They Shall Not Have Me

Jean Helion

• Publisher: Plutonium Press
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9781087959382
• Edition: 1
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: World War I
• Index: History

Story of a French WWII prisoner of war internment in Nazi POW camps and escape. Helion was a painter who lived in the United States and married an American. He returned to the French army at the eve of WWII and was captured in the debacle which he narrates well. He escaped in 1942, eventually returning to the US where he wrote this memoir in English.

CHAPTER 11

Life around the Kommondofuhrer

EVERY two months we received a new Kommandofuhrer, usually a sergeant, but sometimes a staff sergeant, in his late forties, having fought in the last war. He seemed to be chosen according to his military record rather than his ability or experience in any form of organization. A mason’s helper, a chauffeur, a cigar store clerk, suddenly put in charge of a battalion could make our life miserable by applying the Stalag regulations to the letter. They could make it hell, and still look right. If kind, or just indifferent and lazy, they could lighten our plight by overlooking a few of the most trying points.

The life of the camp went up and down with their temper.

* * *

UNTEROFFIZIER SCHUMANN

Unteroffizier Schumann was tall and sportive looking, from the top of his very large cap down to his chest, and there his personality seemed to change. He expanded towards a very ample waist, parked low on legs that were just a little too short. While his arms balanced impressively at each side, his legs shuffled tiny steps that did not match or keep time. The contradiction expressed itself by a coquettish bouncing of the rear, not altogether masculine.

The articulation of his neck might have been built on ball bearings, so swiftly did he move his vast face, a little empty, with no angle, and two small eyes, nestled happily in fat eyelids.

He felt no hatred for the French prisoners, and would have showed them much of his happy disposition if he had obtained from them the satisfaction he yearned for: salutes — plenty of them — from morning to evening, any time he was met; respectful salutes, complete from the dry tap of the heels to the final upward motion of the chin. He himself saluted beautifully, but for the sharp Prussian technique he substituted something mellower, a little round on the edges, so to speak. It began with condescension that melted into familiar kindness. A fifty-year-old hosiery dealer in a medium-sized city of central Germany, manners appropriate to fitting pretty legs, showed through the pride of a man put in charge of a battalion. He studied his mirror a lot. The French prisoners felt only disgust for that sort of stuff. In vain did I explain to my comrades that this old bird, a little fairy-like, was not a bad egg. They affected not to salute him, or to do it as badly as they could, and that irritated him. They cut the remaining buttons off their top coats because he wanted everyone buttoned up to the neck. He ordered those buttons replaced at once, but they reported, an hour later, that none could be found in the camp. What should they do?

His conception of a soldier’s cap was that of a fragile vase set carefully on top of the head, in a horizontal position, so that it wouldn’t fall. A prisoner’s cap is a rag that he puts anywhere above himself, between the ears. To baffle Herr Schumann, the fashion was started to wear the trench cap across the head, in a Napoleonic style, but cocked a little, with hair sticking out, like feathers from a burst pillow.

The reaction was an order to every one of the thirty-five guards to see that the caps of their charges be set correctly. There was little they could do about it. They knew from experience that bothering the prisoners in the morning, brought bad will at work, as revenge, and in the end, trouble for the guard with the overseer. So Schumann, provoked to the point of furor, went through the ranks and viciously twisted the nose of every Napoleon until it became purple. Every eye became so obviously a bullet that wanted to kill him, that he kicked three men in the seat of the pants. The whole assembly hissed, and I ran to him to say that if we had to be punished, to punish us as soldiers, not as dogs.

Compressing his paunch like a powerful bellows, he flooded the yard with imprecations, and made every sentry drive his herd out to work immediately. The ship’s captain, leaning on his bridge, sneered. The Lagerführer stuck his beard out of the kitchen, and expressed the Nazi point of view on this scandal: jail, with bread and water to everyone for a month, but Schumann was not fond of that swastika bearer, and the storm subsided into a silly quarrel between the two.

