The Secret of the Blue Trunk (9 page)

Later, Mathilde was one of these women. Because she made that sacrifice, we were eventually able to emerge from the darkness.

Iréna

Darkness. The perfect word to describe Iréna, the ultimate survivor. Iréna possessed both the innocence of a child and an extraordinary instinct for survival. She could endure suffering without uttering a word. That was her greatest strength. It is around her that we erected our stronghold. Iréna deserved more than anyone else to make it through. I knew very well that the ability to stay alive had nothing to do with merit, but having her survive the horror was a victory over infamy for us and gave meaning to the years we wasted in that hole. Since life had not been kind to her, we hoped that one day she would know a different fate. Born in Poznán, in Poland, Iréna shared a small apartment in that city with her mother and younger sister. The SS cavalry regularly conducted roundups there. They would take the Jews from their homes and beat them up or kill them in the middle of the street. Her father was arrested in one of the first of these roundups. Iréna never saw him again. She and some friends decided to go into hiding in the country, at an uncle’s house, until everything, they thought, got back to normal and the violence ended.

After a few weeks in the country, where she wasn’t worried and ate particularly well, Iréna made up her mind to go back to the city, thinking the danger had passed. It was the feast day of St. Irène, her birthday. She was twenty-one and hoped her mother would give a party for her. Her mother wasn’t at home, but Iréna decided to make preparations for a party, anyway.

Her mother and sister were at the community garden, at the other end of town. Suddenly the SS burst into the apartment and asked her if she knew if her family was hiding Jews whose status was illegal. Iréna answered there was no one hidden in her house. The soldiers were furious. They proceeded to turn the whole apartment upside down. One SS man showed her some photographs and asked her if she knew these people. Afraid her family would suffer reprisals, Iréna chose to keep silent. The soldiers then decided to cart her off. As she went down the building’s narrow stairs ahead of them, she passed her mother and sixteen-year-old sister, who were just coming back. They both looked at her, wondering what was happening. Iréna discreetly signalled to them to ignore her. Her mother began to cry softly, holding her other daughter’s hand very tightly. They passed right by their apartment so as not to attract the soldiers’ attention.

The SS men took Iréna to their headquarters and tried to make her sign certain papers. Iréna refused, saying she didn’t understand their language. She was then sent to the town’s prison. Her mother came to see her a little later. She gave her a blanket and a cushion: “You can sit on it if it’s too cold on the floor or if you have a backache.”

Iréna stayed at another camp before coming to this last one. The first, Auschwitz, established in 1940, included two separate complexes: Auschwitz-Birkenau, the extermination camp, and Auschwitz-Monowitz, the labour camp, where she was taken. The first three days after her arrest, she cried a lot. She felt completely numb for a while, as though she were observing from the outside what she experienced within. We all felt that way at one time or another.

While there, she escaped death thanks to a woman prisoner from her hometown. An SS leader had decided on a whim to send all those Jews to the crematorium whose identification number tattooed on their arms contained the figure
seven
. Iréna’s number was 24215. The figure
one
had been tattooed with a longer line at the top, so that it looked like a
seven
. Consequently, Iréna ended up among the detainees who were going to be sent to the crematorium.

The woman prisoner who dealt with the registers of the camp’s inmates knew Iréna. She went to see the officer right away and proved to him that it wasn’t a
seven
Iréna had her on her arm because the figure lacked the little cross stroke it often has in Europe. The SS checked the register, saw there had been a mistake, and Iréna was spared.

When she arrived in our camp, she was rather distrustful. But little by little, as we showed her affection, her distrust disappeared. She was the last one to share her story and even let us see her official number tattooed on her arm. That was risky because it was due to a mix-up while being transferred that she had ended up with us. She became a treasure we needed to protect at all cost. We made sure her tattoo was always well covered up by a layer of mud, which we made with water, sand and any dirt we found under our boots. When a soldier came too near her, we would try to divert his attention in every possible way.

