to authoritative statistics which I had seen,
eighty million out of a hundred and thirty million Americans lived on
family incomes averaging sixty-nine dollars per family per month. Ever
since then that influential Somebody has not been a friend of mine.
For the rest, every human trait is likely to appear under a dual aspect.
There are things, for instance, that I think I know. I think I know that
two times two makes four. There are things that I consider not at all
certain, for example, that two times two makes five. Now, I have a mania
for drawing a sharp distinction between those two sorts of things. Call
the mania intellectual integrity, call it impertinence if you will. In any
event that impertinence, that intellectual integrity, is one of my most
conspicuous traits and one that differentiates me from the majority of
my contemporaries.
It may be that I have sought to cultivate that trait in myself to such
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a high degree because I think of myself primarily as a writer. The chief
satisfaction in the whole business of writing, it seems to me, comes down
to saying what is, or what you think is. Even if I have to pay dearly for
the fun of doing that, as I have paid, am paying, and will pay again, I do
not regard it as too dearly bought. What is the use of being a writer of
some note if one cannot treat oneself to such a luxury?
When on occasion I explain that twice two makes four, it is surprising
how often I hear the objection that that is going in for politics, and that
politics is no concern of a writer. It is no less astonishing how many
subjects—historical, philological, biological, sociological, economic—
people regard as politics. Yet the fact is that I, of all men, am not at all
interested in politics. I am not a man of action. The pushing, the scrambling,
the hustle and bustle apart from which politics is inconceivable, utterly
disgust me. My delight is contemplation and delineation.
As a writer I happen to be interested in the interrelations between two
domains of intellectual activity, between two sciences, if you prefer; the
interrelations between history and philology, to be specific. I am always
thinking of that remark of Theodor Lessing, which I quoted earlier in
this book, that history is “the art of giving meaning to the meaningless.”
This interest in history that I have sometimes lures me into thinking
out loud of how a writer of the year 2000 will be likely to express what a
journalist of the year 1940 is saying now in this way, now in that; whereas
my delight in philology, my insistence on having language clear-cut and
exact, impels me, when someone says it is cold and someone else that it is
warm, to look at the thermometer and say: “Gentlemen, it is 69 degrees
Fahrenheit in this room.”
To return to the little hillside where I was lying: Shall I, I reflected,
wait here under the protection of the French until the Nazis come and
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get me? When someone is after you, you run. That is the first counsel
of instinct. Those two friends who brought me the news were right: get
away. In fact, there’s no other course.
“What’s the matter?” asked Karl. “Don’t you feel well? Has
something unpleasant happened?”
“Yes,” I answered, “something has happened and it’s unpleasant. But
don’t talk to me now. I’ll tell you about it later on.”
But one should not trust first impulses. Instinct is not always a safe
counsellor by any means. I could get away, of course, right now. But
where would I go? If the Nazis demanded my delivery, if they forced
the French to make a hunt for me in earnest, I would be lost wherever
I might be. In a country that is occupied by the enemy and where all
frontiers are closed, a person cannot hide for any length of time. The
Germans might comb the country, then they would surely get me.
Why not talk the situation over quite frankly with the French?
Wouldn’t that be wiser? They may have no intention of handing me over
at all. Marshal Pétain says much about honour. Would it be consistent
with honour to extradite people to whom one has solemnly promised
refuge and hospitality? I would not find it easy to drop out of sight on
my own resources alone; but if the French wanted to let me disappear,
they would have a thousand ways of doing so.
That’s it. The first thing to do is to have a frank talk with the
commandant. Getting away from here, just walking out into those
woods, that’s something I can do any time, even in the final pinch.
I returned to mingle with the others again. It is astonishing how deep
a gulf some new thing that changes one’s outlook can open between
those who know about it and those who don’t. Only a little while ago,
a short hour at the most, before I had read the news, complete oneness
had prevailed between myself and the others. My interests had been
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their interests: What should be done with the luggage, when would we
get water, would the recently promised tents arrive? Now everything
was changed. Nothing existed for me now but the danger of imminent
extinction. Luggage, water. I despised my comrades for having such
petty worries about such petty things.
Word of Clause Nineteen soon got about. Groups formed and
discussions started. Many of the men were in serious danger, and I could
well understand their anxiety, their worry, their despair. There were also
those about whom the Nazis did not care a row of pins, but who thought
themselves important and seized on the delivery clause as a pretext for
pushing themselves forward before the others. Small shopkeepers who
might at some time have given a few francs to some anti-Fascist enterprise
were going around conceitedly wondering aloud whether they would be
classed as political personages and demanded by the Nazis.
Two or three lawyers explained to me that Clause Nineteen did
not apply to us in camp. Most of the internees were non-political. The
Nazis would certainly not be interested in them. But according to the
language used in the clause the French were not obligated to hand over
those of us who were political opponents of the Nazis. For the Nazis
had revoked the German citizenship of their political opponents. We
were therefore not “Germans” in the meaning of Hitler’s words, in the
meaning of the terms used in the armistice agreement. If the French
were not disposed to yield us up, the wording of Clause Nineteen
afforded a convenient handle.
A few young Leftists called that empty prattle. After all, they
said, the French Fascists now in power had identical interests with the
Germans. Les loups ne se mangent pas entre eux—wolf does not eat wolf.
Hitler’s government and Laval’s government were playing into each
other’s hands. Fascist leaders now in power in France hated the German
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Leftists much more than they hated the Nazis. Of course they would
hand us over. There was no choice but to escape. A large part of the
French population was still on our side. But who could say how much
longer such people would enjoy freedom of movement? Thus we dared
not hesitate, we had to get away then and there.
Much could be said for that point of view, undoubtedly. But I simply
did not want to accept it. Once again my fatalism, my deep-seated
laziness, won the upper hand. The arguments of our lawyers found a
ready response in me and so did the doubts to which the opinion of our
Leftists gave rise.
Meanwhile the promised tents had come. The pegs were driven, the
tents pitched, pretty white tents running up to a conical point, the so-
called marabouts of the French Colonials. On the green fields of that
charming countryside the jolly white dots of canvas made a gay and
lovely sight.
The tents inside, as we soon discovered, were less attractive. There
was not much straw, and damp and cold came up from the ground at
night. As the tents ran up to a point in the centre, the occupants had to
sleep in circles, with their heads toward the lower edge of the canvas, their
bodies running inward at a slant, so that there was great crowding and
colliding of feet in the middle. In addition to that, whenever one turned
one’s head the canvas would brush across one’s face. It was always dark
inside, and the night was as cold as the midday was oppressively sultry.
Here again sleeping space was inadequate. The tents held sixteen
persons each. Up to that time the individual’s life had depended upon
the group to which he belonged, so at Nîmes tent comradeship became a
very important matter.
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There were fourteen of us in my tent at first and we had almost all
belonged to the same group at Les Milles. Most of the men were co-
operative and handy.
The provisions were, on the whole, better in our tent camp than they
had been at Les Milles and they were more abundant. The bread they
supplied us was very poor, always damp and mouldy, hard to digest. It
was the cause of many an illness.
The only thing to remind us that we were prisoners was the barbed wire
that surrounded the camp. But before very long we had so stretched the
wire in several places that one could get through without any great effort.
Still, one had to stoop very low and the barbed wire often tore our coats
or shirts or cut into our skin. I have no great sense of personal dignity, but
time and again I felt that it was somehow belittling that one should have to
crook one’s back so often in the course of a day and so senselessly.
I say “senselessly,” because no one seemed to have any objection to
our crawling through the barbed wire. The guards, who stood at the
entrances a few yards away, observed it indifferently. But if one tried
to leave camp by a legitimate exit and walking upright, he was halted
peremptorily with “No further, there!”
Once when a guard stopped me that way I asked out of my usual
curiosity: “What would you do if I didn’t stop? Would you shoot?”
“I’m not that crazy,” answered the man, “but,” he added sensibly, “why
not make it easy for yourself and for me and crawl through the wire?”
With so few hindrances placed in the way of departures from
the camp attempts to escape were numerous. But not many of those
who tried got very far. Roads, railways, and motor buses were being
watched as closely as ever. For all the general disorganization, the
police were attending to this work stubbornly and dependably. When
one of our men fell into their hands he was sent back to camp, usually
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in handcuffs, after a tiring drive in a police-wagon, and back in camp
he would be locked up for twenty-four hours on bread and water in the
pigsty, a most uncomfortable structure, too low to stand up in, smelly,
and infested with rats.
Nîmes was the farthest point one could reach without serious risk.
On the way thither it was better to avoid the automobile road and there
were crossings where it was safer not to be seen. If one reached town it
was easily possible to drop out of sight in the great throngs of refugees
from the North. “Going to town” became a practice with many of us,
and in Nîmes we would eat a square meal in a good restaurant and have
a sleep in a good bed after treating ourselves to a good warm bath. Very
early the next morning we would drive back in a taxi, order it to stop at
some point near the camp, crawl in through the barbed wire, creep into
our tents, and be nicely on hand for our morning coffee. One man told
us with a grin that he had slept wall to wall in his hotel with a member of
the German Control Commission.
A considerable number would make the quite exerting walk to
Nîmes not to have a night’s refreshment from the discomforts of the tent
camp, but as a matter of business and a way of earning a living. Along
toward evening they would take their knapsacks, slip out into the woods,
and follow mountain trails down to the city. There they would buy
provisions, carry them back up to camp, and dispose of them at a profit.
There had been no end of trading of this sort in the brickyard at Les
Milles and even later on our ghastly train. Here now in the tent camp near
Nîmes buying and selling, bargaining and haggling, became epidemic.
The café men from Vienna were on hand again and, as it seemed, more
flourishing than ever. They were dispensing their tea and coffee in every
available place, not secretly as at Les Milles, but openly drumming up
trade. “Good hot coffee. Fresh, hot coffee.” In active competition with
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one another, they had rough benches and tables made and soon were
offering pastry of every variety.
Our camp rapidly took on the appearance of a country fair.
“Business” soon occupied all “Main Street,” the road that ran the full
length of the rows of tents. There were coffee stands. The owners had
obtained some boards and set up counters before which one could stand
or sit as at a bar. There were delicacies, hot soups, sausages, and cold
meats. Some of them offered music, and the venders praised their wares
vociferously. Other booths sold shirts, watches, shoes, leftovers of those
who had fled. There was frequent quarrelling as someone claimed for his
own an object that was being offered for sale.
It is easy enough to wax indignant at the poor devils who were trying
to get hold of a couple of francs by all this petty trafficking and who
sometimes stole from their companions in misery. But what could the
wretches do? Their clothes were in rags, the food provided by the camp
authorities was sufficient barely to sustain life and always left one hungry.
Perhaps a hundred among the two thousand inmates of the camp were
able to procure available extras and comforts without considering the
price. The great majority had to consider costs, and many had nothing,
literally nothing, not even a friend or a relative outside to send them a
centime. Such people were dependent on the liberality of the well-to-do.
And since the well-to-do were few, while the needy were many, nothing
was left for them but to resort to trading or to more questionable devices.
All in all, life in the camp of San Nicola was much less harrowing
than the life we had led in the brickyard at Les Milles or that on the
train. We had those gay lines of tents, we had the bright sky, that lovely
landscape. There was no roll-call; the barbed wire was mere show. We
were allowed to do exactly what we pleased.
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But life in the pretty white tent city had its challenges.
There was the usual trouble about hygiene. We were given shovels
and picks to dig a long, deep trench for a latrine in a designated area near
the barbed wire. But the trench was public and soon became a revolting
thing to use; one slipped, one stood in excrement. Most of the men
therefore began to relieve themselves in the woods beyond the barbed
wire. Soon, like Sleeping Beauty within her wall, our pretty camp was
surrounded by a circle of stench, and the circle grew wider and wider as
the men, almost of necessity, kept going farther and farther away. The
insufficient water, the bad bread, the overcrowding, the lack of proper
hygiene, caused new outbreaks of dysentery and again some few cases
of a mild form of typhus.
We had no medicines and no opium.
Day after day as many as a hundred men queued up before the tent
where the young French doctor who had been assigned to our camp
was functioning.
“What is the trouble?” he would ask.
“Diarrhoea,” the sick man would answer. “Dysentery, I think.”
The doctor would shrug his shoulders.
“Tant pis pour vous (That’s hard luck). Next!”
Virtually all of us suffered from dysentery sooner or later, but there
was another great plague—mosquitoes. They increased in numbers as
summer advanced. Back at Les Milles many of us had looked as though
we were masquerading in the fantastic assortments of clothes that we
had thrown together and that had soon become rags and tatters. Now
most of the men began protecting their faces from the mosquitoes by
wearing veils of red or green gauze. It was a colourful, grotesque sight to
look upon. At night big fires were lighted in front of the tents to drive the
mosquitoes away with the smoke, while ragged men stood about the fires
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waving leafy branches to fan the smoke into the tents. Standing atop one
of the hillocks that rose around the camp one perceived the spectacle of
white tents with countless fires among them and around the fires ragged
figures frantically waving green branches within a drapery of smoke.
One became acclimated to life in the camp at Nîmes more rapidly
than had been the case at Les Milles. You got used to sleeping in a tent, to
the everlasting stench, to the never-ending noise, to never being alone,
to the sight of haggard men staggering about, weak from dysentery.
As for the dysentery, one assumed fatalistically that one would sooner
or later come down with it. But those things were bearable. Worrying
about them did not make the food any less good or a substantial
discussion less enjoyable.
What one could not get used to, a sting that was not assuaged by time
but sharpened, was the unfathomable uncertainty, our anxiety over that
clause, Clause Nineteen.
That worry was always with us, that mortal question: Would the
French surrender us? It sat beside us as we ate or drank, it brooded over
us as we talked, it watched within us as we slept. We acted as though little
things about us were important, our meals, our drinks, the country-fair
appearance of the camp, the hotels, the restaurants, the girls at Nîmes.
But all such interests had their limits: we never forgot how unimportant
they really were as compared with the danger in which we were living.
The very next day, perhaps, the hand that held us within its grasp might
close upon us. Of all the things we went hunting after in Nîmes the most
eagerly desired was a dose of prussic acid.
Among the two thousand inmates now in our camp perhaps two
or three hundred were in acute danger. Those two or three hundred
displayed widely differing traits of character and temperament. There
were the gloomy and the gay, the cautious and the reckless, the stupid and
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the shrewd, the frivolous and the meditative. But one trait the menaced
all had in common: consciously or unconsciously their thoughts kept
ever returning to one point. Have the Germans drawn up their list? Will
the French give us up? In the midst of a conversation a man under threat
would suddenly draw into himself and then abruptly break out with the
questions: “Do you think the list is there by now? Do you think we’ll be
handed over?”
I had, as may be recalled, decided to have a frank talk with the
commandant and find out whether the French really intended to
surrender us or not. The upshot of that conversation should determine
whether I were to stay or to make off.
The commandant received me in the house, in a room that might once
have served as the dining-room. Pictures of fruits and birds in a faded
fresco peeling from damp ran along the walls. Fairly large, the room
was filled with tables at which army clerks were working. The clatter of
typewriters disturbed me. The task I had set myself was not an easy one
at best. I had to discuss a delicate subject, using cautious circumlocutions
in a language that was not my own, and not a little depended on the skill
with which I conducted the conversation.
The commandant listened with courteous reserve. I could see from
his expression as I talked that he was busy solely with thinking up an
answer that would manifest sympathy but not commit him in any way.
His answer was ready by the time I had finished. It was one of those yes-
and-no answers that bound him to nothing. He explained at great length
that, strictly speaking, we were no longer internees. We were assembled
in the camp there simply to be disbanded in exactly the same way as
French army contingents were now being demobilized. You could not
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send hundreds of thousands of men home all at once. A thing like that
had to be carefully organized, otherwise transportation and commissary
services would be thrown into confusion. We too would be sent home
in a reasonable time, possibly very soon, but we had to be patient. Men
who had disappeared along the way, and those who were now trying to
escape, were making a great mistake. Anyone not carrying the proper
discharge papers would be unable to get a food card and would encounter
all sorts of other difficulties during his whole stay in France. And it
would be quite impossible for such a man to leave the country unless in
possession of the requisite papers. That our situation was distressing was
well understood; our fears, however, were groundless. Marshal Pétain
was particularly sensitive in matters touching military honour. He would
certainly not allow people to whom France had extended the rights of
hospitality to meet disaster.
Was that the commandant’s personal opinion, I inquired, or the
official view of the French authorities? The commandant replied that he
was not a lawyer and that he could not give any official opinion as to how
Clause Nineteen was to be construed. Speaking as a French army officer,
he could not imagine that the Marshal had signed anything that would
not be consistent with French honour.
That was all that came of the interview to which I had looked forward
so eagerly. It was not much, but I had nevertheless gained the impression
that the French authorities were well disposed toward us rather than
not and that they would prefer allowing me to disappear to handing me
over to the Germans. However, one could not forget how negligent the
French army authorities could be. French honour, French hospitality,
well and good; but so far at every critical juncture je-m’en-foutisme, the
French Devil, had carried the day.
I reviewed the matter back and forth. When the commandant said
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that it was unwise to try to escape without the proper papers, he was
stating the plain truth. It was wiser to stay where I was. I might, of
course, get as far as Sanary unchallenged. Considering the general
chaos, it was also quite possible that the police in the little village of
Ollioules nearby might shut their eyes and pretend not to see me. But
what if actual proceedings were opened for my extradition? If I were
at Sanary I would probably not be warned in season, whereas in camp
the French, if amicably inclined, could easily pass the word along in
ample time.
All true enough. But deep down inside me I had a fear that all those
pretty reasonings were mere pretexts designed to shirk a decision, to
spare me the effort required for an escape. In all probability my sole
desire was to go on vegetating comfortably the way I had done at Sanary
before the war, when I had shrunk from the problem of leaving France
in time. In all probability I was simply too lazy, too easy-going, to incur
the dangers and hardships of a flight.
My interview with the commandant took place in the afternoon. I did
not sleep well that night. Once more I went over all the pros and cons,
and once more came to the conclusion that it was wiser to stay.
As I was strolling about among the tents the following morning, I
came across a sturdy-looking young fellow who obviously had been
either brought to camp or brought back that very morning. Catching
sight of me, he stopped short in the utmost amazement, his mouth
actually falling open for a second. Then breaking into the broad, honest
dialect of the Vienna suburbs, he exclaimed: “What, you still here? Say,
have you gone bats?” (Ja, bist du denn ganz deppert?)
The words stirred me more deeply than the young man could have
guessed. In a flash I recognized in them the impulsive expression of
common sense. All that I had been saying to myself in order to justify
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my staying was humbug. The man was right. It was criminal folly for
me to linger on in camp. The Germans might demand from one day to
the next that the lax discipline in our camp be ended and that we be more
closely guarded. We had already been hearing that German commissions
had inspected certain camps. I made up my mind to get away.
There was a young farmer in camp who struck me as being an
unusually capable person. The French have an apt word for a man of
that sort, a man who knows how to extricate himself dexterously from
all embarrassing situations. They call him a débrouillard. I sized up my
young farmer as just such a débrouillard. I cannot remember at this late
day exactly what gave me that impression—it was a mistaken impression
in any event.
Some days before, this young farmer had volunteered to help me in
any attempt that I might make to escape and I thought he was the man
to take with me. He was ready then and there. We ought to start right
away, he thought, within a quarter of an hour. It was then about eleven
in the morning. The patrolling of the roads was slackest around the
noon hour, for to the French police, as to other Frenchmen, mealtime
was a sacred hour.
A man from the group of Dr. F., the lawyer-orator, had offered
me his pass, one of the passes with which the young French officer had
furnished members of that group. The passes, it will be remembered,
had been officially stamped and signed, but with names of bearers still
to be supplied. I decided to accept the young man’s friendly offer now.
We made off, my débrouillard and I. At his suggestion I had put on the
suit that I had worn to Les Milles, city clothes which, in his opinion, made
me look least conspicuous. I carried a briefcase, with a nightshirt, comb,
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and toothbrush, under my arm. We struck a lively pace from the first. It
was a hot day and it soon developed that the outfit I had selected was not
the best suited to a tramp through underbrush and over rocky mountain
paths. Not only were my clothes uncomfortably warm, in a very short
time my suit was covered with burrs, prickly seeds, and everything else
that would stick to cloth.
After more than half an hour our path came to a crossroad. My
débrouillard spoke a vigorous peasant French. He went to a house that
stood nearby to ask the way. I sat down on a low wall of loose-laid
stones, a hard and uncomfortable seat directly in the sun. But I was tired
from the rapid walk and it felt good to sit down. I looked myself over;
my shoes were scratched, my brown suit was covered with burrs and
brambles, beside me lay my briefcase with my toothbrush, comb, and
nightshirt. I was conscious of the absurdity of my situation. I sat in the
sunlight and smiled.
Two men came along; they looked at me, then they looked at each
other. I did not like that. They walked past me, then one of them came
back and asked, in German: “Clearing out? Beating it?”
I hesitated.
The man smiled. “So you’re beating it,” he said. “Well, you’re right.
You’re in greater danger than we are. We’re Foreign Legionnaires.
We’re just going places. Good luck, Comrade Feuchtwanger.”
The débrouillard returned with definite information. About a quarter
of an hour farther along, and just beyond the point of greatest danger,
was a bus stop. How about our taking the bus? It would be a daring
thing to do, but perhaps the safest at that. There would be little patrolling
around the noon hour.
We decided to try it. The bus was full, with a good number of
soldiers aboard. They considerately shoved along to make room for us.
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My escort fell into conversation with his neighbours. He had a manner
that inspired confidence. Labourers and peasants the world over mix
more readily than we others.
We left the bus in the outskirts of Nîmes and continued on foot.
Having made such a good start, we thought we would take another bus
at once for Avignon. In order to reach the terminal we had to walk the
length of the main street. It was very much alive. Just as we had been
told, the city was bubbling with refugees. Motor cars everywhere and
people sleeping in them. The portals of public buildings stood wide open
and one could see that halls and stairs were strewn with layers of straw
for refugees to sleep on.
We passed a number of policemen. It was the first time in my life that
I walked past a policeman of whom I knew that he had the right and the
duty to arrest me. I took a good look at them, more out of curiosity than
of fear. Then I grew bolder. The next one I came to I stared at long and
critically and he returned my stare, surprised.
Many people were waiting in the square from where the Avignon bus
was to start. We overheard talk to the effect that permits were required.
We looked at each other. The bus drew in half an hour before the time
set for its departure. There was a rush for seats, with people pushing and
shoving. It appeared that they were merely staking their claims, and we
did likewise.
We stepped into a café. There was no coffee, no liquor. We were
served a sweetish drink that suggested the synthetic and, there being no
bread, ate something that passed for pastry. My débrouillard procured
meat and fruit. The bus meanwhile had gone on to a garage and now
drove up, this time ready to depart. We took our seats. The driver came
aboard, sat down in his seat, looked over the few passengers who were
already in their places, noticed us, picked up a newspaper, yawned, laid
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it aside, then slowly rose, lounged past us, and whispered: “The bus
will surely be inspected before it leaves.” A shudder ran over me. My
companion said: “I think we had better get out.” We did. The driver
nodded to us.
We entered the café again, sat down, ate another of the poor cakes,
drank another of the synthetic drinks. What should we do now?
A friend of mine, a workingman, who had made his escape some time
before, had given me the address of a lady to whom I could turn if I were
ever in Nîmes and needed advice and help.
We looked her up. She lived in a little hotel on a dreary side street.
A clerk told us to wait, showing us into an untidy dining-room. The
lady we sought came in before very long—she was a stoutish person
with a capable, energetic face. Excitedly she asked: “You bring news
from my husband?”
“No,” we answered, and I introduced myself, mentioning the name
of my friend the workingman.
“You had better come up to my room,” she said, disappointed,
worried. Her husband had gone on the train with us as far as Bayonne.
He had sent her a telegram from Pau. Since then she had had no word of
him. She had hoped we would be bringing news.
For the rest, the woman showed herself quite ready to help us; but,
contrary to the impression of force that her face gave, she now struck me
as a somewhat nervous, timid person, not so very adroit. She referred us
to another woman, Madame L., the wife of an internee in our camp, a
physician. Madame L., she said, could probably help us. My débrouillard
set out to call on Madame L., while our timid-energetic friend hurried
away to see still another woman who also might have advice and help
to give. My débrouillard soon returned. He had not found Madame L.
Madame Timid-Energetic, however, brought the third woman with her.
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She too was eager to help, but equally timid and nervous; in fact, she
would burst into tears every five minutes. All the same she had a plan. She
knew a wine exporter. Perhaps he could get us to Marseille in an empty
hogshead; he had done that twice before. And she hurried off forthwith
to see him. But she came back with matters unsettled. It would be three
days, she reported, weeping torrentially, before the man could make the
attempt, if at all. He would promise nothing definite. Inspections, he
declared, had been stiffening of late, and the lady doubted whether he
would dare to try the thing again.
Under the circumstances my débrouillard thought there was not much
sense in his staying on in Nîmes. For the time being I would be taken care
of by the three ladies, and it would only make my situation more difficult
if the ladies had the problem of looking after still another refugee. In any
case he would now know an address at which I could be reached. And
with that he left me and went back to the camp.
The two ladies imagined that Madame L., of whom they expected
most, must meanwhile have come in. I set out to call on her. Madame
Timid-Energetic chose to go with me. She was too timid to appear in
public with me, however, and I was allowed to follow her at no closer
than twenty paces.
Madame L. lived in the neighbourhood of the Arena, which of all
the structures surviving from the Roman Empire is one of the most
impressive. I had visited it a number of times. To it I owe a vivid picture
of the ways of the Roman circus. Now it was crowded with refugees.
Madame L. was at home. In her I met the first of those selfless persons,
ever so ready to help, who were to enable me eventually to escape from
the Devil in France and his soft, slatternly hell.
Madame L. lived in a low, narrow-fronted house, the whole
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consisting of one small room with a diminutive kitchen adjoining. She
had promised to take in a Frenchwoman for the coming night—the
woman had come from Nice to visit a friend of hers, a lawyer from
Berlin who was an internee in the tent camp. She was also expecting for
the night a young German girl who had not been able to find any other
shelter. In spite of that, Madame L. would have been willing to take me
in too—I would simply have had to sleep on the floor or perhaps in a
chair. She was not sure of the young girl, however, and thought it wiser
that I should not be seen by Germans of whose political views we were
not absolutely certain.
Where could I go, then? The two women racked their brains. The
town was flooded with refugees, and no room was to be had anywhere.
Madame L. thought she knew someone who might take me in. But in
that case Madame Timid-Energetic was apparently the only one who
could arrange matters and she was not sure that she dared to do it. After
much ardent persuasion on Madame L.’s part, she finally started off, but
fearfully and sighing.
With a friendly solicitude for my comfort Madame L. brought out
something for me to eat, but then had to hurry away to attend to matters
concerning other refugees. We arranged that I should meet her an hour
and a half later at the corner of her street to hear what progress had been
made in my case.
Carrying my briefcase under my arm I started out on a stroll about
the town. It was hot weather and the streets were filled with smells. I
thought of entering a café, but there were no seats free; and I had the
same luck at a second café that I tried. Suddenly I lost the self-assurance
required for walking casually through a crowded public place and feeling
people’s eyes on me. I gave up the café idea and strolled on through the
town. I felt uncomfortable, and the uncertainty about finding lodging
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for the night seemed to make me still hotter and more uncomfortable.
For my own part I would have been perfectly willing to walk the streets
all night and occasionally doze on a bench; but according to those who
knew that was the surest way to be picked up by the police.
I was glad when the time came to keep my appointment with Madame
L. She was late, but finally arrived in a great hurry, breathless, harassed.
Kind-hearted, she had the affairs of a hundred different people on her
mind. We went off at once toward the outskirts of the town where
we were to meet Madame Timid-Energetic. Madame L. noticed how
concerned I was over the problem of shelter for the night. Trying to
cheer me up, she said that even if Madame Timid-Energetic failed to find
a place, not all was lost by any means. There was a certain house outside
of town which belonged to a friend of hers. The house was not occupied.
All I would have to do would be to scale a garden wall and make my way
into the main building through a window in the tool-shed. If that did not
work, she added in a tone of finality, why, then, for all the doubt about
the uncertain young German girl, I would simply have to sleep in her
little room too.
It was a long walk to the place where we were to meet Madame
Timid-Energetic. Madame L., who set a brisk pace, asked whether she
was walking too fast for me. She had many such walks behind her for
that day and was scarcely less tired than I. “But,” she added with a laugh,
“trying to help a person these days means walking far and fast.” She
had had her own car and a chauffeur in Berlin. She was a grand person,
unassuming, and with the kindest of hearts.
We reached the meeting place, a corner on a broad, tree-lined
boulevard. Madame Timid-Energetic shortly appeared. It was not
certain, she said, that I could be accommodated, but the prospects were
not bad.
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The two women walked on with me along the country road, explaining
what it was all about. My presumptive host, a retired sergeant-major of
police, had bought himself a house and was living in it on his pension.
Mentally he was not altogether there, but he had a housekeeper, a Czech
woman who had a will of her own. She had taken a former employer of
hers into the house, a Levantine banker who had squandered his entire
fortune on his wife. Now the resolute Czech woman and the bankrupt
Levantine financier were living with and on the senile Frenchman. I
could not get the situation altogether straight. What I was interested in
was a bed, and whether it belonged to a rich man or a poor man, to a
Turk or an Englishman, was a matter of complete indifference to me.
Madame Timid-Energetic impressed upon me that my name must
not be mentioned under any circumstances. According to the story
she had told the Czech woman, I had not been able to find a room at
a hotel in town and would be glad if, out of kindness and for a money
consideration, Monsieur S. would take me in. If they wanted to know
more about me, I should simply say that I had been discharged from the
camp, but had to wait for a travelling permit from the prefecture. I should
offer a certain number of francs for my lodging, not too many, but not
too few. The Czech housekeeper was agreeable to the arrangement, and
if I made a not too bad impression on the old policeman the thing would
go through all right.
Madame L. left us just before we reached the policeman’s house; she
thought it best not to accompany us. Madame L. knew the Czech woman
well. She had gone to see her many a time at the policeman’s and had
gossiped and had cakes and coffee with her. However, Madame L. had
a dog and she could leave him at home only with someone to look after
him. One day she had been unable to find anyone to stay with the dog
and had taken her pet with her to the policeman’s. There the dog had
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frightened the policeman’s cat. The cat scratched the policeman, and the
policeman had looked at Madame L. with malevolent eyes ever since.
No, it was much wiser for her not to come along.
Madame Timid-Energetic was therefore my sole escort when we
reached the policeman’s house. The Czech housekeeper opened the door.
“So this is Monsieur Feust,” she said in a tone of conspiracy. “I have
already prepared Monsieur S. Wait here just a moment. Have you any
sort of paper to identify you?”
“Yes,” I answered proudly, inwardly blessing the foresight that had
prompted me to bring along the certificate issued by the young French
officer. “But there is no name on it yet.”
“That makes no difference,” said the Czech woman, “as long as it is
stamped. Let me have it.” And, taking the paper, she went into the house,
followed by Madame Timid-Energetic.
By this time night was approaching, though a red afterglow still
illuminated the sky. I sat down wearily on the stone doorstep and waited
to see whether the policeman would accord me shelter. I was done in. I
was not very keen about climbing over a garden wall and entering an
empty villa through the window in a tool-shed. No more attractive to me
was the prospect of a long walk back to town with the good-humoured
Madame L. and then of spending the night on the floor in her little room
under the eyes of the French woman and of the young German girl of
dubious political reliability.
A man came out of the house, evidently the Levantine, a Jew, elderly,
in fact somewhat shaky on his legs, courteous, curious. His face showed
craft, but no lack of spirituality. He might well have been at one time a
fine-looking, smartly groomed man. He bowed politely and offered me
words of encouragement. “Monsieur Feust, I take it,” he said. “It can be
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arranged, I think. Monsieur S. is always a little fussy at first and inclined
to be stubborn, but Madame F.”—the Czech woman evidently—“is a
determined person and knows how to manage him.”
Just then the two women reappeared and with them was the old
policeman. He was unsteady on his legs and his voice faltered as of old
age. He looked me over. “So you can’t find room in town?” he said.
“Yes, so many refugees and everybody has to sleep. Your paper has a
stamp on it, but only one stamp. You need another, the stamp of police
headquarters. I have good connexions at police headquarters. All the
inspectors there now have a warm spot for me. You must get the stamp
Monday. So there is no room for you in town? Possible, quite possible.
So you are willing to pay Madame F. at a fixed rate?”
“Yes,” I said. “And if you like, I will pay today and tomorrow in
advance. I cannot go to headquarters before Monday.”
The old policeman considered acutely. Finally he remarked: “When
a man has less than thirty francs in his pocket and no place to sleep, it’s
vagrancy and we pull him in. In the old days, when a franc was worth
something, he could get by with five in his pocket.”
“So then,” the Czech woman interposed, “I’ll show Monsieur Feust
to his room.”
The Levantine looked at me knowingly. The old policeman muttered
something. I thought I caught: “He has more than thirty francs in his
pocket. But he’ll have to go to headquarters Monday just the same.”
Thereupon Madame Timid-Energetic took her leave. She was only
Madame Energetic now. “This is far and away the best solution,” she
said conclusively and obviously much relieved. “Nobody will think of
looking for you here at the policeman’s. You are safe here. I’ll be back
tomorrow or Monday. In any event, be at Madame L.’s Monday morning
by eleven o’clock.”
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The Czech woman showed me to my room. The accommodations
were rather primitive—the toilet was outside of the house. I had a tiny
wash-basin and a diminutive water-pitcher. The room had no door. It was
separated from the hall by a mosquito netting. But to me it was heaven
itself. It had a bed and a chair, and, outside, what seemed a spacious
garden. The Czech woman had a most motherly way toward me and
said she would bring me hot water in the morning, and when would I
want my breakfast, and of course I could have it in bed, and there was
not much butter, to be sure, but honey and eggs and a bit of cake. The
next day would be Sunday and I would see what a meal she would give
me at noontime—I would be surprised. If I wanted anything, I should
just let her know. The money I had paid her covered room, board, and
everything. I would find old Monsieur S. a trifle garrulous, but a good
soul at heart. Only, I must be patient and show an interest in his long-
winded stories.
I went to bed soon. It was not a very good bed, and the next day
I noticed that there must have been a good many mosquitoes in the
room. But that had not prevented me from sleeping soundly. Now the
good, motherly Czech woman brought me an excellent breakfast and
the promised hot water. How long it had been since I had had hot water
to wash in, how long since I had had breakfast in bed. I could not have
felt better.
I dressed and went out into the garden. The Levantine came after me
and begged me to wait before going further. The policeman would want
to show me the garden himself. He was proud of it, cultivated it himself,
and it was really a beautiful garden.
So it proved to be. The pride with which Monsieur S. showed me
about was altogether justified. The garden ran up a hillside and here and
there offered pretty vistas of the country and the town. Part of it grew
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wild; then there were trees, walks, vegetable beds, even the ruins of a
Roman villa.
There was a table under an arbour and the old policeman, on whose
every word I had hung, in accordance with the Czech woman’s advice,
brought me a sawed-off section of tree-trunk. I now had table and chair,
and there I sat down and began to write. I wrote to those closest to me.
I wrote to my wife, sending the letter to Léontine, our devoted maid
in Sanary, to be forwarded. I wrote to my secretary and to friends in
America. I also wrote to the American Ambassador to France and to the
American consul at Marseille. I could not be sure, of course, whether
any of the letters would arrive. Strangely enough, all the letters that I
wrote in that wild-growing garden reached their goals, many, to be sure,
only after protracted journeys. My wife, for example, did not receive her
letter till five months later in the United States.
It was delightful to sit in that summery bower and write to people
who were dear to me. At last I had quiet and composure, at last I was
alone, at last I saw distinctly the faces I wanted to see.
Taken all in all, that Sunday in the policeman’s house and garden I
consider one of the best days in my life. Monsieur S. was garrulous—
his household companions were certainly right on that point—and his
chatter often lacked logical coherence when it was not downright twaddle.
But now and then he would talk sensibly about things worth knowing.
He had been stationed in Tunisia in the heyday of the Empire. He had
wielded absolute power among the natives, had been their highest court
of reference, and had, it seems, conducted himself like an enlightened,
benevolent despot. He would tell about his Arabs, then switch to the way
he raised vegetables, meanwhile casting a slur upon Madame L. and her
dog, which had attacked his cat and made it scratch him. Then, in spite
of my protests, he would rise and amble away on his stiffened legs to
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fetch me certain Arabian sweetmeats that he had on hand.
The Czech woman meanwhile had prepared an excellent midday
meal, too plentiful, if anything. We were a good two hours at table.
Then, while the others were free to lie down for a nap, I had to listen
for another hour to the policeman’s tales, and always with an interested
expression on my face.
What was left of the long summer afternoon I spent alone in my
garden. It was already my garden, and after the noise and the wild
hubbub of the camp I drank deeply and deliciously of the silence and
the solitude.
The Levantine joined me after supper and for a while we strolled
around in the night. He said many clever things, but they belonged to
an era that was past. To listen to his subtle comments on events of the
present was like listening to a gentleman from the Biedermeier period
expressing opinions about a modern airplane factory. He told me stories
from his own life, about his wife who was living in the castle near
Marseille that he had bought her during his period of prosperity. He had
only words of praise for the capable, good-hearted Czech woman who
had sent for him, her former employer and lover apparently, and given
him shelter in his difficult days.
I took leave of my friendly hosts the next morning. I packed into
my briefcase nightshirt, toothbrush, and socks and went into town,
ostensibly to get my pass from police headquarters and to return to
Sanary, but actually to find out at Madame L.’s, whether the three helpful
ladies had meanwhile heard of any chance for me to proceed further.
Madame L.’s little room was crowded with people. I found there not
only the nervous lady with the fits of weeping and the French lady, the
