by Rosemary Say
Before I went to sleep that night it finally struck me that I was now a registered prisoner. With the perversity of human nature I had already memorized my new address: Chambre 101, Section 8, Bloc 2, Bâtiment A, Frontstalag 142, Zivil Internierunslager, Caserne Vauban, Besançon, Doubs, France.
CHAPTER SEVEN
Settling Into Besançon
Hundreds more prisoners arrived during the weeks that followed. There must have been nearly four thousand of us by Christmas. Every inch of space, including the cellars, was used as accommodation.
We counted ourselves lucky in our room. The huge hole in the ceiling at the far end meant that there were only eleven beds, even though the room was easily big enough to fit perhaps thirty. We were all young. I was installed between Shula and Christine, my new friends from the train journey. There were eight other occupants: a Mauritian girl called Rosemary whose husband was to be tortured by the Gestapo; Olga Scrieber, who was big, blonde and good-natured; Penelope Brierly, an English art teacher living in Paris who was very left wing; Margaret Heaton, an elegant English sculptress; a mother and her very small daughter who would sit for hours without saying a word; a pregnant Austrian girl who was soon to be released; and a devastatingly attractive Parisian called Marie.
It is often the most belligerent or the most self-sufficient people who cope best in prison. This was certainly the case at Besançon. Christine and I had fewer problems than many of the others in adjusting to life there. Our education at English boarding schools was to serve us well after all!
Each room had to select a chef de chambre, who would liaise with the German authorities. I proposed our ideal prefect-type, Christine, who was unanimously elected.
‘First off, we need to put together a rota for collecting food,’ she said as we huddled around the stove. ‘It’s daft for us all to go down individually and queue. Especially in this weather – we’re all freezing. Let’s choose two people who can collect each day and they can bring the soup to the rest of us.’
Queuing for food meant standing for perhaps an hour in the freezing cold. Each room was given a large, galvanized bucket to carry the soup. When full this was hard work: it would take two people to carry it across the muddy and often snowy courtyard then up four flights of icy stairs. Our hands were so blue and numb after queuing in the cold that we could hardly hold the bucket. The food was inadequate, dirty and monotonous. At midday we would get a meal of beans, swedes or potatoes stewed in greasy water and served from massive copper pots. The vegetables were often rotten or had been sprayed with sulphur. Sometimes there was an odd piece of tough, stringy meat. In the evenings we were given a spoonful of beetroot jam or ersatz cheese (a lurid and tasteless product squeezed out of a tube) to go with our bread. Diarrhoea and food poisoning were common.
Every three or four days we had to queue up to get the bread for our room. The ration was two kilos a week per person of the flat, round loaves. Two of us would take a blanket to a special store behind one of the blocks. When it was your turn you would walk up to the window and hold open the blanket to catch the bread that was thrown out. We were lucky being fit and young, as we could usually catch it before it landed in the mud. The bread was often green with mould. The date stamped on the bottom would usually show that it was at least one or two weeks old and it could only be cut with an army knife. It was made from some sort of rye flour and tasted very sour but not unpleasant to me. Most people found that it upset their digestion and a great many were made ill.
Christine had the job of waiting in line for the fuel chits. These could be exchanged for logs and coal to keep our old stove going. We soon discovered, however, that no amount of fuel could really warm the room. The winter of 1940–1 was one of the coldest in living memory. Even in the rooms that didn’t have a large hole in the ceiling, icicles would form inside the windows at night.
Repairing the hole was our immediate concern. Christine had an ingenious solution: she would get it fixed by the German guards, her accomplice being our beautiful Marie.
‘Point out the hole in the ceiling to our guard,’ she said to her. ‘After that, just simper and smile sweetly.’ Marie couldn’t understand much English, so Christine helped her by putting on a sickly smile and staring coyly up at the ceiling.
Marie was a great sport and a superb actress. She was also the sort of woman who can look like a model even in a prison camp. Having gesticulated to the guard, she just sat down on a chair by the stove and smiled beatifically. He quickly left and returned a while later with three other soldiers all laden with equipment. I watched from my bed as the four German soldiers tried desperately to repair the roof, while at the same time attempting to impress with their efficiency and asking her to meet them. Marie just sat there smiling. Once the roof was patched so that the rain didn’t actually come in, she gracefully got off the chair.
‘Je vous remercie,’ she said. ‘Mais je ne comprend pas l’allemand. Nicht verstehe.’ (‘I don’t understand.’) She shrugged her shoulders coquettishly. The men were crestfallen and left. They didn’t seem to bear a grudge, however, and still gave her special attention after that.
Christine had the measure of the German Schwester (Sister) or nurse who ran the entire floor of rooms under orders from the Kommandant of the camp. Schwester Ruth was the cartoon idea of a typical Nazi, with flaxen plaits under her cap and dressed in a grey uniform with a white collar. She was determined to make us drill for her each morning, to leave our beds in military order and to obey instructions at once.
