3

ESCAPE FROM FRANCE

Pearl and Henri were forced to separate when Henri was called up for military service in 1939, the year the Nazis invaded Poland and both Great Britain and France declared war on Germany. During the eight months of uneventful tension that followed—called the Drôle de Guerre (Phony War or Silly War)—Henri and Pearl saw each other only once, when Henri was on leave in February 1940. Then, during the Battle of France, which occurred during May and June of 1940, Henri was taken prisoner by the Germans (for more about Henri’s wartime experiences, see “Henri’s Story” in the appendix, page 133), and Pearl and her family made two harrowing attempts to escape the country.

The family’s first trip—straight west from Paris to Normandy—occurred when the Germans first crossed the French border during the Battle of France, causing a panic among the civilians. The French government had not expected the Germans to break through their military defenses as quickly as they did and so had not created an evacuation plan for most of their population. So between six and eight million French people took matters into their own hands and fled in a panic, starting in the northeast and north central parts of the country and working their way south, southwest, and west in what immediately became known as the Exodus. The fears of the French were based mainly on horrible memories of German brutality that had occurred during the First World War, when northeastern France had been occupied by the Germans.

After the armistice was signed with Germany and France was divided into two zones—the north and western occupied zone and the southern free, or unoccupied, zone—most French people, including Pearl and her family, returned to their homes from their initial flight, somewhat relieved that their fears of random German brutality toward the defeated French now seemed exaggerated.

However, Pearl and her family had more to fear than most of their neighbors. They were British citizens, and although defeated France was no longer considered an enemy by the Germans, Great Britain still was. When Pearl heard at the beginning of December that the Germans were planning to arrest British citizens close to her area, she and her family attempted to flee Paris again. All the crucial decisions and bureaucratic technicalities that were part of trying to quickly escape Nazi-overrun France when many others were trying to do the same thing were always Pearl’s responsibility.

Their journeys were not easy. Their initial flight to Normandy had exhausted their savings. When they finally arrived there, they were told to wait for instructions from British embassy officials regarding their passage to England. But while they waited, the Germans arrived. When the instructions finally came, they were told that passage would not be provided for them.

The second trip, beginning in the winter of 1940, was long and difficult, and they occasionally traveled on foot. This map shows the probable route they took with all its twists, turns, reverses, detours, and challenges.

Though Pearl’s family received some money from the American and British embassies—and Pearl worked temporarily for the British embassy in one city along the way—it’s difficult to imagine exactly how they were able to cope during the 13 months spanned by the following account.

Because I was a typist at the British embassy in Paris prior to 1940, I had a diplomatic identity card. In May 1940, when the Germans broke through the defense line and entered France, the ambassador asked us to evacuate Paris and wait for instructions. He and his close colleagues moved to Tours.

I went to Commes, near Port-en-Bessin [on the Normandy coast] with my mother and sisters. The Germans arrived soon afterward. We were completely panicked. I had an argument with my mother, because I didn’t want to leave before my instructions arrived. But the Germans got there first. The ambassador had instructed all his staff to leave Paris. The ambassador and his attachés managed to sail from Saint-Jean-de-Luz. I was a local employee, so I had nowhere to go in England. We were blocked, there was no petrol, no trains running, and we had no money. That was such an intense period in our lives that I still have difficulty talking about it. Even after all these years, it gets stuck in my throat.

I waited in Commes for the train services to start again, and in July, I left Bayeux for Paris. I went to the American embassy in Paris to explain our situation and asked them for money. Through the embassy at Vichy, they contacted the Air Ministry in London, who asked them [the American embassy] to help me and my family as much as possible.

During all that time I was gone, my mother and sisters had to sign in every day at a German post in Port-en-Bessin. Then the Germans decided to arrest and lock up all foreigners within 18 miles of the coast. My mother and my sisters were nearly locked up in Falaise. They managed to slip through the net with the help of a French colonel who spoke German. He was an interpreter at the Kommandatur [military headquarters set up by the Germans] in Bayeux. Even though he knew who we were—British subjects trying to escape from the Germans—he helped without hesitation. Mummy and my sisters joined me in Paris in August. The American embassy had advanced an allowance, which enabled us to exist.

In Paris, I found myself surrounded by Germans; they were all over the place. They played music, and people would go and listen to them! All along rue de Rivoli, as far as you could see from place de la Concorde, there were enormous swastika banners five or six floors high. I just thought, This is impossible.

