Young, Brave and Beautiful

by Tania Szabô

  164 Madame Rossier was an inmate of Ravensbrück and talked to Paul Holley and me at my studio in Jersey.

  165 By Neurenn she means Neue Bremm, a suburb of Saarbrück where the industrial area once held a concentration camp.

  166 Pierre Bur, a Résister of eighteen years of age, arrested on 11 June 1944 near Azat-Châtenet fighting a detachment of the SS-Das Reich Regiment, supplied much information on the men in cattle trucks.

  167 Jacques Vigny lived and worked in Compiègne and has a web page dedicated to him as has Pierre Bur.

  168 Schupo = familiar abbreviation of Schutzpolizei.

  169 STO = service de travail obligatoire = compulsory work service instigated by the Pétainiste government. Not a wise move by Maréchal Pétain. Those young men, their families and friends were suddenly the enemies of Vichy France. Many had scampered to the hills and thus the Maquis was born.

  170 Monique Level says the girls went to Gestapo HQ and later she saw them in Strasbourg and Saabrücken and they finally arrived in Ravensbrück on 25 August 1944. Eighteen days from Fresnes to this camp in north Germany. I first saw this detail from the BBC page written by Martin Sugarman, but have corrected the date. They were also in Strasbourg after Neue Bremm in Saarbrücken.

  36

  Saarbrücken to Fürstenburg and

  a Walk through the Forest

  August 1944

  ‘… that camp of awful fame.’

  From ‘Ode to Violette’ by Charles Bushell, 1946

  The days spent in the town of Saarbrücken, or rather the suburban area of Neue Bremm, had again rendered the young women prisoners from Fresnes prison dirty, hungry and thirsty. They were weary but at least they were not being tortured; manhandled perhaps, even receiving the odd brutal blow from a ‘gummi’171 on the whim of a guard, but the girls simply scoffed at such random and wanton bullying.

  Violette’s cheerfulness and soft voice distracted them from their desolation. Others sometimes noticed a deep sadness in Violette’s eyes and came to comfort her. Mostly she consoled herself with the firm conviction that in her tiny part of the war, she had won her battles and would continue to do so. Even her capture had been a victory of sorts. It had diverted the SS-Feldgendarmerie and the SS-Das Reich patrols from more pressing duties prevented them from torturing somebody else while they wasted their time on her.

  It never failed to surprise the women and their SS jailers when, on the receiving end of bad treatment or when one of the other girls was being roughly treated, Violette showed steel. Immediately laughing eyes turned hard and cold; hot anger lashed out. She did not flinch to insert herself between guard and prisoner, standing there swearing at them roundly in French or English or throwing back the few curses she had learnt from her jailers, ‘Schwein!’ ‘Dreckfink!’172 It was just as she had when bullies fell on her school friend Winnie: she had dived in, arms flailing, mouth swearing, scaring them off.

  Amazement and indecision washed over the faces of the ‘Schläger’.173 Once the mistreatment ended, Violette would again become the sweet young woman with a laughing smile and maybe a silly story or even a dance to cheer everyone up, including herself. Her innate cheerfulness and lack of fear, which had been misinterpreted as a ‘suicide wish’ or a ‘facile attitude’ in not taking things seriously enough in reports on her at the SOE training schools, was the very thing that sustained her in those dark moments. Violette reasoned that fate or the unexpected could only be dealt with pragmatically, and so she got on with whatever fate dealt her.

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  Finally, new groups of dirty and damaged third-class train carriages were ready. No more cattle trucks. The women were separated from the men here and were told they were going to a pretty nice camp where they would work hard, but there would be good food, books to read and hot showers. The guards had received a general order to keep the prisoners unafraid and even slightly looking forward to a labour camp where there would little or no mistreatment. This would keep the prisoners relatively docile and easy to handle over the very long distance to Ravensbrück.

  The journey started out well enough.

  After the starvation diet they had already suffered, there was now what the poor women considered adequate food. The soup had a few chunks of real meat sometimes, maybe half a potato. The bread was not mouldy and there were two hot drinks – one in the morning, ersatz coffee; one at night, unidentifiable but warm, if not hot.

