Good reminder of the sweeping scale of WW2. "The Gestapo came knocking without warning on a freezing night in December. It was the moment that thousands of British civilians caught out by the speed of Germany's invasion of France were dreading. Trapped behind enemy lines many expatriates had deluded themselves into believing that if they kept their heads down they would be left alone until the Nazis went away. But at the end of 1940 the round-up began and no one was spared. Throughout occupied France more than 4,000 female British passport holders from all walks of life were arrested: dancers, members of the aristocracy, nuns, governesses and holidaymakers. There was even the daughter of an Indian maharajah. Among them was Priscilla Mais, a glamorous blonde who had grown up in Hove, East Sussex, and been a model and ballet dancer. Married to a French aristocrat she felt more at home in Paris than Britain and had lingered there when war was declared. Like so many others Priscilla mistakenly believed she would be safe. The 24-year-old was barely given time to pack a suitcase and grab her fur coat before being marched away from her apartment. Priscilla and the rest of the women were herded on to trains at La Gare de l'Est and the doors sealed with barbed wire. Their destination was an internment camp or Ilag in the town of Besancon near the border with Switzerland. Frontstalag 142 was cold and filthy. The lavatories were trenches covered by planks with holes. It's claimed that more than 700 women and children died in the squalor in less than a year. No proper records were maintained and the extent of the horrific conditions was kept secret from the British and the Red Cross. It was only years later that the suffering of these forgotten prisoners began to emerge. Priscilla later wrote about her time at Frontstalag 142 and her journals were eventually found in an old chest after her death by her nephew Nicholas Shakespeare. The woman he discovered was very different from the vivacious aunt "smelling of expensive perfume" that Shakespeare remembered from his childhood. Priscilla's first memories of the internment camp are of being led up a flight of stairs to room 71 in the former barracks, built in the Napoleonic Wars. The old building had recently been used to hold Allied prisoners of war before being hastily cleared to make way for the civilian women." http://www.express.co.uk/news/uk/443638/The-forgotten-women-prisoners-of-war
