A Train in Winter (39 page)

In keeping with the premise instilled into every SS guard that the inmates of Ravensbrück were depraved and inferior, punishments for misdemeanours, however trivial, were ferocious. For attempting to escape, or striking a guard, women were shot, usually in the back of the head. For talking, not standing in orderly rows, moving too slowly, looking defiant or not understanding orders, prisoners were struck by the SS guards, who wore large silver rings with the death’s head insignia, ideal for breaking teeth and noses. Or they were sentenced to lashes—with fifty death was probable, with seventy-five inevitable—carried out by
kapos
, who in return for volunteering for the job were given extra rations of food.

Most feared was the
Strafblock
, a prison within the camp, a bedlam of deranged women driven beyond the limits of endurance by the savagery of the guards and their dogs. A former kitchen maid of 24, Dorothea Binz, a pretty, blond young woman whose face was distorted by cruelty, and who had risen rapidly up through the ranks of the female SS, was in control of the
Strafblock
’s seventy-eight cells. Here, in water up to their ankles, languished women implicated in the July 1944 plot on Hitler’s life. Binz was said to be the lover of Schutzhaftlager Edmund Bräuning, a huge and coarse man, responsible for order in the camp. It was Binz who conducted women into the punishment cage, where they could neither lie down nor stand up, and where they were left naked and without food. Binz used scissors with which to deal out blows. There was no woman in the camp who did not fear her. As she walked slowly down the rows of women assembled for the interminable roll calls, looking for culprits, the women trembled.

What happened now was precisely what the French women had long dreaded: they were split up. The first to go were Cécile, Poupette, Lulu and her sister Carmen—for them separation would not have been bearable—and Gilberte Tamisé, whose sister Andrée had been beaten to death in Birkenau. Called before Pflaum, they were informed that they were being sent to work in a factory making V1s and V2s at Beendorf in Lower Saxony. For Cécile, it meant being parted from Charlotte, to whom she had become very close.

Beendorf was an old salt mine lying 600 metres underground, and it was here, protected from Allied air raids, that the Germans were building their new weapons. Six hundred of the 2,500 women workers were inmates from concentration camps, two hundred of them French or Belgian. Lodged in a hangar three kilometres away and referred to as
Stücke
(pieces), they were marched after roll call each day to the mineshafts, to be carried down deep into the earth in cages. The vast cavern in which the factory had been built was reached across dark, perilous walkways, where it was hard, in ill-fitting clogs, not to trip over the rails laid to carry away the salt, and where the salt itself aggravated all scratches, wounds and open sores. In the immense echoing cave, the salt very white to the eye, the factory looked small.

The women worked twelve-hour shifts, six days a week, night and day, the day shift never seeing daylight. The friends found themselves attached to different groups. Poupette was put with Cécile, whose sharp tongue she had never liked. She befriended a little Jewish Hungarian girl called Véronique, who had been brought to Beendorf with her mother, who was now in the
Revier
dying. Véronique, who was nine, told Poupette that she was an only child, that she had lived in a big house in Budapest with her parents and a governess and that her father had been taken away by the Germans.

It was a measure of the women’s toughness of spirit, and their sense of the approaching end to the war, that they immediately set about practising small acts of sabotage. Put to work on oil filters and assembling components, and given precise instructions, they did the opposite. Told to screw something tightly, they screwed it loosely; ordered to use only a small layer of grease, they spread it lavishly around. Much time was taken laboriously doing the same task again and again, screwing something up, then unscrewing it. Cécile made the holes for the screws just a little too big, so that the screws slipped through, until a German guard was detailed to watch over her continuously. Lulu gathered up some grains of salt and mixed them in with the grease. All the women found ways to drop the more fragile pieces and to spill their cans of oil. One month, seven of the ten completed motors burnt out before they left the factory.

Infuriated by the slow rate of progress, the German overseers tried to bribe the women to increase productivity. They brought in tempting extra food and tried to force them to take it, heaping it on to their arms. But the women refused and kept their arms tightly to their sides, though they were always hungry, their daily rations now little more than watery soup. When the next shift came on, word went down the line to refuse all inducements. ‘We thus did all we could,’ one of them wrote later, ‘to be intelligently stupid and clumsy.’

