A Train in Winter (40 page)

Still more women kept coming. Thick snow covered much of Germany and those whose journeys had involved forced marches, in ill-fitting clogs or barefoot, arrived with frostbite. Not one of the fifty-one friends had died during their months in Ravensbrück, but Simone Loche was gravely ill and being moved constantly from place to place around the camp to protect her from Pflaum’s selections, Simone Sampaix had never been well since Birkenau and the only surviving Polish woman, of the six who had been on the
Convoi
, Julia Slusarczyk, had pleurisy and was being nursed by Adelaïde. Chaos in the vastly overcrowded camp, where the SS, faced with the increasing likelihood of German defeat, were growing palpably more anxious and irritable, was spreading. The question was how many of the group would survive the turmoil which was about to engulf them.

CHAPTER FOURTEEN

Pausing before the battle

By the winter of 1943, Ravensbrück had become home to children of all ages, some of them orphans, others sent to the camp with their mothers. Charlotte and her friends sometimes caught sight of little groups of them in the alleys between the barracks, playing games that mirrored the life of Ravensbrück: roll calls, punishments, SS guards,
kapos
. The children, observed one woman, had ‘unlearnt how to laugh’. Cécile and Yvonne Noutari, who had left children of their own at home, were haunted by these frail, filthy, starving, wary children, often so emaciated that it was hard to tell whether they were boys or girls.

The first children to reach Ravensbrück had arrived with their mothers in the autumn of 1939. They were Sinti and Roma gypsies. Over the next five years, they were followed by Jewish children from the whole of occupied Europe, by Hungarian children sent on from Auschwitz, and by the child survivors of the Warsaw uprising, some 881 in all, it would later be said, from eighteen countries. Denied toys, given no books or lessons, they were obliged to endure the ordeal of the interminable roll calls, before spending their days lying on their bunks, waiting for their mothers to get back from work.

The children were always hungry. The arrival of the cauldron of thin soup caused fights to break out between the stronger ones. The younger were constantly to be found begging for food. One four-year-old girl, told that she would get a piece of bread if she danced, went on dancing right through an air raid. The French women, like many others in the camp, regularly gave them some of their own food, and did what they could to find them warm clothes and more to eat. When they reached the age of 12, the children had to join the work details and do twelve-hour shifts in the factories. Their diet was the same as their mothers’, and almost totally lacking in vitamins. Child mortality was high. Yvonne had befriended the son of a Jewish doctor, a clever, well-educated little boy of seven whose parents had disappeared and who she found wandering miserably around the camp. Unlike the other French women, she talked constantly about her own two children, both younger than the Jewish boy, and what it would feel like to hold them in her arms again. She made Marie-Claude promise to come to her house to celebrate the next birthday of the younger one.

Adelaïde’s old enemy, Dr Schumann, arrived from Auschwitz to continue his experiments in sterilisation. He chose 120 gypsy girls, some as young as eight. Once again he used X-rays, which caused appalling burns. Those who did not die soon disappeared from the camp.

In the first days of Ravensbrück, when the camp was still regarded as a place for re-education, pregnant women were allowed to give birth, after which their babies were handed over to the Nazis for adoption. When, in 1942, the nature of Ravensbrück changed and it became a work camp, pregnant women were forced to undergo abortions, sometimes as late as eight months. In 1943, when Dr Treite took over the medical services, the policy changed again. Now the women were allowed to give birth, but the newborn babies were drowned or strangled, often in full sight of their mothers.

At around the time the first eight French friends arrived in Ravensbrück, an announcement was made that babies would, henceforth, be allowed to live. But since no provision was made for either mother or child, both frequently died, of haemorrhages, infections and starvation. Mothers were left untended in unheated rooms, and the babies, for the most part naked, were soon covered in fleas. In the evenings, when mothers returned from the factories to feed them—if they had milk—they could see them turning grey and wizened before their eyes.

