by Rosemary Say
It seems most extraordinary looking back, but the whole system of communicating with friends or relatives in enemy or enemy-controlled countries operated through the good offices of Thomas Cook & Son Ltd, which was appointed by the British Government as its intermediary. One condition for letters sent to the camp that I especially liked was the instruction that no reference could be made ‘to Thos. Cook & Son, Ltd, or any of their offices’. As if our family and friends would waste their precious few words talking about Thomas Cook!
We knew very little of what was going on in the outside world. Strict censorship meant that even with the postal service working, our knowledge of news from elsewhere was still very scanty. The letters we received gave us very little idea of life in Britain. Some news would be brought in by the French prisoners and doctors who had contact with the town and (in some cases) access to Swiss radio or the BBC. But everything was rather vague and we would speculate endlessly about any rumour.
Our German captors were the only other sources of information about the outside world. They related to us with great relish news of the Blitz over Britain that winter. One particularly nasty guard would taunt us at the daily food queue that our homes had been destroyed and our families killed. Somehow such news didn’t seem real: it is difficult to believe that any place you know well is changing while you are away from it. Or perhaps that was simply a defence mechanism in the face of the German taunts.
The arrival of parcels in the New Year meant for me the two lifelines of food and books. The food parcels were crucial to our well-being and survival. The first consignment arrived from the Red Cross in February 1941. It was only after they started that my weight began to stabilize. Canada sent powdered milk and maple syrup while from Australia came corned beef. Food-rationed Britain sent jam, butter, tinned steak and kidney pudding, marmalade and cigarettes. In the little parcels hut Christine and I eagerly opened the first package from Britain. The familiar labels of Crosse & Blackwell, Peek Frean and Cooper’s marmalade brought back such strong memories of England and our local grocer’s store that tears streamed down our faces. The three German soldiers seemed embarrassed and the sergeant brusquely asked us to leave. Only a few days later did it occur to me that they might have mistaken our tears of nostalgia for those of anger at the number of parcels being pinched for their own family homes.
Book parcels were also terribly important, given that the barracks library only contained musty, old military histories. There was an odd and arbitrary system of censorship towards any books sent to us. There seemed to be no rhyme or reason to what you were allowed to keep and what was confiscated. I requested some specific books from the shelf in my bedroom at home. In the parcel that arrived the censor had refused Palgrave’s Golden Treasury and D.H. Lawrence’s Poems yet had accepted Oscar Wilde’s Picture of Dorian Gray, Henry Miller’s Tropic of Cancer and even an anthology of Russian poetry! For some reason, Dickens seemed to be regularly banned for most people. Frida had a lot of trouble over a book of Matisse and Renoir reproductions, mainly nudes. The soldiers at the parcels offices made her stand there, furious and embarrassed, while they gloated over what they seemed to think was the last word in pornography. Eventually they handed it over with a smirk and ‘Nicht gut, Fräulein’ (‘Not good, miss’).
Friends and family sustained me with their parcels. All were meticulously searched and a couple of times were even requisitioned. The ski suit from Lucile Manguin that I boasted about to my parents was a magnificent, haute couture affair in navy blue, together with matching ski boots. From Madame Izard I received food, books and money. My family in London kept me well stocked. I later found a draft of a letter from home saying that my mother was sending various items including: ‘… soap, chocolate, toothpowder, old skirts and coat. Let us know if there is anything you want.’
The queue for Red Cross parcels, sketched by Frida.
The overcrowded, constantly bickering Room 13.
Any sort of prison has a drab routine to it. I settled into mine as the weeks passed. We were woken at 7.30 a.m. and began our daily preoccupation with keeping the stove lit and our room warm. After a breakfast of bread and water we had some time to ourselves to clear up and wash and then it was work for the rest of the morning. Given that I could type and knew shorthand, I applied for a job in the Kommandant’s office. It was boring and monotonous stuff, with lots of card indexing and archiving of documents. But at least it was warm and I could try to find out what was going on and get as much of the German news as my limited knowledge of the language would allow me.
The afternoons we had for ourselves. There were numerous exercise classes which were run by an ex-PE teacher nicknamed Stanley (I never learnt her real name). She inspired plenty of volunteers and organized a whole series of matches and tournaments in volleyball, netball, rounders and folk dancing. Her classes dominated the afternoons for me. All my school life I had played tennis and netball. I loved the feeling of being physically strong and fit. I felt better in myself when I had run, stretched and jumped away the depression and grumpiness inside me. I wanted to race around the courtyard and leave the others to their interminable debating about the future of the world. I would drag Frida out into the snowy yard and make her play reels and jigs while we bounced around doing folk dances until her fingers were blue with cold.
In many ways, my daily round resembled that of the institutionalized and old-fashioned boarding school that I had only quite recently left. We had dormitories, orders, announcements, games and chapel. ‘Lights out’ was at 9 p.m. We were preoccupied with food, giggling, sex, gossip and even outings to the hospital in Besançon for the lucky ones. And there was always, of course, the desire to try to beat the system in any possible way.
