The Secret of the Blue Trunk (8 page)

A
t
half past four in the morning, the shrill sound of a whistle wakened us. All the women got up, and we had to wait for the group from dormitory A to come back from the toilets before we could rush in there. In the early morning, the bad smells seemed worse to me than the night before. I felt nauseous. Several of us were sick even before entering.

We tried to wash, but the wait was so long and the trickle of water so thin that it was impossible. We would try again another day, especially since we shouldn’t run the risk of being late for work. Any lateness was considered a serious offence, liable to attract a harsh penalty.

I suffered greatly from the lack of hygiene. The Germans treated us like animals, but unfortunately
we
couldn’t lick ourselves clean. I often said to myself that I wouldn’t be able to inflict such a fate on my worst enemy. We then made it our objective to find soap. Soap and food became our two priorities.

When we returned to the dormitories, the soldier on guard started the count and took attendance again. On the very first day, a girl whose straw mattress was within a few paces of ours, died. Iréna, the Polish girl, then slipped in beside her and, taking advantage of the fact that the guard had his back to us, held her in an upright position. When the soldier shouted out the dead prisoner’s name to give her her portion, Iréna yelled “present” in her place and so was able to collect the dead woman’s bread ration. She then laid the lifeless body on the ground and immediately crept back to us. We were in shock and stunned by Iréna’s behaviour. How could such a delicate-looking girl be strong enough to lift up a corpse so quickly?

What we didn’t know at the time was that she had been imprisoned in another camp before ending up with us. So she knew all the tricks to secure her survival.

But the three other girls who shared their straw mattress with the deceased glared at Iréna when they realized the consequence of what she had done. They were dumbfounded to see someone near them stealing the bread portion of a girl who had died on their own mattress.

That first morning, after swallowing our meagre allotment of gruel and our small piece of grey bread, we assembled so we could be divided into work parties. I was shown the machine I would work with for the next four years; until my liberation in fact.

My work consisted in fixing aircraft machine-gun bullets to a belt, which was called a “braid.” This was extremely dangerous work. If ever the fixing mechanism wasn’t properly aligned and I still pushed the pedal, the wire that pressed against the bullet might well cause an explosion because of the exerted pressure. One moment’s inattention and I could have killed or seriously injured myself. I felt as though I were handling actual bombs.

I had no choice: I needed to concentrate on my work. I was utterly surprised, therefore, to hear the whistle announcing the midday break. I hadn’t noticed the morning going by, and the afternoon passed just as quickly. Yet we had to work for twelve hours! I made every effort not to injure myself. Without realizing it, I was putting into practice what Simone had advised me to do: “Keep your mind occupied when you suffer; it will be less painful.”

But there were moments in the late afternoon when I had trouble keeping my eyes open. Waving my hand about over and over again, I would ask permission to go to the toilets. I would splash cold water on my face. This had the desired effect, and, while I was there, I drank lots of water. Revived, I could carry on until six. There was hardly anyone at the wash basin at that time. Perhaps the other women were too embarrassed to ask, but I dared. The worst that could happen was that I’d be turned down.

During evening attendance and roll call, we were forced to stand stock-still. This procedure could take two hours. Several of us were exhausted and had to be helped by others to remain upright. I always wondered why this operation was repeated morning and night, since no one could possibly escape from the camp. One day, Mathilde told me the reason. The day’s dead needed to be counted mainly to avoid wasting food …

For the evening meal, the term “ration” was used: three centimetres of bread the same colour as that of the morning, sometimes mouldy, with a dab of margarine, and, once a week, a spoonful of marmalade.

I didn’t notice at first that I was losing weight because there were no mirrors. But we saw our fellow prisoners becoming skin and bone. We tried any way we could to find a little more food. In this, we weren’t very far from Iréna’s philosophy. We were prepared to do anything for a piece of bread.

