A Week in Paris (41 page)

‘I don’t know anything,’ she repeated stubbornly and turned her head away. On the wall of the interrogation room was a splash of something brown. She averted her eyes.

The officer picked up his cap from the table and the chair grated as he pushed it back. ‘Enough now,’ he said. ‘We’ll speak again tomorrow.’

At the door he hesitated. For a moment he was silent, as if searching for words long unused. Finally he looked at her and said, ‘My sympathies for your loss,’ then bowed his head and left the room.

He questioned her in the same room the next day and for several days after that, but he learned nothing from her. Sometimes he tried to trick her by mentioning some name or other and claiming information about them. But the names did not mean anything to her and she wondered if he was making them up. Seeing the truth in her puzzled face, he changed tack, moving back to the convent and the same old line of enquiry, but she could see that he was losing heart. After that, days passed without questioning, then it stopped altogether. Kitty lay on the mattress in her cell in a miasma of misery, thinking about Gene and praying that her daughter was safe. She felt she could not ask after Fay without drawing attention to her existence, and hoped that her daughter was still at the convent and being well looked after. Thérèse would care for her, she loved all children. Kitty had seen the way she had been with Sofie and her brothers as well as Fay.

At regular intervals, food arrived – thin grey porridge and a crust of hard bread, or a watery stew made of rotting vegetables and a lump or two of fatty meat. She did not care what it was, she had little appetite. Days passed and nights, their transition marked by the brightening or dimming of light from the window. The nights when there was no moon were of a dense blackness. Most days she was taken to exercise in a back yard with a stubby ash tree in its centre and a high wall topped with barbed wire. Here she and several dozen other women were made to walk in a wide circle round the tree. A guard would call a vicious ‘Silence!’ if anyone was caught in conversation.

One day she noticed how the leaves of the tree were edged with brown and wondered how long she had been imprisoned.

‘
Quelle est la date?
’ she breathed to a proud-faced Frenchwoman at her side. ‘
Quel jour est-il?
’

‘
Le dix-huit Septembre
,’ the woman muttered and the shout came to be silent.

18 September
. It had been on 23 August that Gene had been killed. She’d been here almost four weeks. Her throat tightened. How long would she be kept here? What would they do to her? She glanced around at the other women. Some faces were the same, but there were often new ones and others she no longer saw. This made her wonder about the mornings when she was woken by the sound of gunfire. There was one girl whose eyes were crazed with pain: what had been done to her? Kitty pushed these dark thoughts from her mind. She would think only of Fay and try to keep going, praying that her daughter was safe.

On the morning of 24 September, after she’d eaten the sludgy paste that was breakfast, a female warder thrust her head round the door and told her sharply to collect up her possessions. ‘
Mach schnell!
Hurry!’

‘Where am I going?’ she asked, not daring to hope, but the woman merely repeated that Kitty should hurry. She glanced about. She’d been given some prison clothes but didn’t have much else. They’d taken away most of the contents of her handbag. She bundled everything up in the jacket she’d arrived in and followed the warder.

‘Am I being released? Tell me,’ she pleaded as she was led downstairs, to be answered only by a grim glance. Perhaps the woman did not speak English.

In the entrance hall her purse and keys and wedding ring were returned to her by the officer on the desk and her hopes began to rise. ‘Are you letting me go?’ she asked him, but he did not even meet her eye. He went and unlocked the front door and gestured to her to go through. ‘Goodbye,’ he said, in English and she found herself outside on the steps blinking in the sunshine. The door closed behind her with a final sound.

She was free! But there was no time to feel relief, for at the bottom of the steps a soldier was waiting. ‘
Kommen Sie mit mir
,’ he said, and ignoring her protests, escorted her across the street to where a large, covered, military truck was waiting, its engine running. As he helped her into the back she saw with astonishment that it was already full of women. He closed the doors and after a moment the truck lurched into movement.

