Life in Secrets: Vera Atkins & the Missing Agents of WWII (20 page)

Of SOE agents not yet traced, the strongest hope lay with those in camps taken or about to be taken by the Russians in their continuing westward advance. It was now three months since the fortress prison of Ravitsch, on the German-Polish border, had been liberated, and not a word had been heard of the twenty-five agents there. When the Russians took the camps, there was no system for prisoner repatriation, and evidence now suggested that any prisoners found there were often left to make their way to freedom as best they could. Prisoners still appeared to be heading east towards Odessa rather than west, where they feared they might run into German lines. By the end of April the British military mission in Odessa had reported many POWs turning up. Remarkably, information had also somehow reached the offices of solicitors acting for an agent named John Hamilton, one of the SOE Ravitsch prisoners, saying he was safe in hospital in Odessa. Such news naturally inspired optimism in Baker Street. Vera was trying to check the report on Hamilton and wrote: “I am hopeful that all those whom we believe to have been overrun by the Russians in January 1945 in the Fortress of Ravitsch may be somewhere in Russia.” Reports of the bravery of SOE agents as they went to their deaths were also giving cause for pride. One uncorroborated story alleged that the agent Guy Bieler had so impressed his captors at Flossen-burg concentration camp that he received an SS guard of honour as he was marched to execution.

But nothing caused greater optimism than the unexpected news of Francis Suttill that was brought from the camps by a returnee called Wing Commander Harry Day. He was no ordinary returnee. “Wings” Day was one of the masterminds of the great escape from Stalag Luft III in March 1944. On recapture he had been sent to Sachsenhausen concentration camp, from where he had also escaped in September 1944, only to be returned to Sachsenhausen's Xellenbau, or prison block. It was there, in late January or early February 1945, that he saw Suttill and another SOE man, a racing driver named Charles Grover-Williams. “They were both well. They were in solitary confinement but able to communicate
with others, as usual. They were receiving reasonable basic rations but not parcels.” Vera now immediately wrote to Margaret Suttill: “I am pursuing this clue and will certainly keep you informed if it should give results. In any case it is good news that at that time he was well.”

If Suttill and Grover-Williams had survived until the liberation, they too might also be making their way towards Odessa. So encouraged was Buckmaster by this prospect that he offered to go to the Black Sea port at once himself to repatriate survivors. Showing a sudden active interest in the missing, he wrote that an SOE presence in Odessa was “the only likely way of seeing our people again in the reasonably near future (if at all).” Buckmaster, now backing Vera's demand, also insisted that names of the F Section missing—to date totalling 118—should be circulated to every relevant authority in Russia.

There was still resistance to circulating names of women, because, said senior SOE staff, “the including of such names would defeat the desire for normality for the rest of the list.”

Buckmaster, however, made sure that the names of the women were now included. He told officials he would rather rescue an agent “even though that agent were blown to the Russians than to leave him to die or rot in a Russian prison.”

And Vera had another good reason for hope. By the end of April none of the missing women had been found in the western camps liberated by the Americans and British, apart from Yvonne Rudellat, last seen at Belsen. For Vera no news of the other women was good news. There was strong evidence that they too had also been taken east, probably to the concentration camp of Ravensbrück, which would be reached by the Russians any day. In the confusion that was bound to accompany the Russians' arrival, these women might also start the tramp east. Or they might be released in the prisoner exchanges that were suddenly happening. Exchanges administered by the Red Cross were due to start at Ravensbrück in the last days of April, ahead of the Russian liberation.

Vera could not conceal her optimism from Mrs. Rowden, writing on May 1 to Diana's mother: “I am sorry that we are still without news of your daughter. I can tell you however quite definitely that she has not been in any of the camps so far overrun. We have reason to believe that
she may be in a camp which is about to be overrun by the Russians and therefore we are hoping for news shortly.”

Vera very soon had cause to believe her optimism justified. On May 3 a telegram came in from the British mission at Malmö saying a young British woman had turned up with a Swedish Red Cross convoy bringing prisoners out of Ravensbrück. Vera recognised the description, and plans were made to fly the woman to Scotland so that she could catch the overnight train to London. Vera arranged to meet her.

7.
Euston Station

E
uston Station was almost deserted. The clock said eight, and the night train from Glasgow was pulling in. Doors swung open, and
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figures stepped down hauling baggage, then dispersed. A single female figure was left on the platform; she appeared to be waiting for somebody.

The woman was carrying just a brown paper bag. She wore a thick woollen coat that hung loosely from her shoulders and that looked far too heavy for the time of year. She looked uncomfortable and nervous. Two weeks earlier Yvonne Baseden had been in Ravensbrück concentration camp.