One morning, at the beginning of December, some of my sisters’ friends arrived in a panic: the Germans were rounding up all the English in the 16th arrondissement [district]. We lived in the 9th arrondissement. Mummy said, “I don’t want to be taken by the Germans, we’re leaving.” So my mother, two sisters, and I took refuge with two French families, while I tried to find a way of crossing the demarcation line into unoccupied France.

We managed to get some rather vague information. I told the police station where we had to sign on as British citizens, “We’re leaving Paris.” The policeman said he would put the register aside for a couple of days to give us time to get away. We left on December 9, 1940. We took the train to Vichy, where there was an American embassy in the unoccupied zone [there was another in occupied Paris]. The Americans were not yet at war.

We had to cross the demarcation line clandestinely, because we weren’t allowed a pass. I was looking for any possible solution when I heard a traveler in the train compartment saying that he was taking horses across the line. I thought, There’s our answer. When he stood up, I followed him down the corridor and asked him if he would accept to take four Englishwomen across. He agreed right away. We changed our route to follow him to Montceau-les-Mines, then we took a country lane. We had to hide in a ditch when a German patrol went past. Our fellow traveler paid for everything: the extra train fare and even our “coffee”—grilled barley drink—in the station “café.”

The embassy in Vichy sent us to Marseille, where we stayed for three months before obtaining the papers that enabled us to go back to England via Spain and Portugal. All the English soldiers who had escaped from occupied France were grouped at Fort Saint-Jean in Marseille. An English diplomat from the American consulate had asked me if I could help organize a boat journey to take refugees to England, with Italy and Germany’s authorization. It took us two months to prepare everything; then in the end the Germans said no, so it didn’t come off. That diplomat spent a lot of his time helping escaping English, and I realized that something was going on.

After our departure from Marseille we went through Cerbère-Portbou [two towns, the first in France, the second in Spain, separated by a steep hill but joined by a half-mile railway tunnel]. There we were received by a representative of the British embassy who gave us some Spanish money so that we could go on to Barcelona. It was an advance: he asked us for reimbursement on our arrival in England.

To get into Spain one had to have either US dollars, which cost an arm and a leg, or pesetas, Spanish currency. When we went through customs in Spain they asked us whether we had anything to declare. Reply: nothing. We had no more money. One of the female staff began to undress Mummy. She put a hand in her corset: I wish you could have seen Mummy’s face at that moment. I said to her, “What are you looking for”?

“Money.”

“I told you, we haven’t got any.”

“I have never seen English people traveling without any money.”

“Have you never heard of refugees?” I replied.

The train between Portbou and Barcelona was stuffed full. You saw everything in the trains at that time, including cages of hens. We were not in the same compartment: Mummy was with one of my sisters and I was in another compartment with the other sister. I simply could not get near the restaurant car. We had to wait until the next stop to get something to eat. We ran to join Mummy; there we were very close to the restaurant car. But the waiter would not let us in because our ticket was for the preceding service. We had to negotiate. Some young Spanish army officers who spoke French took us under their wing and eventually we were able to eat.

We spent the following night in Madrid. We had the address of a Spanish family we were supposed to go and see to give them news of a niece, married to a Frenchman, whom we knew well in Paris. Unfortunately, on the way back, we crossed a square without using the zebra crossing [crosswalk]. There weren’t many cars, but we were bawled out by a Spanish policeman. It was awful. I said, “No comprende; Inglés …” Eventually, he didn’t fine us. We found somewhere where there were no cars, and all three of us crossed together.

We crossed Spain via Barcelona and Madrid, stayed for another three months in Portugal. As I had worked in Paris for the air attaché, I managed to find the same kind of work in the British embassy in Lisbon. It gave us a bit of money, luckily, because we didn’t have much.

Normally I would have gone to the British embassy in Madrid. Don’t ask me why I didn’t. It must have been fate. If I had, I would have gone no further because they were on the lookout for embassy staff, to employ them. But then destiny is curious, isn’t it?

When we reached Lisbon I went to see the air attaché to ask him to send a message to London, announcing our arrival. There also, they were looking for embassy staff to employ.

