If This Is a Woman: Inside Ravensbruck: Hitler's Concentration Camp for Women (63 page)

PART FOUR

Chapter 21

Vingt-sept Mille

O
n 1 February 1944 a crowd of women gathered on a station platform on the outskirts of Paris waiting for a train. It was cold, but the women were dressed in woollen coats or ski costumes; some even wore furs.

Denise Dufournier, a young Parisian lawyer, carried a rolled-up blanket taken from her prison cell, tied with plaited cord. Her friends Suzanne Hugounencq and Christiane de Cuverville carried kitbags made of canvas ripped from a mattress. Some women had packed their bags with lace pyjamas, powder compacts and eau de cologne, smuggled into Parisian jail cells by their families. Denise and her friends packed sausage, cheese and bread to eat on the journey. The three had become friends over months of imprisonment in the Paris prison of Fresnes. Now they stood on the platform guessing when they’d be back home.

The Allied landings were expected in May at the latest, so they’d definitely be back by Bastille Day, 14 July, said Christiane. A general’s daughter, she had joined a resistance cell at seventeen without telling her parents; when her mother found that Christiane was arrested she marched into the Gestapo’s Paris headquarters declaring, ‘My daughter is not a terrorist. I want her back.’

Neither she nor any of the others were given a chance to tell their families they were leaving for Germany. Denise had lost both her parents when she was very young, and after living out the first phase of war with her brother Bernard, a French diplomat, in neutral Portugal, in 1942 she suddenly decided – against his advice – to return to France and join the resistance. Along with several other women here on the station platform, she
worked with the Comet Line, an underground escape network that guided stranded Allied servicemen out of France, usually over the Pyrenees. She was arrested in the summer of 1943.

Though anxious, the mood was not gloomy. The women were pleased to be out of French prisons, and the worst they expected in Germany was hard labour, which they hoped would be in the open air. Anyone observing the group might have thought they looked more like a happy band leaving on a camping expedition than a group of prisoners going to a concentration camp. Most knew next to nothing about the camps, and those who did certainly didn’t believe they’d be taken to such a place.

An opera singer from Orleans struck up with a Scottish ballad and even the ‘
groupe de comtesses
’ maintained their esprit de corps, although several recoiled in horror at seeing a crowd of French prostitutes gather on the platform. The women had been arrested for infecting the Gestapo with VD, the countesses said.

As they waited, more women arrived. Geneviève de Gaulle was here, niece of the Free French leader. An elegant, reserved young woman, Geneviève was working on an underground newspaper in Paris when arrested, though of course the General knew nothing of it. Convent girls barely out of school, mostly resistance lookouts or couriers, stood beside older sisters who had cycled up to 50 miles a day delivering secret messages. Several members of the
Prosper
resistance circuit were here; the circuit had been run from London by SOE, the Special Operations Executive, but had been infiltrated by the Germans and decimated.

A group of French Red Cross nurses were here, a teacher from Normandy, a librarian from the Quartier Latin, and an eminent grey-haired art historian called Emilie Tillion. She had been arrested with her ethnologist daughter, Germaine, who had been taken off to Germany the previous October, though Emilie had no idea where she had gone.

Some on the platform had been warned of the risks they ran before embarking on resistance work. Cicely Lefort, a British SOE woman who landed in France by moonlight in a small Lysander plane, was told by her bosses back in Baker Street that she’d be shot if arrested. Most, however, knew little of the risks, and several, caught up in random Gestapo sweeps, had no idea why they were even here.

When the train locomotive arrived it pulled wagons, not carriages, and on the wagon doors were written the words: ‘Men 40, horses 8’. Sixty women were loaded into each truck. A guard put a tin pot in the middle, then slammed the doors shut, locking each wagon with a bar and a lead seal fixed on top. Denise, Christiane and Suzanne, squashed together at one end of a wagon, heard Geneviève de Gaulle and her group strike up in song – ‘
Ce n’est
qu’un au revoir mes frères
’ – and then everyone sang the Marseillaise. Through chinks in the door they glimpsed railwaymen on the tracks and threw farewell notes. Cicely Lefort scribbled her husband’s address in Brittany – he was a French doctor – with a note saying: ‘Leaving for Germany. C’.