friend of the interned lawyer from Berlin, but the fat and jovial Herr B.,
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who had struck out from camp with the idea of reaching Montpellier
through the help of a wine merchant, a friend of his. He too had landed
for the interim in good-natured Madame L.’s little room and had spent
the night there.
No opportunity had as yet presented itself for me to go on. On the
contrary, Madame L. told me that Madame Timid-Energetic had come to
her early that morning and reported that a German commission had now
arrived at Nîmes to inspect our tent camp. Madame Timid-Energetic
had been more timid than ever; no matter what happened, she declared,
I must drop out of sight at once in order not to compromise her and
endanger her husband, who was on the road somewhere in flight. Under
no circumstances should I return to the policeman’s house; otherwise
she, Madame Timid-Energetic, might be charged with abetting an
unlawful enterprise.
Madame L. did not take Madame Timid-Energetic’s communiqué
very tragically. If a German commission were really in town, there was
all the more reason, she thought, for me to go back to the policeman’s
and wait there till a chance offered to send me on. But I would have
to think up a good excuse for the policeman to explain why I had not
obtained the pass. It would be folly to pay any attention to Madame
Timid-Energetic’s hysteria. For the time being I should stay in town.
Two guards from camp were to come to her house at three o’clock with
a message from her husband. They might have heard something about
the commission. I should therefore be back at her house again by three.
I went out to get something to eat, accompanied by the French lady,
the friend of the interned lawyer from Berlin. We chose a good restaurant
where we found a plentiful and well-cooked meal at a reasonable price.
We were asked to show our food cards as a mere matter of routine. No
one cared when we failed to produce them. The table arrangement was
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attractive, the service attentive. The patrons, mostly French refugees,
sat there comfortably eating and drinking in spite of the general chaos.
It had been a long time since I had sat at a prettily decorated table in
a roomful of people talking cheerily. My companion was easy to look
at and had charming manners, and though my briefcase was a constant
reminder of the painful circumstances that detained me in Nîmes, it was
a very pleasant dinner.
The lady had been in Nîmes only two days but she had already
exchanged letters with her friend in the camp. She was expecting word
of him from the two soldiers we were to meet at Madame L.’s at three
o’clock. She was counting on going out the next day to some point
near the camp and meeting her friend. She spoke of him fondly and
with devotion.
Taking the period of our suffering as a whole, there was plenty of
evidence to show the surprising strength and permanence of the relations
between German émigrés and their French wives or mistresses. Almost
all these women came to Nîmes, not shrinking from the hardships of
travelling in those evil times. They would spend whole nights, some
of them with their children, without shelter in the squares that the
municipality of Nîmes had assigned to refugees. They would manage
somehow to reach the vicinity of the camp, many of them making the
four-hour tramp on foot over the stony paths. They would linger about
in the woods or in the fields near the camp, though driven away time
and again by the gendarmes. Almost all of them succeeded in seeing
their husbands, in talking with them, in getting messages, food, and little
necessaries of daily living through to them.
The French lady with whom I was having luncheon had letters of
introduction to the prefect at Nîmes. He was reported to be a benevolent
individual of some intelligence. The lady told me that many wives of
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internees kept besieging civil officials and members of the General Staff
to obtain one favour or another for their husbands. She herself was
amiable, capable, self-confident.
At Madame L.’s we actually met the two soldiers, keen, wide-
awake fellows, one of them from the South, the other from Paris. They
explained that they were two of a group of four friends. When any of
them was on duty he did what he could to alleviate our situation—we
could meet our wives as often as we wished, leave the camp, or anything
else of the sort. They refused to take any pay for their services.
Everything considered, the majority of the French population was
on our side. If the government, by its sloth and criminal irresponsibility,
had brought us, guests of France, into the dangerous situation that now
faced us, the French people were doing their utmost to help us out of it.
I gave the soldiers a few notes to carry back to friends of mine in the
camp, asking the latter to take charge of my mail and keep me posted on
everything at Madame L.’s address.
I started back to the policeman’s.
Once more, my briefcase under my arm, I strolled slowly along
through the hot city that literally swarmed with people. I had very
mixed feelings. The report that a German Control Commission was
in town—Madame Timid-Energetic vowed that she had actually seen
them—was anything but pleasant, and it did not look as though I would
reach Marseille very soon. On the other hand, the prospect of spending
a few more days in company with the aged policeman, the interesting
Levantine, and the good-hearted Czech woman, in that wild-growing,
lovely, peaceful garden, was not at all unwelcome.
To be sure, those few days had first to be fought for. How was I to
explain to Monsieur S. my failure to procure the pass that I had promised
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to get at headquarters that very day? So far not even a flimsy excuse had
occurred to me. I looked forward to our interview with some misgiving.
In order to postpone the painful moment I stepped into a barber-
shop. The barber, who considered it his duty to entertain me, told me
that he had his private sources of information and that through them
he had learned, among other things, the real purposes of the German
Control Commission that had arrived in Nîmes that morning. They had
no intention of inspecting flying fields and internment camps. Actually
they were working in league with certain internees at the camp, a band of
professional spies. With all that, the man gave me a regular hair-cut, and
the shampoo he administered was to my entire satisfaction.
But now I could think of no further excuse to defer my having it
out with Monsieur S. I made my way slowly up the slope that led to his
house. I rang the bell. It was the Levantine Jew who opened the door.
He was astonished to see me back and, I thought, a little embarrassed. I
concocted a story, not a very good one, I fear: my house in Sanary had
been requisitioned and was filled with refugees; I would have to wait
till it was vacated. The Levantine replied with a very general remark,
something to the effect that nothing was running normally nowadays,
that one never knew one day what would be happening the next.
While talking thus guardedly, however, he was studying me out of the
corners of his sly eyes, and in that shrewd sidelong glance could be read
everything that he was thinking: that he did not believe a word of what
I was saying, that he knew exactly what was up, that he would be glad to
help me, but that he was not sure that my reasons would fool the old man
on whom he and the Czech woman were dependent. Nothing of all that
did he say aloud; he simply asked me to wait and withdrew into the house
to inform Monsieur S. that I was back again.
So there I was once more sitting on the stone step in front of the
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policeman’s house that had so endeared itself to me. But this time it was
not a sense of the ludicrousness of my situation that held my attention.
There was nothing in me but anxiety, anxiety as to whether I were to
find asylum. The Levantine had impressed me as not at all hopeful, and
on very good grounds. Old Monsieur S. had his moods. He could be
headstrong—that I had already observed. His dislike for Madame L., for
instance, over the incident with the dog, was invincible and the Czech
woman had had to give up her afternoon coffees with Madame L. on
account of it. It was altogether possible that the old man would send me
away. And what then? I would have to go back to the noisy, stench-filled
camp or else I would have to go back to that steaming city of Nîmes to
wander aimlessly about the crowded streets, with terror in my heart at the
sight of every policeman and a never-ending worry over a place to sleep.
The Czech woman came to the door. It was as I feared: the sleuth
had come to life again in the old policeman. He mistrusted me. But the
good-natured Czech woman was eager to help me and volunteered a
suggestion. The old man had a son-in-law who was a public prosecutor
in Tunis. If now the Italians were to occupy Tunis, the son-in-law would
be driven out, the old man feared. Inclined to worry over money matters
like most Frenchmen, Monsieur S. was thinking of ways of meeting that
contingency and was now playing with the idea of selling the property
he owned. How, then, would it be if I were to tell him that I liked the
house and the garden and inquire whether he would consider disposing
of the property?
Just then the old man came out himself. His face wore a scowl and he
was thinking hard. “Show me your paper again,” said he, all policeman
now. He studied the document a long time. “I don’t understand why
they don’t give you a pass on this,” he continued. “I’ll go right into town
with you myself. I know everybody there. I know Inspector X. I know
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Inspector Y . I’d like to see them refuse you a pass if I go with you.”
But the offices were closed, I protested feebly. The old man was
obdurate. “No matter,” he said. “Those men have all been guests in my
house. We can go to their homes, and no bones about it. They will be
glad to see me.”
I managed to put in that my plan was to stay one more night with
him. Otherwise I would be unlikely to find accommodations in Sanary,
since my house—so I had heard in town—was filled with Alsatian
refugees. I liked his property, I liked the city of Nîmes, indeed, I had
already thought of asking him whether he might not be willing to sell
the property. At first he did not understand, and I had to repeat what I
had said. I did so, but with a bad conscience. I hated to be fooling the
old man, and so brazenly at that. The Levantine and the Czech woman
stood there sly, expectant. One could see how the thing was working in
the old man’s mind. Finally he said: “Well, then, stay. But tomorrow or
the day after I am going with you to police headquarters, and then we’ll
see whether they refuse to give you the pass. A good piece of property,
this,” he added; “I’ve put lots of work into it.”
The Czech woman prepared the evening meal. We sat long at table,
eating and drinking leisurely. The old man praised the lettuce and the
vegetables. He had raised them himself. He drifted on to his son-in-law,
the public prosecutor, and then to the city of Tunis and his experiences
in Tunisia, and I listened with the usual interested expression. Rising, he
took me out to see his hens and rabbits, again emphasized the amount of
work he had put into the place, and concluded by saying that if he sold at
all he could not sell for less than a set figure. It was a touchingly modest
sum, and I was ashamed of myself when I answered that we would have
to talk the matter over.
Fatigued by the evening’s excitement, the old man retired early. I
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went out for another walk with the Levantine, this time in the garden that
lay shrouded in the silence of the night. The Levantine discoursed on
politics. He thought it was quite out of the question that the government
of unoccupied France should ever adapt its domestic policies to the
principles of the Nazis. “Never,” he declared, and the normally
indifferent and sceptical gentleman waxed emotional, “never will France
pass laws like yours against Jews.”
I thought of my Levantine later on when the Vichy government
proclaimed laws against Jews that were modelled on those of Nuremberg.
We went to bed. Karl had given me no pajamas, but the Czech woman
hunted up a pair from the policeman’s wardrobe.
The next morning I read in the local newspaper that a judge named
Messia had sentenced three Germans, Messrs. X., Y ., and Z., to prison
terms because they had been picked up without papers, and that
foreigners who could show no papers were now being arrested every
day. Apart from that I had a quiet and a beautiful day, a real day of rest. I
did not leave the place. I enjoyed my garden. I strolled about in it, made
a few notes, and wrote a few letters. The Czech woman still looked after
me with the same motherly solicitude. She went into town and bought
me underwear, postage stamps, and newspapers.
Then the old policeman came up to see me for a chat. My discharge
certificate and the fact that I had been in the camp had apparently
roused memories of certain old-time experiences in him. He had been
stationed in Tunis, he said, at the outbreak of the First World War. All
Germans had been interned at that time too. A number of them managed
to take refuge aboard an Italian ship, the Città da Messina, which was
to sail for Palermo—Italy had not yet entered the war. Now he, the
policeman, was ordered to take those Germans off the ship. He knew
their stateroom numbers, but the ship was crowded and the Germans
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kept out of sight. The Italian captain insisted upon sailing on time, and
the authorities did not care to anger the Italians. The search therefore
could not be continued too long. In that situation he, the policeman,
had a bright idea: he ordered the luggage of the Germans for whom he
was hunting taken ashore. A number of Germans fell into the trap, went
ashore again, claimed their luggage, and were arrested. Others, sly ones,
let their luggage go, did not leave the ship, and so escaped.
Such was the policeman’s story, and for once it cost me no great effort
to listen with my interested expression. I myself was one of the Germans
who had been interned in Tunis and had escaped on the Città da Messina.
I myself was one of the four “sly ones” who had let their luggage go and
preferred to stay in their safe hiding place aboard the ship.
If that day passed in blessed calm, the day following bade fair to be
correspondingly hectic.
As I was sitting at breakfast early in the morning, Madame
Timid-Energetic stormed into the house. She had left a number of
compromising papers at the policeman’s for safekeeping. Now that
a German commission had appeared on the scene, she thought it too
dangerous to have them at all and she wanted to get the papers back
and destroy them. (They were not in the least compromising.) She was
panic-stricken at sight of me. What, was I still there? But the German
commission was in town. Hadn’t she, Madame Timid-Energetic,
urgently bidden me through Madame L. to leave the policeman’s house
at once and never go back again, so that she, Madame Timid-Energetic,
might not be compromised? The angry eyes in her Coleoni-like face
glared at me and the moment the policeman turned his back her lips
hissed words of rage at me. Perceiving, however, that neither the glare
nor the hiss made any great impression, she demanded vehemently that
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at least I do her a favour. She expected her husband home within the next
few days and wanted me to write an urgent letter of recommendation
to the American consulate at Marseille, so that matters of his concern
pending there might at last be pushed through. I wrote the letter but she
continued her growling.
Madame Timid-Energetic had hardly taken her departure when
Madame L. came in, receiving a sullen welcome from the policeman
even though she was not accompanied by her dog. Ever eager to help,
and braving the old codger’s displeasure, that helpful soul had made
the long, hot uphill climb on foot and walking as fast as she could in
order to deliver an urgent note from one of my friends in camp that
our soldiers had brought her. Passes were being issued at the camp to
those who thought themselves justified in claiming right of asylum in
France. Applications had to be signed at once and personally delivered to
the camp authorities by the claimant not later than the coming evening.
A notice had been posted that anyone failing to comply would lose all
title to protection. Knowing of my absence from camp, the commandant
had sent for my friend, the writer of the note, and suggested that he
get in touch with me if there were any way of doing so and advise me
urgently to hurry back and file my application. If I did come back, he,
the commandant, would overlook my departure. Such was the message
that I received by way of the guards and Madame L.
I considered the matter. How painful to leave the quiet, hospitable
home of the friendly policeman. On the other hand, the commandant’s
suggestion that I return to camp was sensible and well intentioned. If the
French were looking for an excuse to evade their obligations to me my
flight certainly supplied one.
With a sigh I made up my mind to go back to the camp. I arranged
with Madame L. to be at her house at three o’clock, when she would
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be expecting the two soldiers. I would make the trip back to camp
with them.
As soon as Madame L. had gone, the policeman told me the story
of the dog and the cat again, showed me the scars of the scratches his
cat had given him, and, stroking the cat’s back, expressed himself in
no favourable terms about Madame L. I said that Madame L. had just
brought me word that I was at liberty to return to Sanary, and that I
would therefore be leaving after the midday meal. The policeman
thought hard. Then he said: “I like you, Monsieur. I should be very glad
to be of service to you, but the price I set on my house is really the best
that I can do.”
It was a very reasonable price, I answered, and I would think the
matter over seriously.
The Czech woman had bought a chicken with the idea of frying it in
the Austrian style—she was an expert at preparing a Backhendl. She had
intended to let the fowl hang overnight, considering it still too freshly killed;
but, contrary to rule and contrary to her own convictions, she resolved to
prepare the dish before my departure, in other words, that very day.
We were all a little glum during the meal. The Czech woman was
frankly unhappy both because the fowl was tough and really not a success
and because of the uncertainty of my future in general. The policeman
sat pondering and unusually taciturn throughout the meal. He finally
declared that as a rule the purchaser of a house bore all the costs of a
transfer, but that as a special favour and to be agreeable to me he would
pay five hundred francs as his share.
I packed my briefcase and took leave of those three good souls with
sincere gratitude and affection. For one last time I walked with my
briefcase under my arm the length of the hot city, and for one last time
climbed the dark, narrow steps that led to Madame L.’s apartment.
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The little room was again packed full. Jovial Herr B. was there; he
had still found no chance to get on to Montpellier and was still sleeping
at Madame L.’s. Then there were the two soldiers, the Frenchwoman
who was the friend of the Berlin lawyer, the nervous woman with the
weeping spells, Madame L., and myself. We sat in a huddle—the bed, the
chairs, the table, the floor were all occupied.
Madame L. dictated to the two soldiers a short list of things that
they were to take her husband, in the camp. Dr. L., a physician of
some note, had organized the sanitation in a number of prison camps
during the First World War. He had asked his wife to send him a certain
preventive against the dysentery that was becoming epidemic. Madame
L. called out her list from the kitchen, where she was busy preparing a
special dish for her husband, who was suffering from the after-effects
of a dysentery attack.
The soldiers checked the list, offering also to get a few things for me
in case I really intended to go back to camp. They were returning by
bus at half-past four and would take me with them. When I suggested
that they should order a taxicab and I would take them up with me, they
accepted gladly.
They left the house and shortly Herr B. and the nervous woman
took their departure. Madame L., the keen-witted Frenchwoman,
and I talked my situation over once more. Might not my invitation
from the commandant to return to camp be just a trap? A German
Control Commission was present in Nîmes—even the newspapers
mentioning the fact. There were also well-authenticated reports
that such commissions had appeared in internment camps. Was the
commandant really a benevolent person? Or was he simply trying to
entice quietly back to camp an internee whose return by force would
have attracted notice?
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The Frenchwoman had called at police headquarters again. She
received an impression there that the French authorities were well
disposed toward us and intended to protect us from the Germans. They
had explained to her that it would be better for us to remain in camp. If
we cut loose and began wandering about the country illegally, we would
inevitably be picked up by policemen who had no sense of the situation
and be sent along to French prisons, which were especially disagreeable
at just that time. In prison, moreover, it would be harder to help us make
a getaway than it would be in camp in case of an emergency.
All things considered, it seemed best that I should return to
San Nicola.
The two soldiers came back. They had attended to everything
faithfully. Shrewdly and with friendly thoughtfulness, they had even
come to an agreement with the taxi-driver, who was waiting in the street
below, on a reasonable price for the journey. As a rule, persons who were
evidently internees or strangers in town were charged either an extra or a
higher fare. The chauffeur had made the soldiers a price that was twenty
francs below the normal.
So I went back to camp with the two soldiers. We talked calmly,
reasonably of the war, of the chances of peace, of personal matters,
of our prospects and worries for the immediate future. We were great
friends by the time we reached the outskirts of the camp.
The taxi halted at a point agreed upon, some twenty minutes’
walk from our destination. The soldiers would not allow me to carry
a basket containing the purchases they had made for me. They took
possession of it, declaring they would get it to me in camp. We were
able to walk along together for a part of the way; finally we separated.
They continued on along the road that led to the entrance gate, while I
veered off into the woods.
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I made my way slowly through a growth of saplings, the familiar
stench serving as a safe guide. When I came to the barbed wire I crawled
through with the usual precautions.
I was back in the camp that I had left with such mingled hopes and
fears. I had not gained much by my jaunt, but I had had five days of peace
and mental composure, and I had been able for once to take counsel with
myself undisturbed by others. All in all, it had been better for me than to
have spent the time in camp.
I received a warm welcome and was eagerly questioned. The
friend who had sent me the commandant’s message urged that I report
immediately to the office, obtain an application form, and sign it.
A young lieutenant, a mere boy, received me. “You have given us
no end of trouble, Monsieur,” he said. “Strictly speaking, the lists are
closed. I really ought not to accept your application now.”
“But you will accept it, Lieutenant?” I returned.
“Of course,” he said.
Then I set out to look for my former tent. During my absence many
fugitives had returned, a new division had been necessary, and it was no
easy matter to find my old group. While I was hunting about, two men
among the older internees invited me to join the company in their tent.
By that time, they said, practically every tent was full, my old one too
presumably. Theirs happened to have only eleven occupants and they
would try to make things as pleasant for me as possible. My man Karl had
meanwhile joined me, somewhat depressed at the failure of my excursion,
but delighted after all to have me back again. He had visited my tent and
found that it was in fact full. I gratefully accepted the offer of the kindly
old gentlemen and with Karl’s help settled forthwith in their tent.
The “leader” of my new tent community happened to be one of
the two gentlemen who had invited me, the noisy, jovial Herr Cohn.
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Formerly owner of a factory in Berlin, he was a man of inherited
wealth and good breeding, somewhat spoiled by money and good luck.
Though nearly sixty, he still made a fine appearance. He was used to
giving orders, and enjoyed managing things, “organizing.” Loud-
voiced, impulsive, good-natured, he could be abrupt, but then always
stood ready to retract an inconsiderate word and apologize. He was
always quarrelling with everybody, making up with everybody, doing
kindnesses and demanding services in return. He suffered deeply because
he had no money left, but even in camp he lived as though he had plenty.
The fact that his extravagance brought an unending series of difficulties
in its train made him none the wiser. In the habit of being waited on, he
was always giving orders to my man Karl. But Karl thought of himself
as my servant only. He had taken it into his head that he was looking after
me and not after any Messrs. Müller, Schulze, or Cohn. As a result there
was constant friction between the two, and I was always being called
upon to straighten things out.
Another man with whom Herr Cohn lived in a constant state of feud
was our tent companion Herr L., a lawyer from Berlin, a shaggy, untidy
individual with a huge, fuzzy red beard. Exactly like Herr Cohn, Herr L.
was quarrelsome and overbearing. The continual warfare between the
two enriched my vocabulary by many a spicy expression from the Berlin
dialect that I had never heard before. For Lawyer L. was a witty man
and had a gift for turning a phrase. On being asked why he washed so
rarely, he answered that he had an iron constitution and that iron rusted
in water. And I shall not forget how once during the night, after someone
had several times broken wind with great force, his deep, cavernous
voice came rhyming out of the dark, with something that might be
rendered as: “A fart a day keeps the doctor away.” He had an enormous
appetite. “He’s digging his grave with his teeth,” a tent companion
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remarked of him. Though Lawyer L. liked to eat often and plenty, he
happened to have no money. Whenever a trader came along and one
of us bought something it became his rule to say: “While you are at it,
just get a little something for me too,” whereupon he would proceed to
consume the greater part of the purchase and then always forget to pay.
Herr Cohn, for his part, not seldom did the same, but he was always
calling Herr L.’s attention to these oversights. As group leader it was
Herr Cohn’s privilege to decide who should go for our food allotment at
the commissary and he frequently designated Lawyer L. This repeatedly
provoked a squabble. Though the lawyer always demanded a large share
of the food intended for us all, he refused to carry the pot, offering his
advanced age as excuse.
It was no simple matter, really, to apportion the various tasks, which
were considerably more numerous than in the days at Les Milles. The
tent had to be kept clean, the canvas walls frequently stretched, the pegs
driven tighter, the surrounding trenches deepened to keep out rainwater.
The food pot had to be cleaned and the water for the cleaning battled for.
The rubbish in and around the tent had to be collected and carried away
to a safe distance. Wood had to be procured for the fire and mosquito
smudges kept going at night in front of the tents. The old men in our
company were hardly suited to work of this sort. Herr Cohn and Herr
L. might have served. But the lawyer did not mind filth and broke into
curses when he was selected for cleaning jobs, and Herr Cohn declared
that as group leader he was exempt from working anyhow.
There were a number of men who performed any sort of work for
pay, but neither Cohn nor L. would or could pay.
Another shirker was the man who made the remark about the
lawyer—that he was digging his grave with his teeth. For that matter
he had no small appetite himself. He had been a judge on the highest
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bench in Berlin. Somewhat moody, squeamishly finical in his ways and
habits, not a little spoiled, he could not even in this tent forget his dignity
as a member of the highest court. The Lawyer L. and Herr Cohn liked
to tease the old man, and mercilessly they would say, for instance, that
he had a bad smell. And at times when they were at it, the ex-judge had
a way of defending himself with a sort of old-maidish fury that was
comical indeed.
“Who smells so bad again today?” Herr Cohn would begin.
“It’s not me today,” the lawyer would answer. “It must be the judge.
I’ve been smelling it all night long. Listen here”—he would say, looking
straight at the poor old man—“this has got to stop. You aren’t alone in
this tent, you know.”
“I don’t smell and I haven’t smelt,” the old judge would retort,
sharply but with dignity. “Tell me, Herr V.,” he would say, turning to his
straw-fellow, an elderly cantor from Berlin, “did you smell anything?”
“I was asleep,” the cantor would answer with diplomatic evasiveness.
I liked the old judge immensely. He was an extremely well-educated
man, having taken his preparatory studies seriously and lovingly, still
retaining everything that he had absorbed as a youth and enjoying a
display of it. I was both touched and surprised to learn that he had had
the same training in the humanities that I had had, but in his case the
liberal education had come to full fruition, encrusting him and cutting
him off from the rest of the world. His mind had shaped itself to the
exact form his schoolmasters had tried to give it. He had learned what he
had been asked to learn and nothing of the chaotic happenings that had
overtaken him in after years had added anything to it. He believed in the
humanism of the classical era in Germany, in the forms in which it had
been laid before him in school; the sort of humanism that is reflected in
the poems of Schiller’s idealistic period.
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I would try sometimes to put myself in the places of the men and
women who had been called to answer before such a judge. That he
knew the law thoroughly there could be no doubt, but how could he
have understood them or they him? There could have been absolutely no
point of contact between them and him. There was none even between
him and me. To that very cultivated gentleman Sigmund Freud and Karl
Marx were mere names. He had never read a book of theirs.
He was passionately fond of quotations. He had been made to learn
long passages from German and classical poets. We happened both to
have memorized a number of poems that are not so generally known, and
what one of us could not remember the other would be able to supply.
All in all, there was a good deal of quoting about the camp and I
often wondered what could be the hidden spur to that passion which
slowly became a mania. Perhaps having so little, not to say nothing, left
in life, we were trying to warm our hearts with a feeling that we were
really cultured people. Or it may have been that we were trying to brush
up on old attainments in order not to lose them for good, or again it
may have been a mere conceit of erudition. We all looked alike, we all
lived under exactly the same conditions. We had to find some way of
proving to ourselves and to others that in spite of everything we were
not altogether as other men were.
I am tempted to go more deeply into the habit of quoting and the
passion for it that is so rife among Germans and Jews in general, and
which became virtually epidemic among the German Jews in the tent
camp at Nîmes. But I will keep to my tent and its occupants.
There were, further, two businessmen among our number, quiet,
well-set-up individuals who spent the better part of their day devising
ways and means to feed themselves succulently, bountifully, and cheaply.
They let themselves go in an orgy of reminiscences about the various
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regional dishes of Germany. Sometimes they would have differences of
opinion as to just how and where a given dish was most tastily prepared.
Unforgettable also were two Jewish cantors from Berlin, excellent
cantors and famous ones, with honours from the great synagogues of the
German capital. They differed widely in temperament yet could not get
along without each other. As a result they quarrelled endlessly, their battles
being cunningly fomented by Herr Cohn and the untidy lawyer Herr L.
One of the cantors was a surly fellow, always going around with his
head lowered as though about to charge in battle. His bad luck was very
much on his mind; he felt like a dethroned prince. The other was an
active body always up to something. He by no means considered his life
at an end. Even from the camp he was feeling out the synagogues in
the South of France for an appointment as cantor, or if not as cantor
as an extra to help out on high holy days—though of course such a
position would be a long step down from what he had had in Berlin.
Nothing could shake his spirit or his self-confidence, not even a piece of
downright bad luck which he had just then experienced. He had checked
his luggage, all he had left in the world, in the parcel-room at the Nîmes
station. He had needed a valise and one of the Foreign Legionnaires
had promised to get it to camp for him. He had turned his check over
to the man, whereupon, it seems, the Legionnaire got out the luggage,
sold it, and calmly pocketed the money. Now he offered the cantor all
sorts of tales and excuses, but without producing the luggage. However,
the cantor did not give up. He was no fool; he knew that a complaint
to the camp authorities or to the police would even his score with the
Legionnaire but could not bring the luggage back. So he turned diplomat
and was now appeasing the Legionnaire. Never once did he let on that
he suspected him. He pretended to believe everything the Legionnaire
said, discussed ways and means of getting the luggage out and up to the
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camp, gave him small sums, ostensibly as bribes to the clerks to release
the luggage, but actually as ransom money for the luggage which the
Legionnaire had stolen and was withholding. Not once did the cantor
doubt of recovering his property in the end.
The two cantors liked to talk about old times in Berlin. They had
had good salaries and, what with weddings, funerals, and the like, had
made fat incomes on the side. They would boastfully tell how much
they had earned on this or that occasion, each improving on the other’s
story and each doubting the other’s statements. Herr Cohn and Herr L.
became enthusiastic seconds in such bouts, maliciously egging on their
respective principals.
I enjoy lingering on the description of my absurd experiences in the
tent camp near Nîmes. Throughout my stay there I fixed my attention
rather on the unusual or curious detail than on our distressing situation
as a whole. Had I not been thinking always of the ludicrous aspects of
my own plight, or of the plight of others, I could not have survived that
depressing, degrading experience without spiritual harm.
Gay and charming as it looked, the tent camp was not a pleasant place
to be in. It was, I beg my reader to believe me, ghastly.
There was no organization. There was no place where an internee
might lodge a complaint or make a request. It was a general dissolution
into filth and slovenliness. Bound hand and foot, we were delivered over
to excrement and indolence. It was not living, it was vegetation. We
longed for death. We endured living there only because we kept telling
ourselves that we must not give in, that we had to survive this period.
Some day we would get out of the camp, some day we would be able to
live again as human beings.
But there were people there—and to see them was perhaps the most
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distressing thing in the whole distressing experience—who had only one
fear, a fear that the tent camp might be abolished and they set free. Yes,
there were men among us, and not a few, who shrank in terror before
the moment when they would be turned loose again upon life. Wretched
as those tents were, they were roofs over their heads. Monotonous
and tasteless as the food was at Nîmes, it kept soul and body together,
it could be forced down, it could be swallowed. When they lost the
camp at Nîmes, they would lose everything, for they had no money, no
prospects, nothing. Once driven from that camp, those utterly wretched
souls would find themselves standing in the void, with nothing but a few
rags on their bodies. They would be strangers, nay, enemies, in a land
that had been conquered and was scarcely able to offer its own sons the
bare necessities for living.
The reader will, I hope, forgive this outburst. I shall now be coming
to a more cheerful subject. I am going to tell you about Bernhard Wolf,
the most delightful of the dwellers in our tent.
Though Herr Cohn was the titular group leader, Herr Wolf was
the actual leader of our little community. He was a fattish sort of man,
perhaps a little over sixty, with a heavy, good-natured Jewish face. He
had no great amount of book-learning, but he had a good brain, a kind
heart, lots of common sense, and a healthy scepticism. He had an unusual
combination of sound judgment, shrewdness, and good-will to men. But
why do I say “had?” He still has all those qualities today.
Herr Wolf was the oldest among a large number of brothers and
sisters who had worked themselves up from small beginnings to very
enviable fortunes. One of his brothers was in our camp. They both came
to terms with their situation in sovereign style. They had been in many
a bad fix before and had come out all right, and this one too they would
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get out of, perhaps with scars, but with skins whole.
Herr Wolf owned factories and a country place near Marseille. He
had provided work for many people, and a habit of getting on with others
had made him a keen judge of human nature. He got attention without
raising his voice. Factories, country estate, employees had vanished, but
he still had composure, patience, authority.
Herr Wolf and I became good comrades from the very first. He was
a more practical man than I and was thereafter to second me in many
little matters with sound advice and efficient action, especially in a rather
difficult situation of which I shall soon have occasion to speak. Then
there were circumstances in which I could be of effective aid to him. I
think we both remember each other with pleasure.
Herr Wolf was a master of the art of living. He never essayed the
impossible, but got the best possible out of every set of circumstances.
For example he was responsible for a number of improvements in our
manner of living. He had one of the internees build a rough table under
a tree in front of our tent and something that could pass as a bench.
There we could sit and eat comfortably, half in the shade, half in the
sunlight. In addition to that he got a few tent-poles and had something
like bedsteads made for himself and me. They had to be low, otherwise
the tent-walls would have come into contact with our faces and rubbed
them sore. But they did provide a little air space between our straw
and the cold, damp ground. Herr Wolf was marvellously ingenious at
procuring provisions and as a result our meals were often appetizing and
of considerable variety.
The camp had changed in aspect in the course of the few days that I
had spent in Nîmes. It was now a big fair. Cafés, sales booths, one after
another in unbroken sequence, lined the streets of the tent city. Hawkers
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roamed the streets from five in the morning till one in the morning
calling their wares: “Condensed milk forbidden. Obtainable nowhere
in France except here of me.” “Fried chicken with fresh cucumber and
tomato salad in ten minutes at Tent 54.” “Three fountain-pens, as good
as new, at unheard-of bargain prices.” “The latest Paris newspapers.”
“Newspapers smuggled in from Switzerland.” “Brown leather shoes,
the last pair. Good condition. Will walk all over France and across the
borders.” “Fine forged passport, Poland, good for gentleman between
forty and fifty, only 3000 francs.” So it went the whole day long and half
the night.
Small restaurants had opened also, good ones, run by experienced
Austrian chefs who had improved their art in the outstanding French
schools for cooking. Such restaurants were of course against the rules
but the officers in charge of the camp began to get their meals in them
and even brought up acquaintances from Nîmes, there being better food
in our camp than in Nîmes.
Our traders had ingenious ways of obtaining things from secret
sources and somehow managed to have on hand anything that a person
could really want. One of them in particular, being an orthodox Jew,
could transact no business between Friday evening and Saturday night,
but he was only the more industrious the other days of the week. He was
scrupulously honest, taking a twenty-two percent profit on cost prices, no
more and no less. He employed three or four assistant salesmen, and two
taxis were always on the road in his service. He offered the finest French
wines at astoundingly low prices. Though Paris was cut off, he procured
books in the exact editions asked for, to say nothing of suspenders,
shoelaces, knapsacks, and similar objects. He had uncanny intuition and
understanding of the needs of individual persons, attending to Herr
Wolf and me with an assiduity that amounted to a passion.
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As organization in France disintegrated, conditions in our camp
became more and more fantastic. Had the scenes in our camp been shown
on the screen or on the stage the public would have scoffed at them as
altogether incredible. Evenings especially, as the sun went down, the tent
city presented an ultra-romantic aspect: white pointed tents lying in the
midst of a lovely landscape, smoking fires in front of the tents and ragged
men poking at them, cabarets, gambling resorts, music and singing from
restaurants and cafés, the whole fenced in with barbed wire, hemmed
in by a wall of stench, and, with all the rest, now and then a police-van
delivering men in handcuffs—fugitives who had been caught again.
As implausible as all this were the life stories, the life destinies, the
worries, the hopes of this or that individual. Among us was a man who
had been on the police force in Germany and had had the bad luck to
shoot a Nazi in dealing with one of the many frays between Nazis and
Leftists. Thorough investigation had absolved him of guilt. But the
Nazis had marked him for their vengeance, and when they came into
power he had thought it wiser to leave the country—and in that he
was certainly right. In the camp his chief worry was about his wife, of
whom he had had no word since his internment. Now after more than
two months he at last received news. Ill, without resources, she had fled
before the oncoming Nazis, and like so many others had fallen exhausted
by the roadside. The Germans advancing picked her up, treated her well,
and left her the option of returning to Germany. After long hesitation
she had decided to accept, seeing no other way out for herself. Loyally,
frankly, she informed her husband of all this. He carried the letter around
for three days, reading it aloud to anyone who would listen and to many
who would not. On the fourth day he went out and hanged himself. A
trader had sold him the rope for three francs.
There was an art dealer who, on being ordered to camp, took the
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valuable pictures that belonged to him, carefully concealed them
between the linings and the walls of a number of trunks, and deposited
the trunks in various places to be held till called for. In this way precious
canvases of old masters went travelling about the country to be held in
the parcel-rooms now of this station, now of that. The man could not get
in touch with his wife and was therefore frantically worried as to what
was happening to his priceless pictures, to which he alone had access
through the parcel-room checks that he held.
A renowned chemist, professor in a German university, had been
of great service to the German army in the First World War through
discoveries that he had made. He was a man of perhaps sixty. Short,
slender, erect of carriage, he went around for the most part wearing
tennis clothes that became more and more soiled, and a monocle. He
had the demeanour and manner of expression of a German officer of the
Kaiser’s day, abrupt, sharp, polished. He spoke in short, crisp, idiomatic
sentences that had an almost telegraphic style but showed a remarkable
choice of words. He moved in an effluvium of alcohol, and on meeting
an acquaintance would unfailingly offer him a whisky or some other sort
of drink and clink glasses, looking him intently in the eye and holding
his elbow sharply squared, but meanwhile taking it for granted that the
treat would be returned. He was subject to depressions and at such times
would call out to you: “Don’t come near me today—I have le cafard.”
But as a rule his attacks of despondency had a touch of good humour
that evinced his sense of superiority to his situation. On one occasion
he confided to me that he carried a dose of cyanide in the pocket of his
tennis shirt, genuine cyanide—a French chemist, one of his colleagues,
had obtained it for him.
Many men in that Brueghel’s hell which was our camp would have
given a good deal to have a dose of poison in their pockets.
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For in the midst of the motley hurly-burly of that country fair,
despair had a way of growing. What wore a man down most was not so
much the ever-present and very real menace of the extradition clause, as
the forced inactivity, the crushingly patent senselessness of our detention
there. It was always the same monotonous round, a stroll, a chat, a chat,
a stroll, and, in the offing, first dysentery and then delivery to the Nazis.
One could stand it for a day or two, for a week, for a month. But in the
long run a man in full possession of his health and his faculties could not
endure it. You were sure at every other turn to meet some acquaintance
with a face shrouded in gloom who would wave you violently aside when
you asked him what the matter was; there was always someone who was
sniffling quietly to himself or someone who was sobbing aloud.
Our cafard expressed itself in other and very strange forms. One
pitch-black night when I had gone out to the latrines, I heard a voice
issue from the dark, unaccented but positive and spiteful: “And to think
that my ancestors settled in Rothenburg across the Tauber in the year
1400.” That was all, and the man who said that certainly had no idea that
anyone would hear him—I never knew who he was.
It was summer and usually very hot at high noon. But mornings
and late afternoons it was pleasant to take walks out in the lovely
surroundings.
I took such walks frequently in company now with the writer R., now