Looking back, I think that my school experience literally saved me. The camp was not such a shock to me as it was to many others, as Christine and I had both realized in the first few days. Boarding school had given me a sense of detachment and almost childlike selfishness. I wasn’t even particularly bothered by the fact that (as at school) I seemed to have been marked out at an early stage as a troublemaker. Perhaps my part in the protests over the braziers for potato-peeling duties and Mendelssohn’s music had been responsible for this. The result was that I was not allowed to go to town to visit the dentist. Even the Hospital Saint-Jacques was out of bounds to me when I had bronchitis; I had to make do instead with a painful ventouse (suction device).
Others, however, found the environment of the camp extremely difficult. One lady spent most of the day sitting at the entrance to our block, quietly sobbing. Another committed suicide by jumping out of a window. Shula had always been at the centre of a close-knit family and found the emotional life of the camp very hard. She had to learn in a short space of time and under very trying conditions what I had learned over many years at school: how to be self-sufficient and to find your own physical and emotional private spaces. This need to create some sort of recognizable routine in order to cope with imprisonment was common throughout the camp. The old ladies cooking up their messes of dinner, each in their tightly secluded world of a bunk bed and part of a stove, were recreating their own little kitchens.
Some of the more public-spirited women formed a Prisoners Committee early in 1941. At first this body received a lot of abuse and snide moaning, including from our room. But within a couple of weeks elections were held for membership and after that it was well respected. It did invaluable work in seeing that everyone (and not just the strongest) had a fair turn. It kept in touch with the Kommandant and his two administrative officers, one from the Gestapo. The committee also checked that we all received our official POW allowance of 300 francs a month and often made out IOUs for those who were permanently broke.
Even the prostitutes quickly set up their own network. The round-up of British women had not been confined just to Paris. The whole of the Occupied Zone from St-Malo across to the Swiss frontier had been meticulously combed. Into this net went a shoal of girls from the b
rothels on the Dieppe coast as well as from the red-light districts of Paris, and with them the brothel-keepers.
The professional and highly organized prostitution system was something the Kommandant totally failed to uncover during his purges. Money was exchanged for favours but cigarettes were more easily accepted. A packet of cigarettes would mean two nights spent in the German quarter. Soldiers from private to officer were bribed. One particular brothel-owner from Boulogne with bright red hair and heavy make-up would sit in the courtyard and sum up the rest of us as we walked by: ‘Good legs. Could use her.’ Marie Ange, her daughter, would nod quietly in agreement.
Many women took (or returned) to religion to help them cope with their internment. There were hundreds of nuns in the camp. Divided firmly into Catholic and Protestant orders, they stood apart from the rest of us. There was one silent order of nuns and the impact of the camp on them and on some of the other closed orders was terrible. They still wore wonderful medieval cornettes: great white swan-wing constructions placed over a neat wimple wrapped tightly around the head. How they managed to keep these headdresses clean and stiff I never worked out. They would exercise in the cinder-covered courtyard like flocks of birds swooping from one side to the other.
Many of the nuns stood up extremely well to this unaccustomed life. They organized a school for the children, study circles and religious plays. They were a calming influence, giving a sense of security to many people. They were very much the carers of the camp, providing nursing and emotional support. They made many true converts as time went on. I wasn’t one of them but I could readily understand the importance for many people of the blessings bestowed by these holy women.
Nuns of various religious orders, wearing their medieval cornettes, in a sketch by Frida.
My own upbringing in England had been a formally religious one. Indeed, my brother was at the time a hardworking young Anglican cleric in Croydon, where his baptism of fire had coincided with the heavy bombing of that part of London. I had been taken regularly with my family as a small girl to Holy Trinity Church in Great Portland Street. I could remember more of the long trudge past Regent’s Park than the service itself, as I would spend most of the latter under the pew seat trying to read my Tiger Tim comic.
The camp at Besançon, drawn by Frida.
Religion itself did not interest me but food did. I quickly discovered that religion could mean extra supplies. The Catholic catechism classes apparently entailed a present of a cake or a biscuit (presumably sent in from the town). I quickly became one of a flock of starry-eyed Catholic novices. It was only when Shula discovered what I was doing and demanded her share that I went too far, even for the nuns. At the end of the next session I went up quietly to the sister and asked if I might have some extra biscuits to sustain me as my friends were too sad to join me in prayer. I was given an extra large piece of cake. But it was accompanied by such a look that I never had the nerve to go back.
CHAPTER NINE
Doctors, Birthday and Moving Camps
Even though I was able to adapt relatively easily to camp life, I still wanted to get out. Indeed, I became increasingly obsessed by this idea as the first months slipped by. Not escaping, mind you, for this seemed to be practically impossible. But just somehow getting out.
I remember sitting on my bunk one day in March writing a letter to Madame Izard in Paris. I was at a very low point, having recently got over a bout of bronchitis. What the hell was I doing here, stuck near the Jura Mountains and surrounded by thousands of women? Especially now that I could see from my fourth-floor window the first signs of spring in the countryside.