Much hurt and red in the face, he climbed up the collapsible stairs leading to the ship’s castle, retired to his cabin, and asked for the prisoner barber, whom he always used as his valet. He wanted him to inquire in the kitchen if a little porridge couldn’t be boiled for him. No perturbation affected his stomach.

He forgot the scene, but the prisoners hated him forever. A year later they still talked about the brute who twisted their noses. It had been more insulting than painful. In spite of my conviction that he would have been a better Kommandoführer than the average, my comrades did not want to pay the price that he required; and it is only as a joke that he got one single satisfaction.

Kiesgruben was the name given to a group of thirty-three prisoners used by the city to extract gravel somewhere along the Oder. They had been collected at the end of the slave market, after the masons, carpenters, and mechanics had been selected. Men of little manual value, they were intellectuals or craftsmen of delicate professions, and formed an exceptional bunch of undaunted rascals. The handles of their shovels always had a defect and broke like glass. The wagons they pushed, on narrow tracks, fell into the river, most unfortunately! They never refused to work, but were expert at producing very little while looking active. In the truck that brought them to work, they sang loudly and pretended to be very gay whenever the civilians looked at them. In the evenings, they showed their rutabagas to the Lagerführer, when the latter crossed the yard, and made starved faces.

Three personalities dominated this fine group. Morelie had the build of a weight thrower, a slow voice, and no fear in the world. He was a Socialist and spoke German well, but hated his captors so much that he had refused to replace my colleague when the latter, unable to cope with the endless responsibilities, had asked to be sent to work.

Ramon was long and thin, with something of a bird in his long nose and high pitched voice. He was a Royalist and could exasperate any Wachmann by his way of standing at attention. His heels didn’t quite meet, his hands were crooked, and his little fingers stood alone on the seam of his trousers.

Rosatier was serious and poised, with large eyes facing you like a supreme court. As a Communist, he had had much political experience and knew how to carry out a mission. Staff sergeant in the army, he took care of the Kiesgruben group and reported its needs and problems to me, together with his views on a possible solution. He despised Schumann whom Ramon wanted to whip, and Morelie to drown. Having once agreed with me that we shouldn’t allow him to believe that Frenchmen were incapable of discipline, they entered the gate, one evening, in a sensational fashion.

I was pacing the yard in the company of Herr Schumann, who, between the formalities of control of the returning firms, was describing his views of world affairs. When the Kiesgruben truck pulled up outside, the thirty-three men jumped down and, to the astonishment of everyone, Rosatier put the men in order, slowly turning the column around, making one of them advance and the other back up, and while the sentry wondered what to do about it he set himself on the side and shouted the commands:

“Repos! Garde a vous! En avant, marcher Like a platoon of candidate corporals eager to ornament their sleeves with a couple of red stripes, Morelle first and Ramon last, these men in their late thirties entered the yard. “Left, right! Left, right!” with a marvelous enthusiasm. Snap! snap! the sabots — those long boxes of soft wood, heelless and looking truly like barges — made sparks. The hands balanced together and sawed the ice of the air on each side of the column.

“Gauche, droite! left, right! section, halte!” One, two, and at three, all the heels clapped, all the hands went down, all the noses went up. Silence swept the yard, and emotion shook Unterofflzier Schumann. Rosatier advanced three steps, saluted and announced:

“Kiesgruben, thirty-three men back from work.”

Schumann set himself at attention so nobly that half a foot of his paunch transferred itself to his height. His salute was an illustration out of a manual. Having sent back his hand slowly so as to show that he was not exactly bound by the rules, he told me softly:

“Lassen sie weg treten.” I translated and turning briskly on his wooden heels, staff sergeant Rosatier dismissed his men. Each paused to salute, and ran off at full speed, to release an explosion of laughter. Meanwhile the Kommandoführer, his chest swollen with delightful pride, his head turned a little upwards, his eyes mellowed like candied fruits, was muttering:

“Schün. Wunderbar. Wonderful! These men are soldiers!”