It was not without risk. The machines were closely supervised and saboteurs were often hanged. The SS guards who had accompanied the women from Ravensbrück were as brutal as they had been in the camp. When Poupette washed her dress and left it to dry, borrowing another from a friend who was ill, she was discovered and beaten. A young German woman, caught talking to a male civilian worker, was so badly thrashed that her face was unrecognisable. During the autumn, fourteen German workers were shot, and their bodies tossed out in paper sacks.

Not long after their arrival, two Polish women escaped. That night, Cécile, Poupette and the others were made to run the three kilometres back to their barracks, where they were beaten and kicked by the SS and forced to spend the night outside, in the rain, without food. Next evening, having once again been made to run all the way back, they discovered that the two women had been caught. The elder was a large, gentle looking woman; the younger, her daughter-in-law, was very fair. They were terrified and trembling. The other women were made to stand and watch while the two captives were attacked; when they tried to get away, they were dragged back by their hair. Finally, they lay still. The others were now allowed to go to their bunks, leaving the bloody bodies on the floor surrounded by tufts of their brown and blond hair, pulled out at the roots. Later, they learnt that neither woman had died; but they disappeared and where they went no one could discover.

But the five friends remained strong. On 7 November, the anniversary of the Russian revolution, at an agreed moment they put down their tools and sang the Marseillaise. On 11 November, they stole coloured wires from the store and made flowers in the red, white and blue of the French flag, and sang again. Soon after their arrival at Beendorf, they had made contact with fellow communists and socialists by singing revolutionary songs, and some of the men, civilian workers drafted in to work in the factory, were able to smuggle in extra food. On Poupette’s 20th birthday, she was given a pair of sandals by one man, a heart made of steel with her name engraved on it by another. Her friends all gave her part of their rations. One day, one of them managed to get hold of a length of cloth and had the idea of making brassières for all of them. But then they looked at themselves and realised that they had no need for brassières, having become as flat-chested as boys.

Hunger, for the women, took many forms. Some went over recipes in their minds, over and over again, savouring every ingredient. Others imagined themselves as empty sacks that nothing would ever fill. Starvation had eaten away not only the fat but the muscles of their bodies. The younger girls, having lost 10 or 20 kilos, looked like skeletons; the more corpulent found that their skin had lost all elasticity and hung in folds, their breasts sinking to their stomachs, their stomachs hanging over their genitals, the flesh of their upper arms and thighs covering their elbows and knees. Nails and hair no longer grew.

What haunted each surviving member of the
Convoi
was that at some point she might find herself alone, separated from all the others. Some time after the five were sent to Beendorf, Hélène Solomon, whose husband Jacques had edited
L’Université Libre
before being shot with Georges Politzer, was told that she was being sent as nurse to the Bosch factories near Berlin. Though transferred in the company of twenty other French women in Ravensbrück, to join 1,500 women making gas masks, she knew none of them. ‘It was,’ she said later, ‘the only time I cried. For over two years, I had never been without my friends, mostly those like Betty and Charlotte whose husbands had also been shot.’ She had lost Maï and Danielle in Birkenau, but the few survivors of the Parisian group of journalists, editors and printers had clung together, certain that only each other’s warmth and protection could save them.

Now, leaving alone on the train for Berlin, Hélène felt desolate. Survival seemed unlikely.

In Ravensbrück itself, conditions were deteriorating. With ever more women arriving as concentration camps further east were evacuated and areas of occupied Europe liberated by the Allies, rations were cut. There was no room, very little water, only flickering supplies of electricity. Parcels of food and letters stopped. Every washroom and latrine was surrounded by a sticky mixture of mud and excrement, and since there was no place for bodies—one of the two crematoria had caught fire through overuse—it was not unusual to find corpses piled in heaps by the basins. One morning, one of the French women, arriving to wash herself, heard a prisoner at a basin, surrounded by bodies, singing to herself. The grotesque had become normal.

