Young, Brave and Beautiful

by Tania Szabô

  Each barrack had a stove that gave out a weak heat and so water could be boiled – but insufficient for a thousand women. However, the women all took it in turns to get hot water and Violette or Denise took the occasional hot drink over to Lilian, who was clearly desperately ill. They all spent every free moment looking for bits of food. Not one of them in this Blockhaus stole from another woman.

  They joined the pitiful scrums when a guard for laughs would throw some small piece of dry bread or meat that had gone rotten. The kind of pride that might make them hold back would only lessen their chances of survival. Monika, a barracks guard still in her twenties, was cruel and sadistic and had been particularly fond of this pastime until she lost her young son.

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  Violette and other women were sometimes cleaned up and forced to make a number of appallingly degrading visits to the Sachsenhausen camp brothels and its sub-camps, where a group of SS guards and officers took photographs of the sexual acts committed on Violette and other women, also making them run around, usually naked, in the snow in freezing temperatures as it was so amusing.

  In December, Violette, Denise and Lilian, along with Marie Lecomte and some others of the French section, were moved far to the north, to a camp at Königsberg, as punishment for again attempting to make escape plans. Here they replaced the Russians as vital slave labour to cut down trees and stack them for transportation all over Germany. The snow frequently came up to their knees as they wielded axes on trees and logs. Violette, as testified by Marie Lecomte, wore nothing but her summer dress and clogs. She, Marie and many others had little else to keep themselves warm. Marie was livid when she saw how warmly they had dressed the women in the biographical film of Violette.188 She kept exclaiming to us how they worked in the lightest of clothes in knee-deep snow in the bitter Königsberg winter of 1944–45. She wrote in a letter to my grandmother and me, ‘The place was so terribly dirty it was frightening. What few bits of clothing were left with the palliasses were full of vermin of the worst kind. There again, Violette went to work all the time while I stayed in the camp thanks to our Corsican doctor – Maria de Pérete.’

  The work was back-breakingly hard. The food hardly replenished a fifth of the energy her now-skinny body used. Violette’s health was finally on the decline.

  Marie continues:

  My poor darling had to work in the snow, helping in the work of building an aerodrome out of forest land. It was getting colder all the time, freezing weather, with the east winds from Siberia … One night, Violette got back to camp at six o’clock. We had a fire that day. She was almost out of her mind with the cold. She had a fit of screaming and crying. I could not quieten her for a long time. I took her in my arms, trying to warm her up a little. “I’m so cold, so cold,” she said. […] I brought her to the fire and showed her the little food I had saved from my dinner for her, a couple of thin slices of potato that I stuck to the stove to cook them. A kind of feast. She enjoyed it.

  She went on to describe the arrival of Sühren, accompanied by a woman to take charge of the prisoners. She was a fiend, lashing and kicking the girls, except for Marie, as the doctor had told her she was sick in the head. Violette shared her small palliasse with Marie, saying, ‘We shall keep one another warm, like this.’

  They had no blankets, no fire, just their thin frocks, and it was below freezing. Marie goes on to explain that this commandant forbad the girls to make a fire, but still a fire was made. At ten o’clock that night she returned demanding through an interpreter to be told who had lit it. Nobody spoke. ‘Who’s in charge of the stove?’ Marie replied that she was. Asked if she understood, Marie replied, ‘No,’ at which the woman pushed her onto the red-hot stovepipe. Next day Marie had to walk through the slush and ice to the commandant’s office and caught pneumonia. When she returned, she said that they had all kept one spoon of soup for her.

  The cold was so intense it was hard to keep on living. But each day they went to the forest to cut trees. Living skeletons; no strength for such hard work. Rations were just two cups of soup made of water and unwashed beet or potato peelings.

  Marie concludes her account that one week they were sent to work with Austrian soldiers who were kind to Violette. She had their soup and they shared their food with the women. They felt great pity for them, especially Violette, so young and looking as she did. It was, says Marie, the first time they had had some human sympathy. There were 700 women in the camp at the time and each day their friends died in the forest, ‘black from the congestion’.

