In our last post we left the Polish captain Wyssogota injured in southern France as the German army was smashing into northern France. In the summer of 1940 Hitler allowed Petain and the Vichy government to administer southern France. This was not necessarily the good news that refugees with reason to fear the Germans might have thought. Vichy had its own share of xenophobia that manifested in a network of internment camps where most foreigners were held in appalling conditions. As a Pole, Wyssogota found out all about them.

Sometime during the early summer of 1940, Wyssogota talked a French prefect into giving him a small truck and enough gasoline to take himself and several other Poles to Bordeaux. They planned to sail to England, but all the ships had already departed. Stymied in Bordeaux, Wyssogota made his way to Toulouse in hopes of crossing the Pyrenees into Spain. But the walk proved too difficult for his injured leg, so he rested in a cave for a few days.

In July 1940, after the French defeat, the Polish consul gave Wyssogota a mission to evacuate Polish soldiers from Marseille. Over the next few months he organized the purchase of 27 small boats and the departure of Belgians, Dutchmen, Frenchmen and of course Poles to join the Allies. This worked well enough until November 1940 when the French police issued a warrant for his arrest. A Polish intelligence officer arranged for him to get new false French identity papers, but a Pole who had taken French citizenship identified him to the French police. They arrested him on charges of attempting to leave the country illegally (yes, it’s odd).

His lawyer got his sentence down to 8 months, but 8 months in solitary confinement was enough to land him in the infirmary. At a second trial in March 1942 the judge acquitted Wyssogota on the grounds that as a Pole he had the right to want to leave the country (le droit de vouloir partir). He was set free, but arrested again after three days. When he complained to the French prefect that he had been acquitted, the prefect asked how he could be sure that Wyssogota wouldn’t start again. He sent the Pole to a French internment camp.

Wyssogota was transferred within the French camp system to the camp aux Mines near Avignon, which detained 1,700-1,800 persons, mostly foreign Jews. The commander made Wyssogota a general interpreter because he spoke more languages than most. Unfortunately, two weeks after he arrived, the camp was turned into a staging area for departures for the extermination camps. Wyssogota did what he could to help Jews escape by falsifying the translations on documents. When the French figured it out, he was designated to go to the Third Reich on the next convoy. He was warned with just enough time to escape.

After more difficulties with Vichy prefects in southern France, Wyssogota made his way to Paris with the goal of making it to England via Belgium or Holland. The fact that he thought he could do that when everyone in Belgium and Holland was concluding that the only way to get to England was via France and Spain demonstrates how difficult it was to get reliable information under the Occupation.