A Train in Winter (41 page)

Adelaïde and another prisoner doctor fashioned splints out of pieces of wood and held them in place with paper bandages, and then her friends carried her back to the barracks and hid her in a gap just below the rafters. Hélène was a fighter. Back in the days when she had helped her father, then taken over his role in the Resistance after his arrest, she had always been strong. Now she concentrated on staying alive, one day at a time.

Solidarity and mutual help now extended well beyond the small band of friends. When the French women were collectively punished for some misdemeanour by being denied all food for three Sundays in a row, they received so much bread from the other women in the camp that they could not eat it all; being full, not craving more, was a sensation they had totally forgotten. Women suspected of being in danger of a selection were hidden behind the coal bins, in the cellars beneath the kitchen, or in among the typhus cases, where the SS never ventured. Marie-Claude, learning that three of their Austrian friends were to be executed, managed to swap their numbers in the office where she worked for those of women who were already dead. Since they had come to Ravensbrück from Auschwitz and had tattoos on their arms, she found prisoner doctors to scrape them off, to make them look like infected abscesses. It was, she would later say, a heartbreaking question of ‘triage, trying to save those who might survive’. But she could do nothing to save four young French girls, two of whom had been parachuted by the Allied secret services into France, the other two the radio operator and liaison officer waiting for them, who were taken out into the woods one afternoon and shot.

The rescue of the surviving
Kaninchen
, the maimed little Polish girls who had been earmarked for extermination, involved the resources not only of the French women in Block 32, but many others in the camp. When it became known that their turn had come, women working in the administrative offices arranged for the electricity of the camp to be turned off for several hours, thereby delaying the roll call. The others used the time to spirit the girls away into hiding places all over the camp. None was ever found; all survived.

With the approach of the Allies had come an intense desire to document what would later be called the
univers concentrationnaire
. Some information had already been recorded and smuggled out by resourceful Polish women, writing between the lines of letters with urine, which became visible under a warm iron. But Germaine Tillon and Marie-Claude were determined to record accurate facts, dates, names, deaths, illnesses, the brutality of the guards, the amount of money looted by the SS. They began to keep diaries and notes. Both felt driven by rage and sheer determination to tell the world all that they had witnessed. Germaine, mourning her mother, would say that though she had lost all ‘visceral desire to live’, her fury and her desire to see the Germans punished kept her going.

Annette Postel-Vinay, who worked in the textile factory, was able to steal paper; a Czech friend in the building office, ink. With this, tiny notes were written, so small as to be barely legible to the naked eye, and then hidden behind a loose plank above their bunks. As the days passed, and the camp became more chaotic and murderous, the two women moved around, avoiding Pflaum and his men, feverishly collecting data. What they could not write down, they memorised.

Now began what was in some ways the most perilous period in the long odyssey of the French women friends. With the Allies advancing from all directions, and conflicting orders reaching the camp commandants from Berlin, a wind of uncertainty spread through the concentration camps. What was to be done with these hundreds of thousands of prisoners, all in various stages of malnutrition and sickness? How dispose of so many living testimonials to atrocities? In Auschwitz, before leaving, the SS had bombed the gas chambers and set fire to mountains of documents chronicling five years of mass murder. Because the SS had kept meticulous records, noting down, in minute detail, every element of the camps and their inmates, the question now, with German defeat imminent, was how to get rid of so much evidence.

Early in March, the French friends learnt that they were to be transferred to the camp of Mauthausen, together with the other remaining
Nacht und Nebel
French women, in all, 585 women of all nationalities. Thirty-three joined a convoy of cattle trucks that left Ravensbrück on 2 March. Among them were Marie-Elisa, Germaine Pican and Madeleine Dissoubray. But several of the friends had to be left behind. Simone Loche was now so ill that no one believed she could survive till liberation. Mado Doiret was working in the Siemens factory. Hélène Bolleau’s broken leg made any transport too dangerous. Betty, Julia Slusarczyk and Simone Sampaix were all in the
Revier
, while Aimée Doridat, whose amputated leg made daily life extremely precarious, was in hiding. To look after them, Adelaïde, Charlotte and Marie-Claude arranged to stay behind. The parting from the others was extremely painful.

