A Train in Winter (47 page)

Many of the women married quickly, often choosing men who had been in the Resistance themselves. Betty met a former member of the Spanish Brigades who had been in Mauthausen; they had a son and moved to live in Morocco. Hélène Bolleau married, determined to have children, to prove that ‘the Germans had not destroyed me’. But there were long spells when she was too depressed to look after them, and they had to go to her parents-in-law. Germaine Renaudin found herself pregnant—her husband returned from a prisoner of war camp soon after she got home—but she did not want the baby. There were days when she was ‘absent’, and she feared that she could never look after anyone again. In the event, a son was born and she called him Daniel, after Danielle Casanova, and then a daughter. Germaine too had nightmares, crying out, again and again, ‘les chiens! les chiens!’ (the dogs, the dogs).

It was not only the women who found life so hard in 1945. Their children were confused and upset. This applied both to those whose mothers returned and those who had only a letter or a final parting to remember them by. Many grew up torn between a desire not to be overwhelmed by their mothers’ stories, yet at the same time needing not to forget the memories so crucial to their identities. No one was quite sure which train would bring Félicienne Bierge back to Bordeaux, so her uncle and grandfather met every train. Her son had been four when he last saw his mother. He went with them to the station, but did not recognise the woman who eventually arrived. Not knowing what to do, he put out his hand and said, ‘Bonjour, madame’. He would never forget the fact that when Félicienne discovered that her husband had been shot at Souge, she said that had she known, she would not have tried so hard to survive.

Some grandparents and surviving husbands found it easier not to tell children where their mothers had gone. Jaunay and his sisters waited, day after day, for news of their mother, Germaine, who had been part of a
passeur
network in and around Amboise, all of them denounced and arrested in the summer of 1942 and not one of whom returned. Their father said nothing. Germaine’s name was never mentioned. The weeks, then the months, passed. Finally Jaunay’s sister went to friends and found out the truth. But his father refused to speak about their mother and never referred to her again. All his life, Jaunay lived with the pale memory of a woman who had loved him, and at the age of 80 he still found it impossible to talk of her without crying.

Pierre Zani, who was 18 months old when his mother was taken away, was brought up by grandparents and aunts who blamed his father for his mother’s arrest. As a boy, he hated the way that the children of parents who had died in the Resistance were singled out at school. For ever afterwards, though he had no conscious memory of his mother, he felt her absence like a hole in his life, a gap that nothing could fill up.

Claude Epaud was 15 when he was told that his mother Annette would not be coming home. He lived with his aunts in a family of close brothers and sisters who treated him as their own. It was years later, talking to Marie-Claude, that he discovered that his mother had been put on to a lorry and taken to the gas chambers after she had given water to the dying women in Block 25 at Birkenau, and that, as she was being driven away, she had called out to the others ‘Look after my son’. And it was not until after the death of his father, when he discovered among his papers the little drawing done of him as a boy that his mother had held on to and then given to Félicienne Bierge, that he realised that she had kept his picture by her through all her months in Birkenau. Félicienne had looked after it and after the war given it to his father. He put the drawing up above his desk, so that he could look at it every day. Annette Epaud was made a ‘Righteous Among the Nations’.

Georgette Rostaing’s daughter Pierrette, who remembered her as a laughing, loving mother, always singing, always dressed up and in high heels, who took her with her when she went to hear Edith Piaf sing, grew up consumed with longing to find out what had happened to her. Her grandparents, with whom she lived, spoke little, existing in a state of grief, having lost not only Georgette but her brother Pierre, who some said had been beaten to death by an SS guard during the evacuation of the Dora camp at Nordhausen, and others that he had been locked up with others in a barn and burnt. Pierrette would later say that after the war she never once saw her grandfather smile.

Knowing that Cécile had returned, she contacted her and asked to see her; but Cécile refused, telling her only much later that she had been unable to bear such things at the time. Cécile herself did not find return easy. Her daughter was eight when she left, 11 when she came home, a tall, very thin, unhappy child who had been intensely miserable in the household in which she had been put to spend the war. She was possessive of her mother and jealous and difficult when Cécile met and married a survivor from Mauthausen. The girl decided she did not want to live with her mother again. ‘If I am honest,’ said Cécile later, ‘I would have to say that I never got her back.’ For twenty years, Cécile kept having the same nightmare. An SS guard, carrying a revolver, was coming up the stairs to kill her. It only stopped, she said, when, in her dream, she told the man, ‘I don’t care if you shoot me.’

And the sense of loss, of unfinished business, of confusion over feelings, went on down the generations. Adrienne Hardenberg, who had helped her printer husband in the Resistance and died in Birkenau, had left behind a daughter, Yolande, who had been sent to live with comrades in the Communist Party. At the end of the war, the child, now a teenager, learnt that her parents were dead. Moved from family to family, never doing well at school, considered a secretive, unstable girl, Yolande died after a botched abortion at home. Only then did her family discover that she had left another baby, a girl called Catherine, with a wet nurse. Catherine grew up with another communist family and it was not until her adoptive mother died, many years later, that she began to put together the story of her grandmother’s life.

Reluctant to talk to their children—though less so to their grand-children—the forty-nine women kept in touch with one another, and as they grew older they met more often, either in ones and twos or at the reunions which increasingly came to mark days of commemoration. Charlotte, Cécile, Carmen and Lulu, though scattered between Geneva, Paris, Brittany and Bordeaux, remained the closest of friends. Often their conversations began with memories of incidents in the camps that had made them laugh, or had good endings: days when some bit of luck had befallen them, or the way that Charlotte, recounting the story of her arrest, would change the colour of the skirt she wore each time she retold the story. But then the mood would grow sombre and they would begin to talk about the women who had died.

