The Paris Secret

by Natasha Lester

  “Bon courage!” they heard villagers shouting at the next station, where the Red Cross pleaded with the driver to stop the train.

  Perhaps Caro had been right. “You see?” Skye said determinedly, taking her turn to lift their mood. “We won’t reach Germany.”

  But she couldn’t meet Caro’s eyes, or Margaux’s, when the train started up once more. She summoned the strength to stand and peer through the wagon slats and saw that the signs were written not in French anymore, but in German.

  Le dernier convoi that train was later called: the last train out of Paris. It arrived at Ravensbrück concentration camp on the twenty-first of August 1944.

  Paris fell to the Allies just four days later.

  Thirty-Three

  Ravensbrück concentration camp, on the far eastern border of Germany, was a place beyond description. Skye, Margaux and Caro’s arrival coincided with an influx of prisoners moved from other camps nearer the western borders as the Germans tried to hide their monstrous deeds from the Allies in this place too far from anywhere to ever be found. There were so many women to house that they were kept outside the gates for days, patrolled by guards and dogs. Over that time, the ground beneath them turned into a mud of excrement.

  Eventually, they were sent inside in ranks of five prisoners, marching down the Lagerstrasse between two rows of hulking gray blocks. A voice boomed Achtung! from the loudspeakers in the Appellplatz as they were herded into a bunker. There, they were washed and stripped and shaved, and dressed in rags with wooden clogs, a headscarf, and a red star that denoted them as political prisoners.

  The only spark of something other than terror came when Margaux, Caro and Skye—or Odette as everyone called her—were allocated to the same accommodation block, one of the French ones.

  Margaux had already heard, somehow, that there was a handful of British women at the camp, and they were kept “in quarantine” by the Nazis, because the only possible explanation for a British woman to be in France was that she was a spy. From the way the word was spoken, Skye knew she did not ever want to be kept in quarantine.

  In the French block, they slept three to a mattress in the triple tiers of bunks but this suited Skye, Caro and Margaux because it meant they could always find one another come nighttime. In her bunk on that first night, Skye remembered shaking Nicholas’s hand across a table and both of them making a vow. You promised not to die, she whispered. And you’ve never broken a promise. So stay alive. And I will too.

  It took Skye several weeks to comprehend what Ravensbrück was. Then came a week in October when she realized that she no longer flinched when she saw a woman licking up a morsel of spilled porridge from the ground. She didn’t groan when the sirens blared at four in the morning and the vigorous jostling for what was called coffee began, and starving woman elbowed aside starving woman because the only thing that mattered was survival. She forgot to recoil when she saw a woman mauled to death by one of the dogs; forgot again when a guard murdered a woman with a pickax in the Appellplatz because she didn’t respond when her name was called; didn’t shudder when the guards made a woman dig a tunnel through the sand until it collapsed on her and she was buried alive. She could no longer smell the scent of the dead disgorged by the crematoriums into every crevice of the camp.

  Only when she saw the tiny body of a dead baby did Skye tremble. How much worse it was, she thought, not to react. How much worse that such unimaginable things had become quotidian. All around her were women whose souls had died but whose bodies lived cruelly on. She touched the finger that had once worn Nicholas’s seaweed ring. She could not let her soul die here too.

  “We have to do whatever we can to stay alive,” she said when Caro refused to drink a bowl of liquid that was soup in name only. Skye took the bowl and pointed to the tiny lump floating in the liquid. It was the first time she’d seen anything that indicated that what they were eating might actually be food. “Look. There’s a piece of turnip. It’s not just water. All we need is to find one thing every day that the guards have missed and that makes this day better than the one before.”

  Margaux nodded resolutely, nothing glamorous about her now, nothing glamorous about any of them. But in that nod Skye recognized the Margaux whose poise always turned heads, who was always composed. Caro’s head lifted too and, despite her baldness, she looked like the determined woman Skye had met that first day in Paris, a woman whose beautiful eyes were as yet undiminished. The relief Skye felt then had her brushing away a tear. She knew she wouldn’t survive without Caro and Margaux. But she also knew that now, each day, they would all find a reason to survive.

