A Train in Winter (32 page)
Authors: Caroline Moorehead
What all the women feared most was the
Revier
, the so-called infirmary. When orders came from Berlin early in 1943 to make Auschwitz more productive for the war effort, some small attempts were made at keeping the stronger prisoners alive. One of these was to appoint from among the prisoners a number of doctors and nurses to care for the sick in special infirmary barracks, where in theory they might be nursed back to health. In practice, however, these infirmaries were, like Block 25, antechambers of death. There were virtually no drugs and no dressings, only scraps of paper. Wedged in together, those with tuberculosis in the same bunk as those with dysentery, the patients gave off an appalling stench; rats mauled the living as well as the dead.
For the women sent because of illness to the
Revier
, the few days’ reprieve from the marshes might at any moment be broken by a selection, when an SS doctor, accompanied by Taube, Drechsler or one of the other guards, would suddenly appear, demand that all the patients stand, naked, by the bunks for inspection, and then dispatch those judged unlikely to recover to Block 25. Some were murdered directly with lethal injections. The spectre that hung over all of them was that they might become
musulmans
, the walking dead, those so exhausted and apathetic that they drew on to their heads endless punishments, and who burnt themselves on the stoves because they no longer noticed pain.
*
Because the windows of Block 26 gave directly on to the courtyard of Block 25, the spectacle of dead and dying women was always present before the French women. Sitting on their bunks, with their tin bowls of gruel, they could see, lying in the yard outside, the naked bodies awaiting collection, their heads shaved, their pubic hair in stiff tufts, their bluish-white bodies frozen in grotesque positions, their toenails brown. They reminded Charlotte of tailor’s dummies, which she had once seen outside a shop as a child, when she had been embarrassed by their nakedness. She thought of them as ‘yesterday’s companions’, women who, like herself, had eaten, scratched, gulped down murky gruel, felt hunger and been beaten, and whose lives had been brought to a sudden end because they had not run fast enough or because their faces had looked ashen during a selection. Seeing her staring in horror at the bodies, having caught sight of one that was still moving, Cécile said to her: ‘Eat your soup. These women no longer need anything.’
The French women were not, however, entirely without resources. Marching into Birkenau singing the Marseillaise, they had been overheard by the surviving members of the convoy of French Resistance men,
le Convoi des 45000
, which had preceded them to Birkenau in July 1942. Marie-Claude, since she spoke good German, had been appointed to work as secretary in one of the German infirmaries, and she had been able to make contact with the French men, who told her that of the 1,175 who had set out from France eight months before, only just over a hundred were still alive. But simply finding friends, hearing news, brought the women some kind of hope. The Frenchmen, who had, with the help of their communist comrades, been able to place a few men in the garage and gardening details, had found ways of smuggling information inside empty acetylene bottles.
More important, Danielle Casanova, working and sleeping in relative ease as a dentist for the SS guards and privileged prisoners, was able to get hold of extra bits of clothing and even medicine from ‘Canada’, the name given to the barracks overflowing with the possessions of the Jews, taken from them when the trains arrived. ‘Canada’ had acquired its name because of the country’s image of a land of unimaginable plenty. The men too had found ways to barter for warm clothes and even medicines in ‘Canada’ and when Hélène Bolleau developed an abscess that would not heal, they brought her ointment. Having got hold of some precious item—a towel, a toothbrush—the overwhelming problem was how not to lose it. ‘Foreign hands grazed our faces at night,’ wrote Adelaïde later, ‘trying to steal anything we had.’
In the evenings, after the roll call, Danielle came to find the others and, as in Romainville, she brought encouragement and comfort. Because she was in constant physical touch with the SS, who were terrified of the epidemics in the camp, she had been allowed to keep clean and to wear decent clothes. Her energetic, cheerful, determined presence and her healthy appearance became a source of strength to the others, who told each other that, whatever happened to the rest of them, Danielle was bound to survive and bear witness to what had happened to them.
