by Paige Bowers
Who could believe that women were being treated this way, after all? And who could believe that those who perished were being incinerated in one of the two crematoriums on-site? Could anyone imagine the stacks of dead bodies piled outside the barracks, just waiting to be wheeled away? All of it was unreal, but all of it was true.
After days of worrying about Geneviève’s whereabouts, Jacqueline learned through Czech prisoners who worked in camp administration that her friend was being closely guarded in the bunker. Because she wasn’t allowed to communicate with Geneviève, she felt like she had lost a twin sister. That’s how close they had been. Jacqueline headed back to work in the clothing workshop, worried that they would never see each other again.
After Geneviève had been alone in the bunker for a few days, her cell door was unlocked. A female guard looked at her and asked who she was, what she was doing there, and how long she had been in the cell. Geneviève could tell her who she was and how long she had been there but not why. The guard left to find out why 27,372 was in solitary confinement. Within moments she returned to tell Geneviève that she had been the victim of an error. She would not be punished, she would soon receive something to eat, and the shutters would be opened so that light could be let in.
A female inmate arrived with some food. Her purple triangle showed that she was a Jehovah’s Witness, and her low prisoner number indicated that she had been at the camp for a long time. When the shutter was opened, Geneviève could see that her damp cell was clean, except for a group of plump cockroaches that had become interested in the bread that had just been delivered. Geneviève chewed her bread slowly as she climbed onto a chair to open her window. The window opened onto a ditch, so Geneviève realized she must have been placed in the underground portion of the bunker. She knocked on her cell walls to figure out who was in the adjoining cells. No one answered. She overheard guards talking to the prisoner in the cell to her right; he was an SS soldier.
All Geneviève had was a large piece of white cloth, the sweater she wore underneath her prison dress, a pair of thick wool socks, a needle holder with three steel needles, a cloth pouch for her bread rations, and a small pencil hidden in the hem of her skirt. Her toilet paper was squares cut from a newspaper. Geneviève passed time catching up on some dated news items before setting aside scraps where the news had been censored. In the morning she stood at attention for roll call, then sat alone in her cell. To ward off boredom she organized cockroach races. Two winners emerged from the competitions. She named the largest Felix and the other Victor. The remaining challengers got a few scattered crumbs for their effort. The Jehovah’s Witness delivered her daily soup, and Geneviève burst into tears when she found a tiny piece of meat floating in it. A guard took her for a walk in the courtyard, and as she looked up at the gray sky, snow began to fall. She was ordered back to her cell.
That night she dreamed of a big, calm lake in the middle of the forest, one not too different from the one just outside the camp’s walls. She walked toward it, but a hand reached out and kept her from falling in the water. She felt peaceful for the first time in months and could remember the Hail Mary chant that she had struggled to recall just a few days before.
8
Marking the Days
They thought they would be home for Christmas, but as the holiday approached, Geneviève realized it was not to be. She had been marking the days on a newspaper page. One Sunday afternoon the woman who brought her meals told her that the SS were having some sort of celebration. They were so drunk that she wanted to take the opportunity to bring her material to repair the holes in her stockings. Geneviève accepted the wool yarn and scissors and put the mending and darning skills she learned at boarding school to use. When the Jehovah’s Witness returned to collect the supplies, she was impressed by Geneviève’s mending work and offered to bring her more to do.
“Please call me Anna,” the woman said.
Geneviève decided to embroider her a napkin for Christmas. After finishing her needlework on Christmas Eve, she sat in her cell, listening to slamming doors and screams all around her and then sudden silence. The stillness frightened her even more than the commotion did. Then a woman’s voice began to sing, “Silent Night, Holy Night. All is calm, all is bright.” The carol brought Geneviève some comfort, so she began to sing a few others to herself before falling asleep.
When Anna delivered her coffee the next day, Geneviève slipped her the handkerchief and wished her Merry Christmas in German. Anna didn’t respond or smile. As she walked away Geneviève sipped her coffee and cried.
The day after Christmas Anna arrived with a box that she placed on Geneviève’s mattress.
“A Christmas present from your friends,” Anna told her. “I couldn’t bring it any sooner because we were being watched by the SS guards even more closely than usual. But now they are sleeping off their long night of heavy drinking and debauchery. I managed to get ahold of the key. Take everything out of the box. I’ll stop by later to pick it up.”
Geneviève opened the box to find a pine tree branch, the Christmas carol “Away in a Manger,” four star-shaped cookies, an apple, a piece of pork fat, and two squares of sugar. Jacqueline had made her a marquise doll dressed in pink with curly white hair. At the bottom of the box was a neatly folded brown shawl made of wool that Geneviève wrapped around her shoulders. She curled up on her bed and fell asleep.
When Anna returned for the box, she told Geneviève that it hadn’t been a good holiday for the rest of the camp.
“Last night was so sad, the air filled as it was with all the screaming and moaning,” she said. “Here in the solitary section you were spared, but your neighbors in the camp were not. For Christmas Eve, beatings were the order of the day.”
