Albert clapped him on the shoulder. “I’m glad to hear the medicines weren’t confiscated, and that they reached people to whom they were useful.”
Gerhard nodded. “I will forever be in your debt. Is there anything you want here? I’m a carpenter. I could make you something.”
Albert smiled. “I do need something. If you can find wood, I would love a desk for my room so I can write and practice organ finger work on it.”
Two days later Gerhard knocked on Albert’s door. He carried a wooden desk made from boards torn loose from the attic wall. Albert was grateful for the gesture, and he and Hélène put the desk to good use.
When Albert inquired about medical opportunities to serve his fellow internees, he was informed that he was the only doctor among them, but that his services were not needed. An elderly doctor who lived in town visited the camp when necessary. Albert was shocked. All around people were sick with malaria, dysentery, and various worm infections. How could a local doctor in the Pyrenees know the treatment for such tropical diseases? Albert asked to see the internment camp governor and volunteered his tropical medicine expertise. The governor turned him down.
Meanwhile, Albert was becoming a popular figure around the prison. When the members of a gypsy band captured while playing at a Paris nightclub recognized him as a well-known organist, they invited Albert to their private music practices. And after roll call in the courtyard twice a day, many of the internees stood talking and exchanging with Albert any news or rumors they’d heard. Other internees formed small groups at which they gave talks on anything they were knowledgeable about. Albert greatly appreciated this because it helped fill the time. He learned many interesting things about finance, architecture, growing grain, factory construction, equipment, and furnace building. Maybe one day, he told himself, I will be able to use this knowledge at Lambaréné.
Thankfully, Hélène’s parents found a way to mail them small amounts of money along with some woolen fabric. A dressmaker among the internees volunteered to make Hélène a suit, for which Hélène was most grateful. The monastery’s stone walls made Christmas 1917 the coldest and bleakest that Albert and Hélène had ever experienced.
Hélène turned thirty-nine on January 25, 1918, and the gypsy band serenaded the event outside her bedroom window. It was a high point in their dismal existence.
Two months later, on March 27, Albert and Hélène were ordered to pack their belongings and prepare to move. They soon found themselves seated in a double-decker train carriage heading east. When the train stopped at the Saint-Rémy-de-Provence station, Albert and Hélène were escorted off and taken by horse-drawn wagon up to another old former monastery, the Monastery of Saint Paul-de-Mausole. Like Garaison, this monastery served as an internment camp, one of seventy the French government had set up for enemy aliens. However, this place was much smaller than Garaison, with only 105 imprisoned there, all from Alsace. As Albert walked through the gates, many of the internees lined up to greet him. For the first time in years, he saw familiar faces from his past. There was Jean Iltis, a schoolmaster from Gunsbach, and Peter Liebrich, one of his former seminary students at the Theological College of St. Thomas, who was now the unofficial camp pastor. Although Albert had enjoyed the diverse group of people at Garaison, he felt a certain relief in being among people he’d grown up around. They all spoke the same Alsatian low-German dialect and knew people and places in common. Some of them knew Albert’s brother-in-law, Jules Ehrtsmann, in Colmar, or had visited Gunsbach and heard his father preach.
Soon after arriving at the Monastery of Saint Paul-de-Mausole, Albert had a vague sense he’d been there before. He noticed something familiar about the long room in which they stayed during the day, with its overhead pipes and single cast-iron stove at one end. Not only that—he was sure he recognized the view from the second-story window. In time, he learned the reason. Albert had seen it all before—in the sketches and paintings done by Vincent van Gogh, who’d been confined thirty years before.
On Good Friday, Peter Liebrich asked Albert to preach at the church service. It was a moving moment for Albert as he looked out over the gathered internees, each with a personal story of how he or she got there. But who knew how their stories would end? The war seemed to be far from over.
After the service, one of the guards announced some war news. The Germans had fired a long-range gun at Paris, and its shell had landed on Saint-Gervais Church during their morning service. The church roof had collapsed, and over eighty worshipers were presumed dead. Upon hearing the news, Albert asked Hélène to allow him time alone. He went to their room, closed the door, sat on the bed, and wept. Albert wept for all those who’d been killed in Paris, he wept for the beautiful church of Saint-Gervais, but most of all he wept for the complete, senseless misery the war was causing so many people on both sides. What, he wondered, will the world be like when this war ends and people assess the horror they have wrought on each other?
The internees at the monastery had a surprising amount of freedom. The internment camp governor was a retired police commissioner from Marseilles and wasn’t interested in punishing his prisoners. Instead, he tried to make their lives easier in any way he could. Whenever a delegation went to him and asked if something was permitted, he responded with a smile. “Nothing is permitted! But there are certain things that are tolerated, if you show yourselves reasonable!”
From the start, Albert liked the governor, who had guards escort those who were strong enough on a walk into the village twice a week. Sadly, as they walked, the internees were met with taunts from the local people. But neither Albert nor Hélène was well enough to keep up with the pace of this long walk. Thankfully, the camp governor himself took them and the other weaker prisoners for shorter walks.
