Young, Brave and Beautiful

by Tania Szabô

  Finally, the train moved out. Including the long wait, the journey took over twenty-two hours instead of the normal time of just under two hours to reach what was then called Châlons-sur-Marne but has since been changed to Châlons-en-Champagne. This township is not far from Compiègne, Carrefour Bellicart de Compiègne to be exact, where one of the French concentration camps of deportation stood and where Claude Malraux, Jean and Florentine Sueur, Isidore Newman and all the others had arrived in March, a month prior to Violette’s reconnaissance mission in April 1944.

  Cattle wagons, packed tight with male prisoners, met up with that train on the northern side of Châlons-sur-Marne. There had been 1,250 men at the Royallieu internment camp. They were regrouped that day in Camp C, where they were provided with a very small amount of food and water and loaded into lorries. The convoys set off to Carrefour Bellicart, where the cattle trucks were waiting on the railway line.166 The two trains were quickly combined. Harry and Yeo-Thomas’ group were shoved roughly into the cattle trucks and the women’s carriage attached to the same one.

  Each livestock truck could reasonably carry eight horses or forty men. But there were never fewer than eighty men in these, even as many as 120 on this day of crushing heat. Immediately chains, irons and bolts clanked closed, ensuring they were entombed behind the locked doors. Night fell, and Wing Commander F.F.E. Yeo-Thomas tells us in his biography The White Rabbit by Bruce Marshall that before they left Compiègne, not a breath of air had arrived to bring the least relief to the prisoners, who were trying to get sufficiently organised, at least to use the empty cans as a communal latrine. The stink flowing from so many grimy, sweating male bodies mixed with the heaviness of the hot, stale air ensured that the old and the sick were already cursing, groaning and moaning, calling for non-existent water to drink.

  The night passed slowly for these poor men stacked together, exhausted from standing hard against the next man or trying not to stand on the sick and dying, trying not to hit out in panic, trying to avoid those hitting and screaming in panic around them. Fights, more curses, knives originally fashioned to dig out floorboards to create small gaps to freedom struck flesh not wood.

  At dawn, the train moved off, slowly clattering down the line with its human livestock. A cooling flurry of air penetrated the slats before giving way to stewing heat. As the miles passed under the chattering wheels, the ‘latrine’ cans filled and overflowed, slipping and slopping everywhere with the train’s motion.

  The drone of Allied planes could be heard, high in the sky. As the train crawled through one station a woman cried, ‘You will not reach Germany, they have made a pact!’ But the train rolled on, continued to roll on and did not stop rolling, ever onwards towards the east.

  At Vic-sur-Aisne and at Soissons station masters and nurses from the Red Cross tried to stop the train but in vain, Jacques Vigny167 tells us a ‘furious madman was commanding the convoy’.

  As they travelled on there was nothing they could do about filth slopping all over the wagons. Thirst was so rampant that many licked the sweat off the back of the man nearest them. Dead men were shoved into a corner, the corpses taking up more space than when they were alive.

  As night fell, firing could be heard all around. The train stopped. Still no water. An escape attempt. The schupos168 raced into the countryside with their police dogs. Several of those who escaped were quickly caught again and shot. Five of the youngest prisoners were forced to dig a grave in a bomb crater, then coldly shot in the head as reprisals. The prisoners who had been detained with them were brought out of their wagon as it was no longer secure and distributed in the other, already cramped wagons.

  They continued to wander along French rails. The detours that could have saved them merely prolonged their agony and when, finally, they reach German territory, all hope had faded. Somewhere along the journey, this cobbled train was bombed by the Allies, thinking – quite rightly – that it was an enemy troop transport.

  The heat was intense, men screaming and cursing and crying and dying had had no water for days. They were sick and dehydrated and no doubt Harry, when he saw Violette, thought that he was hallucinating, except Yeo-Thomas saw her too.