A reunion of some of the survivors in 1945: among them Gilberte, Mado, Betty, Cécile, Lulu and Carmen

Sometimes they talked about why they had survived, what it was in their particular story or character that enabled them to live, whether it was their optimistic nature, or because they had been able to use their skills as women, caring for others. In the end, they always came back to the same two reasons: they had lived because each of them had been incredibly lucky, and because of the friendship between them, which had protected them and made it easier to withstand the barbarity. They had learnt, they would say, the full meaning of friendship, a commitment to each other that went far deeper than individual liking or disliking; and they now felt wiser, in some indefinable way, because they had understood the depths to which human beings can sink and equally the heights to which it is possible to rise.

They would tell each other that for all its extreme horror, the experience had made them more receptive, more interested in the world around them, more conscious of the suffering of others, though they worried that they were not true witnesses, in Primo Levi’s sense, in that only their dead friends, the
sommersi
, the drowned, could really bear witness to the full horror. And they would agree that there were times when the past and the memory of the camps was more real to them than the world about them. Many suffered from poor health, exhaustion, bad eyesight and such terrible nightmares that they fought against going to sleep. They felt, and looked, far older than their years. Lulu told the others that she could not stop dreaming that she smelt burning flesh and bones, and that it was months before she could bear the taste of coffee again. Charlotte longed for the first year of return to end, so that she would no longer be able to say to herself: ‘a year ago, at this time…’

Even when they were not able to meet, the survivors continued to feel bound to each other in ways that did not weaken with time. There remained a familiarity between them, a sense of openness and ease that they shared with no one else. When Germaine Renaudin died, Carmen, Lulu and Charlotte met on the train on the way to the funeral. Joined by other survivors from the
Convoi
, whom they had not met in some years, they found themselves instantly relating not to the faces and figures they saw before them, but to the women they had known in the camps. They fell back, as Charlotte would say, into conversations in which there was ‘no effort to be made, no constraints, not even that of common politeness. Between us, it’s us.’ It was a kind of closeness that required no keeping up.

And, as the years passed, many of the women made new lives, saying they often felt that they had to do all the things that those who had died had not been able to do. As in Birkenau and Ravensbrück, those with strong political commitments, a cause in which to believe, found it easier. Marie-Claude and Hélène Solomon both went into politics; Marie-Elisa Nordmann returned to her research laboratory. Adelaïde Hautval did not go back to her job as psychiatrist but became a school doctor in a suburb of Paris, where she baked cakes for the local children. Haunted by the need to document the medical experiments in the camps, she wrote detailed notes of what she had witnessed. They were not published until after her death; she committed suicide after the death of an elderly friend with whom she had shared her house. As with Primo Levi and Bruno Bettelheim, surviving the horror, in the end, may have proved too hard.

In the late 1940s, Charlotte Delbo sat down and wrote a book about Auschwitz. She had come back to Paris with bad headaches, high temperatures and toothache, suffering from nightmares in which death kept fastening upon her; she spent many months in a sanatorium in Switzerland before rejoining Louis Jouvet at the Athenée theatre. It was only on her return from Poland that she discovered that her youngest brother had died in a concentration camp. Without money or a flat of her own, she moved to Geneva to work for the UN where her knowledge of languages brought her a good salary. She did not complain, but she sometimes wondered whether she had not fled post-war France too heedlessly. ‘It’s not a life for a woman alone, exile,’ she wrote sadly to Jouvet. Having written her account of the camps while convalescing, she decided to put it to the side for twenty years, to see whether it stood the test of time and really conveyed what it had all been like. She wanted her style to be so plain, so transparent that nothing came between the reader and his understanding.

In one form or another, in verse and prose and dialogue, Charlotte spent the rest of her life writing about the camps. She put down a long account to Jouvet in the form of a letter, invoking Eurydice; but she never sent it, and Jouvet died. In her book
Auschwitz and After
, made up of three shorter books, published separately only in the early 1970s, she spoke of having two selves, an Auschwitz self, and an after-Auschwitz self, like a snake shedding its skin in order to gain a new one; always, she feared that the skin might grow thin, crack and that the camps would get hold of her again. Only, unlike a snake’s skin, her skin of Auschwitz memory, so deeply etched that she could forget no part of it, did not disappear. ‘I live,’ she wrote, ‘alongside it. Auschwitz is there, unalterable, precise, but enveloped in the skin of memory.’

There were thus two kinds of memory: the now, which she called ‘ordinary’ memory, and the ‘me of then’ which was
la mémoire profonde
, deep memory, the memory of the senses. The first allowed her to see Auschwitz as part of a narrative, something that had happened and ended, and it made going on possible. The second condemned her to feel that Auschwitz was never, and would never be, over. The thinking, ordinary memory allowed her to transmit the facts; the feeling memory enabled her to convey a glimpse of the unimaginable anguish that accompanied them. Like Paul Celan and Primo Levi, she used careful, stark words, beautifully balanced and without embellishment, in order to touch the reader by appealing to the senses. She wanted, she would say, to carry her readers into Auschwitz with her, to make it as real for them as it had been, and would always be, for her.

Charlotte remained close to many of the women from the
Convoi
, and at some point decided to take down and record, in brief biographical notes, the story of every one of the 230 women. It was when talking to Madeleine Doiret, Mado, that she pinned down in words the essence of what Birkenau and Ravensbrück had meant to them. Mado, who was 22 when she had been sent to Birkenau, told Charlotte that when her first baby was born after the war, she was overwhelmed by a feeling of immense happiness, but that almost at once she was invaded by the ghosts of the women who had died without knowing this particular delight. ‘The silky water of my joy,’ she explained, ‘changed to sticky mud, sooty snow, fetid marshes.’