A Train in Winter (43 page)

Going to look for mattresses in the abandoned villas of the SS guards outside the camp gates, Marie-Claude discovered one of the men prisoners, asleep under an enormous pink silk eiderdown. She observed with some pleasure that the SS villas had been ransacked. She experienced an overwhelming longing to go home. Looking at the sky and the lake, she felt ‘drunk on freedom. I think,’ she wrote, ‘that when I first go home I will want to spend some time alone in the mountains.’

Another day, passing Suhren’s abandoned villa with a friend, she went in and saw a piano. Her companion sat down to play. Marie-Claude felt rising in her ‘a cloud of long suppressed desire’, a wave of pleasure in hearing something that she had for so long been deprived of. They finished by playing old French songs and the inevitable Marseillaise. That night she could not sleep for an intense feeling of ‘fullness’.

By 3 May, when Adelaïde and Marie-Claude went round the camp with a doctor, a photographer and a Russian officer, to document what Ravensbrück had been, the place was much changed. The water and electricity were back on, and the Russians had arranged for thirty cows and a hundred chickens to be brought in, along with some horses. There was now milk for breakfast, butter to have with bread, meat and onions for lunch. Some French soldiers had visited the camp, bringing news from France, much of it depressing. A French general called Allard arrived one day, seeking to find out what had happened to his wife, who had been deported to Ravensbrück early in the war. Marie-Claude had to tell him that she had been gassed. Allard told her that the liberation committee in Paris had been a ‘scandal’, and that the left and the right were arguing fiercely. What she minded most, Marie-Claude wrote in her diary, was the fact that so many of the best men were dead, having died for their country, while so many of the worst, the collaborators, were alive and in positions of power. With the old values gone, and no new ones in place, how could a moral crisis be avoided? There were some days when she dreaded the thought of the political battles to come.

Simone Loche was clearly fading and Adelaïde had almost abandoned all hope of saving her when a Russian doctor, saying that there was one chance in a hundred that it would work, proposed operating on her. Since there were no general anaesthetics available, he gave her a local, and then operated, after which Marie-Claude gave blood for a transfusion. Awake, but not in pain, Simone thought that she would die, but felt pleased that she had at least lived to see liberation. After the operation, her temperature stayed high. Marie-Claude felt wretched. ‘It’s terrible to watch over someone so dear to you, and see them diminish day by day.’ But Simone rallied. The day came when she was evacuated by the Red Cross to Berlin, and from there flown to Paris, where she would spend many months in a hospital at Créteil.

Marie-Claude and Adelaïde stayed at Ravensbrück until mid-June, watching their patients grow stronger and more recognisable as human beings as their hair grew back and their bodies filled out. Turning down General Allard’s invitation to fly back to Paris with him, Marie-Claude felt overwhelmed with a longing for it all to be over, but determined to stay long enough to help the Russian Commission document what had taken place at Ravensbrück. Writing to the Communist leader, Maurice Thorez and telling him what had befallen the 113 Communist women on the
Convoi
, she apologised for her stilted style, saying that it was the first proper letter that she had written in French for almost three years.

Adelaïde had moved into a former SS barracks with a piano, and on 17 May Marie-Claude spent her first night outside the camp perimeter, in a room overlooking the lake, with a real bed, sheets and a pillow. She tried to dwell as little as possible on what might await her at home, for she still had no news of her family or of Pierre Villon, her companion. When the last of the Red Cross lorries came to collect the remaining sick women, and there were some who would clearly die before they reached home, she felt how sad it was to die now, having survived so much.

At last, their patients gone, she and Adelaïde set off for home. ‘This passage of darkness to light,’ Adelaïde wrote, ‘cannot be expressed in words.’ Later she would write that when ‘life took on its colours and was so often disappointing, it was good to remember the infinite privilege of having experienced such a moment of joy’.

Forty-nine of the 230 French women, thirty-four of them communists, who had left Paris twenty-nine months earlier on the
Convoi des 31000
, had lived to see the end of the war. A hundred and eighty-one of their friends and companions had died, of typhus, brutality, starvation, gassing; some had been beaten to death, others had simply given up. Not one who had been over the age of 44, and very few of the youngest, were still alive. Danielle, Maï, Aminthe and Yvette Guillon, Raymonde Sergent, Madeleine Zani and Viva Nenni were all dead, and there were dozens of young children who would now learn that they were orphans, both their mothers and their fathers murdered by the Nazis. It was through the women reaching France again that many families would finally know that their mothers, daughters and wives were not coming home.

Some of the survivors of the
Convoi
reached France on their own, after wandering journeys across countries chaotic with refugees and returning prisoners of war. Others came home in small groups. Ten of the friends found themselves together in Sweden. Mado’s sister, who worked for a Swedish doctor, arranged for them to stay with a senator in a house in the country, where they were slowly nursed back to health. Lulu and her sister Carmen were there—the only two sisters to have survived—and Cécile, Betty, Hélène Bolleau and Simone Sampaix. Simone, the plump young girl who had smiled so warmly out of the photograph taken in Romainville, weighed just 23 kilos. They were fed cream, fish, cheese and fresh vegetables, though it took a while for their mouths and teeth not to ache from the unaccustomed food, and at first they ate only a teaspoon at a time. ‘It was,’ wrote Hélène, ‘one good thing after another.’ From time to time they were asked to answer questions about Ravensbrück put to them by reporters or the Swedish government. ‘We are in a little paradise,’ Betty wrote to her parents. ‘I need this after such terrible hardship.’ She complained of amnesia and anxiety, but her arm, which doctors feared she might lose the use of as a result of the infected abscess, was slowly getting better.