Though many of the new arrivals were quickly sent on to the satellite camps, requests for extra workers were diminishing and more and more inmates were to be seen wandering around the camp, wearing little more than rags. It made it easier for Charlotte, Cécile and the others to avoid being drafted into work details, but even so the SS were constantly on the lookout for able-bodied workers, and the women’s hiding places were regularly discovered. Those caught malingering were punished. Charlotte narrowly avoided capture when the SS unexpectedly cordoned off the section of the camp in which she happened to be. She escaped by darting into a barracks and concealing herself in a narrow slit between the bunks. They all dreaded being conscripted into the group, which contained many French women, that was sent to cut clearings in the forest for hangars in which to conceal planes, and to flatten a plateau for an airstrip. The snow fell early; the women worked up to their ankles in freezing mud. There were many deaths.

Not long after their five friends had left for the salt mine at Beendorf, the others saw an enormous tent going up in a marshy dip at the far end of the camp perimeter. It had been delivered by the army and it stretched for about 50 metres. The tent remained empty, except for a very thin layer of straw strewn over the sharp clinker. But then women and children who had survived the destruction of the Warsaw ghetto began to arrive, and a number of exhausted, terrified and totally silent Hungarians, sent on from the massive deportations of Hungarian Jews to Auschwitz. Some weighed no more than 25 or 30 kilos, and their arms and legs were like sticks. Soon, there was no more space to lie down. Passing not far away, Charlotte and her friends observed that the women were without warm clothes, blankets or mattresses and that very little food or water was ever delivered to the tent. When cauldrons of soup were carried across, women scrambled and fought for a share, and those with children despaired of being able to keep them alive.

From the winter of 1941, it had been clear to the camp authorities that, to make Ravensbrück truly productive, the weak, elderly and sick women would have to be got rid of. The pattern was for a ‘commission’ of doctors to visit the infirmaries, inspect the patients—at a distance if they considered them infectious—and then recommend transfer for some to a ‘nursing home’ at Bernburg an der Saale—which was, in fact, a gas chamber. For those who preferred not to know, the euphemisms were reassuring. Just the same, most inmates referred to these departures as
transports noirs
, black transports, and it was hard to remain in ignorance when the women’s glasses, clothes, toothbrushes and even false teeth were returned to Ravensbrück.

In October 1944, Suhren received orders from Himmler to step up the number of deaths to two thousand women a month. Pflaum became like a man possessed, chasing after women who tried to get away, catching them by their clothes and yanking them up by the scruff of the neck. In the
Revier
, Adelaïde and the other prisoner doctors redoubled their efforts to make their patients at least appear as if they were going to recover. Every kind of ancient remedy, remembered from grandparents, was tried out.

Ravensbrück’s women prisoners, some of whom had been in the camp for several years, had become extremely resourceful. With the arrival of the Hungarian and Warsaw transports had come mountains of clothes, furs, household goods and even toys, and the women sorting them, though closely watched by the SS, had become skilled at every form of deception. Sweaters were the most prized item of clothing and once the striped dresses had run out, new prisoners were given one each, a large cross painted visibly on the front. In order to ensure that as many women as possible were warm, the sorters stole a pot of paint, and put crosses on every useful garment.

Towards Christmas, one of the transports brought a piano to Ravensbrück. Watching it being unloaded, a young Russian girl exclaimed, ‘My God! If only I could be allowed to play.’ The chief sorter that day, a German girl called Sophie, asked the SS guard in charge. He found the idea of a young Russian Jew able to play the piano absurd. But the piano was moved on to flat ground and the girl sat down. She was an accomplished pianist. All over the camp, as far as the notes reached, the women prisoners stopped what they were doing to listen.

This was the second Christmas the group of French women had spent in a German camp. Once again, they gave each other little presents that they had made, stolen or saved up. The news of the war, transmitted by the women working in the SS offices and translated into a dozen languages, was getting better all the time, and there were real hopes that it might be their last Christmas in captivity. A Christmas tree was brought from the forest and the women stole little bits of wire and thread and material from the factories with which to decorate it. Now, in the evenings, the French friends talked about how they would rebuild France, after the war, and how they would make certain that Germany was never strong again. A group of women in the camp put on a puppet show for the children who had arrived on a recent transport, and even the SS guards came to watch. Hungry, afraid, cold, the children stared; but they did not smile.