A Train in Winter (36 page)

There was another doctor working on racial theory. Horst Schumann was a tall, broad-shouldered and excessively brutal Nazi, whose area of interest lay in pre-cancerous conditions of the uterus, an interest shared by Auschwitz’s chief SS medical officer, Dr Eduard Wirths, another tall man, with a sharp and menacing voice. Dr Schumann also removed ovaries to see whether X-rays had been effective in destroying tissue, sometimes burning the women severely in the process. He organised his operations as an assembly line, one prisoner immediately after another, a long chain of injured and crying women. One of the prisoner doctors, an Austrian called Dr Dering, refused to give anaesthetics to Jewish patients.

Also in May, an SS research scientist arrived at Birkenau to verify some racial theories of his own. He had women, of all ages, file naked before him while he took measurements. A number he directed to one side, telling them that he would be moving them from Birkenau to a better camp. Later, Adelaïde discovered that they had been shot, and their skeletons preserved and taken to an institute in Strasbourg for further study. Increasingly haunted by her job, she was forced to stand by while those whom he selected begged to be spared. It was, she said, like watching ‘hunted animals’.

One day, a former professor of gynaecology from Cologne called Maximilian Samuel, deported to Auschwitz as a Jew and made assistant to Schumann, told Adelaïde that she was to assist at an experiment on a woman’s uterus. She found Samuel’s zeal for the work repugnant and despised his apparent inability to face reality. Having recently helped prepare a 17-year-old Greek girl for surgery, she had sworn that she would not do so again. She told him to inform Schumann that she would not work with him. Samuel reported her to the SS.

Wirths, to whom she was summoned, was not, by the standards of Auschwitz, a vicious man, and he had in fact made some attempts to improve the appalling conditions in which the prisoners lived. He asked Adelaïde whether she had not fully realised that Jewish women were very different from herself? Yes, she replied, there were indeed many people who were very different from herself, starting with Dr Wirths himself. She would assist at no more experiments. She now prepared herself for the inevitable, telling the others that she had never really expected to leave Auschwitz alive, and all that was left to her was ‘to behave, for the rest of the short time that remains, as a human being’. She had made the gesture; found the courage. But even so, what worried her was that it simply meant that someone else would have to do what she refused to do, and that they would find it no less hard; while she was left with her ‘good conscience’.

That evening, Orli, a medical assistant in the women’s camp—a woman who had been a prisoner for many years and with whom Adelaïde had become friendly—told her that she had heard that a squad was coming next day to deal with the ‘special cases’, of which she was one. But Orli had a plan. She would give Adelaïde a strong sleeping draught, assign her a bed in the infirmary, and claim that she had died in the night, substituting a dead body in her place. The ruse worked. Adelaïde woke and was smuggled back to Birkenau. Later, she would tell another prisoner, ‘I was fortunate enough to have higher values than life itself.’

The autumn brought no further deaths to the French women. A hundred and seventy-seven were dead, in a little over six months. Those who remained were determined, capable women, strong mentally as well as physically; it was no accident that all but a few of the survivors had been active politically, committed to shared beliefs in a better future, and accustomed to hardship and discipline. They were nearly all much the same age, in their late twenties and early thirties. Apart from Poupette and Simone, not one of the young girls was still alive; all the older women without exception were dead. Of the forty-seven women rounded up by Poinsot and his men in the Gironde and Charente, fewer than ten remained alive. Most of the
résistance intellectuelle
from Paris, almost all the printers and many of the young women who had handed out leaflets for the Jeunes Filles de France had perished.

There had been some changes in Auschwitz. After a scandal involving excessive pilfering of ‘Canada’ by the SS, Hoess had been replaced by a slightly less savage commandant. Arthur Liebehenschel set about curbing the corruption and transferring out of Auschwitz guards he regarded as too brutal. When the work commandos returned from the factories and marshes in the evenings, they brought fewer corpses back with them. Liebehenschel was particularly fond of music, and he liked to have an orchestra of women prisoners, many of them distinguished musicians in their former lives, playing on all possible occasions, dressed in matching pleated skirts and white blouses. The orchestra was ordered to play the work details in and out of camp morning and evening, tramping past in their rows of five to the sounds of Strauss and Offenbach.

