A Train in Winter (37 page)

It was not, however, all it seemed, even if, in theory at least, Ravensbrück was a place of labour and not of extermination. Built on reclaimed marshland in 1939 as a camp for women to take members of the German Resistance, it had grown in a little over three years from twelve barracks to thirty-two. And it was still growing, as the Russians advanced from the east, overrunning German concentration camps and driving their inmates on long forced marches towards the interior of the Reich. The water that appeared so plentiful was contaminated by sewage and the overspill of the factories that had sprung up in and around the camp. Each barracks already housed four times its theoretical maximum; blankets had run out; and fleas, as in Auschwitz, were endemic. No one ever got over the horror of the fleas. There were no spare socks and too few shoes, which meant that many of the women went barefoot; there were not enough spoons, and old tins doubled as bowls. The barracks, few of them with glass in the windows, remained well below freezing for much of the long northern winter; locals called the area ‘Klein-Sibirien in Mecklenburg’, the little Siberian Mecklenburg, on account of the glacial cold arriving from the Baltic.

After registration came showers, then a humiliating and insanitary gynaecological inspection, the doctor not bothering to change her rubber gloves from woman to woman. Ravensbrück had no striped dresses and they were given the clothes taken from the suitcases of new arrivals, with crosses painted clearly on the back and front. After this, they found themselves once again in the relative safety and ease of a quarantine barracks. The women were now, as Lulu wrote to her family, ‘a little closer’ to home.

Four weeks later, they were moved to a block which was already occupied by Russian women prisoners of war, who had refused to work in a German munitions factory and were being punished by being made to stand all day outside the barracks without food. When captured, these women had been described by the German propaganda office as ‘Amazons’ and hysterics, proof of what Bolshevism did to women. Many had arrived in Ravensbrück broken by forced marches.

The eight friends soon discovered other French women in the camp, among them acquaintances from the Resistance in France, from whom they learnt the lie of their confusing new land. Everywhere they looked there were women of different races, nationalities, religions and class, speaking dozens of different languages and dialects, and wearing, as in Birkenau, many combinations of distinguishing labels. Their own, as before, were the red triangles of political prisoners.

Ravensbrück, they heard, was ruled over by a commandant called Fritz Suhren, a man with a taste for drink, not very military in appearance but an able administrator and a particularly willing executioner of Soviet prisoners. Under him were some forty SS officials and several thousand guards, most of them women, either SS or auxiliaries drafted as part of the war effort, having been subjected to a mixture of threats and promises. Even kind and pleasant women, so it was said, took only a few days to become rough and vindictive. Ravensbrück was famous for its use of savage dogs. Those patrolling the perimeter fences were trained, on Himmler’s orders, to tear to pieces anyone suspected of trying to escape.

By early 1944, the camp was home to some 20,000 women detainees. There were Germans who had opposed National Socialism, either because they were devout Christians or because they were communists; Jehovah’s Witnesses, who had been told that they could be released, providing they forswore their beliefs; some five thousand
asociales
, prostitutes, criminals and abortionists; ‘dangerous recidivists’, in the form of Jews, Russians and Ukrainians, for whom the Reich decreed ‘extermination through labour’; and women who had polluted the German race by marrying Jews. There were Italians, Yugoslavs, Spaniards, Norwegians, Albanians and a handful of Egyptians, Argentinians, Chinese, Greeks, British and two Americans. And there were the wives and daughters of Rotterdam’s diamond merchants, along with scientists, professors, journalists, actresses and students from the whole of occupied Europe.

The largest group were the Poles, from the Polish Army and other different political factions, who, given their numerical superiority and their strong sense of discipline and comradeship, had managed to get themselves into the most important positions around the camp—the kitchens, the storerooms and the infirmaries. These they defended fiercely. Most despised, the French women were told, were the Russians, some of them elderly peasants, others doctors and teachers; and the French themselves, of whom there were now several thousand. They were regarded by the other nationalities as chronically undisciplined, and greatly resentful of the SS code of discipline.

The Polish women were said by the French to run the camp with ‘extreme egotism, and a criminal lack of all social conscience’, though by the time Charlotte and the first group of seven French friends reached Ravensbrück, a small number of well-educated German and Austrian women had secured places in the administrative offices. These were, for the most part, communists, and they looked after their own, which would prove useful to the group. Of the eight, only Poupette and Marie-Jeanne Pennec, who had guided people across the demarcation line, and was a solitary, secretive countrywoman who had kept many of them alive in Birkenau by foraging for food in the marshes, had no strong political beliefs.

There were also many gypsy women who, when the weather became warmer, could be seen wandering around the camp after dark, looking to exchange things they had found or stolen for extra rations of bread. Soon after arriving, Charlotte was offered the Larousse edition of Molière’s
Le Misanthrope
. Back in their barracks, she read it aloud to the others, who each gave her a little bit of their bread, and then, ever frightened that she was losing her memory, she proceeded to learn it by heart, reciting the scenes to herself every day. Over the months, she had managed to bring back into her memory fifty-seven of the poems she had read and loved in her free life, and these too she recited to herself and to the others.

Attached to the main camp at Ravensbrück was a smaller one for men, where a number of Germans, Austrians and Poles, a few of them Jews, others wearing the pink triangles of homosexuals, were kept as a labour force for the constant building taking place in and around the camp. Here, among men working punishingly long hours, with rudimentary tools, not enough food and constantly punished, the mortality rate was extremely high.