  After further plans to escape were discovered, Violette, Denise, Lilian and a few others, but not Marie, were all returned to Ravensbrück on direct orders from Himmler’s Nazi headquarters in Berlin. The order came on 19 or 20 January for these girls to get ready to move out of the camp. They had heard from the Austrians that the Russians were getting very close and Violette was very upset at moving again as they were all hoping to celebrate liberation together.

  ‘What does it mean?’ asked Violette. ‘I don’t like it one bit. I have an awful feeling of foreboding.’

  Marie was terribly afraid for her, not knowing how to console her, she said simply, ‘You don’t believe it’s good, but perhaps you’re being moved to a British camp where you’ll be with other parachutists. You’ll get chocolates, cigarettes given to you, better food perhaps. Don’t get upset, chérie.’

  Violette and the others who were leaving were given a comb and clean clothes, along with some soap. ‘You see,’ said Marie, ‘they don’t want to take you to the British in the shocking state you’re now in.’ Violette enjoyed having a good wash, and Marie scrubbed her down, ‘Maman Marie, you must get the vermin out.’ She was getting excited and feeling halfway decent again. Violette then made them promise one another that they would contact the other’s family after the war and give each a kiss from the other. She wrote a note that Marie put in the hem of her thin woollen frock, remembering that there was the name Petit on it – not Petite – the feminine form:

  You will kiss them all for me and tell them everything. If we both return you will come to me in London and I will come to see you in France. We shall eat the fruits of the country, all the good things from the sea. If I return and not you, I promise to look after your family. I swear they’ll never want for anything.

  Then they left. Marie did not leave Königsberg until 5 February 1945.

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  The order from Himmler’s desk commanding the girls’ return to Ravensbrück also instructed that the three girls were to be shot forthwith.

  A similar order had been sent to all the camps with the names of the British prisoners who were to be dealt with in the same way, or simply made to disappear. No trace of their murder has been discovered.

  The Germans were defeated in every quarter and were hurrying to get rid of incriminating evidence. Each of the British and French prisoners considered to be trained by SOE who were in the camp had an individual death sentence passed on them. Their evidence was too damning for them to live.

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  On returning to Ravensbrück, Violette, Lilian and Denise were thrown into the camp bunker in solitary confinement. They persuaded themselves that this was for punitive reasons. After all, Violette had made serious efforts to escape deserving of the harshest punishments like the whipping block. However, their Russian friends said it was more likely they were about to be hanged.

  The same thing had happened to the Brits in Buchenwald; as Harry Peulevé said, ‘seventeen of our number were taken to the bunkers’. Himmler found it easy to choose the women as there were only Violette, Lilian and Denise there, but in Buchenwald it was more difficult and ‘the selection was based purely on the disorder of Himmler’s filing system and the inefficiency of his girl clerks who could not find the files of the remainder.’ Dr von Schuler, one of the SS camp doctors in Buchenwald, confided to his secretary that he was concerned he might be punished after the war for the unethical medical experiments he had carried out on pri
soners as guinea pigs, nicknamed ‘rabbits’ in the camps. Yeo-Thomas, the senior officer left among the Buchenwald Brits, learned of this and made a deal with the doctor that he would put in a good word for him if he exchanged their paperwork with those of prisoners who had just died of typhus. So Yeo-Thomas and Harry Peulevé survived, deeply damaged by their years of torture and incarceration.

  By January 1945, Violette was occasionally and unsurprisingly depressed and uninterested in anything, even in a younger friend, seventeen-year-old Hortense Daman, who had just come back from Block 9 after spending two days there. Violette seemed to be losing the will to live, says Hortense. It is more probable that she was by this time exhausted and very ill, possibly with pneumonia. The winter months had seen her used in brothels, condemned to the block and isolation cells and working in sub-zero temperatures. Nevertheless, Violette had given up her bed for sick Hortense and slept on the floor although she had a mass of open sores all over her legs. It was the last time they met. Several women survivors relate that Violette was always cheerful, helpful and planning to escape.

