Young, Brave and Beautiful

by Tania Szabô

  Violette tried to make the best of it. She was so weary and getting thinner by the day. She was thankful that her periods had stopped although she still wondered if she had fallen pregnant after Limoges and Avenue Foch. Otherwise, she remained in good health and spirits. For many women, menstruation often stopped due to stress and malnourishment. But for those for whom periods continued there was no sanitary protection to prevent the menses flowing down their legs, giving them great distress and humiliation.

  Violette’s surprise was joyful when, one day across the yard shortly after her arrival, she saw Marie Lecomte. They rushed into one another’s arms and cried, so glad the other had survived until now. Marie was quite shocked by Violette’s appearance, by the weight she had lost and the sunken look to her eyes. ‘Whatever have they done to you, my little one?’ she asked.

  ‘I’m tired to death. I only want to sleep,’ she told her. Violette, like most of the women, was barefoot. They were not allowed clogs until winter set in, or late autumn if it was particularly cold. The two spent a lot of time together and Violette introduced Marie to her small group of friends. ‘Maman Marie, they treated us abominably. In a camp in Saarbrücken we were all in chains.’

  Marie saw the marks on her ankles.

  Violette met many other Frenchwomen in her allotted hut, including the communist Jeannie Rousseau, who arrived on 15 August. The papers in her SS dossier gave her name as Madeleine Chaufeur, evidence of her part in an espionage ring in Brittany. She was arrested in 1940. Like Violette, she had been quick to invent a reasonable story. When she was caught, she was carrying two-dozen pairs of French nylon stockings to give as a gift to her British handlers in London. On capture, she explained that they were to be sold on the black market in Brittany. When she arrived in Ravensbrück she gave her real name. For some reason, the Nazis at the camp never cleared the confusion of her dossier name, her codename, and her real name.

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  Violette, Lilian and Denise were sent out on stone-breaking duties, as was Jeannie, and they would try to come back every day with something as a gift to Marie or one of their other friends in their Blockhaus; maybe only a dandelion or a piece of grass, but sometimes something they could eat or chew on. Sometimes Violette sat in on political discussions with the Englishwomen or the French – often enough in a mixed group.

  All these activities were dangerous because if they were caught they would be thrashed or sent to the bunker (that prison within the prison) where they could be heavily beaten again over the ‘beating block’. Many women died from the twenty-five heavy blows administered to their backs by a female criminal inmate, one of the ‘asocials’, bearing a green triangle. But who was this woman? Heavy-set and strong, she was clearly a sadist, probably taking nefarious pleasure from beating the women’s naked backsides with all her strength, sometimes bringing the cane up under their bodies after crashing it down on their backs, using a leather-covered cane about three centimetres thick and fifty centimetres long.

  Some inmates were given the task of ‘elders’ of the barracks, calling the prisoners to roll-call and generally governing their every movement. Some were inexplicably cruel, others helpful, others coldly efficient. They received benefits for work well done, either in small amounts of cash, or extra food rations, clothes or other benefits. In this way, the warders and other SS personnel did not have to suffer the stink, dirt and infestations of the camp, nor the early-morning calls.

  Roll-call took place at half past three every morning in summer. All the women had to congregate in the large yard. There, they were to wait at attention until the Appel or roll-call, was completed. Sometimes it did not start for two or three hours. In winter, they were summoned into the yard at half past four in the morning, ice all around, snow on the ground, whatever the weather. A number of women died every day. They died from the suffocating heat, lack of water and food, or from the terrible cold, lack of sustenance and illness. Other prisoners had to cart them off and pile them up on top of one another, very neatly against a wall. Punishment ensued if the piles were not neat.

  In the winter, snow and ice covered the ground, icicles hung from the Blockhäuser, the women’s faces froze and they got frostbite. Violette, like many, wore summer clothes throughout her incarceration and Kommando187 work in Torgau and Königsberg; they gave not a modicum of warmth. Sometimes, the roll-call would be repeated two or three times. Six hours or more could be passed in the Ravensbrück yard where hell did freeze over.

  A Frenchwoman who had been a prisoner there with Violette told my friend and I that one day Violette had stepped out and danced the ‘Lambeth Walk’ while all the English girls joined in the singing. It gave the women who witnessed it a huge lift and there was much laughter to the furious shouts of the SS overseers. Violette found herself in the bunker in solitary for a week, during which she had soup, bread and water just once on three of those seven days. It was an airless, dark basement cell and the temperature was lower than in the Blockhaus. There were cockroaches crawling around, but she did have a chair, a bed and a bedcover to herself. She could hear the screams of women being beaten or tortured. She continued her exercises, more for warmth and for her brain than for her body. How else to keep sane? How to stay free from sickness, if not exactly remain healthy?

  It was her second time in solitary. The first was after it was discovered that she was attempting to escape. That time she had been beaten on the thrashing block but had survived and, although the wounds took a long time to begin to heal, they did not become infected.

  When she came out on both occasions, she was fussed over by all the women of her hut. They had collected minute morsels of food for her, had heated water with a few grains of ersatz coffee stolen from the canteen and they rubbed her body to warm her up and just make her feel better. It did.