When, in 1939, Ravensbrück had first opened, the camp was perceived as a place of re-education for ‘polluters of race’, prostitutes, recidivists and homosexuals. However, re-education had rapidly given way to slave labour as the needs of the German war economy grew, and by 1943, Ravensbrück was the hub for thirty-three satellite factory camps, producing everything from gunpowder to spare parts for Messerschmitts. Its position, in a relatively isolated area of lakes and forests, but with good rail connections, was ideal. As SS Gruppenführer Pohl, head of the Economic Office of the SS, explained, the Reich needed these women for ‘their arms and their legs, because they must contribute to the great victory of the German people’. What with the gassing of the Jews, the slaughter of the Russian prisoners of war, and the deaths from disease, starvation and brutality among the slave labourers, there were constant fears about running out of workers. As Pohl saw it, work was to be ‘totally exhausting’, and no one appeared to question how sensible it was to make women weakened by hunger perform until they collapsed jobs that were too taxing for them.

Within the camp itself, Siemens had a factory making spare parts for telegraph, radio and precision tools. All these enterprises, as in Birkenau, sent managers to inspect and select the women they wanted. As Marie-Claude would later write, ‘it was just like a slave market. They felt the women’s muscles, checked their state of health, then pointed to the ones they liked.’ After which the women were again inspected, this time naked, by one of the camp doctors. Those who proved ‘feeble’ were quickly returned, to be swapped for better specimens.

It was not long before Charlotte and the others understood why the women in the camp described Ravensbrück as ‘l’enfer des femmes’, the women’s hell. Overcrowding had turned the barracks into a vision of the Inferno as seen by Renaissance painters, tier upon tier of wooden boxes, filled with skeletal semi-naked women in which even the most staunch were prey to terrible rages. To survive meant to fight—for space, food, water. Nights were filled with the noise of women groaning, quarrelling, snoring and yelping with pain, as bony bodies touched the hard wooden slats.

Soon after being taken to their barracks Charlotte, Cécile and the six French friends were put to sewing German military uniforms, sitting as on a conveyor belt, doing twelve-hour shifts in a hut without ventilation and with very little light. The women there already, they noticed, were hunched and their sight had suffered; they coughed constantly. The most unpleasant task, which all dreaded, was unpicking the bloody uniforms of the soldiers who had died on the eastern front. If the daily targets were not reached, an SS woman called Binder threw herself on the women, beating them about the head and arms in a frenzy of fury.

One afternoon, orders came that all the women were to stop work and stand in a line outside the hut. An SS doctor told them to take off their shoes and stockings and hold up the hems of their dresses. Hurriedly, Poupette and the other younger women formed up on the outer edges, shielding the older women in the middle. Orders were given to start walking round in a large circle. As they filed past, the doctor pulled out all those with swollen legs or feet deformed by oedema. With every circle, the ranks thinned. We walked, Charlotte would later say, ‘like the damned upon the tympanums of cathedral portals’. Not one of the friends was pulled out; those who were learnt that they were to go to a ‘fasting camp’ nearby, but just what that entailed they could only guess.

Though not officially an extermination camp, the ethos of Ravensbrück was one of deprivation—of food, warmth, sleep and news. Everyone was hungry, obsessed with food, and afraid. In a world in which the unpredictable and unexpected reigned, there were no laces for shoes, but women were punished when their shoes fell off; no combs or scarves to hold back hair, but punishments if it was not pinned back. After the siren went at 3.30 in the morning, women had a few minutes in which to get ready for work, but there were no towels and no soap, and there were ten lavatories for a thousand women. As in Auschwitz, roll calls were times of ferocious cold and snarling dogs.

Not long after their arrival, two young French women from another barracks tried to escape. One of them, Odette Fabius, was caught and tortured. That day all the French women in the camp were ordered to spend the entire day on their knees on the sharp rough clinker, their hands held in the air, without moving. Many fainted.

Because of the overcrowding, the constant arrival of new inmates and the turmoil, it was sometimes possible to choose between being sent away to work in one of Ravensbrück’s satellite camps and remaining among the
Verfügbaren
, the disposables. These were the women who, because they were sick, or frail, or
Nacht und Nebel
, or elderly, remained in the camp, often with no work to do but available for jobs that were both unpleasant and might lead to sudden round-ups. The worst of these was being harnessed to a steel roller, like a slave, and made to haul it over the rough earth to make new roads. But remaining in camp offered the possibility of finding a mushroom or some dandelions. The friends were growing skilled at avoiding work altogether, having decided that the way to conserve their dwindling strength was to hide—behind the blocks, in the latrines or in the rafters. Sometimes they concealed themselves among the
Schmuckstücke
,
^*
Ravensbrück’s
musulmans
, women who had lost all hope and energy and who drifted apathetically around the camp.

All they knew for certain was that the single most important thing in their lives now was to stay together, and that without the others none would survive. It was a terrible blow to all of them when Marie-Jeanne Pennec was suddenly sent off to work in a factory in Czechoslovakia. She had never been very close to any of them, remaining solitary and somewhat secretive, but all felt her departure as a terrible omen.

A drawing by Jeannette L’Herrminier in Ravensbrück

In the evenings, the seven who remained—Charlotte, Poupette, Cécile, Carmen, Gilberte, Lulu and Mado—gathered close together, pooling their rations, which were getting smaller all the time. The daily soup was now nothing but greenish-grey water, made of beets, white carrots and grasses, and they watched each ladle like hawks, to see which might contain a shred of meat. Dried vegetables had disappeared, and with them fats of any kind. Each woman received one soup spoon of jam and one small lump of cheese a week. The very occasional bit of sausage looked odd and seemed to glow in the dark. They were, quite literally, slowly starving to death. Often, now, they talked to each other about food, going over menus and recipes, dreaming of what they might one day eat again. But they also became resourceful and inventive, skilled at using little bits of wire or cloth or rubber to make combs and toothbrushes. None had quite lost the need to hold on to some vestige of physical pride and dignity, but it was becoming harder and harder to keep up the discipline of catching fleas, and there had been no change of underclothes in three months.