We were equally determined not to jump to her orders. We soon found out she was frightened of the Kommandant, who would bang on his desk with his fist and shout at her, accusing her of making trouble. After one of her more ridiculous orders, Christine threatened to report her alleged persecution to the Kommandant. Schwester Ruth rapidly backed down and together we agreed a truce.
The washing facilities in the camp remained very limited, especially during our first few weeks. The bathhouse stayed out of use until after Christmas and the horse troughs in the washroom downstairs were usually full of ice. We did our best to heat pans of water on the stove in our room. But in that cold winter it was difficult to carry up enough water for cleaning yourself and washing your clothes. Water that was spilt on the steps and in the corridors would soon turn to ice, making any passage treacherous. A basic obstacle to keeping ourselves clean was that we had no soap or towels until the arrival of parcels in the New Year. One fortunate side effect of the shock of being imprisoned was that my periods stopped for many months. I wasn’t alone in this. Nearly everyone in my room experienced the same bodily reaction. Thank goodness!
Fleas, lice and other crawlies seemed to be everywhere, from the walls to the mattresses. I was totally obsessed with my own personal bug battle. It was a struggle I would never win but it dominated my life. I wrote to Madame Izard shortly after my arrival that I was terrified to go to sleep at night because of the bugs.
Everyone had a problem with bugs to a certain degree but to some of us victims it became a kind of purgatory. Each of us dealt with them in different ways. Some people scratched while others picked the little devils delicately off their blankets. Shula would take delight in hitting them with her shoe. I tore my skin to pieces. Our Schwester was unmoved. ‘Our soldiers have to face far worse,’ she said unhelpfully to me after I had yet again begged for help.
I did find a certain relief in the camp infirmary where the St Vincent de Paul nursing nuns in their swan-like white bonnets would delouse us and give out partially effective anti-lice treatment. It only worked until I went back into the dormitory and lay down on the bed. At which point it was as if all the crawlies would let out a great cry of joy, invite their friends round and start to get in some extra rations. My skin was permanently red and uncomfortable. This obsession with lice was to last long after my imprisonment. One day after the war I found myself asking a surprised shop assistant at Selfridges department store in London if the material I had chosen wa
s free of vermin!
Hot showers finally arrived just after Christmas. One morning there was an announcement over the camp tannoy that they were now available in the bathhouse. Within minutes there was a mad rush of women all determined to be at the front of the queue for the dozen or so showers available. I was there with Shula. More and more people arrived as the news spread and the crowd got increasingly impatient. There was lots of shoving and even some scuffles. Several elderly women were knocked down in the crush. The German guards hovered menacingly but seemed at a loss as to what to do when faced with several hundred desperate women armed with towels and toilet bags.
‘Now, dear lady, just tell me your name. Madam, could you wait there. You’ll get your turn. Madam! Please!’
The haughty, Slavic voice rang out above the confusion. I turned to see a striking, dark woman a few feet away from me taking down names on a piece of paper and shouting out instructions to us. Amazingly, she got the manic crowd under control in very little time. Most of us had showers that day.
I had often seen this woman from afar around the camp but had no idea who she was. Word rapidly went around that she was a Russian princess called Sofka Skipworth who was married to an RAF pilot. She took it upon herself to organize the shower rota for the whole camp from that day on. It was hard work but it had its definite perks, as I discovered years later when I read her autobiography. The two French POW shower stokers were ‘trusties’ and so were allowed to go into the town. They would come back with steak, wine and other black-market delicacies. They were great characters, especially Marcel from Provence, who had a real eye for the ladies and who could hardly believe his luck. Sofka and her female helpers were also well supplied with hot water before and after the regular bathers had had their turn. At the time I didn’t know about Sofka’s bathing kingdom or I would have been rooting for the perks like a shot! The bathhouse was the cleanest and warmest place in the camp, even if it was inadequate to cope with the number of women. The water was often turned off after a few minutes – this always seemed to happen when my head was full of soap – or only a few scalding taps would be working. At best we had a couple of showers a month.
It was at this time that a serious bout of dysentery hit the camp. Dirt was probably the main reason for the outbreak, as well as our filthy and meagre diet. Each floor had a single, hole-in-the-ground style toilet but most of these quickly got blocked and were closed. The only toilets available were the open ones in blocks of five at the four corners of the courtyard. There were twenty for nearly four thousand inmates. Dangerously ill women would have to struggle to reach them at all times of the day or night. I remember Christine and I helping an old lady from our landing down four flights of stairs several times over a couple of nights. She was exhausted, dehydrated and freezing.
Some improvements were made to the toilets as a result of the dysentery outbreak. A new set of latrines was built by the French male prisoners. First, they dug a trench. On top of this they fitted a few planks on which rough seat constructions were built, separated by half partitions. The whole thing was roofed. The open trench below the seats was full of excrement, which often overflowed and froze in the snow. The stench was disgusting and the place was swarming with rats.
Among the many rumours that constantly sped around the camp was the sad story of the old dear who fell in the trench one night and was found by a French prisoner the next morning. ‘What a death!’ a nun said to me as we queued for bread. ‘We will pray for her.’ I never found out whether or not the story was apocryphal but it was still the case that going to the loo that freezing winter was very dangerous for the elderly and ill. Many, many women – perhaps in their hundreds – died from bronchitis, flu or dysentery. The dreadful state of sanitation, living conditions and food all took their toll. I escaped the dysentery but developed bronchitis and lost about a stone in weight that winter.