The fate of the babies was a constant source of anguish to many of the women in Ravensbrück. And when, in the autumn of 1944, Treite agreed that a special area, the
Kinderzimmer
(children’s room) be set aside in Block 11, efforts were made to find nappies and milk for the newborn. Simone Loche, whose own son was four when she was arrested and deported, had been saved from the murderous Block 10 by her friends, and was smuggled into Block 11. Here she observed heartbreaking scenes. Babies whose mothers had no milk were fed a mixture of cow’s milk and mashed grain from teats cut from the fingers of a doctor’s surgical rubber glove, then swaddled and put to lie, in a row, on a bunk.

The babies were so weak and undernourished that they fed very slowly, and since there were not enough teats or bottles to go round, frantic mothers had to wait their turn, knowing that they might at any moment be summoned for roll call or departure to the factories before their own baby could be fed. Despite the efforts to steal and scrounge coal, the barracks, once the snows came in November and temperatures fell to below 30 degrees, were arctic. Since the mothers knew that if they put down one of their precious supplies of nappies, it would be stolen immediately, they dried them by carrying them around next to their skin. Only the most soiled were ever changed. Rats were constantly seen in the barracks.

One after another the babies died. Some lived a few hours, a few days, even a month. Geneviève de Gaulle, who had started her medical studies before joining the Resistance, was put to work in Block 11, and was able to describe to Marie-Claude and the French
Nacht und Nebel
women how she had to undress the babies who died, wrap them in rags, then carry them down to the morgue to join the piles of dead and naked women lying there. ‘It is terrible,’ she wrote in notes kept at the time and hidden, ‘these little soft white bodies, I hate to touch them… Every day, the places of the dead are taken by new deaths… I have the feeling that I am descending, day after day, down a staircase that never seems to end.’ In her evidence to a war crimes tribunal after the war, she estimated the number of babies born in Ravensbrück at somewhere between 500 and 550. Almost none survived.

There were now some 45,000 women in Ravensbrück and as the confused, violent, filthy camp kept filling, its barracks so crammed that there was nowhere for anyone to sleep, its basins and latrines blocked and overflowing, so the SS guards withdrew further and further into their own quarters, effectively leaving power in the hands of the
kapos
. There were constant air bombardments. Some women were so weak that they could not lift the watery bowls of soup to their mouths. Others kept fighting—for food, for space, for warm clothes. The camp seethed with rumours. The thirty-nine remaining French friends kept up a constant check on each others’ whereabouts.

Towards the end of January 1945, the
Jugendlager
—a youth camp built in 1941 for juvenile offenders two kilometres from Ravensbrück, part of the programme of cleansing Germany of ‘degenerates’ —was emptied and made ready for new occupants. To it were sent the sick and the elderly from Ravensbrück, lured by the promise of no roll calls and better conditions. Adelaïde was ordered to draw up lists of women who might benefit from the change, which she conscientiously did until she discovered where they were going. After this, she told her patients to sit up straight, tidy their hair, appear as youthful and strong as they could, and to turn down all blandishments to move.

At first, those who volunteered to make the move were delighted with their new surroundings in a clearing of pine trees, agreeable after the scorched appearance of Ravensbrück, where no blade of grass grew. But soon they found themselves in another kind of hell. There were no blankets in the
Jugendlager
, no mattresses and it was snowing hard. Put on half-rations, the 3,672 women taken there over the next few weeks were left standing outside for five or six hours every day. Aimée Doridat, the woman whose leg had been amputated in Auschwitz after she fell from a ladder and her fracture became gangrenous, was caught and sent to the
Jugendlager
. Her friends were all despairing of her return when a compassionate
kapo
unexpectedly brought her back to Ravensbrück. To wander about on one leg was to invite death and the others joined forces to hide her.

When Suhren complained that the women in the
Jugendlager
were still not dying fast enough, their warm clothes were taken away as well as their shoes, and they stood barefoot, in cotton dresses, in the snow. Passing nearby one day, Marie-Claude saw what she took to be an enormous pile of steaming manure; it was a few minutes before she realised that it came from the women inside the
Jugendlager
, for whom the 50-metre walk to the latrines across the slime had become too much. Every morning, lorries arrived to collect the naked bodies of the fifty or so who had died in the night. What was so extraordinary was that more did not die.

