A Train in Winter (33 page)
Authors: Caroline Moorehead
In March, Raymonde Sergent, who had promised her daughter Gisèle that she would soon be home, began to feel ill. Raymonde had been very strong for the first few weeks, making plans with all the women from the Tours region that once they were released they would come to her cafe in Saint-Martin-le-Beau to share some good bottles of wine that she had hidden away for the end of the war. But as the days passed she seemed to give up hope. One day, one of the other women asked her if she really thought that they would ever return to drink the wine? Raymonde replied: ‘No, neither you nor I will ever drink it.’ She entered the
Revier
with her legs swollen and bleeding from oedema, and died there. To Hélène Fournier, who was the last of the seventeen women from the Tours area still alive, she said, ‘Tell my husband and Gisèle that I never forgot them, and that I tried to hold on.’
Then one morning, Maï, who as a nurse working with Danielle was living in the comparative comfort of a
Revier
, woke with a boil on her upper lip. It grew larger and spread: she was diagnosed with typhus. Her temperature rose and she fell unconscious. A few days later she was dead. Rosa, the youngest girl in the group, who had cried so bitterly for her mother in Romainville, also caught typhus. Ill and weak, she became childlike again and kept begging for her mother. Then she too died. These deaths were terrible to the survivors. Maï had been a constant and encouraging presence; Rosa, a child, they counted on saving.
What was becoming clear to all of them was that the younger girls did not appear to possess the resilience of the older women. Even when physically strong and capable, they seemed to be mentally more fragile, and thus more vulnerable. Twenty-year-old Andrée Tamisé was already weakened by dysentery when she picked up a chest infection. Desperate not to be parted from her sister Gilberte, she dragged herself, with Gilberte’s help, to the marshes. Each day, she found breathing a little harder. Finally one morning, she said to Gilberte, ‘I can’t follow you any more.’ When the others left for work, she tried to join the line of women queueing by the
Revier
, but a guard pushed her away. Andrée crept back into her bunk and hid. But a
kapo
spotted her, dragged her outside and beat her. That night Gilberte returned to find her sister covered in mud, bruised and semi-conscious. During the night, Andrée died. Rising before dawn next morning, Gilberte carried her body outside and laid it tenderly by a wall.
One of the next to go was Claudine Guérin, Germaine Pican’s young friend from Rouen. In Birkenau, Claudine had managed to remain cheerful and uncomplaining, trying to make the others laugh. One day she came over to Germaine, to whom she was very close, looking so white that Germaine hardly recognised her. She was wearing, under her striped jacket, a crêpe de Chine dress that someone had given her from ‘Canada’. She said to Germaine: ‘Hug me’. It was a Sunday, and Germaine urged her to go outside to sit in the fresh air and sunshine. A few days later, Claudine found a frog in the fields and insisted on sharing it with Germaine.
Then came a disinfectant day, and the women were driven out of the barracks to stand around naked while the mattresses were shaken out. Claudine was separated from the others when they went back inside. They heard her saying softly, over and over again, ‘Maman, maman’. She died a few days before her 18th birthday.
But perhaps the most demoralising and upsetting blow to the group as a whole was when Danielle Casanova caught typhus. The SS, appreciating her usefulness as a dentist, vaccinated her, and gave her tea and lemon to drink. But it was too late, and Danielle died. When Charlotte went to see her, she found that one of the gardening detail had put a bunch of lilac in a glass by her bed, and some branches, with leaves, between her hands. Her corpse was said to be the only healthy body anyone had seen for a long time, and beautiful in death. They mourned her bitterly. The wedding rings that she had looked after so carefully disappeared. Marie-Claude, to whom she had been so close, was overwhelmed with sadness.
Two and a half months after reaching Birkenau, the French women were down to eighty. A hundred and fifty of them had died, from typhus, pneumonia, dysentery, from dog bites and beatings and gangrenous frostbite, from not being able to eat or sleep, or from being gassed. In the filth and cold and danger of Birkenau, almost anything was fatal. The ones still alive were the stronger women, those neither too old nor too young, those sustained by belief in a new world order; or, quite simply, because they had been lucky. Without the help of the others, they knew that many more of them would already be dead. One Sunday, when the sky was blue and the women were allowed to rest, Charlotte remembered other spring Sundays, walking by the Seine under the chestnut trees. ‘None of us,’ she thought, ‘none of us will return.’