  The very act of searching, or scrounging from the infirmary or sewing rooms, even on occasion the kitchens, kept a spirit of adventure high. All the little plans to accomplish such things meant they had something to concentrate on.

  Violette and Denise Bloch slept on their slatted wood bunk, shared by four to six other women, including Lilian. The blanket was shared by at least three women and straw on the bunk was replaced every now and then from the Strohblock. The new straw was soiled again immediately by women too ill with dysentery to reach the floor, never mind the filthy latrines. Every morning, fifty or more women waited their turn at each of the three latrines available.

  During four years of the war, this huge hellhole had accommodated about 120,000 women, of whom only ten percent, 12,000, remained when the Russians liberated them on 29 April 1945. The Russians immediately burned to the ground every single vermin-infested Blockhaus. Apart from the fear of epidemics, those experienced Russian soldiers were shocked to the core by the starving, stinking skeletons that claimed womanhood. The most recently arrived prisoners were still in reasonably good health and still had a decent covering of flesh. But the others …

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  In late summer 1944, as they entered their Blockhaus for the first time, Violette and the girls with her were speechless, unable to comprehend. A gasp, a sob, a shudder. An ‘Oh no!’ from here and there. When Violette looked around her, her thoughts returned with a vengeance to the possibility of escape. She was still in pretty good shape, considering. Unlike most of the women, she had kept doing exercises in prison and, to a small extent, on the journey, and maybe this helped. She could not bear to watch the suffering of so many, but she would have to bear it while she made her plans. She must not act rashly and spoil her chances of reaching the Allies, even the Russians; Violette had so much to tell them of the crimes that were being committed every day, in every place occupied by the Gestapo, the SD and the Nazis generally.

  Across the lake, the church spire held a strange attraction for her. There must be a little town there, she thought. Those people must know what’s going on here, surely? If that’s the case, it’s too dangerous to escape in that direction. She asked a
woman and was told that, not only did the townsfolk know, but Arbeitkommandos or work groups of dirty, dishevelled and starving prisoners were sent into the town to do menial or construction work. Rumour had it that some large construction was taking place there, something to do with the camp – some said it was a gas chamber. The town was Fürstenberg where they had first stepped foot off the train on their arrival.

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  On 3 September 1944, Violette, Marie, Jeannie, Lilian Rolfe and Denis Bloch with Eileen Nearne and Solange and their Kommando group were taken to Torgau, another manufacturing slave-labour camp for Siemens. Today, many call them labour camps. They were not. They were slave labour camps. No wages were forthcoming and conditions were terrible. The hours were unbelievably long and extra duties often had to be performed. The conditions in the factory where they were forced to make ammunition further eroded the prisoners’ ‘élan de vivre’.

  When their train arrived at Torgau, Violette and the other women were immediately set to work, but Marie Lecomte was taken to the infirmary as she was very ill, semi-conscious and they all thought she was dying. She looked green and blood ran from her mouth. She lost her memory for a while but survived. Violette talked with her many times in the hospital and outside on a patch of grass when she was not working. Gradually Marie’s health improved.

  Jeannie persuaded the others to refuse to work making munitions to kill ‘our brothers’. They had all decided that no way would they work to support the Nazi war machine. With Jeannie were her two especially loyal friends who had worked in the Résistance with her: Countess Germaine de Renty and another communist, Marinette Curateau. Jeannie stood to the front and refused. In bad German, she made a speech to the fat-faced German chief of the camp, ‘that all these women are prisoners of war and the Gestapo have no right under the Geneva Convention to force them to make ammunition that would be used to kill their own people’.

  It was a gesture of pure madness, defiance of the sort that Violette was happy to take part in, loudly backed up by their friends. It raised the spirits of all the other women too. Jeannie said, ‘We were so childish, you see.’

  Finally, an old German doctor who was as kind as he could be advised them not to be foolish. The Torgau camp was good in comparison to others. But some would not listen. Marie says in her letter, ‘all 500 of us had to be punished for a few rebels.’ They were forced to obey and work or be shot out of hand. Commandant Sühren came from Ravensbrück and picked 250 women to go to Leipzig as slave labour. The other 250, including Marie, Violette and her friends were ‘to suffer the command of the slow-death reprisal in Königsberg in East Prussia’. But not right away.

  Violette, Lilian, Eileen Nearne and Solange were not made to return at that time. Jeannie, however, was immediately sent back to Ravensbrück, as the ringleader. She was lucky to survive. ‘I would have died that time,’ she said. But the Germans could not find her papers under the name of Jeannie Rousseau because, quite simply they did not exist! There were thousands of women in the camp so it would not have entered their mind that she might be registered under a pseudonym. ‘They asked me why I had been sent to Ravensbrück and I said I didn’t know.’ Still, it was noted and recorded by the Gestapo that she was indeed a troublemaker.

