Scum of the Earth by Arthur Koestler

Author:Arthur Koestler [Arthur Koestler]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
ISBN: 9781906011918
Publisher: Eland Publishing
Published: 2012-03-12T04:00:00+00:00

XIV

Our chief pre-occupation, pastime, and obsession was, of course, the weighing of our chances of release. In fact, there seemed no hope at all. For the Austrians and Germans in ‘normal camps’ a sort of Advisory Committee1 had been instituted and a considerable proportion of them was released. But Vernet seemed surrounded by an iron curtain. Its inmates were the outcasts amongst the internees, pariahs, untouchables.

Our friends and relations in Paris wrote despairing letters. For weeks on end they had not even been able to discover which authority they should approach on our behalf. The Préfecture de Police alleged it was the Sûreté Nationale, the Sûreté alleged it was the ‘Military Authorities’; the Military Authorities, if one succeeded in approaching them, sent one back to the Préfecture. The French administration was in those days already in a state of disintegration; a few months later it was to collapse in a cloud of dust.

While I was still in the coal cellar of the Préfecture, David Scott, Paris correspondent of the News Chronicle, began to make inquiries about the reasons for my arrest. He approached a responsible official at police headquarters, who looked up my file. ‘Monsieur K. has been interned because he is a German national,’ said the official. ‘He is not,’ said Scott. ‘He is a Hungarian.’ ‘That’s what you think,’ said the official with a superior smile. ‘Have you seen his passport?’ Of course, Scott had not seen it—one does not as a rule ask one’s acquaintances for their passports. And, even had he asked me for it, I could not have produced it at that moment, as the passport in question, issued by the Hungarian Legation in London, was to be found in the file on the official’s table.

It was plain sabotage and it was the same in all other government departments. The war had at last provided the bureaucracy with an outlet for their traditional xenophobia; but in our case there was an additional motive involved. The bureaucracy was pro-Bonnet and pro-Munich and, although not consciously pro-Hitler, it had to all intents and purposes a Fascist outlook. They hated the war and they hated all the refugee warmongers, who in their opinion had dragged peaceful France into this ordeal.

The German radio in its French broadcasts efficiently exploited this feeling. ‘The French people do not want to fight; they are the unconscious tools of British Imperialists, refugees and Jews,’ psalmodized Radio Stuttgart; and in the murky cabinets of the French ministries an inaudible chorus sighed an inaudible ‘Amen.’

Echoes of Radio Stuttgart’s famous Thursday talks reached even our camp. Newcomers from Paris transmitted to us Goebbels’ ironic congratulations on our cordial reception in the Land of Freedom. Voelkischer Beobachter, the official Nazi organ, published a list of anti-Nazi authors interned in France, asking them whether they still clung to the blessings of democracy. It was cheap irony, but it cut to the quick; it hurt and stung and burnt.

Fainter echoes also reached us of the campaign which the British and American Press had started against the scandal of the French camps.

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