By now France had been at war for three and a half years and French doctors were in short supply, since many of them had been killed at the battlefront. As a result, Saint-Rémy was soon without a doctor. The camp governor asked Albert, despite his suffering from dysentery, to take over the position. Albert agreed, and before long people from the village were begging him for treatment. Albert was allowed to leave the monastery under escort to do so.
Although the mail coming in and out of the internment camp was censored, bit by bit Albert pieced together what was happening in the war. The Bolshevik Revolution and resulting civil war in Russia had led to a cessation of fighting on the Eastern Front. No longer fighting the Russians, Germany quickly moved its troops to reinforce the Western Front, especially now that the United States had entered the war on the side of France, Great Britain, and the Allies. Already fresh American troops were streaming into France. Nonetheless, Germany was making a determined effort to push farther into France. Albert hoped it would all be over soon. He wondered how many more people would have to die before reason prevailed.
In March, around the time that Albert and Hélène had arrived, prisoners began leaving the monastery. Germany and France had reached an agreement that allowed an exchange of prisoners. At first nonmilitary prisoners over forty-eight years of age who’d been in captivity for more than eighteen months were exchanged. Albert hoped it was only a matter of time before he and Hélène were released. It took another three and a half months, but at midnight on July 12, 1918, Albert and Hélène were awakened and told to prepare to leave. Albert was relieved. At thirty-nine years of age, Hélène had recently realized she was pregnant and expecting a baby in January. Albert was concerned about her health and hoped to be able to provide more nutritious food once they were released.
At sunrise, Albert and Hélène carried their belongings to the internment camp courtyard for inspection. From the internment camp, they were transported to the railway station and put on a train headed north to Lyon and then northeast toward Switzerland. Albert was glad to be allowed to take the notes on his civilization book that he’d been writing at both Garaison and Saint-Rémy.
The train grew longer as carriages carrying prisoners from other internment camps were hitched to it. When they reached the Swiss border, the internees had to wait for hours. Albert stared out the window, hoping that everything was going to be all right. At last a telegram arrived, saying that the German train carrying French and Allied prisoners had arrived at Constance, a city on the other side of the country near the Swiss border. Albert, Hélène, and the others were led from the train and into Switzerland. Across the border they climbed onto another train and were taken to Zürich, then farther east to the border, where they crossed into Constance, Germany. Everything seemed so normal to Albert as he traveled through Switzerland. People went about their daily business, goatherds watched their goats, and small children skipped across train station platforms. It was hard to grasp that Switzerland hadn’t been touched by the war.
Constance, Germany, was a stark contrast to Switzerland. Pale, emaciated, listless people stood hopelessly in the city streets begging for food. It was worse than the suffering and starvation Albert had seen in Africa. As soon as they could, Albert and Hélène left Constance behind and headed for Strasbourg, where they were reunited with Hélène’s parents.
The next day Albert set out to visit his father. Since Gunsbach was within the sphere of military operations on the German side of the Western Front, he had to get permission to travel there. Once he had a travel permit, he caught a train to Colmar, where the railway line ended because of the war. He would have to walk the last ten miles into the Vosges Mountains to his hometown.
The valley in which Gunsbach nestled was no longer peaceful. In the distance Albert could hear artillery guns roaring from their positions high in the mountains. On the roads, he had to walk between lines of razor wire packed with straw, and everywhere he noticed concrete machine gun emplacements. As he made his way along, he saw houses destroyed by cannon fire, and many of the tree-covered hillsides were now stripped of vegetation. Although Gunsbach was the last inhabited village before the trenches of the Western Front, its location in a valley surrounded by hills had provided enough cover to stop artillery fire from destroying it.
When Albert walked into Gunsbach, he found the streets crowded with wounded German soldiers from the front. He greeted them, but most didn’t respond. He could see the indifference in their eyes, as if they’d stopped caring. He found the same indifference in his father’s eyes. In the face of danger, his father just sat in his study while artillery shells whistled overhead. He told Albert that he could now barely remember a time when there was no war and no German army officers shared the manse with him.
Albert tried to cheer his father up and care for him, but it was a challenge, given the scarcity of food and other essentials. After several weeks, Hélène obtained permission to travel to Gunsbach. Although she was exhausted from all she’d been through and from her pregnancy, her first job upon arrival was to nurse Albert. He’d hoped the mountain air would cure his dysentery completely, but instead he’d become very sick. A large abscess on his intestine made it difficult for him to even get out of bed. He kept waiting for it to heal, but by late October he realized the abscess needed surgery.
Hélène and Albert supported each other as they started the long walk back to Colmar to get Albert help. They stumbled along for the first two miles until a military wagon picked them up and transported them the rest of the way. In Colmar they stayed the night with Albert’s older sister, Louisa, then went by train to Strasbourg, where Albert’s old medical lecturer, Professor Stolz, operated on him.