  The others were put back to work. There were some whippings and promises of far worse if they tried similar stunts again. SOE training came into its own for those agents who had been captured and forced to work as slave labour in the enemy manufacturing industry. Taught to feign ‘stupidity, ignorance, over-caution or fear of being suspected of active sabotage’, factory workers are then in a position to ask unnecessary questions, to check things frequently in order to avoid accusations of sabotage, to reject the slightest imperfections, stalling and working well but slowly, misunderstanding orders, misdirecting goods trucks and so on. ‘Feigning exhaustion, workers can cause delay by slightly increased accident rate, slightly inefficient work or not correcting errors of others’. All these and more should be utterly plausible ploys.

  Violette decided to employ the SOE tactics she had learned. It brought back all the skill she had had the opportunity to use in April during her very successful Rouen–Le Havre mission. She also quietly but avidly planned to escape with Eileen and Solange. The work was not too bad and they found ways of sabotaging the manufacturing processes in tiny but damaging ways. When faults were found in the machinery or ammunition because of their sabotage, there was nothing to suggest it was sabotage. As they moved around the factory, sometimes slipping past guards, they obstructed the work in any way they could. They had decided that it was better to create small hindrances, and lots of them, rather than be caught on a big one that would soon be fixed. In fact, Violette was adamant she would do nothing to endanger their sabotage efforts and escape plans. She was cautious, planned each step precisely and would not move unless there was a high possibility of success. Being women, they could have headaches and stomach aches and generally be unco-operative – but only so far.

  In this factory, the food was better. The soup had bits of cabbage and potato and once a week a tiny piece of meat. Bread rationing was increased a little from the one-tenth of a loaf they received in Ravensbrück. There was ersatz coffee in the morning and more soup for dinner in the same proportions. But they worked long hours – eleven, often twelve, hours a day.

  The good spirits of the girls sustained them, as Eileen Nearne recounted to me.

  Eileen told Violette many times that she thought they should get out as soon as possible. Violette’s response was always that they would escape in the right damn way. No use escaping only to have the dogs jump on them, or walk straight into the arms of an informer. None of them spoke particularly good German. Violette was in very high spirits, loving every minute of planning, telling Eileen that she had been speaking to one of the chaps and that he seemed to think Violette was not bad looking and liked it when she gave him a robust kiss on the cheek. He promised to make a key for the gates.

  Denise laughed as she towered over Violette’s slight figure, and chided her for her deception in spite of the fact that her charms were working. Suddenly she changed subject with a frown, wondering how Lilian was doing and whether she was sickening for something. But Solange, impatient that they were getting off the subject, asked when the key would be ready. The guard had told Violette that it would be a week or so, but that he must be careful and that the key needed copying and tooling.

  Violette turned to Denise saying she too was worried about Lilian but that if she were careful, she would hopefully improve and that they could all scrounge some little extras to feed her up. That seemed like a joke, though. Little extras – a few leaves of cabbage, half a potato, piece of bread that rolled under a board and got nibbled at by God knows what! And she remonstrated with Denise that she had been coughing too and must be careful!

  Denise said not to worry as she would go to the infirmary the next day as they were nowhere near as bad here as they were at Ravensbrück. They would give her something. It was not too cold yet and they spent most of the time inside the factory working so she was not getting chilled to the bone, just feeling weak, nothing more.

  And so they planned. The key came and still Violette would not budge. Eileen was impatient to escape but knew Violette was right when she said she would not try to escape until they had acquired some half-decent maps and warm clothing. They should keep the key safe for that time. Then they would be off like a shot. The girls going with her were thus saved from certain death lost in wintry forests or recapture if they sought help in the wrong place.

  Eileen Nearne was soon moved on to another sub-camp of Ravensbrück and never saw any of them again. Eileen had parachuted in to France in February 1944 and was captured shortly afterwards. She had insisted that she was Mademoiselle du Tort, and the Germans decided she must be a French réfractaire. After spells elsewhere, she finally ended up at Torgau, where she was liberated by the Americans in 1945. She was very lucky as well as smart. />
  Several weeks after Eileen had left, Violette, with Denise, Lilian and Marie – who were still unwell – were trucked back to Ravensbrück. They had been considered troublesome and suspected of planning to escape. The weather was turning cold now and they were pretty short on warm clothes. The others hunted around and all found something to keep Lilian a bit warmer. Violette had nothing but the silk summer dress and now a pair of worn clogs, a couple of sizes too large for her.

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  It was much worse when they returned to Ravensbrück this time; unbelievably more crowded and even filthier. Women were dying in their bunks or on the floor; more were throwing themselves against the electrified fences to end their torment.

  Just after the girls had left to go to Torgau in September, a huge red tent had been erected in the middle of the entrance yard to accommodate the overflow of 500 Jewish women from Hungary and thousands of women from Poland’s ghettos after the uprising. These women from Eastern Europe lived in unutterable filth. They starved; they fought for crumbs that fell on the muddy, stinking, rotting floor of the huge tent, awash with every form of human contaminant. They so wanted to live. They died in droves.

  When Violette and her friends returned, they just could not believe their eyes, or noses. A thick, sick, putrid smell wafted thickly from its interior and instantly women vomited including Violette. Women who had been at Ravensbrück for years were shocked by this turn of events and further deeply dispirited. A jackbooted female guard pushed the returning Kommandogruppe along, with the help of three or four others, all with firearms, short whips and rubber truncheons, much as they had when Violette and her group had first arrived.