Hope & Oblivion

THE LONG HOLIDAY (249 pp.)--Francis Ambriere, translated by Elaine P. Halperin--Ziff-Davis ($3).

It was six weeks after the massive German attack on May 10, 1940, which ended the "phony" war and routed the French army. The captain of Francis Ambriere'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." Ambriere, 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.

The Long Holiday is his first-person story of 56 months spent in seven forced-labor and concentration camps, 118 days of that time in solitary confinement. In France, the book won the first Goncourt prize to be awarded in six years, sold over 200,000 copies within a year. No literary achievement, it is a thoughtful and simple account of man's courage and man's weakness under demoralizing brutality.

For an Added Ladle. "For a 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 Ambriere 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."

Not many had the strength or the spirit to offer complete resistance. Ambriere 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 Ambriere's group was liberated by the U.S. Third Army.

The 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. Ambriere 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.

Proust Without Interruption. Not even his time in solitary left him entirely bitter, for he found "that it is far easier to withstand hunger when alone than in the company of others." And he there had the chance "to read all the works of Marcel Proust without interruption. . . . I also read eleven volumes of The Origins of Contemporary France, Dom Leclerq's History of the Revolution, and Rousseau's Confessions, The very length of these works prevents most free men from completing them; in one sense, therefore, I was freer than most." Nor was he forgotten by his fellow prisoners: a thousand of them contributed a cigarette apiece for him, which a German guard delivered.

A few of the bitter-end prisoners escaped; many others, like Ambriere, tried and failed. Some lived on hope, one went insane, others found comfort in religion. But for all, "nightfall became a cherished haven. . . . Apart from hopes of freedom, oblivion was the dearest thing we possessed."

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.