  One day it was a handful of herbs that Caro managed to pick and pocket before anyone noticed as they walked five abreast through the pine-scented woods with shovels over their shoulders to begin their twelve-hour work shift.

  “The herbs have vitamins in them,” Caro whispered. “Vitamins will keep us alive.”

  Another day Margaux discovered that Geneviève de Gaulle, Charles de Gaulle’s niece, was in Ravensbrück too. “The Allies will come for her,” Margaux said firmly. “And they’ll find us too.”

  For one incredible month it was the revelation that resistance still lived in all of them. Skye, Caro and Margaux were sent to a sub-camp at Torgau along with a group of Frenchwomen. The three women held hands as they marched there, terror-stricken at having the known horror that was Ravensbrück taken temporarily from them, dreading what unknown horror they might find at the end of their journey.

  On arrival they discovered they were to make munitions. Bullets for the Germans to fire upon the French and the British and the American and the other Allied armies.

  “Non,” Skye whispered to Caro and Margaux. Because what if one of those bullets killed Nicholas, or Liberty?

  Their fellow-prisoner Jeannie Rousseau said to the German officer in charge of the factory what everyone assembled there was thinking. “I won’t make arms for the Germans. I cannot. Asking us to do so is in direct contravention of the Geneva Convention.”

  Caro’s hand tightened around Skye’s and Margaux’s. They stepped in behind Jeannie. Many others did too. They hadn’t enough food, they were, all of them, bleeding or bruised from some German violence or other, their smocks were damp from rain and their bodies shivered with cold, but they would gladly accept all that and more in order not to make the weapons that would murder their fathers and sisters and friends and lovers.

  They were lucky. The officer was so shocked at their refusal—a refusal nobody had ever dared to make before—that he placed them in the kitchens to work, where they made food for the women who did not protest, the women who made bullets instead.

  How much easier it was to work in a kitchen, where the ovens provided warmth and where crumbs could be easily stolen, than it was to dig sand for twelve hours for no purpose whatsoever except to exhaust them all to an eventual death.

  Of course it couldn’t last. The women who’d protested were sent back to Ravensbrück.

  “I don’t know if I can go back in there,” Margaux said as the gates loomed before them.

  It was the first time Skye had ever seen Margaux vulnerable and it frightened her more than reentering the gates of hell.

  “You can,” she said. “I need you.” She placed Margaux’s hand on her stomach, and Margaux nodded.

  It meant that the next day they had to find something that would make Margaux’s day better than the one before. Skye and Caro spent all day collecting what they needed from wherever it could be found. By evening, they had enough.

  Crumbs. That was what they had searched so painstakingly for. Crumbs which, molded together, made a birthday cake for Margaux. And while marching through the snow-whitened forest on their way to work, Skye had gathered twenty-six twigs for candles. Caro had found a Christmas rose to place atop the cake too.

  Margaux cried when she saw it. Skye and Caro held her, crying too. Skye tried to sing “Somewhere Over the Rainbow,” but the bluebirds would
not fly. They got stuck in her throat instead, beating their trapped little wings.

  The very best day of all was when Margaux was moved to the Effektenkammer, where prisoner possessions were stored, and she stole a piece of cardboard from which they cut out tiny playing cards. How many precious hours were spent thereafter in a game of bridge or rummy, which made time actually pass rather than stall.

  On the days when they found nothing, especially those bitter November days when they were made to lay slabs of sod in the snow at Königsberg—sods that iced up one day and had to be hacked free, or that thawed another day and turned into an arctic mud that froze the women despite the straw they had stuffed in their clothes for warmth—they would share stories of the past, of their childhoods. So Skye and Margaux knew all about Caro’s brother Christian and the family villa, Les Rhumbs, at Granville by the sea.

