If This Is a Woman: Inside Ravensbruck: Hitler's Concentration Camp for Women (72 page)

‘It was as if a little of our former life had slipped illegally into the camp. A breath of France,’ said Denise. ‘And we thought – what did our own fate matter if the Tricolour was once again flying over Paris?’

PART FIVE

Chapter 25

Paris and Warsaw

O
n 8 August 1944, with American forces just 100 miles west of Paris, three British women were taken from the cells in the city’s Fresnes Prison, put inside a truck and taken to the Gare de l’Est. Violette Szabo, Denise Bloch and Lilian Rolfe were shackled around their ankles and put on a train for Germany. In a separate carriage on the same train, handcuffed two by two, was a group of British men.

On the station the women and men had recognised each other. All were members of the Special Operations Executive (SOE), and all had parachuted into France to work with the resistance. Violette Szabo saw Harry Peulevé, a British man she had trained with. Denise Bloch saw her circuit leader and her lover, Robert Benoist, a French racing driver. The agents had been captured in the run-up to D-Day and held by the Germans in French jails. They had hoped to be liberated by the Americans, probably in a matter of days. Instead, along with thousands of captured French resisters held in prisons across France, they were snatched away and sent to German concentration camps in the last days before Allied forces recaptured Paris and took back France.

As the Germans retreated from French soil, the Führer called for all captured French resisters to be sent as slaves to German factories. Daily the exodus gathered speed; in the three weeks after the first D-Day landings 6000 French men and women were taken by train to Germany. The journeys lasted for days, due to Allied bombing of the tracks, and took a dreadful toll. A so-called
train de la mort
, death train, arrived at Buchenwald in July with
530 Frenchmen dead. During long delays, they had suffocated in the heat, or killed each other as they struggled to get out.

The train carrying Violette Szabo, Denise Bloch and Lilian Rolfe made slow progress to the German border, as bombing caused many stops. During one long halt, Violette appeared at the men’s carriage window, offering water. She crawled down the side of the train, still shackled to Denise Bloch, as the German guards took cover during an air raid. When the train neared the border at Soissons, the stationmaster and French Red Cross nurses tried to persuade the driver to turn back, but were ignored.

At Saarbrücken, in a transit camp, the women encountered Yvonne Baseden, another SOE woman. Six weeks earlier, in the Jura Mountains, her SOE circuit had received the first daylight drop of arms from a US Flying Fortress and hidden the munitions on a dairy farm behind stacks of giant cheeses. When a German patrol approached, twenty-year-old Yvonne hid there too, but was discovered and arrested. With train lines to Paris out of action, she was put on a train direct from Dijon to Saarbrücken. Among her travelling companions was a French countess who had no idea why she’d been arrested, a group of ‘squabbling communists’ and a ‘bossy’ British woman who wore the uniform of the French Red Cross.

As these trains left, thousands remained in Paris prisons. Amid fears that the Germans would massacre them all in the final days, resistance leaders called for an insurrection ahead of the Allied liberation. The Swedish consul in Paris, Raoul Nordling, as representative of a neutral country, attempted to negotiate with the Germans for the French jails to be placed under Swedish protection, and he called for a halt to the deportations. By now the city’s electricity was cut off, French train drivers had called a strike, and the Gare de l’Est had been destroyed by an Allied bomb. But the trains continued to leave. German train drivers were called in and the trains left from a suburban station, Gare de Pantin.

On 15 August Virginia Lake, a thirty-four-year-old American, stood on a packed bus crossing the Place de la Concorde. A month earlier she had been helping Allied airmen reach safety, but now, along with scores of other women resisters, she was part of a convoy heading for the Gare de Pantin. The French bus driver told Virginia he’d been ferrying prisoners to the station all day long and was sick of it. It was as if every prisoner in Paris was being evacuated that day, he said.

‘
And the Allies?
Where are they?’ she asked him.

‘They’re doing well,’ he said. ‘They’re at Rambouillet,’ mentioning a town just forty-five kilometres from Paris.

