Salois had traveled its fickle, azure waters before. The first time was during his deportation. It was like crossing the Styx.The Wannsee Conference designated the ports of Trieste, in Italy, and Gotenhafen, on the Baltic, as the “primary expulsion conduits” for the Jews. When they failed to cope with the numbers, Marseille, in France, and Salonika, in Greece, were added, and later Constanta, to remove Romanian and Bulgarian Jews. A special fleet was created from the North German Lloyd and Hamburg-American lines, supplemented by the KdF’s older cruise ships: 120 vessels in total. The initial route to Madagaskar was via the Cape of Good Hope; after the Casablanca Conference, Britain opened up the Suez Canal, reducing the journey to thirty days. Relays of ships chugged through the Red Sea and down the eastern coast of Africa to the processing stations of Diego Suarez, Mazunka, and Salzig, a journey of at least six thousand miles. They headed to the equator tottering on the waterline; returned empty.After Salois’s capture at Dunkirk, he spent the summer as a POW before being identified as a Jew (a fellow Belgian gave him up for a handful of cigarettes) and taken to the Breendonk labor camp.
