If This Is a Woman: Inside Ravensbruck: Hitler's Concentration Camp for Women (76 page)

Given the preference for using young women, it is surprising that two ageing Dutch sisters were chosen for Siemens, but the company needed outdoor workers too, and instead of coiling wire under cover, Corrie and Betsie were made to push an iron handcart laden with metal plates along a railway track, for eleven hours a day. When they returned to the main camp in the evening, Betsie, the weaker, could barely walk from exhaustion. After the evening soup, the sisters found a space on a flea-ridden bunk and read quietly from a bible they had smuggled into the camp. As Betsie and Corrie translated the Dutch verses into German, they heard their words passed along the aisles in French, Polish, Russian, Czech and back into Dutch. A group of Catholics recited the Magnificat.

When the Paris women were called to the cattle market some of their group were selected for Siemens too, but an order had come from a Heinkel factory at Torgau, 200 miles to the south, and most of the French were sent there. The women were eager to go, ‘especially as everything here seemed calculated to make people die without being killed’, recalled Virginia Lake. By early September they were on a train out of Ravensbrück, and praying they’d never come back.

It took three days in cattle wagons to reach Torgau, a pretty town on the Elbe. Marching to their subcamp, Lilian Rolfe felt faint, so a French woman who had befriended her, Jacqueline Bernard, linked arms and helped along. Ravensbrück women were astonished to pass a POW camp where thousands of French men were held. They looked healthy and happy, which cheered the women. ‘It won’t be long now,’ the men shouted. ‘We’ve crossed the frontier. The Allies are in Germany and on their way.’ At this news a new surge of joy erupted along the women’s ranks. Some said it could be weeks, others that it might be days. Hitler might surrender any day, now he knew that all was lost.

Entering the camp gates, the barracks seemed clean and well equipped. They had a mattress each and there were steam radiators in each block, with running water. Their first night, they even had a blanket each. Next morning the pleasant surprises continued. At
Appell
the commanding officer addressed the women politely, using good French. ‘You’ll soon have everything you need,’ he said. That evening they had fresh bread, sauerkraut and a piece of sausage each. Seeing how thinly dressed the women were, the officer allowed them to
stand at the next
Appell
in their blankets. Lilian was taken to the hospital, which even had medicines.

Among the group, however, there was unrest. Torgau was obviously a munitions factory and some of the women were talking of revolt. According to Virginia it was precisely the atmosphere of cleanliness and consideration that made the women ‘freshly conscious of their rights’. Lists were drawn up of who was for and who was against a protest. ‘Not even the Nazis have the right to make us work in arms factories,’ the women said.

Soon Jeannie Rousseau, the woman who back in the quarantine block had told them they would soon be free, had once again taken a lead, telling the women they should refuse to make arms. A spirited twenty-two-year-old from Brittany, Jeannie had perhaps more reason than most to feel this way. Early in the war she had worked as an interpreter for German generals in France. So adept had she been at securing their trust that she was privy to high-level discussions about the German V2 bomb. She even saw inside Hitler’s weapons establishment at Peenemünde. She passed on what she learned to British intelligence, who considered her so valuable that in May 1944 plans were made to get her back to London for a debriefing, by taking her off the Breton coast in a small boat. But traitors scuppered her escape and Jeannie was arrested by the Gestapo.

As she called the protest at Torgau, Jeannie still had no idea that the factory there made parts for the V2, but she knew enough to tell the German officer in charge there that she would not work for him. ‘I went to this man and said in my beautiful German: “We are with the resistance. We cannot accept work on ammunition.” I told him we would work, but not to produce arms,’ said Jeannie, who spoke ‘beautiful English’ too. She lived on the Quai de Grenelle on the banks of the Seine. ‘So this officer, he just said: “OK, it can be arranged. If you refuse to work in the factory you can go back to Ravensbrück.”’

At this the protest fell apart. Nobody wanted to return to the camp. Lists were drawn up and women put their names down to stay or go. The war was so nearly over that the arms they would make would never be used, said some. Others said that Ravensbrück would kill them if they went back. ‘Halfheartedly I signed up for Ravensbrück, but half an hour later someone convinced me it was lunacy and I took my name off,’ Virginia Lake recalled.

