A Train in Winter (45 page)

Almost no woman from the Gironde or Charente on the
Convoi
had survived to give evidence against Poinsot, the head of the Brigades Spéciales responsible, so it was charged, for the death in deportation of 1,560 Jews and nine hundred
politiques
, for the execution of 285 men, and for torture so extreme people were ‘literally massacred’. Aminthe Guillon and her daughter-in-law Yvette were dead, and their husbands had been shot at Souge; neither Madeleine Zani, nor Jeanne Souques, nor Marguerite Valina had lived to come home.

Poinsot, who at the end of August 1944 had slipped away from France to Germany in one of twelve cars commandeered for himself and his associates, was recognised and arrested in Switzerland and handed over to the French police. His wife was picked up a few days later at Dijon station, with a million francs and a fortune in other currencies. Poinsot narrowly escaped being lynched when the prison in which he was held was mobbed. On 12 June 1945, he appeared before the court in Moulins. The most damning piece of evidence against him was a list written in red ink, in his own hand, with the names of those he had sent to their deaths. Poinsot was shot at Riom on 12 July. Ferdinand Vincent, the informer who had given away Annette Epaud, the Guillons and many others, went before a firing squad in 1949.

Some of the harshest criticism for behaviour during the occupation was levelled at the writers and journalists who had extolled the virtues and policies of the Nazis. In September 1944, the Comité Nationale des Écrivains, which Charlotte’s husband Georges Dudach along with Georges Politzer had helped set up, had drawn up a first blacklist of twelve writers perceived as collaborators. Later, the list grew to 158 names. In the event, forty-four were charged and Robert Brasillach and Jean Luchaire were executed; Drieu de la Rochelle managed to commit suicide on his third attempt. As with the political leaders, no one could quite agree on the severity of the judgments. Mauriac, worried that too much
épuration
would pollute the new French state before it had time to govern, acted as an apostle for reconciliation and pardon, while Camus began by urging the French to move straight from resistance to ‘revolution’ and to treat collaborators harshly. Later he tempered his views and said that the very word
épuration
had become odious to him.

It was generally agreed, however, that a great many prominent writers had sat out the occupation in shameful silence and inaction, and it would long be remembered that Simone de Beauvoir worked for a while for Radio Nationale under the Germans, and that Sartre had been happy to replace a Jewish professor of philosophy who was dismissed from his post under the anti-Semitic edicts. There were eulogies to the editors of
Lettres Françaises
shot at Mont-Valérien.

Pétain’s trial, which opened on 23 July 1945 and lasted three weeks, was less a legal hearing than a ceremonial condemnation of all that Vichy had stood for. In the dock, Pétain remained largely silent, not least because the 89-year-old
maréchal
was becoming increasingly senile. He was sentenced to death by firing squad but de Gaulle commuted the sentence to life imprisonment; Pétain was sent to the Ile d’Yeu in the Atlantic, where he died, entirely senile, six years later. On 16 October 1946, Pierre Laval, Prime Minister of Vichy France, having attempted but failed to commit suicide by taking cyanide, was executed. At neither trial was there much talk of the deportation of the Jews.

Across liberated Europe and in the four zones of Allied occupation in Germany many other trials were under way. Long before the end of the war, the Allies had announced that anyone who had taken part in war crimes would be tried and punished, and on 26 June 1945 a conference was called in London for the purpose of reaching an agreement on how precisely the major war criminals were to be prosecuted. It was not made easier by the animosity between negotiators and the bitter disagreements over legal traditions, but on 8 August a London Charter, setting out the statutory basis for an International Military Tribunal was agreed on. The crucial legal innovation was a category of ‘crimes against humanity’, to be applied not only to murder and to extermination but to a wide variety of other acts.

The first and most important tribunal opened at Nuremberg on 20 November 1945. There were twenty-two leading Nazis in the dock; there should have been twenty-four, but Gustav Krupp, the Nazi industrialist, was ill and Robert Ley, the head of the German Labour Front, committed suicide before the trial began. The hope, as expressed by the American Counsel for the Prosecution, Telford Taylor, was that justice would prevail, and also that the truth, ‘why and how these things happened’ would emerge. The nature and gravity of the offences lay at the far limits of human experience, and all present were conscious of how hard it would be to bring the holocaust into the courtroom in a way that did honour to the catastrophe that had taken place. ‘The wrongs which we seek to condemn and punish,’ said Taylor, ‘have been so calculated, so malignant, and so devastating that civilisation cannot tolerate their being ignored, because it cannot survive their being repeated.’ Almost hardest to address was the question of where the line should be drawn between legitimate and illegitimate violence in time of war.

Marie-Claude was the only survivor of the
Convoi des 31000
to be called as witness at Nuremberg. She appeared on the 44th day of the trial, on Monday, 28 January 1946. Dignified and articulate, her fair hair wound in a plait around her head, she described, in firm, clear sentences, what she had seen and experienced in Birkenau and Ravensbrück. She answered questions about her arrest in Paris, her friends and colleagues shot by the Germans, her months in La Santé prison; then she talked about the journey from Romainville to Auschwitz, the roll calls, the brutality of the guards, the gas chambers. She used the word
nous
, us, because she was speaking, she said, not just for herself but for the 229 women deported with her. She talked about Alice Viterbo, the singer with only one leg, who had fallen in ‘the race’ and begged Danielle to give her poison before she was driven away to her death.