Yvonne was one of about fifty women who were released to the Swedish Red Cross on the eve of the camp's liberation in April 1945. The women were driven in coaches across the ruins of Germany to the Danish border and then on to Sweden. On the docks at Malmö, the women, many fainting with weakness, were herded into steam-filled tents for cleaning and delousing. Then they were housed in hospitals or tents; Yvonne's first nights of freedom were spent on a mattress on the floor of Malmö's Museum of Prehistory, sleeping under the skeletons of dinosaurs. She was then flown to Scotland and put on the train to Euston. She had been told there would be somebody to meet her. But it was now eight-fifteen a.m. and nobody was here.

“I saw a telephone, and I decided to call the Air Ministry,” Yvonne told me. “I had a number on a piece of paper, but it was Sunday morning and I wasn't expecting anyone to be there. And I didn't know what to say, you see, so I said: ‘I'm sorry, but I am a WAAF officer and I have just come from Germany and I am at Euston and I don't know what to do.' A voice—I suppose it must have been a duty officer—said: ‘Don't move. Hold on a moment.' Then a few moments later the voice said: ‘Miss Atkins is on her way.'

“I waited on the platform, and then after a while Vera suddenly appeared. I think she was wearing a suit and looked just the same. She probably signalled to me, and I walked over to join her. I was quite weak. There was no emotion. I was quite confused, you see, and just pleased to see a face I knew.”

“What did she say?”

“Oh, very little at first. Just pleasantries. I think she may have asked about the journey and apologised for keeping me waiting. She was quite distant—cold almost, at first. Suspicious even. On reflection I realised what it was. You see, she had reason to be quite suspicious of me.”

“Why?”

“Well, I think she must have thought—you know—why had I been released? What had I done to be released and not the others? I think that must have been why she was a little wary of me.

“Then she took me to a waiting car. When I asked where we were going, she said, ‘I am taking you home to your father.' You see, my father lived quite close by, in Brockwell Park, and he had been told, of course, that I was coming back.

“Then, as soon as we were in the car, I remember the first thing she said to me was: ‘What do you know of any others?'

“Who did she mean?”

“Well, I thought she must mean the others who were in Ravensbrück with me—Violette Szabo, Lilian Rolfe, and Denise Bloch. So I told her the whole story: how I saw them first at Saarbrücken on the way to
Germany. I was taken in a convoy from Dijon, and we stopped first at Saarbrücken, which was like a big base—a kind of holding camp for all the prisoners going east, with lots of sheds. And I was taken into one of these sheds, and there they were in this shed.”

“What was it like?”

“I am trying to visualise that hut, which was quite dark and full of women. Packed with beds. I looked round and began to see these faces that I knew, and I thought, My God, the whole of Baker Street is here! I expected to see more.”

“How did they seem?”

“They were in quite a good state at that time—particularly Violette. They were sitting on beds. But there were a lot of people around, and we could not speak easily. And they were very wary of me—suspicious really—because they would have thought, What is she doing here arriving on another convoy? And you see, they would not have known the circumstances of my arrest, so they would have been wary of me. And I don't even know if we spoke English. I doubt it because I didn't want people to know I was English. You see, as far as the Germans knew, I was just a French woman with the resistance. That is how I survived. They never knew I was a British agent, but the other girls had been through some sort of process. They had already been put in a different category. They went on in a different transport to Ravensbrück from me. They left before I left, and thank goodness for me, I did not go with them.”

“What did you think was going to happen?”

“We had no idea. I had just come from the prison in Dijon in solitary confinement. The others had come from Paris. They seemed quite confident, particularly Violette. Lilian and Denise seemed more subdued, but I remember Violette was sitting quite casually, and she had obviously made an effort to get whatever clothes she was wearing clean. She had taken her shirt off and had washed it. She had lost none of her vivacity— or else she had been in prison longer than the others and had got used to the atmosphere.

“But later it occurred to me they had been constrained in some way as a group, and I have an idea they had chains on their feet. I sensed it afterwards.

“Then they all left for Ravensbrück, and I went on there a few days later. But I didn't see them again, so I could not tell Vera much, except that I heard they had been sent out on a work commando to a factory. They were gone for many weeks. I told Vera that I had heard one day they had been brought back from the factory to Ravensbrück. I didn't see them when they came back. All I had heard was that they had then been taken off again, and we didn't see them anymore. I heard that their clothes had been suddenly handed back to one of the block guards, but nobody knew for sure what had happened to them. I think Vera had hoped I would be able to tell her more.”

“Did Vera ask you about the camp, about what it was like?” “Oh, no,” said Yvonne. “We reached my father's house, and then she left me.”

Nobody—not even Vera until recently—had suspected there was such a thing as a concentration camp for women. Despite the concerns that SOE women would not be covered by the rules of war, it had been tacitly understood that women prisoners—simply because they were women— would receive better treatment than men. Now Vera was learning fast about Himmler's purpose-built women's concentration camp. By the time Yvonne arrived back in Britain, Vera had already studied the reports from Paris of scores of other women detainees at Ravensbrück, mostly French, who had been released to other Red Cross convoys.