“Actually, it’s madame,” she said. “I had a wedding ring, but it was stolen by one of your French guards. Not that it ever stayed on my finger, after the diet I’ve endured. My husband is in another camp. Le Vernet. I hope things are better there. My God, it could hardly be any worse. You know something? I’m sorry the war is over. I just wish our boys could have killed a lot more Frenchmen before they were obliged to throw in the towel.” She leaned forward and tapped the corporal and the driver on their shoulders. “Christ, I’m proud of you, boys. You really gave the Franzis a well-deserved kicking. But if you want to put the cherry on my cake, you’ll arrest the criminal who’s in charge of the camp at Gurs and shoot him down like the pig he is. Here, I tell you what. I’ll sleep with whichever one of you puts a bullet in that bastard’s head.”

The corporal looked at the driver and grinned. I could tell that the idea was not without appeal for him, so I said:

“And I will shoot whoever takes this lady up on her generous offer.” I took her bony hand in mine. “Please don’t do that again, Frau Kemmerich. I appreciate that you’ve had a rough time of it, but I can’t allow you to make things worse.”

“Worse?” she sneered. “There isn’t anything that’s worse than Gurs.”

The camp, situated in the foothills of the Pyrenees, was much larger than I had supposed, covering an area of about a square kilometer and split into two halves. A makeshift street ran the length of the camp, and on each side there were three or four hundred wooden huts. There seemed to be no sanitation or running water, and the smell was indescribable. I had been to Dachau. The only differences between Gurs and Dachau were that the barbed-wire fence at Gurs was smaller and not obviously electrified, and there were no executions; otherwise, conditions seemed to be much the same, and it was only after a parade was called in the men’s half of the camp and we went in among the prisoners that it was possible to see how things were actually much worse than at Dachau.