Eyewitness (27 page)

Through that night there was spasmodic gun-fire in the northern suburbs, but in the morning Paris was calm again, de Gaulle had arrived, and every able-bodied Parisian in the centre of the city was hurrying to the Champs Elysées. The people had now settled into their exhilaration. They had composed themselves for pleasure, just as previously they had had to compose themselves for the misery of the arrival of the Germans. In June 1940 they had rushed for their homes; now they rushed into the streets. Both moves were spontaneous, subjective, unpremeditated.

The last time the Champs Elysées had filled with a crowd like this was on 14 July 1939, for the Bastille celebrations, during that last summer of peace when people, despairing of the future, were determined to seize what pleasure they could. And now the colours were the same, the immense tricolour floating from the Arc, the girls with flowers in their hair, the red, white and blue dresses, the flags hanging from the window boxes. They stood in the same places under the trees on either side of the road, in all the windows and the balconies, and they perched like flies on the house-tops. Some things were missing from that other day: Daladier with his Cabinet on the wooden stand in front of the Café Coupole, the diplomats, the top hats and the ceremonial dress. But the real difference lay in the intangible emotion of the people, this sense of utter relief. It had the glow and freshness of an adolescent love affair.

If it is true that the greatest joy humanity can experience is release from pain, then this was it. Here it was in tens of thousands of faces, a thing beyond cynicism or excitement, a consuming wellbeing more like gratitude than pleasure. Given the meanest sensitivity you could feel this atmosphere coming out from the crowd, wave upon wave, a sense of complete content.

I did not yet understand it. Tomorrow or the day after I would perhaps begin to understand. As yet I had not been able to find anyone who was able to explain what had happened in those four years in Paris, when she was cut off not only from the outside world but from herself as well. At this moment people were too engrossed in their revolution to talk. They simply stood and, as it were, savoured the new atmosphere in a Paris that was their own again. Not knowing what had happened, not being part of the dark experience, it was difficult as yet to see anything more than an outward Paris that was itself, a place of great open spaces, of statues and trees and graceful buildings along the river. Nothing bombed. All intact, and as it was. If anything more beautiful than ever because it was so invested with memory.

De Gaulle got out of his car and began to inspect the ring of French armoured cars drawn up in a circle round the Arc. Ten thousand people looked at him as he walked along, stiff, ungainly, a heavy lugubrious face under his
képi
, an air of school-masterish tautness, an imposing and unattractive figure, General de Gaulle,
le libérateur
. More than ever he was the remote symbol of resistance, an undefinable man representing an idea, and now personifying an idea. His lieutenants, great figures of the Resistance, walked behind: Koenig,
le vainqueur de Bir Hacheim,
Leclerc of Lake Chad, and those who fought in Paris. Then the cameramen, the police, the officials.

They moved in a body up to the central arch and the eternal flame. As de Gaulle saluted, the ‘Marseillaise’ began. The people sang it quietly and falteringly, as though it were a prayer of thanksgiving rather than a triumph. They were a little out of tune. They missed a beat and hurried to catch up again. They were facing one another, and they kept staring through one another as they sang, apparently seeing nothing with their eyes, and evidently unconscious of tears. They sang as though the words had come quite freshly into mind, as though they were singing the music for the first time. It spread and expanded, bar after bar, down the Champs Elysées, a contagion of emotional feeling; and soon everyone was engulfed, all those who were hemmed in by the crowd and could see nothing, and those on the roof-tops who could not hear and those who had expected nothing from this day beyond a celebration.

It was a little difficult to follow de Gaulle as he turned and began to walk down the Elysées, with his men spread out in a line on either side of him; we ran for the cars. I edged the Volkswagen into a position in the centre directly behind the general. A hundred other cars came swerving forward through the crowd and soon we were locked together, twenty cars abreast, the mudguards touching, another row of cars behind, and then another and another, a solid block of vehicles moving at walking pace and hemmed in on either side by the vast crowds. It was difficult driving. Three inches from the car in front; three inches from the car behind. One was conscious only of repeated waves of noise from the people. Once when I got a moment to look up from the driving I turned and saw with astonishment that everyone in my car was crying.

