Word: ambri
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...LONG HOLIDAY (249 pp.)-Francis Ambrière, translated by Elaine P. Halperin-Ziff-Davis...
...weeks after the massive German attack on May 10, 1940, which ended the "phony" war and routed the French army. The captain of Francis Ambrière's fleeing battery led his 200 men to some woods, distributed rations and said: "My friends, good luck to you, and every man for himself." Ambrière, armed with an 1872 model revolver and six cartridges, started towards Switzerland. That day he ran into some German machine guns and became one of the 1,500,000 French soldiers behind German barbed wire...
...promised piece of bread, for an added ladle of soup, some poor souls became the valets of the Germans . . . swept out their mess halls, polished their boots, cleaned their bicycles. . . ." And then there were the prisoners who obeyed Vichy orders to collaborate, and were given preferential treatment. For them Ambrière reserves his deepest scorn, remembering how, when they crossed the Rhine on the return trip to France, "with languid fingers they removed the Fascist symbol they had been wearing since 1941 and pinned the cross of Lorraine in its place...
...many had the strength or the spirit to offer complete resistance. Ambrière was one of 4,000 Frenchmen (there were also 300 Dutchmen and 200 Belgians) who were sent to a special camp in Poland for bitter-enders who refused to do any work for the Germans. When the Russians got close, these prisoners were returned to Germany, where Ambrière's group was liberated by the U.S. Third Army...
...Long Holiday has none of the passionate bitterness of E. E. Cummings' The Enormous Room (best of World War I's prisoner accounts), none of that book's fierce compassion and detailed hatred for fellow captives. Ambrière remembers enough kindly German acts (though there were not many) to be convinced that "many Germans were cruel only out of fear" of their Nazi masters...