Paris after the Liberation 1944-1949

learned that Bessie de Mauduit had managed to look so elegant in her camp uniformbecause a forewoman from Schiaparelli, a fellow prisoner, had refashioned it for her.
    The resistants survived best in the long run, while ‘
kapos
’ and collaborators – with what might be seen retrospectively as moral justice – had the lowest survival rate. Those who had tried to obliterate their own individuality in an attempt to make themselves invisible to
kapos
or SS guards may have survived better in the short term; but turning off a psychological switch to become an apathetic automaton – they were known as ‘musulmans’ in the camps – made it almost impossible to recover afterwards. Altogether 6,000 deportees died soon after their return, of whom ‘musulmans’ made up a significant proportion.
    The difficulty of returning to their old lives was common to all. They were unable to sleep in a soft bed. They suffered from nightmares and a lack of confidence. Worst of all, in a way, was the disappointment in homecoming: their families found it very hard to cope with their depressions, caused largely by survivor guilt. ‘Joy did not come,’ wrote Daix, ‘because we had brought too many dead back with us.’
    Their whole relationship with the normal world had been completely distorted by their recent submersion in the nightmare of the ‘
univers concentrationnaire
’. Charles Spitz, a
résistant-déporté
who had worked in the Dora tunnel, found that the habits of the prison camp died hard. Two months after his return to Paris, his wife suggested they go and have dinner in a restaurant. ‘She had bought me the whole panoply of civilized man, including a wallet and purse. But, without her knowledge, I still kept in my pocket a little wooden box which a comrade from Dora had made for me. It contained some bits of string, pins, and other treasures which were precious in the camp… When it came to pay the bill, to everybody’s stupefaction, I automatically opened my box and emptied its contents on the table.’
    *
    The prisoners of war were processed at the Rex and Gaumont cinemas. One prisoner, just arrived from Germany, when asked where his home was in France, replied that he was from Oradour. The person in charge of interviewing himfainted, unable to tell himthat the village and almost all its inhabitants had been destroyed by the SS Das Reich Division.
    There were many tragedies awaiting them, both great and small. In a number of cases, a prisoner reached his apartment to be told by a neighbour that his wife had gone to live with another man. One arrived home to find a child of whose existence he had never been told. His wife was not there, having slipped out to the shops. The man’s jealousy exploded after five years of prison camp and he killed the child. He then went off to surrender to the police. But the child was not his wife’s by another man. She had just been acting as a child-minder, to earn a little money.
    Special Operations Executive, whose captured agents had been sent to concentration camps, devoted great efforts to finding them in the crowds at the Gare d’Orsay. Teams of FANYs (the young women of the First Aid Nursing Yeomanry attached to SOE) worked in relays trying to spot survivors who had changed almost out of all recognition. The task was so distressing that one or two of them had nervous breakdowns.
    SOE had already set up a base in Paris by taking over the Hotel Cecil in the rue Lauriston, and was doing all it could to help its agents, their families and those who had assisted in other ways, with food from US army bulk ration packs. This had to done discreetly, because it was strictly against regulations. They were all invited to eat at the Cecil, then encouraged to take away as much as they could afterwards.
    Apart from its own refugees, France found itself responsible for over 100,000 displaced persons of forty-seven nationalities by July 1945. They included 30,000 Russians, of whom 11,800 were prisoners of war, 31,500 Poles and 24,000 Yugoslavs.
    Since long before the First World War, Paris had been the haven for refugees from all over Europe, fleeing autocracy, pogroms and violent nationalism. Bolshevismand then fascismin all its forms vastly increased the flow. Since 1900 foreign communities had swelled in Paris, with Armenians escaping the Turkish massacres; White Russians escaping theRevolution and civil war; and Poles, mainly Jewish, fleeing Piłsudski’s regime. Political