The Girl in the Blue Beret (33 page)

“What happened next is unspeakable. I have gone over and over it my mind, and I never comprehend it. There were two things I held closely for the duration: the image of Monique and her doll, and the presence of my mother, holding me in the same way Monique held her doll.

“I clung to my mother like a baby, and she held me in her strong arms and sang lullabies.”

Bernard lifted his head toward her, but Annette went steadily on.

“Paris was liberated on August 25, although the war did not end for many months yet. I have seen the films. Oh! Such scenes! When the Allied tanks roared into Paris—led by Frenchmen!—there was jubilation, and de Gaulle strode down the Champs-Elysées like a man on stilts, wearing the military hat that always reminds me of a
gâteau
box. ‘La Marseillaise’ was sung everywhere. There was so much joy. The church bells rang again. The champagne came out of hiding.”

Annette folded her hands across her breasts and continued in a soft monotone.

“However, we were not there. Ten days before, the Germans—who were in retreat from Paris—sent off the last convoy to Germany. My mother and I were in one of those cattle cars, creeping out of Paris toward Germany as the sun was rising.”

46.

I
T WAS DARK. ANNETTE WENT TO THE KITCHEN, TAKING WITH HER
the plate of toast and the pâté. Bernard followed her, and in a little while she returned. She brought candles but did not light them. Marshall tried to speak. He did not know if, in telling her story, she was offering him a gift or transferring a burden. His ears and eyes and heart were not sharp enough to catch fully all that Annette was telling him. He could not grasp the depths of her story. He felt that his mind was cemented over. She replenished the wine, and the wine made him feel easier with her, drawn to her like someone reaching across an abyss.

When she touched the inside of her forearm, he tried to remember if she had worn long sleeves throughout their visits. It was ironic, he thought, that the Nazis had kept such meticulous records, branding their victims while knowing the numbers would disappear, flecks of ash floating through the air.

He took her hand and—boldly or tenderly, he did not know which—pushed her sleeve up, nearly to the elbow.

“No, there was not a number,” she said. “We wore a cloth patch with our numbers, on our clothing.”

Gently, he kissed the spot where he thought the Nazi mark would have been, and she enfolded his head with her arms.

She held him close to her breast, an endless embrace. There was no time, just this breathless communion. The courtyard was silent.

Eventually, slowly, he raised his head.

“And that was the price you paid for helping us—for helping me.” Marshall was near tears. “I can’t bear it.”

“It was the same—you aided us and we aided you,” she said, touching his face gently. “It is no matter. Whatever I did for you, I also did for myself, for my family, for France. We were crushed, Marshall. Defeated. You cannot know the shame. Whatever any of us did, we did for ourselves—so that we could have still a little self-respect. Just a little.”

“I didn’t know that any of this happened to you,” he said.

“I didn’t want you to know. I have told very few.”

“I was safe back home, and you were still going through the war.”

She rose and gathered the napkins and wine. “I must check the dinner,” she said. “And then I want to tell you the rest.”

He didn’t know if he had had too much wine or too little. Food would not have occurred to him. He opened the kitchen door for her, bringing his glass.

“Please stay here tonight,” she said with a smile. “There is a room upstairs that can be yours. It will be like the old times. You will be in hiding, and I will take care of you.”

47.

T
HEY MOVED INSIDE, WITH BERNARD, TO HER SITTING ROOM
. Marshall noticed that the dog seemed to trust him now, enough to leave Annette’s side and go to his bed in the corner. A table was set in the adjoining dining room, and Marshall could smell food cooking. She said they would eat soon.

They sat on a divan, side by side, and she resumed her telling. It seemed that she was telling her past to him as she had told it to herself for years. It came even more easily as they became more comfortable together. Intermittently, her expressive hands touched him, making contact, drawing him in.

“I don’t speak of it,” she reminded him. “But now I tell you. I want to tell you. I trust you, and you are part of my past. A good part.

“I know you are well aware of the Jews, their terrible fate under the Nazis. There were also thousands of
résistants
like us sent to Germany during the war. We were sixty women in a train carriage that had room for forty. The train journey was five days, with little food or water or other necessities—space, air.… On the way, through the small vents on the wooden sides of the car, we glimpsed the bombing damage to Germany.

