Ravensbruck

by Sarah Helm

  As she called the protest at Torgau, Jeannie still had no idea that the factory there made parts for the V2, but she knew enough to tell the German officer in charge there that she would not work for him. ‘I went to this man and said in my beautiful German: “We are with the resistance. We cannot accept work on ammunition.” I told him we would work, but not to produce arms,’ said Jeannie, who spoke ‘beautiful English’ too. She lived on the Quai de Grenelle on the banks of the Seine. ‘So this officer, he just said: “OK, it can be arranged. If you refuse to work in the factory you can go back to Ravensbrück.” ’

  At this the protest fell apart. Nobody wanted to return to the camp. Lists were drawn up and women put their names down to stay or go. The war was so nearly over that the arms they would make would never be used, said some. Others said that Ravensbrück would kill them if they went back. ‘Half-heartedly I signed up for Ravensbrück, but half an hour later someone convinced me it was lunacy and I took my name off,’ Virginia Lake recalled.

  Jeannie addressed the crowd. ‘I stood up in front of them all and I said, look, we have gone through so many difficult years. Now, after all that work, for the first time we can stand up to the Germans. I thought this was our chance. I was there like that in front of them all. You see I was convinced somebody had to do something. Somebody had to stand up. I decided to do it.’

  ‘Why you?’

  ‘Because I was there. Period.’ She drew on a cigarette. ‘And because I was very young.’ At eighty-nine Jeannie, now Jeannie de Clarens, had lost little of her allure, but her voice faltered as she talked of her action that day at Torgau. She knew that many women—including many French—had died in atrocious circumstances as a direct consequence of the protest she led. She knew that comrades blamed her at the time and that some still blame her today.

  ‘It was very childish. I never knew his name, that man. I remember there was this one officer and he was in charge of the factory. And there were 1000 of us standing to attention. I decided it was the time to come out in the open. I said you obviously don’t know who we are. We are this and we are that, and I told him what we had done. We ought to be protected by the Geneva Conventions, I said.’

  ‘What was he like?’

  I remember feeling I could talk to him. This is my name, so-and-so, and I am speaking for my friends. We will not do this work. Many remained silent, you know. Many said no.

  And I went on and said: ‘We will go and pick your potatoes but I won’t make your bombs.’ It was when I said that that he threw me in the punishment cell, and it was not a very pleasant punishment cell I can tell you. He was flabbergasted. He could not imagine this could happen. And for a long time he didn’t know what to do with the others. But he sent me to this cell while he tried to get orders about what to do with the rest. I spent about three weeks there. Every morning I was put under a cold-water spray. And beaten. And then back to my cell. Next morning same thing.

  ‘Did you have any doubts at the time?’

  ‘No, I had no doubts. I knew the chance was there. We never knew at the time we would spend another winter there.’

  While Jeannie was in her cell, the munitions workers went to the factory, where they endured terrible conditions. Most made shell cases, which were dipped by cranes into tubs of acid that burned their hands and clothes, and they choked on sulphur. Others worked in sunken caves linked by underground railway tracks. Those who had refused to make arms were sent instead to work in the kitchens and the fields, while the camp director sought instructions about what to do with them. They were far better off than those in the factory, often working in the fresh air.

  Virginia recalled that all the Anglo-Americans were there. She didn’t know all the English women’s real names, because they still kept their aliases, but her descriptions of the women, recorded in a diary, identified three ‘parachutists’ who clearly included Violette Szabo. ‘She was young, charming and attractive. She used to stretch her limbs like a cat as she lay on her bunk not far from mine.’

  Denise Bloch was there too—‘She was very much in love with a French automobile champion.’* And Lilian Rolfe, now out of the sickbay: ‘We lost patience with her sometimes. We tried hard to make her eat the little food we were given, but she wouldn’t because she didn’t like it. She appeared to be doomed from the start.’

  Virginia herself was the only American-born woman here, but there were two other Americans by marriage. Charlotte Jackson, a Swiss woman, was married to an American doctor who had been working at a hospital in Neuilly, outside Paris, at the outbreak of war, and she was arrested with her husband and son. Also in the group was a French woman, Lucienne Dixon, married to an American engineer who had also been working in France.

  The other two British SOE women who had also arrived from Paris in late summer—the white-haired Yvonne Rudellat and a radio operator called Eileen Nearne—also went to Torgau at first, but they didn’t stay. Yvonne Rudellat returned to Ravensbrück, probably too sick to work. Eileen Nearne joined the protest at Torgau, but was then selected for a different subcamp near Leipzig and taken away.

  The seven British and Americans who remained at Torgau were then sent to work in the vegetable cellar just outside the camp wall, where they made contact again with the French POWs. The men left messages and gifts in a hiding place in the woods—aspirins, pencils, paper and prayer books. The POWs were much better off than the concentration-camp women. One day they provided a banquet from their Red Cross parcels—Kraft cheese, Sun-Maid raisins, Jack Frost sugar. They told the women they had built a secret radio transmitter, and offered to send messages to London. Violette, Lilian and Denise gave them numbers and a code with which to contact their headquarters in London’s Baker Street. Whether it was really possible to send the message, they didn’t know.