In Raisko, the return to some small semblance of normality and physical health had brought with it a need to talk and to exchange stories, always taking care to avoid intimate and painful memories. ‘We never spoke,’ Charlotte would later say, ‘of love.’ They talked about what they would do after the war, spinning dreams that made them feel they might just still go home. Best was anything to do with literature or the theatre and when Claudette Bloch, Marie-Elisa’s chemist friend, revealed that she knew Molière’s
Le Malade imaginaire
almost by heart, the French women set about recreating the play, line by line, the memories coming back in fits and starts, scene by scene, with Charlotte directing and Cécile once again, as in Romainville, doing the costumes. Cécile had a sharp tongue, but she made the others laugh. Carmen found props; Lulu, who loved acting, took the part of Argan. Aprons were turned into the doctor’s gown; tulle netting was borrowed from the laboratory for ruffles, and wood shavings were made into a wig. In the evenings, for an hour at the end of the day, the women rehearsed.

Then came the Sunday of the performance, attended by the whole block. ‘It was magnificent,’ Charlotte would write, ‘because, for the space of two hours, while the smokestacks never stopped belching their smoke of human flesh, for two whole hours we believed in what we were doing.’ After remaining silent for so long, the characters of plays and books had finally re-entered Charlotte’s mind, and she entertained the others by describing them. Later she would say that she looked in vain for Madame Bovary, Anna Karenina and Rastignac, but that Proust returned to her.

On Christmas Eve, the women were permitted to stop work at four. Plans had been made for a dinner of celebration: women still alive despite all the odds celebrating the simple fact that they were not dead. They realised with delight that their hair had grown back a bit and they helped each other to wash it and brush the new tufts and strands that covered their heads. A few of the women had acquired stockings from ‘Canada’, and shirts had been ‘organised’ and cut up to make a clean white collar for each of them. With sheets as tablecloths, the refectory tables were formed into a horseshoe and decorated. Paper was crinkled into flowers, and the chemists had fashioned rouge and lipstick out of powders in the laboratory. Food, saved from the parcels from France and vegetables pilfered from the gardens were made into a feast of beans and cabbage, potatoes with onion sauce and poppy seeds. The women ate little, having lost the habit of food, but the sight of so much to eat made them cheerful. They drank sweet dark beer, stolen from the SS kitchens. After they had eaten, they turned out the lights, lit candles, and the Polish women sang hymns and ballads, saying to each other
Do domou
: back home. Presents were exchanged: a bar of soap, a rope woven into a belt, a teddy bear found near the gas chambers and exchanged for two onions.

Early in the New Year an SS guard appeared at Raisko with a list of names. On it were those of the French women, who were to return immediately to Birkenau. Extremely apprehensive, fearing that an order might have come to kill off the French prisoners, they packed a small cloth bag each, with a precious toothbrush and some soap. As they left the barracks, they began to sing the Marseillaise, which had marked every step of their journey. Loaded on to a cart, they went on singing, led by Carmen, who had a large repertoire of songs. When they saw the barbed wire and the smoking chimney stacks their hearts seemed to stop.

But the news was, as far as they could tell, good. A first party of French women was to leave for the camp of Ravensbrück, north of Berlin. Charlotte, Cécile, Poupette, Mado, Lulu, Carmen, Gilberte and Marie-Jeanne Pennec were told to undress while slightly cleaner clothes were found for them. Then, to their amazement, their original suitcases, with at least some of their possessions still inside, were returned to them, and they were asked to sign a form swearing not to describe what they had witnessed at Auschwitz. More surprising still, Taube, whose brutality had coloured many of their days, knelt down to fix Carmen’s laces. As if in a dream, they were marched to the station, in their loose striped dresses and ill-fitting shoes, and put on to an ordinary train, where they looked out of the windows at ordinary people going about their lives as if Auschwitz had never existed. They noted with pleasure the degree of damage inflicted by Allied bombing on German towns. The train passed a column of tanks, a Panzer division heading for the eastern front. What surprised the women most was that they felt so little surprise at the luxury of their surroundings; like coats, left hanging behind a door, they had found their old selves, and it was as if they had never been away.