  Orders arrived from the Reich main security office in Berlin towards the end of January. Only a few days later, probably on 26 January – six months to the day before Violette’s twenty-fourth birthday – but no later than 5 February, Violette, Denise and Lilian were summoned to the shooting alley.

  The shooting alley was about three feet wide and ran between the long Commandant’s HQ building and, on the other side, the three smaller showers, kitchens and a cellblock.

  Lilian and Denise could not walk and were stretchered by Kapos to the passage and laid on the ground. Alone, Violette walked unaided, head held high, going to her death knowing she had done her duty on every count. Her face showed her huge visible scorn for those present: the camp overseers, Commandant Sühren, Schwartzhuber and dentist Dr Hellinger, doctors and all the rest. The revolver shots rang out around the prison. Denise and Lilian were both propped up and shot in the neck. After being forced to watch her two friends die, finally Violette was pushed to the ground in a kneeling position and shot in the neck.

  She smiled a little sadly.

  She was dead.

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  Marie had a gruelling journey back to Ravensbrück. Ninety of her fellow prisoners were machine-gunned en route; only 60 of the 250 women survived. More died of typhus and dysentery when they arrived. Marie begged a French nurse to give her news of Violette. Two days later the nurse reported that Violette was dead, hanged. ‘I saw her clothes at the sterilisation rooms. Full of blood,’ she told Marie. Marie asked what the clothes were like, and they matched those Violette had been wearing, but she said, ‘There’s no blood after a hanging.’

  The nurse said, ‘That’s all I was told, but you are right.’

  Violette’s body was perhaps cast into the muddy waters of the lake on the left as you stand at the wall looking to the distant spire. There are reeds and plenty of strong-growing plants and water life among them. Since writing this piece, I have discovered that the ashes of the women burned in the crematoria were cast into the lake. For all the horrors committed there, it is a beautiful spot for a final resting place.

  She did her duty well. She knew it. She was the victor.

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  ‘Age cannot wither her.’

  Shakespeare

  ‘Thou art a monument without a tomb.’

  Ben Jonson

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  Like a star shining brightly

  You are one amongst millions

  But like a star shining brightly

  You shine separately and brilliant

  People revere you

  People speak fondly of you

  People are proud of you

  Military and civil alike

  Beautiful of face

  And beautiful of spirit

  Brave with grace

  In pits, you had grit

  You are the mother

  I could not know

  Except by another

  I could not grow

  If I could only see

  The smiling face I saw …

  Tania Szabó, January 1999

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  175 Fürst = prince, fürsten = royal (a common surname, like Royal in English); Berg = hill or mountain; See = lake. Schwedt is a derivative of an original Slavic name meaning ‘hell’ so Schwedtsee could be translated as Hell’s Lake – not so inaccurate for these five or so years. Ravensbrück actually means Ravens Marsh, the ‘k’ having taken the place of the ‘h’ at the end.

  176 The SS euphemism for ‘gas chamber’. Weide = pasture; mitt- = mid-.

  177 Nicknamed by the prisoners, perhaps because Mina is a green vale near Mecca, Saudi Arabia.

  178 Geneviève de Gaulle wrote a small book of her time in Ravensbrück, God remained Outside, as well as travelling all over the world until old age prevented it to keep the flame of remembrance alive – lest we forget – at our own peril!

  179 Odette Churchill (Samson, Hallowes, liaison and wife to Peter Churchill of SOE). Odette Hallowes GC.

  180 Bettpolitik = politics of the bed.

  181 Jehovah’s Witnesses were imprisoned because they refused to serve the war effort, to take an oath of allegiance to the Third Reich, to make the ‘Heil Hitler’ salute, or to serve in the army. Their barracks were always extremely orderly and clean. They refused to try to escape, which led the SS to entrust positions of responsibility to them. At any time, they chose they could be freed by signing a document stating they would no longer practise their faith. Very few sought their freedom by signing.

