The Face of Vichy

Eleven men sat in the prisoners' dock in a narrow Algiers courtroom. They were servants of Vichy--the officers and guards of a concentration camp in North Africa, now indicted and on trial for murder and torture. A. P. Correspondent Relman Morin described them as they looked in the Gaullist courtroom:

"One is a sleek, young officer, at times almost handsome. His expression comes alive with a kind of haunted fury. His black eyes widen. His neck stretches. His head begins to twitch in spasmodic jerks. He looks like a hunted animal. It is a spasm. As it passes, he leans back against the dock and only the wariness in his eyes remains.

"He is accused of having given orders to guards to beat the prisoners, of having made them drink soup heavily saturated with salt, of having himself promised to 'finish off in eight days' a husky Spanish doctor.

"Beside him sits a little man with dull, lustful eyes, abnormally high cheekbones, and an enormous shock of brown hair. Legally he is a Russian but the face is oriental. He is a Mongol of the easternmost end of Asia.

"On his right is a giant German, all blocks and angles. Neither his head nor his body seems to have any curves or rounded lines. His expression alternates between defiance and weary exasperation.

"Yes, he beat the prisoners. 'I struck hard. I struck often. I struck enough.' He did it, he says, because he was ordered to do it and one obeys an order.

"At the extreme end of the box is a little man with a hook nose, sunken cheeks, deep sunken eyes. He is French and he wears a string of medals. He looks like an Egyptian mummy, except for the queer glitter in his colorless eyes. Another French officer is fat. His eyebrows slant upward. His normal complexion is purple-red--that of a man bursting with rage.

"These were some of the faces which Vichy's prisoners saw, every day and every night, until they died."

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