The camp of Mauthausen near Linz in Austria had been built in the summer of 1938, soon after the
Anschluss
, on a bluff above the Danube. From afar it looked like a medieval fortified castle, made out of blocks of granite, with bastions and towers and surrounded by dense forest. In some ways the worst of all the concentration camps—as opposed to the extermination camps—Mauthausen had worked to death countless thousands of Soviet prisoners of war, captured Allied airmen, political detainees, Jews, gypsies and priests in the nearby stone quarry. Here they had cut and hauled vast blocks up a ‘stairs of death’ for the public buildings planned by Hitler for Nuremberg and Berlin. Even by Nazi standards, the regime was harsh; when, in 1941, Himmler and Heydrich had ranked the camps according to the severity of treatment and danger to the prisoners, only Mauthausen had come out in the third, and worst, category. No one who was sent to Mauthausen, so it was said, would ever emerge alive. And though never designated an extermination camp, as at Ravensbrück a small gas chamber had been built to dispose of those too feeble or too disobedient.

The thirty-three French women had reached the limits of what they could endure when they finally reached Mauthausen on 7 March. The journey had been appalling, the train constantly stopping during bombardments, and the last bit had been done on foot, walking all night by the light of the moon through silent, deserted villages; those too weak to walk were pulled out and shot, their bodies left by the roadside. Eighteen of the 585 women who started out had died on the way. There was an agonising moment when a young woman holding one child in her arms and pulling another by the hand, staggering and faltering at every step, was suddenly yanked out of the line by an SS guard and shot dead. Silently, the other women picked up the small children and walked on.

On reaching Mauthausen, Marie-Elisa and the others were led to a barracks, where they caught sight of a group of men they had known in France during their time in the Resistance. Telling them how hungry they were, having had almost no food for five days, they were surprised when not one offered to find them something to eat. They were then taken to a shower room, had their genitals doused in disinfectant with a brush, and given men’s clothes to put on. The women were so thin and shrunken that the trousers and jackets fell off them. The moment they reappeared, their male comrades hurried over and handed them bits of bread, and pieces of string with which to tie on their clothes. ‘Why didn’t you give us the bread before?’ asked Madeleine. ‘Because we assumed that you were being taken straight to the gas chamber,’ the men replied.

Conditions in the barracks were little better than those in the tent at Ravensbrück: no mattresses, no blankets, only the floor to sleep on. Marie-Elisa was sent off to work as a nurse in the
Revier
, where there were many cases of TB, but only medicines for a fraction of them.

Then, on 21 March, something terrible happened. Most of the French women had been taken to clear the rubble from the station at Amstetten, partially destroyed in an American bombing raid. While they were digging through the twisted rails and cement, the bombers returned. A hundred of the women were killed. Among them were three of the French friends: Charlotte Decock, the much-loved cook from Raisko, who had stolen food from the SS kitchens for her companions; Olga Melin, who left a 15-year-old disabled son, and who had been planning to return to her husband and patch up their marriage; and Yvonne Noutari, the young mother who had talked so often and with such longing of her two small children. Yvonne did not die at once, but lay in great pain all night. Having felt so close to the moment when she might see her children again, she clung desperately to life. But next day she could fight no longer.

For the others, these deaths were profoundly upsetting. As Cécile said, so close did each of the women feel to the others, that to die oneself would be no worse than to see one of the others die. Every day now, the survivors wondered who might go next. It was impossible not to feel constantly afraid, the
Nacht und Nebel
prisoners especially, because they had so clearly understood that the German plan was to exterminate them all.