with Herr W olf, who liked a comfortable pace and a comfortable talk, now
with Herr Cohn, who thought a walk was a cross-country run. Before long
Herr Cohn knew all the farm people in the neighbourhood and talked in
jovial familiarity with them. If you went to walk with Herr Cohn, you
were sure to be invited to a glass of wine and to come home with beer,
butter, or an occasional chicken, obtained at very reasonable prices.
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It was against the rules to take such walks, and one had to look about
before crossing a public highway if one would not come afoul of some
police patrol. Dignity was hardly the word to describe us as we crouched
low in a ditch, then craned our necks to see how the land lay, and finally
darted across a road behind a bush or over a hedge in guilty haste, to be
gazed at suspiciously by some autoist who chanced to be passing. But the
walks more than repaid the humiliation. It was a delightful country of
infinitely varied aspects at every turn—old farmhouses, now occupied,
now deserted, thickets, broad, flat uplands, blue hills with graceful,
magnificently sweeping curves, distant vistas over the towns of Uzès and
Nîmes, a swift stream that wound snakelike with many twists through a
deep ravine, high bridges, ancient cloisters.
One of our company had acquired great skill in cutting gnarled
knotted walking-sticks out of a sort of stout rush. They were useful
curios and with them we walked, raced, climbed about, half naked in our
tattered shirts and patched trousers, and sandals of cloth and hemp. We
would have preferred to wear shorts or even bathing trunks, had not the
French sense of propriety forbidden such things.
Quite apart from whiskies, wines, and food one could have all sorts of
amusements in camp and for very little money. Partners were available
for any imaginable game of cards. Shrewd speculators set up roulette
tables, though games of chance had considerable sentiment against
them. Gambling dens were certain sooner or later to be raided by crowds
of internees, who would rush the tables, smash the equipment, confiscate
any loose cash, and beat up the banker and his customers.
Musical enterprises were multiple and varied. Two or three times a
week we would be invited, by notices posted on trees, to attend a “big
cabaret and floor show.” Several hundred men would sometimes gather
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on such occasions in front of an improvised stage. Offerings were not
exactly bad, though as a rule they were fairly vulgar. Noticeably better
were the occasional performances given in the small cafés or restaurants.
By “restaurant” or “café” or “bar” one must understand a sort of
hut, made of tent-poles or sapling trunks, covered over with a loose layer
of green branches. Under this leafy shelter one would find two or three
improvised tables and benches at which as many as a dozen men might
be accommodated. Fifty or sixty people would gather outside these huts
when there was singing or instrumental music inside.
I have a vivid memory of one “cabaret evening” in particular in one
of the restaurants. The writer R. and Herr Wolf were with me. A man
in the tent next adjoining had gone fishing in the stream and had sold
us his catch. We had had the fish cooked at the restaurant. They turned
out well, especially when supplemented with a bit of local wine. The
cabaret evening began when we had finished our meal. An excellent
violinist played a number with a harmonica accompaniment instead of
an orchestra. Next came a night-club singer who had been famous in
Berlin. The Nazis had first sent him to a concentration camp in northern
Germany and then to Dachau. During his stay in those camps the Nazis
had kept him at hard labour all day and then at night, though quite
exhausted, he had to sing to them for their entertainment. To us now he
recited and sang the witty verses and songs, filled with such a healthy
hate, that had won him fame in the old days in Berlin.
A cabaretist from Vienna, a man of extraordinary talent, next
appeared and we had him sing “Die Moorsoldaten” (The Peat-Bog
Soldiers), that ballad of Germans interned by Nazis, one of the most
agonizing songs in the world, which one never forgets once one has
heard it. As he sang it we joined in, humming or singing the tune with
him. After that he sang a song that he himself had written there in the
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camp of San Nicola, a lullaby for a child born of a German mother in
France while her husband is a prisoner in a concentration camp. This
song, too, of the popular variety, mournful and with savage thrusts at
French hospitality, had a catchy refrain, so that at the end of his third
stanza we were able to join in and sing it with him.
So through the evening we sat there, listening, singing, drinking.
Through the green branches of our shelter we could see a great full
moon, round, red, while all about us were stench and haggling and
shouting and laughter and sickness and despair. And the week before a
man had killed himself and that week another.
Every day fresh rumours about the application of the extradition
clause circulated through the camp. The Nazis had handed in their list,
a list of two thousand names, or rather, no, only forty names; and then,
later, none of the names of men in the camp were on the list—it referred
only to renegades from the National Socialist Party. We believed such
rumours, for an hour, for a day.
Sometimes a rumour would be embellished with a declaration of
its exact source, now the prefecture in Nîmes, now Staff Headquarters
at Marseille, and, on occasion, reports actually did emanate from
such sources, for there were still anti-Nazis in every office who kept
us informed of everything touching our interest that they learned.
Unfortunately the things they learned were unreliable or contradictory.
Several of our men who had been lucky enough to get to Marseille
had, contrary to rules, received permission from the municipal
authorities to stay on there. But the police were paying no attention to
such permits and were ruthlessly arresting all Central Europeans whom
they came across during their frequent raids. Men so arrested were not
well treated. They were not allowed to get their belongings from their
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places of residence, and as a result they almost always lost everything
they had. Certain former members of the Foreign Legion made a
business of offering to recover property of this sort that had been left
in hotels or private houses. But the owners rarely saw any of it again. If
it had not already been stolen in the places where it had been left, it was
appropriated by the commissioner.
Most of us nevertheless had our eyes fixed hopefully on Marseille.
There the great majority of the populace was friendly toward us. There
we would find friends who stood ready to make sacrifices in our behalf.
With their help probably we could find ways to drop out of sight, to sink
below the surface in that great city of so many nooks and corners. There,
too, was a harbour, the sea, the one road of escape to some foreign land
or at least to one of the colonies.
Though most of those who got as far as Marseille were arrested
again and shipped back to camp, some few did make a success of it,
did get away overseas. There was the case of W ., for instance, who,
on reaching Marseille, met a young Arab with whom he had had a
previous acquaintance. The Arab had a job on a ship of the line running
to Algeria. He smuggled W . and one other man aboard, and they were
now in Casablanca or perhaps even farther along. The story emanated
from a man whom W . and the Arab offered to take with them. But he
had decided not to risk the venture. Now remorsefully and enviously he
talked of the luck of his more courageous comrades, and enviously and
longingly we listened to him.
No trace of discipline was now left in camp. Wives and sweethearts
of internees boldly appeared just beyond the barbed wire and their men
openly went out to join them.
Officers and guard patrols still ordered the women away. “You can’t
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stay here,” they would say, and then add jocularly and crassly: “We ’d
all like to sleep with our wives.” And then, finally, in an undertone: “Go
a little farther away, or better into the woods where we don’t have to
see you.”
Our old friend Weinberg had had his dog with him even in Les Milles.
Now he was having visits regularly from his wife, a Frenchwoman. Dog,
wife, and Weinberg, reunited, would go on walks together, he again in
tasselled nightcap and dirty pajamas, she prettily and neatly gowned, and
the dog capering and yelping delightedly about them.
On the edge of the woods across the field where men and women
were now habitually meeting, I saw my helpful Madame L. again and
with her the Frenchwoman with whom I had had luncheon in Nîmes,
the friend of the Berlin lawyer. The two women were picnicking with
their respective men and having a great battle with flies and mosquitoes.
Madame L. had meanwhile not relaxed her efforts in my behalf. She had
written scores of letters trying to discover the whereabouts of my wife
and she had heard that Frau Feuchtwanger had been interned at Gurs,
then released, then interned there again. Now, apparently, she had been
released a second time and was en route to Sanary. One never could
tell about travelling in France in those days, and it might well be weeks
before my wife would reach our neighbourhood or Sanary.
At this point I cannot resist setting down a word in praise of our
women. They behaved magnificently through all this ghastly experience.
They may have complained at times or at times scolded, but there were
very few cases of nervous breakdowns or weeping hysterics. Our wives,
German women or French women as they may have been, stood loyally
by us and wisely, cool-headedly, did what they could to help us all. They
were allowed greater freedom of movement than we men. They were
less closely watched—even in that desperate emergency the Frenchman
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remained gallant. With shrewdness, a certain amount of good looks,
and a dash of coquetry our women could obtain favours for us in many
different directions. Very few shrank from the hardships and dangers of
the journey to Nîmes. They came to see us from all parts of France. Now
without papers, now with papers obtained by one device or another, they
found ways to get through to our tent city.
The erotic played a surprisingly insignificant role in life at our camp.
Of course one heard most shocking remarks now and again, and the white
canvases of our tents were often defaced with primitive expressions of
obscenity; but the prisoners did not suffer from erotic privations to any
such degree as I had foreseen.
On the other hand, family ties, the tie between man and wife, held
firm in almost all cases. Many a time it would have been possible for
husband or wife to escape alone without the corresponding partner, but
exceedingly few took advantage of such opportunities.
The sick became more and more numerous in our camp and the
general health of all of us progressively deteriorated. The doctors
explained that hospitals in the neighbourhood were overcrowded and
that opium and other necessary medicines were not to be had; in other
words, they simply gave us up.
Many of the guards deserted, refusing to stay on in such a plague
spot. Health inspectors came, one after another, shook their heads,
declared it was all a crying shame, ordered the latrines sprinkled with
chloride of lime, and issued a few dozen commitments to hospitals.
That was all. Nothing decisive, effective, was ever done. Some two
hundred of us fell sick of dysentery one after another. Those who were
not yet afflicted expected, with a kind of fatalistic resignation, to catch
the disease any day.
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Of the many physicians among the internees some enjoyed
Continental renown. Dr. L., Madame L.’s husband, for instance, as I
have already noted, had been physician-in-chief to prison camps during
the First World War and was regarded as an expert in the sanitary
organization of such camps as ours. He pointed out to the authorities in
charge of us that the use of a few inexpensive remedies would rid us of
most of our troubles. The commandant and the French doctors listened
courteously but answered that unfortunately not even those inexpensive
remedies could be obtained.
Luckily the malady that was epidemic among us was of a mild
form. Very few died of it. A patient generally ran a high temperature
for a certain number of days, after which the fever would rapidly abate.
Meanwhile he would suffer a constant diarrhoea with loss of blood,
which reduced him to utter weakness. A man suffering from dysentery
offered a spectacle of the most pitiable debility; he could scarcely get
about on his feet.
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THE THIRD NIGHT
I fell sick under the following circumstances.
I had eaten a good meal at midday and in the afternoon had taken a
walk. The weather was close, sticky. Ordinarily the mosquitoes did not
come out till just before evening, but that day they had tormented us
from early morning. I had to visit the stench zone several times in the
course of the afternoon and became aware of symptoms of weakness
and dizziness toward evening. Herr Wolf and I had rooted up a bottle
of especially fine wine through the good offices of our supply man, the
orthodox Jew, and we had invited the writer R. to dinner, knowing well
that he would be able to appreciate the fine quality of our trophy. I did
not want to spoil the fun and refused to admit even to myself that I was
sick. I sat down with the others but was soon unable to hold out any
longer and retired to my tent.
The usual mosquito smudge had been lighted out in front and the
smoke that filled the whole tent seemed to trouble me. However, I simply
could not keep on my feet and, smoke or no smoke, had to lie down. Karl
came to help me with the usual evening chores. He did not like my looks
and called one of our physicians, Dr. L., a young Austrian. Dr. L. shook
his head and gave me a medicine, but was afraid that it might be too late.
In spite of the smoke and noise I dropped off into a dull half-
stupor. I was conscious of my tentmates coming in, undressing, and
going to bed. My fever was soaring. Everything swam before my
eyes—the mosquito veils of red and green gauze that the men were
wearing, the flickering lights, the red moon still not long past the full,
the Brueghelesque hubbub all around. The outlines of the two cantors,
of the bushy-bearded, gnome-like, red-headed lawyer, of the prissy
old judge, of good-natured, plumpish Herr Wolf, all melted one into
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another. I was suffering miserably from my fever, from weakness, from
the noise roundabout.
An attack of cramps came and in spite of my weakness I had to rise
and go out into the hot, steaming night. I staggered through the tent
city to the latrine. Yes, there was blood. I started back toward the tent,
dragging myself along—a painful, endless journey. Would I ever get
there? There it was at last. I crept inside and collapsed exhausted upon
my pile of straw.
I lay there in great distress. Noises from outside and within, snoring,
groaning, wind-breaking, all the sounds of sleeping men. I did not think
I would recover. I was deathly weak, fever was clouding my brain. I was
going to die, I longed to die.
Figures began to dance before my eyes. No, it was not a “dance.”
They reeled, they wheeled, they made the vague uncertain flight of bats.
They were bats. No, they were not bats, they were not real things, they
were figures from Goya.
What did it matter whether they were real or Goyas? They were filth,
they were dung. Everything was foul; everything was miserable. Not
only my present condition, my helplessness, the flat, degraded existence
in the internment camp, the compulsion of being always with people and
never alone; not only this, but my whole life till now, all fifty-six years of
it—which, when I was well and in my normal frame of mind, seemed so
good, so full and worthwhile—now struck me as senseless, empty, vile.
As a little boy I had been taught a bedtime prayer in Hebrew verse
against the terrors of the night, and evening after evening was made
to repeat it in my childish voice: “Look, there is the camp of Solomon
encircled by heroes, three lines of them, heroes of Israel. Swords they
hold, all, mighty warriors are they all. On each hip a sword to guard the
king from the terrors of the night.” I babbled the verses in my fever now.
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They came, they went, and then they came back—in German, in verses
of Heine:
Wo wird einst des Wandermüden
Letzte Ruhestätte sein?
Unter Palmen in dem Süden,
Unter…an dem Rhein?
What kind of trees on the Rhine—and they had to fit the meter—
oaks, birches, beeches? Nothing fitted just right. I was desperate, for if I
did not remember the tree, the exact tree, I would die.
I said to myself: If I find the right tree and the right word, I’ll pull
through. If I don’t find them, I will die.
I did not find the tree or the word for it. So I would have to die and I
was resigned to dying. Only, it seemed unfair that I should die there in
that filthy camp among so many people, that Fate should not allow me to
die alone and in peace.
A great longing swept over me for a clean white bedroom to lie
in. Other illnesses passed through my mind, operations of mine, and
what a comfort it had been in all my anguish to feel myself well cared
for, to know that I had skilled physicians in attendance, and my wife’s
solicitude, and ever-watchful nurses, clad in white. Whiteness, neatness,
that was what I longed for so desperately.
I had to get up again. Again I had to make my way out into the hot,
steaming night. If only I could stop where I was; but no—it was against
the rules. The men in the tents beat you up for doing that, no matter
how sick you were. And rightly so, with so much infection about. I had
to drag myself on beyond the tents. The road to the latrine was a long
road—five minutes long, five hours long, five years long. I went on,
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swaying, with sagging knees, stopping at every few steps and catching
my breath. At last I was there, the end of the camp grounds, but the
latrine was still far away. I could not make it. I squatted down. Swarms
of mosquitoes immediately attacked my bared thighs, but I was too weak
to beat them off. Sweat streaming from every pore, I squatted there, and
finally I collapsed, miserably, in blood and excrement.
I dragged myself back. One tent looked like another, with snores and
moans coming from every one, and mosquitoes around them all. Here
was Tent 67, then Tent 59, but where was Tent 54? Where was my tent?
So there I was on my back again, happy that death was near. What
a useless life I had led. Often enough in hours of normal health I had
debated the value of writing books. What did one accomplish by writing,
what influence did one exert, what improvements did one effect? The
nihilist intelligentsia had sustained the thesis that writing was merely a
pastime like any other, an empty amusement of the writer like sports or
liquor or whoring or what you will. I had never accepted that view. I
had declared that a well-turned sentence, written and read at the right
moment, could influence the life of a reader, and permanently. My
personal experience had shown it to be true in myself and in others. But
now in that bitter night I forgot all that and gave grim approval to the
contention of the Nihilists that all writing, all living, all great things that
were ever thought or done were stuff and nonsense.
I took a sentimental turn. Oh, if only I could see that woman again
and that friend, go to the Prado once more, see the Velazquezes and the
Goyas. Why should I have to die just then, such a short time before the
final overthrow of the barbarians? I wanted to hear Carmen once more
at the opera in Moscow. German rhymes began running through my
head—Wein, sein, geben, leben—and I fashioned them into despondent
phrases about wine and girls and “nevermore.”
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Und es wird ein Wein sein,
Und wir werden nimmer sein,
Und es wird schöne Mädel geben,
Und wir werden nimmer leben.
I had to get up again and again and again for the endless journey out
into the night toward the centre of the stench.
It was a July night less than seven hours long. To me it was seven
years long and more than that.
Karl came to help me dress. Herr Wolf asked how I felt and what I
wanted for breakfast. I replied that I felt as wretched as a dog. We could
not see each other clearly in the half-light of the tent. The men stooped
over to look at me and shrank back in horror.
The young Austrian physician came in, accompanied by another
physician. Their faces fell and they stepped aside to confer. They knew
what French hospitals were like and did not send patients to them even in
normal times, to say nothing of the circumstances then prevailing.
They thought of the camp infirmary more as a place to die in than
to recover in. It consisted of a single room, bare and damp, in which
the sick lay side by side infecting each other and mutually retarding
improvement. To use the latrine a patient had to drag himself up a
long, steep flight of stairs. The doctors concluded it would be better
for me to stay where I was in the tent. But how was I, exhausted, to
make the long journey through the tent city two dozen times a day
to the latrines? We would have to have a bucket in the tent. Karl,
alternating with a second man, could attend to emptying it from time
to time.
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Would the other occupants of the tent consent to such an
arrangement? Could one even ask that much of them? The doctors
put the question to them, and my tent companions without the slightest
hesitation expressed themselves as agreeable. Not only that, they placed
at my disposal a portion of their water ration, for cleaning the bucket.
I shall never forget my pitiable yet ludicrous plight as, weak and
wretched, and supported by Karl, I squatted over the bucket, while the
stout Herr Wolf stood guard at the tent entrance like an archangel to keep
people away. Herr Wolf was especially magnificent in those dreadful
hours. He procured—God knows how—a supply of the necessary
opium which the French physicians were unable to obtain anywhere. He
forced me to accept his sleeping bag so that I would not be cold at night,
though that meant that he would himself be cold. That illness was one of
the not many occasions in my life when I was to see myself unselfishly
sustained and cared for by others. A mother could not have surrounded
me with tenderer care than did plump little Herr Wolf. Karl and the
young Austrian doctor too worked over me day and night.
Most of the time I lay in a dull semi-consciousness, dreaming a deal
of nonsense and probably talking it aloud. I laboured indefatigably
digging up from memory lines, poems, scenes from plays that I had been
obliged to learn by heart at one time or another. It irked me that, try as I
would, I could never find the name of the tree that Heine mentioned in
the poem on the wanderer’s rest.
It grew terribly hot in the tent around noon. I scarcely noticed it
in the burning fever that beset me day and night. Now and then, with
permission from Herr Wolf or the doctor, some friend would look in,
stay a minute or two, say a few words, and then withdraw. All were
shocked at my appearance.
I took practically no food—my diet was tea, morphine, liquor.
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Mixed with so much alcohol, the tea began to disgust me before very
long—my brain was already dull enough. The doctors insisted that I
continue it, however.
My high fever took a sudden drop on the fourth day. Then, however,
I felt exceedingly weak, and I was consumed by a wolfish hunger. But I
was not allowed any food. When in the morning and in the evening of
the fifth day I was allowed a zwieback with my tea it was thought to be
a great concession.
Finally the day came when I could go out in front of the tent for the
first time and sit in the sun. Many people came by, stopped for a moment,
and expressed their sympathy. Again my ghastly appearance seemed to
shock them.
After a brief period of relapse I became definitely better and my
allowance of food was increased, first cocoa with zwieback, then wine
with an egg.
It has always been a blessed experience with me after an illness
to feel that I was recovering. Now again my whole being seemed to
become conscious of the strength, the life, the muscular control that
was streaming back into my body. When I was able to walk a little, and
was no longer bound to the stench zone, my happiness mounted. I took
deep breaths of the beautiful free air, eagerly inhaled the fragrance of
woods and fields, gazed voluptuously at the hills and the sky. I felt that
I was alive.
A day or so after, I received an unexpected summons to go and see the
commandant. That was a rare occurrence in the camp; the commandant
seldom saw anyone who had not asked for an interview. I set out tense
with curiosity. As I was waiting outside the office in the stone-paved yard
I asked the interpreter what it was all about. All that he could say was
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that a telephone call in my regard had come from Staff Headquarters.
Hope rose high in me. Perhaps the efforts my friends had been making
were bringing results after all. Perhaps I would be sent back to my
Sanary provided with a genuine discharge certificate, perhaps across the
borders, perhaps overseas.
“You sent for me, Captain?” I said.
“Yes,” he answered. “I wanted to make sure you were about. Take
my advice, don’t leave the camp.”
I stood there disheartened. What did he mean? What was it all about?
I tried to frame a question so that his answer would give me some hint as
to what was really wanted of me.
“C’est ça. That’s all. Thank you,” he said before I could put my
question. I had no choice but to withdraw.
The beautiful day had turned grey for me. What could lie behind the
strange admonition? Had the dreaded list come in? Were the Germans
demanding my surrender? “Don’t leave the camp”—what did that
mean? The opposite of what it said? I went over our brief conversation
in my mind, studying each sentence, examining each word from all
possible angles. I could make no sense of it at all. I asked other men what
they thought. They too could make nothing of it. I walked about in the
greatest depression.
The following day I was taking a walk in one of the fields near the
camp when I heard my name called. I hurried in the direction of the voice
and as I drew near the voice called again: “Come, your wife is here.”
I broke into a run, reached the first tents, then my own. There she
was sitting on the bench under the trees with Herr Wolf, Herr Cohn, and
others gathered around her. She saw me coming and leapt to her feet.
We had not seen each other for two months. For two months we had had
only vague reports of each other. Now we were walking toward each
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other, alive and well. She stood still, her lips quivering slightly. My wife,
Marta, is a good-looking woman of the athletic type. She was wearing a
coarse skirt and a coarse blouse, and her hair had turned strikingly grey.
My heart went out to her.
We were completely happy all that day, the first of our reunion. We
were not prisoners any longer, not hemmed in by a thousand prohibitions;
the menacing thought of our surrender to the Nazis faded away, the camp
lost its noise and its stench because we were together again. She was
over-exhilarated, laughed a great deal, and talked volubly and somewhat
incoherently. Much of what she said was hard to understand. She ate
avidly of such things as our traders had to offer. During her internment
and on the fatiguing journey to San Nicola she had virtually starved. She
was terribly hungry and had grown very thin.
Marta’s arrival explained what had been at the bottom of my
mysterious summons to the camp commandant’s. She had not been able
to find out definitely where I was. On a chance she had come to Nîmes
and called on the military authorities in quest of information about me.
A well-intentioned officer had got in touch with the commandant at our
camp. My call to his office had been a friendly gesture on his part; he
simply wanted to make sure that I would be on hand in view of my wife’s
expected arrival.
Marta did not complain much. She thought that as a result of her fine
physical training the stay in camp had not told on her heavily. But her
looks and her nervous incoherence did not bear out that optimism, nor
did the inordinate hunger with which she threw herself upon any food
that was set before her. All her life she had been noticeably moderate in
eating; and my heart was therefore wrung with a double pity as I saw
how her eyes remained fixed upon the food in unconscious greed as she
talked. She had proudly brought fruit and chocolate along with her and
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was almost crestfallen when she saw that they made no great contribution
to our menu. Things that she had procured in Nîmes with the greatest
difficulty, we were obtaining in abundance at the camp.
Marta, as I said, made no great complaint of what she had had to
go through, but the factual details that she recounted of the women’s
camp at Gurs sufficed to grip one ’s heart. Women were taken there in
the last stages of pregnancy and children were brought into the world
in the camp. Water was as scarce at Gurs as in most of the French
internment camps, and when a child was born there many women went
without their coffee for breakfast that their water rations might go to
the young mothers.
Hygienic arrangements seem to have been no better than ours. The
ground of Gurs, moreover, was mostly clay so that when it rained—
and rains are frequent in the Pyrenees—the camp became one unbroken
swamp. Women prisoners would often get stuck in the mud on the way
to the latrines and would lose their shoes as they were pulled out.
The number of women internees at that particular camp varied, but
ran around ten thousand. The French indiscriminately interned any
women who had at any time had anything to do with Central Europe.
(The department of Nîmes was a solitary and a notable exception.)
My secretary was interned though she was of Swiss citizenship, and
her sister, though a British subject. Even French mothers of French
soldiers were interned if they had been born in Germany or were wives
of Germans resident in France. It became clearer and clearer as time
went on that no serious military consideration, even at the beginning,
had dictated the internment policy. That policy was motivated solely by
the hatred of Hitler’s French sympathizers for the German anti-Fascists.
How shamelessly far the French Fascists ventured to go I could myself
see some weeks later from an editorial in an evening paper of Marseille,
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Le Soleil. Under the harmless title “Postal Difficulties between Occupied
and Unoccupied Zones,” the article urged that the Nazis also take over
the parts of France that were so far unoccupied.
Marta and I were able to see each other for several hours at a time
during the four days she could be with me. Not once during that period
did either she or I denounce the French authorities or the criminal folly
of the edicts that had placed us in that situation. Both of us had long
since learned to take the stupidity and indolence of men for granted and
as things of which it was superfluous to speak.
Marta put her stay in Nîmes to good use by trying to help me. She
constantly importuned the civil and military officials then in power to
release me. She found them courteous and sympathetic. The effects of
my recent illness were still visible. Marta was greatly shocked by my
appearance and managed to transmit her anxiety to those gentlemen.
One of them, an army officer, had an idea. He did not see how I could
be released from camp from one day to the next without setting an
unwelcome precedent. I could be transferred to a hospital and there,
without attracting much notice, I could be granted indefinite leave of
absence to convalesce at my own expense.
One day, accordingly, I was called before the camp physician, a
new man.
“How do you feel?” he asked.
I had listened to Marta’s account of the officer’s plan with not more
than half an ear, having long since lost all credence in the comforting
words of French officials. The whole project had slipped from my mind
and I had not the faintest idea of what the doctor was driving at in
sending for me. I thought he had heard some criticism because of my
bad condition and was thinking of putting me into our ghastly infirmary.
I therefore replied: “Pretty well, thank you. Not at all bad.”
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The doctor told me to open my clothes, palpated my abdomen in a
number of places, and asked: “Any pain?”
“No,” I answered eagerly.
“So, then,” he growled, “everything is all right. Put your clothes in
order again. Thanks.”
And with that I left his office. Neither he nor I had divined the shrewd
manoeuvre of the Staff, and the ruse of the ingenious officer to get me
out of camp came to nothing.
The camp authorities had been allowing us to go bathing in the
stream nearby, and during those hot days several hundred of us went
down there every afternoon. It was a full hour’s distance on foot. A
sergeant and a couple of soldiers were sent along with us. They paid no
attention to us, but went about their own business.
The river—the Gard or the Gardon, I forget which—wound in just
that region through a deep ravine that was most varied in character. At
one point there would be a strong current, then places where the flow was
so imperceptible that one felt one was swimming in a pool. Here the banks
would be high rocky cliffs, there gentle slopes covered with grass, farther
along wooded. The water, green and clear, would at some points reach
depths of fifteen or twenty feet; at other points it would be very shallow.
Anyone who saw those two or three hundred men, men of every age,
sporting naked in the water and sunlight, laughing, talking, chasing one
another about, swimming, diving, displaying their skills, would scarcely
have thought that he was looking upon prisoners, many of whom were
in mortal danger and hardly any of whom knew what the future had in
store for them.
For Karl especially those bathing expeditions were great events. He
was an accomplished swimmer and diver and his passion for the sport
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was as great as his skill. Throw a coin into the water and he would come
back with it every time, from no matter what depth. I enjoyed the hours
at the river too. To be sure, the long walk back was often arduous for me.
But on the other hand I was glad when I could tire myself out: I slept
better at night.
Anarchy reigned in the land. No one knew for certain who had the
right to command. When they were not at once replaced by others, the
prefects expected to be dismissed before very long and hesitated to take
any drastic measures. Only the vaguest instructions emanated from
the central government, so called, and that government itself, being
Fascist, was hated by the majority of the population and of the officials.
The main responsibility for the defeat of France was laid at its door
and it was thought to be intriguing with the Nazis. Enemies of the new
government had desks in every office and were sabotaging its decrees
while new appointees were prevented from getting the run of things.
Continuity in the conduct of official business was ensured by the fact
that the new men were as poorly paid as the old and therefore accepted
bribes just as readily.
The newspapers published strict admonitions to soldiers that they
should not demobilize themselves, and they were told that a man without
his discharge papers would find it hard to get work. Many soldiers simply
packed up and went home for all that, and those who stayed with their
regiments did exactly as they pleased. So it was with the guards at our
camp. A detachment of gendarmes from the Mobile Guard, the most
reliable troops the country had left, were sent to reinforce them. But
when the new arrivals saw that no beds had been provided for them at
San Nicola and that they were exposed to the dysentery infection, they
too deserted without more ado.
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Our officers were at no pains to conceal a feeling that the task of watching
us was a burdensome duty hardly less humiliating to them than to us. They
thought of themselves as plain citizens and of their uniforms as mere
window-dressing. One of them was a banker. He went around from tent to
tent, trying to locate American dollars. He offered my Karl a commission if
he would bring him people who had American currency to sell.
The barbed wire was still there of course, with sentries patrolling just
inside it, but no one paid any attention. Our wives and children were now
coming to the tents to see us. The days when they had to keep at a distance
from the camp, anxiously hunting for places where they would not be
caught by the gendarmes and guards, were long past. Now they walked
boldly into the camp and stayed there all day long, sometimes all night long.
In that situation it would have been easy to leave the camp and take
up residence somewhere in unoccupied France under much pleasanter
conditions. But we had to think further ahead than that: our problem
was to get out of the land, out of France. For the whole land of France
had become one great prison, and its jailers were our fiercest enemies,
the Nazis. The current prerequisite to an attempt to escape from France
was the possession of papers in proper form. If it was inadvisable for
soldiers to quit their regiments without discharge certificates, it was still
more inadvisable for us to quit our camp illegally. A man whose situation
was not “entirely regular” might manage to live comfortably for some
days or even some weeks, but he would thereby be ruining his chances
of ever leaving hostile Europe behind him. Without papers it was simply
impossible to move from a hostile France across a hostile Spain and a not
exactly sympathetic Portugal and thence reach an overseas country that
was itself fussily bureaucratic.
So once more we began pestering the authorities to set us free at long,
long last. We sent telegram after telegram to anybody who, we thought,
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might help us, especially to all the great American relief agencies.
Whenever we heard that a Red Cross Commission or a delegation of
Unitarians or of Quakers had arrived in France, our hearts would leap
up and we would try in no end of ways to get in touch with them.
There had been an internment camp for Italians not far from San
Nicola, so close at hand indeed that many of the men there had been in
the habit of visiting us—they liked our concert evenings especially. This
camp was now discontinued and the occupants set free with properly
drawn certificates. That increased the unrest among us. When, oh, when,
would they let us go?
French officials tried to comfort us—it would be a matter of days,
at the most of a few weeks. A rumour began to circulate that the
government had decided to order a first release of permanent residents
in France who were in a position to be self-supporting. We had another
attack of list-making and we began writing and telegraphing in order
to marshal proofs that we had money or regular sources of income and
permanent homes in France.
Cases were now becoming frequent where one or another of our
number, usually manufacturers or businessmen, were being given leaves
of absence for three or four days to attend to their private affairs. On
one occasion one of these men came back to camp filled with happy
excitement. He had had a talk with a government minister, and the
minister had assured him that we would all be free in two weeks. We
believed the story, yet did not believe it, and the man who had had the
conversation with the high official began placing bets. There was a full
moon, and the man wagered five to one that by the next full moon we
would no longer be in the camp—and ten to one that we would no longer
be there for the following full moon. He lost money on both bets.
One afternoon a rumour started that a final and conclusive order had
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at last come from the government at Vichy. Within the ensuing fortnight
every last man among us would be free. The Foreign Legionnaires were
to go the following day. The report emanated from the camp office and
bore all the marks of genuineness.
The Legionnaires believed it. They packed up and in the evening
gave a big party in celebration of the eve of their farewell. They drank
themselves delirious, made more noise than ever, and sang their songs,
which were a mixture of French obscenity and French patriotism. The
Saarlanders thought that they were going to be released immediately
after the Legionnaires, so they had their party too. They had made up
a song in camp and composed the music for it, a sort of anthem full of
sentimentality, love of the homeland, and smut. The Legionnaires and
the Saarlanders tried to outdo each other in the fervour and volume of
their singing. Then they passed to brawling and fisticuffs—it turned into
a wild night.
Whether Legionnaire or Saarlander, nobody was released.
If a man did not mind a long walk he could find a little country
restaurant in the best French tradition near a charming swimming pool
some seven miles distant. By sending notice a day in advance you could
be sure of getting a delicious, carefully prepared meal.
Herr Wolf and I decided to take one more excursion thither toward
the end of July. A brother and a nephew of his, the writer R. and another
of our friends, agreed to come with us. We had planned to start about
nine in the morning, take our time on the beautiful two-hour walk, have
a swim in the river, lunch at the excellent inn, then take a nap somewhere
in the meadow behind it, and come back at our convenience.
It was a hot day and the road to the inn was mostly uphill and steep.
In order to be as comfortable as possible I put on nothing but a thin,
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short-sleeved shirt, somewhat the worse for wear, an old pair of light-
coloured trousers, and a pair of sandals with thick rubber soles. The
trousers really had too many holes to be serviceable, but a tailor in the
tent adjoining hastily patched them up.
We set out, first making the top of a long hill and following the crest
high above the river. Then we took a stony path that traversed a wild
stand of scrub oak, went down into a pretty valley, then climbed up
again to a second hilltop, whence, within view of a high bridge, sharp-
cut against the sky, and a beautiful convent, we clambered down a steep
pitch straight to the river-bank.
We had a swim, lay about a bit on the grass, and then walked straight
on to our restaurant. The host, attentive, solicitous, laid before us
the menu that he had planned in advance. It met with our approval: a
rich assortment of hors d’oeuvre, an excellent fish course with a light
Alsatian wine, guinea-hen, potatoes and a lettuce salad, and a very decent
Burgundy, then a dessert with a heavy Algerian wine, finally fruits,
assorted cheeses, and coffee topped off with an old cognac. At table
we talked politics, literature, and French cuisine. Our host expressed
a number of political opinions considerably keener than the views the
average professional politician in France had been delivering during all
that period. The cognac, he insisted, should be on the house.
After the meal we felt full and somewhat tired, so we went on into
the meadow behind the tavern, as we had planned, and stretched out on
the ground. It proved to be a fairly hard bed, but the expanse of green
was beautiful and there was no stench. We lay in a bit of shade that was
flecked with sunlight.
I did not get a good nap. For the first time in a long while I had eaten
beyond the craving of hunger and had consumed a good deal of wine.
It gave me a headache and I soon woke up. I stared up at the sky from
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where I lay. It looked hazy and hot through the thin foliage overhead.
Then I looked around at the other men. They were still asleep. My eye
lingered long and closely upon the writer R. What a head, a heavy head,
with a purplish, intelligent, muse-inspired face, somewhat puffy perhaps
from drinking. It was the last time I was to see that face.
Herr Wolf awoke shortly after I did. He motioned to me and we rose
quietly in order not to disturb the others. Herr Wolf ’s nephew had not
slept at all. He joined us. He felt like exercising after our heavy meal. We
went into the tavern, had another round of coffee, and set out on the way
home, leaving word with our host for the others.
We decided to take the country road. It was longer, but not so
hilly and made easier going. There was little motor traffic left by now
and hardly any dust, and the road lay partly in the shade. We walked
slowly. For a time I chatted with Herr Wolf, then we both fell silent. My
headache was worse, I was tired. The way still to go seemed endless. I
longed to be back “at home” at the camp and stretch out on my straw.
How far away were we? Just ahead the path to the swimming hole near
the camp branched off. That meant that we had gone almost two-thirds
of the whole distance.
There, perhaps fifty yards on my side of the turn to the swimming
hole, I suddenly saw Madame L. She had evidently been waiting to
intercept me.
“They told me that you had gone bathing,” she began hurriedly. “I
have been waiting for you here. I have news for you from your wife.”
She handed me a letter. I stood looking at her completely dumbfounded.
I did not know what to make of her sudden appearance.
“Thank you,” I said, taking the letter.
“But read it,” she urged. “Read it at once.”
I tore the envelope open. “Do exactly as you are told,” Marta had
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written to me in French. “Do not stop to consider. It is all straightforward
and perfectly trustworthy.” I read the note a second time, and then looked
questioningly at Madame L.
She pointed in the direction of a nice car that was standing not far
away on the roadside. Someone was getting out of the car, a young man,
in fact I knew him well. It was astonishing to see him on that road, at that
hour of the day! He was smartly dressed, and I remember every detail of
his white summer suit, his knitted gloves.
“Don’t stop to ask questions,” he said to me, speaking in English.
“Just get in. Don’t delay. I will explain everything on the way.”
I looked at him. Then I looked down at myself, my ragged short-
sleeved shirt, my patched trousers, my sandals with thick rubber soles.
“Get in, please,” he repeated, urgent. “There is a coat in the car.”
Herr Wolf stood off to one side, waiting. One could see from the
expression on his clever, good-natured face how hard he was trying to
guess the meaning of all those strange proceedings. I shook his hand for
one last time.
“Good-bye,” I said. “Thanks again for everything. Please give Karl a
few hundred francs and send what I have left in camp to Sanary.”
Then I got into the car, followed by Madame L. There was in fact a
coat in the car. It was a woman’s coat, of light weight, with an English
badge on the lapel. I pulled it around me. In a pocket I found a pair of
dark glasses and a coloured shawl.
“Put them on, and the shawl too,” said the smartly dressed gentleman
as the motor started.
I did so. They made me look like an aged Englishwoman. So we
drove off, at high speed, in that very good car, off out of the reach of
the Devil in France.
THE TENTS OF NÎMES | THE DEVIL IN FRANCE

