by Sarah Helm
Loulou recalled an ‘adorable little Bretonne’, Simone Jezequel—‘she died of TB in my arms’. And there was a little Hollandaise. ‘Her brothers came to see me when I returned because they heard I’d been with her, and I remember they cried.’ And Loulou got to know the Russians and Poles in the block just as well, though names were harder to recall. She formed a particular bond with a Red Army doctor called Maria Czeniciuk, who was suffering badly with TB. ‘We couldn’t speak, of course, but we understood each other as doctors.’
The Armenian-born Annie de Montfort was ‘a dear friend’; she died of exhaustion, ‘and just before her death she asked Violette to collect her furs from storage in the Rue de Rivoli’.*2 And Loulou had many memories of Madame Van den Broek d’Obrenan, ‘a woman of a certain age’, who was extremely rich: ‘I saw her the evening of her death. She said all she wished now was that her body be taken back to France…She had come to the camp with her maid who died too, before her mistress I believe.’
Loulou’s favourite was probably Mademoiselle Zimberlin, an English teacher from Cluny in Burgundy, who in the resistance had helped somehow with ‘les parachutages’—the reception of parachutists landing from England—but was ‘very discreet’, so Loulou never heard the details. In fact Marie-Louise ‘Zim’ Zimberlin, aged fifty-six, had used her English (learned in Scotland) to interpret messages sent by signal from England when parachutists were about to land and then took them to resistance cells around Cluny. Loulou had met Zim in the scarlet fever block.
‘She was an older woman and very weak, but her spirit was strong. She hadn’t “baissé les bras” [given up] so I arranged that she should come into Block Ten. At least there was shelter from the worst of the camp in there and we could look after her.’
At the end of the day the three French medics would huddle on the top bunk and talk about Zim, Madame de Montfort and the other sick comrades.
And then we made up recipes and remembered our families. I learned all about Violette’s brother Jacques, and Jacqueline spoke about her sister. We had total confidence in each other; but still we didn’t talk of what we did in the resistance even then. It was dangerous. One never knew who was listening.
Mory and Spoerry were close by, hidden behind their screen. Sometimes they would hardly see Mory all day, but sometimes she would appear with her whip, and if she felt angry she would lash out at the sick with the whip or her fists, or just cancel their food. She particularly detested the women who soiled their beds, and though the French nurses tried to clean as best they could, there was little they could do: there were only two bedpans for the whole block. As the weeks passed, more and more of their patients were dying of dysentery and other sickness, not just TB.
‘Mory terrified everyone,’ said Loulou.
Jacqueline said she even terrified Treite. But I must say she was always reserved with me. I kept my distance and she kept her distance from me. It was very ambiguous. Very bizarre. She never did me personally any harm. When it was my birthday she even signed her name on a card that Violette had drawn.
I never understood why she behaved like this to me, because I had no power in the camp at all, and it was she who had the power. With others she was always very aggressive, particularly towards the Jews. I asked myself why does she behave like that?
Mory and Claude treated the ‘mad’ women worst of all, says Loulou. The French trio were not allowed in the Block 10 Idiotenstübchen over which Mory had sole control, though often she sent Claude into the room to quieten the women. ‘Claude would do anything for Mory. I think she was very frightened—of everything in the camp. Some people were so terrified they reacted like that. They became easy prey. And don’t forget Mory had power and charm.’
Loulou says she herself was never frightened in that way in the camp. We were talking in the sunny conservatory at her Bordeaux home. I asked her why. ‘Perhaps I had seen more of life. I’d seen people die before.’ She paused. ‘And I had my faith. But I have to say there were days in the camp when I found it hard to pray.’
Loulou had kept the birthday card that Carmen and the others signed: ‘For Doctor Loulou, for your smiles and optimism towards all your patients on this scrap of paper we give you a piece of our hearts.’ And the card was signed ‘Violette, Jacqueline, Carmen and Claude’.
