JED PERL
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narrator except that he's a soldier, left directionless and leaderless in
June 1941. "I was not sent to war," he begins.
It
came to me in Mezieres en Drouais, a charming village west of
Paris, where, for months, I had crawled upon the hills, ducked
under blank shots, dug model trenches, and absorbed soporific
chapters from the infantry sergeant handbooks very peace–
fully .... We expected to leave for the front, and were eager to
fight; but our train never came .. . . On the eve of the thir–
teenth, a lieutenant of my platoon, of whom
I
was very fond,
took me aside and told me that the Germans were hardly twenty
miles away, advancing rapidly after breaking the main line of
resistance. The order had come at last that all troops should
evacuate.
On
the very same day, June 13, Alberto Giacometti and his brother,
Diego, were setting out from Paris by bicycle, to try to make it to
Bordeaux, and a boat for America. For the Giacomettis, who were
Swiss citizens, the days of flight ended with a return to Paris.
Alberto ended up spending the war years in Geneva. But for Helion
and his fellow troops the days of rout ended in capture, and a week–
long forced march during which many men fell by the wayside of
wounds or starvation . After this,
They Shall Not Have Me
turns to an
extended series of scenes from the two years of Helion's life in
pnson.
After spending several months in a prison camp in France,
Helion is sent to work on a Pomeranian farm on the Polish border.
The couple of chapters about this experience have the focused inten–
sity of a classic of prison literature. Along with a small group of
workers, he spends a brutal fall and winter- painting outhouses,
digging for potatoes, working at a threshing machine. At first, the
accommodations don't look so bad.
To have a room for eight, with a few square inches of shelf for
each was a forgotten delicacy [after the months in prison] . There
was a window with a view of a large field and a forest beyond . As
a playground , we had a ten yards' stretch between the tool shelter
and the privy . The latter looked like a sentry box, and from each
of the three holes inside, one could view the farm and the castle
through the cracks.
Everything is a struggle. "We spent much time fitting our footwear,