Mathilde became her guardian angel. She used all her power to obtain certain well-deserved advantages for Iréna and made that her personal business.

Through her intervention, for example, Iréna was given other work because the work she had been doing, the packing of arms, was too exhausting.

What should be pointed out is that there existed a hierarchy among prisoners. Mathilde, who was French and spoke German, was at the top of the ladder. Then came Simone and I, two British subjects. At the bottom of the scale were all the others, except the Jews, who were unclassifiable. So, thanks to Mathilde, Iréna was assigned to another, less physically demanding job and found herself, like me, assembling belts for machine-gun bullets. With the consent of two officers, Mathilde managed throughout our captivity to leave Iréna’s name out of the Lottery of Death.

A
t
the camp, we lost all track of time. Our only reference point was the day of Hitler’s birthday, April 20, because then we were entitled to a slice of sausage. How generous of him! That’s how I could tell how many years I had been locked up here.

Gradually a certain routine settled in, in spite of the horror around us. The production of arms seemed to be our guards’ main concern. In the course of my second year of captivity, however, the German soldiers started behaving more violently toward us. There must have been a reason. At the beginning of the war, Mathilde said, the German army was confident it would win. But the situation had become more difficult, owing to the huge loss of life on the battlefields. The troops’ morale was affected by this. It was out of the question for Hitler to suffer another defeat like the one of 1914–18.

One day, after our shift and roll call, the soldiers decided to make up a new game to avenge themselves for the deaths of their countrymen killed in action. They would place the prisoners’ names in the helmet of a soldier and the woman whose name was drawn was shot on the spot, in front of all the others. We called this appalling game the “Lottery of Death.” It took place once a month.

How can I describe the dread they made us endure while we waited for them to draw the name of the woman who would be doomed to die? We would stand close together. When we heard that our name hadn’t been chosen, we couldn’t help but be relieved, but at the same time we felt immensely sad for the woman who was going to be shot.

When the soldier took aim at the prisoner and she began to scream, we turned around so we wouldn’t have to witness that horrible scene. It was unspeakable. The screams of those girls have always haunted my sleep. Yet the height of barbarism hadn’t been reached yet.

There were twins among us, just eighteen years old. They were from Quebec. They happened to be in Brittany when they were arrested. Their father, an engineer, had been awarded a two-year contract for the building of a bridge and decided to take his little family with him. On a certain day, a soldier drew the name of one of the twins. Her sister started howling and clung to her. The girls who shared their mattress tried to hold her back, but when the gun went off and her sister fell, she cried and screamed even louder. As no one was able to calm her down, the soldier ordered the girls to stand back with the tip of his gun and then fired at the other twin, who collapsed on top of her sister, who was already dead.

This time, we didn’t have a chance to turn around and we saw it all. We never expected such an inhuman act. The soldier himself seemed surprised by his impulsive decision. He was no longer able to look us in the eye. I had a feeling that the soldiers found our distress so difficult to bear that their rage turned them into real beasts. Perhaps they wanted to indicate to us that they really had no choice but to act this way, they were just following orders and couldn’t do anything about it. Otherwise, they might go mad …

Another ordeal was repeated every month to try and make us feel inferior and dehumanize us, as though the soldiers wanted to prove to the enemy that if we didn’t surrender to Germany, they would continue ill-treating us. Yet we were only enemy ants, hidden three hundred feet underground. We couldn’t serve as an example to anyone. The acts of cruelty they committed toward us showed their frustration at not winning the war as easily as they thought they would.

We believed that certain soldiers made it their mission to think up new forms of torture, just to impress their
Führer
.

So, once a month, our guards forced us to walk past them naked while they pointed at us and made fun of us. Their loud, coarse laughter still rings in my ears.

