A Train in Winter Read Online Free Page A

twenty-one Picassos to add to his growing collection of looted paintings.
    But it was not only the Jews who attracted the interest of von Stülpnagel and his men. France had rightly been proud of the welcome given to successive waves of refugees fleeing civil wars, political repression or acute poverty. Poles in particular had been coming to France since the eighteenth century, and the 1920s had brought thousands of men to replace the shortage of manpower caused by the immense French losses in the First World War. Many had become coal miners, settling in the north and east. More recently had come the German refugees, arriving in response to every Nazi crackdown, 35,000 of them in 1933 alone; Austrians escaping the Anschluss ; Czechs in the wake of Munich; Italians, who had opposed Mussolini. Then there were the Spanish republicans, fleeing Franco at the end of the civil war, of whom some 100,000 were still in France, many of them living in appalling hardship behind barbed wire in camps near the Spanish border.
    To these refugees the French had been generous, at least until the economic reversals of the 1930s pushed up unemployment and Prime Minister Daladier drafted measures to curtail their numbers and keep checks on ‘spies and agitators’ while opening camps for ‘undesirable aliens’. France, under Daladier, had been the only Western democracy not to condemn Kristallnacht. The extreme right-wing leader of L’Action Française, Charles Maurras, spoke of ‘these pathogenic political, social and moral microbes’. Watching a train of refugees leave France not long before the war, the writer Saint-Exupéry had remarked that they had become ‘no more than half human beings, shunted from one end of Europe to the other by economic interests’. Despite the growing xenophobia, many foreigners remained in France; but now, in an atmosphere of uncertainty and hostility, they were stateless, without protection and extremely vulnerable. By late September 1940, many were on their way to internment camps, the German refugees among them branded ‘enemies of the Reich’ and handed over by the very French who not so long before had granted them asylum.
    The treatment of the political exiles caused little protest. The French had other things on their mind. Initial relief at the politeness of the German occupiers was rapidly giving way to unease and a growing uncertainty about how, given that the war showed no signs of ending, they were going to survive economically. As more Germans arrived to run France, they commandeered houses, hotels, schools, even entire streets. They requisitioned furniture, cars, tyres, sheets, glasses and petrol, closed some restaurants and cinemas to all but German personnel, and reserved whole sections of hospitals for German patients. Charcuterie vanished from the shops, as Germans helped themselves to pigs, sheep and cattle.
    What they had no immediate use for, they sent back to Germany, and packed goods wagons were soon to be seen leaving from the eastern Parisian stations, laden down with looted goods, along with raw materials and anything that might be useful to Germany’s war effort. ‘I dream of looting, and thoroughly,’ wrote Göring to the military command in France. Just as Napoleon had once looted the territories he occupied of their art, now Germany was helping itself to everything that took the fancy of the occupiers. Soon, dressmakers in Paris were closing, because there was no cloth for them to work with; shoemakers were shutting, because there was no leather. Safe-deposit boxes and bank accounts were scrutinised and, if they were Jewish, plundered. Rapidly, French factories found themselves making planes, spare parts, ammunition, cars, tractors and radios for Germany.
    In September 1940, the French were issued with ration books and told that in restaurants they could have no more than one hors d’oeuvre, one main dish, one vegetable and one piece of cheese. Coupons were needed for