Sonia
Tomara was born into a prosperous family in St Petersburg, Russia,
in 1897. During the Russian Revolution
Sonia and her mother fled the country and eventually reached France.
Her father stayed behind and was never heard of again.
Sonia found
work with the French newspaper, Le Matin.
She concentrated on political reporting and in 1928 was recruited
by the New
York Tribune.
In the 1930s she covered the rise of Adolf
Hitler and spent some time in Nazi
Germany.
In 1937
joined the staff of the newspaper in New
York. However, on the outbreak of the Second
World War she returned to Europe as a roving correspondent. She
covered the German Western Offensive
and the invasion of France in May 1940. After
the armistice she escaped to Portugal
before returning to the United States.
In 1942
Sonia received accreditation as a war correspondent and visited India,
China
and Burma.
In 1943 she was transferred to North Africa
before moving to France in 1944.
Sonia resigned
from the New
York Tribune when
she married Federal Judge William Clark in 1945. Sonia Tomara died
in 1982.
(1)
Sonia Tomara, New
York Tribune (14th
June, 1940)
For four days and four nights I have shared the appalling hardship
of 5,000,000 French refugees who are now fleeing
down all the roads of France leading to the south. My story is the
typical story of nine-tenths of these refugees.
I left Paris Monday night,
June 10, in a big car which was to take me, my sister, Irene Tomara,
and a Canadian doctor, William Douglas, who has been working with
the American and civilian refugees. We loaded our car with whatever
we could carry. We had enough gasoline to take us at least to Bordeaux.
It was quite dark when we left. All days cars
had been going toward the southern gates of Paris. Just as we departed
dark clouds rose above the town, obscuring the rising crescent of
the moon. I thought at first it was a storm. Then I understood it
was a smoke screen the French had laid down to save the city from
bombing.
We drove across the Seine
bridge and in complete darkness past the Montparnasse station, in
which a desperate crowd was camping. We found the so-called Italian
Gate and drove past it, risking all the time the chance of being hit
by trucks. But all went well for about fifteen miles. Then, as we
started up the first hill, the gears of our car refused to work and
the car would not move.
We managed to pull off
the road and park. We were in a small suburb of Paris. As nothing
could be done during the dark hours, we rolled into our sleeping bags
in a ditch alongside the road and tried to sleep. But cars roared
by us incessantly. Then came an air-raid alarm. Then the cars started
again.
When dawn came we tried
to get the car going. It would not start. We waited for hours for
a mechanic, while cars passed at the rate of twenty a minute. Then
we learned there were no mechanics. They had all been called into
the army. But the driver of a truck stopped and inspected the car.
He said it could not be repaired on the road.
We tried to buy a little
truck that could take our luggage. Finally the gendarmes on the road
took pity on us and stopped a military truck, asking its driver to
tow us. Fortunately we had a chain. We started off at noon on the
road to Fontainebleau. At that time the road was a dense stream of
army and factory trucks carrying big machines. We drove all day, and
at 8 P.M. got into Fontainebleau.
In Fontainebleau we located
a garage. The mechanic looked at the car and said it could not be
repaired in less than two days. "We have no men to repair it,
anyway," the manager of the garage said. "We work only for
the army." We passed the night at a hotel and in the morning
started to look for a truck that could tow us. Douglas found a youngster
who had a country truck, but no gasoline. He was going back to Paris.
We promised him gasoline and he said he would take us to Orleans and
then drive to Paris.
We were abandoning our
car, which was worth at least 40,000 francs (approximately $875),
but money had ceased to have significance. We reloaded our bags on
the truck, which had no top, and sat on them. It was 5 p.m. We drove
five miles without difficulty and then got into a stream of refugees
and army cars. Refugees blocked the road by trying
to get past the main line of cars, thus interfering with oncoming
traffic.
At 10 p.m. we had driven
less than fifteen miles from Fontainebleau. The boy driving our car
was in despair. He wanted to turn back to Paris, but we would not
let him. We saw thousands of cars by the roadsides, without gasoline
or broken down.
We drove on in the night.
Presently the road cleared, but we were off our route. Soldiers had
detoured traffic to permit movement of military cars. We were driving
south instead of toward Orleans. In a small village we turned off
and started at a good speed through the dead of night, with lights
turned off. It was fantastic. The clouds parted and the moon came
up. The country seemed phantom-like. There were piles of stones in
front of each village we passed, and peasants
with rifles guarded these barricades. They looked at our papers and
let us pass.
We arrived before the Orleans
station at 3 a.m. on Thursday. After three nights and two days we
had made only seventy miles. The scene near the station was appalling.
People lay on the floor inside and the town square was filled. We
piled our baggage and waited until daylight.
There was nothing to eat
in the town, no rooms in the hotels, no cars for sale or hire, no
gasoline anywhere. Yet a steady stream of refugees was coming in,
men, women and children, all desperate, not knowing where to go or
how.
I walked around and found
a truck that was fairly empty. I talked to the driver, offering him
money to take me to Tours. He would take us near Tours. For food,
we had only a little wine, some stale bread and a can of ham.
The scene of the refugees
around the station was the most horrible I had ever seen, worse than
the refugees in Poland. Fortunately, there was no bombing. Had there
been any attacks it would have been too ghastly for words. Children
were crying. There was no milk, no bread. Yet social workers were
doing their best and groups were led away all the time, but new ones
continued to arrive.
All morning we sought means
of transportation. There was none. I decided to go to Tours. I started
to walk in the rain with my typewriter and sleeping bag, at last getting
a lift in a car which moved slowly through a mob of refugees moving
in the opposite direction. In Tours, I learned that the government
had left. Also gone were most newspapermen, but a press wireless operator
and the French censor were still there.
As I finish this story
there is a German air raid. The sound of bombs is terrific. I hope
the German bombers have not hit at the road which leads to the south,
for there refugees are packed in fleeing crowds.
The catastrophe that has
befallen France has no parallel in human history. Nobody knows how
or when it will end. Like the other refugees, and there are millions
of us, I do not know tonight when I shall sleep in a bed again, or
how I shall get out of this town.
(2)
Sonia Tomara talking to Jean E. Collins for her book, She Was There:
Stories of Pioneering Women Journalists (1980)
I never tried to have
scoops, because a scoop lives one day and dies the next. Newspaper
articles last only one day. You don't have to have any illusions about
that. I think it's more important to cover the events behind the scene
rather than the obvious, which everybody covers. Any foreign correspondent
for a serious paper wants to cover history, or at least have the illusion
that he or she covers history.
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