From somewhere a young
poilu
had jumped aboard, and he was sitting bolt upright in the back seat, with his rifle between his knees, staring ahead, weeping. From somewhere flowers were raining down on us. From somewhere odd people kept jumping on and jumping off. Faces went by, livid and shouting, and then disappeared. It was hot. People seemed to be yelling anything that came into their heads. The congestion got steadily worse as we turned into the Place de la Concorde; then a brief clear moment in the Rue de Rivoli, then back into the dense masses of people again outside the Hôtel de Ville.

The first shots of the snipers came from the row of buildings on the opposite side of the street, but they were too unexpected for anyone to know exactly what was happening. The crowd rocked dazedly. Then a second volley came down. One or two people round us dropped screaming on to the asphalt. At once like a house of cards the whole crowd went down and fumbled blindly and instinctively for the ground. Some crawled under the armoured cars. Others attempted to rush for the cover of the pavement, tripped and fell, in shouting and convulsive groups. In the windows people slammed their shutters. There must have been five or six thousand people in front of the Hôtel de Ville, and it was like a field of wheat suddenly struck by a strong gust of wind.

After the first blank moment of shock everyone who had a gun began blazing away at the house-tops. If a man saw a stream of bullets hitting a window he aimed in the same direction himself without in the least knowing what he was firing at. Some of the armoured cars began opening up with their machine-guns, and the bullets passed a few inches over the heads of the people. The firing was now spreading up and down the Rue de Rivoli, and indeed all over central Paris. In the Champs Elysées; in the Place de la Concorde. On the IIe de la Cité. Through the back streets.

It had begun at an obviously pre-arranged hour. German snipers and the French
Milice
had secreted themselves at twenty or thirty vantage-points on the roof-tops, and now they were simply firing point-blank into the crowd below. They were even in Notre Dame. As de Gaulle walked in, the congregation was suddenly horrified by a volley of rifle shots which were fired, it seemed, from the crypt and directly towards the General. Officers jumped forward to drag de Gaulle back behind the pillars. He shook them off and walked forward down the aisle. After that there was no more firing in the cathedral, but outside the skirmishing went on. The
Milice
had chosen rows of flat-topped buildings where they could unloose a volley and then run to a new point on the roofs to open up again.

These were the young men who had been carried by the war out of all normal relationship with mankind. They shot, not out of a desire for revenge, not out of anger or hatred, or in self-defence, but out of a sheer desire to kill. They had turned traitor. They knew they would be massacred by the crowd if they were caught. They knew they could not escape, and that their freedom was measured only by the number of bullets in their pouches. They shot coolly and deliberately into the unprotected crowd. It was a last defiant gesture against society, the instinct of the gangster at bay. One man was brought down from the roof-tops in the Rue de Rivoli, and I watched the mob rush him. He was already half-naked when they got him on the ground.

French nurses kept bicycling by with bandages. The F.F.I. patrols reached a state of animation that was unbelievable, and their erratic firing became really dangerous for everybody. I touched one lad on the arm as he was blazing away at an empty window, but he was too far gone in excitement to listen to reason. Other officials were running round shouting at the people either to open or close their shutters. But it was impossible to understand what they were saying, and consequently half the shutters remained closed, half flung back. Oblivious to it all, two lovers clung to one another beside my car. The boy was a soldier in an armoured car, and he was forced to reach down awkwardly to the girl standing on the pavement. Stretcher bearers hurrying into the bistro behind kept breaking them apart. There were many women with babies in their arms, their faces streaming with perspiration and white with anxiety. They scurried into the shops and the cafés and sat down panting.