261
Part Four
The Gardens of Marseille
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And they heard the voice of the Lord God walking in the garden in the cool
of the day.
I have written the fourth part of this book, but I cannot publish it as
yet.* Some people who would have to be mentioned in its pages are in
the midst of events still in progress, and the outcome of those events
might be unfavourably affected if what they did in my case were to
become known.
I am sorry I cannot publish the ending to my book. I have so far had
to talk of many quailings, of much that was cowardly, weak, or petty. My
last part would have far more to tell of courage, kindness, and readiness
for self-sacrifice.
To five men I am particularly indebted. Had it not been for them, I
could scarcely have surmounted the hardships and dangers that I had to
face in the vile hell into which our lovely France has been transformed.
Of the five, I can mention the names of only two: B. W . Huebsch and
Waitstill Hastings Sharp.
I stand on the threshold of old age. My rages are losing their fury,
my ill humour its teeth, my enthusiasm its buoyancy. I have met God in
many forms, but the Devil also in quite as many. My delight in God has
not lessened, but my fear of the Devil has. I have had to learn that the
stupidity and the wickedness of men are as wild and as deep as the Seven
Seas. But it has also been vouchsafed me to discover that the dike, which
the minority of the good and the wise are erecting to contain them, is
rising higher and stronger with every passing day.
*In an August 20, 1981, letter to Aufbau Verlag, Marta Feuchtwanger informed the editors at the
publishing house that her husband had never written the fourth section of his memoir. “Lion
Feuchtwanger intended to write the conclusion of The Devil in France after those left behind in
Europe were safe from danger,” she wrote. “However, this danger remained longer than expected,
and in the meantime L.F. had long since become occupied with other projects.” [Note appears
courtesy of Aufbau Verlag.]
THE GARDENS OF MARSEILLE | THE DEVIL IN FRANCE