Jeannie addressed the crowd. ‘I stood up in front of them all and I said, look, we have gone through so many difficult years. Now, after all that work, for the first time we can stand up to the Germans. I thought this was our chance. I was there like that in front of them all. You see I was convinced somebody had to do something. Somebody had to stand up. I decided to do it.’

‘Why you?’

‘Because I was there. Period.’ She drew on a cigarette. ‘And because I was very young.’ At eighty-nine Jeannie, now Jeannie de Clarens, had lost little of her allure, but her voice faltered as she talked of her action that day at Torgau. She knew that many women – including many French – had died in atrocious circumstances as a direct consequence of the protest she led. She knew that comrades blamed her at the time and that some still blame her today.

‘It was very childish. I never knew his name, that man. I remember there was this one officer and he was in charge of the factory. And there were 1000 of us standing to attention. I decided it was the time to come out in the open. I said you obviously don’t know who we are. We are this and we are that, and I told him what we had done. We ought to be protected by the Geneva Conventions, I said.’

‘What was he like?’

I remember feeling I could talk to him. This is my name, so-and-so, and I am speaking for my friends. We will not do this work. Many remained silent, you know. Many said no.

And I went on and said: ‘We will go and pick your potatoes but I won’t make your bombs.’ It was when I said that that he threw me in the punishment cell, and it was not a very pleasant punishment cell I can tell you. He was flabbergasted. He could not imagine this could happen. And for a long time he didn’t know what to do with the others. But he sent me to this cell while he tried to get orders about what to do with the rest. I spent about three weeks there. Every morning I was put under a cold-water spray. And beaten. And then back to my cell. Next morning same thing.

‘Did you have any doubts at the time?’

‘No, I had no doubts. I knew the chance was there. We never knew at the time we would spend another winter there.’

While Jeannie was in her cell, the munitions workers went to the factory, where they endured terrible conditions. Most made shell cases, which were dipped by cranes into tubs of acid that burned their hands and clothes, and they choked on sulphur. Others worked in sunken caves linked by underground railway tracks. Those who had refused to make arms were sent instead to work in the kitchens and the fields, while the camp director sought instructions about what to do with them. They were far better off than those in the factory, often working in the fresh air.

Virginia recalled that all the Anglo-Americans were there. She didn’t know all the English women’s real names, because they still kept their aliases, but her descriptions of the women, recorded in a diary, identified three ‘parachutists’ who clearly included Violette Szabo. ‘She was young, charming and
attractive. She used to stretch her limbs like a cat as she lay on her bunk not far from mine.’

Denise Bloch was there too – ‘She was very much in love with a French automobile champion.’
^*
And Lilian Rolfe, now out of the sickbay: ‘We lost patience with her sometimes. We tried hard to make her eat the little food we were given, but she wouldn’t because she didn’t like it. She appeared to be doomed from the start.’

Virginia herself was the only American-born woman here, but there were two other Americans by marriage. Charlotte Jackson, a Swiss woman, was married to an American doctor who had been working at a hospital in Neuilly, Paris, at the outbreak of war, and she was arrested with her husband and son. Also in the group was a French woman, Lucienne Dixon, married to an American engineer who had also been working in France.

The other two British SOE women who had also arrived from Paris in late summer – the white-haired Yvonne Rudellat and a radio operator called Eileen Nearne – also went to Torgau at first, but they didn’t stay. Yvonne Rudellat returned to Ravensbrück, probably too sick to work. Eileen Nearne joined the protest at Torgau, but was then selected for a different subcamp near Leipzig and taken away.

The seven British and Americans who remained at Torgau were then sent to work in the vegetable cellar just outside the camp wall, where they made contact again with the French POWs. The men left messages and gifts in a hiding place in the woods – aspirins, pencils, paper and prayer books. The POWs were much better off than the concentration-camp women. One day they provided a banquet from their Red Cross parcels – Kraft cheese, Sun-Maid raisins, Jack Frost sugar. They told the women they had built a secret radio transmitter, and offered to send messages to London. Violette, Lilian and Denise gave them numbers and a code with which to contact their headquarters in London’s Baker Street. Whether it was really possible to send the message, they didn’t know.