It seemed unbearably sad that all this happiness had been turned so quickly into fear. Not many people were killed or hurt, but the shock was intense. No-one had been prepared for so swift a return to the danger of the past week. They had no mental reserves for the ordeal, and they stood about on the pavements, white-faced and pathetic. Presently as the firing died away they began to drift homeward, leaving the streets to the F.F.I. and the soldiers and all the furtive things that were happening just then in Paris by night. Too much had happened too quickly. Paris that night lay prostrate in nervous exhaustion.

Osmar White

Osmar White was bombed and badly injured in the Solomons in 1943. While recuperating he wrote
Green Armour
, and was sent by Sir Keith Murdoch to New York in 1943 for further treatment. Needing more he went to London, and by the end of 1944 was with the Allied forces in the drive (literally in Osmar’s case) to Berlin. He was one of the handful of journalists present at the signing of the German surrender, and had revealed an aspect of the Holocaust after visiting Buchenwald.

His book
Conqueror’s Road
was about the final days of the war in Europe, but was mysteriously not published despite being scheduled for 1946. It finally reached the public in 1996, after White had rediscovered the manuscript in 1983.

After the war he was the
Herald
special correspondent in New Guinea, and wrote a series of books, including the influential
Parliament of a Thousand Tribes
(1965) and
Time Now, Time Before
(1967).

Osmar White died in 1990.

*

April 17th.
Dismemberment of Germany by invasion armies in the last week or ten days has disclosed moral debasement which has destroyed the nation’s soul as surely as bombers, guns and tanks have destroyed its physical entity.

We are in the heart of Germany, in a diseased nation. We are in the concentration-camp country. Today I’ve seen the Buchenwald, and moved among its living dead. I cannot now nor ever will be able to write objectively of what I have seen. One cannot observe war for three-and-a-half years as a newspaperman and remain either sentimentalist or supersensitive about spectacles of human suffering. Yet what I saw today moved me to physical illness.

It moved me to the conviction that never again can civilisation trust the German people as they are to determine their own social and political destiny.

Before that the civilised world must be assured – more, convinced by unchallengeable proofs – that the Germans have been severed completely from the inheritance of a past which is not only their shame, but the shame of all humanity.

This morning I left the city of Weimar, the beloved home of Goethe, Schiller and Liszt, and drove three miles through forests and fields beautiful with spring.

I came to a fence of barbed wire, and an entrance lodge of brown wood, over which a great black flag hung limply on a pole.

This, they told me, was the Buchenwald – the deepest pit of the hell Hitler has dug.

I said to myself: ‘One more concentration camp. Tighten up your guts. Get ready to look at torture hooks and corpses.’

They told me that once there were 50,000 people here, but now there were only 20,000. I went through the iron gates, looking at people who walked about on concrete, grave courtyards. Most of them showed signs of slow starvation. They were clad in ragged ugly prison suits. They were unshaven. The lines on their faces were lines etched there by long suffering and the death of hope. They wore little coloured badges to ‘indicate the nature of their offence’ and their nationality.

For six weeks now I have been seeing people like these on the roads all through Germany. I have been answering their salutes until my arms tired and their smiles until my answering smile became meaningless.

These were the same slaves – not yet quite free, and a little hungrier – a little uglier, more brutalised.

Doctor Hugo Mortelmans, lecturer in pathology at Antwerp Medical School, a small, round-faced man with blank bright eyes, came forward and offered himself as guide and interpreter. He had been taken by the Gestapo because of his resistance activities, and given employment in the SS ‘Department of Histology’.

First he led the way to a concrete court where the day’s dead were being loaded into an iron-sided truck. There were about a hundred blue-white stiff bodies, with shaven skulls and the purple bruises of beatings still on their skins. They were most horribly emaciated from starvation and disease. Atop of them was the limp, fat corpse of an SS man who hanged himself in a cell last night.

We went to the crematorium where six furnaces still contained the blackened frames of what once were men. Above the door was a verse beginning:
‘Worms shall not devour me, but flames consume this body. I
always loved the heat and light …’

*

We descended to the death-room in the basement, containing holes with 30 hooks upon which men had been garrotted.