  “Christian and I both love it there, but he’s always hated the dining room,” Caro told them, smiling a little. “The lions and chimeras fighting on the dresser have always frightened him. When he was younger, I’d tell him to come with me into the garden because there were definitely no dragons in a place filled with flowers.”

  Skye pictured a small and serious Catherine giving her brother a posy of blooms, just as she’d once given Margaux and Skye those hopeful jasmine flowers.

  Then Margaux spoke about her childhood in Lyon, her years in Paris, and school in England. And Skye described her magical Cornwall summers, how she’d learned to fly, and everything about Nicholas. Always Nicholas: the day she’d found him again on an airfield in England, the moment she realized she loved him, what they’d said to each other when he’d placed a seaweed ring on her finger.

  They didn’t, ever, share their dreams. Everything they spoke of was from the past—a time that was real and beautiful and couldn’t be taken from them, unlike the hypothetical future and the phantasmagorical present. Occasionally, when her courage was failing, Skye wondered if it meant that none of them had any dreams left.

  Abandon all hope, ye who enter here, Dante had said. Words meant for Ravensbrück, even though they were written centuries before. But then Margaux would deal out the playing cards, or Caro would describe the pink roses at Les Rhumbs, or Skye would tell the story of Nicholas bringing cowrie shells to her when she was lonely, and they would think only of that moment. And because of that, Skye Penrose, Margaux Jourdan and Catherine Dior came to be more than friends. They were the currents of air holding one another up, keeping each other alive.

  * * *

  By December, freezing December, the Appell began at half past three in the morning and women froze to death as they stood waiting for their names to be called. Skye, Caro and Margaux’s most important job became not to search for that one life-giving thing every day, but to find out more about the Kinderzimmer—Block 11—where the babies were kept. Because, between the three of them, they would soon have a baby to care for: Skye and Nicholas’s child.

  Before Skye had arrived at the camp, any pregnant women had been taken away and their babies murdered. But with the influx of prisoners in August and September, the rules had been changed. Births were now permitted, but Skye knew that just because something was allowed, it didn’t mean it was desired. And so it proved to be.

  Margaux, who had cleverly managed to be moved from the Effektenkammer to the camp administration block where she could find out the things that might keep them alive, told Caro and Skye that she had news.

  “Six hundred babies have been born since October. Only about forty are still alive,” she said.

  Skye sank to the ground. It was worse than she’d hoped.

  “The babies are kept five across one side of a mattress and five along the other,” Margaux continued. “When the mothers are allowed into the block to feed their babies, they can’t tell which one is theirs. Each baby is given only one rag, which is to serve as both nappy and blanket. The babies are locked up alone in the block each night, and one of the nurses maintains that a window must be kept open, regardless that it is December, to allow for ventilation. Rats thrive in Block 11,” she finished.

  “Skye’s baby cannot go there,” Caro said firmly.

  “No,” Margaux agreed. “Nobody knows you’re pregnant, Skye. It’s impossible to see anything beneath that smock. We’ll keep it that way, and keep the baby with us when it comes. It’s becoming possible now.”

  And it was. In the hoar and frost of winter 1944–45, it was well known that the Allies were moving through Europe—although to the women in the camp it felt as if they must be crawling on their hands and knees, so long was it taking them to reach Germany. Many of the guards no longer cared what their prisoners did, and sometimes didn’t even bother to make them work. They were simply marking time until the inevitable occurred. In such circumstances a baby might not be noticed.

  But then Margaux came to them with another warning. “Camp Commandant Suhren has been told to clean up this mess by making sure two thousand women die each month. It is retrospective: he must catch up to his quota. I’ve heard they’re building a gas chamber and will take the weak and the sick first. You must never go to the Revier. Besides, the doctor told me that they keep women with typhus in the same bed as those with a simple foot infection, hoping the one with the infection will catch the typhus and then she will die too.”

  Skye touched a hand to her stomach. Never go to the Revier, the camp’s infirmary. Which meant having a baby and seeking no medical help. For the first time she felt all hope slipping away.