The other women were Americans, she quickly discovered; she was the only Englishwoman, there by virtue of her marriage certificate. Since they’d all been collected from their homes, they’d been able to bring luggage and she’d had to clamber across their suitcases with her modest bundle to find a seat. She recognized one or two. Sitting next to her was the wife of a French doctor at the American Hospital whose name she thought was Sarah; another was a middle-aged woman she’d seen at the library sometimes. Although nobody had any idea where they were going, they were putting on a cheerful face, and despite her profound disappointment that she wasn’t free, Kitty felt comforted to be among them. For their part, they regarded her with open curiosity. She knew she’d lost a bit of weight, but now she realized she must look dreadful. She answered their questions as simply as she could and could hardly bear the warmth of their sympathy, which made her want to cry. Beside her, Sarah, who must have already known about Gene, gently squeezed her arm.

The truck wound its way through Paris, stopping at one house after another to collect more American women, and now the word ‘interned’ was being whispered and there was much speculation about where. Not Germany, it was to be hoped. Kitty was in a panic at being taken further away from Fay. Was there nothing she could do? ‘I’m worried about my daughter,’ she told Sarah, who nodded. Her two were with her husband. ‘I think Fay must be with the nuns,’ Kitty said. Sarah didn’t know.

‘I’m sure she must be safe,’ Sarah said. ‘Perhaps we won’t be gone for long. My husband will get me out soon. They’ll see that it’s a mistake.’

But there’s no one to argue my case, Kitty thought sadly. No one at all. She didn’t think anyone at the convent would take up the matter with the authorities. Their bravery was of a different kind, the kind that quietly endures.

And now the truck was speeding along a road where the sound of city traffic was left behind. Through chinks in the tarpaulin she glimpsed trees and expanses of water. When eventually they stopped and the soldier ordered them out, she knew at once where they were. It was the Bois de Boulogne, in peacetime a busy public park which she’d sometimes visited with Gene, but today it was bleak and empty. The truck had deposited them at the door of the Jardin d’Acclimatation, home to the city’s zoo. As they were hurried into the glass-enclosed structure and past rows of empty cages, Kitty remembered how it had been before the war. She’d seen giraffes and a bad-tempered elephant, deer and darting fish in the aquarium. Where had the animals been taken, she wondered, or had they been destroyed? She was aghast when one of the soldiers with them stopped and unlocked a large cage then ordered the protesting women inside. There were many already there. It was, she remembered, the monkey house. It had been cleaned, but there was still a whiff of its previous inhabitants. Now they were the animals, to be fed and stared at by their captors.

The women were kept there for several days, sleeping in makeshift dormitories. More arrived each day until there were several hundred of them, far too many for the number of beds. When it rained, water dripped from the roof onto their faces. Some quickly became ill. At night, Kitty heard some crying themselves to sleep. Others walked up and down the aisles, unable to settle. The braver amongst them taunted the German soldiers who circulated with flashlights, desperately trying to count them all. Kitty lay curled up on her cot wearing all the clothes she possessed against the cold, quietly thinking about Gene and Fay.

The wide assortment of women astonished her. There were nuns, artists, French brides of American soldiers from the Great War, prostitutes, a dancer or two, a bookseller, various women wearing expensive clothes and jewellery, the wives of officials and Vichy politicians. There was one in particular, an older woman with silvery white hair and a New York accent, who tested everyone’s patience by complaining vociferously about everything being ‘not what she was used to’ until one of the dancers told her to ‘stow it’.

Although more women arrived, a few were also released – on grounds, it seemed, of age or ill health. Eventually this included the silver-haired woman, which was a great relief to everyone. Kitty decided to approach the harassed official charged with organizing these releases, and who she’d heard speak English. ‘I have a young child,’ she told him.

He stared at her for a moment. ‘What is your name?’ he asked, and when he found it on the list, read something handwritten by it and shook his head. ‘There are many in your position,’ he said, dismissing her. She was curious to know what he’d read. Whatever it was, it had informed his answer. She turned away, not knowing what to do. Later she begged some writing materials from Sarah and penned a short letter to the Reverend Mother explaining what had happened to her and asking after Fay.