The holes had been hastily plastered up and whitewashed, in a vain effort to conceal the room’s purpose. An attendant showed me a club with which those who did not die quickly enough had their brains beaten out. Dr Mortelmans said he believed that between 30 and 40 Allied airmen had been executed.

It was estimated that 48,000 executions took place in five years. From this place we were taken to the SS museum of pathology, where magnificently prepared sections of diseased organs of the human body were displayed.

Here Dr Mark Klein, professor of histology in Strasbourg University, who had been interned in Buchenwald camp since 5 May 1944, said that he had been forced to work preparing sections. So many cases of all kinds of disease in all stages were available as material that the work done here was of scientific value.

Other such work also done here was of no scientific value whatever. It was indulged in solely to satisfy the sadistic mania of those in control.

Dr Klein produced sections of human skin bearing elaborate tattoo marks, which, he said, were prepared and preserved by a German doctor, who had written and published a paper about them.

Dr Klein produced two human heads on wooden mounts, and explained that the technician who prepared them had carefully followed the shrinking process of the Jivaro Indians of South America. They were the heads of Poles or Russians.

The heads were so perfectly preserved that they still bore the expression the men died with.

I was taken to ‘Block 50’ – the department of bacteriology, where a slave scientist, Professor Maurice Suard, of Angers medical school, explained the work done. Their chief task had been the development of anti-typhus serum.

After experiments on animals, Nazi physicians had deliberately inoculated healthy prisoners with typhus virus, to observe the course of the disease and the efficacy of various sera.

Professor Suard said that batches of 40 to 50 prisoners had been executed by toxic injections.

He demonstrated the excellent scientific equipment of the block, and said that the work undertaken there was of objective scientific value, but that the experiments had been undertaken with complete disregard of human life and suffering, and countless prisoners had been murdered by Nazi scientists in their experiments.

Slave scientists had not been required to make these experiments. They were employed solely to prepare sera, to do work in which there was danger of infection, of which the Germans were almost ludicrously afraid, and to keep records which were sent to Berlin.

*

Dr Joseph Brau, a physician from Coulommiers, who is now acting chief physician of all prisoners remaining in the camp, conducted me to the quarters of the Poles and Russians. I first inspected the barracks of ‘normal’ prisoners. They showed advanced malnutrition and were sleeping or lying in filthy three-tier bunks.

Ten men were in each compartment of the hut, which was swarming with vermin. All the occupants were suffering from dysentery. Many of the men were obviously insane.

As the party walked by the hut and British uniforms were recognised, a low, growling noise broke out. I did not recognise that this was a kind of applause until someone started hand-clapping.

Men crawled weakly from their bunks, stood at attention, and saluted.

*

Among the prisoners were children aged 11 and 12. Dr Brau said that mostly children were sent to gas chambers. One man concealed his son in this jungle of indescribable suffering for three years. We saw the child. He was five years old, and tolerably nourished. His father was washing his hands, which were delicately formed.

Dr Brau then conducted me to the ‘sick house’. I cannot picture for you what I saw there.

I can only say that here the dead walked or stood stark naked outside in the sun, shivering uncontrollable rigours, or lay in the filth of their diseases.

I can only say that their voices sounded like wind in a dark, deep place; that the image of their eyes and their teeth as they smiled will, until the day of my death, remain my life’s most terrible recollection.

I said to Dr Brau: ‘The only humane thing the Germans have done here they did when they strangled them.’

He replied: ‘That is true.’

After this inspection I did not go to the brothel kept by the guards for prisoners who had money, and to which women were assigned as a final punishment.

I went back to the town where Goethe, Schiller and Liszt lived and worked.

In a recent dispatch I said that the people who make the peace settlement with Germany should, before making it, see for themselves the destruction of Germany’s material assets before speaking of reparations. I implied what I still believe to be true – that Germany will be unable to make material reparation.