  At this time Violette was again talking of escaping. ‘Night after night her plan was to be culminated,’ Virginia recalled, ‘but somehow it never worked, although she spent hours waiting for her chance.’ Then in early October the Anglo-American group were told they were to leave the vegetable cellar and feared this might mean a return to Ravensbrück, but instead they were sent to dig potatoes. It was getting colder but they were pleased to be out in the open. The forest turned yellow, red and orange. Then came further rumours about a return to the main camp, but the orders were to dig faster, the frosts were coming.

  —

  While the Torgau potato-pickers dug into frozen soil, another group of French and British women had turned up at the Ravensbrück gates. This was a small transport of just fifty, and among them were Yvonne Baseden, the SOE woman captured in the cheese factory near Dijon, and her older English travelling companion, the bossy woman in the French Red Cross uniform. The woman’s name was Mary Lindell, though she was also the Comtesse de Milleville, as she had married a Belgian count.

  Such was the chaos at the gates at the time Yvonne and Mary’s group arrived that they seem to have wandered into the camp almost unnoticed. It was getting dark and they stumbled across a giant tent. According to Mary Lindell, it was empty and ‘piled high with clean straw and blankets’. Someone told them they couldn’t sleep in it because a new transport of Polish prisoners was expected any minute, so this must have been the second, bigger, tent, put up in the first week of September. Mary and Yvonne saw it just before it was filled with more prisoners, so it was still clean.

  Mary marched in, grabbed an armful of blankets and handed them out to her friends. After making sure Yvonne was warm enough—Mary had taken the young woman under her wing—they all settled down on the ground. It was damp and a mist blew off the lake, but they were all so tired they fell asleep.

  An important-looking German officer and a woman guard approached and pulled the blankets off. The officer, who had an interpreter, demanded to know who gave the women permission to take the blankets. Mary jumped up and retorted: ‘I did. Who gave you the right to allow women to sleep out in the open like this? We are prisoners of war. These women
have been sleeping in a cattle truck for over fourteen days, and I’m going to see they keep the blankets for the night.’

  Mary’s behaviour must have astonished onlookers, but it came as no surprise to Yvonne, who was already used to her companion’s brazen ways. In her forty-five years Mary Lindell had never been one to show fear. At the start of the First World War she volunteered as a Red Cross nurse and organised dressing stations close to the front line. Between the wars she married a Belgian count and raised a family, then in 1939 she volunteered again as a French Red Cross nurse before being recruited by the British escape service, MI9, to smuggle Allied servicemen out of southwest France. Finding herself in a Nazi concentration camp, she now seems to have thought nothing of tearing a strip off an SS commandant.

  ‘She always thought she knew best,’ said Yvonne Baseden. ‘She was an impossible character and disliked by everyone in normal circumstances. But in the camp you needed someone like that.’

  Fritz Suhren, however, was not at all put out by die Engländerin, as he called Lindell. But he was interested in the quality of her barathea twill uniform. When she had finished complaining to him, he leant forward and felt the lapel, then he turned to Dorothea Binz, saying: ‘Das ist schön.’ Binz felt the woollen cloth too. After more discussion the group were permitted to keep the blankets for the night. The following day Mary continued to protest that she and Yvonne were prisoners of war, but the women were soon sent off for the usual shower. Mary was forced to remove her uniform and was handed a soiled yellow flowery dress in return, while Yvonne took a red skirt and shirt.

  A woman with a red arm band, printed with a black ‘P’, then approached them. ‘You are English and so am I,’ she said. The woman said her name was Julia Barry, and she was a camp policewoman. She explained that she had been chosen for the role because she spoke several languages. Yvonne and Mary had no idea what to make of her. The camp appeared to be run by the inmates, and one of them, this ‘Englishwoman’, Julia Barry, carried a truncheon and a whip.

  And yet Julia Barry obviously wanted to help. She hid Mary’s First World War Croix de Guerre medal, which had been pinned on her uniform, and suggested that Mary should seek work in the Revier, as conditions were better there. The SS doctor even had English connections. Julia Barry said there were several other Englishwomen in the camp too, and she described a few. Some were obviously the SOE women, whose identities—despite their use of aliases—Yvonne guessed. But Julia mentioned others who had nothing to do with SOE.

  —

  Under interrogation after the war, Fritz Suhren denied there were any British women at all in Ravensbrück. It was one of his many blatant lies: he knew that by September 1944 the camp held at least twenty British prisoners, or women who were British by marriage. And not only had die Engländerin, Mary Lindell, caught his attention, so had a woman called Odette Sansom, whom he believed to be related to Winston Churchill.

  Odette Sansom, who was French by birth and married to an Englishman, was another SOE agent. When she was captured in southern France in 1942, Odette was in bed with her SOE circuit organiser, Peter Churchill, a very distant relative of the British prime minister. Hoping it might help her, Odette told her German captors that she was ‘Mrs Churchill’. Her deception afforded her little protection at first, but on arrival in Ravensbrück in July 1944, Suhren questioned her about her family connections. ‘I told him that “my husband” was a distant relative of the prime minister, but I could see he thought I was a nearer relation than that,’ she said. Suhren put Odette in one of the ‘privileged’ bunker cells, with a bed, blankets and SS canteen food. He also visited her regularly to check that all was well.

