A Train in Winter (34 page)

When Caesar married Ruth Weimann, the women were ordered to make a duvet for the bridal pair, out of the feathers from the geese and ducks reared not far away for the SS. They took great pleasure in leaving in some of the sharper quills. For with the food and warmth had come a new taste for life. Women whose horizons had shrunk to an hourly preoccupation with survival found themselves once again wanting diversion. They began to barter, taught by the Polish women who had become skilled at negotiating for cabbages, potatoes and beans with the Russian prisoner gardeners. They discovered that extra bread, saved from their own rations, could be swapped for a lump of sugar, a packet of noodles, or even needles, thread and pens. To see their friends slowly come back to life, looking less haunted and skeletal, beginning to smile again, was a delight for all of them. When, one day, the SS came and confiscated everything from their barracks, the women gathered together and sang the Marseillaise, very softly, under their breaths. Next day they set about replacing everything they had lost.

On the pretext that the nearby Institute of Hygiene, where some of the French men were working, had more sophisticated equipment, and that they needed to centrifuge their latex samples, Marie-Elisa and Hélène hid tomatoes in their voluminous knickers and exchanged them for jam and even some blood, which they later made into blood sausage. It was very risky, for all such transactions were strictly forbidden, but it gave them a feeling that they were not entirely without power. It also inspired them to perform small acts of sabotage, selecting the weaker roots for propagation, mixing up the numbers of batches and treating the plants with chemicals to stunt their growth.

The women had become skilled at thieving. Charlotte Decock, who was sent to join the others in Raisko as cook for the SS, stole everything that she could lay her hands on—wine, flour, eggs, a jar of pickled pork—though getting rid of the jar afterwards proved almost impossible. All through the months at Birkenau, Charlotte Decock was one of the women who had remained most cheerful and optimistic; the others loved her and found her presence comforting.

In the evenings, sitting on their beds, the friends sewed and drew and even did embroidery, discussing how they might find ways of making borscht, and how delicious it would be if they could only get hold of some cream. They might have become bolder in their scavenging had Germaine Pican not been caught trying to smuggle onions back to their friends in Birkenau, and sent back there herself as punishment. Though he encouraged the women to do what they could to improve their surroundings and even once found sunglasses for those working in the fields, Caesar did not intervene over punishments. Nor did he save a young girl called Lily, who had a fiancé among the gardeners and who was shot when a note of his was intercepted. ‘We are like plants full of life and sap, like plants wanting to grow and live,’ the boy had written, ‘and I cannot help thinking that these plants are not meant to live.’

Even at Raisko, however, the presence of the SS was constant and menacing. As the women’s hair grew and was not immediately shaved off again, Marie-Elisa’s hair grew back very curly. One of the SS guards eyed her suspiciously, saying that she looked to him very Jewish. No one gave her away.

One of their tormentors was Irma Grese, a farmer’s daughter who had joined the SS at the age of 18 and arrived at Auschwitz at 19. Grese walked around the camp with a whip in her hand, smelling strongly of expensive scent. She was an exceptionally pretty girl, with large, very blue innocent eyes and an angelic face and she had plans to become a film star.

The fortunes of the women left behind in Birkenau were also about to take a sudden turn for the better.

Some time during the late spring, Marie-Claude, who was in the infirmary recovering from typhus, had overheard a conversation between a Polish doctor and an SS guard. The French women, said the guard, were not standing up well to the Polish climate; in fact, they seemed to be ‘dying like flies’. It looked, he went on, as if ‘they will all be transferred to Ravensbrück’. Though nothing of the kind was forthcoming, it was clear that the camp authorities were concerned about their non-Jewish French prisoners.

Towards the end of April, Emmanuel Fleury, a former communist city councillor in Paris now living underground in France, had received a telegram forwarded to him by fellow members of the Resistance. Originally addressed to her parents, it announced the death of his wife, Marie-Thérèse, from heart problems, in ‘the Auschwitz hospital’. These ‘death notices’ were part of Auschwitz’s grotesque bureaucracy. In theory at least, a secretary was appointed to each of the
Reviers
to note down the tattooed number of every corpse and record the cause of death in order to notify families. In practice, rats had often eaten the flesh where the numbers were tattooed, and many deaths were not recorded at all.