To that I would add that only God is powerful enough to exact spiritual reparation for what has happened in such camps as Buchenwald.

But the men who make peace should be required also to see such camps, and be made to take an oath before mankind to make and keep the kind of peace in which never again will any nation in the human family be permitted the power to debase itself to such a level of bestiality as has Germany in the years between 1933 and 1945.

It may be true that 99 per cent of Germans did not know what was going on, but it is certainly true that they did not know because they had not the guts to find out, much less to do anything about it.

… As for the immediate job, it seems that now I’m for all time out of the new-boy class. The wangling of a place to see the surrender signed, amongst all the bigtime tigers wangling to get places, and the subsequent job, which was officially acknowledged as the best and most full and accurate produced by the seeded sixteen has, temporarily anyway, elevated me to [your father’s] ‘international journalist’ status. The tumult died, but looking back on it, it does truthfully seem to have been in its context a professional achievement without modification [or] comparison. It would, for instance, get me a job on any British or American newspaper for years to come. The witnessing of the surrender was accounted, for some reason, The War’s Greatest Story. Personally, I realise it was a moment of tremendous, truly tremendous, historical significance and that to be one of only ten newspapermen (others radio blokes) to be present was a sort of final accolade of privilege and achievement in the newspaper profession; but my distrust of newspaper assessment persists – a sort of arrogance to my own profession – and I can’t see the signing of four pieces of paper as ‘great’ for anything other than pure symbolism, which irks me. Nevertheless, I was flat out – completely and unreservedly flat out for 50 hours on the job, and I’ll brag coldbloodedly to you that the four thousand words I wrote in that time was the only account which did two things, related the facts without error and in perspective, and re-created with colour and accuracy the atmosphere of the occasion. This brag is for your ear alone, because you know about my bragging; but I think that on Monday I got a toe at least on the last rung of reporting.

I’m waiting with some trepidation to hear your comment. A great occasion would seem to demand
great
reporting. Well, it didn’t get it, but it got the best that the available great reporters could give it. We worked under a really tremendous tension. I’ll give you a ball to ball description one day. Wrote an average of ten thousand words in ‘prepared pieces’ to cover every possible contingency and of course scrapped almost all of it. When the event was over, the final accounts were written in a condition of complete exhaustion and at tremendous speed. The fourteen hundred words of eyewitness stuff on the signing I wrote in 38 minutes flat. No literary masterpiece of calculated adjectives and nice nuances was ever turned out under such conditions, but the result was at least an exhibition of my newspaper instincts if it wasn’t pure Conrad! … After the signing I got decorously drunk and stayed decorously drunk for three days.

Rheims, May 7th.
The war in Europe was ended in a bleak classroom of a French industrial school – Ecole Professionelle – in this town at 2.45 a.m. today.

I saw the surrender signed during a five-minute drama, unbearable in intensity, under merciless arc lights and in a storm of flashbulbs, by men on whose faces was the grave, indelible print of a five years’ struggle which had ravaged half the world. It was signed by men exhausted by war – for men exhausted by war.

The minute during which pens scrawled the signatures which ended Europe’s mass murder were minutes for which countless millions of common people throughout the world have prayed for years which seemed endless. The ghosts of those prayers came in and made heavy the very air of the white-ceilinged, blue-walled room at one of the great moments in the history of humanity.

This was the end of a climatic chapter in a tragic story of a tragic Continent. It came after a long waiting. But it was a moment in which there was no joy. Even in the hearts of men who had led the forces which won the victory there was no joy, only a thankfulness, a relief deeper than exultation.

Peace came to Europe with no pomp. Only 15 men sat at the peace table. Only 16 representatives of the world’s press and radio were spectators – they and a few high officers of the Public Relations Division of the Allied Expeditionary Force, and official technicians and cameramen who recorded the sound and shadow of a great event for the world today and the world tomorrow.

They called us from a little conference room where we had been cooped up making notes and writing madly for eight hours. A general came in and said: ‘Something will be happening very soon gentlemen.’