  Saarbrücken to Ravensbrück is a long distance to cover by train and took an exceedingly long time. Five hundred miles of mind-numbing clacking wheels on rail.

  Ravensbrück sits on a small and lovely lake of the same name along the river Havel in eastern Mecklenburg. Today the entire area caters to everyone from youngsters and young adults to those who have retired. Boating, fishing, horse riding and many other outdoor activities in an area of growing popularity. In 1944, marshlands covered the land in grasses and, where the land was especially swampy, forests of fir trees grew tall but little vegetation arose from the mists.

  Violette’s world and that of her companions had reduced to endless grey railway tracks and sidings, grey stations, grey platforms and the noise of grey guards and grey dogs. Even a few of the young women turned grey with pain or fear.

  The long hours of the journey gave time for meditation, for discussion, gave time to weep at what had been done to humanity and their families as well as to themselves. There was time too for songs and jokes and laughter. There was time for healing but time for sinking into apathy and illness.

  Counting and roll calls were a constant curse on the journey. The trains they travelled in stopped frequently and the mostly Wehrmacht guards shunted the women from one train to the next, increasingly dirty during a never-ending fortnight of fairly constant hot sun.

  Occasionally, during platform ‘appels’ the women were drenched from welcome summer thunderstorms, only to steam dry under the broiling sun for an hour or two, or in the stink of sweat and worse of their grimy carriage. They all stank; they could not wash. Many of the girls were already sick with dysentery.

  Rarely the Wehrmacht soldiers, but always the SS and Gestapo, treated these filthy things that called themselves women as mere creatures of scorn. They were there to be used – in any way they saw fit. On this journey, thankfully, the SS and Gestapo were few and far between.

  Smoke and hot steam poured in through open windows, soot settled everywhere. However, the rhythmic clattering wheels on rails did ease tensions and helped the women to doze fitfully during the day as well as at night. Sometimes at Violette’s or another active woman’s behest, a group of women did exercises in the passageways.

  They were still shackled together in twos so that escape was made all the more difficult. However, escape was not recommended on this journey and had not been from the start of the first train in Paris; the SS warned that if anyone even tried to escape, many of their companions would be shot dead in reprisal. There was not a woman there who could accept such a direct reprisal for her action. Ideas of escape were shelved for the time being.

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  Violette had remarked to the women with her during the never-ending journey to Fürstenberg, in their desultory conversations that they were certainly becoming well-travelled, and it wasn’t costing them a penny. She watched the country change its colours and contours, she looked at the towns and villages they passed through, chatted about them with others equally fascinated, she even learnt a little German, to go with the small amount of Dutch she knew.

  She was not crushed or even terribly down by the situation she found herself in. Although still in pain, she was slowly healing and took joy from new vistas during the journey, passing a little of that joy of discovery to some of the others, joy, too, in the long meandering rivers, the ponds and lakes, the fishing boats, the farms and tractors, the harvests being collected, the clothes worn by the farmers and farmhands, villagers and city folk. The livestock, horses, sheep and chickens running wild in the fields. Roosters proclaimi
ng their territory. The sun’s long golden rays delving deep into the earth as twilight rushed in.

  It was, Violette decided, a fine thing to travel extensively. After the war, if she survived, she would do much more, as her brothers were already doing in the armed forces, except for young Dickie. But for her, it would always be first class, never ever again in discomfort.

  She was reminded by these scenes – reluctantly to be sure and much to her surprise – that not all Germans were guttural swine, ready to bawl and shout, ready to bring down a gummi, pistol butt onto their soft bodies or dogs to bite on soft flesh. She also discovered that the language itself could be beautiful and despite herself was drawn to some of the songs that drifted up from one of the guards’ wireless sets or from the occasional happy singsong of the guards.

  She did not hate the gentle people she saw from the train window. She wondered how they could be so deluded as to follow the frantic rantings of a megalomaniac – for Hitler was that. Violette knew she could do the ‘silent kill’ that she had been trained to do on him, without hesitation.

