Behind Enemy Lines: The True Story of a French Jewish Spy in Nazi Germany

by Marthe Cohn

course, I’d been aware that there were camps. I even knew the names—Dachau, Belsen, Auschwitz-Birkenau, Treblinka, Ravensbrück, Buchenwald—though the names meant little to me then, or to history. They were camps designed to hold in “protective custody” those the Germans deemed dangerous—communists, Jews, homosexuals, Catholics. I hadn’t exactly expected the Germans to treat them particularly well, but I’d thought that they’d at least treat them as human beings. After all, the Germans were our next-door neighbors. We had so much in common; some of us even spoke the same language. Their inventors, scientists, musicians, doctors, and philosophers had made enormous contributions to the world. Theirs was the land of Beethoven, Mozart, Einstein, Freud, Heine. Their nobility had married into some of the greatest royal households in Europe. They weren’t far-off barbarians, oblivious to culture or knowledge or morality. News had begun to trickle through about some of the appalling conditions the liberating soldiers were discovering, but working undercover right up to the armistice, and without access to a radio, I’d missed much of it. But as I came across more of these unfortunate souls on the roads of Germany, I began to comprehend the true scale of the deportations, and feared for the first time that my Steph might well not have survived. Stopping almost every group I came across, I searched for her among those harrowed faces.