The Girl in the Blue Beret

by Bobbie Ann Mason

  “I didn’t expect Ravensbrück. The world didn’t know of such places. We didn’t know.

  “We were in the night and the fog—la nuit et le brouillard. We were meant to disappear.” She stopped. “The résistants were supposed to vanish.”

  She rubbed the material of her sleeve.

  “There were no uniforms,” she went on. “We had to sew a cross on the front and back of our clothing, to identify us as prisoners, and we had to sew our numbers on our clothing. I still have my number. I often thought about being a number, whether a person can be reduced to a number—at once the most specific and the most abstract of designations.”

  She clasped his knee and continued, “I wasn’t tortured. I was beaten, but … oh, that’s no matter. So many women suffered more.

  “The women SS guards, the Aufseherinnen, were monsters. They were brutal. Well, I won’t go into that. Those women—they had a cruel sense of humor. They laughed at us, knowing how that would humiliate us. We were in Block 22, with the French, and the other blocks were Poles, Slavs, and other Europeans. Gypsies. Sometimes our own block leaders, chosen from among us and given privileges, were more difficult to deal with than the SS women themselves. To receive their petty rewards, they closed their hearts to us, their compatriots. But the SS women …”

  Annette sighed heavily.

  “There were so many of us in our block that we had to form alliances to allocate resources, to protect each other. My mother and I had formed a close attachment to the three Frenchwomen with us at Fresnes, and we were all of a sympathy as women. We slept so close together that we were each other’s blankets and pillows. There was so little food that to save your life you had to steal; to save your humanity you had to share. I must emphasize that although we were in an enfer, there was a goodness in the women who helped each other. This goodness was our survival.

  “Each day Maman said we were going to remain brave.

  “Then a group of the most able-bodied of us were transferred to Torgau to make ammunition, but many of us refused. The Geneva convention forbade us to make ammunition. So in retaliation we were sent to another work Kommando in Koenigsberg. Torgau and Koenigsberg were satellites of Ravensbrück. Ravensbrück was Heinrich Himmler’s baby! His pet project, you might say. He would sell the women’s services to factories all over Germany.”

  Once again Annette stopped speaking. She seemed to summon up courage before continuing. “This is difficult,” she said.

  “Do you want to wait?”

  “No. Please listen.”

  Marshall visualized the young girl Annette at his hiding place in Paris. He remembered seeing her as she bent her head to flip her hair forward, positioned a hair ribbon, then lifted her head and tied the ribbon on top. She shook her hair so that it fell into place, her head beribboned like a package. That memory made him ache.

  “We were sent to Koenigsberg-sur-Oder, across the border in Occupied Poland, where we leveled an airstrip for the Luftwaffe. The hangars were disguised so the Allies wouldn’t see them from the air. We worked on a plateau, in fierce wind and snow. All I had to wear was a thin cotton dress, no gloves or coat or hat, and it was the coldest winter I had ever known. Oh, but perhaps you think I’m exaggerating. It is no matter. As you want. After the first snow they gave us coats. Some were nice and some were ragged. You can comprehend how they collected such garments. Each morning I stuffed my clothing with the straw from my mattress.

  “The appel began each morning outside the barracks at four and then again after work. They had to make sure no one had escaped, and they would call the roll again and again. But there was no guard tower there, for it was too cold to escape. We had to stand still in the cold for the appel. We tried to stand as closely together as possible. During the appel we had to be sure to stand straight. If you weren’t strong enough to work, you might be shot. We don’t know why we weren’t shot. There were five hundred women, half of whom were French. At Ravensbrück where there were so many women, the appel went on for hours. The appel was smaller, so we didn’t have to stand for so long, but sometimes they made us stand naked, and they turned the water hose on us. It was the winter. They made us stand there while the water froze on our bodies.”

  “My God, Annette. How did you survive?” Marshall blurted.

  She didn’t answer that. “The work Kommando—the airstrip,” she said. “We cut out large blocks of frozen sod and lifted it into wagons that ran on rails. The rails were short, and from time to time we had to move them with our hands and then lift the wagons to fit onto the rails. We were moving the sod from one place to another. We were cows!