According to the exchanges between England and Portugal, I ought to have gone to Madrid. I did not want to do that at all. I wanted to stay with Mummy and my two sisters. We spent three months in Lisbon. They were so insistent that I stay at the embassy that I wasn’t at all sure that I would be able to return to England; that’s why I did not register for the boat. I did it at the last minute and so I couldn’t travel in the same cabin as my mother and sisters.

In the meantime, the staff from the British embassy in Yugoslavia had arrived in Madrid as refugees. They were grabbed [pressured to work for the embassy], and it was they who had to stay there while I took the boat with Mummy. That happened at the end of June 1941.

I set foot in a nightclub for the first time in my life in Portugal. We even stayed up all night once because some of my sisters’ friends wanted to see the sunrise on mount Sintra. Portugal wasn’t at war, so there were lights everywhere. It was wonderful. Also, there were no shortages. There was a mix of anyone you can imagine: Allies, Germans…. We were there from March to May.

We took a banana boat from the port in Lisbon and arrived in Gibraltar four or five days later. The passengers had to bring their own food; we ate sardines for the entire trip. We slept where we could: on the bridge, in the hold, elsewhere. In Gibraltar we were put on board the Scythia, which was moored at a detached mole; that is to say, on a faraway quay. It was a liner that had come from South Africa with a great many officers on board, mainly airmen. There were not enough places in England to train all the airmen—and it was dangerous there as well—so many of them went to South Africa for their training.

The banana boat on which we had arrived returned to Lisbon; we had to wait until it came back with another cargo of refugees. We remained at anchor in Gibraltar for at least two weeks. When the Scythia left, another ship joined it. We made the crossing to Scotland in a convoy of only 2 ships, instead of the usual 22. There were at least three warships surrounding us. I suppose we were carrying a particularly important cargo.

When we got near the Scottish coast we were joined by a cruiser. Having left Paris on December 9, 1940, we arrived in London on July 14, 1941. From the beginning to the end of that seven-month journey, we always found help. Long before we began talking about the word “resistance,” there were French people who were fundamentally and morally opposed to the occupation. It was those people who helped my mother, my sisters, and me to escape to England.

When I arrived in London, I started by settling my mother in a rented flat, and my sisters joined the WAAF [Women’s Auxiliary Air Force]. I contacted the administration services of the air attachés. For two years I was personal assistant to the director of Allied Air Forces and Foreign Liaison.

It was nearly impossible for Henri and I to communicate while I was in England, but we managed to do so. I was at the Air Ministry, in the department which was responsible for all the foreign air forces based in England. The sections included France, Poland, Czechoslovakia, and so on, and there was a security section. In December 1940, just before I left Paris, I managed to get Henri’s address. At that time he was a prisoner in Germany. When I left Lisbon to go to England, with my mother and sisters, I gave Henri’s address to a colleague who was half-English, half-Portuguese. She worked in the embassy press office. As her name was Portuguese, it helped vis-a-vis German censorship. I also left her some money and asked her to be kind enough to send a Red Cross parcel to Henri from time to time. The Portuguese Red Cross was able to send parcels to prisoners of war for which there was a charge. Henri didn’t suspect that I’d sent them. I think it was via his grandmother in Lausanne [Switzerland] that Henri learned I was in England. We could write to Switzerland, they weren’t at war.

When I arrived in England, I learned that Henri had escaped from Germany to unoccupied France; correspondence was possible between Portugal and unoccupied France. I came to an arrangement with the department’s security section. They asked the English censorship office to read my unsealed letters but not to mark them CENSORED. Normally each letter was opened, read, then closed with a sticker saying CENSORED. So I gave them my letters, they sealed them, and the letters were put in the diplomatic bag for Lisbon. My friend in Portugal, to whom the outside envelope was addressed, opened it, and inside was a letter for Henri in the unoccupied zone. She would put Portuguese stamps on, and when the letter went through the German censorship, it looked as if it had come from Portugal. Thus we kept in touch up to 1942, until the North African landing. That’s when London put a stop to it.

We used this method for lots of letters, in both directions. We even have an envelope that was censored twice, which is unique in history. The Germans had their own censorship and they also cut bits out. When they found something they didn’t like, they crossed it out and you couldn’t read it. If that’s not a dictatorship I don’t know what is. Dictatorship is something I cannot abide, whatever kind. This letter was censored by the Germans when it was sent and by the English on arrival, which is why it’s unique, because there was no correspondence between France and England.