A Train in Winter (35 page)

And it came too late for the tall, aristocratic France Rondeaux, who had distracted herself when not praying by reciting recipes. France died of typhus, her skin slack over her emaciated body. She was at least spared the knowledge that her young daughter, at about this time, had died in a tragic accident in France.

Infinitely relieved by their change in fortune, the remaining women got together their one or two possessions and walked the couple of hundred yards to their new home just outside the barbed wire. Later they would all say that without this move, it was unlikely that any one of them would have survived. Hélène Fournier was so thin that she felt as if her thigh bones, which had so little flesh on them, were almost touching.

Now they got down to writing letters, devising codes and using historical references to try to convey to their families in France what had happened to them. Marie-Claude immediately sent news confirming the deaths of Danielle and Maï, using nicknames. ‘I am very sad that Hortense [Danielle] has gone to her father [he had died in 1937]. I also think a lot about poor little Mimi [the nickname of Maï’s son, now an orphan].’ She wrote about Hades and Dante’s Inferno, and said it was a bit ‘as if Eurydice had received a letter’. She said that not only had she lost two teeth, but that, at the age of 31, she had fifty white hairs.

Betty wrote to her aunt saying that it was sad that Rosette [Blanc, founder of a branch of the Jeunes Filles de France] had also left with Hortense, but that she was happy to report that Pomme [Marie-Claude] was in good health. She added that she was delighted to hear that Monique [one of her own nicknames] was moving to another school, where she would be far happier.

Yvonne Noutari wrote to ask her sister whether there was any news of her husband Robert, arrested shortly before her. Her sister, in one of the first replies to reach the camp, answered that it was ‘impossible to send news’. What she could not bring herself to write was that Robert had been executed by the Gestapo. When Yvonne wrote to her mother, saying ‘Happy days will bloom again’ —with the suggestion that the nightmare of the Nazis could not endure for ever—she was punished with one month in a disciplinary detail, which meant leaving for work at four in the morning and not returning until ten at night. Her friends saved extra bread from their rations to give her.

Learning from her example, the other women kept their letters very bland. Every letter that Lulu was able to write was about her son Paul, sending him her love, asking for photographs and news. ‘I kiss you and little Paul from all my heart,’ she wrote. ‘It is hard for me to realise that he isn’t a baby any more. I will always regret these days in which I couldn’t live with him…’ How much had he grown? she asked. What did he talk about? What did he play with? About Auschwitz she said nothing.

In France, the letters were received and many of the references understood. When Hélène Bolleau’s aunt received a letter saying that ‘From now on, you will be my little mother’, she understood that Emma was dead. Some of the allusions however remained puzzling. Why were the women asking for onions and garlic? (To ward off scurvy.) What did Cécile mean when she wrote: ‘don’t send any
oseilles
[sorrel]’, which was French slang for money, but which was translated by a friend in France for her family into ‘lettuce’? And what could they possibly be saying when they described a great many
pommes au four
, apples in the oven?

Complaints continued to be addressed by families to the authorities, and Aragon wrote a poem with the line: ‘I salute you, Marie of France of the hundred faces’. Parcels were quickly posted off to Auschwitz, and some, though never all of the desperately needed food, reached the women in their quarantine block, where it was meticulously shared out. Hélène Bolleau’s aunt sent a packet containing oil, chocolate, biscuits, dried plums, sugar, jam, tuna, cassoulet, mustard and onions. The taste of so many different things, after so long, was extraordinary. When Betty received her first parcel from her parents, she wept.

One day, while still in Raisko, Marie-Elisa received a a pot of honey. They had agreed that, when sharing out the contents of their packets, the woman to whom it had been addressed would be allowed to lick out anything that remained at the bottom of a jar. Licking the pot, Marie-Elisa found a piece of paper stuck along the bottom. Underneath was a photograph of her small son. It was, she would later say, an incredible moment and from this instant she knew she would survive and go home, because she had to see her son again. Despite the risk of discovery and punishment, for photographs were still forbidden, she found a way of keeping it by her at all times. The other women shared in her intense pleasure.

