They Shall Not Have Me The Capture, Forced Labor, and Escape of a French Prisoner in World War II

The French armistice with the Third Reich, signed by Vichy's aging Marshal Petain on June 22, 1940, stipulated the following: "The French armed forces in the territory to be occupied by Germany are to be hastily withdrawn into the territory not to be occupied, and be discharged." No wonder, then, that hundreds of thousands of exhausted French soldiers allowed themselves to be encircled by German troops and held in barbed-wire enclosures pending their expected demobilization. Most believed they would be going home.The German high command had a different agenda. Hitler, who would break his pact with Stalin and invade the Soviet Union within a year of signing the Vichy agreement, planned to replace the German manpower needed for the Russian front with the labor of the surrendered French army. Trains crammed with prisoners would soon make the four-day journey to hastily constructed barracks at dozens of sites near the former Polish border. Such was the fate of close to a million and a half French prisoners of war, most of whom would not see their home again for five years; 25,000 would never return.In New York, in 1943, a detailed eyewitness account of the conditions in German POW camps was published by a French escapee, Jean Helion (1904-87). Helion was by then an internationally known painter who had been living in New York at the outbreak of World War II. He returned to France for military service, only to be part of the debacle that followed the German invasion. At the request of E.P. Dutton publishers, he set down his experience in "They Shall Not Have Me," a meticulously observed description of the lives of French POWs as virtual slaves of the Third Reich, with vivid delineations of both captors and captives.Written in English and never published in France, the book became a best seller, and its author found himself in demand for lectures and interviews, trying, as he said, to tell Americans what it was like to be hungry, devoured by lice, worked to the bone, and