On the fourth morning, most of the women were taken from the monkey house to buses waiting outside the zoo. By this time, there were crowds gathered, of friends and relatives clamouring to see their loved ones, and more soldiers had been brought in to prevent them surging forwards and impeding operations. ‘Where are we going?’ the women asked repeatedly, but the soldiers did not appear to know. After each bus was loaded up it departed, to the great distress of the onlookers. Gauging that the driver of hers was French, Kitty took care to sit near the front and on the journey asked if he’d post her letter. ‘It’s just to let my daughter’s carers know that I’m well,’ she assured him, and when he agreed, slipped him the envelope and a coin for a stamp.

The bus took them out of Paris to a remote railway station where a train of shabby third-class carriages awaited. The compartments the women were packed into were filthy. They still didn’t know their destination. The doors were sealed and the train travelled east. Again, there were rumours that they were being taken to Germany and Kitty’s fear grew.

They travelled all day and for most of the following night, with a tiny packed lunch to sustain them and nothing to drink. At Nancy the train was held up by an Allied bombing raid, but only the German soldiers were allowed to leave the train and seek shelter. The women clutched each other in terror as bombs exploded in the darkness around. When the planes had passed, the soldiers returned and the journey continued. In the morning the train arrived at Vittel station and everyone was ordered to disembark. It was blessedly well short of the German border.

After the grim prison in Paris and her wild imaginings of what might await Kitty in Germany, Frontstalag 194, the internment camp near Vittel, came as something of a relief. The complex itself was extraordinary. At some time during the nineteenth century the village had been turned into a luxurious holiday resort, and the Nazis had created the camp by fencing off some of the grand hotels, which were grouped together in a lovely park. Seeing it for the first time, full of Englishwomen, who hung out of the hotel windows and cheered to welcome the American newcomers, it was only the barbed wire on the surrounding fences and the billowing Nazi flags everywhere that indicated to Kitty that this was a prison. She learned soon afterwards that the Germans were using Vittel as a show-camp, to convince the international community that they were abiding by international law and treating innocent British and American internees well. First impressions of pampering though, were quickly dispersed: everyone’s luggage was thoroughly searched and articles believed to be compromising confiscated. These included paper and envelopes, torches, which might be used to signal to the Allied enemy, and any books deemed to be suspicious.

Their accommodation not yet being ready, they had to crowd into rooms already occupied. Kitty and Sarah managed to room together, with two English girls their own age, who were at first a little disgruntled to have to share their grandiose surroundings. Their first-floor suite was spacious with a balcony overlooking the park and with a view of the valley of the Vosges Mountains beyond. There were gloriously high ceilings, proper beds and, joy of joys, a private bathroom. Here Kitty had finally to confront her appearance in a mirror. It was a shock. Her face looked grey and wasted, her eyes sunken in their sockets. This was the legacy of the weeks of her imprisonment by the Gestapo.

Given generous rations of food, which they cooked in their room, and lots of fresh air, she began to look better. She managed to buy a few clothes from other inmates, with the little money she had with her, and necessities such as a toothbrush. Everybody hoped the next consignment of Red Cross parcels wouldn’t be long in coming. She was amazed at the range of activities on offer in the camp. Much was organized by other Englishwomen but there were also tennis courts and a bowling green, and in one hotel a hall with a stage and even a grand piano – not, unfortunately, perfectly in tune, as Kitty discovered when she sat in the half-darkness of the hall and played a desultory scale.

She tried to tell herself that in many ways she was lucky, considering the fate she might have suffered at the hands of the Gestapo, but still a heaviness blanketed her heart. In Vittel she was clothed and sheltered and fed, and if not treated exactly with kindness, certainly without cruelty, yet she was mourning her husband, lost in the most brutal of circumstances, and she had been parted from her only child.

The camp felt crowded. There were already over a thousand women here before Kitty and the nearly three hundred Americans arrived, but there were also some men, mainly older, released from the camp at St-Denis near Paris to join their wives. It was a few days after her arrival, while she was speaking to one of them in the food queue, an English schoolmaster who’d not wished to abandon his work when war broke out – that Kitty heard her name spoken. She looked round to see behind her a woman whose face was dear to her.