Once They Had a Country: Two Teenage Refugees in the Second World War

4. Refugees in the Free Zone

4 Refugees in the free Zone The Contracting States shall accord to refugees lawfully staying in their territory the same treatment with respect to public relief and assistance as is accorded to their nationals. —Convention Relating to the Status of Refugees, Article 23, 1951 The dazed, dirty, and hungry children who emerged from the bus into the french sunlight were so glad to have arrived somewhere, anywhere, that the youngest ones forgot to cry and the oldest ones forgot to worry. Many of them were excited about the new adventure they were about to begin in southern france. but even the most upbeat of the children were stunned when they saw their new home was an abandoned stable. The accommodations, Ilse would say more than sixty-five years later, were “truly deluxe: we had rats and mice and fleas and lice and whatever else you can imagine.” behind the stables was an outhouse; the children used leaves for toilet paper. After the initial shock, the older children began as thorough a cleaning of their quarters as they could manage without either scouring powder or vacuum cleaners.Within days of their arrival, the villagers had supplied some rudimentary furniture. The older boys in the group fashioned simple tables and primitive beds of wooden planks. The small stipend provided to refugee children by the french government sufficed to purchase basic supplies from local farmers,though the children primarily subsisted on turnips—turnip stew, turnip soup, turnip mush. All the survivors of those years remember the turnips , and most of them would never be able to eat turnips again. They also ate cornmeal in the form of cornbread and cornmeal stew. Their cook, flora Schlesinger, who had come along from belgium, was a veritable magician in the kitchen, turning what little she had into dishes that, if only barely palatable , were at least nutritious. Sometimes the stews had bits of meat—usually animal lungs or stomachs that the local farmers did not deign to eat.1 A single main street comprised the entire commercial area of the nearby village of Seyre, which boasted a church with a clock tower and a small general store. Most of the village men were in the french army, leaving behind perhaps 300 of the very old and the very young. The village idiot remained behind—a man of indeterminate age who always wore the same dirty clothes 52 / Chapter 4 and sported a beret that had seen better days. fields of thistles and weeds grew beyond the town.2 The adults in charge of the refugees were a motley crew: Alex frank had rejoined his regiment in the belgian army, his wife, Elka, Ilse’s tormenter on the freight train, stayed with the children. both flora the cook and her husband had traveled with the group from belgium. Gaspar DeWaay, the reviled director of the boys’ refugee home in brussels, was in charge of the colony. In his thirties, with wavy blond hair and glasses, DeWaay insisted that the children call him “Uncle Gaspar.” Accompanied by his wife, lucienne, who wanted be called “Tante Marie,” he was “our most terrible scourge,” according to one of the older girls.3 He treated the children with contempt and required that they speak french exclusively. legend has it that he heard one of the younger children ask “was?” (German for “what?”) and immediately ordered her into seclusion, with only bread and water for a week. but already in those early days at the farmstead in Seyre, the children had banded together and they sneaked food to the hapless victim of DeWaay’s harsh discipline . The boys were even worse off—Gaspar beat them with a cane if they disobeyed him. One of the boys, Edgar Chaim, ran away when he found his nemesis from brussels in charge once again. Edgar stayed on a local farm until DeWaay left, which happened mercifully soon. According to one account, rebellion to protect then three-year-old Manfred Manasse precipitated DeWaay’s departure.4 Manfred—now fred—was a strong-willed child. Today he lives in the boston area, is friends with Hans and Ilse, and is still strikingly strong-willed. The fight, or near-fight, started when Manfred refused to eat his gruel, pronouncing it disgusting, a sentiment that the other children clearly shared. In a bizarre reversal of the orphan Oliver Twist asking for more, Manfred Manasse brazenly asserted he was not going to take another bite.Gaspar DeWaay was unmoved by...