  She remembered Oswald Mosley who formed the British Union of Fascists in 1932 and his gangs in London. They were nothing but bullyboys, hurting and causing damage to many Jewish people in the East End of London. They pranced down the streets like idiots, she thought at the time, in black shirts and shiny black boots, thick leather belts with spikes, giving speeches and showing a mindless swagger to the world. Most people laughed at them … And yet, there were some 8,000 English men and women who did not. Thousands who listened. Thousands who wanted to believe that democracy was waning and a new order dawning. She even remembered a friend or two, one a girl, being quite taken up with the Mosley set, currying favour, trying to persuade Violette and others to join them. So maybe you just needed the right set of circumstances, she reflected, to turn a people. She remembered laughing aloud at such crazy stuff.

  The British were not partial to swagger and oration, they preferred a quieter life of individual eccentricities and freedom but …

  But Germany had been well and truly mentally infected. Would the Allies be able to rid the world of such malevolent ideology going by the name of Aryanism? Hope was in the air. Big battles were being fought and won. News filtered through. The Allies would win the war after so many devastating setbacks.

  The German population knew of the camps – after all, thousands were employed in them; they were a virtual industry, sending out slave-labour to chemical plants, aircraft and weapons factories and food-processing concerns.

  A German doctor reported at the trials in Nuremburg and Hamburg in December 1946 that everyone in Germany knew about Konzentrationslagern.174 He had seen correspondence in 1940 from the Bishop of Bonn or Cologne, addressed to the SS-Headquarters in Berlin, complaining because the local children were using the phrase as a joke, ‘I will send you to the chimney’ and mothers would warn their children that if they were naughty they ‘would be sent to the chimney’; the ‘chimney’, of course, was an extermination camp.

  Violette recalled that SOE had sent agents into Germany. She remembered that there had been a German or two at the SOE schools, seen and heard only from a distance. Maybe the German, she couldn’t remember his name now, but he was always very pleasant and polite, who had lived in lodgings in 18 Burnley Road had been persuaded to become an agent or a double agent for the Allies rather than live in internment camps in England. She hoped so.

  Twice a day, sometimes three times, they were made to line up for perhaps an hour, often more, to be roll-called, counted, checked and double-checked. Each leg of their journey took time to organise and provision so the Wehrmacht occupied everyone’s time in this useless exercise. But it did give the women a chance to stretch their legs.

  A stop early in the last week of August seemed just another in the constant flow of rail beneath wheel. The train pulled slowly into Fürstenberg.

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  171 Gummi = gum, rubber in German, here means a rubber truncheon.

  172 Fink = finch. Dreck = dirt, so Dreckfink = ‘dirtyfinch’, which is quite amusing, is used for ‘filthy pig’. The Germans used these slang expressions towards all their prisoners. To throw such curses back at them could be rather dangerous.

  173 Schläger = thug, ruffian. Schläger also means ‘hitter’ and, therefore, ‘hit song’.

  174 Konzentrationslagern means concentration camps; Lager means camp + ‘n’ makes it plural, camps. Often written KzL.

  Women forced into the camp brothels came mainly from Ravensbrück concentration camp for the benefit of Kapos and inmates as an inducement in camps like Mathausen (from 1942) and Sachsenhausen – established in August 1944.

  37

  Ravensbrück and the Final Curtain

  August 1944 to February 1945

  Bahnhof Fürstenberg was wonderfully located for an open-air spa but was the reception station for those about to be detrained. The air was fresh and smelt of midsummer flowers and pine. The place was invigorating and so very popular for ‘cures’, particularly for pneumonia and tuberculosis. But this town was unseen by the women locked in their filthy carriages. Glimpses of rail yards, trucks, tips and some construction work was all they saw.

  They were ordered out onto the platform at Fürstenberg and made to stand in silent lines. Their shackles were removed and they were lined up five abreast with guards and their dogs walking up and down. They felt stiff; some stumbled but were helped up by their travelling companions.

