Rosie's War (11 page)

PART TWO

Enemy
Alien

DECEMBER 1940 – MAY 1941

CHAPTER SIX

Arrest and Imprisonment

O
ne morning in early December, as I was hurrying the girls along to get them off to school, Madame Izard arrived in the breakfast room. She was accompanied by three policemen.

‘Rosemary, these gentlemen wish to speak to you for a minute.’ There was a slight note of concern in her voice.

I nodded to the three men; I recognized them from the canteen where I had often served them. I was still feeling the after-effects of a late session with Lucile Manguin and her husband the previous night. The men stood there for a few moments looking quite hesitant. Then the tall, plump one (Paul, I thought his name was) stepped forward sheepishly.

‘Mam’zelle Rose, we would like you to accompany us to the
mairie
. It’s only a routine check-up for a short while. But you will need to bring a bag of your things with you,’ he added quickly.

The children were startled and frightened by the policemen. They held on to me and began to cry. I soothed them and told them that I’d be back by the time they returned from school. Jeanne and Madame Izard helped me to put together some things in a small bag. I said goodbye to the family and stepped outside with the men, who were apologizing profusely for having to take me.

‘The car is down the road,’ the tall one told me awkwardly. ‘Would you like a cup of coffee at the bar on the corner?’

I would. As we sipped our coffee they told me they were acting under German orders.

‘But I’m registered. My papers are fine,’ I protested. ‘This is just a check up, isn’t it?’

‘Wait and see, Mam’zelle Rose.’

‘For what? A new German order?’

‘Maybe.’

That they were obviously very uncomfortable with the whole situation didn’t register with me, even at that stage. I thought they were simply embarrassed by the children’s noise or by the fact that I knew them. I certainly wasn’t frightened and didn’t take any of this seriously. It was probably yet another piece of German bureaucracy. These polite men couldn’t be a threat. After all, I had often seen them eating and joking with their friends. There might be some other English people at the station and I could then find out what was happening.

‘Au revoir, Mam’zelle Rose … Ayez courage,’ they all wished me when we got to the
mairie
.

The building was packed and noisy. A crowd of women were waiting around, all laden down with bags and possessions. I joined them. A few more came in as the morning wore on. We all chatted, wondering just what was going on. Most of them seemed to be English. There were numerous French policemen and German soldiers all busily checking and stamping various papers and passports. They looked very focused. I began to realize that the situation was more serious than I had first thought. At one point the rumour went round that we were to be imprisoned in a camp in Germany. The police told us nothing. I doubt if they knew anyway.

I recognized one of the policemen from the canteen who had been friendly towards me and I asked him if he would deliver a note to Madame Izard. I scribbled it in pencil on a scrap of paper. Amazingly it has survived. In translation it went:

I am writing you a quick note – we are still waiting at the Commissariat. There are about thirty old Englishwomen but the morale is magnificent. I think I shall be interned for at least the winter. There is talk of our being taken near Tours. In the end nobody knows anything. I thank you for all your kindness. See you soon. Rosemary.

In the afternoon we were piled into black police vans and driven fast across Paris. I could see little out of the high-barred windows to tell where we were going but I guessed it would be to one of the train stations.

We were unloaded at the Gare de l’Est. The scene that confronted me was quite awesome. There were hundreds and hundreds of people. They were mainly women, but also numerous children and some elderly men. I noticed a group of nuns huddled together and some sick or infirm people being helped along. Everyone seemed to be milling about confusedly, clutching their personal possessions. The noise was deafening, with people shouting and protesting. German soldiers were everywhere but they were having a hard job keeping the crowd under control.

After a short period of total confusion we were bundled onto a train. We waited for several hours in the freezing cold, eventually moving off in the dark. As we scrambled to lean out of the windows, some French railwaymen who were working on the tracks waved and called out, ‘Bonne chance, bonne chance.’

My journey to imprisonment had begun. I felt curiously detached and calm. I understood, of course, that the situation was grave: we were almost certainly going to be imprisoned somewhere as enemy aliens. Yet I seemed to have no feelings and no reactions. How could I be afraid when I was surrounded by so many people in a worse state than me?

The journey was to last for two days. Conditions on board the train were horrendous. There were no toilets or running water. The compartments were unlit and unheated in that bitterly cold winter. There was a constant noise of crying and high-pitched wailing. With all the self-absorption of youth, however, I couldn’t appreciate the great misery and suffering around me for the infirm, the sick, those with young children and the elderly. In my carriage there was a lady who must have been at least eighty. She was almost totally blind. Another was bedridden. Looking back on it now, I dread to think what they must have gone through during those two days. Later I learnt that a couple of babies were actually born on the train and that a poor, three-day-old child had died on the journey, his mother having been taken from her bed at the maternity hospital.

On and on we travelled, being shunted into sidings for hours at a time. Occasionally we stopped briefly at unknown stations and were given thin soup or sausage meat and bread by German nurses. We were desperate for water. I read later in an account by a nun that her group so longed for something to drink that they refreshed themselves with eau de cologne until a little old Nazareth nun managed to spill the lot. The stop-overs were frantic affairs, as we all scrambled to get some food or water before the train pulled away.

After two days the lavatory situation was unimaginable. We managed as best we could at any stop when we were allowed down beside the tracks. It was an extraordinary sight to see women of all sorts and ages openly relieving themselves in front of the guards. In between the stops we had to use our compartment as a toilet; the stench by the end was overwhelming. I was told later of one resourceful lady who used her toilet bag as a container, with the contents being emptied out of the window.

