After the prisoners and the guard had left, the door through which Ilse Husson had entered was rapidly shut and locked. The ‘disinfection’ team emptied the contents of Zyklon-B boxes through special apertures. The gas began spreading the moment the pellets hit the ground. Those closest to the vents fell almost immediately. Approximately one-third of the victims died very quickly. The others collapsed upon each other, crying out and gasping for air. The healthy and the young fell last. Their shouts dwindled to moans, and a few minutes later all who had been locked in the chamber were prostrate, twitching ever more feebly. Within twenty minutes there was no movement at all, and having waited an additional ten minutes, the guards reopened the doors.
The naked bodies bore no particular marks; they were neither contorted nor discoloured. There were no lesions of any kind, faecal soiling was rare, faces were not twisted. The corpses were taken from the bunker. The men of the Sonderkommando went to work, opening mouths and extracting gold teeth by means of pliers. The teeth were later melted down by SS dentists into ingots. Ilse Husson had no gold teeth. A prisoner was assigned to cut off her hair, which was later dried in a loft before being bagged and sent to a government factory in Silesia, where it was made into felt or mattress stuffing.
The clothing that Ilse Husson had left outside was collected with the rest and taken by truck to a sorting station. Her naked body was thrown with other naked bodies onto a trolley on a narrow-gauge railway siding. It was shunted to a large ditch excavated outside the camp – this was before the construction of new gas chambers equipped with crematoria – where it was doused in methyl alcohol.
A young SS officer, Oskar Gröning, witnessed the cremation in the ditch. Horrified and shocked, he remained some seventy yards from the flames. A kapo told him later that when the bodies began to burn, gas bubbles formed in the lungs and elsewhere, the corpses seemed to leap, and the male bodies got erections.
Thomas and Marta Wolffsohn vanished without a trace. Their names do not appear on any register of immigrants to Palestine in 1938–1939. Their son Franz, sentenced to death for terrorism, was decapitated by axe at Hamburg prison on 16 October 1940.
Amédée Lévy, the sole Jewish inhabitant of Andigny, never returned from deportation.
NOTES
1 Lieutenant.
2 An office of the Reich Ministry of Popular Enlightenment and Propaganda, with offices at 52 Champs-Élysées. The Schrifttumgruppe (‘literary group’) led by Lieutenant Gerhard Heller was in charge of publishing.
3 Jean Giraudoux, Pleins pouvoirs, Gallimard, 1939.
4 Philippe Pétain, from a speech delivered in Pau on 20 April 1941.
5 An extract from this letter from Philippe Pétain was reproduced in Marc Ferro, Pétain, Fayard, 1987, p. 150.
6 By 1944, the Commission had dealt with 666,594 files. In total, 3.1 per cent of the 485,200 people naturalised between 1927 and August 1940 – some 15,154 – were denaturalised between 1940 and 1944. Of the files examined, 78 per cent involved Jews. Between 1927 and 1940, 23,648 Jews (4.9 per cent of the total number of new citizens) had been naturalised. By late August 1943 (when the Gestapo denounced the agreement struck by René Bousquet whereby French Jews were temporarily exempt from deportation), 30 per cent of Jews, some 7,053 individuals, had been denaturalised.
7 Jacques Chardonne, Chronique privée de l’an 40, Stock, 1941.
8 The Viking invader Ganger Hrolf, later known as Robert, first Duke of Normandy.
9 See Georges Montandon in Le Matin, 5 August 1941, and Comment reconnaître le Juif?, published during the Occupation by Les Nouvelles Éditions Françaises, a subsidiary of Denoël that also published Les Tribus du cinéma et du théâtre by Lucien Rebatet.
10 Jewess.
11 The three perpetrators, the Hungarian Martinek and the Romanians Copla and Cracium, were arrested on 19 October 1942 and shot on 9 March 1943.
12 Renseignements Généraux (RG): political security branch.
13 Parti Populaire Français, a right-wing collaborationist group whose leader was the former communist Jacques Doriot.
14 Documents 1 and 2 were filed by France at the Nuremberg trials.
15 Leaders of the National Socialist Party.
16 Name changed. See ‘Publisher’s Note’.
17 Sic.
18 A far-right league of the inter-war period.
19 See Jean Galtier-Boissière, Mon journal depuis la Libération, La Jeune Parque, 1945.
20 See Jacques Delperrié de Bayac, Histoire de la Milice 1918–1945, Fayard, 1969.
For a list of works consulted and suggestions for further reading, please visit www.gallicbooks.com
About the Author
Romain Slocombe is a writer, director, translator, illustrator, cartoonist and photographer. He was born in Paris in 1953.
Jesse Browner is a writer and translator. He lives in New York City.
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First published in 2013
by Gallic Books, 59 Ebury Street,
London, SW1W 0NZ
This ebook edition first published in 2013
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