Life in Secrets: Vera Atkins & the Missing Agents of WWII (40 page)

Did he know what happened to the clothes that could not be returned? He did not remember.

Back in Karlsruhe, Vera retraced much old ground, but she also collected several new statements. She spoke to the guards who booked in the prisoners, and she even memorised the shifts of night watchmen to find the guards who might have seen them leave. One guard thought he recalled
the women leaving in a green car “that looked like a hearse.” It was dawn, he remembered, because he had just removed the prison blackout curtains. Vera spoke to the female guard who exercised the girls in the courtyard and to those who supervised their showers. She learned every detail of the prison routine and the layout with each cell's precise location.

Vera also discovered that it was one of Theresia Becker's hallowed rules that men were never allowed into the women's wing of the prison; that only she and her deputy, Fräulein Hager, held the keys to the women's wing; and that nobody left unless accompanied by one of them.

So when Vera arrived to be guided around the women's section in Riefstahlstrasse by Becker herself, the prison seemed quite familiar. From the gatehouse she knew that straight ahead was the courtyard where the girls exercised singly, by walking up and down. She knew that if she looked up to the left she would see the cell windows, high, barred, and covered with metal mesh.

To reach the women's section, Becker led her up stone steps on the right of the gatehouse, then down a corridor and round three sides of the courtyard anticlockwise, passing line after line of male cells. The white gate leading into the women's section was just where she had been told it would be, by cell twenty-six, and there was the warder's office where Becker kept the prisoners' possessions. Vera looked in the empty lockers. She walked the corridor where Hedwig Müller had told her the girls lined up peeling potatoes. She saw the bathroom where, as Lisa Graf had told her, every three weeks the twelve women were escorted for showers. She inspected the cells, first entering cell seventeen, where Martine had played hairdresser, putting bright things in people's hair, while Yolande next door did darning, patching, and embroidery for Becker. And she saw where, during the bombing, Martine had stood in a corner holding her rosary, while Yolande, in the adjacent cell, cried. Lisa Graf had told her that sometime in July she had climbed up the sloping buttress to the window's edge and had seen Andrée Borrel in the courtyard below. An-drée had suddenly turned her face up towards Lisa's window and signalled “goodbye.”

The walls between the cells were of solid granite one foot thick, as Vera could now see. Yet through these walls the women had “chatted”
with their forks and spoons. The scratches where they had done this were still there on the whitewashed walls.

Vera had learned how the girls had forged deep friendships in Becker's prison. Sometimes, perhaps, they had even felt safe under Becker's lock and key. But for all her new enquiries on her second trip to Karlsruhe, Vera learned nothing more to confirm who left when. There-sia Becker had stubbornly stuck to the same story she had always told.

I asked Lisa Graf if the girls might have stayed safely in the jail until the end of the war had Becker not so rigorously observed the rules. “Maybe,” she said with a shrug. “Maybe not.” I had long been sure that Lisa must be dead. But I was sitting talking to her in Paris at a long table covered with Indian fabrics and pots stuffed with pencils, and papers everywhere. All around were artefacts—elephants and storks—and vases brimming with orchids.

“So who are you?” she exclaimed, staring at me wide-eyed. “What have you brought me here from my past?” Striking still at eighty-two, Lisa had shining green eyes. I showed her the letters she wrote to Vera in February and March 1946. “Yes, yes. That's me,” she said, and laughed.

Lisa had been nineteen when the war broke out. One day she saw a German walk up the drive at her home in Alsace, so she reached for a shotgun and tried to shoot him. Later, while in the resistance, she tried to rescue an imprisoned American spy but was caught and locked up in Karlsruhe.

“Yes, Martine was in a cell next to me for about a year. One day I went to empty my pot outside the door—you know, the pot for dirty water to wash and so on—and the door opened next door, and I was bending down and I looked around, and this woman was bending down, and she turned to me and she smiled, and I smiled and when I went back in my cell I thought, She's French. So I tapped in Morse: ‘You are French.' And she tapped back: ‘Yes.' ” Lisa had learned Morse as a girl scout.

“We couldn't talk, you see, as there were three guards standing by the door. I remember she had brown eyes and a nice smiling face, a little round with dark hair, big lips. She had a pleasant face. Not pretty.

“Then we began our conversations in Morse, which carried on for hours every night. So I used to tap the point of the fork for the short sound and scratch with the prongs for the long sounds. Our conversations took a long time, you understand, but we had a long time. She told me her name and about her family. She told me she was not married, and I told her I was not married. She was arrested with other people and denounced, like me, by a Frenchman.

“Then we talked of politics, the landings, that Germany had lost the war. We had such lovely conversations. We were both en secret [in solitary confinement] at that time.”

Lisa read on through her letters to Vera, nodding. “I have a great visual memory, you see—this is my métier,” said Lisa, who after the war had become a comedienne. “And I thought at the time when I saw these girls, They are not going to come back. And so, I thought, I will fix them all, now, in my mind.”

“How did you survive?” I asked.

“You know, I never knew. But one day they took me to see a Gestapo man. He was nice and gave me food. I didn't know why he was being nice, and then one day, when the door opened, I saw somebody come in the outer room who looked just like me. It was his daughter. She could have been my twin. So I knew why he was so kind.”

I asked Lisa what Theresia Becker was like. “Madame Becker?” she exclaimed, as if surprised to hear herself voice the name all these years later. “Madame Becker. We got on fine. I was not a whore or a murderer, so she liked me well enough. Enfin, she was severe! But she could be kind. And when you left, she saw you off, and you collected your belongings from her. I had a little valise and collected it when I left.

“One day she put in the prison an enormous bag of potatoes and told me to peel them. I said: ‘You think I am going to peel potatoes.^ ne suis pas condamnée, je suis prisonnière politique! I do not peel potatoes for the Germans!' And you know what?—she never asked me again. I said I would like to iron. They gave me an iron, so I ironed the clothes of the priests from the church. I could turn the iron over and reheat my soup.”

“How did you get to know the other girls?”

“Martine told me about them. We were all copines [pals], she said.

When they were in the courtyard below, I was at the window, and Madame Greiner, one of the guards, would come and tell me the name of each and everything they were wearing, and when they were leaving. I told Madame Greiner: ‘You know, Fräulein, Germany has lost the war and you must help me,' and she did!

“Then I caught glimpses of them sometimes. In the shower, perhaps. I had a few words with Odette in the shower, I remember. She told me some girls were leaving. I remember her face.

“If I think now, I do not see the faces of the others, you know.”

I asked Lisa if she had known somebody named Noor, or Nora, who might have used the alias Madeleine. “I saw her,” she said, and turned to look at me as if she were not certain.

“Are you quite sure?” I said.

“I think so. I saw her in the courtyard, didn't I? I didn't know her name. She was not called Nora. Yes, I saw her. At least I thought it was Nora—later when I saw the photograph that the British officer sent me.

“She was called Suzanne. She had black hair, brown eyes, and the skin a little dark. She could have been Jewish. She was a dancer.”

I told Lisa that Nora wasn't a dancer. “Well, perhaps I didn't see her after all,” she said.

Vera with her brothers,
Guy and Ralph.
[Courtesy of K. Rosenberg]

Vera (with plaits) at a wedding at Crasna, early 1920s.
[Atkins Papers]

Vera (with plaits) and friend at Crasna, early 1920s.
[Atkins Papers]