In the first few weeks there were quite a few men around the camp, apart from the German guards and officials, of course. Of the British men, most were elderly with their wives. But at first there were a number of younger ones – jockeys, barkeepers, teachers and clerks. There was also a motley selection of other nationals, caught in the general round-up of enemy aliens, with several bemused Norwegians, Czechs and Dutchmen who had no idea why they had been arrested and who were soon released. Two Spanish brothers, Miguel and Juan, who were Republican refugees from their country’s civil war, worked as cobblers. A hundred or so French POWs were kept on to work in the camp. Four were doctors based at the infirmary. Many of these POWs were specialized workmen serving as plumbers, carpenters, cobblers and mechanics. Some worked in the offices and stables. In those early weeks our contacts with these French prisoners were very easy and unsupervised. They helped us in practical ways, repairing and mending the broken old bits of furniture and utensils we had been given. They were our lifelines to the town and the outside world: from them came news about the war and much needed black-market goods.
They were also the mainstay of our social life. We’d meet up during the first weeks in a makeshift bar called La Cantine. The alcohol was courtesy of the French prisoners, who would buy it in town. It was fun. Many romances started in the grimy depths of the bar. I suspect that some of these affairs were more for the goodies from the town that the men could offer than for pure love. Still, La Cantine was a diversion from the routine of camp life, with its attendant boredom and endless killing of time.
My own mild romance was not with one of these French workers but with an enormously tall Dutch lawyer called Paul. Arrested in Paris because he looked English, he had been sent to Besançon and was still there after most of the other male prisoners had left. We would sit in the bar not saying a word, given that he spoke no English or French and I spoke no Dutch or German. Much to my chagrin he was soon to leave the camp. I was teased about him because he was so tall – his nickname was Two Metres – but I really missed him when he was released.
For the first few weeks we had little personal contact with the camp authorities. Perhaps this was because we were all in a state of shock and more concerned with trying to adapt to our new lives. But clashes were inevitable. Our first real confrontation with the Kommandant came a few days before Christmas. One of the regular tasks, which everyone hated, was peeling vegetables. One freezing morning a group of us were sitting in the large and draughty outhouse. We had been there for a couple of hours, surrounded by piles of potatoes, carrots and swedes. We were supposed to be peeling them and it was an almost impossible job. They were black with frozen earth and in varying stages of decay. Our hands were frozen. It was difficult to tell if you were peeling earth, vegetable or human skin.
‘I’ve had enough,’ I said, jumping up. ‘I’m going to see the Kommandant to complain.’
‘Now wait,’ Christine said, stopping me. She was as practical as ever: ‘If you’re going to make a fuss then I’m going to hide some of these carrots first. Just what we want for tea, girls. Frozen, raw carrots. Lovely. Now you’ll be able to see all those little bed bugs in the dark, Pat.’
We quickly salted away a large pile of carrots and then struck. We called out to the Schwester that we wanted no more vegetable peeling drill. We sat there doggedly in the outhouse while she pleaded and threatened. In the end she sent for the Kommandant. He was a middle-aged soldier from the Black Forest, a giant of a man who (luckily for us) had been treated well by the French as a prisoner in the last war. He listened thoughtfully to our protests.
We must have looked a very odd sight, sitting there stubbornly on strike. We were wearing outsize army boots, some with no laces, and the light blue, poor quality overcoats worn by the French soldiers in the First World War that we had been issued by the camp authorities. Underneath we had on just about every garment we possessed.
‘Someone has to do the vegetable chores,’ he said when we had finished. ‘My men are busy enough as it is. I shall have a brazier sent over.’
‘Two,’ said Christine quickl
y. ‘We need two braziers. One for each end.’
The Kommandant looked at her and gave a slight smile, as though indulging a child. He nodded in agreement and went off, speaking quietly to one of the guards as he did. A while later, two braziers were set up, one at each end of the piles of rotting vegetables. We were certainly warmer from then on but the air in the room would get very unpleasant as there was no chimney to let the smoke escape.
We felt triumphant at our half victory. We had been at Besançon for less than a month and considered that this was a vital confrontation. Honour had been saved even though the work was no less demanding. And we had stolen some carrots! We rudely mocked the Schwester and the German guards for a couple of days, ostentatiously warming our hands on the braziers or deliberately wasting time on our chores, silly little things like that. We didn’t realize how indulged we had been. We rarely gained another concession so easily and our next clash with the Kommandant was to be much more sinister.
A few days after our brazier confrontation we decided to make more trouble. There were loudspeakers dotted around the camp playing turgid, German music, which was continually interrupted as orders were blasted out. One morning, a small group of us got together near the Kommandant’s office and began to clap and shout: ‘We want Mendelssohn. We want Mendelssohn.’ Other women quickly joined us and within a few minutes there were perhaps fifty of us chanting the composer’s name.