  “We tried to work crowded together, for warmth. We took turns shielding each other from the wind. We hugged and huddled. As our hands began to freeze, we thrust them into each other’s clothing to thaw. We fashioned a system for keeping our blood warm. We blew warm breath on each other and rubbed each other. If someone began to whimper or fall behind, we quickly surrounded her and circulated our meager warmth around her. Our model was the herd animal, the clustering that keeps deer and cattle alive in the winter.

  “A truck arrived with soup at midday, and we scrambled to fill our bowls. Sometimes it was hot, but unless you managed to be first in line, the soup quickly became cold. It was watery, just a few scraps of potato or rutabaga. At night there was a piece of bread and sometimes a bit of ersatz cheese. In the morning we had something they called coffee. It wasn’t coffee. It was watery and tasteless. We suspected it was soaking water from old leather.

  “The women were all thin and hungry. In our miserable section of the barracks there was a little fire where we could cook what food we could find—that is, if we could find wood or coal. Sometimes we burned our own bed slats. One day Jacqueline smuggled to us a goose egg one of the kitchen workers had let her have. We hunched over the little stove, and we boiled it so we wouldn’t spill any. But when we cracked and peeled it, we found a little goose inside, formed perfectly, boiled alive. For only a second we retched in horror, but then we tore at the food, sharing it equally among the five of us. It was a delicacy!

  “The water was usually frozen, so we had little for cooking. We couldn’t wash ourselves. As each day went by, we weakened. We were growing too weak to be useful as labor. We saw so many people die. In their beds during the night, or in the snow on the plateau. My mother fell ill and was allowed to stay in the infirmary for two nights, and two of our friends shared their food with her. She was returned to the plateau during a heavy snowstorm. We found that the snow acted as insulation. We pushed it up to make a little fort that shielded us from the wind.

  “After several weeks of this enfer, the commandant asked for volunteers to work in the woods. We could see the forest in the distance. It would be farther to walk, and the work would be more difficult, but the trees would shield us from the wind. It was five kilometers in the direction of Gdánsk. My mother and I and some of our friends trudged to the forest, and our work there was to dig out stumps. The Germans had forced some Russian prisoners of war to cut down trees to make a road through the forest. We dug the stumps out. We had the wagons and the rails, and we had to dig trenches for the rails, cutting through the roots. The ground was frozen, and we hacked and hacked. We had only shovels and axes.”

  Marshall laid his arm around her shoulder, a brief embrace. She went on, “It is not a sequence in time. It is a collection of sensations. Time blurred; it was like sleep. When you have only a scrap for sustenance and you must labor until the dark, then you are already almost dead. My mother, who could hardly walk because of vitamin sores, labored alongside me, and she tried to conceal her sufferings from me, until there was a time when she could not continue. She breathed in sharply and lowered her head and closed her eyes. She clutched her hoe and said, ‘Don’t lose heart, Annette.’

  “On the plateau, the gardiens watched us like those birds that feed on the dead. When a woman collapsed, the gardiens ran to grab her and throw her onto a cart. We were being wo
rked to death. Our numbers diminished, and the bodies disappeared. There was no four-crématoire at Koenigsberg. I could not let my mother fall. I had to keep her upright until we could reach the infirmary.

  “From the beginning, my mother was my strength. I had the hantise, or—how do you say it?—the anxiety to be separated from my mother. We were close, so physically close, her arms around me as if I were still balled—roulé en boule!—inside her. And in time, it was reversed, when I had to hold her, when she curled up in her weakness, the loss of strength, and the illness of which she was surely dying. In the infirmary I kept her warm. I gave her my soup. I mashed the bread into a little gruel, a panade. Bread and water heated on a fire felt so much more nourishing—to have something warm in our stomachs. She could hardly swallow, but she tried her best to eat, for me. It dribbled from her mouth, and she could not swallow. I lifted her head so she would not choke, and I caught the dribbles from her mouth in her spoon and saved it until she rallied and could get the breath again to try to eat.”

  Annette’s voice cracked.

  Marshall held her, and he caressed her hair. She turned her head away.

  “You are good,” she said, pulling back from him.