Some of the news from home, however, was unsettling. Poupette discovered that her father, after the death of her mother, had fallen in love with a much younger woman and was thinking of marrying again. Simply being in touch with the outside world again, after so long isolated in an existence infinitely remote from anything they had previously known and understood, but which they had learnt to navigate and adapt to, was in itself unnerving. The communication with home, said Marie-Claude, had served to remind them ‘that there was also another world out there, of love and gentleness’, and that was no bad thing because it was important not to allow oneself to become hard. But, she added, it also made them realise how very far away they were. It was a different world, and they had become different people.

Something of this came across to all of them the day that Olga Melin suddenly caught sight of her husband, working on the railway line in Birkenau. She dropped the vat of soup that she had been carrying and ran across to speak to him. When she returned, having by great good fortune not been seen by the SS, she told them that he was in Auschwitz because he had tried to escape from a prisoner of war camp. What about their divorce? the others asked, knowing that at the beginning of the war the two had decided to separate. ‘We’re getting back together,’ Olga told them. The Melins’ son, disabled from polio, was living with her mother. The Melins had helped Jews cross the demarcation line.

There was, however, one woman whose fate in Birkenau took a different turn. This was Dr Adelaïde Hautval, the psychiatrist from Alsace who had castigated the German soldiers whom she had seen mistreating a family of Jews. Adelaïde possessed a somewhat stern, reserved manner which had not brought her close to the other women, but the clarity of her moral stance did not desert her in Auschwitz, where she was widely respected and admired.

Not long after reaching the camp, Adelaïde was sent as doctor to the German infirmary block, where the ‘asocials’, the German criminal prisoners and the prostitutes, went when they fell ill. Though better provisioned than the other infirmary blocks, it was nonetheless menaced by enormous rats, so bold that they would attack the women patients. All the
Reviers
were a form of hell, with no soap, no clean sheets, very little water, and full of women with suppurating sores which would not heal.

Adelaïde did her best to help the other French women, by stealing medicines and food, though often she had nothing but a few aspirin to take them. When Paulette Prunières, a young colleague of Danielle’s before the war, came down with pleurisy, she managed to get hold of some insulin, stolen for her by a Czech doctor. Adelaïde was tormented by having constantly to decide whom to save, whom to let die. ‘One ampoule for a couple of hundred people,’ she would write. ‘How can one use this? Who should receive it? Toss a coin?’ One day, a man working in ‘Canada’ brought her a box of medicines, stolen from the piles of possessions recently brought by a new train full of Jews. She hid it, and drew on the supplies secretly. But her hiding place was discovered by an SS doctor, who confiscated the drugs. Adelaïde cried with anger.

The patients in the German infirmary, perhaps disconcerted by her rigid ways, took against her and she would have been injured by them had it not been for the block elder, a prostitute with a strong sense of fairness, who protected her. When Adelaïde herself came down with typhus, it was this woman who looked after her. In her feverish nightmares, she dreamt about a man standing in front of an oven trying to lift her on to his spade and shouting ‘I will show you how to die!’ Some two and a half months after reaching Auschwitz, Adelaïde was informed that she was being transferred to the experimental block, to work as a gynaecologist. She would later explain that she agreed to go because she wanted to see for herself what went on there, and hoped to live to be able to describe it after the war was over. For the inmates of Auschwitz, the experimental blocks were places of rumour and nightmares; for the prisoner doctors, they were where the questions of compromise and complicity were at their most bald.

Nazi medical experiments lay at the heart of the long process of eugenic purification through medicine. From the summer of 1933, when a sterilisation law had identified a number of hereditary illnesses, among them schizophrenia, epilepsy and alcoholism, threatening to the purity of the German race, euthanasia programmes had been set up, foreshadowing the death camps, to select and exterminate those with mental or physical deformities. Once Auschwitz was running, it seemed the obvious place for ambitious doctors to extend their experimental work, not only on blood and drugs and surgical procedures, but on aspects of eugenics. Human flesh was far cheaper and more widely available than animals, and human guinea pigs were plentiful. ‘Consumed material’ could readily be replaced by ‘fresh material’ taken straight from the new transports. Marie-Claude, observing a long line of Greek Jews waiting to be used as experimental material, realised that they had no idea what was about to happen to them. ‘But,’ she would later say, in a brief, stark sentence, ‘I knew.’

