The General's Niece

by Paige Bowers

  Geneviève looked at the young woman, who couldn’t have been more than nineteen years old, and couldn’t believe that she had called Dorothea Binz fair. But she had been employed at the camp for six months at most, Geneviève thought, so what could she have known about her? How could she have known about all the cruel things she had done? She thought of the beatings and Binz’s glee at watching people suffer. Although she was far from Ravensbrück’s gates, Geneviève’s thoughts about the camp disturbed her, even in that peaceful inn.

  One of the SS officers returned from the village carrying a large package of butter and eggs. That evening the five of them sat at the same table for dinner. All of them ate hot soup, but only the SS were served scrambled eggs and fried potatoes. Geneviève and Virginia sat in front of empty plates until they offered their host margarine from their rations and were served potatoes too. After dinner the group went to bed. The women shared the room with two twin beds; the guard got a bed to herself, while Geneviève and Virginia shared the other one. The guard locked the door and tucked the key under her pillow before she fell asleep. One male guard slept outside the room in the doorway, while another curled up on a table for the night.

  They set out for Ulm the next day on foot, reaching the city limits as air-raid sirens began to wail. They kept walking. An old woman ran past them frantically, and the streets emptied. The group hid in an air-raid shelter and waited for the all clear to sound. When it did thirty minutes later, Ulm had been pounded to rubble. Families pulled carts of their possessions through the streets. Geneviève, Virginia, and their guards wove their way to the train station only to find it was no longer standing. To reach Stuttgart they would have to walk to a smaller station five miles north of Ulm. Virginia told the others she didn’t think she could walk that far, but she realized she had no other choice. They took to the road in a sea of soldiers and civilians, reaching the station that afternoon. The station stood in the open countryside and was surrounded by travelers just like them who were eager to leave. Geneviève, Virginia, and their guards reached Stuttgart later that night only to find it in ruins too. They walked the streets looking for the Gestapo headquarters where they were to receive their final orders. It was locked, so they slept on benches in front of it as the night watchman monitored their every move. The next day they were told to head back to Ulm. A functionary from the Interior Ministry said things were about to get better.

  “You will be taken to a camp for Anglo-American internees where you will be very well taken care of,” he said. “Stay calm.”

  They walked back to Ulm in the heavy snow. During the journey Geneviève learned their female guard was from Saarbrücken, not far from where Geneviève had lived as a child. Prior to becoming a guard, the woman said that she had lingering memories of crowding into a bomb shelter with two hundred other residents from her hometown and being one of two people to survive an Allied bombing raid. Now falling bombs terrified her, she said, and she did not want to wait in Ulm because she feared another bombing. She demanded that they begin walking again.

  They continued five miles south to Donautal, which was crowded with refugees. Virginia signaled to Geneviève that she needed to stop, and they entered the first inn they found. Geneviève thought it was a pitiful sight; the room was full of worried people crowded around a radio. They found a table near the stove when an announcer said that a wave of bombers was headed in their direction. There was barely enough time to close the inn’s shutters when bombs began falling on the train station nearby. The ground rumbled and the building shook as chairs fell over, glasses crashed to the floor, and people ran outside or hid under tables. Virginia didn’t move from her perch by the stove. The guards rushed Geneviève and Virginia out of the building and into a cement shelter until the end of the raid. When the bombing stopped they walked along the highway in the midst of people in trucks and on bicycles until a driver stopped and offered them a ride to their next train station. They waited for three hours in an inn across the street from the depot, dipping into Geneviève’s food parcels to share a box of sardines. The smell floated over the room, arousing interest among those who had not seen or tasted the delicacy during wartime. Virginia looked up and saw her reflection in a mirror for the first time since leaving France. Skin stretched across her bones like parchment, she had no hips or breasts, and her eyes lacked sparkle. She turned away in shock.

  The group reached Liebenau at 10:30 PM. One of the SS officers phoned the camp to warn them of their arrival. There was no transportation at that time, so they walked three miles in the snow to get to the camp. They trudged past houses in the dark, occasionally stopping to ask for directions. The female guard got so tired that the male officers arranged to have her stay at a residence along the way. Geneviève, Virginia, and the SS officers kept walking in the darkness. They couldn’t find the camp, so they decided to go back to the train station. It was 2:30 AM when they returned, and they slept on wooden benches. The camp supervisors came for them the next morning. On their walk back to the camp, they realized that they had turned back too soon. The moment they reached the gates of Liebenau, they knew they had been saved.

  Liebenau was once a Catholic-run mental hospital, but it had been turned into an internment camp for American and English women during the war. It had three large, modern buildings and a farm situated in a rolling countryside of fields and orchards. Lake Constance and the Swiss Alps provided a stunning backdrop.

  When Geneviève and Virginia arrived, they were given clean, comfortable beds in a large room shared with four other internees. They were fed camp food and given Red Cross parcels. They could take walks and read whatever they wanted in the well-stocked library. The difference with their evening roll call was that sometimes a nurse would kiss them on the head good night after tucking them in. Geneviève’s last name made her a camp celebrity, while Virginia’s physical condition garnered her great sympathy. Two weeks after her arrival, she contracted dysentery, but the staff nursed her back to health and happiness. On April 20 Geneviève was released from the camp, and all the former internees crowded around the car to give her a joyful send-off. The next day Allied troops came into Liebenau and the women rejoiced, throwing a party for the French forces that liberated them.