  She and Denise Bloch, whom she was shackled to, had struggled out of their carriage, where the women were piled in more comfortable conditions than the men, but still basic and with hardly any food. Violette could not bear the suffering she could hear – maybe the image of the young man in Limoges being tortured moved her to action.

  She said to Denise, ‘Look, we’ve got to help those poor buggers.’

  ‘Yes, yes, I agree,’ said Denise. ‘But how can we?’ She looked pale and ill.

  ‘Well, we can damn well get them some water!’ shouted Violette above the cacophony of bombs dropping, fires crackling, the anti-aircraft guns firing and the uproar coming from the wagons of men. ‘The bloody Bosch have all run for cover except those on the guns. They’re too busy firing at our boys in the skies to think of two scrawny girls. Come on, Denise. We’ve got to get to the water supply, fill up as many cans or anything we can find and slip it through to the men.’

  ‘Okay, Violette. I’m with you. Got no bloody choice really, do I? Chained up as I am to you and you so bloody stubborn! But I’m only too happy. Poor blokes.’

  So they struggled along the corridor, found the water, filled a couple of cans and went back to the wagons, carefully lifting the cans as high as possible, wondering how on earth to get the water inside.

  ‘Violette, is that really you?’ was the voice of Harry Peulevé, full of wonder.

  ‘Who the bleedin’ ’ell d’yer think I am, matey? Look, how do we get this water through to you? Put your thinking cap on quick. Once this bombing raid stops, they’ll be onto us like a ton of bricks.’

  ‘Yeo,’ shouted Harry to Yeo-Thomas. ‘Get your mugs over here. Vi’s got water for us.’

  ‘What? Christ, that’s bloody wonderful!’

  And so, oh-so slowly for the men, Violette and Denise poured the water through the slats into the mugs. They repeated this many times, giving sustenance and life to a good number of men in two wagons. It was exhausting. Poor Denise was almost dropping and Violette was keeping her going with words and a helping hand, taking the weight of the large can they found and refilled over and over again from the water closet used by the soldiers.

  The bombing stopped, the soldiers returned from their hiding places in ditches alongside the railway track. They shot some dozen prisoners, beat ten half to death. Violette and Denise also caught the butt of a rifle each, sending them hurrying back to their carriage knowing that by their actions alone many of the men were somewhat refreshed.

  The courage and example of those two dirty, starving girls gave the men more courage to endure their own agonies and kept some of them alive for a while longer. Some lived until old age thanks to the two young women and their simple courage. The sights and sounds that Yeo-Thomas and Harry suffered were terrible. Scared and dehydrated, unable to throw themselves down on the floor, some of the prisoners threw themselves on top of each other, they were stacked so tightly. It was steaming hot in those filthy cattle trucks. Even Harry and Yeo-Thomas, who were trained to withstand, would have had a hard time suppressing their fear. A few were frothing at the mouth. Yeo-Thomas says in The White Rabbit:

  We all felt deeply ashamed when we saw Violette Szabó, while the raid was still on, come crawling along the corridor towards us with a jug of water which she had filled in the lavatory. She handed it to us through the iron bars. With her, crawling too, came the girl to whose ankle she was chained. […]

  This act of mercy made an unforgettable impression on all. She spoke words of comfort, jested, went back with the jug to fill it again and again.

  ‘My God that girl had guts,’ says Yeo-Thomas. ‘I shall never forget that moment,’ says Harry Peulevé, ‘I felt very proud that I knew her. She looked so pretty, despite her shabby clothes and her lack of make-up – and she was full of good che
er. I have never under any circumstances known her to be depressed or moody.’

  The journey to the German frontier took the best part of a week. From the attack they were transferred into lorries. After a gruelling journey through Reims and Verdun they finally arrived at Neue Bremm. It had been exhausting, frightening and the conditions were diabolical.