At the Gare de Pantin, the prisoners were packed sixty to a truck. Red Cross workers passed out parcels and assured them: ‘You’ll never make it to
Germany. It’s impossible. You’ll be liberated before then.’ As the train rolled out carrying a total of 400 women as well as 2200 men, including 168 Allied pilots, a blizzard of notes sailed onto the tracks, to be collected by passers-by.

So frequent were the stops and detours that the prisoners hoped they wouldn’t make it to the border. During one stop they were forced out of the train and made to march miles past the bombed tracks. A young French resister called Nicole de Witasse saw a chance to escape and dived into a pile of straw, but was soon found, beaten, and brought back.

Villagers called out: ‘
Bon courage! Vive la France!
’ Once again a stationmaster called for the driver to stop, but it did no good. Soon, peeking through the slats, the prisoners read German signs and wept. Their guards relaxed. Four hours later, the train reached Weimar and stopped. The married women were told they could say goodbye to their husbands, who were sent on to Buchenwald. Soon after all the women were put on a train north to Ravensbrück, which arrived on 21 August 1944. On 25 August, Paris was free.

The sun was hot as the women were marched towards the camp. Through the gates they saw rows of gnome-like women and enormous bottle-green barracks standing on black dust.

They’d been crammed inside trucks for fifteen hours and cried out for water, but were told there was none. ‘Typhus, typhus,’ said the creatures: the water could not be drunk. A small jug of ersatz coffee was distributed, but there were no cups, so the new arrivals delved in their rucksacks for cups or bottles, or frantically emptied jars of jam or sugar that they’d packed and held them out for a drop of brown liquid. Other prisoners looking on saw the spilt sugar and jam and tried to scrape it off the ground.

As night fell the new arrivals had still not been allocated blocks. The camp was in chaos, and the women were being squeezed down a narrow side alley and pushed up against a line of open latrines. Virginia looked up at the wire behind her and saw a skull and crossbones sign, warning of live current. An overpowering stench came from under her feet: she was standing above the mortuary.

There were hundreds of others squashed into the alley, and they cried out in different languages: Dutch, Romanian, Hungarian, Greek, Serbo-Croat and many more. As night began to fall all these prisoners were pushed on further into the camp. Ahead they saw what looked like the top of a giant tent.

A new group, some dressed in fur coats, pushed their way through the alley, then slumped exhausted to the ground and lay moaning. Others – mothers with children – sat on expensive leather suitcases and stared in disgust at those around them or wailed. The word went round that these were Poles. The French stared at the Poles and the Poles stared back. One or two
could speak each other’s language. The Poles had come from Warsaw, the French learned, and the Poles learned that the French had come from Paris. Paris was about to be liberated, the French said. Warsaw was burning said the Poles.

At the beginning of August, as the French had been waiting for the Americans to liberate Paris, the Polish resistance army saw their chance to rise up and seize their city, but the revolt had been crushed. Himmler’s SS divisions moved in and set the city on fire, slaughtering as they went.
A sixteen-year-old girl
called Krystyna Dąbrówska was here in the alley; three weeks earlier she had watched her home in Warsaw go up in flames. Krystyna’s father, a doctor, escaped through the sewage system; her brother was shot. She and her mother were then herded onto a train and sent west along with thousands of others to work as Hitler’s slaves.

On her first night in Ravensbrück Krystyna eventually found a place to sleep, after descending some steps and curling up where it was warm. When she woke in the morning she found she had slept in the morgue. Others on Krystyna’s transport from Warsaw slept their first night in the giant tent.

The tent seemed harmless enough when it first appeared in the middle of August, its clean white canvas flapping in the breeze. Denise Dufournier and the painting gang watched it go up, amazed. Was it to be a circus, perhaps, or an exhibition centre? they joked. Nobody expected prisoners to live in it. In fact, it was an old army tent and Suhren claimed later that he had found the last of its sort in Germany – such was the demand for them in other overcrowded camps. When the tent arrived Suhren even helped bang in the pegs himself.