Danielle managed to find a place in an infirmary for Maï Politzer, who, as a midwife, had medical skills, and places for several others in a sewing commando. She had also been able to place Betty in the infirmary, where her job was to scare the rats away from the living and carry the dead outside. When Hélène Solomon got an open sore on her foot, which became infected and turned black, Danielle invented a job as a nurse for her as well, and in the greater cleanliness of an infirmary barracks the infection cleared up. Sometimes, when Danielle came to visit the others in the evenings, her face was wet with tears; so many of the friends were dying and she felt responsible for not keeping them alive. So certain were the others that Danielle would live to see the end of the war that when they felt themselves near death they gave her their wedding rings to return to their husbands. For most of the women, these rings were the only personal possession they had managed to hold on to.
Friendship between the French women had, if possible, grown stronger. They took pride in their closeness and the fact that, unlike the Polish and German women who shared their barracks, they were as kind, helpful and polite towards one another as they would have been back at home. In the evenings, as they crouched in their dark damp bunks, Georgette Rostaing would sing to them, her strong voice rising in the silent barracks, and for a while they forgot and felt better. From the days working in the marshes, Marie-Jeanne Pennec, a countrywoman with a keen sense of what could be eaten, returned with snails, dandelions and grasses for the common pot.
Each of them, as Madeleine Dissoubray would later say, had come to regard her own survival as of no greater or lesser importance than the survival of any one of the others. The women kept back rations of their own bread for those among them who seemed especially weak, protected them at roll calls, and watched out for them when Taube and Drechsler were around. Knowing that the fate of each depended on the others, Poupette would say that all individual egotism seemed to vanish and that, stripped back to the bare edge of survival, each rose to behaviour few would have believed themselves capable of. ‘We didn’t stop to ask ourselves whom we liked and whom we didn’t,’ Cécile would later say. ‘It wasn’t so much friendship as solidarity. We just made certain we didn’t leave anyone alone.’
When Charlotte came down with typhus and for a few days was almost blind, the others held on to her all the time, leading her to work, putting the shovel in her hand, and telling her when and where to dig when the SS were close by. Few of Birkenau’s other women prisoners had the same closeness. Marie-Elisa was filled with pity for the Jewish women who, separated from their friends and families, mourning those who had gone straight to the gas chambers, struggled on their own, isolated in a fog of terror, exhaustion and grief. ‘We watched them, we knew how terrible it was for them,’ Marie-Elisa would say, ‘but we couldn’t help them.’
On the dreaded Sundays when the camp was suddenly disinfected, and all the inmates were driven out naked to stand about in the open while the barracks were cleaned out, the French women would look at one another with concern and affection, noting the bruises and the sores, teasing one another about their spiky tufts of hair. Even now, they could laugh and vanity had not altogether died. It was at these times, when the women had no clothes on, that the SS in search of maids came to choose ones they liked the look of.
The two sisters, Lulu and Carmen, together with Charlotte, Viva, Maï and Cécile were a particularly devoted group and they did what they could to look after Poupette and the other younger girls. During pauses in the work in the marshes, the women talked about going home, about literature and politics, about how they would remain friends for ever, and about what they would do once the war was over. But they were careful never to say too much about the children they had left behind, because the topic was too painful to bear. Poupette would later say that, like a sponge, she tried to absorb all they said.
Poupette was now one of the few left who still had a sister alive. Marie, however, had been particularly broken by Birkenau. She had been an optimistic, happy young woman, but now her eyes seemed permanently clouded over by disgust and disbelief. Haunted by their mother’s death, brooding over her fiancé’s treatment at the hands of the Gestapo, she kept wondering and worrying about who had given them away. But she and Poupette felt as if they were one, indissolubly linked, watching over each other.
Hélène’s mother Emma, who was still only 42, found the horror of Auschwitz doubly hard to bear. She feared and suffered for herself, but this was nothing to what she suffered for her daughter, dreading at every moment that Hélène would fall ill and feeling desolate that she could do nothing to protect or feed her only child. Increasingly, she came to feel a burden on Hélène. Then, in February, she came down with dysentery. Unlike many of the women, however, she clung on for a while, but she was growing weaker and more emaciated all the time. One morning, in the fields, Hélène watched her mother crawl over to some ruts left by horses’ hooves and drink the muddy water collected in them. On the 52nd day, so dehydrated that she could no longer drink, Emma died. She had become a skeleton. Hélène now clung to Poupette and Simone for survival.
