A Train in Winter (30 page)

When the women had been in Birkenau about a week, the roll call one morning took a slightly different form. An SS doctor asked, in a surprisingly mild voice, whether there were any women among them who felt too fragile for these long roll calls and would rather skip them altogether? Magda, the Czech
kapo
of Block 14, a woman the others were coming to like, nudged Marie-Claude who, without pausing in her translation, added the words: ‘but it is better not to admit to it’. Several of the women, whose hands were already raised, put them down, but not Marie Chaux, the widow from Chalon-sur-Saône, who had sheltered resisters in her boarding house. Mme Chaux was a very short woman, and she was standing at the back. Rising on to her tiptoes, she called out: ‘Me. I’m 67.’ And then Marie Dubois, whose cafe in Saint-Denis had been a meeting place and mail drop for the Resistance, put up her hand too, though Marie-Elisa Nordmann, standing next to her, begged her not to. ‘Stay with us. You don’t know where they will take you.’ But Mme Dubois kept her hand up anyway. ‘
Komm
,’ said the SS doctor and led the two women away, but where they were taken no one knew. When Cécile asked a Jewish girl in the barracks what had happened to her parents, and was told that they had ‘gone up in smoke’, she still didn’t understand what this meant.

What was clear to the younger, stronger women, particularly those who like Cécile were used to hard lives and the discipline of the Communist Party, was that in order to survive the women would have to take some kind of control over what was happening to them. They could not, they told each other, become victims, vulnerable to every twist of chance. They needed to organise themselves, to try to understand their surroundings, so that they could navigate the dangers and respond quickly enough to the orders shouted at them in the camp jargon, with its mixture of Polish, Yiddish, Silesian and German.

On the third morning, returning from the roll call stiff, cold and hungry, Maï, Viva and Charlotte suggested that the women all do gymnastics together. It would make them strong, they said, give them energy and hope. Forcing their companions outside, to jump and stretch, they were seen by a group of other women, themselves on their way to a work detail. ‘You must be mad,’ one of them called out. ‘Don’t use up your energy. You are going to need it.’ Maï tried to start folk dances. The women knew that they looked absurd, as Adelaïde later wrote, shuffling awkwardly around in their ill-fitting striped clothes, ‘but it gave us a feeling of being ourselves’. The full horror of Birkenau was still to hit them.

It was not long in coming. On 10 February, when they had been in the camp a fortnight, the entire contingent of 15,000 women was roused at 3 a.m. for roll call. Only this time, no order came for them to return to their barracks. Dawn came and went. A bitter wind blew from the Carpathian mountains and their breath seemed to freeze inside their heads. It was a blue, clear, sparkling day and the sun on the snow was hard and blinding. The women stood, inert, glacially cold. The SS guards, in their heavy capes and greatcoats, circled with dogs, also wrapped up in warm coats. An SS officer on horseback came to look, then rode away. ‘Stay still,’ called out Marie-Claude, ‘stay calm.’ Charlotte noted that there were no birds other than crows in the vast frozen plain that surrounded them.

Here and there, in ones and twos, breaking the neat pattern of the rows, women began to fall and to lie still in the snow. The hours passed. The living tried to rub one another’s backs, to talk to one another. When they stamped their feet, it made no sound in the snow. Madeleine said to Simone, who was standing next to her, ‘Move your feet inside your socks.’ ‘I can’t,’ Simone replied, ‘I don’t have my socks, I lost them.’ Her neighbours now crowded more closely round her and forced her to move her feet.

Towards the end of the morning, the sound of lorries was heard. Turning their heads to watch, the women saw that they were full of bodies, naked corpses piled one on top of another, arms and legs jutting out at different angles. A whisper passed down the lines: ‘They are emptying Block 25.’ Block 25, as they now knew, was the antechamber of death, the barracks to which the frail and sick were taken to die. What was so terrifying was that not all the bodies were still, and as the lorries passed, among the shorn, boy-like, narrow heads could be seen living faces calling out for help. On one lorry, standing upright in a posture that conveyed both dignity and hatred, stood a very young woman, her head newly shaved. ‘As for us,’ Charlotte would later write, ‘we were walled in the ice, the light, the silence.’

It was getting dark when the order was finally given to move. The landscape had grown hazy in the dusk and the edges of the trees were blurred. Even then, the ordeal was not over. Stumbling, taking what Charlotte described as ‘shrunken’ steps, leaning on one another, walking as if automatically on legs so cold that they had no feeling of any kind, the women set out slowly and silently for the barracks. All around lay the bodies of those who had fallen during the day. It made Marie-Claude think of a battlefield strewn with corpses. The snow, as far as the eye could see, was spotted with diarrhoea. Simone’s bare feet refused to move and Madeleine took hold of her and pulled her forward. Later, Simone would remember that, unable to speak, her body paralysed, she had kept repeating to herself: ‘I will get through this. I will.’

As they neared the gates, Josée, who was walking at the front, sent back an urgent message down the lines: ‘When you get near, run.’ It was now that the women perceived that two rows of SS guards, men and women, and
kapos
as well, had formed, each holding a truncheon, whip or belt, leaving a corridor down which the women were to pass, shouting ‘Schnell! Schnell!’ Scrambling, jostling, holding their frozen arms above their heads to ward off the blows, the women began to run. Hélène Bolleau, standing near her mother Emma, took her arm to help her. As they ran, the stragglers were hooked out of the line by the guards and thrown to one side. Hélène Solomon was helping Alice Viterbo, whose wooden leg made running in the snow all but impossible. She told her to cling hard to her coat. But then Alice fell, and Hélène found herself alone. Looking back, she saw that Alice had been caught and pulled out of the line. She ran on.