The most important experimental block was Block 10, in the main Auschwitz camp. Its windows were kept shuttered and barred, and all communication with the outside world was forbidden, which added to its sinister reputation; and it gave directly on to the courtyard of Block 11, against whose wall prisoners who had tried to escape were shot. Adelaïde could not avoid seeing these executions, or, later, parts of the bodies of those shot being amputated for SS researchers to dissect. Block 10 also acted as a bordello for the SS and privileged camp inmates, and it had a mascot, in the shape of a blond, blue-eyed six-year-old boy called Peter, who goose-stepped up and down at roll call, in imitation of the SS. It was here that Adelaïde was sent.

Block 10, with its four experimental operating rooms and its sophisticated X-ray equipment, was the domain of an SS brigadier-general from Upper Silesia called Professor Clauberg, a very short, bald, highly ambitious man who specialised in castration and sterilisation and who wore a Tyrolean hat and boots while he operated. Himmler had expressed a particular interest in his work, telling him that he wanted to know ‘how long it would take to sterilise a thousand Jewesses’. Clauberg’s guinea-pigs were all married Jewish women who had had children and were aged between 20 and 40, and they were selected straight from the trains, when they were given a vague promise that by agreeing they might be permitted to live. Much as they dreaded the operations, they dreaded even more the spectre of being transferred to Birkenau and the gas chambers.

Clauberg’s experiments consisted in injecting a caustic substance straight into the cervix in order to obstruct the fallopian tubes. This procedure was extremely painful, causing high temperatures and inflammation, and those who survived were often mentally and physically scarred. It was not unusual for two male prisoners to be ordered to hold down the screaming women, whose cries could be heard several blocks away. Called on to certify whether the women had been so disturbed that they were ‘incapable of work’, which would have taken them immediately to the gas chambers, Adelaïde insisted that they would undoubtedly recover.

Since the women were not operated on when they were menstruating, she certified as often as she could that they were; even though the extremely malnourished women of Birkenau had long since stopped having any periods at all. She was finding the moral ambiguities of her work almost too painful to bear. To her horror, she had also learnt that when babies were born in the camp, they were drowned in a barrel by one of the ‘green triangles’, a German woman sent to Auschwitz because she had conducted abortions. Adelaïde was told that it took twenty minutes for a child to die. But when this German woman herself died, no one else could be found to do the job. So the babies lived, and soon died of starvation and neglect. To save the mothers, some of their friends became killers of their babies.

In May 1943 Josef Mengele arrived in Auschwitz to carry out his own experiments on eyes, heredity and race, using twins and dwarfs, selected, like the women, straight from the trains with the help of Drechsler and Taube. Mengele’s obsession with creating a genetically superior race took the form of removing organs from twins, as well as blinding them or deliberately infecting them with fatal diseases in order to test out drugs. On being told that she was about to be sent to work with him, Adelaïde protested. ‘Is this order definitive?’ she asked. Yes, she was told, all orders were definitive.

Within Mengele’s experimental block, she was forced to witness his own particular selections, the prisoners made to walk up and down naked before him: he sent some back into the wards, the others into a special room to await collection by the lorries that would take them to the gas chambers. While this was going on, Adelaïde and the other prisoner doctors were shut into a room, from where they could hear the cries of those being herded on to the lorries. Adelaïde wept. Elly, one of the nurses, said to her that as she saw it, there was not much difference between taking an active part in these selections, and sitting by passively and doing nothing. ‘This is true,’ Adelaïde would write. ‘She is completely right. If we had more courage we would protest more.’ Later, she agonised over the ‘grey area’ inhabited by herself and others like her, caught up and complicit in these medical atrocities. What might have happened if she had interfered? ‘A useless gesture? Perhaps, but that’s not certain… A simple gesture can encourage others. But none of us set an example.’