Marie-Thérèse had been assistant federal secretary of the French United Postal Federation and she had been active with her husband in the Resistance before being caught and sent to Romainville. Until the moment the telegram arrived, no one in France had known the fate of the 230 women who had left Compiègne together on 24 January 1943. There had been rumours about labour camps in the east, particularly after the notes slipped out through the cracks in the wooden cattle trucks reached their families, sent on by the railway workers who had found them lying by the tracks. But the
Nacht und Nebel
decree had ensured that there had been a terrifying silence about their whereabouts.

The telegram about Marie-Thérèse—sent in error by the German authorities—made its way to the French Resistance in London, where it was read out in the regular French-language broadcast over the BBC. Questions now began to be asked. Where in fact
had
all the women gone? Were many of them dead? And what was Mme Fleury doing in the Auschwitz hospital? What, precisely, was Auschwitz?

By the spring of 1943, much had already been said and written about the concentration camps in occupied Poland. Ever since the Wannsee conference of 15 senior Nazis in January 1942, stories had been circulating about the Nazi plans for a Final Solution for Europe’s Jews, and about mass killing centres. Reports, based on information carried out by escaped prisoners, industrialists, travellers, workers, churchmen and Jewish organisations, had made their way to the Allied governments, to the Vatican and to the International Committee of the Red Cross in Geneva. And though, in October 1942, the ICRC had voted against the idea of issuing a public communiqué—saying that it would ‘serve no purpose’ and jeopardise their work with prisoners of war—by December of that year questions had been raised and statements made, both in London and in Washington. Even so, no military action was contemplated, the view being that all resources should be directed to ending the war. Bombers, dropping their loads on factories near Auschwitz had not been diverted to bomb the railway lines or the camp to which they led.

For the most part, the messages of fear and alarm that had reached the Allied leaders had spoken of Sobibor, Belzec and Treblinka as extermination centres where people were being gassed, but not Auschwitz, even though reports of Birkenau’s gas chambers had been carried out to the Allies. The very size and nature of the camp, with its vast industrial complex and satellite factories, may have concealed its lethal intent. Auschwitz, it was said, was indeed a place of slave labour, but not of mass murder. The Jews deported on the trains from Drancy continued to be described as heading for ‘an unknown destination, somewhere in Poland’.

What happened now was that the French families, whose 229 mothers, wives, sisters and daughters had been on the
Convoi des 31000
with Marie-Thérèse Fleury began to contact their local churches, the Red Cross and the Vichy government to ask for news. Some of these enquiries made their way to the Gestapo offices. A letter from Poupette and Marie Alizon’s family spoke of Mme Alizon having died, ‘crushed by despair’, not knowing what had become of her two daughters. Bit by bit, other ‘death notices’ reached France from Auschwitz. Responding to the news of the deaths of nineteen women from Bordeaux and the Gironde, the Prefect announced that they had died ‘because of poor conditions of hygiene and nutrition’. The truth was somewhat different: Aminthe Guillon had been caught in the murderous ‘race’ of 10 February, Elisabeth Dupeyron and Annette Epaud had been gassed, 20-year-old Aurore Pica had died of thirst and 21-year-old Andrée Tamisé had been beaten to death. Together, they left five children, the youngest Elisabeth’s five-year-old daughter.

In France, the Front National de la Résistance collected all available facts and put out a bulletin, naming Danielle Casanova, Marie-Elisa Nordmann and a few others as having been on the train and now having vanished. Other reports circulated with a description of mass gassings. The story was picked up by a French correspondent in London called Fernand Grenier, who on 17 August broadcast at some length about the ‘murder of these young French women’, twenty-six of them widows of Resistance fighters, and insisting that Pétain and the Vichy government would have to take responsibility for their deaths.

