soldiers.’
‘Irregulars. That’s why we’re here and not in a proper PoW camp. Back in London once I heard that the girl who landed with me on my first drop by Lysander – she got captured and taken to some women’s camp called Ravensbrück. They heard nothing more. The Red Cross doesn’t function there.’
‘Are you saying they killed her?’
‘I think so.’
That night at roll call, the SS officer asked if anyone spoke French, and, without thinking, Geoffrey raised his arm. No sooner had he stepped forward and been pushed at rifle point towards the administrative buildings near the camp entrance than he saw that he had made a mistake. What had he been thinking? A better job, some interpreter’s office work, an end to ditch-digging and beating … The collaborator’s comfort? There was no such thing as ‘better’ in this place; there were only faster or slower roads to the same end. The smile on the face of the SS guard who accompanied him to the office was that of a man who knows but will not tell.
Geoffrey was given a new ‘Special Unit’ uniform with thicker stripes and told to wait. It was past midnight when they heard the distant sound of a train approaching through the pine forest. All trains sound the same in the night, thought Geoffrey: forlorn – and for a moment, a line from a Charles Trenet song sounded in his head. The rails rattled as the clanking wagons came closer; there was the outline of smoke and steam against the moonlit clouds, then the shape of the locomotive nosing through the night, slowing as it neared the terminal point, until the train of twenty wagons came juddering to a halt beside the platform and the engine let out a final gasp of steam. For a moment in the night all was silent.
Then the sides of the cattle trucks were unlocked and wrenched to one side, squealing on their metal runners, by willing striped prisoners of the Special Unit of which Geoffrey was now part. Inside there were no cattle or horses, but hundreds of people – children, women, men, old, young, jumping or falling down on to the platform, eager to leave behind the excrement and the dead bodies in the trucks. With an Alsatian dog snarling at his heels, Geoffrey urged and encouraged the people to dismount. They were French. ‘
Descendez. Vite. Messieursdames! Vite, s’il vous plaît
.’ How pathetic it was, he thought, that he could only dignify his part in what was happening by saying ‘please’. The French so loved their please and thank you and monsieur, madame; his mother and her Limoges family would be proud of him.
The members of the Special Unit pushed the people into lines while the SS officers screamed at them to hurry. ‘
Les hommes à droite. Les femmes et les enfants à gauche
,’ Geoffrey called out, translating the German order. The prisoners’ suitcases, bags and in some cases mere bundles of belongings were ripped from their hands and taken to large piles at the end of the platform, where other prisoners, many of them women, emerged from the darkness and took them swiftly back inside a building, like mice taking cheese through a hole in the wainscot. The new arrivals were haggard and startled, yet many still looked hopeful; there were men in good coats with yellow stars stitched to the lapels, women with neat dresses and hair they had managed to keep tidy through the journey from the west. Some of them held the hands of children purposefully to them; others were already like beggars, vagrants, living on the last scraps of energy; they looked to Geoffrey as though they would welcome any development that would let them rest. The majority, though, were stoical; they seemed hopeful, despite the dogs, the whips and the screaming, that some natural justice would prevail; Geoffrey saw them looking towards their future home, its strong brick buildings, its orderly air, with something like optimism.
The mothers and children came forward first. They were pushed and piled on to the backs of
‘Irregulars. That’s why we’re here and not in a proper PoW camp. Back in London once I heard that the girl who landed with me on my first drop by Lysander – she got captured and taken to some women’s camp called Ravensbrück. They heard nothing more. The Red Cross doesn’t function there.’
‘Are you saying they killed her?’
‘I think so.’
That night at roll call, the SS officer asked if anyone spoke French, and, without thinking, Geoffrey raised his arm. No sooner had he stepped forward and been pushed at rifle point towards the administrative buildings near the camp entrance than he saw that he had made a mistake. What had he been thinking? A better job, some interpreter’s office work, an end to ditch-digging and beating … The collaborator’s comfort? There was no such thing as ‘better’ in this place; there were only faster or slower roads to the same end. The smile on the face of the SS guard who accompanied him to the office was that of a man who knows but will not tell.
Geoffrey was given a new ‘Special Unit’ uniform with thicker stripes and told to wait. It was past midnight when they heard the distant sound of a train approaching through the pine forest. All trains sound the same in the night, thought Geoffrey: forlorn – and for a moment, a line from a Charles Trenet song sounded in his head. The rails rattled as the clanking wagons came closer; there was the outline of smoke and steam against the moonlit clouds, then the shape of the locomotive nosing through the night, slowing as it neared the terminal point, until the train of twenty wagons came juddering to a halt beside the platform and the engine let out a final gasp of steam. For a moment in the night all was silent.
Then the sides of the cattle trucks were unlocked and wrenched to one side, squealing on their metal runners, by willing striped prisoners of the Special Unit of which Geoffrey was now part. Inside there were no cattle or horses, but hundreds of people – children, women, men, old, young, jumping or falling down on to the platform, eager to leave behind the excrement and the dead bodies in the trucks. With an Alsatian dog snarling at his heels, Geoffrey urged and encouraged the people to dismount. They were French. ‘
Descendez. Vite. Messieursdames! Vite, s’il vous plaît
.’ How pathetic it was, he thought, that he could only dignify his part in what was happening by saying ‘please’. The French so loved their please and thank you and monsieur, madame; his mother and her Limoges family would be proud of him.
The members of the Special Unit pushed the people into lines while the SS officers screamed at them to hurry. ‘
Les hommes à droite. Les femmes et les enfants à gauche
,’ Geoffrey called out, translating the German order. The prisoners’ suitcases, bags and in some cases mere bundles of belongings were ripped from their hands and taken to large piles at the end of the platform, where other prisoners, many of them women, emerged from the darkness and took them swiftly back inside a building, like mice taking cheese through a hole in the wainscot. The new arrivals were haggard and startled, yet many still looked hopeful; there were men in good coats with yellow stars stitched to the lapels, women with neat dresses and hair they had managed to keep tidy through the journey from the west. Some of them held the hands of children purposefully to them; others were already like beggars, vagrants, living on the last scraps of energy; they looked to Geoffrey as though they would welcome any development that would let them rest. The majority, though, were stoical; they seemed hopeful, despite the dogs, the whips and the screaming, that some natural justice would prevail; Geoffrey saw them looking towards their future home, its strong brick buildings, its orderly air, with something like optimism.
The mothers and children came forward first. They were pushed and piled on to the backs of
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