As the train moved towards the German border, it pulled up from time to time and soldiers opened doors to empty buckets. The women were thirsty, and struggled in the darkness with hands, arms and legs that were jolted and jarred. The smell grew nauseating. Over the border a German officer with a riding whip ordered everyone out. Denise observed that he ‘didn’t dare meet our glance for fear of seeing our confidence in our certain victory’.

Soup was offered at the next stop and soldiers shouted ‘
Arbeit, Arbeit
’ and laughed, and the women laughed too. ‘We still thought we were heading for Silesia to work, then we turned north so we thought, no it can’t be that,’ said Christiane.

Two more days, then at 2 a.m. on 3 February someone shouted: ‘We’ve arrived.’ As they tumbled out half dazed, the women stared at the guards and the dogs in utter disbelief. The French women’s description of their arrival has a different tone to many other prisoners. Though they were shocked by the brutality, what they remember most today is their inability to believe what they saw. ‘The reality was so brutal and so hard we could hardly grasp it,’ said Denise Dufournier. Some survivors said later they genuinely thought they had been brought here by mistake. Others say they simply refused to see what was in front of them. ‘There was a healthy smell of resin and the air felt salty on the lips,’ said Denise. ‘Just to breathe the Baltic sea air was good,’ said Michèle Agniel.

The women recall being ‘half in a dream’ as they trudged to the camp gates, and many stumbled and fell. ‘Our bundles so carefully prepared but too hastily packed hampered us a lot,’ said Denise. At the gates they passed ‘without transition from pitch darkness into a blinding light’. Then someone said: ‘Oh we’ve arrived at a concentration camp.’ Others said: ‘No! Are you mad? It can’t be true.’

‘Inside the gates we saw this “
stupeur des visages
” [stupefied faces]. It was obviously a place of death. We had a sense of entering an abattoir. Really it was like that. But we never thought we were going to stay here,’ said Anise Girard. ‘You see,’ said Christiane de Cuverville, ‘we were “
jeunes filles bien élevées
” – well brought up young ladies – and we thought, this cannot be for us. It is a mistake. Someone will come along soon and take us on somewhere else.’

Walking on inside the camp they saw strange half-starved creatures like figures from the Middle Ages, carrying vats, and so now they began to think they’d all gone mad. ‘Eat your food, they’ll take everything from you,’ said a figure darting forward.

In the bath they were stripped. ‘And then the young ladies had to stand “
nues devant leur mère
”. It was the worst. In those days the humiliation for French girls to be naked in front of their mothers was something terrible.’ As heads were shaved the guards ransacked bags for eau de cologne. ‘They searched us with toothbrushes between our legs,’ said Amanda Staessart, a Belgian who was there with her mother.

After the shower they were taken to a temporary block for the rest of the night, crammed in with ‘strange half-starved creatures’, and some of the women were so terrified by the skeletons that they shouted to the guards to ‘keep these monsters away’ while others offered the skeletons their last bits of food. French prisoners who had arrived a few months earlier got word that friends or relatives were amongst the new group and tried to get messages to them. Germaine Tillion, who had arrived in October, heard that her mother, Emilie, was here.

At daybreak a woman with a vat of beet soup appeared, but the Frenchwomen refused to believe the food was really for them either. One shouted: ‘Come on, we can’t eat this, let’s eat our own and have a picnic,’ so they made a picnic, sitting on their kitbags out in the snow, eating the left-over cheese and bread from their bags. They looked around to see who’d dare stop them, but so amazed were the guards and camp police that nobody did. Prisoners passing by whispered ‘
Franzosen
’ and stared.

Inside their quarantine block, the French still refused to believe that anything was real, and told each other they’d be out of there as soon as the authorities learned their mistake. Meanwhile, the women told stories and recited poems and played their guessing game about the end of the war. They made up names for the ‘
Aufseherinnen
’ – or ‘
officerines
’, as the French called the guards. ‘We’ll live if we don’t eat the soup,’ said Christiane, who already had stomach cramps from the raw swede. Someone looked out of a window and saw prisoners kneeling sharing out a bit of bread, and what looked like women dressed as men walking on the path. The Blockova called them ‘
les Jules
’.