Sometimes during this parade, carried out in front of two officers and a group of soldiers, girls had their period. That made them laugh even more. Fortunately, my menstrual cycle had stopped since my arrest (which caused me many problems later on). Be that as it may, it meant one humiliation less for me. Mathilde was our guide and made her recommendations. She told us to hold ourselves very erect and, especially, always look the voyeurs in the eye, without blinking. At the end of this degrading procession, several girls had no strength left to go on. Their distress was so unbearable that we often heard a few of them scream that they wanted to die and needed our help to kill themselves. As for our group of four, it became even more closely knit, and we were convinced we were going to survive. Improbable as it may seem, we were confident and defiant. Our passion for life was so strong that all we wanted to do was spit on every German.

Toward the end of the second year, punishments began to rain on us for anything and everything. A bowl not put back where it belonged, a crooked row at roll call, being a minute late for work; anything was an excuse to penalize us. That might mean a few days of solitary confinement, with or without light, a soup ration only once every four days, or spending time in a cell that was flooded up to your ankles.

Occasionally our guards forced prisoners to punish each other. One day, a Russian woman tried to escape but didn’t succeed. The three inmates who shared her mattress were punished. For two and a half days they had to remain standing, a sanction the soldiers called “the pose.” This was followed by three days of food deprivation. Next, rather than dealing with the fugitive themselves, the guards handed her over to her fellow inmates so they would punish her. Then the girls beat her to death! The Germans really knew all the ways to turn human beings into brutes.

I have also had experiences that were unusual to say the least, especially considering the situation I was in: While busy working one morning, I thought I heard someone speak to me in a hushed voice. The staple machine was making a noise and I couldn’t quite make out where the sound of that voice came from. Anyway, I carried on with my work.

Then, once again, between two pedal strokes, I heard someone whisper beside me. Incredible as it may seem, a young soldier on guard duty was trying to talk to me. This struck me as so unbelievable that at first I thought I wasn’t in my right mind. But on his way back, the soldier slowed down to be closer to my work station. “It’s
me
talking to you. Hello!” As he walked past me again, he said hello to me once more. This time I knew for sure who was speaking to me. I was stunned, it was beyond all comprehension.

I lowered my eyes as though nothing had happened. I couldn’t answer him; after all, it could be a trick. If I opened my mouth, there would certainly be dreadful consequences. He must have noticed my confusion because he tried to reassure me: “I don’t mean to frighten you. I would just like to chat with you, only if you want to, of course.”

The idea of chatting with a torturer seemed diabolical, so naturally I hesitated. He went on, “I am not who you think I am. I assure you this isn’t a trap. I know perfectly well we could both suffer grave reprisals, but I can’t help it. I have been watching you for the past few days and seen such strength of character in you that I wanted to talk to you so I could find out a little more about you. I was anxious to tell you that I am very unhappy about what is going on at the moment. I am not trying to justify myself. I simply wanted to say that not all Germans agree with this war. I would especially like to explain that not all of us are heartless men. If you decide to speak to me, we’ll be extremely careful. We’ll talk without moving our mouths too much and without looking at each other. I cannot trust anyone either because some soldiers are very indoctrinated and denounce the most humane among us. If it will reassure you: I have thoroughly weighed the risks. For example, the position of the stapler you work with makes it easier to communicate because it’s at quite a distance from the other guards. From where I am, I have a clear view of the entrance stairway. When I suspect danger or feel we are being watched, I will stop talking immediately for your safety and mine.”

And he continued, without asking if I agreed, “All right then, I’ll begin, Mademoiselle. My name is Franz. I am sure you are wondering why I am speaking to you in French. That is because I received part of my education in Paris. I lived there for two years.”

I didn’t even look at him. I was really afraid it might be a trap. A few moments after the whistle that marked the end of the shift had sounded, he said, “See you tomorrow!”

I was in a state of shock.

At night I waited for the eight o’clock curfew and for all the lights to be switched off to tell my story to the girls. Pressed against each other — Simone at the end of the row, I next to her, Iréna and Mathilde at the other end — I whispered my conversation with the soldier to them.

