A Train in Winter (63 page)

United States

HarperCollins Publishers Inc.

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Deiss would later be beheaded by axe in Hamburg.

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Though not to vote, a right the conservative French continued to find too threatening.

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Paris is cold, Paris is hungry/ Paris no longer eats chestnuts in the streets/ Paris trembling like a star’.

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In all, between 1942 and 1944, 75,721 Jews were deported from France; 2,500 returned. 13.5 per cent of French Jews were deported; 42 per cent of Jewish non-French citizens.

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Poinsot would later say that of the forty-seven men executed, twelve should not have been on the list at all, for they really posed no kind of danger.

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The name given to teams of men prisoners, kept separate and alive to work the crematoria, before themselves being gassed and incinerated.

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The SS chose the prisoners most willing to do their bidding, gave them some privileges and special armbands and set them, with almost unlimited power, over the others:
kapos
to oversee work commandos,
Blockältesten
to maintain order,
Lagerältesten
who reported directly to the camp commandant.

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No one was sure where the word came from. Some said that it was derived from the image of Arabs praying, others from a popular German song in which a
musulman
is a Turk weakened and made pale by drinking too much coffee.

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Literally ‘pieces of jewellery’, like
musulman
, a word never properly explained.

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Within ten years, a third of all survivors had died.

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In 1980 a poll of French people aged between 18 and 44 revealed that 34 per cent did not think that the existence of gas chambers had been clearly proven.

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Of the 120 men and women who had worked for Johnny, twenty-eight had been killed by the Germans.