In the first week, Simone volunteered to go and get the gruel pot from the kitchens. It took four women to carry it, two in front and two behind, because even empty, the pot was too heavy for one woman.

Eventually a soldier noticed Simone’s repeated volunteering to help out at mealtime. After several weeks she became an employee. The SS chose personnel from among the prisoners to do the routine work they would otherwise have to carry out themselves. To some, they delegated certain administrative and supply duties. These women worked in the offices, warehouses, kitchens, and infirmaries. Simone was assigned to the kitchen.

A few weeks later, Mathilde was selected, too, and put in charge of supplies. This was an important job, which she got mainly because she spoke German quite well.

Thanks to her new position, Simone was allowed to go into the kitchens and managed to bring us more bread, or a small potato. One day she brought us a piece of sausage she had stolen, wrapped in an old dish towel.

She felt guilty at first for sharing these little treats just with the three of us. Mathilde quickly brought her back to reality: “Listen, if we grow stronger thanks to your little leftovers, we’ll be able to help more girls to get through this.”

Get through this! Some of us were beginning to think we would never survive this hell. Luckily, we, the four girls on our mattress, constituted a solid unit and that kept us from being too depressed. Little by little, we began to form a kind of wall of resistance, which stayed upright thanks to our complementary strengths.

Every night before going to sleep, we talked about what had happened during the day. If one of us had felt a pang of despair, she would no longer be alone to bear it: the three others would take on a share of it. If I survived all of that horror, it is largely thanks to Simone, Mathilde, and Iréna. These three admirable women taught me to be strong. They communicated their fighting spirit to me and encouraged me to be resilient.

The women who entered the camp while repeating over and over, “We are going to die here,” nearly all died at the camp. Those, however, who kept saying, “They won’t get us. We are going to come out of this place alive!” mostly survived.

Here is the portrait of these women with whom I lived through the worst times of my life.

Simone

As soon as we arrived at the camp, I realized she had unbelievable strength of character. She glared at the Germans in a way that would have made the most hardened of torturers quake in his boots. At the same time she was the embodiment of goodness, never indifferent to the fate of others. She shouldered the responsibility for our four stomachs. All day long, the only thing on her mind was our dietary survival and she would try to find small compensations to make our everyday life a little more pleasant.

Once, she managed to steal some pieces of cardboard from the kitchen, which she hid under her dress, one at a time. She then put them under our straw mattress to block the damp rising from the concrete.

Born in Trois-Rivières, Simone married a Breton, Léon Bocage. He was her Léon, as she used to say to us.

Léon had met Simone, a friend of his sister-in-law, on a trip to Montreal, where he had gone to visit his brother, Paul. The two Bocage brothers had inherited the family patisserie, in the village of Hédé, twenty-four kilometres from Rennes, in Brittany. Paul decided to let his brother have the business and settled in North America.

Simone was twenty-five when she met Léon. He was twenty-nine. In a few days, they became inseparable. Being single, unattached, she dropped everything to follow him to Europe.

They got married, and were working together in the family patisserie when they were arrested. Léon closed the shop on the day of his arrest. The Germans were aware of his reputation as a pastry cook and forced him to come and work in the kitchens of the German army’s headquarters in Rennes. Léon suspected that sooner or later Simone, still a Canadian citizen and therefore a British subject, was going to be arrested, too. The couple knew a lot about the war, thanks to all the customers who came into their shop. Before he left, Léon made Simone swear she would try everything to survive this war, and he promised he would do the same.

I could understand why Léon loved Simone because, since I met her, Simone had been my rock. I was in great need of her kindness and resourcefulness. I felt safe with her. She had become my older sister. I always sought her approval before carrying out anything at all. With her sense of humour she was often able to make the day’s events seem less alarming.

It took an awfully long while, though, before we could laugh again. The first few times we managed to smile were mainly Simone’s doing. To make fun of the soldiers, she would call them “those nice guys.” She had even come up with a code to warn of impending danger. Being a pastry cook, she decided that “charlotte russe” would be a really good password to alert us. But two words, that was much too long, and we unanimously chose “charlotte.”