But the war for those in Mauthausen was nearing its end. On 22 April, the thirty remaining women were summoned to the offices, ordered to stand in rows of five, and informed that they were to have a shower. For survivors of Auschwitz, showers meant only one thing. But standing nearby were some of the men they knew, and they learnt that a number of Red Cross lorries had arrived to evacuate the French. They found it inconceivable. Even stranger, when the SS handed out mouldy bread for the women to take with them on their journey, the Red Cross officers ordered the Germans to replace it with their own better bread—and the SS obeyed. Slowly, uncertain and apprehensive, the women approached the lorries and climbed on board. It was later that they discovered that their lives had been saved only because the telephone lines were down and Hitler’s message that the women were to be liquidated had not come through. They were alive, Marie-Elisa, Madeleine, Simone, the two Germaines and the others; and they were on their way home, through a country in ruins and under bombardment. But what they would find when they got there, and how they would feel, none of them knew.

The Mauthausen group was lucky: the end of their war came quickly. The others did not fare so well.

In Oranienburg, Hélène Solomon was working in the Bosch factory when it was bombed. The barracks caught fire. The inmates were ordered to form up into lines, keeping to their national groups, and marched out, the men in front, the women behind. The SS guards set a course, with the Russians to the east, the Americans to the west. Those too weak to keep up were shot. It began to snow. Hélène had brought a blanket and wrapped it around her shoulders. For twelve days they kept walking, mostly at night, stopping from time to time to rest in barns, but there was almost nothing to eat, and, day by day, more women died.

One morning, they realised that the SS had disappeared. Hélène and some of the other French women went ahead and found a group of French soldiers, who gave them some food and took them in carts to an American encampment in a former holiday centre for the Hitler Youth. Hélène was given a glass of schnapps. It was her first taste of alcohol in over three years. Later, the French women returned to the others waiting in the forest, and as they walked, they sang the Marseillaise. When the liberating troops considered it safe, they were driven by truck to Lille, where the Red Cross and some French officers were waiting for them. Hélène had survived to see liberation. She weighed just 35 kilos.

In Beendorf, Cécile, Poupette, Lulu, Carmen and Gilberte decided to refuse to descend into the salt mine if news came of the imminent arrival of the Allies; what they feared was being locked in and left to die. On 10 April, orders were suddenly given to get on to a train for Neuengamme, 180 kilometres away. There were five thousand prisoners on the train, so tightly wedged in that the women took turns lying, sitting and standing. Among them were a number of
kapos
. The little group of friends clung together. There was again almost nothing to eat and fights broke out. The
kapos
, who, having been better fed in Ravensbrück were considerably stronger than the other women, wrapped the weakest and sickest prisoners in blankets and sat on them, suffocating them, then tipped their bodies out on to the tracks. During the frequent stops, the women were forced to bury the many corpses of the dead, after which they looked for grass shoots to eat.

One night, when the train was stopped, all the Russian prisoners of war in one car escaped. The SS raked the train with their machine guns, then selected three hundred men and shot them. After five days, the remaining men on the train were unloaded and the train travelled on, in fits and starts. The women could hear the bombing getting closer. Occasionally they were shunted into a siding, to let a train of German soldiers by. Poupette’s sandals were stolen while she slept. She was now barefoot.

When, after twelve days, the train reached the camp of Neuengamme, they discovered that it had been evacuated that morning, and that some of the last inmates had been put on to a boat, the
Cap Arcona
, in the Bay of Lübeck. Unaware that the ship contained survivors from the concentration camps, and believing it to be full of escaping officers from the SS, the Royal Airforce bombed it. Many of the SS guards on board were able to escape, but the prisoners were locked below, and just 350 of the 4,500 on board survived. At Neuengamme, the French friends were joined by Mado Doiret, who had still been working in the Siemens factory when it was liberated by the Red Cross. Her reunion with her friends was saddened by the bitter news that awaited her. Her brother Roger, who had joined the Maquis before being caught and deported from France to a concentration camp, was one of the men drowned in the
Cap Arcona
. Her cousin Serge, who had also been in Neuengamme, had died just a few days before her arrival.