Epistolophilia: Writing the Life of Ona Simaite

22. La Courtine

149 chapter 22 La Courtine august 2007 Sebastian is six months old when we decide to travel from Toulouse to see Le Camp de la Courtine, where Šimaitė was interned after Ludelange. She has been slipping away from me over these past months. Despite my best intentions, fatigue and the demands of a new baby have made it impossible for me to visit with my ghostly friend the way I used to. I miss her terribly, so, even though it means that we will have to cross close to half of France, I’m determined to go. The drive to La Courtine is awful. Sebastian screams for an hour. Sometime over the past eight weeks he has decided that he hates riding in the car. I find that I have horribly miscalculated the distances between the places I plan to see. It turns out that Šimaitė covered a lot of ground, and we will have to drive four hours each way to visit La Courtine. Sean still doesn’t have a driver’s license, so his job is to try and calm the baby while I take the wheel. It doesn’t work very well, and by the time we reach the camp, the two of them are in a black mood. Even so, I’m still excited to see the camp. We drive northward under an angry sky, but even under dark clouds, the Limousin glows green. We are heading to the Plateau des Millevaches, dairy country, and start to climb once we see signs for La Courtine. The forest around us grows thick, and begins to look increasingly northern, with its birches and old evergreens. 150 La Courtine A military town, La Courtine is bigger than Ludelange, and has all the services of a real place. The houses here are made of stone and seem cold and forlorn in the rain. As we feel our way to the Military Camp, I’m surprised to find it is active. All around signs warn against unauthorized entry, so we return to the small museum, the “Maison de mémoire” at the camp’s base. It is deserted, but inside a small display tells how Dutch soldiers helped the people of La Courtine through devastating floods in the 1960s. “I guess the Dutch know from floods,” I say wryly to Sean. He’s still angry, and only half-responds. As I’m poking around the display, Thierry, an engineer and civilian employee of the army base returns. When I tell him that I have come to see the camp as part of my research on Ona Šimaitė, and ask if he knows anything about prisoners like her, he gets visibly excited. “Yes,” he says. “Just last week an elderly couple came in. Both had been prisoners here in 1944. He was in the men’s camp and she in the women’s. They met here and eventually married. They were Belarusian.” Šimaitė was probably interned with them. They had shown Thierry the barracks in which they had lived, and he could certainly show them to me. Otherwise, he tells me, there is little information on this fleeting period of the camp that marked the end of the Vichy regime—a time most people have preferred to forget. The prisoners of La Courtine were members of the anti-Nazi resistance, Belarusians, for the most part. During the year or so they spent there, they underwent a reeducation program. Most had been captive for four years and needed help reintegrating into society. Did they get French lessons? I ask. “Certainly,” replies Thierry. He has been waiting for a group of students to arrive from the military school. He will give them a tour of the Memory House, and a sense of the history of the camp. He can’t give me a tour of the base, but will try to convince his wife to do so. I hear him arguing with her as he talks on his cell phone, telling her it will only 151 La Courtine take a few minutes. She agrees and two minutes later she arrives in her car that is licensed to enter the base. As I climb in, I deduce from the bits of hay strewn about her vehicle that she and Thierry have horses. Sean and Sebastian will wait for me in our car while I take a quick tour. The base’s buildings are...