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  The train’s route and then the lorries had been circuitous for three reasons. First, Allied bombing had destroyed or damaged many of the lines. Second, continuing sabotage of lines made detours even more necessary. And third, it is quite possible that the Germans were happy for these detours to take place, knowing the agony of the prisoners and therefore knowing a good proportion of the weaker ones would be dead on arrival. The wounded Germans were taken good care of by nurses and doctors in carriages roughly adapted as medical areas. There was plenty of drinking water and food for them. And kindness. But for the prisoners, the more that died, the fewer that needed to be fed even meagre rations of watery soup and mouldy bread in the labour camps. Those still alive would be farmed out at Saarbrücken to work in one concentration camp or another, with a few to be executed on arrival or summarily thrown into the gas chambers or hung and cremated in the ovens.

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  On reaching Metz, our shackled prisoners were ‘billeted’ in stables for the night. Martin Sugarman, archivist at the British Association of Jewish Ex-Servicemen and Women (AJEX), says that one agent, Bernard Guillot, reports that he saw many of the female prisoners while he was being moved from one prison to another. In his debriefing of 12 April 1945, Guillot mentions that he had seen and talked to Denise Bloch.

  It was extremely crowded. They were there for about two days with little food but adequate water. Violette was even able to wash out her white blouse and underwear. Yvonne Basedon particularly remembers, as she told me when I met her, seeing Violette washing her blouse in a bowl on what seemed to be a stack of crates.

  Just as for the horses attached to the barracks that had once dwelled in these stables in great comfort, straw was provided for the prisoners in the loose boxes. Horseboxes ran down each side of the stable, with a walking area and a drain running down the centre. The guards pointed their rifles at the men and women with the threat of instant death if they approached one another, but they were able to talk during the day. There was so much talking, in fact, that it was hard to hear what anyone was saying. When night fell, things quietened down, men and women moved closer together as they lay across the straw- and sawdust-covered floor so they were able to touch and talk to one another across the drain. However, they remained chained by the ankle to their companion, as they had been the entire journey.

  Violette and Harry managed to move right up close to one another and spent the day and night going over everything that had happened to them. Harry recounted to Rubeigh Minney, writing his biography of Violette entitled Carve her Name with Pride, the dreadful suffering that had befallen Violette. He was diffident in relating such things to another man for a book her daughter would surely read and he only briefly and so eloquently touched upon the horror.

  Harry had this to say:

  Violette and I talked all through the night.

  Her voice, as always, was so sweet and soothing, one could listen to it for hours.

  We spoke of old times and we told each other our experiences in France.

  Bit by bit everything was unfolded – her life in Fresnes, her interviews at Avenue Foch.

  But either through modesty or a sense of delicacy, since some of the tortures were too intimate in their application; or perhaps because she did not wish to live again through the pain of it, she spoke hardly at all about the tortures she had been made to suffer.

  She was in a cheerful mood. Her spirits were high.

  She was confident of victory and was resolved on escaping no matter where they took her.

  She would have wanted her family, including me, to know something of what had happened to her under interrogation. However, Violette may well not have wished to go into detail with Harry. She would not have covered herself in shame and embarrassment. If she were here today she would have stood defiantly proclaiming that by remaining silent while her body was used and abused she had given no useful information to the enemy at any time. In fact, she did not impart hard information to her cellmates and travelling companions, shackled and thirsty and hungry and in pain. Just in case. Only now, to her friend, Harry, who had suffered as she had without speaking, could she speak – but lightly – of what had been done to her. She would want it known that she had not given in. Harry’s words to Rubeigh Minney are so kind that they soothed Violette’s mother, Reine Bushell’s, troubled spirit on reading what her darling daughter had suffered. These two men, the author and the friend, did well.

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  The two days in the stables provided much psychological sustenance to Harry and Violette. They whispered many things together in the darkness of the night and laughed together in the daylight with the others. Although everyone was weary and distressed there was still singing, and jokes and stories. Nor did it prevent the guards coming in and slamming rifles and belt buckles down onto the shoulders or back of any they could reach to give a salutary lesson to these ‘sub-humans’. The doctors and nurses actually came among the prisoners to check as best they could all those who were ill or appeared to be getting ill. They called the guards to take those who were desperately ill to the infirmary.