Marie-Claude Vaillant-Couturier, giving evidence at Nuremberg

Occasionally Marie-Claude was stopped and told to speak more slowly, for the interpreters were having trouble keeping up with her. Later she would say that, sitting in the witness box, looking across at Göring, Bormann, Dönitz and von Ribbentrop, she thought to herself: ‘Look at me, because in my eyes you will see hundreds of thousands of eyes staring at you, and in my voice you will hear hundreds of thousands of voices accusing you.’ Staring at their faces and their expressions, she marvelled at how ordinary they looked. She had returned to France, Marie-Claude said, with a deep hatred of Fascism, whether French or German, and she considered the men in the dock to be monsters, and as such ‘to be done away with’. She was appalled and upset when, on the first morning, Dr Hans Marx, one of the lawyers for the defence, asked her how she could explain the fact that she had been subjected to such horror and hardship, and yet was able to return in such apparent good health. Her reply was terse: she had been home over a year. Ten of the twenty-two men in the dock were eventually hanged; the firing squad was deemed too dignified an end for them.

The London Charter served as a basis for subsequent Allied and German trials. Over five thousand people were convicted in allied courts and about the same number in German ones. Safeguards from the Anglo-American legal traditions ensured the right to counsel, presumption of innocence and convictions based upon proof beyond all reasonable doubt, but there were complaints of victors’ justice. And there was not always sufficient evidence to convict the clearly guilty. In the dock, in courts all over Europe, those charged argued that they had only obeyed orders, that they had been under duress themselves and that they were victims of mistaken identity.

On trial in Warsaw, Rudolf Hoess, commandant of Auschwitz, struck the court by the calm with which he described the gas chambers, explaining, with technical precision, the process of asphyxiation and how roughly a third of the people died at once, while the others ‘staggered about and began to scream and struggle for air’. Asked whether it was true that some two and a half million people had gone to their deaths in Auschwitz, he replied that he thought the figure was nearer to one and a half. In his memoirs, written while he was in prison awaiting trial, he noted that the public would never regard him as anything but a ‘bloodthirsty beast … cruel, sadistic and a mass murderer’, and that no one would ever understand that he, too, had a ‘heart and that he was not evil’. Hoess was hanged at Auschwitz on 15 April 1947, in front of the villa in whose gardens Charlotte had watched his children play.

Many, but not all, of the people whose brutality had dominated and destroyed the lives of the women from the
Convoi
were brought to justice. Mengele, the doctor whose experiments Adelaïde Hautval had refused to assist in, slipped away and was never caught. Dr Schumann, who had X-rayed young men and women and burned them beyond recovery, went to work in Africa and died, a free man, in 1983. Dr Clauberg, who had performed his sterilisation operations in his military uniform, died in a prison cell, in mysterious circumstances, in August 1957. Dr Treite, head of the medical services at Ravensbrück, committed suicide. Dr Winkelmann, who had made selections for the gas chamber with such relish, died before his sentence could be carried out. Dr Caesar, the botanist at Raisko, avoided prison altogether and set up a laundry business. General Karl Oberg and Helmut Knochen, the SS officers who between them had rounded up, tortured, shot and deported countless thousands of French men, women and children during the four years of occupation were condemned to death, but their sentences were commuted. They were freed in 1962.

But Hans Pflaum, the murderous guard in Ravensbrück, who had cornered escaping women with rugby tackles, and Adolf Taube, the bull-like tormenter in Birkenau were both executed, as were Elisabeth Marschall and Dorothea Binz, who had clubbed sick and frail women to death. It would be said that many of those sentenced to die were hanged in such a way that they were slowly strangled to death. But what became of the vicious Margot Drechsler, known to the inmates as ‘Death’ and at whose hands the women had suffered so repeatedly in Birkenau, no one ever discovered.

After the Allied High Command lifted the remaining restrictions on German courts in 1955 a kind of amnesty fever broke out. Sentences were commuted, convictions overturned, prosecutions lifted. In France, 40,000 people went to prison for collaboration; in 1948, there were only 13,000 still inside, and by 1965 all were free.

The last of the
Convoi
’s women to testify was Adelaïde, called to give evidence against Dr Dering, the Polish prisoner gynaecologist in Auschwitz, whom she had so often observed ingratiating himself with the Nazi doctors. In 1964, in London, Dering sued the American writer Leon Uris for libel, after Uris wrote in his novel
Exodus
that Dering had performed 17,000 sterilisations on prisoners without anaesthetic. In the event, the jury ruled in Dering’s favour and he was awarded a halfpenny in damages, but the court made its feelings clear by the decision that he was to pay the costs himself.

In his summing up, Lord Justice Lawton referred to Adelaïde as ‘one of the most courageous and remarkable women who has ever testified before a British court’. When, the following year, Israel proposed to confer on her a medal as one of the Righteous Among the Nations, she refused to accept it, saying that everything that she had done in Auschwitz and Ravensbrück was only natural, logical and born of a ‘moral obligation’. She came back from the camps, she would say, obsessed with the fear that the Nazis would go unexposed and unpunished, and that only some superhuman force, some extraordinary feat of determination, would really be able to bring to an end the ‘negation of every human and spiritual value’ demonstrated by the Nazis. The French gave her a
Légion d’honneur
.

It was no accident that the women from the
Convoi
called to testify at war crimes trials were Marie-Claude, Adelaïde and Betty. All three were strong, determined, combative women who had survived in part because of a ferocious desire to see the Nazis and the French collaborators punished. But France was not altogether in the mood to hear what they had to say; and the men and women who had returned from the camps were not, for the most part, well enough, either physically or mentally, to make their voices heard. De Gaulle, pushing his myth of France as a country of united resisters betrayed by a handful of traitors, needed collective amnesia. The gaunt, sickly deportees were an unwelcome reminder that in five weeks the Germans had crushed what had been considered one of the finest armies in the world; and that, during four years of occupation, it was the French themselves who had rounded up and interned Jews and resisters, before sending them to their death in Poland.