  “One morning at the work camp we saw a man come from the forest and speak with a gardien. Then the gardiens pushed us out on the road, but we didn’t march five by five in lines, as usual. It was chaotic, and we did not know where we were going. There was turmoil among the gardiens, as if they couldn’t agree on anything. Their discipline was crumbling. Finally, they marched us back to the camp, and they locked us inside again. We did not return to work that day.

  “There was no appel that evening. There was no noise during the night; usually there was much noise. In the morning also there was no noise. No guards were there!”

  Annette rose from the divan and paced back and forth, unable to contain her energy.

  “We crept out of our barracks and rushed around. The gardiens had disappeared! We ventured farther. There were no Germans anywhere. We broke out of the camp. We went into their headquarters across the road and saw that they had left. They had abandoned everything. They had been living there with their families. There were bottles for babies. And food! We found food!

  “We began to eat everything we could find. And we carried all we could back to our quarters, fearful that the Germans would return at any moment. They had left in the middle of a meal—lovely vegetables and meat. We ate everything left on their plates. To see how they had been living—with their families, in luxury—so near to us, it filled us with rage. They had their children there! Can you imagine bringing children to such a place? The children would surely know how we were treated. There were toys and sports equipment—tennis rackets, skis.

  “We raided the women’s closets. I found sweaters and coats and blankets, and wool jackets and skirts. I found a beautiful navy wool coat and put it on immediately, for it was freezing that day! I took an ensemble back for my mother, who was too feeble to join the raiding party, but I was still strong enough. I brought back an enormous tin of peaches! I wore the coat back and forth—and filled its pockets with food.

  “The water was frozen, but we made a fire and heated ice. We had hot water! We washed ourselves. We changed clothing. In luxury and liberty, we walked out in the sunshine. I can’t explain the joy. We were all together.”

  Her arms opened wide, as if to embrace all those she remembered. “We were so happy! It was sunny! We felt free.

  “Then at dark we returned to our barracks. A Polish girl wanted to escape—to leave—but we pulled her back. ‘Don’t go out there,’ we urged her. ‘It is too cold. You have nowhere to go. We have plenty of food here now, and the Russians will come to liberate us.’ Some Frenchmen who were prisoners of war at another camp had been exchanging messages, clandestinely, with us at the Kommando in the forest, and they had received hints that the Soviet army was coming. But we were afraid the Germans would return, and so we hid carefully all our stolen goods.

  “Two Russian soldiers on a bicycle stopped at the camp. One of our women, who was Russian, told them we were ‘partisan,’ the Russian word for résistante. The soldiers left. We knew their units were advancing and they would find us. We waited, praying for liberation. We could hear their cannons in the distance.

  “We had two days of freedom. Then a German patrol appeared in the night. We had been sheltering two escaped Frenchmen—two of the prisoners I mentioned—but the Germans discovered them and shot them instantly, then left abruptly. The Frenchwomen had been so happy to have the Frenchmen there. Now our hearts were breaking.

  “In the morning we heard shouting and shooting, shouting and shooting. It was thunderous, murderous. Explosions. Yelling. It was dreadful. The SS from Ravensbrück had arrived, and they were pulling everybody out of the blocks.”

  Annette had been speaking with Marshall in English most of the time, but now she lapsed into rapid, excited French. Gently, he guided her back.

  “Slowly,” he said. “You’re going too fast for me.”

  “Désolée.”

  “Go slowly.”

  She sat down beside him and took a deep breath. “The SS made everybody who could walk go out on a forced march back to Ravensbrück,” she continued, in English. “I could walk, but my mother could not walk, and I could not leave her! I could not leave her. I hid in the infirmary with her. We were in the room with a nurse who was very good with my mother. She had been arrested for falling in love with a German. She was a nice girl, and when the Germans routed everybody, she warned them away from the infirmary.

  “ ‘They have the typhus!’ she cried. The Germans backed away then.

  “There were only a handful of us left behind in the infirmary, and all the others were sent back to Ravensbrück, on foot. Eighty kilometers. I knew they wouldn’t live.