265
THE ESCAPE
Marta Feuchtwanger
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MARTA FEUCHTWANGER
I write this postscript only reluctantly, from a sense of duty that has
complex underlying causes.
Readers who have reached this point in the documentary account
deserve to find out how the episode—which represents a small fragment
of the period’s history—turns out. So I will resume the tale at the place
where, for various significant reasons, Lion Feuchtwanger had to stop.
Large numbers of hunted refugees were still on the hostile soil of Vichy
France, which was teeming with Nazi henchmen. Later, I was also at risk
of abduction while waiting in the port of Lisbon. I would not have been
the only one to suffer that fate.
Partly sabotaged by consular officials hostile to the exiles, American
aid organizations were trying to liberate as many as possible of those
bound for the safety of America’s shores from the grasp of the Third
Reich’s impending forces. In the boulevard cafés, there were already
rumors of abductions of the parliamentarians Severing and Breitscheid,
and of the chief editor of the Berliner Tageblatt Theodor Wolff.* For a
time we felt safe (we were on American soil at the consulate, after all), in
ignorance of the fact that the private villa of the consul Hiram Bingham
was actually not part of the consulate itself. I was aware that his Swiss
housekeeper, who was loyal to the family, was the sister of a Nazi, as
the Czech maid had warned me of this. I tried to buy the housekeeper’s
goodwill with gifts. Perhaps more importantly, I stepped in for her in the
kitchen on numerous evenings, allowing her to pay regular visits to her
brother, a hotel chef. Bizarre situations of this kind were not uncommon,
and I will try to recount all of these memories. Often I had to go into
town to obtain entrance or transit visas at the various consulates. I
always took the tram, which was a rattling old relic but allowed me to
remain inconspicuous. On one occasion the only space available was
on the small platform on the outside of the tram. I was perched there
*They died miserable deaths in the Nazi camps.
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when someone tapped on my shoulder. My heart stopped; I thought I
was being arrested, but it was only the conductor asking for the fare. On
the steps of the consulate—if you were lucky, there was still somewhere
to sit down—you were liable to meet acquaintances and friends who
had turned up in Marseille from all over France. Among them was the
well-known Heidelberg mathematician Emil Gumbel, who as a pacifist
after World War I had coined the phrase “died on the field of dishonor.”
In return for this he was beaten up by students and dismissed from his
academic post. Leo Lania also showed up, along with Leonhard Frank.
Walter Mehring was arrested on the street in Marseille, dragged in chains
from one camp to the next along with common criminals until, exhausted
and sick, he was released thanks to Lion and Bingham’s intervention.
Mehring’s clever girlfriend Hertha Pauli then took responsibility for
getting him out of France. The long waits in the heat and dust were
interminable but forgotten once you had the life-saving documents in
your hands.
Lion, whom Bingham only permitted outside the house to take a
few steps after sunset, was engrossed in the third novel of his Josephus
trilogy, oblivious to the present and the world around him. Or if he
was aware, he refused to let it show. Only Bingham was disheartened,
often in despair over his own powerlessness. The State Department
had forbidden him from providing the necessary visas to the swarms of
people who besieged the consulate.
I remembered encountering long lines of people in the hot sun after
my flight from the Gurs internment camp. The young, the old, and the
very old told me that it was like this every day, and at five in the afternoon
everyone would be sent home. I then did something which weighs on my
mind to this day. I walked along the endless lines of people, who merely
stared at me in silence, until I reached the consulate door. I handed over
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a note with my name on it and was soon let in. One of the consuls, who
had visited us once in Sanary, did not recognize me, as I was so scruffy
and emaciated. And then something remarkable happened. During
internment I had kept my composure no matter what happened, as I had
to keep everyone else’s spirits up. But now that I was in safety for the first
time, I thought of Lion and burst into tears.
Americans can’t stand the sight of a woman crying. Something must
be done, they said. And so Miles Standish, the younger of the two consuls,
paid a visit to the mafia in the notorious harbor district and made inquiries.
“Sure,” he was told. “Y ou want us to kill your mother-in-law….W e do
anything for money,” but they didn’t want to deal with the Nazis.
Standish said, “If no one else will, I’ll have to do it myself.” He
explained he was planning to abduct Lion. He asked me for details
about the San Nicola camp near Nîmes. I had been there myself, having
managed to sneak into Lion’s part of the camp with the help of a Russian
taxi driver, who had brought me along in the guise of a black marketeer.
The first person I had encountered there was the painter Max Ernst, thin
as a skeleton, who took me to Lion.
I told Vice-Consul Standish it would be best to approach the camp
in the afternoon. Some of the inmates were allowed to leave the camp
and bathe in the river, where they were only lightly guarded. Who
would dare escape in only their trousers? I also gave Standish a piece
of paper to hold in the palm of his hand. I had written on it: “Don’t ask
any questions. Don’t say anything. Just go with him.” I didn’t sign it,
since I knew Lion would recognize my handwriting. And so it happened.
Standish left the car parked behind bushes. He gave Lion a long coat and
headscarf. When the car was stopped and Standish, with his American
diplomatic pass, was asked who was sitting in the back, he replied, “This
is my mother-in-law.”
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THE ESCAPE
Lion stepped out of the car in Marseille, still in disguise, and found
me waiting for him in front of the consul’s house. Standish himself
disappeared, and we never saw him again. After our safe arrival in
America, we were determined to thank him, but no one knew his
address. All I could ascertain was that he had left the consulate. Were
his actions too bold or not in accordance with the regulations? Hardly
a day passes without my thinking about him with profound gratitude.
(What happens to our thoughts about others? Can they tell when we are
thinking about them?)
Soon visitors arrived, unusual visitors sent by aid organizations,
the Quakers, and Mrs. Roosevelt. When I broke down in tears at the
consulate, Bingham said he already knew about Lion’s case, and that
both the consulate and the embassy were now under instructions to
locate him and do their utmost to get him out. We later discovered what
had been the first stone in the avalanche that led to the rescue of Hitler’s
personal enemy and the author of Success.
Without Lion’s knowledge, someone had taken a photo of him behind
the barbed wire at the Les Milles camp. This unknown person had sent
the photo to Ben Huebsch, Lion’s publisher at the Viking Press in New
York. Huebsch, deeply shocked, had immediately driven to Washington
to contact Mrs. Roosevelt. She showed the picture to the President, and
the machinery of his rescue was set in motion. First a trade unionist
appeared, a Dr. Frank Bohn. He had been informed by Mrs. Roosevelt
that Lion was in jeopardy in France. Bohn, an energetic Irishman with
a rich sense of humor, managed to find out that we were hiding out at
consul Bingham’s residence. Bohn was confident, saying, “I’ll get them
out whatever it takes.” He rented an Italian boat, moored in a harbor
some distance away, in which we were supposed to sail to Africa.
Lion then had an extraordinary conversation with Bingham. He
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MARTA FEUCHTWANGER
said, “We need to fetch Thomas Mann’s brother Heinrich from Nice.
One of Thomas Mann’s sons, Golo, is there as well, and he too needs
to be rescued.” Bingham replied: “I don’t think a group as large as that
was foreseen. We’ll probably have to make a decision about which one
we can take. Do you think we should take the younger one, Golo, or
Heinrich? He’s the more important of the two; on the other hand he has
already lived his life….”
Lion said, “I can’t compromise. We need to rescue them both.”
Bingham was persuaded. Golo arrived, and he too took refuge at
Bingham’s residence.
At that stage we were unaware that the Werfels were also in Marseille.
It was decided we should walk the 30 kilometers to the harbor where
the boat was anchored. Heinrich Mann said to Lion, “Since you’re
advising me to come, I’ll do so.” Heinrich Mann was already quite old by
then and not in good health.
Suddenly Dr. Bohn appeared and said, “All is lost.” The boat had
been seized by the Italians, who had spotted provisions being loaded
onto it. We were quite lucky that we were not on board.
Then Varian Fry—a Quaker and a professor at Columbia
University—turned up. He was working with the Red Cross, and was
also under instructions to rescue us. He knew all about Lion and said
that, come what may, he could bring Lion and me and Golo and Heinrich
Mann and the Werfels to America. Having already rescued the Nobel
Prize winner Otto Meyerhof and ensured that he reached America, Fry
was well prepared. We would have to drive to Cerbère on the Spanish
border and then pass through a tunnel beneath the Pyrenees into Spain.
The next time Fry appeared he was in a state of agitation. He said,
“The regulations have been tightened very suddenly. You can only
take the tunnel if you have an exit permit.” The only option was to
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THE ESCAPE
cross the Pyrenees on foot. Everyone else was in a stronger position
than we: Werfel was Czech, Heinrich Mann had Czech papers, and so
did Golo Mann.
Varian Fry drew Lion aside to tell him that everything was in order,
but that he, Lion, would endanger the others. The entire rescue mission
might be in jeopardy because of us. Lion understood this very well.
In the first edition of his book Surrender on Demand, Fry wrote:
“Feuchtwanger sat immobile at his table as we told him what had
happened. Feuchtwanger took the news very well. He had waited for
weeks for the boat to take him to safety, and now his hopes of rescue
were gone. All through dinner he talked and joked as if nothing more
serious had happened than the last-minute postponement of a long-
planned vacation.”
Lion said nothing to me. He sat down at his desk in our attic room
and continued writing the last part of the Josephus trilogy. He was asleep
when I got up in the middle of the night to wake Golo and bring him his
breakfast. But Golo was groggy and unaware of anything around him. I
made myself scarce without saying goodbye.
At this point, the avalanche gained momentum. To be able to leave
France, you needed an entrance visa to the U.S. The name Feuchtwanger
was too dangerous, so Bingham came up with an idea. He asked Lion
whether he had ever written under a pseudonym. Lion told a story:
inspired by Sinclair Lewis’s Babbitt, he had once published satirical
ballads about America in the Berliner Tageblatt under the pseudonym
J.L. Wetcheek, the quasi-literal English translation of his name.
The American consulate then proceeded to issue papers bearing the
unremarkable name Wetcheek. Bingham made various preparations. But
how would we actually make our escape?
Finally there was a breakthrough. A Mr. Sharp arrived from
272
MARTA FEUCHTWANGER
America. Dr. Fritchman, a Unitarian minister in Los Angeles with ties
to Mrs. Roosevelt, had been asked by her to do everything humanly
possible to intercede on Lion’s behalf. Fritchman had arranged for
Waitstill Sharp, a minister of the Unitarian church in Boston, to travel
to Marseille immediately. Here was Sharp, standing in the garden,
seemingly brimming with confidence, telling Lion, “I’ve been sent for
you.” His wife, who had recently arrived from Czechoslovakia where
she had rescued hundreds of Jewish children, was also in Marseille.
First of all, how would we get to the station? Marseille was full of
manned roadblocks, and to travel you needed a pass. Mrs. Sharp had
cleverly circumvented this problem. She found out that the city’s station
hotel was built right into the train station. She rented a room for herself
and noticed by coincidence that inside the hotel, guests’ luggage travelled
along a narrow underground passageway to be loaded onto trains via
the platform. The passengers meanwhile had to negotiate a manned
roadblock outside the hotel.
During the night we made our way to the hotel, up to Mrs. Sharp’s
room, thence down into the cellar, and through the tunnel to the platform.
Once on board the train, we felt a major obstacle fall away behind us.
We reached Narbonne, where we changed trains and caught a glimpse
of the beautiful old town. Sharp was somewhat nervous but he remained
brave. We continued to Cerbère at the foot of the Pyrenees; beyond the
mountains lay Spain. Sharp made various enquiries and came back in
dismay, having confirmed that, as anticipated, without an exit permit we
could not take the train and would have to go on foot.
Sharp at first thought he could bribe the border guards to let us take
the road, as some of them were allegedly receptive to the idea and willing
to help emigrants. But not all of the guards appeared trustworthy, and
they were constantly being changed. There was too much uncertainty.
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THE ESCAPE
Sharp then reappeared with a young American named Ball, who had
also been instructed by Varian Fry to help us. Ball showed me the route
on the map but dared not come himself. Go as far and high as you can
and avoid the roads, he advised. We were both good climbers, and as
a skier I was accustomed to difficult terrain. I committed everything to
memory, as we did not wish to be caught in possession of a map.
Initially we made our way through vineyards, but thereafter we
found only rocky terrain. The main objective was to find the customs
house or be summarily shot as smugglers. After a lengthy climb we
heard voices below, and there we saw the customs house. We could not
go in together because, although Lion had his American immigrant
visa with the pseudonym Wetcheek, I had no visa or papers under an
assumed name.
Lion went on ahead; I hid and watched him enter. He soon re-
emerged and marched briskly down the mountain.
It was my turn. Once again, Bingham proved his worth. As he stuffed
my rucksack and pockets full of cigarette packs, he had said you could get
a lot done in Spain with Camel cigarettes. I went into the customs house
and told the officers I wanted to bring the cigarettes but had heard there
was an expensive duty on them, so perhaps I should simply abandon
them. I tossed handfuls of packs onto the table. They all pounced, and
one of them hastily stamped my papers without even a glance at my
name or me. I have never run down a mountain so fast in my life.
We had agreed with Sharp to meet at the Cook travel office in
Portbou. It was on the first floor of an unassuming building and was a
well-known meeting point. Lion was not there when I arrived—only
Sharp. I was shocked. Hunting through the town’s restaurants, of which
there many, all full of people, I finally found myself in the best one, and
there was Lion, munching away with a satisfied look on his face. “Sit
274
MARTA FEUCHTWANGER
down and have something,” he said. He had completely forgotten about
our arranged meeting place.
The next morning we headed on to Barcelona, where further
difficulties awaited. We needed to get to Lisbon but could not go by air,
since it was a German Lufthansa plane. Moreover, it was Sunday and we
needed money, which we could only get at the American consulate—
which was closed. The energetic Reverend Sharp came to our aid once
again, tracking down the consul at his private residence and rustling up
enough money to allow us to take the train.
Before we left, Sharp had one request. He wanted us to accompany
him to the Protestant parish outside the city, home to a small university.
Protestants had been persecuted mercilessly in Franco’s Catholic Spain,
their schools shut down and the teachers imprisoned. According to
Sharp, it would be tremendously supportive to the church if Lion were
to visit. And perhaps he could be persuaded to do something for them in
America. So we visited the Protestants, which proved a successful day
for all concerned.
Sharp had determined that it was only possible to travel safely in
the sleeping cars, which the police would not monitor closely. Since
our funds only stretched to two tickets, I travelled third class, allowing
Sharp to keep a close eye on Lion. Sharp gave Lion his briefcase bearing
a highly visible Red Cross insignia, urging him to keep it with him at
all times on the train. And this proved to be a good thing. When Lion
adjourned to the sleeping car’s bathroom, the door opposite promptly
opened to reveal a Nazi officer in full uniform. The officer greeted Lion
in traditional military manner and said in English, “Ah, the Red Cross.”
Lion concurred. The Nazi officer’s English was tinged with Prussian,
Lion’s with Bavarian.
Third class was completely full and I had to stand. Still suffering
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THE ESCAPE
from my spell in the internment camp, my legs were apt to swell
whenever I stood for long periods. As I stood there in discomfort, I was
greeted by an elderly man. “What’s going on with this young lady? She
needs a seat,” he said and moved off up the train to look for one. On his
return, he said in French, “Listen, I’ve found you a seat, come.” I was
reluctant, as I did not want to attract attention, but I accompanied him
to an empty compartment nonetheless. Within moments of our sitting
down the police appeared, snarling, “This is our compartment. You need
to get out.” The elderly man burst into a torrent of German profanity,
which made the two policemen very pale. The sound of the German
language, the language of the Nazis, scared them away. The old man
was actually Swiss and a speaker of both French and German. He was
also very cunning. I was now able to lie down and stretch out tolerably
on the wooden seats.
At the Portuguese border everyone had to alight. We changed trains
and were told to produce our papers. Lion and I stood at opposite ends
of the platform, pretending not to know one other. My papers were the
risky ones, bearing the name Feuchtwanger.
I was standing on my own on the platform in this way when a
woman approached me. She asked in loud English, “Is it true that Lion
Feuchtwanger is on board?” “Who’s that?” I replied. “That’s pretty
philistine, not to know who Lion Feuchtwanger is,” she answered. From
some way off, Sharp had seen that something was amiss. He advanced.
“What do you want from her?” he rasped. “I’m a journalist and hoping
for a scoop,” she said. “I’d heard Feuchtwanger was on board and
wanted to let my newspaper know.” Sharp told her in no uncertain terms
to shut up. Didn’t she realize idle chatter put people at risk? he asked.
She became embarrassed, murmuring, “All I wanted was a scoop.” All at
once, everything went back to normal. The train arrived, and our papers
276
MARTA FEUCHTWANGER
were returned to us. Nothing could ever be easy or straightforward.
At Lisbon, Sharp took us straight to the American aid point for
refugees. A friendly gentleman named Joy told us Lion could not stay
in Lisbon and must board a ship as soon as possible. The city was full of
Nazi spies, the so-called Fifth Column, he warned, and there had been
numerous abductions already. The Portuguese government refused to
take sides, cared little, and would not intervene in abductions, he said.
At the offices of the shipping company we learned there were no
available berths for a fortnight. I do not know how Sharp managed it; at
any rate, suddenly there were two tickets, and Lion was able to depart
with Sharp, who had to return quickly.
I accompanied Lion and Sharp to the steamer to watch them board.
Yellow, sulfurous dust lay everywhere, dotted with depressing pools of
dirty seawater. A few ragged-looking figures could be seen here or there,
but not many. Far too few, in fact.
That was the end of Europe. Lion was on board, alone, without me.
It was hard for him, but I felt everything was fine. He was safe.
Two eventful weeks later, I too departed the inhospitable continent,
secure in the knowledge that Lion was expecting me in the harbor of
New York.
THE ESCAPE

