Chanel's Riviera by Anne de Courcy

Author:Anne de Courcy
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: St. Martin's Publishing Group

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As for the internees, some 3,500 artists and intellectuals were now detained at the Camp de Milles, including writers such as William Herzog, Golo Mann and Lion Feuchtwanger, scientists such as the Nobel-Prize winner Otto Fritz Meyerhof, as well as musicians and painters such as Erich Itor Khan, Hans Bellmer, Max Ernst, Ferdinand Springer and Robert Liebknecht. More and more were piled in as the age limit was raised to sixty-five. Catsy, von Dincklage’s half-Jewish wife, was interned at Gurs, a French concentration camp in the Basses-Pyrénées.

In the camp, a former brickyard, conditions were harsh. As Marcel Block recorded, they rose at 5.30, rushed across the courtyard to queue for one of the seven latrines and the cold tap. The day was spent working – building, breaking stones on the roads, peeling vegetables. The midday meal was taken at eleven, and there was another roll call at two. Supper was at five.

The nights were almost worse. As a former inmate described the building in which they were housed: ‘It had several floors, in which the bricks had formerly been stacked on wooden shelves … so there was a huge amount of brick dust and masses of fleas. The floorboards fitted badly and there were gaps everywhere, through which anything you dropped fell onto the next floor. On my floor there was one toilet but no water. You could not get to other floors at night as finding one’s way to the latrines past rows of sleeping men packed together in the pitch dark was almost impossible so people did their business wherever they happened to be, so that urine and faeces fell to the next floor. Many had dysentery.

‘There was hardly any water and nothing with which to clean yourself. There was no paper to be had … daily newspapers were forbidden. We cleaned ourselves with grass, sand and empty cigarette packets thrown away by the guards. For the morning wash, there was only one tap, out in the open. Such were the conditions in a French internment camp even before the surrender and armistice, when they were our allies defending democratic values.’

As the German Army advanced in France, fear spread through the camp. ‘Among us were forty-two persons on Hitler’s death list and we were helpless,’ remembered Feuchtwanger a few months later. ‘We all prepared to commit suicide by taking Veronal4 if the German Army should come. We insisted that the French commander release us or take us away. Finally Hitler’s army was only sixty miles away. One writer, Walter Hasenclever, a playwright and poet, committed suicide. He died next day just as we were moved from Les Milles.’

An alternative favoured plan should the Germans arrive was to give all their remaining money to one of the guards, saying: ‘I’m going to try and escape, mind you shoot straight.’ As Arthur Koestler, another inhabitant, later wrote: ‘The camp was run with that mixture of ignominy, corruption and laissez-faire so typical of the French administration.’ Eventually the commander agreed to have them moved.

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