—
The first Idiotenstübchen, described by Sylvia Salvesen, was close to the main Revier. The new one, in Block 10, was probably established over the summer of 1944 when the block became a ‘death block’. Sylvia saw six women in the original ‘lunatics’ room’; now there were at least fifty. Treite selected women for the room, but he never showed anyone the records, so an ‘idiot’s’ name was rarely known unless one of the Block 10 prisoner staff had come to know them. For example Carmen Mory recalled that a Belgian woman called Nelly Decornet was put in the mad room, simply because she had a nervous tic.
Treite carried out experiments to find out what sent people ‘mad’. In one case he carried out an autopsy on a woman who had killed herself by throwing herself at the wire. The Norwegian Nelly Langholm remembers another sort of experiment, which was probably also conducted by Treite. In her block Nelly befriended a young Polish woman who spoke fluent Norwegian.
She was called Joanna and in Poland she had studied Norwegian literature and the Norwegian language. She was quite young and very, very clever. So she was delighted to meet us real Norwegians. We spoke about Ibsen and became very good friends. One day she was taken to the Revier and she came back again without hair and with a big, big scar. She couldn’t speak and she couldn’t eat. She was very, very intelligent. I think they made some experiment to find out what makes a good brain, then they took her away to be killed.
Sometimes prisoners would notice a friend going ‘mad’, and then she would suddenly disappear. Micheline Maurel remembered how this happened to the twins Marie and Henriette Leger. Micheline had befriended the twins, in their early thirties, when they arrived together at Neubrandenburg, probably in the spring of 1944. They told Micheline they had been arrested for writing a book in praise of the French army. ‘They were a little odd, and neither could do anything without the other, but they were the most dependable of friends. One of them became mad and was sent back to Ravensbrück. Then the other lost her mind, and she too was sent away.’
It was Henriette who was sent back to Ravensbrück first; we know this because her camp health card is one of the few to have survived, and shows she died on 7 June 1944 of TB, probably in Block 10. Her twin Marie, who could ‘do nothing without her sister’, was later sent to the Block 10 ‘lunatic room’ and was seen there by Loulou Le Porz, who remembers Marie well:
She and her twin were the daughters of a notary from Normandy. Then they lived in Fontainebleau. But the girl was not mad. She was a little special in her manner perhaps. If you live in those conditions some people react in strange ways. But it always surprised me that there were not more mental problems than there were in the camp. The resistance gave women a strong character, perhaps it was that.
Treite recalled at his trial that at first the Block 10 Idiotenstübchen was split into two, one side for the ‘dangerous lunatics’ and the other for the rest, but by the time Marie Leger was put inside there were so many ‘idiots’ that the partition was removed to make space; but the numbers grew, so the room was moved, this time right next to the cubicle occupied by Mory and Spoerry. This did not please Mory, who demanded to be relocated, as the Idiotenstübchen impinged on her space, though it was still only three by four metres in size, and the fifty women had to fit in.
The Idiotenstübchen had one boarded-up window, no furniture and nothing on the floor. The rations were half what the rest of the inmates had. They were fed twice a day, but much of it spilled. Their heads were shaved. Each morning they were let out one by one to visit the washroom and latrines, marched by a camp policewoman, usually with Mory and Spoerry looking on. Stragglers were whipped and punched. For the rest of the day and night
the women were locked up; they had to relieve themselves where they sat or stood. Each morning two or three bodies were taken out and thrown straight onto a cart, and perhaps every two weeks a group of ‘lunatics’ would be taken off in lorries.
There was constant disturbance. If the noise got loud Mory dragged out the culprits, whipped them and called for straitjackets. Jacqueline Héreil, Violette Lecoq and Loulou Le Porz all recalled how in October 1944 Mory dragged out a Polish woman who was covered in excrement. She dragged the woman to the washroom, where she doused her with cold water for so long that the next day she died. Anne Spoerry helped Mory do all this. ‘Claude was always at Mory’s boot,’ said Loulou.