Anna walked away with the box, and Geneviève was left alone with the mental image of what might have happened to her friends the night before. Distressed, she wrapped her shawl around herself tightly again and drifted off. She dreamed she was a little girl of nine and that she was walking through a field of daisies and then a forest of pines in the summer. One of her uncles twisted together a crown of leaves and placed it on her head before telling her, “You’re the queen of the flowers, Geneviève.” She was happy in her reverie, and she saw her brother, Roger, and sister, Jacqueline, there too, looking at her with adoration. When she woke up she remembered that Jacqueline was dead, and she had no idea whether Roger was still alive. She was cut off from everyone and everything she cared about.
Throughout the camp there were holiday celebrations, some of which were SS approved. One group of prisoners formed a committee to organize a party for children at the camp, which would include extra food, gifts, stories, songs, a puppet show, and a visit from Santa. The prisoners received approval to host the gathering in an empty, newly disinfected block and went to work building and painting the puppet stage, sewing costumes, and decorating a tree cut down from the nearby forests. Women saved their food and made gifts from fabric scraps and other found items so Santa could leave them under their pillows at the end of the night. Polish prisoners decided to throw another party too, and Binz made appearances at both of them to remind them to finish the festivities as soon as they could. Carolers filed into the infirmary to sing to the ill before fanning out across the camp to sing to other prisoners. The SS doled out even more food to the children.
“Some of us thought we would get caught for celebrating,” one prisoner wrote. “But it seemed that even the grace of Christmas could touch the German heart.”
Across the camp Margarete Buber-Neumann received a large package of gift-wrapped food and sweets from her brother-in-law, Bernhard. When she removed the contents of the box, she turned it over to find color reproductions of Vincent Van Gogh’s Three Ships on the Strand and Sunflowers and Pierre-Auguste Renoir’s The Country House.
“Those three pictures gave us a tremendous amount of pleasure,” she recalled. “They spoke of another world and another life and they fortified our b
elief that one day we should be free to enjoy all the things they symbolized.”
It was impossible not to dream of that other life. Bernhard, a doctor, understood this because he had once been interred in a concentration camp. Now that he had been released, he knew how to send prisoners secret letters that censors couldn’t decipher. One day he sent Margarete a dozen eggs, each of them decorated with an intricate miniature of flowers, birds, children, and other images. The supervisor at the parcel office was suspicious of the contents but couldn’t figure out why, so she refused to hand them over. Margarete begged, and the woman changed her mind. Margarete ran off with the box and sat on the ground with friends to inspect what was inside. All of the paintings were harmless, except for one: Bernhard had re-created the legend of Perseus and Andromeda on one of the shells. As Margarete looked at the egg closely, she could see that Bernhard had painted a tiny “You” onto Andromeda and an “Us” onto Perseus. She was convinced Bernhard was trying to tell her that the Nazis would soon be defeated.
Until then what would become of them? By the end of 1944, Nazis were emptying German prisons and sending convoys of women and children to Ravensbrück. Anise watched them arrive and didn’t believe they were in any state to survive. Trucks came to take the sick from the infirmary blocks. The official word was that these women would be transported to the camp at Uckermark to make room for new, able-bodied prisoners. But behind the scenes Suhren told his men that anyone who couldn’t march or was too sick to work had to be exterminated. At Uckermark nurses gave ailing prisoners a mysterious white powder that killed them within twenty-four hours.
Some blockovas thought the story behind the Uckermark evacuations was suspicious. When guards asked them for their lists of ill prisoners, they would tell them that everyone in their barracks was healthy and able to work. But one blockova admitted that she turned over a total of 132 names to her superiors before she realized these women were to be murdered. She stopped after that. However, other blockovas continued to comply with orders, allowing women to be taken away. Those prisoners were never seen again.
Anise wondered where the trucks were going. She and others got as close as they could to the entrance gate to see whether they could determine in which direction the departures were headed. Because the trucks returned within ten to fifteen minutes, Anise knew they couldn’t have gone far.
The US Seventh Army captured records from the Struthof concentration camp in Alsace and determined how many people had died behind its electric fences. Records indicated that at least fifteen thousand died between April 1941 and November 1944.
The camp had what Nazi officers described as a “fumigation unit,” which was outfitted with fire extinguishers and a gas outlet. Witnesses disputed that characterization, saying that they heard the screams of eighty women coming from the so-called unit late one August night in 1943. Two Germans witnessed the mass killing, which was said to be a test of a new gas’s effect on the human body.
At Ravensbrück, camp officials had built a gas chamber just outside the facility’s gates so that no one inside the camp could see it. Suhren appointed SS officer Johann Schwarzhuber to be in charge of selections for the chamber, and each afternoon he visited Uckermark for meetings about who should be gassed. Those who were selected were told that they were being taken to a camp called Mittwerda. It was a ruse. The camp did not exist. The women were taken to the gas chambers in the evenings. When they stopped outside of Ravensbrück, guards told worried passengers that it was because they needed to be deloused before the rest of their trip.
After their arrival Schwarzhuber ordered 150 women at a time into the chamber, where they were told to undress so they could be deloused. They were directed into the gassing room, and the door was closed. A male inmate donned a gas mask and threw a gas canister into the room via an opening in the roof. Moans and screams began as soon as the room was sealed shut.
