A Train in Winter (42 page)

The women deportees, the five French friends among them, were put back on the train, which crawled on. They had eaten nothing but a little sugar, some raw noodles and some grass for twelve days, and many had died; but the group of friends, now, with Mado, six, were alive. Two days later, they reached a camp near Hamburg. The military police guarding the camp told Cécile and the others: ‘None of this is our fault, don’t blame us.’ The noise of the bombing was very close. Poupette, still barefoot, was ordered to dig graves, and spent her days carrying corpses. The women, starving, thirsty, filthy, their legs covered in sores, their clothes in rags, were suddenly informed that they were to be handed over to the Red Cross. At first, they felt nothing. Then, Poupette would later say, there was an ‘explosion of joy. We sang. We shouted out the words from half-remembered songs’. Put back on a train, they travelled until four the next afternoon, when it stopped in the middle of the countryside. They could see Red Cross ambulances waiting. Silently, warily, one behind the other, they climbed down and approached. A Red Cross official gave them cigarettes.

After this came yet another train, to Copenhagen. Each woman was given a little box with white bread, butter, cheese, jam and a piece of chocolate. They ate slowly, in silence. Copenhagen station was full of staring, friendly crowds, who pressed more food on them. Their clothes were burnt, their bodies disinfected, and they were given new clothes. Then came a ferry to Malmö, and another train to Stockholm. On the last night, the train paused and, sitting there in the dark, remembering all they had been through, they realised at last that they were, indeed, free.

They sang the Marseillaise, as they had sung it so often before to mark the stages of their long ordeal, and it seemed right to sing it now, when it was over. They were alive, and they were going home, emaciated, haunted, grieving for their dead companions, but alive. ‘It was,’ Poupette would say, ‘an incredible feeling. And then we just sat silently, waiting. It was like the pause before a battle.’

The end, for those still left in Ravensbrück—Charlotte, Marie-Claude, Adelaïde, Hélène, Betty, Julia and Simone—came suddenly.

For some time now, discussions had been taking place between Count Bernadotte of the Swedish Red Cross, Norbert Masur, Sweden’s representative to the World Jewish Congress, and Himmler who, against Hitler’s wishes, hoped to negotiate a separate peace. An earlier deal with Musy, ex-president of the Swiss Confederation, to evacuate a number of Jews from Theresienstadt, had angered Hitler and negotiations were tricky. However, Bernadotte pressed on, and early in April the first group of sick women was evacuated from Ravensbrück; on the 7th a number of Norwegian and Danish women followed.

By now, the camp had descended into chaos. Orders were given, then countermanded. Groups were lined up ready to depart to other camps, then told that they were not leaving. Commandos no longer set off for the factories. There was very little water and virtually no food. Marie-Claude noted in her diary that rats were everywhere, eating the bodies of the dead that lay around the camp. The SS themselves were erratic, at times behaving harshly, at others almost fawning on the prisoners, anxious about the coming end to the war. One day, in anticipation of a visit by the International Committee of the Red Cross, Suhren ordered that all the
Schmuckstücke
, the women who looked more like corpses than human beings, be locked up in the latrines and kept out of sight. Hélène Bolleau was in the
Revier
that day and she watched as the nurses hid all the more skeletal and wretched women behind curtains at the far end of the barracks. When an ICRC official appeared and spoke to her, Hélène urged them to examine the whole place more thoroughly. The SS doctor showing him around hurried him away. ‘No, no, you mustn’t go there, there are highly contagious typhus cases.’ The ICRC man obeyed.

A few Canadian Red Cross parcels reached the camp. Late that night, when the others were asleep, Charlotte made herself a cup of coffee from the packet in her box. There was no hot water, so she made it with cold, stirring in spoon after spoon of the powder, wanting her first cup after so long to be truly delicious. When she tasted it, she found it bitter and disappointing. She realised, she wrote later, that remembered delights are not easily recaptured. ‘I would have to get used to pleasures all over again.’ That night her heart beat so wildly from the caffeine that she thought she was dying. Next morning, she and the others sat dipping their fingers into the tins of butter, very slowly licking them, then tried the peanut butter, which many had not seen before.