Who were all these women and why had we been carted off in this way? My initial impression of the huge crowd at the Gare de l’Est had been that we were an incredible mixture of people. I was right. But all of us had one thing in common: somewhere, at some time, in some way, we all had the word ‘British’ stamped on our papers. Purely because of this fact we were now prisoners; a reprisal, the rumour went, for the British Government having incarcerated enemy aliens on the Isle of Man earlier in the year.

Many of the people on the train had quite tenuous links to Britain. In those days a woman took her husband’s nationality and his name would be on the passport. This meant that there were bewildered French widows on the train who had married Tommies in the First World War. They spoke hardly a word of English and had no desire to lose their French identity. I talked to a couple of women who were fishwives from Arcachon, where they sold their fish in baskets at the quayside. Long ago they had had brief marriages to English soldiers, who had since died or returned to England. A number of women had English husbands who had simply left France at the beginning of the war, thinking that their French wives and children would be safe. There were White Russians with so-called Nansen passports.
³
There were Jewish women from Palestine, a British Mandated Territory at the time. There were also women from all parts of the Commonwealth, including some Afrikaners who were deeply unsympathetic to Britain. In all, there must have been some thirty-odd nationalities among us.

Some of the women were – like me – ‘proper’ English, for want of a better phrase. That is, born of English parents and with an English home, but in France for various reasons. There were the Bluebell Girls, dancers from the Folies Bergère (traditionally English), girls who looked after the horses at the Longchamps racecourse, women in fur coats and leopard-skin hats straight out of a P.G. Wodehouse novel, middle-aged governesses or nannies and prostitutes from the French Channel ports and the
maisons closes
. There were many quite elderly women who had lived in France for years, some since before the First World War. They had survived that war unscathed and many were bewildered by their arrest. We ‘proper’ English probably made up less than a quarter of the total. I didn’t realize at the time how protected that made me. I was told later that even in the allocation of seats on the train we were given preferential treatment. I don’t know if this was true.

In my compartment there was a young English girl with blonde hair tightly curled into a bun. She was one of the most typical examples of a prefect at an English girls’ public school that I had ever set eyes on. I looked at her superb self-possession and slightly questioning manner towards me with complete understanding. As the train lumbered through the Parisian suburbs we regarded each other blankly for a while and then smiled with open relief.

‘How long have you been in Paris?’ she asked.

‘A few months.’

‘Did you come over with your parents or to see friends?’

‘I was working in the South of France and was advised to go home via Paris.’

It seems bizarre to think now that we were sitting on that train delicately finding out each other’s social position. But then nothing had actually happened yet to jolt us out of ourselves. We had seen the Germans in Paris and had not been hurt. And unlike most of the passengers, we were already away from home.

A young girl with black, curly hair was crouched in the corner watching us. She had been crying and seemed very young and frightened. This was my first sight of Shulamith Przepiorka, or Shula, as she was known. She wrote to me after the war:

When we got to the train I looked for young people among all these poor, old, grey, frightened women. I saw you, Pat, with your curly hair and your unmistakeable English manner. You were talking to another very English girl and I didn’t understand a word. Then you said hello to me and started talking in French, which gave me back my nerve. I hoped we would stick together.

Shula told us that she was the daughter of a Jewish leather worker and an immigrant Polish woman living in Porte Saint-Martin. She was born in Haifa during a family visit to Jerusalem, then in Palestine, where a British official had registered her birth. She thereby had a British passport unlike the rest of her family. She spoke no English and was desperately worried about her relatives.

We stopped for a long time at Belfort, very near the Swiss and German borders. Rumours had gone round that we were going to work in a munitions factory near Hamburg or that we were being sent to a prison camp somewhere in Germany. I suppose this was the unspoken fear of us all; if we could somehow stay in France we would be safe. But there was no definite news. The German guards in the corridors refused to tell us anything when we finally got going again.

‘We’re changing direction,’ someone called out excitedly. ‘We’re going south.’

‘We’re headed for Besançon,’ a bossy woman in the carriage told us. ‘It’s an old garrison town near Switzerland. It can’t possibly be our destination. There’s nothing there.’

But it was at Besançon that we stopped. It was almost worth it just to see that woman’s face. It was a scene of utter chaos as we spilled out onto the platform after our two-day ordeal, shuffling and cursing as we gathered our belongings together. A reception committee of German officers and guards awaited us. They did not have the same smooth, self-satisfied manner we had got to know among the occupying forces in Paris. These soldiers seemed flustered and disorganized. Our official reception involved lots of roll calls, shouting, dogs barking and waiting around for what seemed like ages. It was all unpleasant and frightening. After such a long and uncomfortable journey we were in a state of shock, exhausted and famished. And the cold! It was early December and we were in the foothills of the Jura Mountains.

Eventually we set off. In front of me were the nuns in their traditional headgear of great, white cornettes wrapped over stiff hats. I counted five different religious orders on that walk. We climbed a steep road, watched by sullen, blank-faced inhabitants. We discovered later that they thought we were a consignment of British spies. Perhaps they could see nothing but trouble ahead. We passed the remains of old medieval walls. The town below to our left was wonderfully picturesque. It was enclosed by a river and several hills, each one topped with what looked to be an old fortress.

Finally we approached huge, grey barracks. As we shuffled through the entrance gates we saw the sentries in full battledress, with rifles at the ready. The barracks, in traditional Napoleonic style, were made up of three huge blocks of four-storey buildings on two sides of a large, cinder-covered courtyard that was at least the size of a football pitch. There were outhouses and offices at the far end of the yard, thereby enclosing them on three sides. A further set of buildings on our left extended the barracks. On each corner of the yard there was a primitive lavatory open to the sky. The buildings were bleak and surrounded by a high brick wall that was festooned with barbed wire.