A Train in Winter (31 page)

When the women had been in Birkenau for about three weeks, a transport arrived from Paris, bringing more Jews from Drancy. On it was Gisèle Kotlerewsky, whose mother Marguerite—who was not Jewish—was with the French women in Block 26. Gisèle, who was 19, was not selected with most of the others at the ramp, but directed to join the workers’ camp. That night she came to find her mother. They clung to each other and wept. Then Gisèle suddenly turned on her mother and cried out: ‘Why am I Jewish? Why is this happening to me? You see what you’ve done! Look at me!’ Marguerite was mortified and wretched. Soon after, coming to see her mother again, Gisèle was beaten by one of the SS guards, who crushed her nose and badly injured one eye. Marguerite managed to get hold of some water and bathed her daughter’s face; but a few days later Gisèle died. Marguerite stopped eating; then she, too, died. Hélène Bolleau saw her body lying in a pile outside Block 25.

Half a litre of black coffee in the morning, watery soup at midday, 300 grams of bread with either—if they were lucky—a scrape of margarine, a bit of sausage, cheese or jam at night, was not enough to stop the women’s bodies shrinking and feeding on themselves, the fat disappearing first and then the muscles. The food never varied. It left the prisoners famished, bloated and constantly needing to urinate, their stomachs swollen as if pregnant. Cécile continued to say that it was not as bad for her, since she had spent most of her childhood hungry, but Marie Alizon, who had arrived in Birkenau a healthy, energetic young woman, was tormented by cravings for food.

One night, Simone dreamt that a horse bent over her and she was so hungry that she took a knife and cut a piece of its flesh, but then the horse began to cry and she cried too. They were all growing scrawny, angular, their bones beginning to protrude. Their shaven heads, where the hair had grown back in tufts and clumps, made Simone think of porcupines; their faces were pinched and sallow and seemed longer and more lined. Their breasts had disappeared, or fell in loose folds. Plagued by lice and fleas, so numerous that in the sunlight they looked like ants, the women scratched continuously. Many had sores that festered and suppurated and would not heal. When they walked to the marshes, they had the gait of long-term prisoners, their heads and necks stuck forward, as if pulling the weight of their reluctant bodies behind them, their legs shapeless and swollen, their lips black from cold or red from bleeding gums. Jacqueline, whose musical voice had given them hope, developed an abscess on her shoulder, which quickly spread. As she lay dying, her body was covered in lice.

But it was the thirst rather than hunger that haunted Charlotte, agonising, unceasing thirst that made her jaws lock together and her teeth feel as if they were glued to her cheeks. The women’s camp had just one tap for 12,000 prisoners, and it was fiercely guarded by the green triangles, the German criminal prisoners. Charlotte became increasingly obsessed. To the horror and fear of the others, walking one morning towards the marshes, she left the line and went over to a brook to lick the ice. The guards did not see her. Later, she drank the muddy water of the marshes. At night, back in the barracks, she exchanged her small portion of bread for a mug of tea. She dreamt of oranges, their juice flowing down her throat.

Then came the day when, assigned to a tree planting detail with Viva and Lulu, her desperation was such that she feared she was going mad. That night, her friends pooled all their bread for an entire bucket of water. When they gave it to her, Charlotte plunged her head in, rather like a horse, and drank until she reached the bottom. Her stomach swelled alarmingly. But in some miraculous way, she was cured. The obsession lifted. She would later say that if she thought of suicide, she rejected it. In a place of such constant death, the immediate aim became not to die but to live, to get enough to eat and drink, to keep warm. That was all she thought about.

By now the French women were no longer under any illusion about the smoke that rose from the chimneys at the far end of the camp and that filled their mouths, throats and lungs with a cloying, nauseating taste. They could see for themselves the way the chimneys belched out flames about three-quarters of an hour after the arrival of a Jewish transport. What haunted Marie-Elisa Nordmann was the thought that her mother might be on one of the trains. When, now, they saw the lorries carrying the dead and the dying from Block 25, they knew that those still alive would also be thrown straight into the flames along with the dead. ‘It was a ceaseless battle,’ Madeleine would say, ‘with ourselves, not to give up.’