Simone Loche was very ill and growing weaker all the time; Betty, Julia and Simone Sampaix were frail; but the others redoubled their efforts at avoiding detection by the SS. They had become extremely skilled at choosing their hiding places and when, during the interminable roll calls that continued day after day, the guards walked up and down the lines, pulling out the sicker women, they had mastered the technique of appearing strong and healthy. The selections for the gas chamber continued, and Rudolf Hoess, having left Auschwitz well before the arrival of the Red Army, arrived one day to inspect the building of the second chamber. Often, now, the selections took the form of manhunts, the women chased around the camp while they tried frantically to hide.

One day, seven French women were pulled out of the line. Locked in a barracks to await transport to the gas chamber, they managed to escape. When the SS realised they were missing they announced that all the remaining French women would be ‘selected’, if the seven did not give themselves up. The seven returned. Their friends watched in horror as one cried out: ‘I’m 34 years old. I have three children to bring up. I don’t want to die.’ That night, they listened to the sound of the lorries taking the women to the gas chamber, and they could hear the cries of the women as the SS men beat them and they begged for mercy.

One afternoon not long afterwards, while Adelaïde was in the
Revier
, she heard the sound of lorries approaching. A nurse appeared and began to call out names. Adelaïde fled, feeling that she could no longer bear to be witness to so many deaths. But when she returned later, expecting a row of empty beds, she found the women still there, the order for their gassing having been cancelled. She understood that such was the chaos that anything was now possible. ‘I realised,’ she said later, ‘that the time had come for me to fight.’

On 23 April, orders were given for all the remaining 488 French, 231 Belgian and 34 Dutch women in Ravensbrück to line up. It was four o’clock in the morning and, standing with Simone, Betty, Julia and Marie-Claude, Charlotte saw SS guards with machine guns take up positions by the gate. The women were searched. Germaine Tillon managed to hide a roll of photographs of the little
Kaninchen
with their mutilated legs in an empty tin of milk powder. As they stood there, a group of ragged, shrunken, staggering women appeared out of the dark from the direction of the
Jugendlager
: they were heading for the gas chamber.

The five friends clung to each other; the moment had come and they knew they were about to die. Having for so long feared death, Charlotte felt completely calm. Instructions were shouted out to begin walking towards the gate. The SS pointed their machine guns. But they did not fire. The lines of women, in silence, walked out. There was a man in a khaki uniform waiting for them, with a Red Cross band on his arm. ‘You are French?’ he asked. ‘I am taking you to Sweden.’ No one moved.

Then, very slowly, still in silence, they climbed on to the white lorries waiting on the road; those barely able to walk were gently helped. They had longed for this moment, certain that they would feel an overwhelming sensation of joy. Instead, they felt flat. Before the lorries moved off, one of the women called out that they should observe a moment of silence for all their friends who had died at Ravensbrück. Several of the women wept. Charlotte remembered that 23 April was the date when she had first walked home with Georges Dudach after class; and it was also the date on which she had said goodbye to him in La Santé.

They drove, in slow convoy, along roads clogged with fleeing people, past ruined houses, through Kiel where the very earth seemed to have been turned over by the shelling. Young German boys threw stones at the lorries. Among the French women was 20-year-old Madeleine Aylmer, who had given birth to a girl a month earlier and who had somehow managed to avoid Pflaum’s round-ups of the pregnant women and nursing mothers and their babies. In the confusion of the moment, she had succeeded, with the help of the others, in smuggling her baby out under her dress. The little girl was one of only a handful of babies to survive. As the lorries crossed the border into Denmark, the French women began to sing. There were banners welcoming them. Charlotte thought how incredibly beautiful everything looked.