In a mean-spirited way, I also felt depressed by the fact that so many women were leaving the camp on a daily basis. Many were British Commonwealth citizens who were being repatriated on the grounds (so I had heard) that their countries had not interned Germans. Ronka, the Nigerian girl from our room, had recently left. Officially the prisoners eligible for release were women over sixty, those with children under sixteen or with husbands over sixty-five. But it seemed that many sick women were being sent home as well. There were about four thousand of us interned in the early days; by the spring perhaps half of these had been released.
I joked in the letter to Madame Izard that the only hope for me in being able to leave Besançon was a chronic illness of some sort that could put me in the next group for release. As I wrote it occurred to me that I might very well be able to engineer just such an illness. I had heard a rumour that soap increased your heartbeat. So why not take an overdose? Would that work? It was worth a try. At least I might get a few days in the infirmary away from the bugs.
The infirmary was staffed by some very suave French POW doctors who had always remained carefully distanced and detached from all of us. They were the heart-throbs of the camp. Much too canny to get into trouble with the Germans by fraternizing openly with the internees, they realized (quite rightly) that it was preferable to be interned in Besançon than in a male POW camp. I had always thought them very big-headed and pompous, fancying themselves in their white coats. Their doctoring seemed to consist of two coloured pills, white and brown, which they handed out indiscriminately. They were, however, the ones who could recommend you being sent to the hospital in town (and thence home) if they really thought you were too ill to stay.
My plan was very crude. For the next week I collected scraps of soap in exchange for cigarettes. One afternoon I dutifully ate my entire secret hoard. Feeling extremely queasy and slightly panicked by what I had done I rushed over to Schwester Ruth.
‘I have to see a doctor. I’m ill, really ill.’
She examined me, taking my temperature and pulse, and took me quickly to the camp infirmary. ‘This English girl, Rosemary, says she is ill,’ she told the doctor on duty.
‘I feel dreadful,’ I moaned. ‘My heart’s beating so hard. I want to go home.’
By this time I wasn’t faking it. I rushed over to the basin and was violently sick. The doctor gave me what seemed to be a very cursory examination.
‘Mmmm. You are the fifth this week’, he said quietly, out of earshot of the Schwester. ‘The English are a sickly race, no? But very clean!’
I looked at him blankly and said nothing. He gave a slight smile and continued.
‘Once a rumour starts in this place, Mademoiselle, it is not just the women who get to hear of it. Luckily it hasn’t reached the ears of our Schwester, eh?’
He dismissed me and handed over a small sachet of powder, which he instructed should be dissolved in water and drunk. It made me ill for the rest of the day but by the following morning I had quite literally been purged of all traces of my soap-induced trauma. I was bitterly disappointed at the failure of my plan. I was also a bit shamefaced at having been exposed so easily. I recounted miserably to the rest of the room my total lack of success.
‘Pat, you can’t seriously have thought it would work,’ was Frida’s damning comment.
‘Why not? I was more worried that it would work too well and I was really going to be ill.’ Shula lay giggling in the corner. ‘Well, at least we know the doctors are human after all and not pill machines,’ I said. ‘Let’s invite them to the birthday party.’
My twenty-second birthday was on 30 March. I was determined to have a good time. We scrounged a gramophone and some records and bought food and wine from the French prisoners working at the shop. A parcel from Madame Izard provided some special treats. The colourful menu card, beautifully drawn by Shula, boasted untruthfully of roast chicken, plum pudding, sweets and even champagne! Olga did the cooking and entry to our room was by invitation only.
It was a wonderful party. There were about twenty of us. Christine had primed the doctors beforehand on what the drill was to be if we had a visit from the German guards and Schwester Ruth. I would hop into bed and pretend to be ill and they would appear to be looking after me. Putting one over on the authorities was to be the crowning touch to our festivities.
‘W
hat is the meaning of this, Doctor?’
The old German sergeant had appeared at the door. He was addressing one of the doctors, who was by now apparently taking my temperature and showing signs of concern.
‘We are just on our way into town and I thought we would stop by to check on Mademoiselle Say. She was in the infirmary the other day and we were concerned about her, as you well know.’ He looked at the Schwester.
She nodded her head. Authority intimidated her, as we had found in the past, and doctors seemed to possess the air of authority in abundance. He rose from my bedside and made to leave the room.
‘Eh bien, Mademoiselle. Perhaps a day or two in bed and you should be feeling fine. Bonsoir.’
And with that the doctors swanned out. The sergeant gruffly told us to keep the noise down and they left too. Amazingly, it had worked! Why I should be an object of concern when the room was full of empty bottles and glasses hadn’t seemed to occur to the Germans. The party had been cut short but we were quite happy to clear up. It was the best birthday party I have ever had.
The long, cold winter finally ended a few days after my birthday with a wonderful, warm spell. From my roof perch I watched the snow disappear from the great mountains and the colours of spring push through in the woods below. Margaret, the elegant sculptress, announced one night that with the change in the weather it was time to remind ourselves that we were still part of the female race and dress accordingly.
‘Look at you all,’ she said. ‘You seem to live in old army coats and rags.’
‘What about me?’ I said in mock outrage.