By the late spring of 1943, when the snows began to melt and the meadows beyond the barbed-wire fence turned green with yellow buttercups, and the blackthorn was covered in white down, Auschwitz was well into its phase of maximum activity. There were trains arriving almost daily from the ghettos of Pruzana, Theresienstadt and Zamosc, from Holland, Germany and France. About one in ten of all new arrivals was being picked out to work, the rest ‘lodged separately’, that is to say gassed. Every one of the 1,750 children from Poland, all of them under 10, who arrived over a two-day period before the snows had melted, was gassed on arrival. The new crematoria were working night and day, and the flames could be seen rising brightly against the sky. A high-ranking party of SS officials from Berlin and inspectors from J.A. Topf and Sons came to Birkenau on an official visit and pronounced the ovens to be efficient.
Thirty barracks, vast empty hangars, were filled to overflowing with the possessions of Europe’s Jews, who had been encouraged to bring with them all that they would need for their new lives in the east, not only gold and jewellery, but professional equipment, medicines, fur coats, extra clothes, vitamins and prams. The trains that brought people to Auschwitz returned to Germany packed with loot, to be funnelled into elaborate networks that permeated the whole of the Third Reich.
Auschwitz itself, now the Reich’s largest concentration and extermination camp, had become a vast complex of offices, storerooms, workshops, canteens and houses for the three thousand or so SS present at any one time, while some thirty-nine separate satellite camps were turning out spare parts for tanks, lorries, planes, anti-aircraft guns, as well as synthetic rubber, ammunition, cement and uniforms. For every worker leased out to IG Farben or Siemens, the SS charged three marks a day; for a specialist, a skilled electrician or welder, five marks. Those unable to function productively on the 1,200 or less calories allotted to them were returned to the gas chambers at Birkenau. Employers sometimes complained that they were being sent skeletons, not men and women.
What was now absolutely plain to the eighty surviving French women, many of whom were extremely frail, was that their continuing survival would depend on great luck and on their continuing ability to adapt and organise themselves. They had taken care to master enough German and the bastardised language of the camps to avoid blows by reacting too slowly to orders. They had learnt to hang back, when the cauldrons of soup arrived, in order to get the bottom layers, where shreds of meat or vegetables gathered. They knew to cultivate friends in ‘Canada’, who, in return for extra portions of bread, might take the risk of stealing a pair of woollen stockings or some decent shoes. They had discovered how important it was to stay together, not get separated, so each could watch the others’ backs.
Their own particular skills as women, caring for others and being practical, made them, they told themselves, less vulnerable than men to harsh conditions and despair. Adaptibility was crucial, resignation fatal. The inability to undo a vision of life as it should be and not cope with what it was, led, as they had observed, to apathy and the condition of
musulmans
, those more dead than alive. They did their best to stay clean, to wash their faces in the snow or icy brooks, believing that it made them both healthier and more dignified. And they wanted, passionately, to live, to survive the war, and to describe to the world exactly what they had been through and what they had witnessed.
When Germaine Pican found a dead crow in the marshes, even the mouthful she shared with the others gave them a sense of achievement. Charlotte, for her part, fought the cold and exhaustion by pretending that she was somewhere else, reciting to herself poems and plays. Her refrain was ‘to keep alive, to remain me’. It did not nullify what was going on around her, but it made her feel some kind of ‘victory over horror’.
Even so, by now most of the women had ceased in their hearts to believe that they would live to see the end of the war. Conditions in the women’s camp at Birkenau, worse than elsewhere in Auschwitz, with more overcrowding and less water, were getting harsher, and few felt confident that they could for much longer escape the sudden and arbitrary brutality of the SS and the
kapos
. Their bodies were covered in soft, fat, white lice. They were exhausted. Walking back at the end of a long day in the marshes, Cécile, so strong and positive by nature, could only think how close she felt to the end, how without hope of any kind.