  Sometimes they did and sometimes they didn’t.

  Sometimes they took ill men and women – but not to the infirmary …

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  Harry Peulevé’s report written on 23 April 1945 was for official purposes and has nothing to do with the feelings that were stirred a few years later when he was talking to Rubeigh Minney. As it should be, that report is coldly calm. All SOE agents are trained to give impartial and particularly uncluttered reports. He says:

  I left Fresnes on 10th August and was taken from solitary confinement to a cell where I met other agents. In all we left Paris 37 strong, mostly from Fresnes but with a few who came from avenue Foch or Compiegne …

  We travelled all night until two o’clock next afternoon when the train was bombed by allied planes and brought to a standstill. Luckily we had no casualties either amongst the women or ourselves, but seventeen German soldiers being evacuated to Germany were killed and one British prisoner of war.

  I believe we were in the vicinity of Châlons-sur-Marne and from there we continued our journey in a requisitioned lorry to Reims, having been told that should one escape everybody would be shot. I nevertheless made every attempt to free myself from the handcuffs and had agreed with the other man to whom I was handcuffed, whose name was Barrett, that we should attempt to escape. Unfortunately, the majority of prisoners saw that we were attempting to escape and said that we should not as we should be endangering everybody’s lives. We stayed the night in large barracks in Reims and the next morning continued our journey in the lorry and here I managed to get my handcuffs off.

  Although he does not mention here that Violette had offered water to the men, this does not mean, as has been suggested, that he was cold and calculating and therefore there was no warm friendship between Violette and himself. Nor does it mean that he was not in love with her. He was, as is fully evidenced by his handwritten notes. Harry came back in very feeble health. It took him many months to come to some sort of terms with his life and what he had just endured. The fact that he says, ‘Half the men who met Violette Szabó were probably in love with her; she was after all an exceptionally attractive girl’ does not mean Harry was not truly in love with her. And it might have been something he could cling to while he tried to recover his lost health. But after he finally escaped Buchenwald concentration camp, he commanded his two prisoners, SS guards, to empty their pockets. He wanted their papers to hand over to the Americans when he reached their lines. A new and terrible image, a photo, of Violette assailed him. Photos dropped fr
om the SS guards’ pockets showed twelve women being forced to jump naked through the snow. One of them he was in no doubt about. As he states in his handwritten notes (in my archives), it was Violette. With great bitterness and anger he stomps the photos into the snow which he later regretted as it was yet more proof of SS barbarity.

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  Later, the women travelled northward to Saarbrücken. They were now truly on German territory. Neue Bremm is on the southern outskirts of the city of Saarbrücken, very close to the French border, about 160 miles from Paris. It remains a transitory stopover for visitors of all kinds. A memorial area acknowledging the men’s and women’s camps existed there. Here, as in so many places in Germany and Nazi-occupied countries, the Gestapo had established a collection point from which prisoners were sent elsewhere to larger concentration or extermination camps. It was also a camp for disciplining conscripted workers of the STO169 programme. The Nazis called Neue Bremm in Saarbrücken an ‘expanded police prison’. Here, men and women were brutally disciplined, undernourished and killed. The prisoners who were transitory and to be sent on elsewhere were treated no better. The Germans today call such places Orte des Schreckens, ‘Places of Horror’.

  This place at Neue Bremm was the camp in which Mademoiselle Monique Level,170 a French prisoner, saw Violette, Lilian and Denise. She thought that Lilian looked quite ill; both Denise and Lilian were, by this time, worn down into illness.

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  163 Jean-Pierre Wimille, part of the old Chestnut sub-circuit that Roger Benoist (French world champion racing driver) revived along with Clergyman, had been arrested, as had Benoist, who managed to escape on 18 June. Christiane Wimille, Jean-Pierre’s wife was also part of the Clergyman circuit.