“I can’t say whether the women were dead or unconscious because I was not present when the room was cleared out,” Schwarzhuber later said.
Prisoners began gossiping about possible gassings on-site, and their fears became stronger when they saw mountains of clothing returned to the camp, some of it recognizable. In the middle of the night, the bodies were brought to the crematorium, which was just inside the front gates.
“These bodies would be a big problem for them,” Anise recalled. “It helped that the ovens weren’t too far away.”
After hearing about the horrors that had begun unfolding outside the camp’s gates, Germaine Tillion couldn’t help but write a dark comic operetta, called Verfügbar in Hell, in one of her hidden notebooks. In it one of the characters talks about being shipped off to a model camp with all the comforts of water, gas, and electricity. The choir chimed in, “Gas, above all!”
The smell of the crematoriums became intolerable. Smoke began filling Geneviève’s cell because of its proximity to the ovens. One of the furnaces, which had been packed with bodies, caught fire. The death toll kept rising, and there was no way to hide that.
“They’re all going to die,” Anna told Geneviève, as she handed her coffee.
Geneviève couldn’t bear the prolonged separation from her friends, especially under these circumstances. For several nights she had a recurring dream that she was taken from her cell and put into a car that kept driving into the night. Suddenly she was facing a tribunal. Dressed in dark robes and magistrate hats, the judges asked her to describe life at Ravensbrück. She knew they were asking her to do something important, but as she began to speak there were gaps in her testimony.
She had already forgotten.
Each time she woke up from the dream, she felt like she was not up to the task of testifying.
“I only want to share what I saw with my own eyes, what I personally experienced . . . and that is atrocious,” she said. “Little by little, my memory reconstitutes what until now I have done my best to forget simply in order to survive.”
Meanwhile at a farmhouse two hours southeast of Paris, the men who had handed Geneviève de Gaulle over to the Germans were about to be brought to justice. A police scout dressed as a hobo had been monitoring the farm and had information that Pierre Bonny and Henri Lafont, chiefs of the gang behind Geneviève de Gaulle’s arrest, had been holed up there with their families since the liberation of Paris, trying to avoid capture. One day later, thirty French Forces of the Interior fighters descended on the farm and found Lafont there, repairing a chair. When he and Bonny were told they were under arrest, Bonny asked for a warrant. The officer in charge showed Bonny his machine gun and said, “Here it is.” Bonny was taken away, along with one of his mistresses, her son, her daughter, and Bonny’s actual wife.
When the gang was brought in to the prefect of police, he expressed his disgust.
“You Frenchmen, who have been sold to the enemy, you carry on your shoulders all the hatred and contempt of the French,” the prefect told them.
Their trial began in September. It began with a Mme Lascaut telling the courtroom what Bonny, “a monster,” did to her two impressionable nephews, Jacques and Jean. Bonny, she said, lured the boys into his gang and coerced them into denouncing resistance members. The boys had been raised by a woman who had become widowed very young and who sacrificed mightily for her three children, one of whom was a girl, Lascaut said. Mme Lascaut had educated them well, but the boys were soon lured down a slippery slope.
Jacques, twenty-four, was the handsome one, and he hated his less attractive younger brother, who limped through life, drinking heavily. But what he lacked in polish, Jean had in intelligence and drive. Although Jean spent a lot of time with his older brother, he loathed him as well. Their contempt for each other was such that they almost stabbed each other to death over 1,000 francs. They joined the French Gestapo under Bonny on the sole condition that their brotherhood remain a secret. Bonny honored that.
Jacques changed as soon as he began working with the rue Lauriston gang, Lascaut testified. He ca
rried on like the men around him, taking three mistresses in Montmartre and acting as their protector. Before long he earned his stripes among this tough set. They trusted him in the confession room to use whatever force necessary to get subjects to speak. Many times he would return to one of his mistresses after a brutal session, drunk on alcohol and another man’s blood.
“I drank to give me heart,” he told his women. “I had a funny job to do.”
He loved blood, Lascaut said. But the two brothers had a falling-out with Bonny. Jacques went to Brittany, and Jean worked with the German paramilitary group the Nationalsozialistisches Kraftfahrkorps (National Socialist Motor Corp), or NSKK, in Cherbourg. Both boys testified in the trial to give inspectors information on the main players who were arrested.
On the first day of the trial, Henri Lafont’s attorneys described his life as one full of setbacks and condemnations until 1941, when he joined the Gestapo. He became a naturalized German in 1942 and then a very wealthy man as a result of his work with Bonny. Lafont had turned over several names to the police.
Bonny and Lafont had to answer for their group’s betrayal of patriots, especially Geneviève de Gaulle. Three days into the hearing, Lafont said he couldn’t remember anything that had happened with General de Gaulle’s niece. Bonny knew he had given information to the Gestapo, but Lafont added that they weren’t the informants. A young resister who had been arrested at the same time as Geneviève de Gaulle then testified that Geneviève herself said that she had been arrested by Bonny and turned over to the Germans.