Of the original group of French friends on the
Convoi
there now remained in Ravensbrück only Hélène Bolleau, with her broken leg, Simone Loche, who was growing weaker, and Adelaïde and Marie-Claude, who had insisted on remaining behind to be with them. During the night of 27 April most of the SS guards disappeared, cutting off the supplies of water and electricity and making bonfires of the camp records as they left. The convoy taking Suhren and his wife in one car, his deputy in another in advance of the liberating Allied troops, drove past a final forced march of women leaving the camp. Many of the women were so weak that they could barely stagger, but they clutched their Red Cross parcels to them. Suhren’s last orders were to bury the dead, so that their graves ‘looked neat’.

There had been rumours that the Germans would blow up Ravensbrück before they left, but nothing happened. ‘The camp looks abandoned and filthy,’ Marie-Claude wrote in her diary. Some of the
Schmuckstücke
, she noted, had rallied, and were sitting by the gates, eating the Red Cross tins of food, looking as if they were having a picnic. She could hear the bombing getting closer all the time, but ‘such are the horrors of this camp that it is hard to feel a sense of joy that the end is near’. Not until she saw the first Red Army soldier would that come.

Bit by bit, Adelaïde, Marie-Claude and a number of doctors who had remained behind began to take charge of the sick. They moved the dying women into the infirmary, Marie-Claude noting that they looked like scraps of rubbish. They drew up lists of names for the next Red Cross evacuation, and they directed the stronger women to cook what little there was to eat and to start clearing up the camp. The
Schmuckstücke
continued to wander aimlessly around, defying any attempt to organise them, and Marie-Claude told them that they would not be fed unless they helped. There were also 260 elderly German nuns, who had spent over ten years in various concentration camps for saying they believed that Hitler was the Antichrist. The much-hated Dorothea Binz, one of the very few SS still in the camp, appeared to ask for food. It was refused.

Adelaïde and Marie-Claude went to visit the nearby men’s camp, where they found four hundred dying men, and about four hundred others, many French among them, who were clearly not far from death. They had had no food or water for eight days. ‘It is simply atrocious,’ Marie-Claude wrote. ‘They no longer look like men but like haggard ghosts, driven out of their minds by pain, hunger and thirst. No one, no one could ever describe this sight; no one could believe us.’ They fetched some of the stronger women and between them carried the dying men to one of the abandoned SS barracks.

At 11.30 on the morning of 30 April, the first Red Army soldiers were spotted approaching through the trees. Later, the liberators would say that the camp could be smelt from three kilometres away, and that when they saw the filth, the piles of human remains and the living skeletons, they felt extreme pity, but also revulsion. ‘Seeing the first motorcyclist,’ Marie-Claude wrote, ‘my eyes were filled with tears, tears of joy this time. I thought of the tears of rage that I had shed when I saw the first German motorcyclist in the Place de l’Opéra in June 1940.’ They were followed by soldiers from an infantry brigade, then by officers in cars. ‘The camp has gone mad … everyone wants to see them, to talk to them,’ Marie-Claude wrote, adding crisply that in the excitement they seemed to have forgotten that there was work to be done.

The Red Army commanding officer was polite and asked precise questions about conditions in the camp; then he arranged for supplies of food and medicines and left a number of doctors to help care for the sick. A Russian doctor put Hélène Bolleau’s leg in a cast and she was now able to hobble around the camp. Before leaving, the commanding officer directed that the German inhabitants of the surrounding villages be forcibly brought to the camp to help. Adelaïde found herself walking down the line of German civilians, looking for women to assist with the nursing, thinking of the way the German industrialists had gone down the lines of women prisoners, not so long before, selecting women to work in their factories. The Russians were both welcomed and feared. There were stories of some of the women who had been sent off with the SS to other camps, had escaped along the way, then been raped by the advancing Red Army.