A Train in Winter (38 page)

In Ravensbrück, Charlotte had discovered others who also longed to keep their minds alive. Among women reduced to skeletons, shuffling around in rags, a ‘spoken newspaper’ had taken shape, with news from the outside world, information about the camp, even poems, repeated and passed around from woman to woman. It was in this way that Charlotte heard of the Normandy landings in June, over which the entire camp rejoiced. National feast days were marked by small acts of celebration. Teachers gave classes in literature and history. Mathematicians drew problems in the sand. Discussion groups were started, on everything from raising rabbits to esoteric questions of philosophy. Despite the lack of books and paper, there was a huge hunger for knowledge, particularly the learning of languages, though very few women chose to learn German.

Whenever possible, the women sang. The Russians, with their haunting laments, proved the most popular, until Suhren forbade all singing of patriotic songs, after which they whistled, until that was forbidden too. Ordered to sing in German, they chanted ‘
Ja, Ja, Ja
’ at the top of their voices. Even such minor acts of rebellion were exhilarating. On 14 July, the French women in Block 14 attached cockades the colours of the French flag to their dresses and sang the Marseillaise, until the SS fell on them with sticks. To survive, they instinctively knew, they had to remain human, and to be human was to remember that there was another world, of decency and culture and plenty, however painful the memories were.

Confined to the camp, the seven remaining friends decided that their job would be to brief all new women arriving on trains from France, finding ways of climbing into their barracks to instruct them on what to do and what to avoid. ‘We told them,’ Lulu would later explain, ‘that they should never admit to being Jewish, that they should never say they were tired or ill, and that they should do everything they could to appear young and healthy. And we told them about the importance of looking after each other, which was the only way they were likely to survive.’

Early in August, arriving from Auschwitz in two separate groups, came all but one of the remaining survivors of the
Convoi des 31000
. Marie-Jeanne Bauer was too ill to be moved. As the cattle trucks pulled away, Marie-Claude remembered the day they had marched, singing, through the gates of Birkenau, nineteen months earlier, and thought of all the friends who had died. ‘We had,’ she said later, ‘the feeling that we were leaving hell, and for the first time I felt a glimmer of hope that I would live to see the world again.’ Fifty-one of them had now been transferred to Ravensbrück. The reunion between the friends felt like a celebration, for none had known they would ever see the others again, and Charlotte and the others quickly coached the newcomers in the art of surviving their surroundings. Ravensbrück had almost doubled in size since January, and more women were arriving every day. It was a confusing, chaotic place.

For some, arrival in Ravensbrück confirmed their worst fears. To her immense pleasure, Yolande found her mother Céleste Pica in the camp, but she had to tell her that 19-year-old Aurore was dead; and Céleste broke to her the news that her father, Attilio, had been executed by the Germans. What neither of them knew was that Yolande’s husband Armand had been killed not long before while fighting with the Maquis. And Germaine Pican had to tell her friend Lucie Guérin, who had also recently arrived in Ravensbrück, that her 17-year-old daughter Claudine was dead.

Among the
Nacht und Nebel
prisoners were Marie-Elisa, Marie-Claude and Adelaïde, though their whereabouts were no longer in fact a secret. After the obligatory period in quarantine, they were sent to Block 32, to join the other secret prisoners from occupied Europe, many of them communist leaders, strong and capable women who were happy to take those they identified as possible future communists under their wing. Here they discovered Geneviève de Gaulle, niece to the general, the ethnographer Germaine Tillon and 20-year-old Annette Postel-Vinay, highly educated and forthright young French women brought straight to Ravensbrück from Paris after their capture for Resistance activities. Germaine Tillon’s mother, arrested not long after her by the Gestapo, had recently arrived in Ravensbrück; she was a gentle and distinguished woman in her sixties.

These women had been in the camp some months, and had become skilled at navigating its pitfalls. They had news about the progress of the war and the approach of the Russian army, having persuaded an Austrian woman employed to clean the SS canteens to pass on any newspapers she found to a Czech friend who, in turn, passed them on to the French women. Annette, like Adelaïde, came from Alsace, and spoke German. At one end of the block were a number of elderly Russian women, so pious that they crossed themselves whenever they discovered a shred of rutabaga in the soup. One day Annette found a silk map hidden in the folds of a German uniform she was unpicking, after which they were able to follow the advance of the Allied troops. It gave them a sense that victory was possible.