Not one of the women believed that she would survive alone. It was only when they were together, Charlotte thought, that it was possible to ward off desperation. All her life, characters in plays and novels had lived with her inside her head. Since reaching Birkenau, they had fallen silent. ‘Where human beings are suffering and dying,’ she would later write, ‘there characters from the theatre cannot live.’ There was, she said, no place for theatre without a society, and in Auschwitz people so ‘diminished, so demeaned, so without their own selves, do not make a society’.
There were occasional moments of comradeship with outsiders. One day, walking back to the barracks, Simone crossed the path of a male prisoner who, pretending to stumble, dropped something at her feet. It turned out to be a present of woollen stockings, though she never discovered who the man was. And Charlotte was mysteriously befriended by a young Belorussian woman called Esther, who worked as a block elder in a barracks of German women and was clean and decently dressed. Every day, for a few weeks, Esther brought her a small present, a toothbrush one day, a sweater another. Then one day she vanished.
More remarkable, perhaps, was the story of how Aimée Doridat, who had helped her communist brother hide tracts at the beginning of the German occupation, was saved.
Working as a cleaner in the
Revier
, Aimée fell from a stepladder and broke her leg. Gangrene set in. Then Erna, the Czech head of the
Revier
, arranged to have her transferred to the men’s camp, where a Polish surgeon told her that he would have to amputate. Aimée said that she would rather die. ‘But don’t you have young children?’ the surgeon asked. ‘They will need you.’ Aimée had two children and the younger was just nine. The operation went ahead. While Aimée was recovering, an SS doctor, one of the very few humane men among them, said to her that he so admired her courage that she could ask for something she wanted. ‘A French friend I can talk to,’ Aimée replied. Betty was brought over by Danielle to look after her. A pair of crutches was ‘organised’ from Canada, and she rejoined the others, who now never abandoned her for a moment, to ensure that she would not be left defenceless. Marie-Claude, working in the administrative offices, was able to get advance notice of special selections for the gas chambers, and on those days, Aimée was hidden. So cohesive had the women become, so attuned to each other’s frailties, so watchful and protective, that planning how to keep the group alive had become a way of life.
March brought rains. The snow melted and the marshes turned into a sea of mud. Those responsible for collecting the vast cauldrons of soup sank in the mud up to their thighs. Sixty-seven days after reaching Birkenau, the women removed their stockings for the first time, and were permitted to wash their feet in the water now flowing in the ditches. They discovered that, except for their big toes, all their other nails had gone. Looking at her friends sitting caked in mud reminded Charlotte of a ‘miserable swarm that made one think of flies on a dung heap’. She dreamt of having three baths, one after the other, in warm, soft, soapy water. During the interminable roll calls, the women had taken to playing a game. One would ask another: ‘If you could choose between a big bowl of boiling hot, foamy chocolate, or a bath with lavender soap, or a warm cosy bed, which would you choose?’ Nearly always the answer was the same: the hot bath or the warm bed.
But the number of survivors was dwindling. Dysentery set in and the women aged before the eyes of their friends. Typhus, brought to Auschwitz in April 1941 by prisoners transferred from a jail in Lublin, was ravaging the camp. One by one the French women, who had survived the hunger, the back-breaking work, the intense cold and the endless skin infections, began to fall ill. At roll calls, they pinched their ashen cheeks to appear healthier. All night, death rattles could be heard rising from the bunks. Women woke to find that their faces had swollen during the night and that they were too ill to move. They were now dying at the same rate as the Jewish women, who were more brutally treated by the guards. On one single night, nine of the remaining French women died. André Montagne, a 19-year-old survivor from the
Convoi des 45000
, sent to work in Birkenau one day, happened to look into the French women’s barracks. He would never forget the horror of what he saw, the appalling dirt and overcrowding and the groans of the sick.