Walking back from long days in the marshes, Cécile felt guilty that, when she could smell the acrid smoke she was relieved, knowing that they no longer had far to walk. At night, she dreamt of the smell, which made her think of the boiled-down carcasses of animals. Looking around at her emaciated and sickly companions, knowing that most would soon be dead, she kept seeing herself in the mound of corpses. ‘I don’t know if anyone else felt hope,’ she said later. ‘But I never did.’ She rarely wept, she would say, because she was in such a permanent state of horror that no tears came. But when Josée, who fought back when the
kapos
beat her, was herself beaten so savagely that she died, then Cécile cried. If Josée, so strong, so courageous, had not survived, how would she?

One Sunday, the whistle for roll call blew earlier than usual. Because Simone was still weak from the day of the
course
, she took longer than usual to get her shoes on and so found herself separated from the others. She was standing in a line of Polish women when a lorry with SS men stopped close by. One leant out and indicated that a number of the women were to fall out. One of these was a mother with twin girls of about eight or nine. She clung to them, but was yanked away and pushed on to the lorry, which then drove off. The little girls, left standing on their own, were crying. Simone took one by each hand and when the whistle blew to return to the barracks, she began to lead them away, singing to them. But then two SS women appeared, unleashed their dogs and gave an order in German. The dogs leapt on the girls and seized them by the throat. Simone stood paralysed. When the dogs were ordered to let go, the girls were dead, their faces savaged beyond recognition. Simone continued to cling to their hands, the children’s bodies hanging limply by her side. Cécile and Charlotte, seeing what had happened, ran over, dragged Simone away and then carried her back to the barracks. For several days, she did not say a single word.

Such scenes were constant now. Berthe Lapeyrade, arrested by Poinsot’s men in the Bordeaux round-ups, collapsed one day in the marshes and refused to get up. An SS guard picked up a spade and beat her to a pulp. That evening, Lulu, Viva, Charlotte and Cécile carried her body back to the camp, because no one could be left in the marshes or the numbers would not tally at roll call. They had to keep stopping to fold Berthe’s hands over her chest and prevent them trailing in the mud. As they staggered along, they felt torn between relief for her, that she was now out of this misery, and despair at having to carry her heavy body back to the camp. It was not long after this that Alice Varailhon found the body of a little girl lying by a well with a doll in her arms. Picking the doll up and brandishing it furiously in the direction of the SS guards, Alice shouted out: ‘Assassins!’ One of the men calmly took out his revolver and shot her. That night, Hélène Bolleau and the others helped her back to camp; she died soon after roll call.

One day, the women returning from the marshes passed a group of especially emaciated men, so reduced by starvation that they appeared barely human. Having a little bread left over, they threw it in their direction. In an instant the men were fighting, tearing the bread out of each other’s hands. Their eyes made Charlotte think of wolves. The SS guards set their dogs on them.

There were few days, now, when the women did not witness killings and deaths, women driven insane by hunger and misery, set on by dogs and mauled, or clubbed by guards. On 20 February, Annette Epaud, whose cafe in La Rochelle had sheltered so many resisters, and whose 15-year-old son Claude had watched her throw revolvers into the river, took some water to a woman who had been crying piteously for a drink for several hours. ‘Wasser, Wasser, Wasser.’ Annette carried it across in a cup and passed it through the bars. But she was spotted by an SS guard called Hasse, who was walking past with her Alsatian dog. Hasse ran over, seized her by the neck and threw her into Block 25. Annette was just able to give the drawing of Claude, miraculously held on to through all this time, to Félicienne Bierge, who promised to look after it.