Later, they were put on a plane to Paris. Charlotte could feel only loss and uncertainty. She had an overpowering sensation that from now on, for the rest of her life, she would be alone, and that no one, ever, would take the place of her lost companions. ‘As time gathered speed,’ she wrote later, ‘they became diaphanous, more and more translucent, losing their colours and their forms… Only their voices remained, but even they began to fade as Paris grew closer… When we arrived, I could no longer recognise them. Was I alive to have an afterwards, to know what afterwards meant?’

CHAPTER FIFTEEN

Slipping into the shadows

It was not long after Charlotte Delbo came home to Paris that she began to write about the German camps. Much of it was in verse. ‘I’ve come back from another world,’ she wrote,

to this world

I had not left

and I know not

which one is real…

As far as I am concerned

I’m still there

dying there

a little more each day

dying over again

the death of those who died…

I have returned

from a world beyond knowledge

and now must unlearn

for otherwise I clearly see

I can no longer live.

Her words could have been written by any one of the forty-nine survivors of the
Convoi des 31000
, for each shared the same sense of alienation, loss and loneliness. In their two years and three months in the German camps they had been too cold, too frightened, too ill, too hungry, too dirty and too sad. They had witnessed both the worst and the best that life had to offer, cruelty, sadism, brutality, betrayal, thievery, but also generosity and selflessness. Their reserves of strength and character had been pushed to the very far limits of endurance and every notion of humanity had been challenged.

An ambivalence marked them all. They no longer felt themselves to be the same people and, looking back at the young women they had once been, full of hope and confidence and excitement, they marvelled at how innocent and trusting they had been. There was no innocence left, in any of them; and they would not find it again.

Having lived so intensely together, depending on each other to stay alive, they were now forced apart: by geography, by families, by a world whose rules and ways they had forgotten and which, physically weak, quickly exhausted, prematurely aged, they had to learn again. When, later, they met, they admitted to one another that the return to France in the early summer of 1945 had proved as hard and as unhappy as anything they had known. Return, they said, was a time of ‘shadowy places, silences and things not said’.

The art deco Hotel Lutétia on the boulevard Raspail in Paris, home to the Abwehr for the four years of German occupation, had been turned into a reception centre for returning deportees. Because no one had a clear idea of the numbers involved, nor of the state of health of those coming back from the concentration camps, conditions in the former hotel were chaotic. There were doctors and Red Cross officials on hand, representatives from the government and journalists, and in the halls and lobbies had been posted photographs and lists of names of the missing. Arriving by plane or train in little groups, the friends found themselves surrounded by anxious families holding photographs of lost relatives, desperate for news of survivors, begging them to look at the pictures and see if they could recognise the faces. Madeleine Dissoubray, put into a room with four strangers, was constantly disturbed by knocks on the door, frantic parents outside searching for lost sons and daughters, women for their husbands, men for their wives.

Lulu arrived at the Lutétia a few days before her sister Carmen. She had been able to telephone her husband Georges, who had been wounded trying to escape from a prisoner of war camp and had been repatriated early. Lulu reached home in time for Paul’s fifth birthday. She took him some sweets; they were the first that he had ever eaten. She had left a baby, and returned to find a little boy who did not know her.

Gilberte Tamisé—putting off the moment when she would have to send a telegram to her father in Bordeaux, telling him that though she had survived, her younger sister Andrée was dead—found herself alone in the Lutétia. Some of her friends had already left to join their families, others had not yet been repatriated. That night she dreamt of freedom, but waking in an empty room, alone for the first time in nearly three years, her immediate thought was ‘Is this really freedom, this intolerable solitude, this room, this exhaustion?’ How was she going to answer the question ‘And Andrée? what did you do with Andrée?’ What if her father, too, were dead? And how would she explain to the Lapeyrade family that Berthe had died in the marshes at Birkenau, and that she, Charlotte, Viva, Lulu and Carmen had carried her body back to the camp for the evening roll call? How tell Charlotte Lescure’s young son that she had seen his mother beaten to death by a
kapo
? Overwhelmed by a sense of aloneness and bewilderment, aching for Lulu and Carmen and Charlotte, she went back to bed and slept. This time she dreamt of being back among her friends and felt ‘comforted, reassured, warmed’.

Finally driven from her room by hunger, Gilberte stood in the corridor watching, waiting, wondering where to go. She felt afraid, inadequate. Seeing her there, so uncertain and wary, a man approached and told her he had just come from Mauthausen. Coaxing her along, urging her to try to face up to going home, he steered her gently to the dining room, then to the telegram office, then to the desk where there were vouchers for travel. More than anything else, she felt like crying. He brought her food, helped her fill in the forms, wiped her face softly with his handkerchief. Later that evening, she travelled south to Bordeaux, with others who had returned from the camps. Her father was waiting for her on the platform. He looked stooped and tired. He did not ask her about Andrée: he knew already. At home, Gilberte found Andrée’s things in her room, just as she had left them. Everything felt to her sharp, threatening; she had a sensation of being wounded, as if covered in bruises.