The Malgre-Nous

No tricolors, no flowers, no formal reception--only a couple of French officials, a doctor and two nurses waited on the platform at the Strasbourg station. The train from Germany pulled in, and eight men got out. They were reluctant wanderers, helpless victims of two mighty tyrannies, home for the first time in seven years. As P.W.s, they had been pushed around Europe and Asia, and released finally a fortnight ago from a Soviet labor camp in Kiev.

"Les malgre-nous," the Alsatians called them--malgre-nous meaning "in spite of ourselves." In 1942-44 the German army had drafted 130,000 Alsatians and Lorrainers, in spite of themselves (only a few were pro-Nazi). Most of the still living came home after the war; others, in little groups, came home last week; 13,000 are still missing.

Along the station platform, the eight Strasbourg malgre-nous shuffled forlornly, dressed in patched pants of dark Soviet cloth and carrying light wooden boxes and flimsy suitcases. Among them was Oscar Baehr, a husky, 25-year-old, tawny-haired farm boy. As he was driven to the village where his parents have a prosperous farm, he recalled the great Wehrmacht retreat from Russia in 1944 (when he was only 18), then the Soviet P.W. camp at Grozny in the Caucasus, next Siberia, and finally Kiev, where month after month he cracked rocks with other P.W.s and some Ukrainian women. ("If we got caught talking to the women, they simply disappeared. Those Ukrainian girls; God knows where they were sent.")

Oscar Baehr for the moment was a village celebrity, but leadenly unthrilled. Seven of his best years were gone, in spite of himself.

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