To speed up the rate of deaths still further, a small gas chamber was opened in a converted storeroom near the crematorium. A systematic programme of extermination began. Dr Winkelmann, helped by Greta Bösel, a woman much feared for her sudden, brutal attacks, did the rounds of the various infirmaries every day, going through the motions of inspecting temperature charts and medical records, the patients ordered to hold up their dresses to show the state of their feet and ankles. By some names, a mark was made. Later, lorries arrived and the designated women, those with TB or suppurating sores, or who seemed to have lost their wits, were herded out in their nightshirts and roughly loaded on to the back.

The women left behind watched and listened in silence. The journey took about six minutes. They could hear the sound of the motors being switched off by the gas chamber. Then the empty lorries returned. Next morning, at roll call, the wind brought waves of gluey, thick smoke. All the women learnt to dread this sinister shuttle of lorries. In the camp offices, the files of the women who had been removed were marked ‘departure for convalescence’, with the destination given as the nursing home of Mittweida, a euphemism quickly known to all. Every day, the list of the gassed grew longer. As a further absurdity, Marie-Elisa found herself as chemist analysing the urine of sick prisoners, as if they might be treated, when in fact all were destined to be destroyed.

The Allies were advancing and the SS, suddenly faced with not knowing what to do with so many ravaged human skeletons, were becoming increasingly nervous. They killed even more, even faster. In Block 10, an SS nurse called Schwester Maria offered powders to women who could not sleep and those who took them seldom woke up. A second gas chamber, referred to by the SS as the ‘new laundry’, was being built, but meanwhile some of the sick women were taken behind the crematorium and shot in the back of the head. Suhren, it was said, attended executions. Pflaum, known to the women as the ‘rat catcher’ or the ‘cattle merchant’, was tireless in his round-ups, hurling himself in what looked like rugger tackles at the legs of frantic women trying to escape. Pflaum, too, took his turn making selections in the
Jugendlager
. But it was the SS nurse Elisabeth Marschall who personally supervised the emptying of the barracks. The women and children were sent to Belsen. The thirty-two remaining babies were gassed at Ravensbrück.

Towards the end of January 1945, the first of some seven thousand women arrived from Auschwitz, which they had left shortly before the liberating Red Army had arrived. Many of them were in a state of complete collapse, having walked most of the way through snow and ice, the stronger carrying the weaker between them, incessantly hounded by SS guards with whips and snapped at by their dogs. Hundreds of these walking cadavers died along the way and their bodies were left lining the roads. The last convoy, with three thousand women on board, spent twenty-four hours parked in the open before being allowed into the camp.

Marie-Jeanne Bauer was left behind. She had endured the lonely autumn in Birkenau, missing her companions. When the Red Army arrived she was looked after by Soviet doctors and nurses. But there was more horror to come. One evening a soldier entered the kitchens where she was working, having just learnt that his entire family had been killed by the Germans. He was drunk. Taking out his pistol and mistaking Marie-Jeanne for a German, he shot her. The bullet passed close to her aorta and emerged under the shoulder blade. She survived, and managed to prevent the soldier from being executed. Though it would be many months before she was able to set off for France, one of the French friends, at least, had survived to tell their story.

What was now clear to Charlotte, Marie-Claude, Adelaïde and the others still in Ravensbrück was that a race was on, with the Germans bent on destroying all possible evidence of the atrocities, and the prisoners determined to survive until the liberation which they sensed could not be far away. In this last battle for survival, renewed efforts were made to protect and save each other. Never had the French women felt greater resolve not to die, but to defeat their jailers: it gave them a last burst of strength, a shared purpose. The ethnographer, Germaine Tillon, could do nothing for her mother, Emilie, who one day was taken off to the
Jugendlager
and not seen again. But when 20-year-old Hélène Bolleau broke her leg, slipping on the ice by the kitchens under the weight of a cauldron of soup, the group closed in to help her.