Nearly every mattress had its code, in fact. As soon as someone spotted a soldier coming too near us, prisoners were heard whispering names of colours, numbers, and so on.

Simone occupied such a large place in our lives that when she was down in the dumps, we were affected by it, too. We would be eager for her to recover her high spirits, her sparkle, and black humour. Her sin of gluttony became, for us, an asset. Yes, Simone was very fond of her food and often took great risks to hunt up treasures for us, snatched straight from the officers’ dishes.

If we were sharing a carrot, Simone would say, “Just think, girls, that a carrot is often cooked along with a chicken in a sauce, or with a beef stew, and it can be mashed with potatoes.” Our mouths would water and, with our eyes closed, we slowly savoured our quarter of the carrot. Both being Quebeckers, Simone and I salivated most at the thought of the beef stew. For Iréna, it was the purée, and all Mathilde could think of was the chicken.

Mathilde

Mathilde, the Resistance fighter. The mysterious, elusive one. Mental strength personified. She never wasted words and always thought before she spoke.

She spent most of her time observing, analyzing, and finding clever ways to cheat, to distract the soldiers’ attention. Endowed with a phenomenal memory, she knew all the guards’ schedules by heart, since she couldn’t write anything down.

She was able to memorize the face of every soldier who watched us, and had the gift of picking out the most humane among them. She had a good grasp of the basics of the German language and often asked us to be quiet to better hear the soldiers’ conversations.

Before the shaving session, her hair was golden blond. Judging by the clothes she wore when she arrived at the camp, she must have been a very elegant woman before her imprisonment. She no doubt owed her job in the camp’s administrative services to her great physical appeal.

Her work consisted in drawing up inventories of certain products manufactured here. Her relationship with the officers was therefore on a different level.

Mathilde was arrested in Nancy, her birthplace, because she was a member of the Resistance. She taught history. The Germans arrested her in her lycée.

She was single and went to see her parents every Sunday. One day, when rumours of the Second World War began to circulate in earnest, her father, who had fought in the First World War, changed completely. The looming conflict became his only topic of conversation. Before a part of France was occupied, Mathilde took little interest in political issues and thought her father was a lovable but silly old fool. She began to listen carefully to him, though, when she heard that Paris had become an “open city” and the Germans moved around freely there. Then she started asking questions.

One day, a friend of her father’s, a Jewish woman of Alsatian origin who had been their neighbour from the very beginning, shot herself in the head. She had left a letter to explain why she did it. The prospect of falling into the hands of the Nazi invaders was unbearable to her. Jewish friends had told her that members of their family had disappeared. Many horror stories were beginning to surface. Hitler hadn’t yet given the order to exterminate the Jewish people, but the Dachau and Auschwitz camps already existed. That neighbour had heard enough and knew she wouldn’t have the strength to survive such brutal treatment. The suicide confronted Mathilde with harsh reality. She was deeply shaken, and her father inconsolable. It was above all the thought of this woman that made her decide to act.

Little by little, her apartment became a political haven. Her colleagues from the lycée who wished to be involved by working in the
armée des ombres
, as the friends of the Resistance were called, would meet at her home. If before joining the movement she had been unconvinced her co-workers could make a difference in this conflict, she now realized the importance of small acts.

First of all, she learned the enemy’s language, the most frequently used words at least. Her role consisted in circulating information. She would go to public places, and, sometimes without uttering a single word, exchange a piece of information or a code word hidden inside a newspaper. She knew the risk she ran, but felt relieved no one asked her to take part in what was commonly called “horizontal collaboration.” That was the term used for women who granted sexual favours to the Germans in exchange for information, food, or to actually save someone’s life. These women must have had no reservations of a moral nature. They were doing “their part” in that way to help the Resistance, as a last resort.