Paris after the Liberation 1944-1949

gesture so dramatic that it seemed to silence his critics.

13
    The Return of Exiles
    The steady stream of exiles returning to Paris in 1944 and 1945 came from all classes and several nationalities. Many workers and their families, who had been close to starvation in the city, had sought shelter with peasant relatives. Hitching rides in different sorts of wood-burning vehicles, or on trains once the tracks were repaired, they returned with their few possessions in cardboard suitcases. Wherever possible, they brought a sack or two of flour back with them, either to sell or to keep them through the months ahead. Few took much notice of their arrival in the upheaval of the times. But the exiles whose return Parisians remembered for the rest of their lives were the
déportés
who arrived back from Germany in the spring of 1945.
    The term
déporté
was loosely used to cover three different categories of prisoner: Jewish and other racial minorities sent to extermination camps, members of the Resistance sent to concentration camps, and conscripts sent on forced labour by the Vichy government from 1943. The prisoners of war from the defeat in 1940 were treated no differently from their British, Dutch and Belgian counterparts.
    In April 1945, the advancing armies found themselves liberating one camp after another. The commanders, their attention focused on finishing the war, were unprepared to cope with the problemof feeding and caring for hundreds of thousands of civilians, many of whom were close to death. All too often, they were given ration packs and told to fend for themselves until the fighting was over.
    Relatives waiting for news in Paris found the mixture of hope andfear very hard to bear. It often produced a feverish nausea. Sleep was impossible. The novelist Marguerite Duras sat by the telephone, convinced that her husband, Robert Antelme, had been among those executed at the last moment by the SS before the Allies arrived. Whenever it rang, the caller turned out to be a friend asking: ‘Any news?’
    Even when transport was finally organized for repatriation, the process was still slow. The journey back to France could take five days. (As soon as the war ended in May, the Americans allocated the bulk of their transport aircraft to ferrying back prisoners and the whole procedure speeded up immeasurably.) Some passed through Switzerland via Geneva, where Pierre de Gaulle, the General’s brother, was consul. The depth of his sympathy was in no doubt. Pierre Daix, a young Communist who had survived Mauthausen, found himself spontaneously embraced.
    On 14 April 1945 at the Gare de Lyon, an official reception committee, which included General de Gaulle, Henri Frenay, François Mitterrand and the two Communist leaders Jacques Duclos and André Marty, waited to welcome back the first group of 288 women. * Well-wishers carried lilac blossom to present to them and women brought lipsticks and face powder to distribute. They expected the returning prisoners to look thin and tired from their experiences, but not much more. France had been partially shielded from the appalling truth. The French ministry with responsibility for prisoners, deportees and refugees had been trying to suppress information about the camps, just when General Eisenhower was calling for every available journalist to be brought in to Germany to report on their horrors. Few had imagined the reality of virtual skeletons dressed like scarecrows. ‘Their faces were grey-green with reddish brown circles round their eyes, which seemed to see but not to take in,’ wrote Janet Flanner, the American journalist. Galtier-Boissière described deportees as having ‘a greenish, waxen complexion, shrunken faces, reminiscent of those little human heads modelled by primitive tribes’. Some were too weak to remain upright, but those who could stood to attention in front of the welcoming committee and beganto sing the Marseillaise in cracked voices. Their audience was devastated.
    Such scenes were repeated many times. Louise Alcan, aged thirty-four, a survivor of Birkenau and Ravensbrück, described her own arrival: ‘Gare de l’Est. Eight in the morning. A crowd behind the barriers. We sing the Marseillaise. The people look at us and burst into tears.’
    The few French Jews who returned from the death camps aligned themselves with their compatriots. Vichy had stripped them of their nationality and handed themover to the Germans, but they were no less French for