“We expected to go to a labor camp. We also expected that the war would end soon. Maman reassured me. She said, ‘We’re strong. We can work. It won’t last. The war is almost over.’ Her reassurances gave me strength, and my acquiescence and obedience gave her strength.

“We still had not heard what had happened with my father and Robert and the priest and the two
aviateurs
. Fear for our men had haunted me all the while we were at Fresnes. If the
aviateurs
were lucky, they would go to a stalag as prisoners of war. But I had a profound apprehension about the others. I did not know what might happen. My mother insisted they would not be shot, but I had seen the posters on the street stating clearly that anyone caught helping
aviateur
evaders would be punished; the men would be shot, the women would go to prison. At Saint-Mandé we had lived under this threat, and we took the risk willingly. But now the reality of our situation was very bitter.”

Annette fell silent for a moment. Then with a shake of her head, she said, “Others suffered so much worse than we.”

She clasped her hands together, as if to squeeze something out of her memory. “We arrived at Ravensbrück, a camp for women north of Berlin. Ravensbrück was in a beautiful part of Germany. There was a lake and beautiful trees. But then the sight of the camp struck us with terror. We could not comprehend what this place was. There was a high wall all around it, with electric barbed wire strung along the top. Inside were many long rows of rough wooden buildings—like warehouses, with bars on the windows. They were overflowing with thousands of women—women starving, despairing, fighting for survival. It was shocking and so bewildering that we thought we must have lost our sanity.

“The prisoners worked in the Siemens factory, which made armaments. And there were many workshops. We were put to work first filling in a swamp with sand, then hauling wagons of manure to a field. The barracks was terribly overcrowded, and there was not enough food. We were slaves. Women were dying. And more kept arriving.

“I didn’t expect Ravensbrück. The world didn’t know of such places. We didn’t know.

“We were in the night and the fog—
la nuit et le brouillard
. We were meant to disappear.” She stopped. “The
résistants
were supposed to vanish.”

She rubbed the material of her sleeve.

“There were no uniforms,” she went on. “We had to sew a cross on the front and back of our clothing, to identify us as prisoners, and we had to sew our numbers on our clothing. I still have my number. I often thought about being a number, whether a person can be reduced to a number—at once the most specific and the most abstract of designations.”

She clasped his knee and continued, “I wasn’t tortured. I was beaten, but … oh, that’s no matter. So many women suffered more.

“The women SS guards, the
Aufseherinnen
, were monsters. They were brutal. Well, I won’t go into that. Those women—they had a cruel sense of humor. They laughed at us, knowing how that would humiliate us. We were in Block 22, with the French, and the other blocks were Poles, Slavs, and other Europeans. Gypsies. Sometimes our own block leaders, chosen from among us and given privileges, were more difficult to deal with than the SS women themselves. To receive their petty rewards, they closed their hearts to us, their compatriots. But the SS women …”

Annette sighed heavily.

“There were so many of us in our block that we had to form alliances to allocate resources, to protect each other. My mother and I had formed a close attachment to the three Frenchwomen with us at Fresnes, and we were all of a sympathy as women. We slept so close together that we were each other’s blankets and pillows. There was so little food that to save your life you had to steal; to save your humanity you had to share. I must emphasize that although we were in an
enfer
, there was a goodness in the women who helped each other. This goodness was our survival.

“Each day Maman said we were going to remain brave.

“Then a group of the most able-bodied of us were transferred to Torgau to make ammunition, but many of us refused. The Geneva convention forbade us to make ammunition. So in retaliation we were sent to another work
Kommando
in Koenigsberg. Torgau and Koenigsberg were satellites of Ravensbrück. Ravensbrück was Heinrich Himmler’s baby! His pet project, you might say. He would sell the women’s services to factories all over Germany.”

Once again Annette stopped speaking. She seemed to summon up courage before continuing. “This is difficult,” she said.

“Do you want to wait?”

“No. Please listen.”

