The Luchaires both spent the rest of that year in various prisons. Corinne, ill from tuberculosis, had tried to commit suicide but remained heedless of the implications of her friendship with Nazis, asking constantly, what did I do wrong, what did my family do wrong? When she complained about how badly she had been treated in French prisons after the Liberation, accusing French officers of speaking to her harshly and not providing enough milk for her baby, she revealed the vacuum in which she had lived during the Occupation, oblivious of how the Germans had treated other detained women. But then, as the deportees now slowly dragging themselves back were soon to find, oblivion was the religion of many others in Paris.
By June 1945 the returnees included both Jews and political prisoners from the camps, as well as prisoners of war. They arrived by the trainload, mostly at the Gare de l’Est, and were greeted by uniformed women recruited to the newly formed Repatriation Service who referred to the prisoners of war as ‘the poor boys, the poor boys’, while a loudspeaker played ‘La Marseillaise’. The writer Marguerite Duras, anxiously awaiting news of her husband Robert Antelme in Dachau, captured a moment when one of these ‘ladies’, pointing to her stripes, scolded a soldier:
‘So my friend – we’re not saluting? Can’t you see I’m a captain,’ she said.
The soldier looked at her. ‘Me, when I see a skirt, I don’t salute her, I fuck her.’ The lady, in shock, beat a dignified retreat.
Duras conveyed brilliantly in her writings the fevered anguish, ‘the throbbing in the temples’, of wives waiting for husbands, mothers for sons. Would there be a phone call, a ring on the doorbell, a letter? Would a fellow prisoner bring bad news? Or might he telephone directly, himself, without warning? Was it safe to go out, just in case?
And then she heard from Antelme’s friend Fran?ois Mitterrand (whom she refers to under a pseudonym, Morland):
I do not know what day it was, it was definitely one day in April, it was not a day in May. At eleven o’clock the telephone rang. It came from Germany, it was Fran?ois Morland. He did not say ‘Hello’, it was almost brutal, but clear as ever.
‘Listen to me. Robert is alive. Calm down. Yes. He is at Dachau. Listen again with all your strength. Robert is very feeble to a level that you cannot imagine. I must tell you, it is a matter of hours. He can live perhaps three days, but no longer.’
As it turned out the liberation of Dachau came just in time for the seriously ill Robert Antelme. He survived and returned to France on 13 May 1945. His sister, Marie-Louise Antelme, who had been deported to Ravensbrück, did not return. Duras later recalled the ‘smile of embarrassment’ of her husband upon their reunion after wartime separation: ‘He’s apologizing for being here, reduced to such a wreck. And then the smile fades and he becomes a stranger again.’ Antelme returned to Paris weighing 86 pounds and for three weeks wavered between life and death. The story ‘Did Not Die Deported’ plots Duras’s agonizing wait for him and the almost more appalling account of tending his damaged and bony body back to health. For months he had eaten nothing but grass and earth. ‘Had he eaten solid food on returning from the camp his stomach would have ruptured under its weight.’
Duras deliberately gave graphic details of her husband’s bodily functions, and concluded: ‘Those who wince at this very moment, reading this, those whom it nauseates – I shit on them. I hope one day they encounter a man whose body will empty out like that through its anus and I hope that man is the most beautiful and beloved and desirable thing they have. Their lover. I wish that kind of devastation on them.’