279
TIMELINE
Michaela Ullmann
280
MICHAELA ULLMANN
JANUARY 30, 1933
Adolf Hitler is appointed chancellor of Germany. At the time, Lion
Feuchtwanger is on a reading tour in the United States. The German
ambassador in Washington warns him not to return to Germany. Later
that year, Nazi propaganda minister Joseph Goebbels calls Feuchtwanger
“Enemy Number One of the German people” in a radio speech.
MARCH 1933
Following the ambassador’s advice, Lion meets his wife Marta in Austria,
where she had been vacationing. Together, they move to southern
France. They soon learn that their house in Berlin has been plundered,
and their library and possessions have been confiscated.
MAY 10, 1933
Led by the Nazi-affiliated German Student Association, university
students burn more than 25,000 “un-German” books—including the
works of Feuchtwanger—during the following weeks.
AUGUST 23, 1933
Lion Feuchtwanger’s German citizenship is revoked for “disloyalty to
the German Reich and the German people.”
1934
The Feuchtwangers purchase Villa Valmer in Sanary-sur-Mer, France,
where they join a growing community of German-speaking émigrés.
281
TIMELINE
MARCH 12, 1938
Austria is annexed to the German Reich.
SEPTEMBER 1939
Lion Feuchtwanger is interned for the first time in the camp at Les Milles
near Aix-en-Provence. He is released after 10 days.
1939 or 1940
Feuchtwanger’s American publisher Ben Huebsch receives a photograph
from an unknown source showing Lion Feuchtwanger behind barbed
wire during his first internment at Les Milles. Huebsch contacts Eleanor
Roosevelt, who helps to initiate plans for Feuchtwanger’s rescue.
MAY 10, 1940
Germany invades Luxembourg, Belgium, the Netherlands, and France.
MAY 15, 1940
The Dutch army surrenders to Nazi forces.
MAY 19, 1940
German troops besiege Amiens, France, while Rommel’s forces surround
Arras, and other German units reach Noyelles.
MAY 21, 1940
Feuchtwanger is interned for the second time at the camp near Les Milles.
282
MICHAELA ULLMANN
MAY 25, 1940
The French troops at Boulogne-sur-Mer surrender to German forces.
MAY 26, 1940
The troops defending Calais surrender to German forces.
MAY 28, 1940
Belgium surrenders to Germany; King Leopold III is interned.
JUNE 3, 1940
The German Luftwaffe bombs Paris.
JUNE 10, 1940
Italy declares war on France and the United Kingdom.
JUNE 11, 1940
The French government relocates to Tours.
JUNE 14, 1940
German troops occupy Paris, and the French government moves again—
this time to Bordeaux. The same day, Feuchtwanger reports the news of
Paris’ occupation in his diary.
JUNE 16, 1940
After Paul Reynaud steps down, Philippe Pétain becomes prime minister
of the French government. One day later, Feuchtwanger reports hearing
rumors of an armistice.
283
TIMELINE
JUNE 21, 1940
The Franco-German armistice negotiations begin at Compiègne.
The Italian army invades France through the Alps and along the
Mediterranean coast towards Nice.
JUNE 22, 1940
France and Germany sign an armistice agreement. Feuchtwanger and
other Les Milles internees are transported by train towards Marseille. On
June 23, the train continues from Cette in the direction of the Pyrenees.
JUNE 24, 1940
The Franco-Italian armistice is signed. Feuchtwanger and the other
internees continue from Toulouse to Bayonne.
JUNE 25, 1940
France officially surrenders to Germany at 12:35 in the morning.
Because of a false report that the Germans were just two hours away
from Bayonne, the train with the Les Milles internees turns back towards
Lourdes. The next day, it arrives in Nîmes. Feuchtwanger and his fellow
internees continue on foot to the camp at San Nicola.
JUNE 27, 1940
Feuchtwanger learns of the armistice and the news that prisoners can be
surrendered on demand to German officials.
284
MICHAELA ULLMANN
JUNE 28, 1940
General Charles de Gaulle is recognized by the British as the leader of
the Forces Françaises Libres (or Free French Forces).
JULY 1, 1940
The French government moves to Vichy, from which it administers
the “free zone” of southern France, while the German army occupies
northern France.
JULY 18, 1940
Marta Feuchtwanger visits Lion in the camp at San Nicola.
JULY 21, 1940
Nanette Lekisch hands Lion a note from Marta while he is bathing in a
river near the camp. Following its instructions, Lion steps into a waiting
car with U.S. Vice Consul Miles Standish. He arrives at the home of U.S.
Consul Hiram Bingham in Marseille and is reunited with Marta. Known
as the “Angel of Nîmes,” Lekisch provided refuge to countless German
émigrés during the Vichy period.
AUGUST 2, 1940
Charles de Gaulle is sentenced to death in absentia by a French military court.
AUGUST 11, 1940
The Feuchtwangers make plans to escape to North Africa in a smuggler’s
boat anchored in a harbor near Marseille. They are joined in Marseille by
Heinrich, Nelly , and Golo Mann, as well as Franz and Alma Mahler-W erfel.
285
TIMELINE
AUGUST 13, 1940
On Adler Tag (or Eagle Day), Luftwaffe Commander Hermann
Goering starts a two-week assault on British airfields in preparation for
the German invasion of Great Britain.
AUGUST 18, 1940
Bingham issues Feuchtwanger a U.S. entrance visa under the pseudonym
of Wetcheek.
AUGUST 29, 1940
After their boat is discovered by Italian authorities, the Feuchtwangers
abandon the plan to leave France by sea. Instead, they make plans to
cross the southern border into Spain.
SEPTEMBER 1, 1940
Germany’s Jewish population is ordered to wear yellow stars for
identification.
SEPTEMBER 11, 1940
Feuchtwanger reports that the Manns and the Werfels plan to cross the
Pyrenees with help from Varian Fry of the U.S. Emergency Rescue
Committee. The Feuchtwangers cannot join them without endangering
the others.
SEPTEMBER 14, 1940
Feuchtwanger receives a telegram confirming that his friends have made
it safely across the Spanish border.
286
MICHAELA ULLMANN
SEPTEMBER 18-19, 1940
With the help of Reverend Waitstill Sharp and his wife Martha of the
Unitarian Service Committee, the Feuchtwangers travel by train from
Marseille to Cerbère. From there, they must climb the Pyrenees to enter
Spain illegally. After arriving in the Spanish city of Portbou, they meet
up with the Sharps again. They proceed by train to Barcelona, where
they board another train to Lisbon, Portugal.
OCTOBER 1940
The German forces in Warsaw begin plans to confine the Jewish
population to the Warsaw Ghetto. In November, they wall it off from
the rest of the city and post armed guards.
OCTOBER 2, 1940
The bombing of London continues throughout the month.
OCTOBER 4, 1940
Adolf Hitler and Benito Mussolini meet at the Brenner Pass to discuss
war plans.
OCTOBER 5, 1940
Lion Feuchtwanger and Reverend Sharp arrive in New York on the
S.S. Excalibur.
OCTOBER 18, 1940
Marta Feuchtwanger arrives in New York on the S.S. Exeter.
287
TIMELINE
JANUARY 28, 1941
The Feuchtwangers leave New York for Los Angeles.
FEBRUARY 9, 1941
The Feuchtwangers officially enter the United States from Mexico by
walking across the border at Nogales, Arizona. They live in Los Angeles
with friends and in apartments while searching for a new home.
JUNE 22, 1941
During Operation Barbarossa, Germany and other European Axis
nations—joined by Finland—invade the Soviet Union.
NOVEMBER 1941
Viking Press of New Y ork publishes The Devil in France, Feuchtwanger’s
autobiographical account of his internment. In 1942, El Libro Libre of
Mexico publishes the first German edition under the title Unholdes Frankreich.
DECEMBER 7, 1941
The Japanese navy attacks Pearl Harbor.
JANUARY 26, 1942
The first U.S. forces arrive in Europe.
OCTOBER 25, 1943
The Feuchtwangers move into their home at 520 Paseo Miramar in Pacific
Palisades. The house, later called Villa Aurora, becomes a meeting place
for European writers and artists during the war.
288
MICHAELA ULLMANN
JUNE 6, 1944
On D-Day, the Allies invade northern France and later push south,
leading to the defeat of the German Army in France. Paris is liberated
by the French resistance.
APRIL 4, 1945
The U.S. 89th Infantry Division overruns Ohrdruf, a subcamp within
the larger Buchenwald concentration camp. It is the first camp liberated
by U.S. troops.
MAY 8, 1945
V-E Day marks the official end of World War II in Europe.
DECEMBER 21, 1958
Lion Feuchtwanger dies at Mount Sinai Hospital at the age of 74. He
is buried at Woodlawn Cemetery in Santa Monica. Shortly afterwards,
Marta bequeaths the Feuchtwanger estate to USC and is appointed the
first curator of the newly established Feuchtwanger Memorial Library at
their home in Pacific Palisades. She devotes the remainder of her life to
promoting the work of her husband.
JUNE 5, 1980
Marta receives an honorary doctorate from USC.
OCTOBER 25, 1987
Marta dies at the age of 96 in Santa Monica. She is buried next to her
husband at Woodlawn Cemetery.
289
TIMELINE
AUGUST 31, 1995
A new space is dedicated for the Feuchtwanger Memorial Library inside
Doheny Memorial Library on the USC campus, preserving the rare
books from Feuchtwanger’s collection. It endures as a testament to the
Feuchtwangers and Lion’s literary legacy.
DECEMBER 1, 1995
The Feuchtwangers’ former home opens as an international artists’ residence
operated by the Friends and Supporters of the Villa Aurora in Berlin, which
purchased the home in 1990 and oversaw its historic preservation. Villa
Aurora displays rare books and artwork on loan from the USC Libraries,
and the two organizations collaborate on a variety of cultural programs
related to Feuchtwanger and writers in exile.