A few days later, while they were at roll call, her friends caught sight of Annette, standing on the lorry carrying the sick and the dead to the crematoria. Seeing them, she called out, ‘Danielle, take care of my son!’ Fear consumed them all now, fear of getting colder, of being bitten by the dogs, of being beaten by the
kapos
, of falling, and, as bad as anything, of being separated from their friends.

As the days passed, so the women learnt which guards to dread the most. All, the men as well as the women, had been trained according to a strict Prussian drill and told that if they showed signs of ‘softness’ they would be stripped of their rank and humiliated before their colleagues. There was the brutal Aufseherin Margot Drechsler, a woman in her early thirties who had come to Birkenau in October 1942 and who set her Alsatian dog on the women at every minor infringement of the rules, and was present at many of the selections. Drechsler had large protruding teeth like a horse and was known to the women as
Kostucha
, the reaper. When the trucks left from Block 25, carrying the dead and the just living, Drechsler laughed and waved. Everyone feared her. She often stood at the door of the barracks with her hooked stick, yanking people out for the gas chamber. On a piece of land, in full view of the barracks, Drechsler and the others trained their dogs, using stuffed dolls in striped clothes as dummies, urging them on to bite and tear. One of her helpers was a very pretty Polish girl, Stenia, who had been made block elder. She delighted in kicking over the buckets of precious water just as the women brought them into the barracks, and shouted obscenities at them if they fell over.

The guards in Auschwitz

Then there was Rapportführer Adolf Taube, a big heavy man who reminded the women of a bull; Taube took particular pleasure in hunting down the weaker women. At roll calls, he enjoyed making the Jewish women kneel, their hands above their heads, in the icy mud. As Marie-Elisa would later say, if it was terrible for the French women, it was far worse for the Jewish ones, on whom the guards vented their sadism, and who seemed especially defenceless against the endless degradation, public nakedness and verbal abuse. Taube was ‘their worst tormentor’. When Suzanne Roze, a strong, well-built woman, robust from years of transporting heavy typewriters and mimeograph machines for the Resistance, fell ill and was hidden by the others behind the bunks, she was discovered by Taube and beaten to death. She had helped Madeleine Dissoubray run the networks in Rouen.

And it was not only the SS and the
kapos
who were so lethal. Some of the women prisoners were no less vicious. Léa Kerisit was a nurse from Tours, where she had belonged to a network of
passeurs
. Sent to work in an infirmary for German criminal prisoners—because these were German women, there were better conditions—she was repeatedly beaten for rejecting lesbian advances. When she fell sick with typhus, her tormentors bludgeoned her to death.

February and March brought trains full of Jewish women from Salonica, train after train of healthy looking Greek women, some in Soviet paratrooper uniforms seized by the Germans on the Russian front, others in brightly coloured dresses and shawls, bringing with them olives, which Simone had never tasted before. Poupette thought how beautiful the women looked, and how wonderful their clothes were against the drab greyness of Birkenau. But the Greek women were thought to be carriers of typhus and within a few days all but a handful had been sent to the gas chambers.

The early spring also brought gypsies, train after train of Roma and Sinti families, with many children, from all over occupied Europe. They were put into a special gypsy family camp, where there was no water and no electricity and where their rations were less than those of the rest of Birkenau. Over the next few months, 363 babies were born to gypsy mothers. Many were put to death immediately. All her life, Lulu would be haunted by the memory of SS guards murdering gypsy babies by battering their heads against a wall. The others died slowly of starvation. At roll call one morning, Charlotte saw a gypsy woman cradling a baby who was clearly dead; its face was bluish-black and its head lolled to one side. Later she saw it lying on a garbage heap by the kitchens and heard that the mother had fought frantically to prevent the SS from taking it from her, and had herself been clubbed to death. ‘How do you know it’s a gypsy,’ she wrote later, ‘when all that is left of it is a skeleton?’ Walking back to the barracks through a sudden flurry of snow, she passed an isolated house and saw a single pink tulip in a vase in the window.