In the barracks, there was a desperate count. ‘Who is back? Where is Viva? Is Charlotte here?’ They counted again and again: fourteen were missing. The other women, in silence, waited; no one else arrived.

The
kapo
Magda appeared and called for volunteers to collect the bodies of those who had fallen. She wanted to take Simone, but Simone, shocked and frozen, was in no shape to move. Cécile volunteered to take her place. She wanted, she said, to see what had happened to everyone. When she came back, she was crying. Collecting the bodies, in a long line of women with stretchers bearing away the dead, she had come across a woman who was still alive and who had clutched desperately at her ankle, begging to be saved. But then a guard saw her and cracked her head with his truncheon. As Cécile talked, her teeth chattering and tears running down her cheeks, the other women crowded around her, rubbing her back, to comfort and warm her.

That day, 10 February 1943, a thousand women died in Birkenau. It was later claimed that the
course
, the race, was an act of revenge on the part of the SS. On 2 February, Stalingrad had finally fallen to the Russians; 100,000 German soldiers and twenty-five generals had been taken prisoner.

Among the fourteen French women who died were Mme van der Lee, whose otter coat had long since gone to warm the guards, and who was said by those close to her to have lost her mind, standing all those hours in the cold; and Sophie Brabander, whose daughter Hélène could do nothing to help her; and Yvonne B., whose surname was never spelt out to protect her identity, and who was a farmer’s wife from Indre-et-Loire, aged only 24 and pregnant. Had Yvonne told the guards at Romainville that she was pregnant, instead of being too embarrassed to come forward, she might never have been sent to Birkenau at all; but Yvonne’s husband had been a prisoner of war in Germany since 1940, and she felt ashamed.

Forty-five-year-old Sophie Gigand died too, but how much she minded no one was sure because her daughter Andrée, who was 21, had died soon after arriving at the camp, almost unnoticed in the crowd of dazed women. Aminthe Guillon was dead, though Yvette, her daughter-in-law, had struggled back to safety. The causes of these deaths, recorded in the camp register, were assigned randomly; some days, all deaths were noted as being due to pneumonia, others all to heart failure. Aminthe was said to have died from a blocked heart valve. The deaths filled the survivors with dread. If all these women could die, so suddenly, so arbitrarily, how could they hope to live? Later, looking at all the bodies piled up outside Block 25, trying to find their friends, the women saw rats, the size of cats, digging among the frozen corpses. For a while, Alice Viterbo, taken to Block 25 after falling in the snow with her wooden leg, stayed alive. From their barracks the other women could see her at the window. Alice kept calling out, begging them to get Danielle to bring her some poison. Then one morning Simone caught sight of something lying in the snow. When she went over, she discovered that it was Alice’s wooden leg. She called the others, and they went to look. For several weeks it lay there, and then one day it was gone.

Twenty-seven of the French women were now dead. They had died still not knowing where they were. Two days later, the survivors were moved from Block 14 to Block 26. It was now, Poupette would later write, that they discovered the true meaning of hell.

Terrible as the roll calls were, their stay in quarantine had allowed the French women to spend the hours in between in relative shelter and safety. Moved to Block 26, they found themselves sharing the space with a number of Polish women, eight to a bunk in something that looked rather like an open rabbit hutch. The bottom bunk was on the earth, permanently damp from melted snow and urine. They lay head to toe, twenty-four to a hutch, eight to a bunk, sharing their thin cotton blankets. Next morning the assignment to work tasks began. It was seventeen days since the women had washed or changed their clothes, and many more since they had last eaten a proper meal. They were weak, hungry and exhausted. After a bowl of watery ersatz coffee and the interminable morning roll call, they were now marched out of the camp, through squalls of snow and wind that felt as if it were a solid wall.

In the spring of 1943 work was continuing on the expansion of Birkenau: there were still buildings to be knocked down and cleared and the marshes were being drained for agricultural projects or to be made into fish ponds. On the first morning, the women were walked, for almost two hours, in their lines of five, the guards shouting ‘
Links! Zwei! Drei!
’, holding one another’s arms so as not to slip on the ice in their ill-fitting shoes. To keep up their spirits, they sang. It was so foggy that Charlotte Delbo kept worrying that they would become separated. Those whose swollen legs made walking hard were supported by the others. When they reached a swampy field, they were given shovels and hods, wheelbarrows without wheels, which had to be loaded with mud and stones and carried to a ditch to be emptied. All day, except for a pause in the late morning when a tepid, thin soup of swedes and cabbage arrived, they dug through the ice, lifted and shovelled, staggering and falling under the weight. With the temperature far below zero, the metal stuck to their hands.

When a pale sun rose and the ice began to melt, their feet sank ever deeper into the mud so that they were soon standing ankle deep in freezing mud and water. Women unaccustomed to physical work, whose lives had been spent in offices or schoolrooms, found the work acutely painful. Their backs, arms and legs ached. The SS guards, well fed and warmly dressed, lit fires, around which they crouched, and if the women paused in their work, sent the dogs over to snap at their heels, or came themselves to deal out blows. From all over the misty field could be heard shouts and cries of pain. Charlotte, watching the rows of women at work, thought that they looked like ants, ‘a frieze of shadows against the light’. Viva and Lulu, strong and cheerful by temperament, did their best to keep the spirits of the others up. The shovels grew heavier and heavier. The women felt feverish. At dusk, when the whistle blew to stop work, it was found that every French woman had survived the day. Not all the Poles had, and they had to wait for the bodies of the dead to be collected. Then came the two-hour walk back to camp and the evening roll call. It was dark by the time they got back to their barracks.