291
Occupied and Administered by the German Military
Axis Countries Allied with Germany
Administered by the Vichy Regime
Neutral Countries
Allied Countries Opposing Germany
During Feuchtwanger’s second internment at Les Milles in 1940, German
forces invaded Belgium, France, Luxembourg, and the Netherlands.
Headquartered in Vichy, Prime Minister Phillipe Pétain’s government
administered a “free zone” in southern France starting in June of 1940.
Key Locations from The Devil in France
292
Occupied and Administered by the German Military
Axis Countries Allied with Germany
Administered by the Vichy Regime
Neutral Countries
Allied Countries Opposing Germany
During Feuchtwanger’s second internment at Les Milles in 1940, German
forces invaded Belgium, France, Luxembourg, and the Netherlands.
Headquartered in Vichy, Prime Minister Phillipe Pétain’s government
administered a “free zone” in southern France starting in June of 1940.
Key Locations from The Devil in France
293
294
COVER IMAGES
Lion Feuchtwanger during his first confinement at the Les Milles internment
camp in September, 1939
As part of the Imagined Spaces project, first-year students at the USC
School of Architecture create drawings inspired by books in the USC
Libraries’ collections. In the fall of 2009, students in Professor Lee
Olvera’s Fundamentals of Design Communication class were given
passages from The Devil in France. For the cover of Feuchtwanger’s
memoir of internment and survival, we selected drawings by Marcos
Carrillo, Alex Hagentorn, Lillian Lin, Nicholas Tedesco, and Kevin Yan
that re-imagined the following passage:
Les Milles is an ugly little village, though the surrounding country has its quiet charm: hilly
fields with blues and greens, placid little steams, old farmhouses, olive-groves, vineyards, some
green grass (a thing rare in that region), and, visible in the distance, an aqueduct, lofty, bold. In
the midst of that lovely country our brickyard lay, indescribably ugly. The main building, wide,
low-studded, was surrounded by bare white yards. A smaller building to one side served as
office, guardroom, infirmary, kitchen, wagon-shed. The whole area was enclosed on two of its
sides by a brick wall, on the other two, by an earthwork or terrace, all thoroughly fenced in with
barbed wire and guarded by sentries. The internees were in the habit of hanging their wash on
the barbed wire in the back yard. There it fluttered gaily in the wind while on the other side
the guards idled up and down, bored. It was a strange sensation to gaze out from there upon
the lovely, rolling, soft green fields, so near yet so far beyond our reach. Looking into the main
building from the yard through one of the great doors, one saw nothing but a huge black hole.
Every time one entered one had to accustom one’s eyes to the dark. Especially on the ground
floor one was always stumbling over something. Dusky runways that led past the openings
intended for the brick kilns made the approach to the straw piles on this floor particularly
narrow. The whole place reminded one of a catacomb.
A crude flight of wooden steps, narrow, shaky, covered with dirt, led up to a second floor. There
the room was more spacious, but because of the danger from air raids the windows were partly
boarded up and the few panes left uncovered were painted a dark blue so that no ray of light
might make its way to the outside. As a result this second floor was always in a semi-twilight,
and such a thing as reading was out of the question. At night there were a few very feeble
electric bulbs that served rather to emphasize the darkness than to relieve it.
Marcos Carrillo
Alex Hagentorn
Lillian Lin
Nicholas Tedesco
Kevin Yan
300
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
Special thanks to Marcos Carrillo, Martin Engelmann, Adrian Feuchtwanger,
Alex Hagentorn, Lillian Lin, Martin Lorentz, Robert de Neufville, Lee Olvera,
Tiffany Quon, Nicholas Tedesco, and Kevin Yan.

