Rescue and Flight: American Relief Workers Who Defied the Nazis

4. Marseille, 1941

4 Marseille, 1941 chArleS Joy remAined Alone in liSbon And frAnce through the 1940 holiday season. He spent some of his time visiting the French internment camps where thousands of refugees suffered through their first winter there without adequate clothing or nourishment. For instance, the barracks at the largest camp, Gurs, were never designed for long-term habitation, and most of the buildings were unheated. In a short time, Joy managed to make a substantial improvement in the living conditions in the camp. He arranged to have vitric windows put in all of the 260 barracks at Gurs where previously vents in the ceiling had let in the cold and the rain.1 The new windows dramatically reduced the death rate at the camp, and Joy was convinced that the Unitarian Service Committee should spend its resources on relief in the camps, especially medical aid, even if it was at the expense of their emigration program.2 “My own conviction [is] that it is better to keep 6000 children alive in France than to take a hundred or so to America,” Joy explained in a letter to Marion Niles.3 Headquarters in Boston agreed to allow Charles Joy to expand work in the camps and to hire his own director for France instead of hiring Helen Lowrie, as Martha Sharp had wished. In mid-March, Charles Joy found the man he wanted to run the new relief program. Noel Field, anAmerican Quaker in his midthirties, had come highly recommended by Donald Lowrie.Although Field’s profession had been international relations, started during an early career at the U.S. State Department, he was deeply idealistic and had recently worked on a refugee program for the League of Nations. With the League, he had traveled to Spain at the end of the civil war and helped to repatriate foreigners who were stranded after fighting in the Spanish Republican Army. Field himself mArSeille, 1941 | 85 had strong left-leaning sympathies and little confidence in the workings of western European governments or that of his own. After the war had brought an end to his job at the League of Nations, he had been hoping to help refugees in some way and knew more about their plight than most from his brother, Hermann. In 1939 Hermann had headed the small office of the British Czech Refugee Committee in Krakow, Poland, and had looked out especially for refugees who had support from British communist groups.After the war began, Hermann resumed his career as an architect, but his experience in Krakow was an important influence on Noel, who shared his politics.4 Unlike the other Americans working for the service committee, who had reasonable French language skills and a smattering of German, Noel Field and his wife, Herta, were trilingual. Noel was a smoker and had a disheveled glamour despite his earnestness. Charles Joy sent Field’s résumé along to Boston headquarters. “He has also written 11. Herta Field, Charles Joy, and Noel Field, 1941. Unitarian Universalist Service Committee Collection, bmS 16076, Box 11, Andover-Harvard Theological Library, Harvard Divinity School, Harvard University. 86 | mArSeille, 1941 speeches for Roosevelt, but don’t let that prejudice you,” went Joy’s glowing introduction.5 The Fields were given a position that included some pay and responsibility for Noel’s wife, Herta. Herta had been Noel’s loyal and solicitous companion from the time she was nine years old, and they had been neighbors in an affluent neighborhood of Zurich. The Field family had even brought the teenage Herta with them to Cambridge, Massachusetts , where the Fields relocated after the death of Noel’s father.6 She was the practical side of the pair and would have preferred a more settled life, but she supported Noel in all his career ambitions regardless of the sacrifice that entailed. Having moved to Geneva in late 1936 to work for the League of Nations, the Fields now packed up their things and moved into modest rooms in a boarding house in Marseille.7 Throughout the winter, Donald Lowrie and other members of the Nimes Committee of relief organizations had met to work out how to make life in the internment camps more bearable. The Quakers and the Jewish organization hicem were working to provide more food in the camps,8 and the ymcA was setting up programs such as libraries and music groups aimed at reviving refugees...