  “It won’t survive, will it?” she said hoarsely, unable, on that bitter day in late December when she’d forgotten that Christmas had ever existed, when all she wished for now was the end of winter, rather than something as uncertain and undependable as the end of the war, to find the sliver of turnip floating in the soup of her hopelessness.

  She coughed, the spasm lasting so long her hands scratched at the dirt beside her, clawing onto life, such as it was. She knew she probably had pneumonia, that Margaux had dysentery, and that Caro most likely had both.

  But Margaux paid no heed to the crippling stomach pain that accompanied her dysentery. She stood up straight and tall despite her spindly legs and gestured toward the truck that had pulled up by the Revier. It tipped to the ground a pile of newly arrived bodies that were to be sorted into those who were, thankfully, dead, those who were, unfortunately, still alive, and those whose minds had departed their bodies. Then Margaux moved her hand to encompass the bones stacked against the washroom wall; to the ash of the crematorium graying the snow at their feet. “If anyone had told you a year ago about this, would you have believed that you could have survived for as long as you have?” she said.

  “No one will ever believe this, will they?” Caro said, staring at the truck.

  Skye shook her head. She didn’t believe it and yet she could see it.

  “Would you have ever believed you would carry a baby to full term in these conditions?” Margaux demanded, standing in front of Caro and Skye, blocking their view of the wretched bodies. “It’s a miracle, Skye.”

  Now, Skye saw only Margaux, unwavering in her belief that they still had, somehow, one last scrap of wonder. Something precious. And Skye couldn’t believe that she’d once looked at this woman on an airfield in England and tried to dislike her. Margaux was the bravest of them all.

  * * *

  When the day came, Skye ignored the pain at first. Pain was normal now; its absence so disconcerting that she had seen women reopen their wounds in order to feel its reassuring presence again. Indeed, Skye’s lungs burned with disease unrelentingly now and she hardly noticed it. But the tightening of the skin on her stomach and the clutch of her insides told her this pain was different. It was a sacred thing in this most unsacred of places.

  Caro and Margaux knew the instant they caught her eye, because the three of them were closer now than sisters; they were each the same person. If one was kicked by the guards, the others gasped too. If one’s
dreams were cauterizing, the others awoke and embraced the dreamer before she even realized she was in the grip of a night terror.

  “Inside,” Caro hissed, taking Skye’s hand and leading her into their block.

  “I’ll keep the guards at bay,” Margaux said, and she let Caro stay by Skye’s side while she herself moved between Skye’s bed and the block entrance, keeping a lookout, using her obdurate presence to conceal what was happening in one of the bunks.

  Instead of medicines, Caro used stories of her family home, Les Rhumbs, to anesthetize Skye. “Pink roses,” she said, sniffing the air as if flowers, not evil, bloomed beside them. “And peonies all through the garden. Jasmine so thick you feel dizzy when you first walk outside. I would use a bucket to collect all the petals and buds that fell off the bushes and I’d lie on the ground and tip them all over me. Have you ever felt a shower of flowers? It’s something a child would love to feel.”

  So Skye imagined her baby lying on green lawn by the sea, a deluge of pink peonies and white jasmine falling down around her.

  As much as she could, through fits of coughing alternating with the shuddering contractions of childbirth, Skye held on to that picture. She wished she could smell salty air sweetened by rose, but she hadn’t the strength to push away a stench so powerful as Ravensbrück.

  Luckily for all of them, the birth took only a few hours: a baby reared on air and love did not grow like a normal child. She slipped out, a tiny blue thing that Caro rubbed with all her might, while Margaux held Skye’s hand and watched for the afterbirth.

  Then Skye held her child, Nicholas’s child, the first of the brood of fearless girls he had promised her, and she wept. Nicholas had no idea he was a father. He had no idea where Skye was. She had no idea where he was or how to tell him about their miracle. And Skye had no idea how fierce love could be until she touched her daughter’s cheek and saw her tiny mouth open, felt the flail of a little fist against her breast. She knew right then and there that she would kill anyone who came between her and her child, that she would give all she had left to protect this baby.