In her own testimony Mory said it was Treite who ordered half-rations and Treite who ordered the mad women’s hair to be shaved. She said she had never wanted to take charge of the lunatics, as it wasn’t possible to control fifty women shut up in such a room. That was why she had demanded straitjackets, but there were none to be had. She tried on one occasion ‘to tie the women up inside a blanket to control them’, but it hadn’t worked and they had started to foam at the mouth. In his testimony Treite seemed to concede that Mory had protested about being put in charge of the lunatics. ‘She repeatedly asked to be moved,’ he said.
I asked Loulou what it was really like in the room, and she seemed to hold back. ‘The women were in a terrible state. It was disgusting. A state of total misery you can’t imagine. They couldn’t leave the room. Others could move about in the block, at least, but the women in the mad room could never leave—only in the lorries that came to take them away. Have you seen Violette’s drawings?’ She opened the sketchbook lying on the desk, which fell open at ‘Vermin and Vultures’.
You see how big the rats were. They came out at night in the washroom where all the bodies were piled. And we tried to chase them out but they came back very quickly. Once one of our dead came back to life. Someone had taken her away too soon and Violette ran in from the washroom crying out: ‘Mais dis donc! There is a dead woman who is sitting in the bathroom and talking,’ There were situations that were so grotesque we had to laugh. But we were not tranquilles.
She rubs thumb and forefinger together. ‘When the chimney was throwing out its smoke we could feel the dust in the air. You know it was very fine. And we would turn to each other and say: “You see they are amongst us again—our comrades.” ’
By the end of November 1944 there were sixty-five ‘idiots’ at any one time, jammed wall to wall, so a truck came and cleared the room again. Loulou remembers a time just after it was cleared when Mory turned up with a group of Slovakian Jews. The women had just arrived and it was obvious what was going to happen, as the guards didn’t even bother to put them in camp clothes. ‘They were just going to let them die, right here in this room of hunger and thirst. That was the reality by then.’
It was just not worth while to transport them elsewhere or waste food on them. But Mory made me examine them because there had to be a doctor to sign the forms. So there I was, standing in front of fifty Slovakian grandmothers who were about to die, and I thought I was going mad. What am I doing here? I couldn’t talk to them—they spoke only Yiddish. They were all over seventy.
We pleaded to be able to give them food or drink, but we were not allowed. It was cold and they had nothing. We were not allowed to go in the room, and they died one after the other. In a week all of them were dead. And I thought why did I examine them? For what? I should have simply written: ‘These are grandmothers and are going to be left to die.’ This is my most abominable memory. I am haunted by that.
As the weeks passed the disturbances in the idiots’ room got worse, and those present remembered several horrors, which in their testimony seem to merge into one great horror, as the pattern hardly changed. According to Jacqueline Héreil one morning the French trio found that the ‘mad women’ had been attacking each other in the night and one had her face scratched to shreds. In what may have been the same incident, Mory said that when the door was opened one morning women were found strangled; they’d been killing each other. In another incident someone said five were found dead. Mory recalled when she led a ‘mutiny’, telling Treite ‘this could not go on, and conditions should be improved’.
Loulou and the French nurses remembered another occasion when, after a commotion in the ‘mad room’, Mory called for all the lunatics to be killed. She asked Loulou, Jacqueline and Violette to help her kill them. On that occasion, said Violette, the block was woken by terrible cries in the night. ‘We got up, so did Carmen Mory and Anne Spoerry, and when we went in we saw the cries came from a woman, probably a Russian, who was fighting with another among the prostrate bodies. There were sixty-seven women in the room that night. Mory hit them with a leather strap but failed to quieten them.’ Mory’s version was that Anne Spoerry had come to her one morning and said that a Polish woman, ‘Paulina’, who had ‘Herculean strength’, had killed one of the others by banging her head against the wall. Mory went to Treite and said, ‘I’ve found two more dead in the room,’ at which Treite laughed and replied, ‘Better two less than two more.’