At this time Violette was again talking of escaping. ‘Night after night her plan was to be culminated,’ Virginia recalled, ‘but somehow it never worked, although she spent hours waiting for her chance.’ Then in early October the Anglo-American group were told they were to leave the vegetable cellar and feared this might mean a return to Ravensbrück, but instead they were sent to dig potatoes. It was getting colder but they were pleased to be out in the open. The forest turned yellow, red and orange. Then came further rumours
about a return to the main camp, but the orders were to dig faster, the frosts were coming.

While the Torgau potato-pickers dug into frozen soil, another group of French and British women had turned up at the Ravensbrück gates. This was a small transport of just fifty, and among them were Yvonne Baseden, the SOE woman captured in the cheese factory near Dijon, and her older English travelling companion, the bossy woman in the French Red Cross uniform. The woman’s name was Mary Lindell, though she was also the Comtesse de Milleville, as she had married a Belgian count.

Such was the chaos at the gates at the time Yvonne and Mary’s group arrived that they seem to have wandered into the camp almost unnoticed. It was getting dark and they stumbled across a giant tent. According to Mary Lindell, it was empty and ‘
piled high
with clean straw and blankets’. Someone told them they couldn’t sleep in it because a new transport of Polish prisoners was expected any minute, so this must have been the second, bigger, tent, put up in the first week of September. Mary and Yvonne saw it just before it was filled with more prisoners, so it was still clean.

Mary marched in, grabbed an armful of blankets and handed them out to her friends. After making sure Yvonne was warm enough – Mary had taken the young woman under her wing – they all settled down on the ground. It was damp and a mist blew off the lake, but they were all so tired they fell asleep.

An important-looking German officer and a woman guard approached and pulled the blankets off. The officer, who had an interpreter, demanded to know who gave the women permission to take the blankets. Mary jumped up and retorted: ‘I did. Who gave you the right to allow women to sleep out in the open like this? We are prisoners of war. These women have been sleeping in a cattle truck for over fourteen days, and I’m going to see they keep the blankets for the night.’

Mary’s behaviour must have astonished onlookers, but it came as no surprise to Yvonne, who was already used to her companion’s brazen ways. In her forty-five years Mary Lindell had never been one to show fear. At the start of the First World War she volunteered as a Red Cross nurse and organised dressing stations close to the front line. Between the wars she married a Belgian count and raised a family, then in 1939 she volunteered again as a French Red Cross nurse before being recruited by the British escape service, MI9, to smuggle Allied servicemen out of south-west France. Finding herself in a Nazi concentration camp, she now seems to have thought nothing of tearing a strip off an SS commandant.

‘
She always thought
she knew best,’ said Yvonne Baseden. ‘She was an
impossible character and disliked by everyone in normal circumstances. But in the camp you needed someone like that.’

Fritz Suhren, however, was not at all put out by
die Engländerin
, as he called Lindell. But he was interested in the quality of her barathea twill uniform. When she had finished complaining to him, he leant forward and felt the lapel, then he turned to Dorothea Binz, saying: ‘
Das ist schön
.’ Binz felt the woollen cloth too. After more discussion the group were permitted to keep the blankets for the night. The following day Mary continued to protest that she and Yvonne were prisoners of war, but the women were soon sent off for the usual shower. Mary was forced to remove her uniform and was handed a soiled yellow flowery dress in return, while Yvonne took a red skirt and shirt.

A woman with a red arm band, printed with a black ‘P’, then approached them. ‘You are English and so am I,’ she said. The woman said her name was Julia Barry, and she was a camp policewoman. She explained that she had been chosen for the role because she spoke several languages. Yvonne and Mary had no idea what to make of her. The camp appeared to be run by the inmates, and one of them, this ‘Englishwoman’, Julia Barry, carried a truncheon and a whip.

And yet Julia Barry obviously wanted to help. She hid Mary’s First World War Croix de Guerre medal, which had been pinned on her uniform, and suggested that Mary should seek work in the
Revier
, as conditions were better there. The SS doctor even had English connections. Julia Barry said there were several other Englishwomen in the camp too, and she described a few. Some were obviously the SOE women, whose identities – despite their use of aliases – Yvonne guessed. But Julia mentioned others who had nothing to do with SOE.