And if the mood was down, it only took one of them to say, ‘Girls, I dreamt of shoes last night, which must mean we’ll be returning soon,’ and in a flash the rumour would go round that they’d be out by Bastille Day, and everyone would cheer and laugh.

‘Yes we always tried to laugh,’ says Christiane. ‘You see, because we couldn’t believe, it helped to laugh. I remember when my hair was shaved and someone said: “
Mais dis donc
, hey, Christiane – it suits you,”’ and she laughs. ‘The other groups were far more serious. The Poles were very serious. I remember the day soon after we arrived and the Polish Blockova was ordering us to clean up because Himmler was coming to inspect. But we French
refused to budge. So she was very angry and she said: “Himmler is coming and the whole camp trembles but you French just laugh.”’

The inspection by Himmler
that made the French laugh is not noted in his official diary, but the German prisoner Klara Tanke remembers the Reichsführer’s visit some time in the early months of 1944 because he ordered her release ‘after four years, six months and fourteen days in the camp’. He was looking for women to work in his Berlin office, which had lost staff in the recent bombings. Klara recalled: ‘He picked out eight big blonde women and I was one.’

The timing of Himmler’s inspection almost certainly coincided with another visit to Häschen, who was expecting a second child. He was much in need of a break from the pressures of the war, particularly on the Russian front. According to Felix Kersten, his masseur, the Reichsführer’s health had not been good since January. After a treatment session, Kersten noted on 15 January 1944 that Himmler was ‘
depressed in mind
as well as in health’. From Kersten’s account, he was most depressed about matters of propagation – both animal and vegetable – which were not working out as he had once hoped.

Despite the mass killing, Russia’s population was still growing at the rate of three million a year. It was ‘like the hydra in the Greek myth. If you cut off its head, seven more grow in its place.’ Furthermore, Himmler complained, the Russians had developed a new breed of corn that could withstand extreme cold, and this had enabled them to reclaim more land to the north and to grow more corn for feeding their troops.

It was not only the broad strategic issues of propagation, according to Kersten, that were troubling Himmler; more localised breeding questions were on his mind. For example, too few SS officers were marrying and producing children. The Reichsführer SS had also requested a report on how best to produce boys rather than girls. If Germany’s women spent too much time in bomb shelters there would be little procreation at all, he told Kersten.

Himmler’s comments show how by early 1944 even he had begun to accept – in private, at least – the limitations, perhaps even the madness, of the Nazi project. He had also begun to concede the possibility of defeat, speaking to Kersten of the need to put out feelers to the Americans and British, who ‘would soon realise the danger of Russian predominance on the continent’ and seek a separate peace with Germany. Himmler had even asked Kersten to go to Sweden to seek out possible negotiating partners in Washington and London, and to reward him Himmler had given his loyal masseur his own estate not far from Ravensbrück, as well as a handful of women prisoners – Jehovah’s Witnesses – to work on the estate as slaves.

Despite these private doubts, however, in public Himmler, like his master, displayed absolute certainty in a German victory. In a series of speeches made to party officials and to his SS generals at Posen over the winter of 1943–4, he glorified the Führer’s achievements, particularly his success in ‘eradicating the plague of Jews’. In this area Himmler claimed that he had, indeed, been able to control propagation. He even explained, in unprecedented detail, why it had been necessary to take the ‘difficult decision’ to kill Jewish women and children as well as the men; it was done, he said, in order to prevent a new generation of avengers:

We come to the question: how is it with the women and children. I have resolved even here on a completely clear solution. That is to say I do not consider myself justified in eradicating the men – so to speak killing or ordering them killed – and allowing the avengers in the shape of the children to grow up for our sons and grandsons. The difficult decision had to be taken, to cause this
Volk
to disappear from the earth.

Yet even as he talked of victory, Himmler was hedging his bets. He had started to gather hostages and hold them in his camps as bargaining chips, ready for when his secret peace negotiations began. Some of those chips were held at Ravensbrück.