  “The SS put out the fires in the stoves and removed the fuel. Then, with the fuel, they set the camp on fire. They locked the doors and left. Our little group, left behind in the infirmary, was going to die in the fire! Frantic, we managed to break the door. And then”—Annette clasped her hands together in a quick gesture of thanksgiving or prayer—“it began to snow, and the snow stopped the fire! Our infirmary survived the fire. But six of us died. We had to bury them, and the two Frenchmen. It was true. We did have the typhus.

  “We waited. There were so few of us. The nurse, who stayed behind with us, had reserves of strength, and she built a fire to keep us warm. And she cooked for us. But I slept then for two days. I slept through the Battle of the Oder! The Russians and the Germans were shooting at each other across the camp, near the infirmary. But I was so sick I didn’t care.”

  Annette’s hands flew up, quivering, then lighted in her lap. Again she had spoken rapidly, mixing French with her English. It had taken Marshall a moment to decipher “typhus,” which she pronounced TEEF-us. He took her hands and quieted them down. She turned her head away from him for a time.

  “After two days the Russians arrived, with their tanks and their large guns, and they liberated the camp. It was such joy for us! Oh, they were very good with us. They spoke some English.

  “We spent three weeks at the camp with the Russians. They were like children with us. Playing, laughing. One of them shot a cow so that we could have meat. But the nurse told me that my mother should not eat meat because of the typhus—it would make her bleed more. She was losing blood, leaving a trail. But the Russian, a big high officer, wouldn’t obey the nurse. He ordered a soldier to cut a bifteck and barbecue it for her. We couldn’t make him understand. He insisted.

  “There are two images that stand out in my mind the most strongly now. One is my sister and her poupée—dressed in baby-chick yellow!—on the day the milice came. And the other is my mother with the bifteck—her joy at having it, and the Russians’ delight with themselves for providing it, and my own despair that it was bad for the typhus. It made her dysentery worse. We all had the dysentery from eating so much
when we plundered the abandoned German quarters. So much jam! And beautiful vegetables and cans of asparagus and boxes and boxes of crackers.”

  She sighed. “I was increvable. Indefatigable.” She laughed, then hid her mouth with her hands. “So much had happened.” She paused, looked at him, then turned away. “I can’t go further now.”

  Marshall’s feelings were whirling. He could scarcely comprehend how she had survived, or that she was here now with her strength and her beauty. He didn’t know how to respond to her words. No response could possibly be adequate.

  He put his arms around her. He felt her body relax, and they held the quiet embrace for several long moments.

  “We will eat now,” she said, smiling up at him. “And talk of other things. You will tell me about your airplanes.”

  48.

  “IT WASN’T UNTIL LATE JUNE THAT WE RETURNED TO PARIS,” ANNETTE said later, after the dinner was finished and they were again in the sitting room. “We were in a Polish hospital for three months. From there, we traveled through Germany, then Holland, then Belgium. The journey was slow because of all the destruction. We were in a camion, a transport truck, and the route was difficult, with many detours. In Germany, the people regarded us with awe. They were reserved and subdued, their land so beaten, but the ordinary people were kind.

  “We arrived at the Hôtel Lutetia, where the lobby was now a center for returning déportés.” She paused. “The Germans had used this fine hotel for interrogations. But now the boulevard Raspail, with all its air of normality and ease and bonheur, was our lovely prewar Paris again. Yet we felt out of place, so humiliated and crazed and ashamed. There were very nice people at the Lutetia, and they tried to be helpful. They had set up tables in the lobby by the fireplace, under a magnificent chandelier, but the place clashed with the memories fresh in my mind such that I was in shock. We were desperate for news of my father and Monique. We had to fill out forms. We put notices on the wall. We read all the notices, people searching for loved ones, wanting news of the returning prisoners. Pictures and pleas. An agreeable young woman at the desk said, ‘Oh, yes! We had news of a Monsieur Vallon, returned from one of the camps.’ Oh, we were so happy! I clasped my mother. We embraced in the lobby and wept. It was an eternity before the young woman returned, and with a long face she apologized again and again. She had made a mistake. It was not Monsieur Vallon, she said. It was Monsieur Ballon.”