See you soon Caroline! Chapter 4. The Camp

Chapter Four:

The Camp

Philip Weaver (Caroline’s father) was not in a good mood. He had just got home from work and opened the one letter which the postman had brought addressed to him. It was from the travel company he had booked the family holiday with. It seemed that the hotel in the Greek island of Santorini where they were supposed to be staying in August had suddenly closed. It was all due to the financial crisis in the Eurozone, and Greece in particular. Apparently, the family would not lose the money he had paid as a reservation, but he would have to find somewhere else – quickly! There was only a week or so before they were due to go. So when Caroline arrived in the house bursting to tell the family the news that she had just discovered about her Grandad, her father was not in a particularly receptive mood.

“I wish you’d leave this business alone” he snapped. “I’ve told you that Grandad doesn’t want to be bothered with all this meddling about in his affairs. Anyway, we’ve got enough to worry about ourselves at the moment. We’ve just lost our holiday in the sun!”

That brought Caroline back to earth with a jolt. She had been looking forward to their holiday in Greece. They were there the year before last, and the dream of the long lazy days on the beach in Santorini had kept her going throughout the summer term. Now it wasn’t going to happen!

It was a gloomy meal-time that afternoon, and as soon as it was over she went up to her room and switched on her computer. Perhaps she would forget her disappointment if she tried to find out a bit more about Rivesaltes?

There was certainly plenty of information online.  There were even pictures, showing broken down old huts surrounded by weeds and rubbish, and in the distance what looked like a wind-farm, similar to the one out to sea off Whitstable and Herne Bay. It seemed that the remains of the camp were still there, after all these years! But how could she be sure that her grandfather had really been there himself? Perhaps even born there? Why would an English child be in a French concentration camp – for that was what it was – it said so quite plainly! What would the family make of that? What would Grandad say if it was true?

She spent the next couple of hours browsing the internet, reading all she could about the terrible conditions in which thousands of people lived all those years ago. When she finally went to bed, she couldn’t get the camp out of her mind, and the disappointment of the lost holiday was completely forgotten!

A mile or two away, John Bond was looking at his computer’s screen.  He realised that what had begun as a means of getting to know Caroline Weaver better, had now become an obsession of his own. He had remembered that Caroline’s mysterious piece of card that had started all this had other characters on it too. After the name of the camp, he had noticed the letters “ilotk”. As soon as his computer was fired up, he typed “ilotk” into Google.  There were, as usual, many web addresses to choose from. But there, just four or five down, he read “ Rivesaltes, France, Ilot K, the children’s section of the camp”. Clicking on this, he found himself looking at a picture of a boy with a bicycle inside what seemed to be some kind of hut. There were other pictures too, and all of them were of children.

As he flicked through the pictures appearing on his screen, John began to form a picture of this place called Rivesaltes. It was big, it was flat, it was dirty, and this section at least was full of children. Where were their parents? The caption had said that “Ilot K” was the children’s section of the camp. So were their parents somewhere else? Why would anyone want to separate children so young from their parents? Like Caroline, John drifted off to sleep that night with confused images of unhappy children in his mind.

The following morning, with Simon still away, Caroline sought out the history teacher as soon as she could.

“Well, young lady! What have you discovered?

“It’s a concentration camp isn’t it? Rivesaltes I mean!”

“Yes! And do you know whereabouts it was?”

“I know it was somewhere in France. Near a place called Perpignan I believe. But I don’t know where that is.”

Mr Shaw pointed to a map of Europe on the wall. “Let’s see if we can find it! Do you know where the Pyrenees are?”

Caroline pointed to the border between France and Spain. “Down here, aren’t they?”

“Right! Now, come along the coast a little way. What do you find?”

“Got it!” Caroline turned to her teacher with a smile. “Here’s Perpignan – not far from Spain, and almost on the sea. What sort of place is it?”

“Very nice!” answered Mr Shaw. “I’ve spent several holidays in that region with my family.  I prefer the mountains myself, but there’s some lovely beaches too!”

Caroline was still looking at the map, tracing the coast-line with her finger. “But where’s this Rivesaltes place? Where the camp was?”

“It won’t be marked on that map, it’s too small a scale. But it’s pretty near Perpignan. Just a bit the other way – away from Spain I mean.”

His pupil looked puzzled. “So – are you saying that my Grandad was definitely there? Would there be a sort of register we could look at?”

“There may be – probably in Perpignan. But I’m not sure if there would be a complete record of all the inmates. They were coming and going all the time. But you tell me that your grandfather was an orphan? If he was in this camp, it’s almost certain that at least one of his parents would have been there too.” He paused, turned away, and looked out of the window. “Caroline – that place was a sort of assembly centre for all the Jews in the south of France. Thousands of them were sent from there to the camps in Poland. You know – we studied the Holocaust last term.”

“Like Auschwitz, you mean? Are you saying that my Grandad’s parents were sent to Auschwitz? Why wasn’t he sent too?”

“That’s what we’ve got to find out. Many children were rescued and hidden away. He could have been one of them. He was too young to remember of course. We need a name, then we could be certain. I don’t suppose your grandfather knew his real parents’ names?”

“No – he didn’t even know his parents weren’t his real parents until he was grown up. All he has is that picture.”

Her teacher thought a moment. “Are you sure there’s nothing else? Nothing else written on the picture I mean? Have you got it with you?”

“No, but I’ve got what I wrote down when we fiddled about with it in Photoshop.” She opened her bag and brought out the sheet of paper. “There are a few letters before the word ‘Rivesaltes’. It looks like ‘F P I C K P A U C H’”

Mr Shaw looked at the paper. “But you’ve underlined the ‘F’ and the two ‘P’s. didn’t you say that they were very indistinct. What if we change the ‘F’ to an ‘E’ and the ‘P’s’ to an ‘R’? Like we did before? Then we get ‘E R I C K R A U C H’.  That’s a name, surely? It could be ‘Erick Rauch’ or even ‘Eric Krauch’. Either way, it sounds very German to me.”

Caroline shook her head. “It’s all getting a bit beyond me” she said. “You’re saying then that my grandfather is German, he’s Jewish, and that his parents were gassed in Auschwitz? That’s terrible –how can I tell Grandad that?”

Her teacher smiled. “Hang on – hang on! At the moment this is just supposition. It’s the way it looks! But you don’t know for sure that that piece of paper is anything to do with your Grandad. It could be sheer chance that it got mixed up with those photos you told me about. But from my point of view, as your teacher, this is all good stuff! It’s teaching you to check your sources! That’s what doing history is all about! You see, if you were a tabloid newspaper editor you’d be rushing out the latest edition with the headline ‘Local sixteen year old girl’s family perished in the gas-chambers’. But that’s not history, that’s sensationalism!”

“So what am I going to tell my family?”

“I think you’ve got to tell them that there’s a possibility – a very strong possibility – that your grandfather was rescued from a French concentration camp, and that you need their permission to go on researching. If they – your Dad or Grandad - say ‘No!’, then that’s it. Job done! Leave it there!”

“And if they say ‘Yes!’?

“Well, then we have to research the name “Rauch” or “Krauch”

“Can we do that?”

“As I said before, there may or may not be registers of the inmates of that camp still in existence. But there are lists of all known victims of the Holocaust. We could start there.”