He spoke of Maï Politzer, Hélène Solomon and Marie-Claude and gave a generally accurate picture of conditions in Auschwitz, but, unable to believe that his figures were right, changed the number of women for every tap of water from five thousand women to five hundred. ‘This silence,’ he concluded, ‘must be broken.’ Other language sections of the BBC picked up Grenier’s story, which then also appeared in newspapers in Britain and the US. Hearing that Danielle was among the dead, a group of Parisian women wrote an open letter to Pétain. ‘We wish to inform you that we hold you responsible for the death of these truly French women.’

No documents have ever been found in any French, Polish or German archive, or among the papers at Auschwitz, to explain what happened next. Was it because the US, USSR and Britain had announced that all those found guilty of war crimes would eventually be subject to ‘terrible punishments’? Or that Himmler could no longer ignore the fact that in the case of defeat he would certainly be charged with war crimes? Or that, now that the place where the women were held was no longer a secret and the terrors of
Nacht und Nebel
no longer applied, orders had come from Berlin that no more French resisters were to be allowed to die?

Whatever the reason, Marie-Claude, to her terror, was suddenly summoned to the Gestapo office in the camp. Here, believing she was about to be punished for some misdemeanour, she was informed by an SS man called Schutz, who was known to like to attend gassings in person, that the International Committee of the Red Cross had been making enquiries about her, and that she was to be allowed to write a letter to her family. It was to be no longer than fifteen lines, written in German, and it was to contain no criticism of the conditions in which she was held. In fact, all the surviving French women, and all the men survivors of the
Convoi des 45000
, were also to be allowed to write letters to their families, provided someone translated them into German. What was more, they were to be permitted to receive parcels as well.

Better than this, the women were to be moved out of Block 25 and into quarantine in a barracks just outside the perimeter fence. There would be no more work in the factories and marshes, and no more roll calls for hours at dawn and dusk.

The surviving French women of the
Convoi
in Birkenau, after the departure of the group for Raisko, were now down to thirty-seven; most knew they were very close to death. The few young girls still alive looked ravaged and ageless. Hélène Bolleau weighed just 32 kilos; suffering from constant diarrhoea, she dragged herself around the camp wrapped in a filthy blanket. Simone was struggling to throw off a prolonged series of illnesses, having miraculously escaped the gas ovens when the
Revier
in which she was recuperating was cleared by the lorries collecting the sick: she got away by biting the hand of an SS guard and hiding among a group of women digging a ditch nearby. On the day of her 20th birthday, two of the French men prisoners gave her a little bag with a piece of soap and a small flask of scent.

The move to the quarantine block came too late, however, for Marie Alizon.

All through the early summer Marie, who had never got over her terrible hunger and cravings for food, had been growing weaker and weaker, exhausted by dysentery, her legs so swollen she could barely walk. She said sadly to Poupette, ‘Maybe we didn’t pray enough’. Soon she couldn’t eat and her voice became that of a little girl. She clung on to Poupette. When she got an ear infection, she was moved into the
Revier
. The last time Poupette saw her sister she was lying naked under a filthy sheet and her lips were black. She was in a coma and her ears were full of pus; a rat had bitten her. Marie died a few days after her 22nd birthday. Poupette was devastated. She could not accept that the sister who had always looked after her, had been so good to everyone, was no longer there. Charlotte took her in her arms and held her tight. Marie-Claude managed to arrange for her to be transferred to Raisko, to join the team of biologists.

The change in the women’s fortune also came too late for Viva Nenni. To the relief of her friends, and especially Charlotte, who had grown very close to her, Viva had seemed to recover from a particularly virulent attack of typhus. Then she fell ill again. When Charlotte went to see her in the
Revier
, she seemed almost unnaturally well, even if she had become so thin that her bones showed through her shoulders; her thick black curls were growing back and they talked about how pleased Viva’s father, Pietro Nenni, must be at the news that the Allies had landed at Nettuno. Charlotte felt relieved. But suddenly, Viva told her that she was about to be sent back to France, where her sister was waiting for her. The delirium of typhus had set in. Soon she was unconscious. A few days later, she died. These deaths of friends to whom the women felt indissoluably bound, with whom they had endured so much, were almost too painful to bear.