Simone and Iréna warned me right away. “You must never trust the enemy,” they said over and over. Neither one believed in the German soldier’s benevolence. “There must be something he wants from you,” they said. “You believed him when he explained he spoke to you because he admired your strength of character?” Mathilde asked, and added, “We’ll have to protect you, not just from soldiers but men in general.”

I couldn’t quite understand what she meant by that. The three of them insisted that I stop these exchanges immediately.

The following morning, as soon as she got up, Simone reminded me once again of their instructions. If that soldier happened to be still on guard duty today, I should ignore him. I didn’t promise anything, but I agreed just to get rid of her and went to my work station. Franz was still on guard. Strangely enough, I felt a peculiar little rush of joy when I caught sight of him. Was that only because he took an interest in me?

Franz waited patiently until we were all back at our posts and the steady noise of the machines started up again before he tried to approach me. I took advantage of the moments when he wasn’t looking at me to observe him. I took my time examining him. He was blond, with eyes too blue to be mean, fine features, large hands. I jumped when he said hello to me. He told me his name again and asked for mine. I didn’t answer. He tried to put me at ease. “I understand perfectly why you keep silent, after what you have been through. I am going to tell you my story and then you will decide if I am worthy of your attention.”

While I carried on with my work and without ever looking at him, I listened to him describing himself.

“My name is Franz Weis. I come from Garmisch-Partenkirchen, near the Austrian border, in Bavaria. Those two villages were amalgamated in 1935 on Hitler’s orders, in anticipation of the Olympic Games of 1936. Garmisch lies in a magnificent valley surrounded by mountains. One of these, the Zugspitze, is the tallest in Germany. If you can come to visit this place one day, you’ll see how pretty it is.

“In my family, we have been soldiers for three generations. My father fought in the First World War. He is a very cold person. In his opinion, a man should never show his feelings. You can imagine it was out of the question that his son would avoid his military service. I don’t know if he is proud of my getting my degree in history in Paris, because he never told me. I feel I will never accomplish enough for him to look at me with pride. That’s why I hate him sometimes.

“Paris is an enthralling city. The two years that I lived there were the most rewarding years of my life. I fell deeply in love with the city and my only wish, once this terrible war is over, if I get out of it alive of course, is to go back and live there and become a journalist.”

Franz got carried away as he told his story. He forgot to speak in a low voice. He asked me, “Have you been there?” He didn’t know how badly I wanted to answer, but I did nothing of the sort. “Fine. Don’t answer me. I understand.”

He continued: “It is a fascinating, elegant and romantic city, because of the architecture, the wide avenues, the vast parks. I keep thinking back to my strolls on the Champs-Élysées, in the late afternoon. It was magical. The trees lining the avenue are extremely well looked after. There are many cafés where you can enjoy a good café au lait while watching the women with their elegant clothes and the impeccably dressed men. There is also the Place de la Concorde and the obelisk given to the city by the Egyptians, the Bois de Boulogne, the Eiffel Tower with its astonishing metal structure we have all heard so much about since the World’s Fair. I lived in a small
pension
, on rue Washington, in a beautiful neighbourhood. I went to see
Carmen
at the Opéra-Comique. I saw the musée Grévin and its wax figures. Those are unique experiences. To live in Paris means to be surrounded by art and science. Paris thrills me. When I lived there, I felt elated and eagerly looked forward to the future.”

I was just about to answer when an officer very nearly caught us. Franz suddenly stopped talking. He hadn’t heard him coming.

That night, once we had settled ourselves on our straw mattress, Simone and Iréna lost no time in asking me if I had spoken to the soldier. I told them there had been no communication between us. I wondered why I felt the need to hide the truth from them.

I examined my conscience, asked myself when I last told a lie. I had no recollection of it because I am not accustomed to lying. It seems to me I have always been direct and frank. It’s true that the life I had led until then encouraged that attitude.