  Geneviève crossed Germany in a Red Cross car on a beautiful spring day. The fruit trees were flowering, and the sun softened the landscape. When she reached Lake Constance, a boat took her and Red Cross representatives to the opposite shore. From there they drove to the Swiss frontier and waited until border guards got the order to let her pass into Switzerland. Geneviève tried to call her father, who was en route to Bâle for the first trade show France had participated in since the beginning of the war. She met him that evening at his residence in Geneva. When Xavier saw his emaciated daughter standing before him, he was too overcome with emotion to speak. All he could do was hold her close.

  The next day Geneviève rediscovered France. Xavier was invited to a ceremony in the little French village of Saint-Jeoire, which had been home to many resisters and maquisards. Geneviève accompanied him on his journey, and when she crossed into Haute-Savoie, she was full of emotion. At the monument to the dead, she heard her first “La Marseillaise” as a free woman. There had been bouquets prepared for all the women at the ceremony except for her because the organizers did not expect her to be in attendance. Locals gathered lilies from neighboring gardens and presented them to her before she returned to her father’s car only to find it covered in a mountain of bouquets.

  10

  Liberation

  Still languishing at Ravensbrück, Geneviève’s friends did what they could to survive. Rumors spread around the camp that the Rabbits would be killed. When the SS began rounding up prisoners during work hours for reasons that were not clear, some of the women sought to protect their Polish friends, because there were at least six of them who could no longer walk due to the experiments that had been performed on their legs. A band of prisoners hid them in the sick bay
s for contagious internees because they knew SS nurses would not go in there. A few days later it became clear that women were being sent off to the gas chamber.

  In early February there was another roundup of prisoners in Block 32 and an order that the Rabbits could not leave the barracks. Six women in the barracks offered to switch numbers with the invalids and die in their place. In the meantime Russian prisoners cut the camp’s electricity in an effort to slow down the SS. In the confusion the Rabbits were able to hide, but the prisoners had to continue to find ways to conceal the women every day. The SS suspected that the women were being hidden and organized surprise roll calls to get around the subterfuge. Other prisoners stood in for them anyway and never turned them over to the Germans.

  In March a Polish internee in one of the more privileged blocks sheltered Jacqueline for two hours a day. She helped her sneak in through the barracks window so that she wouldn’t be noticed. She gave Jacqueline paper and a pencil to write down all the poems she could recite from memory, among them works by Paul Claudel and Pierre de Ronsard and passages from the Song of Songs. Jacqueline hid in a corner when she created these little books, writing painstakingly small to conserve paper. After poetry Jacqueline created recipe collections, which she believed were no different from fairy tales given the dearth of food. A prisoner had begun asking around to see who Jacqueline was and whether she lived in the block. Before having to admit she really belonged in Block 31, Jacqueline jumped out the window and hid.

  Electric power had been cut off and daily rations arrived after dark. In the dark, as frigid air blew into the glassless windows, prisoners fought for food and stumbled back to their beds to eat, trying not to spill what was in their bowls. Dysentery was rampant, and the washrooms smelled like sewers. At night two to three women shared one blanket unless they lived in the nicer barracks. The guards had been conducting selections, and they were on the hunt for the weak or Verfügbar to send to the gas chamber, on death marches, or on a deadly work assignment.

  “Constantly on the alert, we formed a team of five comrades and each morning we thought up all sorts of stratagems to escape the horrible manhunt that rounded up victims for the gas chamber,” Jacqueline recalled, adding that they jumped out of windows or hid in the block’s false ceilings or under its bunk beds. “Survival depended on the speed of our reactions,” she said.

  A Czech prisoner named Anicka got Jacqueline assigned to a work group that sorted clothes that prisoners handed over upon their arrival at the camp. At the end of her shift, she returned to Block 31 with a hidden stash of skirts and sweaters that her fellow inmates could wear underneath their uniforms.

  On the morning of March 2, the siren sounded for roll call. The ritual did not happen as it usually did. As Soviet cannon fire blasted in the distance, women were asked to march past the SS, who would assign them to a line on the right or the left. No one knew what would happen to anyone standing in either of those lines, but Jacqueline assumed that the camp would be evacuated ahead of the Russian advance. Jacqueline and her friends decided they would try to escape any selection that required them to leave.

  “We would meet the same fate if, at the end of our strength, we were forced to go on foot day after day,” she later recalled. “Our only hope was to wait on the spot for the liberation that seemed so close.”

  They continued to work as if the war would never end. All around them women died of starvation, exhaustion, gassings, and lethal injections. They believed that pressing on in the camp would be better than being thrust out into a seemingly never-ending march.

  “Here, we knew our hell,” Jacqueline said. “Who could tell what the next one might be?”