  To be British in Ravensbrück in 1944 was certainly unusual, but it was not unheard-of. The numbers were small because the British Isles were not occupied. Mass deportation never happened. Nevertheless, several hundred British men and women did find themselves in Hitler’s camps. Those we know most about were captured while working with the resistance in occupied countries on the continent, either for British intelligence or guerrilla cells such as those organised by SOE.

  Less well known are the hundreds of ordinary British men and women who simply happened to be on the continent when war broke out and were then captured. Many British women—nurses, nuns, governesses—were captured in France, Belgium and the Netherlands, where they were living and working, perhaps married to a Frenchman. Those captured and sent to Ravensbrück had often helped a local underground cell and had been rounded up like any other resister.

  The stories of the SOE women taken to Ravensbrück were investigated after the war, but most of the other British prisoners at the camp have remained largely anonymous. Hints of who some were and what became of them appear from time to time in the testimony of other survivors, in letters, or occasionally in post-war reports filed by Allied officials who investigated the camps. One such report shows that among the motley British group were a former British golfing champion called Pat Cheramy, who worked on a resistance escape line, a sixty-year-old Scottish nurse called Mary Young and the Irish-born governess Mary O’Shaughnessy, who had an artificial arm and came from Leigh in Lancashire. Two Irish nuns who hid Allied airmen in their convents were also loosely joined to the British group.

  There were also women who claimed to be British, but who probably were not. One, a journalist called Ann Sheridan, with Swiss connections, was distrusted by the rest of the group for being ‘too close to the Germans’. On the other hand Julia Barry, the camp policewoman, whose claim to be British was also doubtful, was well liked and said by others to have been cheerful, and ‘intensely patriotic about Guernsey’.

  Born Julia Brichta, her father was a Hungarian Jew and her mother American. In the 1930s she married an Englishman called Barry and went to live in the Channel Islands, where she had made several applications for a British passport, which were always refused. In 1942 she helped British intelligence by sending signals to London about German shipping movements in the Channel, for which she was arrested and sent to Ravensbrück.

  Julia’s own story emerged in more detail than many others after the war, in part because she gave evidence at the Hamburg trial. As a camp policewoman she might well have faced accusations of collaboration with the SS, but Julia had made good use of her policing role to get around all parts of the camp, gathering vital information as she went. At the same time she became known to the other British women because she was the only one of the group who seems to have tried to keep an eye out for the rest. Leaders are usually easy to identify amongst other national groups in the camp, but the small number of British women seem to have been unusually disunited and diverse. Amongst them only Julia Barry seems to have displayed any ‘British solidarity’ and tried to follow what happened to them all.

  For example Julia quickly heard when Pat Cheramy, the golf champion, was bitten by a guard; Pat even went to Julia ‘to show me the teeth marks’. Julia heard about a British woman called Sylvia who was beaten up so badly her face was covered in blood. And when Mary O’Shaughnessy was beaten so hard across the face that her front teeth were knocked out, Julia learned of it. She also learned that after Mary was knocked down for the first time, she stood up and was beaten down again, and smashed in the face so that her nose was broken.

  As a camp policewoman, Julia Barry also saw when British women came and left the camp. She knew that the British SOE women had left for Torgau in mid-September, and on 6 October she saw Violette, Denise and Lilian come back. The three returned with the American, Virginia Lake, and a large group of French, all of whom had taken part in the Torgau protest. It was expected that they would now be punished, though nobody yet knew how.

  —

  Entering under the Ravensbrück gates was far worse the second time. The women were treated as if they ‘already belonged here’ and everything was eerily familiar. Even in a month things had got worse. The guards seemed more brutal, pulling hair, beating with sticks and ‘seizing our miserable little
sacks that we had made of whatever we could’. The food rations were smaller and there was less bread. The morning Appell was much worse too. At 4 a.m. in mid-October it was far colder than it had been in early September, and the women had no coats. There was a ‘black-haired Gypsy—a witch’ who kicked and shoved them out into the cold. After a few days, some of the younger women were issued with coats while the old were left shivering with no coats at all, ‘but still we clung on to ours,’ recalled Virginia.

  The Norwegian prisoner Nelly Langholm remembers meeting Violette in October, when she was sent to work with Norwegians in the fabric store. ‘She talked of her little daughter and was so beautiful and cheerful and full of life.’ A guard came and took Violette away, but before she left, she was ordered to remove her number and triangle, ‘which made us all very scared, as it only happened when prisoners were going to be shot,’ said Nelly.

  Yvonne Baseden also saw the women when they returned in October. The three sought out Yvonne in her block, probably on the direction of Julia Barry, and they told her they were leaving for another subcamp. This would explain why Nelly saw Violette take off her number. Prisoners were always given new camp numbers when they went to subcamps. Violette, Denise and Lilian also told Yvonne something of their time at Torgau: