The Bitter Road to Freedom: The Human Cost of Allied Victory in World War II Europe (45 page)

like ocean herring.” In the eyes of this prisoner, Alek- sandr Solzhenitsyn, Russia had betrayed these ill-fated repatriates three times: once “through ineptitude”— poorly preparing for war; second, when they were left to rot in German camps, with no provisions sent in, like those enjoyed by prisoners of other allied nations; and third, by coaxing them back home, “with such phrases as The Motherland has forgiven you! The Motherland calls you!’” and then snatching them up “the moment they reached the frontiers.” Solzhenitsyn described their predicament with bitter irony: “For not want- ing to die from a German bullet, the prisoner had to die from a Soviet bullet for having been a prisoner of war! Some get theirs from the enemy; we get it from our own!…In general, this war revealed to us that the worst thing in the world to be was to be a Russian.”
17

It was no better to be a Cossack. This tribe, a peren- nial enemy of the Bolsheviks—it had fought for the Tsar in the Russian civil war—had provided tens of thou- sands of its warriors to the German army. During the German occupation, Cossacks aided the occupiers in hunting down Soviet partisans in the rear areas and ruthlessly killing them. The Cossacks fought Stalin and his regime—a legitimate enough enterprise—but had done so at the side of the Nazi invaders. In the waning days of the war, Cossack units surrendered to British

forces in Austria, hoping perhaps for some lenience, given their openly expressed desire not to be repatri- ated. Their appeals fell on deaf ears. Between May 28 and June 7, 1945, in the border town of Lienz, Austria, the British army gathered about 23,800 men, women, and children belonging to Cossack and Caucasian tribes. Their morale was “surprisingly high,” the offi- cial British army report said. Perhaps their spirits were high because their fate was as yet unknown to them: “it was considered essential that the fact that they were to be sent to the USSR should be kept from them as long as possible.” First, the British troops disarmed them. Then they called the 1,600 officers to a bogus confer- ence, arrested them, and placed them in a prison camp in nearby Spittal. There, the officers spent the night, now aware of their fate. Two officers committed suicide by hanging themselves on the lavatory chains. The next morning, on May 29, trucks were produced to deliver the men to the waiting Russians. The Cossack officers resisted, and a platoon of British soldiers was sent in to drag the men out of their barracks and into the trucks. “ The difficulties were considerable,” according to the army report, “as they all sat on the ground with linked arms and legs.” The British soldiers resorted to force: “rifle butts, pick helves and the points of bayonets were freely used.” In due course, the officers were loaded onto the trucks. Two more officers committed suicide

during the truck ride to Judenburg, where they were handed over to the Russians.

While this sinister transport was under way, the re- maining lower ranks, along with their families, were told that they too were to be handed over to the Rus- sians. The opposition to this plan was intense. From the windows of their barracks, Cossacks hung signs saying “ We will die or starve rather than return to the USSR.” Over the course of the next few days, Cossacks tried either to escape into the surrounding country- side, where they were tracked down by the British soldiers, or resisted as best they could the British sol- diers who loaded them onto trains. More rifle butts and beatings were required to entrain the thousands of doomed Cossacks. “It was not until a platoon had advanced with fixed bayonets and administered some further blows that any movement started. This move- ment was continued only by the further persuasion of the bayonets and the firing of automatic weapons into the gaps between the groups of Cossacks.” Three peo- ple, including one boy, were killed. But gradually, the armed force of the British soldiers prevailed. By June 7, the British they had turned over 22,934 Cossacks to the Russians.

There remained only the awkward question of what to

do with the 4,000 horses that the Cossacks left behind. Three hundred of them, too ill to be of any use, were shot. Some were given away to local farmers. Many were eaten on the spot by ravenous local citizens. But about 2,000 of these beasts simply wandered away into the Austrian hills, riderless and alone.
18

* * *

“

HE EATS A mutton chop. Then he gnaws the bone, eyes lowered, concentrating on not missing a mor- sel of meat. Then he takes a second chop. Then a

third. Without looking up.” The eater was Robert An- telme, recently returned home to Paris after a year in German concentration camps. His wife, the writer Marguerite Duras, anxiously observed this silent eat- ing from a distance. Her husband, once large, power- ful, and dynamic, had been reduced to a skeletal figure of eighty pounds. “His legs look like crutches inside his trousers,” she wrote in her mournful memoir of the war years. “ When the sun shines, you can see through his hands.”
19

At first, he could not eat anything at all, so devastated was his digestion from prolonged starvation. On his first day home, he saw a cherry clafoutis in the kitchen and asked to have some. He could not; it was too rich

for him. At this, “a great silent pain spread over his face because he was still being refused food, because it was still as it had been in the concentration camp. And, as in the camp, he accepted it in silence. He didn’t see that we were weeping.”

Upon his return, Antelme fell ill with a high fever, and he was carefully nursed back to a semblance of health. A spoonful of gruel seven times a day at first, no more. For seventeen days, he lay feverish, half conscious, ly- ing on pillows to protect his fleshless bones. At long last, he ate some solid food. But then, his hunger grew, and became insatiable. “It took on terrifying propor- tions,” Duras recalled. “ We put the dishes in front of him and left him and he ate. Methodically, as if per- forming a duty, he was doing what he had to do to live. He ate. It was an occupation that took up all his time. He would wait for food for hours. He would swallow without knowing what he was eating. Then we’d take the food away and he’d wait for it to come again. He has gone, and hunger has taken his place.”
20

Five years earlier, in 1940, Robert Antelme had been serving in the French army; after the defeat, he was de- mobilized and got a job in police headquarters in Paris as a civil servant. He also quietly established links to the Resistance and provided aid, shelter, papers, and

contacts to downed pilots, foreigners, and others try- ing to escape wartime France. He soon secured a post as private secretary to Vichy’s minister of the interior, Pierre Pucheu. By mid-1943, Antelme became increas- ingly involved in Resistance activities, using his posi- tion to gain access to documents that he passed to the Resistance. He and Duras had a close friendship with François Mitterrand, an ambitious young man who had briefly been a prisoner of war after the fall of France, and then after the armistice worked on POW matters for the Vichy government before turning to the Resis- tance in January 1943. Mitterrand worked out of Du- ras’s Paris apartment, which became the hub of a small but influential Resistance network. In the spring of 1944, Mitterrand founded an underground cell called the Mouvement National des Prisonniers de Guerre et Deportés (National Movement of Prisoners of War and Deportees), in which Antelme was involved. But the group was betrayed, and although Mitterrand narrowly escaped a number of attempts to arrest him, Antelme did not. He was arrested on June 1, 1944—just five days before the D-Day invasion. He was sent to Drancy, the French transit camp, and then deported to Germany. He spent ten months in a labor camp in Gandersheim, before being transported to Dachau in late April. When the Americans liberated the camp, Antelme was near death.
21

Yet his Resistance connections now saved his life. Mar- guerite Duras and Mitterrand kept a careful eye out for reports from the liberated camps for any word of An- telme. On April 24, Duras had word that Antelme was still alive, and in Dachau. Mitterrand, who by this time had risen up the ranks of the Resistance and become a major player in liberated France, was appointed to a commission sent into Germany to inspect the liberated camps. On April 30, he found Antelme in Dachau, but the American soldiers in command of the camp refused Mitterrand’s request to take Antelme home with him to France; they had standing orders to allow no one out, for fear of spreading typhus and other diseases that were rampant in the camp. So Mitterrand flew back to Paris, and detailed two friends to go back to Germany for Antelme. Outfitted with phony papers, gasoline ra- tions, and a few French officers’ uniforms, these two men drove through the war-wracked countryside until they reached Dachau, where they secreted Antelme out of the camp and drove him back to Paris. One of the friends called ahead to warn Marguerite Duras of An- telme’s condition: “it’s more terrible than everything we’ve imagined.”
22

Antelme’s story—of a painful return, in which the joy of survival is suppressed by the memory of the recent past and the sheer effort of recovery—was only one of

millions playing out across France in the spring and summer of 1945, as the prisoners of war and deport- ees began to make their difficult way home. In the early months of 1945, there were almost two million French people inside Germany—the second largest national group, after the Russians, of displaced persons in the Reich. Of these, 1.2 million were POWs who had been taken upon France’s defeat in 1940. But there were also about 700,000 forced laborers who had been sent to Germany during the war to work in war-related in- dustries—some of them voluntarily. And there were 200,000 people deported to Germany for Resistance activities, for criminal activity, or because they were Jewish. Almost 76,000 Jews did not return, having been killed in German camps.
23

As early as November 1943, the Gaullist government in exile, then in Algiers, had started planning for the repatriation of prisoners and deportees; the task of running the new Ministry for Prisoners, Deportees and Refugees was assigned to Henri Frenay, a former pris- oner (he had escaped from a POW camp in 1940) and the founder of the influential Resistance network Com- bat. With Allied forces pushing into Germany by early 1945, Frenay sprang into action. The government estab- lished reception centers for the anticipated returnees along the French border with Belgium, Luxembourg,

and Germany and in the port cities of Marseilles, Bor- deaux, and Cherbourg. The largest of these camps were located in Paris itself, as well as in Marseilles (where prisoners and deportees liberated by the Soviets were shipped, via Odessa), and along the northeastern bor- der with Germany at Mulhouse, Longuyon, Strasbourg, and along the Belgian border at Lille and Maubeuge. French nationals began to flood into France well before the end of the hostilities. Frenay remembers that in the first week of March, with Allied troops just barely cross- ing into Germany, an aide burst into his office to an- nounce breathlessly that “last night the Longuyon cen- ter received the first group of displaced persons!” By the end of that month, 36,300 nationals had returned; by the end of April, the number stood at 265,474. On June 3, 1945, France welcomed home its one millionth returnee—a tall, blond POW named Jules Caron, who was received with huge acclamation and driven home to his village in southeastern France in a limousine. By September another half a million had arrived. They re- turned by the tens of thousands each day in May and June, choking the roads and rails. Some walked, often with fellow prisoners, waving flags and singing songs. Some were flown into Paris on lumbering U.S. trans- port aircraft. But most came back the same way they had left: on trains, stuffed into crowded boxcars.
24

If ever there was a time for joyful reunions, surely the return home after liberation from Hitler’s camps would be it. And indeed there were rapturous reunions between long-separated loved ones, between fathers and children, husbands and wives, sons and parents, sisters and brothers. France for a brief moment was awash in the explosive and heartbreaking sweetness of le Retour—the return. Yet this homecoming proved more complex than anyone might have anticipated. For amidst the happiness was also longing, sadness, frus- tration, anger, alienation, and a host of complex, con- tradictory emotions that welled up in many of those who survived captivity. Many prisoners of war and deport- ees who have left us their reminiscences of this time speak of awkward silences, repressed anger, and un- bearable tension. The country to which they had come home was no longer the France of their imagination and longing, but a country that had suffered through years of war and occupation, a country devastated by fighting, a country without wealth or self-confidence. And the prisoners and deportees themselves had been transformed by their long captivity. Even for those who returned home to find their family and friends safe and sound, the most difficult task was simply returning to normal.
25

Returning French prisoners of war, for example, faced

particularly awkward questions. These 1.2 million men, taken prisoner after their embarrassing defeat in May– June 1940, were on some level failures—they had failed to fend off the invading Germans, failed then to die fighting, failed at the very least to escape from prison during their long ordeal. The POWs were also tarnished, through no fault of their own, by the associations be- tween them and the Vichy regime. As part of a cynical effort to lend legitimacy to his government, the Vichy government’s aged, collaborationist leader Marshal Henri-Philippe Pétain in 1940 had decided to make the protection of the POWs his personal concern. His gov- ernment made it clear to the German authorities that Vichy, not the Red Cross, would take responsibility for these men, provide them with food packages, reading materials, letters from home, and so on. Pétain asked all Frenchmen to identify themselves with the suffering of the prisoners, to make sacrifices on their behalf, and to devote themselves, through Vichy’s agency, to their eventual release and restoration to the nation. To this end, Pétain’s government promoted a much-maligned scheme to exchange three civilian French workers for the release of one POW. This was the much-dreaded relève, or “relief” scheme that was so unpopular that it led many young Frenchmen to flee into the forests in search of Resistance organizations to join. Yet for Pé- tain, it was meant to remind French people that they