The Foreign Service Journal, July-August 2010

Foreign Service in 1951. Over the next 36 years, I had several diplo- matic assignments in France and Francophone countries. (It was my high school French that had en- abled me to become my battery’s interpreter in 1945 and speak with the prisoners at Dachau.) In 1995, I revisited the village of Vieux-Manor near Rouen, where my division had been billeted 50 years earlier. The warmth of that reunion was remarkable. A 12-year-old girl to whom I had given candy in 1945 was now a 62-year-old matron, who took us all to a gala dinner. I then continued on to Dachau for the first time since 1945, representing my unit (along with two other mem- bers) at a large memorial ceremony organized by the Bavarian government. We joined 100 veterans from the 42nd Rainbow Division, as well as several thousand sur- vivors from all over Europe. At the 2005 commemoration, I was one of only about a dozen U.S. veterans present, but we met two special French survivors. And in October 2009, my wife, Susie, and I traveled to France as their guests. It was in this in- formal, very personal setting that we were privileged to take the measure of their heroism. Marcel’s Story At the 1995 ceremony, I had met Marcel Fonfréde, an extremely bright and active veteran of the French Resist- ance who now lives in St. Ismier, a suburb of Grenoble in the French Alps. His story is remarkable. During the Christmas holiday in 1943, he went home from his school to see his family. His father was a well- known Resistance leader sought by the SS. Unfortu- nately, the Germans picked up Marcel instead; his father escaped and later became an important cog in the under- ground, helping Allied pilots escape to Portugal. Marcel himself was a key link in that same chain, though the Nazis never figured that out even after inter- rogating him. Klaus Barbie, now imprisoned for life after having been discovered and extradited from Argentina in the 1990s, presided over the torture. Marcel’s trick was to give up the names of Resistance fighters who had already been executed, so there could be no reprisals. For the next two years Marcel was moved from prison to prison (the worst was Buchenwald), forced to perform hard labor along the way amid un- believable conditions. He finally arrived in Dachau on the “death train.” As defeat approached, the Nazis had two overarching goals in mind: to erase all traces of their bestial treatment of prisoners in other camps in Germany, and to fight to the end defending Bavaria. Many of Marcel’s friends had died along the way, and their SS guards would not even bury their bodies. After arriving at the Dachau train station, the prisoners pro- ceeded on foot the five miles to the camp, chased there by dogs who bit those who fell along the way. Once there, Marcel was admitted to the infirmary, which saved him from the death march in which the few remaining ambulatory prisoners were forced to walk to- ward Munich and thence to the Alps. Fortunately, several American units caught up with the death march three days after Dachau’s liberation and took care of the poor, wretched prisoners. A friend of Marcel’s whom I met during my 1995 trip had had a similar, but happier, experience. He was on one of the trains en route to Dachau when it came to a stop in a gully between two tunnels. While Allied and German artillery units exchanged fire over the train, the French prisoners, all in the same cattle car, fashioned a tricolor flag out of old clothes and laid it on top of their freight car for American pilots to spot. Later, the friend and a Polish prisoner walked back along the tracks, evading enemy lines until they came to the American camp. They persuaded the Americans to take a Sherman tank, hook it to the car holding the French prisoners and pull it back to their camp. There they all rested for a month or so, slowly returning to health be- fore French authorities came to rescue them. Two Massacres You can imagine what a wonderful reception we had from Marcel’s family after 14 years of correspondence. They took us to a beautiful mountain restaurant above Grenoble. During the lunch, they told us about the activities of the French Resistance in the Vercor, an isolated moun- tain about 3,000 feet high that can only be reached through three narrow roads, complete with dangerous hairpin turns. The Germans tried many times to go up J U LY- A U G U S T 2 0 1 0 / F O R E I G N S E R V I C E J O U R N A L 23 F O C U S We counted 37 carloads of bodies, shipped hastily from other concentration camps.