On another occasion, so Mory said, Spoerry took all the other block workers to see another dead body in the mad room. It was terribly mutilated and had marks around the neck. Part of the head ‘had been literally scalped, with big blue marks all over’. Spoerry looked at Paulina’s hands and under the nails, finding traces of blood. Oberschwester Marschall was brought to see and ‘thought the situation was as appalling as we did’.
Violette said that Mory went to the French group and asked for their support, saying the lunatics should be killed rather than live in those conditions. ‘But we refused to agree.’ Jacqueline said Treite then appeared and told Mory to choose the maddest, as he was going to inject them. ‘Mory chose them and the women disappeared.’
Loulou remembered nothing of the scalped head or the traces of blood, but she recalled Paulina, who had a ‘superb singing voice’ and had sung out loud all night. ‘She was in a kind of hallucination. A delirium.’ The next morning Mory came up to Loulou carrying a syringe with something in it. ‘She said: “We can’t go on, we must execute her.” I said I couldn’t do that. She threatened me. Menaced me. At that point Claude volunteered. Anne Spoerry took that syringe and injected Paulina right there in the heart and she died immediately.’
—
Soon after Paulina died the Idiotenstübchen was cleared out again, but this time it wasn’t only the ‘idiots’ who went, but many of Dr Loulou’s patients too. As always it was the office workers who found out first that a new black transport was planned, when lists were called for, and secret plans made for a medical commission to come from Berlin to oversee the selections. The selections began in Block 10, and all the prisoner medical staff had to be there too.
There was the usual utmost secrecy about the destination, but this time more questions. It couldn’t be Majdanek, where the last gassing transport had gone—it was now in the hands of the Russians. Nor could it be Auschwitz: the gas chambers there had been dismantled ahead of the evacuation. The office workers were simply told to write beside the selected names: ‘sent to a new camp’.
Once a list was drawn up, the final selection took place. Violette Lecoq was called to one of the big rooms in the main Revier block, where a large table had been placed, behind which stood Drs Trommer, Treite and Orendi, and a ‘psychiatrist from Berlin’. Also present, she recalled, were ‘Oberschwester Marschall, Carmen Mory, Dr Le Porz, Jacqueline Héreil, Anne Spoerry and myself’.
Lists for selection had been prepared, and now the prisoners were called by name. ‘Thus began a march-past by which with a simple gesture the women were chosen either for transport or for return to their block,’ said Violette. Many of the names were well known to the Block 10 staff. The French woman Marie Leger was among them. Loulou tried to persuade Claude to use her sway with Mory to take Marie Leger off the list—she was only on it ‘because Mory detested
her’. But Claude refused to help.
Julia Barry, the ‘British’ camp policewoman from Guernsey, was called to guard the women in the Idiotenstübchen the morning before they left, and she later recalled that one of them was English. ‘When they passed, a young girl spoke English to me. She said she was going away now and would soon be home. I asked if she was an English girl and she said: “Of course.” That was all, and I never saw her again.’
According to Violette Lecoq, those selected remained in the block that night, and the following evening at seven ‘we started to dress them’. At 4 the next morning, Bräuning and Binz appeared at the block along with the prisoner camp police chief, Elisabeth Thury, and several women guards, who began to round up the women and pile them onto lorries. Violette was ordered to accompany the transport as far as the station, along with Carmen Mory.
At the station Violette saw the women put into cattle trucks ‘that contained nothing but a truss of straw’, about fifty crammed into each truck, under an armed SS guard. A Gypsy convoy left at the same time. Even then nobody knew for sure where the women were going, but Mory knew more than the rest: she told Oberschwester Marschall that she had heard they were going to Linz, in Austria.
In evidence for the trial in Hamburg in 1946 Percival Treite said at first that the women were sent to a health spa at Thüringen. Questioned again, he said: ‘We supposed that they went to a psychiatric hospital at Linz, but later a nurse told me that it was a transport for the gas chamber.’ Where exactly the gassing took place at Linz did not emerge until SS truck drivers gave evidence in a separate trial, relating to Mauthausen concentration camp. The drivers were questioned about gassings of male prisoners at Castle Hartheim near Linz.