When they changed trains in Berlin, they found the city in ruins and felt ‘nothing but pleasure’. The guards allowed them to go to the women’s rest rooms, and there, for the first time in over a year, they saw themselves in a mirror. They stared with disbelief at their bony, haggard faces and straggling wisps of hair. They discussed trying to escape, but in their distinctive striped clothes felt there was little chance of success. And where would they have gone? They were herded on to a second train full of Gestapo officers in soft leather coats. Charlotte was touched and amazed when a young woman in their compartment with a little girl insisted that the French women take their places. It gave them a sense that there was still a world in which decency and pity existed.

The remaining French women were still in their quarantine block outside the fence of Birkenau when Hoess was reappointed commandant, in order to expedite the extermination of the Hungarian Jews, who from May arrived in their tens of thousands every day. There was now a new railway spur inside Birkenau itself, which led directly to the gas ovens. This meant that there was an assembly line of death, on a scale and at a speed never seen before. One night, Marie-Claude heard terrible cries; next morning she learnt that because the gas chambers had run out of Zyklon B pellets, the smaller children had been thrown directly on to the flames. ‘When we tell people,’ she said to the others, ‘who will believe us?’

They were there when the gypsy family camp was finally liquidated, and those small children who had miraculously survived starvation were herded into the gas ovens with their parents. And they still had no news of their fate when an international commission visited Auschwitz and was effectively bamboozled about its true intent. After the commissioners left, the women were asked whether they wanted to go to work in Germany, but they refused, fearing a trap, and so were sent back inside Birkenau, to a wooden block just by the railway spur, where they were put to sewing crosses on to ordinary dresses, for Auschwitz had run out of striped material for the new arrivals. They sewed the crosses very loosely, hoping that the wearer might find the chance to escape. From their block they could watch the endless arrivals of Hungarian Jews, and heart-rending scenes when mothers were torn away from their children.

With summer, the garden of Hoess’s house, where his children played with balls on the lawn, was full of roses, and in his window boxes grew begonias. Between the barbed-wire fence and the line of rose bushes lay the path leading to the crematoria, and all day long they could see the endless procession of stretchers carrying the dead to the ovens.

But then the day came when they too were put on to a train for Ravensbrück. Marie-Claude, Marie-Elisa, Adelaïde, Germaine Pican and Simone Sampaix were in the first group, followed a few days later by Germaine Renaudin and Hélène Solomon. They were forced to leave behind them one member of the
Convoi
, Marie-Jeanne Bauer, who had survived typhus and repeated abscesses but now had such bad conjunctivitis that the SS refused to let her leave; at one point, Marie-Jeanne had found herself sharing a bunk with four corpses. Her sense of loneliness and loss when the others left was overwhelming.

Of the women who had arrived at Birkenau with a sister, a mother or an aunt, there were almost no pairs left: Poupette had lost Marie, Hélène Bolleau had lost her mother Emma, Yolande her sister Aurore. Not one of the
Convoi
had died in Raisko, and only five during the spring and summer months the others had spent in the quarantine block. One of them was 17-year-old Sylviane Coupet, whom the others found covered in lice in the
Revier
, and whom Carmen kissed tenderly as she died. To Charlotte, who had accompanied her to see Sylviane, Carmen said: ‘You kiss her too.’ Looking at the skeletal body, with its sallow skin and lips covered with pinkish saliva, Charlotte drew back, appalled; ever afterwards, she felt ashamed when she remembered the moment.

The French women were now down to fifty-two. What was extraordinary was not that so many had died; but that so many had survived.

CHAPTER THIRTEEN

The disposables

The train bringing Charlotte, Poupette, Cécile and the others to Ravensbrück stopped at Fürstenberg station. From here they were marched seven kilometres through the flat wooded countryside of Mecklenburg, past dunes of almost white sand, until they reached a line of pretty cottages and a lake. ‘It’s less terrifying than electrified barbed wire,’ Poupette said to the others. They saw ahead of them a high brick wall, an imposing stone building and a tall fence; entering the gates, which were guarded by SS men, they noted orderly rows of barracks, much like those at Birkenau, standing on an immense field of black clinker. There were no railway tracks leading to a crematorium, no trains delivering terrified families to the gas ovens, no signs of ‘selections’. And there was water, a tap for every barracks, which meant that they could finally wash their clothes and drink as much as they wanted. ‘Here we can live,’ Mado remarked.