Rosie's War (18 page)

The guard finally arrived to let us into our room. We bounced on the beds and opened the big wardrobes with cries of delight. There was a bathroom just along the corridor with taps that worked. Luxury indeed!

PART THREE

Breaking Free

MAY – NOVEMBER 1941

CHAPTER TEN

Vittel: The Model Camp

F
or the second time we seemed to have been moved to our prison camp in a hurry. Food was scarce for a while until the Red Cross and our families caught up with us and the all-important parcels began to arrive. It didn’t seem that the authorities had even thought about security, as there were no physical restrictions around the complex of hotels. So, for the first few days we were not allowed out of our building until the German soldiers had installed barricades and barbed wire around the grounds. After that we were able to move about quite freely within the compound, which stretched for a number of acres. But we were not, of course, allowed into the town of Vittel itself.

It would be difficult to imagine two POW camps more dissimilar than Besançon and Vittel. To picture the former, just think of the numerous postwar films about Colditz and the like: dour surroundings, large courtyards, harsh conditions, constant surveillance and the continual presence of lice and other bugs. Vittel, on the other hand, was almost luxurious. We found that there were a number of untended but perfectly adequate tennis courts, albeit without nets. Coming from the bleak, cinder courtyard of Besançon, we were now in the middle of a landscaped park complete with a small pond and swans (this being France, we weren’t allowed to walk on the grass). The rules on parcels, food and jewellery were quite relaxed. Most of us had small rooms which we shared with a few others. There were baths on our floor, although the hot water was erratic and limited. Most importantly, there was proper sanitation at last.

We were constantly reminded, however, that this was a gilded cage: it was a prison camp. The hotels had been closed for a year or so and the carpets and curtains remained mothballed. Everywhere was very crowded and noisy; the army boots that many of us had been given at Besançon had wooden soles that created a constant clatter. It was bitterly cold during the first few weeks of that spring until the weather improved. The heating wasn’t fired up until the autumn.

It soon became clear to us that Vittel was being used by the Germans as a propaganda camp: a model internment area to show the world that the horror stories and violence attributed to German soldiery were untrue. Hence the newsreel cameras at our arrival. Visiting groups of German VIPs were shown around the spacious grounds and we began to feel like show puppets. One of my friends, Madeleine White, complained many years later that people after the war would dismiss her imprisonment with a shrug, saying, ‘Oh, tu étais à Vittel, c’était un paradis.’ Yes, it was better than Besançon but as the war went on the nature of the camp changed. It became a staging post for Jews going to death camps in Eastern Europe.

In the early weeks at Besançon there had been a laxity of discipline. Contact with the French prisoners had been easy and frequent. We were able to purchase wine and food through them. It was very different in Vittel. The French male prisoners of war had been moved with us, again to act as general handymen and labourers around the camp. But now they and the French doctors were located in quite separate quarters and we hardly ever saw them.

We also had little contact with the German guards. Indeed, the grounds themselves were so large that we rarely seemed to encounter them. They were ungainly men in their poor quality uniforms, thick dirty boots, all-enveloping helmets and army belts with ‘
Gott Mit Uns
’ (God With Us) stamped on the buckle. Most of them were very second-rate soldiers; after all, guard duty in a camp such as ours was not for the elite of the army. They lived in an enormous building in the park which we nicknamed the Villa des Fées or Fairies’ House.

As at Besançon, Frida managed to spend hours talking to them, trying to find out what ordinary German soldiers thought about the war. Most were imbued with Goebbels’s Nazi propaganda and ignorant of everything else. Only occasionally would she come across one who had some glimmerings of doubt and who understood that there might be propaganda on both sides. Such soldiers genuinely did want to hear about life in England.

Like most of the other inmates, I had little to do with the guards. Only a few were approachable. Some had been separated from their families for years and they would sadly show us photographs of young women holding babies. But most were pretty arrogant. When war was declared on the Soviet Union in the summer of 1941, they accepted Hitler’s change of policy towards Stalin without question. They were cock-a-hoop and would often goad us by saying that the campaign in the east would be over in a few weeks. Then it will be England’s turn, they would add. ‘Our Fuhrer knows what he is doing,’ was their constant refrain. It was only as the first reports came through of Soviet resistance in the autumn that these men became less enthusiastic about being transferred to the Eastern Front. I was told by Shula after the war that some soldiers would be weeping and drunk as they left for the front.

The Vittel camp was portrayed in a film called
Two Thousand Women
, made towards the end of the war by Frank Launder. It had a star-studded cast that included Phyllis Calvert, Dulcie Gray, Patricia Roc and Flora Robson. The last portrayed an uppity English lady who arrived with a lady’s maid; she was to be accused of espionage and sent off to Germany. The first two actresses played the heroines Rosemary and Freda (of course!) It was all pretty silly stuff, with Rosemary at one point sitting up in bed in a negligée to find an RAF man hiding in her room. A discreet love affair starts between them. He evades detection by dressing up in voluminous washerwoman clothes like Toad from
The Wind in the Willows
and finally makes his escape dressed as a German officer.