Abstract (if available)

Linked assets

Feuchtwanger: Books

Description

Lion Feuchtwanger. The devil in France: My encounter with him in the summer of 1940. Los Angeles, CA: Figueroa Press, 2009. https://libraries.usc.edu/devil-france Includes Marta Feuchtwanger's The escape.

Asset Metadata

Creator Feuchtwanger, Lion, 1884-1958 (creator)

Core Title The devil in France, 2009

Publisher 840 Childs Way, 3rd Floor, University of Southern California, Los Angeles, CA 90089-2540 (original), Figueroa Press (original), University of Southern California. Libraries (digital)

Tag OAI-PMH Harvest

Place Name France (countries)

Format 300 p.: ill. (format), application/pdf (imt), books (aat)

Contributor Abbott, Elisabeth (translator), Feuchtwanger, Adrian (translator)

Permanent Link (DOI) https://doi.org/10.25549/feucht-c35-313

Unique identifier UC1612895

Identifier devilinfrancelibrary.pdf (filename),feucht-c35-313 (legacy record id)

Legacy Identifier devilinfrancelibrary.pdf

Dmrecord 313

Format 300 p.: ill. (format),application/pdf (imt),books (aat)

Type images, texts

Source Feuchtwanger: Books (subcollection), Lion Feuchtwanger Papers, 1884-1958 (collection)

Access Conditions No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner without written permission from the publisher, except in the context of reviews.

Repository Name USC Libraries Special Collections

Repository Location Doheny Memorial Library, Los Angeles, CA 90089-0189

Repository Email specol@lib.usc.edu

Inherited Values

Title Feuchtwanger: Books

Coverage Temporal 1884 to 1958