  It was all done peacefully enough. Denise Bloch thought the guards and dogs from the train were probably just as weary of the journey as they were. They had no idea where they were going but one of the older women said she thought there was a women’s prison somewhere well to the north of Berlin but could not remember its name. Someone asked an SS guard from the camp who was standing nearby and was slapped so hard in the face that she fell to the ground. She lost a couple of teeth and her right jaw had been slightly cracked, but stood up again in stoic silence – eyes down, tears seeping onto her cheeks and rolling off her chin – knowing worse would follow if she did not. Violette, at the other end of the platform, bit down her outrage and stood calmly. Sometimes she smiled at a neighbour, sometimes she scowled, head to the front. She must do nothing rash, nor attract attention. In the roiling midday sun, the SS count took place. Women fainted and were manhandled until they revived or were taken to one side for recuperation or just cast aside to a grimmer destination.

  Then they set off on what felt to the weary and stiff women like an interminably long walk to Ravensbrück.

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  They marched in a straggling line of grimy, weary and weakened women. Violette, weary like the others, was dismayed to realise the soporific journey had ended. Hardly a word was spoken. Out of one hellhole into another. Hearts heavy, backs a little stooped, one step in front of the other.

  Despite the ordeal, one woman pointed to a flower the colour of sunlight and smiled. Another said, ‘I’ve just heard a bird, isn’t that wonderful?’

  As she marched beside the other prisoners, with her few belongings under her arm, Violette thought to herself that people suffering great mental or physical pain or with terminal illnesses would feel much as these women and herself felt, taking pleasure from the same tiny glimpses of sweet nature. A sunbeam, the caw of a raven or the chattering of a magpie, rustling leaves, a child’s laugh, a song of hope, even a prayer. These pleasures usually bring smiles to the elderly and infirm; not usually to the young and vigorous, whose laughter rings out and who seek action rather than serenity.

  ‘Ein, zwei! Ein, zwei!’ screamed a young SS guard, brandishing his rifle, carried away by the power he wielded. ‘One, two! One, two! It is not a stroll to a picnic; it is a march to work! Arbeit macht frei! Work makes you free!’ He turned and grinned at a female SS guard. No longer being guarded by the Wehrmacht, the women knew things would be different now. The rosy picture painted by the Wehrmacht soldier, who probab
ly knew no better, was mere delusion.

  As she marched aimlessly along with the other women, Violette saw they were walking through woodlands. She heard the song of birds that she could not identify. She pondered that all the different kinds of birds and animals managed to live together. They would stand firm or fight if their territory were under threat, but they didn’t exterminate one another.

  The guards imitated their dogs, barking and snarling if some poor woman strayed too far out of line. The prisoners trudged on, one foot after the other. The tangy fresh smell of resin from the pine trees growing so well in the marshland’s sandy soil gave them a lift. The air was so crisp and clear. Violette remarked to the other women what a wonderful place it was. The others nodded and plodded on. Maybe, just maybe, their situation might improve. Just maybe.

  The convoy of ragged women could not remain truly sullen in this magical, mysterious and clean, clean, clean forest. Twigs cracked under their feet and old cones were still strewn where they had fallen, decaying and giving sustenance to the poor soil.

  Suddenly, on the left side of the roadway, they passed some pretty two-storey houses. Fitting perfectly and snugly into their surroundings of pine forest, constructed of slatted wood, they had been painted in delightful patterns. She discovered later that their occupants were the overseers of Ravensbrück concentration camp; the fact rather marred their loveliness.

  Violette trudging beside Denise, although no longer shackled at the ankles, Lilian Rolfe and a young Belgian she was next to, remained together and chatted from time to time

  Although Lilian and Violette had not met in South London, as they quietly whispered together they discovered both had family there. Lilian used to visit her grandparents in Paulet Road in Brixton from time to time, not at all far from Burnley Road where the Bushells lived. The next coincidence was that Lilian, codenamed Nadine, landed near Orléans by Lysander on the night of 5 April, pretty well the same time that Violette had jumped out of the plane to go to Rouen–Le Havre. As they walked along, the four could not refrain from broaching the various rumours of betrayal by agents and Résistants in France and betrayal in SOE headquarters. Violette was convinced but did not mention any names. They did not arrive at a firm answer. And yet each had felt that painful emotional kick in the stomach that made them want to cry out, ‘Why?’