I watched this film at a cinema in London’s West End at the time it opened, when the memory of my imprisonment was vivid and fresh. I found it ridiculous and insulting. I saw it again over a half a century later on afternoon British television. This time I was struck by how well the film portrayed the class divisions that soon appeared. You might see a woman in a hat, white gloves, smart dress and high-heeled shoes chatting to another internee similarly dressed. Yet next to them would be a woman dressed in boots and a First World War army uniform or perhaps a dress made from mattress covers where the dye was already fading in patches. The regular visits of a hairdresser from the town made no difference to me, but to many of the older women it meant elaborate, waved hair and the reappearance of colour. I described the camp in a letter to my sister as a ‘mixture of Mayfair with artiness and heartiness’. It was this resurgence of class distinctions that gave our new quarters a sour taste. Bridge parties flourished and those who didn’t play would gossip alongside the tables. It might have been any afternoon in Bournemouth! Frida gave a memorable description in a letter home:

Life’s a monotonous but not unpleasant round, a sort of island of rest-curing, reading, tennis, music and it’s sometimes difficult to believe that the tempestuous world outside exists … There are crowds of bores here …

The class divisions were largely as a result of our softer surroundings. There was much more leniency here on parcels. Gone was what seemed the revolutionary boldness shown in those terrible early days of Besançon, when the camp had been severely stricken with dysentery. Even recently we had shown fighting spirit with the insensitive de-lousing plan. At Vittel, however, we felt almost deflated now that the struggle was apparently over. Although we didn’t know it at the time, perhaps we were experiencing the same flat feeling that was to be felt in Britain after the Blitz by those who looked back to that time of camaraderie when everyone had pulled together.

Some of us, nevertheless, still kept up over the coming months a barrage of complaints: over the blatant disappearance of our Red Cross parcels (a constant theme in my letters home), the haphazard censorship of books sent to us and the indifferent quality of the food, even though on this last point Christine and I agreed that it was now just about on par with boarding school fare.

To the dismay of our room, we found that most people seemed to be settling down quite happily for what could be an indefinite period of confinement. They wanted no more trouble. They acquiesced in the break-up of the elected Prisoners Committee and did not query the new appointments made by the Kommandant. He now controlled the unelected British representatives who replaced the Schwesters and who were accountable to him for the smooth running of their particular floors. They all seemed to me to be bossy, middle-aged types. They wore armbands and looked pleased to be helping the authorities (in return, of course, for special privileges). Within a few weeks they had reported on three prisoners who were planning to escape.

We suspected that these women wrote at least some of the unsigned letters that the Kommandant began to receive. Their missives complained of other internees’ behaviour. These anonymous writers were the scourges of the place: embittered, jealous and frustrated, they would see themselves as part of a crusade to give the least trouble to the Germans and to hound the rest of us.

With the loss of any community spirit in the camp, I began to look much more not only to my close friends near by but also to my family and friends at home. Like all prisoners of war, I eagerly awaited letters. Red Cross telegrams were often terribly delayed and could say little other than banalities. Yet they provided a wonderfully reassuring lifeline that could be read day after day. Typical was a telegram sent by my father on 18 June:

ALL WELL HERE ANXIOUS TO RECEIVE YOUR NEWS. FONDEST LOVE WE MISS YOU MORE THAN EVER. DADDY AND MUMMY.

My reply to this was (and I can’t work out why I was allowed so many words):

DON’T BE ANXIOUS ABOUT ME. VERY WELL AND FLOURISHING. RECEIVE YOUR LETTERS REGULARLY. PLENTY OF NOURISHMENT, MUSIC,TENNIS, FILMS, BOOKS AND RAIN. FONDEST LOVE PAT.

Our families would scrimp and save to send us food, money and clothes at a time when they themselves were cut to the bone. My mother raided my wardrobe at home. I was delighted to find waiting for me one morning a parcel of underwear. At last I could abandon my dirty grey outfit! My parents also sent a large amount of my pre-war poetry collection. Unfortunately this arrived the day before I escaped from the camp and I had to leave it all behind.

Such a lifeline did not exist for all internees. The elderly spinsters who had kept themselves to themselves all their lives, for example, were now cruelly forgotten in the excited morning rush for a precious sign of communication by letter or parcel. We in our high spirits and selfish youth found these women boring and uninteresting.

Their isolation was brought home to me as I sat at lunch one day. A money order from Bobby had arrived. I was in a great mood, discussing with Shula and Olga what we could buy with the money on the camp black market. As usual, food was at the top of my priorities! Succulent dishes were by now being made and sold by many internees and I was determined to have some. It would be better than the dirty-brown soup and the stone-hard bread in front of us. The elderly lady sitting next to me, a Miss Walker, put her bony hand on mine.

‘You’re blessed to have such good family and friends, Miss Say,’ she said simply with a sweet smile.

She was genuinely pleased for me. Yet she was all alone in the world. I knew this because she had told me just a few days before that she had spent her life looking after other people’s children as a governess. Not only was she alone in the world but, like many of the older women, she spoke very little French which was the common language of the different nationalities in the camp. I felt ashamed of my self-centredness. I resolved later that day that the least I could do would be to ensure through a friend that some of my possessions went to her if I ever managed to escape.

Money from home could also be used to buy toilet necessities. In the summer a special concession was given to two salesmen who were allowed to distribute toiletries and sewing things. They came every couple of weeks and dashed all over the place scattering talcum powder, soap, flannels and sanitary towels in their wake. Of course, most of these articles were of the ersatz version; toothpaste, for example, seemed to come from a lump of mushed fish gills. We didn’t mind. Anyway, it was pleasant to chat to this pair of active little men, especially as we missed the company of the French doctors and the male prisoners. It was also an opportunity to glean some information about the outside world.