Not yet awakened from his stupor, the forgotten sentry approached and got ready to accomplish his little act: to report. But it was a statue of disdain that faced him, with an arm stretched towards the Wachmänner barrack, and meaning:

“Ape, this way.”

* * *

He took me as witness to his most intimate life, and didn’t seem to remember that I was a prisoner. I think his only objection to me was the little care I took of my appearance. I could go to the Kommando’s storeroom and choose the best clothes available. Instead, I had replaced my torn coat of the confetti patches, with a decent but modest one, being careful not to distinguish myself from the mass of my comrades, otherwise than by my white armband. He had allowed me to replace the former interpreter by Paul, a cultured Belgian professor — a fine man and a warm patriot — always so neatly clad. His confidence in me was unlimited; and as long as he remained our Kommandoführer, I handled the accounts of the camp, with my colleague. I wrote the current mail to the Kontrollstelle and the Stalag, placed it under his nose and offered him a pen. He loved to scratch a few words, correct my mistakes or my gallicisms, and sign with a handsome flourish. To replace the thundering Jurk whom we had lost, he selected among the guards a Gefreiter (corporal) who became a strange shadow to him. His name was Asiatic, but my men nicknamed him “The Gnome.” Incapable of writing three lines that anybody else could make out, he could hand the telephone to his master and follow him, three steps behind, anywhere, like a tail. Schumann wanted everyone of his secretaries to have a secretary, and be like the top of a mountain expanding indefinitely downwards. He never referred to me otherwise than as his “Oberdolmetscher.” As super-interpreter, I had a first interpreter in the Belgian professor. Later, as was necessary for such a big camp, we had another Belgian teacher, an excellent man from the coal country, who took the title of second interpreter, and had to assist the sentries and take charge of the cleanliness of the ship.

Rather than call the camp-barber directly, Schumann sent someone for him, and the latter, busy making his boss’ bed, called one of the prisoners charged with sweeping the floors and washing the decks, to fetch the coffee from the kitchen. I wondered why one of those whose nose Schumann had twisted several times was volunteering for this, and I asked him.

“Haven’t you guessed yet?” he said. “I go to the kitchen, get the coffee, and take it to his room, but on the way I stop in the washroom and pour out one fourth of it.”

“But why do you think that makes any difference?”

“It does, all right, but not in the quantity, because I fill it up myself.”

“What?”

“With the coffee that I drank yesterday.”

The man was deadly serious. For one month he had been avenging himself and the camp for the insult of the kicks and of the twists, in his own way, without telling anyone. I have never looked at Schumann since without thinking that he buckled his belt around a chamber pot.

* * *

Schumann felt towards the telephone as one intoxicated by tobacco feels towards his pipe. He couldn’t resist picking it up and filling it with all the tones of his throat, and all the fog of his soul. He had three mistresses — chiefly I think to call them up.

“Irma? It is I. Yon know, I. Yes. I am in my office, with my Dolmetscher and my assistant. I have so much to do. . . . Are you in bed? What have you got on?” For an hour or more he waded through swamps of sticky sentimentality, seasoned with inquiries about the menu. When she would at last hang up he turned to me, sitting on his left in the narrow office and said: “That was Irma, you know; a charming person. I ought to call up the others, too, but I’m so tired. However I have to say a word to my Luischen.”

While fingering the dial, he lifted up his monstrous thigh and broke wind loudly, making this unavoidable comment:

“Nicht schön aber gesund”

Whether it was as he said, not pretty but healthy, my colleague, sitting with his back to him, got up with an angry face, clapped his heels in the direction of Herr Schumann and disappeared for ten minutes.

* * *

My re-entry permit to the United States of America had expired while I dug rutabagas out of the frozen fields around Bornzin, and I had in vain applied for renewal. The censor of the Stalag had refused to pass my letter. I had persuaded our first Kommandoführer to present my case to the Kontrollstelle and to show that, through lack of a simple formality, I would lose the right to live in the country where my wife and son resided. The reply of the major had been most clearly worded:

“A prisoner of war needs no visa.”

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