Block 32 was also home to the survivors of Ravensbrück’s lethal medical experiments, the
Kaninchen
or little rabbits, Polish girls whose legs had been ‘treated’ by Professor Gebhardt, President of the German Red Cross, Professor of Orthopaedic Surgery at Berlin University and former chief surgeon to the 1936 Olympics, whose private nursing home lay not far from the camp. Gebhardt had been summoned to care for Heydrich after he was shot, but had failed to save his life when the wound became infected with gas gangrene. On the eastern front, hundreds of German soldiers had died from gas gangrene, and there was a pressing need for a cure. In Ravensbrück, having been criticised for not using the new sulphonamide drugs on Heydrich and in order to redeem his reputation by proving that they would not have saved Heydrich’s life, Gebhardt had removed muscles and bones from seventy-five Polish girls. He had then injected their wounds with tetanus, gangrene and streptococcus, before testing out different drugs.

When, after the first painful operation, the girls resisted a second, they were held down and operated on without anaesthetics, Gebhardt presiding in his military uniform and making no effort at cleanliness. Though initially lured into the operating theatre by promises that they would be released afterwards, none of the Polish girls had been freed. Five had died, six others had been shot, but the survivors could be seen limping around the camp, in considerable pain. In Block 32, the French women took care of them as best they could. The youngest was just 14. In Block 32 there was no thieving, and you could leave a piece of bread on your bunk and find it there later. The women kept their block clean and free of fleas, and shared their rations with those who had the least. It was, however, perfectly clear to everyone that the Germans intended no one in the block to survive and bear witness to their medical experiments.

The new French arrivals were distributed around various camp jobs by Hans Pflaum, the SS officer in charge of work details, a large, brutish man in his early twenties widely feared throughout the camp. Pflaum was often drunk. Some women were sent to haul coal from Fürstenberg to the furnaces heating the guards’ villas; some went to work in the gardens, where they were sometimes spat on by the SS children; others cut down trees, shifted sand from the lake or joined Charlotte and Poupette and the others mending German uniforms. Occasionally one of them would be dispatched to unload wagons of iron or wood, arriving as loot from other countries.

Marie-Claude was sent first to the sand quarry, then moved to the
Revier
to act as secretary until she had an argument with a
kapo
, after which she was put to raking the paths in the camp, a job she much preferred. Hélène Bolleau was ordered to help a number of distinguished and important Austrian women, brought to Ravensbrück as hostages, who lived in the relative comfort of one of the privileged barracks; since they were allowed to receive parcels of food, they spurned the camp soup, and Hélène was able to take their rations back to her friends each evening. Betty once again found herself working as a nurse. What struck them all was that Ravensbrück, though indeed
l’enfer
(hell), felt very different from Birkenau. There, the primary goal had been to exterminate the inmates, with the majority being gassed as soon as they arrived, and the others worked to death; here they soon understood that the purpose was to run a successful commercial exercise, death being simply a by-product and not an end.

For the first time since leaving France nineteen months earlier they began to think that they had a real chance of surviving until the end of the war. But they knew, too, that to lower their guard would be fatal and that all the old rules that had saved them in Birkenau—cleanliness, wariness, a sense of humour, and close friendships—still applied. The friendship between them, stronger than anything they had known in their previous lives, had become their credo; it defined them.

In the evenings, after sharing their rations and eating them crouched on their bunks, the friends visited one another in their different barracks, swapping news and encouragement. They still never talked about their families, and particularly not their children, for it remained too painful. Not all had ever received a letter from home, and those who hadn’t lived in a constant state of fear as to what might have befallen their families. Lulu, who had last seen Paul when he was 18 months old, at least had news that he was safe; but she was painfully conscious of how much of his infancy she had missed. In the occasional letter she was allowed to write, she begged for news of him. Though the letters were carefully bland, occasional cries from the heart came through. ‘It is hard for me to realise,’ she wrote one day, ‘that he isn’t a baby any more… I will always regret the days of his very young years in which I couldn’t live next to him and with him.’ Cécile and Germaine Pican had left little girls behind and could only wonder what the months of uncertainty about their mothers had done to them.