  As the guards sorted people into lines, Jacqueline saw that they weren’t paying attention to the women who were waiting to be sorted. She disappeared in the crowd and crept back to Block 31 to hide in the false ceiling. As she climbed up to her hiding place, she discovered that some of her friends were already there. They stayed there for fifteen hours, trying to stay still and hold their breath. All day long they heard crowds marching outside and then silence, except for the guard who paced outside their block. There was a gunshot and then nothing but the sentry’s soft steps. Then it sounded as if the barracks had been invaded. The throng that assembled beneath them was a group of Russian women who had been deported after a German attack.

  “We were obliged to reveal our presence to the new female guard,” Jacqueline said. “She was hesitant; the situation was dangerous for her as well as for us. Because we were not listed on the roll for the block, she could not justify our presence. We no longer had the right to daily food rations, but if we provided them, she was willing to close her eyes and not denounce us.”

  Meanwhile Germaine and Anise were transferred from the Night and Fog block to the bunker, which was half full. As they walked toward the bunker, monitored by police, Germaine snuck into her mother’s bunker and told her to come with them. There was no way she was leaving Émilie there alone. The first night in their new surroundings they were confined with a group of Gypsy women and their children, so Anise knew they were destined to be gassed. Germaine was suffering from a high fever and pain in her jaw. Anise vowed to herself that if she survived and returned to France, she would “tell everything I had seen until my last breath.”

  In the morning Germaine could no longer stand up and was taken to the infirmary. Anise remained behind with Émilie. Soon they were ordered outside for roll call. Nearly one thousand women stood and waited for what might come next. Anise stood at the end of one of the rows and put Émilie on her other side to protect the older woman. A friend of hers told her that she and Émilie should hide because there would be a selection that day and anyone chosen would be shipped to Mauthausen, one of the worst camps. Anise grabbed Germaine’s mother by the arm and ran with her behind one of the blocks, alongside another prisoner named Simone. They hid there until they learned the selection would happen that night. Émilie couldn’t walk well, and her snow-white hair doubled her chances of being chosen.

  “I told Mme Tillion that we could hoist her up into the roof to hide,” Girard said. “With a great smile she told me, ‘You’ve got to be kidding. I am not going up into the roof.’”

  Desperate, Anise told Germaine’s mother that it would be easy to lift her and that she needed to hide because the selection was not looking good.

  Émilie’s face turned serene.

  “Listen my dear, I’m no acrobat,” she said. “I’ve always said I’d meet my fate head on. So I don’t want you to hide me. It’s not worth the trouble.”

  Anise pleaded with her to hide, but Émilie would have none of it. She told the young woman that she wanted to meet her Lord. Anise took other measures. She marched the old woman around and pinched her cheeks to make them look rosy. Then she covered Émilie’s head with a purple scarf so the Nazis couldn’t see her silver hair. When the selections began a doctor approached Mme Tillion with his head held high. He held a machine gun in his right hand. With his left hand he pointed at Émilie. They took her away. Anise was shattered.

  “Germaine was in the infirmary at this time and I had to go see her so I could tell her that they had taken her mother,” Anise recalled. “It was the worst. I cried by the window [before I could tell her anything]. A friend who was at the infirmary heard me and I told her to warn Germaine.”

  Margarete Buber-Neumann was in the infirmary with Germaine and heard there would be another roundup of sick or missing prisoners. Margarete knew she had to hide Germaine and told her to climb under the covers with her and make herself as small as possible. The siren sounded for another roll call, and officers went through the camp looking for prisoners who might be hiding. They entered the infirmary; Germaine squeezed closer to Margarete, and three SS doctors entered the room.

  “How many sick in this room?” one of them asked.

  Margarete answered that there were only two. The woman in the bunk below her was on the verge of death. The officer
s looked at them both, then left the room.

  Relieved, the women discussed how to sneak out of the infirmary. Then Anise’s face appeared at the window.

  “Germaine,” she said. “They’ve taken your mother away to the gas chamber.”

  Germaine jumped from the bed.

  “My God,” she cried. “My God! How could I have thought only of myself? My mother. My mother . . .”

  For Anise it was the worst night of her life. Germaine, meanwhile, had recurring dreams that she was in a café with her mother in Paris, drinking a cold glass of milk and eating a poached egg.

  In the back of the camp, Jacqueline continued to hide with her friends in Block 31. A kitchen worker left a container of soup outside for them every day.

  “We went to fetch it, but not without difficulty,” Jacqueline recalled. “Some of the captives, reduced to the state of starving dogs, attacked us. The container was overturned, the soup disappeared into the ground. From then on, we had to defend ourselves against these gangs.”

  Other prisoners knew Jacqueline was in a dangerous situation. One of them moved the young woman into her block on the condition that she became a part of a regular work gang. She became the lone French woodcutter in the forest group, which mostly consisted of Russian peasant women. By the end of March, Jacqueline had become so ill and had been worked so hard that she could barely stand up straight. As cannon fire neared the camp, she thought that all she wanted to do was see her family before she died. At the entrance gate a French prisoner who worked in the infirmary approached her.