The tent was put up on a piece of waste ground between blocks 24 and 25. In winter it was a swamp and in summer a rubbish tip, infested with flies. Then word got around that this was a temporary measure to put a roof over the heads of new arrivals, and there was certainly a need for that, as every inch of space inside the walls was now used up. In most blocks women slept three to a mattress, but in the large slum blocks as many as seven squeezed onto two adjoining mattresses. The day rooms were packed with prisoners lying on tables, benches or on the floor. In the Gypsy block the women crouched on the basins ‘like perched hens’, said Sylvia Salvesen. The mortuary was always so full that dead bodies were piled up in the washrooms of the blocks until the corpse cart came to take them away.

The surge in arrivals had been overwhelming and had begun to accelerate long before the Warsaw women arrived. As the Russians drove on across Poland, Hitler had ordered that every Nazi camp and prison that lay in their path must be emptied: no prisoner of the Reich must fall into enemy hands.
As a result thousands of prisoners had been put on trains west to camps further behind German lines, all of which now overflowed with new arrivals. Although the Russians were still miles away from southern Poland, evacuation transports from Auschwitz had already started, and the Polish ghettos were being cleared too, some of the Jews held in them sent on west.

At the same time throngs of German prisoners were still reaching Ravensbrück – housewives heard doubting Germany’s victory, prostitutes found wandering the ruins of Dresden, more
Bettpolitische
. Then came the latest transports from France, ahead of the Allied liberation. And evacuees from the concentration camp of Vught, in southern Holland, were also expected soon.

All summer long Fritz Suhren had tried to make more space, building new blocks, squeezing more in here and there, but by mid-August the camp infrastructure was crumbling. He didn’t even have the staff to process arrivals. Under strict camp rules no prisoner could be admitted without filling out forms and being issued with a number, which was why the French and others had had to wait in alleys before they could be processed.

Then, when the Warsaw influx began, the camp bureaucracy finally collapsed. The tent alleviated things, but it was not big enough to accommodate an entire city’s womenfolk. In the space of a few weeks between August and October 1944 more than 12,000 Warsaw women and children would be put on the road to Ravensbrück.

By the end of August Suhren had refused to admit more. Those awaiting registration were kept in a vast seething mass outside the gates, exhausted, hungry and sick. The ground on which they sat and lay was soon a field of mud, excrement and human detritus.

The camp Poles were eager to glean whatever news they could from the new arrivals, and Krysia Czyż and Wanda Wojtasik, now strong enough to walk, had been assigned to guard new anti-aircraft ditches, dug outside the camp walls as bomb shelters, which gave them a chance to observe the Warsaw women whom they found in a desperate state. After ten hours in cattle wagons, the newcomers had been left in the sun without food or water. Krystyna and Wanda took buckets of clean water for them, asking: ‘
What news of Warsaw?
’ The answer kept coming back ‘There is no Warsaw. There is nothing left.’

Whole families arrived, and soon children were everywhere, running off into the woods, or trying to get food from SS villas. Still more kept coming and each transport appeared to bring with it more and more paraphernalia. Women sat with heaps of possessions piled around them, packed in suitcases, boxes or giant trunks.

Asked why they had brought these things the women said they had been told by the Germans to ‘bring everything’ and they had also been promised safety. Others had looted the riches themselves. Inmates of an entire civilian prison arrived along with nuns from several convents. Some women brought pet dogs and Grete Buber-Neumann noticed one woman with a canary in a cage. As the squalor worsened the SS feared the spread of disease, and more effort was made to get the women inside, so they could at least be disinfected and await their registration in the tent. But given the numbers involved, and the amount of baggage to be processed, the usual shower and disinfection procedures were impossible.

In the first instance the women were quickly searched for valuables before being sent to the tent, and seeing this many then tried to bury what they had in the ground, or to hide jewellery and other valuables in orifices. Most luxury apparel and jewellery was eventually stripped off the women by the guards, but such was the quantity of goods that whole piles of personal effects were left outside the bathhouse.

‘
There were badges
and brooches and images of Our Lady and the Polish eagle, powder boxes, watches and evening dresses, prayer books, pots and pans, silver spoons, whole lengths of expensive material, mirrors, eiderdowns and violins, beautiful silk underwear and peasant kerchiefs – all higgledypiggledy,’ said Karolina Lanckorońska. Prisoners passing by stood staring in astonishment at the finery, and many helped themselves.