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Kindle Notes & Highlights
by
Marthe Cohn
Read between
September 24 - September 29, 2018
In total, more than thirty members of my immediate family had been lost to the Holocaust—
In total, only 2,500 of the Jews deported from France during the war survived.
Frustrated that his plan had been thwarted, Goiset began to make my daily life a misery.
My decision to leave Germany was also based on my fear that I was getting too much of a swollen head. Power is a strange commodity, and I wasn’t sure I handled it terribly well. I was growing accustomed to people doing my bidding and being in awe of me. Remembering my roots and what my family meant to me, I felt it was becoming unhealthy to remain in the intelligence environment. I wanted to go back to real life and real people.
On February 6, 180 women and four thousand men boarded the ship, a huge military transport vessel.
The journey was to last thirty-six days, and took us along the eastern coast of Corsica, between Sicily and Calabria, and into the Suez Canal. When we went through the canal, a large group of us requested permission to disembark to visit the pyramids, but the Egyptian government refused. The heavily armed Egyptian soldiers who remained on board while we sailed through the canal were extremely hostile.
Singapore loomed into view with all its lights twinkling.
As we neared Indochina we hit terrible typhoons and my seasickness was worse than ever. I seriously thought I would die. I was terrified of drowning, and the ship was pitching way up and then way down and I couldn’t have been sicker. I tied myself to the lounger as the waves crashed on the deck in huge bursts. It was horrifying. I was washed-out and wretched with fear and sickness.
I was sent with four other nurses to a military hospital in Phnom Penh, Cambodia.
Half of the military hospital was for French soldiers and the other for Cambodians.
to participate in a reconnaissance mission along the river, with about twenty-five soldiers. We headed south across the muddy brown waters edged by the jungle. It was nice to be out on the water and to feel the breeze in my hair. But my pleasure was short-lived when a bullet whizzed past my ear,
Japanese snipers.
After nine months in Phnom Penh, I was transferred to Tourane (later called Da Nang), a port in Central Annam, where Ho Chi Minh had started a war against the French. Ho Chi Minh had been to Paris to sign an agreement with the French government stipulating no further troop movements, but Admiral Thierry d’Argenlieu, the chief of the Expeditionary Corps, had other ideas and sent troops to Tourane anyway. All hell broke loose, and they desperately needed French nurses to tend to the subsequent wounded. In January 1947, I was flown there and assigned to the military hospital to be part of a team
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The captain was devoted to saving lives, and motivated by him, we carried on. He was a great humanitarian.
Madame Philippe, the nurse who administered anesthesia, refused to make the transfer to the DMZ, or Demilitarized Zone, because of the danger, and Captain Ricard told me simply that I’d have to take over her duties.
My return to France in December 1948 was not quite as I had dreamed it. After sailing home with a group of friends from the Foreign Legion and bidding them a sad adieu in a café on the Canebière in Marseille, I took the crowded night train to Paris. Having been surrounded night and day by colleagues, patients, friends, or by Serge, it felt strange to be traveling on my own, facing an unknown future.
With great trepidation, I took the train to Metz, where my parents and grandmother now lived. It was the first time I had been back there since we’d left, nearly ten years earlier, in 1939.
My parents had found much the same difficulty trying to reclaim our old apartment as Fred had with our store in Poitiers. Under the new despoliation laws, they won their court case, but were still unsuccessful in reclaiming it. I was appalled to find them living in my grandmother’s small apartment—stripped of everything, including my grandfather’s library—while a deputy from the prefecture squatted in theirs. It was early 1949, four years after the end of the war, and yet they were still virtually homeless.
In June 1956, I sailed to the United States with Major on the Ile de France. We were married in a civil ceremony on January 30, 1958, in St. Louis, Missouri. The half-hour ceremony was held at the Justice of the Peace’s office. It took place on my lunch hour during a split shift. I was a student in the School of Anesthesia of Barnes Hospital, Washington University, earning fifty dollars a month. Major was a resident in Internal Medicine in the same institution, on the same stipend. Once married, we’d get a hundred-dollar allowance for housing. Melvin and Ruby were our only witnesses. My simple
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The simple ceremony took place on Bastille Day, July 14, 2000, in a suite of the Sofitel Hotel in Beverly Hills, not far from where I now live. The Medaille Militaire, created in 1852 by Napoleon III and once awarded to Winston Churchill, was presented to me by Monsieur Yves Yelda, the French Consul to Los Angeles, for my “exceptional courage” while on “special missions” in the Black Forest in April 1945. According to the citation, my small part in the war “facilitated in large measure the success of the last operations of the French Army.”
Until that day, many of my neighbors and close friends had no idea what I had done in the French Army during the war.
War taught me many things, among them that, like anyone, I could be a coward one minute and brave the next, depending entirely on circumstance. They say that war brings out the best and the worst in people, and I certainly saw both sides. When I think of the dozens of people who risked their lives for us, it almost helps compensate for all the sad and bitter memories of those who were so cruel. War also made me accept the inevitable and savor the important gains, like my two wonderful sons and the granddaughter I might so easily have never lived to see.
