Trains from the East arrive every hour, streaming into Paris’s various stations. Planes land at Le Bourget and Villacoublay sometimes, too. On the first day, a uniformed brass band welcomed the returning deportees with a rousing rendition of “La Marseillaise.” Passengers returning from extermination camps were helped off the train first, and then prisoners of war, and finally those who had been drafted into the Service du travail obligatoire. That was on the first day. Outside the stations, the returning survivors are told to board buses—the very same buses that, months earlier, transported
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