Marshall visualized the young girl Annette at his hiding place in Paris. He remembered seeing her as she bent her head to flip her hair forward, positioned a hair ribbon, then lifted her head and tied the ribbon on top. She shook her hair so that it fell into place, her head beribboned like a package. That memory made him ache.

“We were sent to Koenigsberg-sur-Oder, across the border in Occupied Poland, where we leveled an airstrip for the Luftwaffe. The hangars were disguised so the Allies wouldn’t see them from the air. We worked on a plateau, in fierce wind and snow. All I had to wear was a thin cotton dress, no gloves or coat or hat, and it was the coldest winter I had ever known. Oh, but perhaps you think I’m exaggerating. It is no matter. As you want. After the first snow they gave us coats. Some were nice and some were ragged. You can comprehend how they collected such garments. Each morning I stuffed my clothing with the straw from my mattress.

“The
appel
began each morning outside the barracks at four and then again after work. They had to make sure no one had escaped, and they would call the roll again and again. But there was no guard tower there, for it was too cold to escape. We had to stand still in the cold for the
appel
. We tried to stand as closely together as possible. During the
appel
we had to be sure to stand straight. If you weren’t strong enough to work, you might be shot. We don’t know why we weren’t shot. There were five hundred women, half of whom were French. At Ravensbrück where there were so many women, the
appel
went on for hours. The
appel
was smaller, so we didn’t have to stand for so long, but sometimes they made us stand naked, and they turned the water hose on us. It was the winter. They made us stand there while the water froze on our bodies.”

“My God, Annette. How did you survive?” Marshall blurted.

She didn’t answer that. “The work
Kommando
—the airstrip,” she said. “We cut out large blocks of frozen sod and lifted it into wagons that ran on rails. The rails were short, and from time to time we had to move them with our hands and then lift the wagons to fit onto the rails. We were moving the sod from one place to another. We were cows!

“We tried to work crowded together, for warmth. We took turns shielding each other from the wind. We hugged and huddled. As our hands began to freeze, we thrust them into each other’s clothing to thaw. We fashioned a system for keeping our blood warm. We blew warm breath on each other and rubbed each other. If someone began to whimper or fall behind, we quickly surrounded her and circulated our meager warmth around her. Our model was the herd animal, the clustering that keeps deer and cattle alive in the winter.

“A truck arrived with soup at midday, and we scrambled to fill our bowls. Sometimes it was hot, but unless you managed to be first in line, the soup quickly became cold. It was watery, just a few scraps of potato or rutabaga. At night there was a piece of bread and sometimes a bit of ersatz cheese. In the morning we had something they called coffee. It wasn’t coffee. It was watery and tasteless. We suspected it was soaking water from old leather.

“The women were all thin and hungry. In our miserable section of the barracks there was a little fire where we could cook what food we could find—that is, if we could find wood or coal. Sometimes we burned our own bed slats. One day Jacqueline smuggled to us a goose egg one of the kitchen workers had let her have. We hunched over the little stove, and we boiled it so we wouldn’t spill any. But when we cracked and peeled it, we found a little goose inside, formed perfectly, boiled alive. For only a second we retched in horror, but then we tore at the food, sharing it equally among the five of us. It was a delicacy!

“The water was usually frozen, so we had little for cooking. We couldn’t wash ourselves. As each day went by, we weakened. We were growing too weak to be useful as labor. We saw so many people die. In their beds during the night, or in the snow on the plateau. My mother fell ill and was allowed to stay in the infirmary for two nights, and two of our friends shared their food with her. She was returned to the plateau during a heavy snowstorm. We found that the snow acted as insulation. We pushed it up to make a little fort that shielded us from the wind.

“After several weeks of this
enfer
, the commandant asked for volunteers to work in the woods. We could see the forest in the distance. It would be farther to walk, and the work would be more difficult, but the trees would shield us from the wind. It was five kilometers in the direction of Gdánsk. My mother and I and some of our friends trudged to the forest, and our work there was to dig out stumps. The Germans had forced some Russian prisoners of war to cut down trees to make a road through the forest. We dug the stumps out. We had the wagons and the rails, and we had to dig trenches for the rails, cutting through the roots. The ground was frozen, and we hacked and hacked. We had only shovels and axes.”