Saturday - November 27, 2010

this is a book review of an englishwoman’s diary from WW2, found and published 70 yrs later

I have never copied a book review for posting in all the time I’ve been here.  And there has only been one other book I would have posted, had I known at the time how to find it.  This was brought to my attention a few hours ago, and I only had an opportunity to read it some minutes ago. I was really impressed.
After all these years, stories from the war years (WW-2) are still being discovered.

This may not be a Schindler’s List but then it doesn’t have to be.  It’s the experience of an English woman and others caught in a roundup of foreign nationals after the fall of France.  If I have one complaint with the reviewer it’s the constant use of words in another language. French. That’s done by so many authors I can only think they do it to show how well educated they are and literate and well read and ... and.  Look at me. Aren’t I superior. Even if the diarist wrote it that way, why can’t the foreign words be translated as not everyone speaks French. I think at the time it was written, it wasn’t expected to be a book 70 years on. Also, it may have been meant for immediate family and many ppl in the authors circle would probably have spoken the language.
Be all that as it may ... this is one heck of a story.  Take a look.

Frontstalag 142: The Internment Diary of an English Lady by Katherine Lack: review

Nicholas Shakespeare hails Frontstalag 142: The Internment Diary of an English Lady by Katherine Lack, a remarkable wartime story.
By Nicholas Shakespeare

This little-told story took place 70 years ago in Occupied France. Early on December 5 1940, during the coldest winter of the war, French policemen rounded up all women with British papers. The procedure did not vary: a bang on the door in the freezing darkness, often in the presence of a Gestapo officer; half an hour to pack – and no whisper of where they were going.

The arrest was conducted in the blackout, without warning and with military efficiency. Since October, the Germans had required British women still at large to sign daily at the local Commissariat; on October 16, a new decree warned that anyone sheltering a British subject must declare their presence, or be shot.
Among those civilians crammed shivering into an unheated train that day was a 59-year-old artist, Fan Twemlow, who kept a diary. Her great niece, Katherine Lack, has edited and expanded this into an account that commemorates the experiences not just of “Aunt Fan” but of several internees.

“They were a diverse group, culturally and socially, from stable boys’ wives to Indian royalty,” Lack writes. Some didn’t speak English, but had married an Englishman. Others had been trapped in France, on holiday when the Germans invaded.

There were governesses, nurses, couturiers, dancers like Margaret Kelly (founder of the Blue Belle Girls), plus 500 nuns from 90 orders. Most were rounded up in Paris and spent the day waiting at the Gare de l’Est. Rumours spread that their destination was a concentration camp in Frankfurt, and so they were relieved when the train came to a halt two days later in Besançon, in the Doubs. German soldiers marched them through the snow to a barracks where they were incarcerated for five months.

Mention les Anglaises internées today in Besançon and you will be greeted by blank faces, as I discovered in September when I gained access to the Caserne Vauban, locked up since 2006.
Not even the brigadier in charge knew about this episode, but he opened the gates because my aunt was a prisoner there too. I spent a solitary afternoon wandering through the empty bâtiments, trying to envisage the place in 1940. I wish I’d had this book to guide me.

The secrecy surrounding the initial round-up was well kept, even from the Germans who ran the barracks. They were utterly unprepared for the arrival of an estimated 3,900 English women (no exact record exists), some with screaming babies, some old and ill, all hungry and anxious and cold. The chaos and the filth were indescribable.

Aunt Fan was marshalled into a large four-storey building, one side of which was “one big rubbish heap and inside old straw mattresses in all stages of decay on the floor, old shoes, helmets and soldiers’ discarded rags, and dirt everywhere”. For “dirt”, read urine and excrement.

The women slept sometimes 40 to a room. A bugle call woke them at dawn. They had to climb down 100 concrete steps to fetch water, coal and food. Aunt Fan lacked cutlery for her first meal. “‘Get something off the rubbish heap,’ we were told – ‘any old tin or even a helmet’.” She found a mess tin without any holes, cleaned it with earth, and gulped her ersatz coffee.

Another inmate, Mabel Bayliss, wrote in an unpublished memoir: “We drank it until one day we found a mass of tousled hair at the bottom of the can. Rats were frequent, some seemed as large as rabbits. These awful creatures would tear the sacks of dried vegetables before our very eyes.” The diet blackened my aunt’s gums.

Pretty much everyone agreed with Elizabeth Hales, a 63-year-old New Zealand artist: “The worst thing in the camp is the sanitary arrangement” – 20 privies on the ground floor for nearly 4,000 women. These swiftly blocked and were closed off, forcing queues to form in the snow for the tinettes. My aunt wrote of these hazardous long sheds, each with a deep trench and planks across the holes on which to perch: “Most of the older people couldn’t cope with the straddling, so they performed on the side and everything got frozen up and one sometimes slipped and fell in.” A row of white crosses in the local cemetery marks the graves of those elderly who, in temperatures below zero, failed to scramble back out. The excrement overflowed onto the ground and it was impossible for Aunt Fan to keep her clothes clean.

Conditions improved only after news of the camp reached England. A direct threat, Lack writes, warned that unless something radical was done, German civilians interned in Britain were to be dispatched to northern Canada. In January 1941, the Red Cross sent a delegation to Frontstalag 142, as the Besançon camp was called, which included Goering’s wife.

Thereafter, prisoners received food parcels and a money allowance and were allowed to write 25-word messages home. In May, the women were moved south to the spa town of Vittel. Aunt Fan was released on her 60th birthday in December, although most remained interned until 1944.

Lack is respectful of her great aunt’s “suspiciously understated” diary, but also of her wonderful sketches. The result has the haphazard feel of a scrapbook, rather than a comprehensive history.

None the less, Frontstalag 142 is a satisfying addition to the shockingly sparse literature on Besançon. It nudges a little farther into the light a dramatic and long-overlooked story of survival, until now only glanced upon in books such as Antonia Hunt’s Little Resistance and Sofka Zinovieff’s marvellous Red Princess.

* Nicholas Shakespeare’s latest novel, Inheritance, is published by Harvill Secker
Frontstalag 142: the Internment Diary of an English Lady
by Katherine Lack

SATURDAY BOOK REVIEWS FROM THE TELEGRAPH

Posted by peiper     on 11/27/2010 at 01:42 PM   
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