What the new arrivals discovered was that among the five thousand or so French women already in Ravensbrück all France was represented. About a quarter were theoretically ‘criminals’: these were prostitutes who had infected German soldiers with venereal diseases; and there were black marketeers, and women who had volunteered for German war work, then committed a crime. The rest were all ‘politicals’, though in some cases only because they were the sister or the concierge of a
résistant
wanted by the Gestapo, or had been denounced by a jealous neighbour. They found that those who came from recognised groups—the communists, the Catholic Bretons, the intellectual bourgeoisie—were team players, and the easiest to get on with. The very rich, the
tout Paris
, were the dirtiest and most unfriendly. But the French, as a national group, were more cohesive than the other nationalities, more prone to look after their own.

The lives of the new French inmates were immeasurably improved by the help of the German-speakers who had been able to secure positions in the various camp offices. One, whose job it was to sort through the vast piles of clothes arriving, as at Auschwitz, with every transport, had become skilled at smuggling sweaters under her clothes, going to work each morning naked under her thin dress. Another, who worked in the forest, brought back twigs, with which she made charcoal, which helped a little against dysentery. Each woman sewed herself a little bag out of scraps of material, in which she kept anything precious like a toothbrush and which she never let out of her sight.

Though the sulphonamide experiments—which had also been performed on male prisoners, brought from Sachsenhausen—were over by the time the women reached Ravensbrück, a number of sterilisation tests were still being conducted, and plans were being made to continue Professor Clauberg’s work in Auschwitz. Adelaïde soon found herself summoned to the
Revier
where they were to take place. Once again, her manner glacial and appearing completely unemotional, as a friend later described her, she refused to have any part in the proceedings. ‘My conviction is now certain,’ she wrote. ‘I won’t follow orders any more. I will take as cover the abscesses on my legs, which won’t heal, as a defence.’ And, once again, she was lucky. Sent as doctor to another
Revier
, she set about saving lives.

It was not easy. By the summer of 1944, a military SS doctor called Percival Treite was in charge of Ravensbrück’s medical services, a blond, correct but chilly surgeon, harsh but not sadistic, soon to be joined by Dr Adolf Winkelmann who came from Auschwitz. Winkelmann, who strode about the camp in his long brown leather coat, was much feared and hated; he sometimes rode a motorcycle and had a machine gun. The senior nurse was a large, hard, white-haired woman called Elisabeth Marschall. Together, they kept up a constant search for the very sick, women who were clearly dying, but taking too long over it, and who could be ‘selected’ and finished off with a lethal injection.

With the ever growing population of the camp and the inexorable spread of infectious diseases, long queues of severely malnourished, coughing, itching, shuffling, stinking women, their legs covered in suppurating sores, gathered outside the
Revier
every morning. What every woman feared most was being sent to Block 10, known as the cemetery, for it was here that women with TB were put, hundreds of women of dozens of nationalities crowded together with no treatment, for none was expected to live. Block 10 was presided over by Carmen Mori, one of the more vicious
kapos
, who frequently beat women until they were unconscious.

Faced with so many sick women and determined to protect them from Dr Winkelmann’s selections, Adelaïde devised ways of falsifying the length of their illnesses, changed temperatures on charts, and discovered how to make a paste from the red pencils used in the
Reviers
, to put colour into the women’s ashen cheeks. When Betty developed a phlegmon under her arm, which spread and became infected, Adelaïde and a Polish doctor operated—without anaesthetic—and showed her how to hold her arm during the SS medical inspections in such a way that the long scar did not show. And there was a wonderful day when a prisoner doctor, who happened to be working on unloading wagons bringing loot from Poland, came across a large medical chest full of drugs. He buried it in the sand and every day women passing that way returned with little stocks of medicine hidden in folds in their socks. For a while, many lives were saved. Once again, Adelaïde was haunted by the choices she had to make. ‘I am integrated into a system that stems from the Devil… We all take part in it in some way and I will always feel a sense of shame.’