But then, something completely unexpected happened. Their luck, the ultimate arbiter of life and death in Auschwitz, changed.
In Ukraine and Belorussia, the Germans had seen fields of kok-saghyz, a dandelion from central Asia whose root and juice contained latex, and from which the Russians derived rubber. In desperate need of rubber themselves, the Germans thought they could cultivate kok-saghyz on the swampy plains of Auschwitz and, under the auspices of IG Farben, appointed an SS Obersturmbannführer with a PhD in agricultural sciences, Joachim Caesar, to run the laboratory.
The first recruits chosen to work under him were Polish women from Birkenau, but in March word reached Marie-Claude, whose position in the camp administration meant she was aware of any new developments, that Caesar was looking for biologists. Marie-Elisa Nordmann and Madeleine Dechavassine, both chemists before the war, applied. Marie-Elisa was actually in the infirmary with pneumonia and such a high temperature that she could not stand up, but a nurse showed her how to bring the fever down with an instant remedy of 90 per cent alcohol and a bit of coffee, and she pulled round before the medical inspection. And in the wake of Marie-Elisa and Madeleine, claiming scientific expertise that few had any notion of, fifteen more French women set off for the experimental station at Raisko. Among them were Cécile, Charlotte, Germaine Pican, Lulu and her sister Carmen. Lulu would later say that up until that moment, she could barely tell a potato from a carrot.
Hélène Solomon, who was just recovering from typhus, was allowed to join the group after a prisoner doctor swore that she had only been suffering from flu. Viva was to have gone with them, but she had typhus and was in the
Revier
, where it seemed that she was holding her own.
Raisko, which consisted of an old schoolhouse surrounded by fields and greenhouses, lay some three kilometres from Birkenau. It was encircled by barbed wire, but not electrified, and there were no watchtowers with SS guards and guns. Caesar, who was afraid of contagion, as were all the SS, and whose own wife had died of typhus not long before, insisted that the women who worked for him were clean and healthy. After nearly three months of filth, the French women could not believe it when they were permitted to wash and were given clean new blouses and proper leather shoes; though the food was the same, the soup was thicker, and there were endless possibilities of ‘organising’ —Auschwitz’s word for stealing—vegetables from the surrounding fields, where other prisoners were growing produce for the SS.
Until a new barracks was made ready for them, the women returned to Birkenau each night. The camp still lay under a crust of ice, and when the moon shone the barbed wire was picked out in frost. They tramped through a silent, still world, holding on to one another, so as not to slip. But then they moved into Raisko itself in which there were dormitories and each woman had her own bed, with a straw mattress. There were hot showers. The roll call, during which so many of their friends had died, was reduced to no more than a few minutes morning and evening. There were far fewer fleas. Caesar was more interested in getting results—which would keep him from a possible transfer to the eastern front—than in persecuting his staff. At times he treated the scientists among them almost as colleagues. Their ailments were even noted in the ledger of the Raisko hospital, where they were allowed to spend time when ill. When it got warmer, one of the SS guards, who told the women that unless he was soon transferred away from Auschwitz he was going to kill himself, let them bathe in a pond and wash their clothes, while he looked scrupulously away.
The work was not arduous. The more skilled among them, such as Marie-Elisa and Madeleine, were assigned to a young German chemist called Ruth Weimann in the laboratory, where they divided their time between helping her with the chemistry for her dissertation, and ensuring that the results of their experiments appeared positive, the better to prolong Raisko’s existence. The others worked in the kok-saghyz fields, sorted plants and acted as assistants. Occasionally, they were ordered to make funeral wreaths for SS guards who died of typhus.
On arriving, Marie-Elisa had discovered a friend and colleague from before the war, Claudette Bloch, who told her that several of the French men from the
Convoi des 45,000
were employed at Raisko as gardeners. As in Birkenau, the men had found ways of learning the news, and even of getting hold of newspapers, which they now left hidden in safe spots for the women. Using an atlas from ‘Canada’, concealed in an attic above the laboratory, Marie-Elisa, Charlotte and the others were able to follow the Nazi defeats on the eastern front.