  182 Forscher = researcher, research scientist or explorer; Bibel = Bible.

  183 Nanda Herbermann’s small book, The Blessed Abyss, is most interesting and revealing as she was bourgeois, a very careful and an obedient Nazi who found herself thrown into this underworld life after helping a priest who fled to Holland.

  184 Kapo, from the Italian ‘capo’ meaning ‘head’ and ‘boss’, was the title given to all inmates who, in an effort to save their own lives, betrayed their fellow prisoners by becoming guards, informers or supervisors. They received extra privileges such as food or better sleeping quarters. Those who were still alive at liberation were often murdered by other prisoners.

  185 Elie Cohen, Human Behaviour in the Concentration Camp, 1954; London Association Books 1988 p.135.

  186 As witnessed by Walter Jahn, male prisoner since 1941, Otto Pohl with Camp Commander Fritz Sühren inspected the Neue Wäscherei – laundry – to be the new gas chambers between February and March 1945, never to see it completed.

  187 Kommando = work crew.

  188 Carve her Name with Pride (1958), starring Virginia McKenna and Paul Scofield, with Michael Caine in his first bit part, in the train scene.

  Epilogue

  December 1947: a winter so cold that ice and snow lay thick on the ground over London. For some time my grandmother, Violette’s mother, has been teaching me how to curtsy. I knew, at the age of four and a half, how to curtsy perfectly and did not need to keep practising all the time. It was the word itself that gave me trouble. I called it ‘skurtsy’. Everyone would laugh and then my grandfather would finally mutter, ‘Can’t the poor child even say the word properly? Good God, she’s getting on for five.’ And then he would laugh a little gruffly, give his wife a kiss on the cheek and invite me to his knee for another intriguing story about a magic princess called Tania. Try as I might, that word remained ‘skurtsy’ for some time to come.

  The day arrives and the snow is crisp and even. My grandmother starts to tell me very carefully again about the King and curtseying and being polite. She tells me I will be able to wear the dress from Paris, and she tells me about Violette.

  ‘You know, Tania, that your mother will never be able to come back. She is a long, long way away. She is in a place that people call Heaven.’

  ‘Yes, but Granny, where is she? Can’t I go there too?’

  ‘No, Tania, n
ot for a long time. But our darling Violette, your dear mother, she was very, very brave for you and for all of us. She is dead, which means that she can never come back. She must stay in Heaven, although I am sure that she will watch over you.

  ‘And, Tania, most importantly, she wants you to do this thing for her: to go and collect her George Cross from that good and kind king, King George VI.’

  And so I went to see the King.

  I knew the protocol, not the word but the way to behave before the King. I had been told that he was a good man, not very strong but good, and wise. My grandparents repeated many times how brave he was in insisting that the entire royal family remain at Buckingham Palace as the bombs rained down over London. More interesting to my young mind was the fact that at last I could wear the dress that Violette had brought back for me from Paris. It still needed some alteration that my grandmother did with great care as tears glistened in her eyes.

  I had been a ‘sickly’ child, not very tall and quite thin. When, as an adult, I returned to Australia for a brief visit in this new millennium, Rick – Dickie, as he was called when he was younger – told me that he went to Mill Hill with Mum (I too called ‘Granny’ ‘Mum’ in Australia, after asking her permission) to fetch me away. He was eleven at the time. He told me, ‘Mum and I were shocked by the pervading smell of dog in the house and that you, Tania, were left alone with it. You were in a poor state of health.’

  He went on, ‘Maybe Vi chose Mill Hill because of some argument with Dad; why else would she have left you there?’

  ‘I have no idea, Rick,’ was my puzzled reply. ‘Perhaps because they were good friends; Vera Maidment was young and Violette knew Mum needed a rest from bringing up children.’