by Larry Loftis
They say the Germans have little ammunition in France because the High Command doesn’t intend to put up much resistance.
When the invasion of occupied France was finally ordered, SOE went into overdrive. On the evening of June 5, the night before the landing, the BBC broadcast 306 messages. Buried within them were messages to Lieutenant Cammaerts, remnants of SPINDLE, agents whom Peter and Odette had helped in Marseille and other cities, and countless circuits throughout France:
“Vilma vous dit oui.”—“Destroy all German rolling stock on the railway line Angoulême-Bordeaux.”
“Madame dit non.”—“Bring down all telegraph wires between Caen and Alençon, and Caen and Évreux.”
After D-Day the Maquis were dispatched behind battle zones to disrupt German transport and communication. Telephone lines were sabotaged, cutting off Berlin from Wehrmacht officers at the front. The Germans responded by sending couriers to deliver messages and they were ambushed and shot. Bridges were blown, reinforcements were blocked.
Like Stalingrad, Normandy had become a German death trap.
* * *
AT THE BEGINNING OF July Odette was called to the Karlsruhe Prison office, where the commandant introduced a reporter from the Völkischer Beobachter, the daily newspaper of the Nazi Party. He was a small man with red shifty eyes and a notebook. Odette said nothing and the reporter jeered, “Well, Frau Churchill, you will be pleased to know that we already have three Churchills in our German prisons. We look forward to the arrival of yet another—of Mister Winston Churchill.”
“You will not have to wait long,” she replied, “but when Winston Churchill comes to Berlin, it will not be as you think. He will drive through the rubble of your city in triumph.”
Interview concluded. Odette returned to her cell.
* * *
ABOUT THIS TIME ODETTE had a disturbing premonition. For a week none of her colleagues appeared in the yard; strange, since at least one would be allowed exercise each day. Her intuition proved accurate: she would never see any of them again. Vera Leigh, Diana Rowden, and Andrée Borrel were executed July 6 at the Natzweiler-Struthof concentration camp. Injected with lethal doses of carbolic acid, the three were then fed into the furnace. Yolande Beekman, Madeleine Damerment, and Eliane Plewman would be executed two months later, on September 13, at Dachau.
Odette’s fate seemed certain to follow. She was the only one of the seven, after all, who had been condemned to death. She accepted it stoically, without complaint or reservation.
Two weeks later, on July 18, she was told to pack; her sentence would soon be carried out. With her daily ration—one slice of bread—Odette returned to the station, where she entrained for her cemetery.
The train chugged along, apparently east, and she saw more RAF handiwork: pockmarked stations and yards, twisted metal, delays from destroyed lines. Word spread about the Normandy invasion and the sea of bombers heading deep into France. Allied troops would follow and soon they would be at the Rhine, rapping on Adolf’s door.
In the next compartment, male prisoners began stirring.
“Encore un peu de patience, comarade,” came one cry, “Hitler’s day is over.”
British POWs began singing “It’s a long way to Tipperary . . .”
The train steamed into Frankfurt around midnight and Odette noticed that the station roof was shattered; so, too, it appeared, dreams of the guards, who moved about somberly. She was taken to police headquarters and repeated the drill: questions, searching, incarceration. This time, however, there would be no cell.
She was locked in a cage.
Single iron mesh, it was five feet long by four feet wide by six feet high; Odette was now a circus sideshow. She had been given nothing to drink since departing Karlsruhe, and was given nothing now. The cage had no water and no sanitation facility. Within hours, two other women were thrown in, and for the next several days this was their home.
Odette was then shipped to Halle, 250 miles north, and shut in a windowless prison attic with some forty-odd Ukrainian women. Sanitation was nonexistent and many women had dysentery. July heat and the foul combustion of sweat, body odor, blood, urine, and excrement turned the room into a septic sauna. To compound matters, the Germans had scattered sand across the floor as a fire retardant against Allied bombing, and it swirled constantly.
One day a large man came to the attic and asked for Odette. He was either Gestapo or part of the local police; she wasn’t sure. The man asked if she was English and when she confirmed that she was, he struck her twice across her still-swollen neck.
Yet the worst was to come.
On July 26, after four suffocating days in the septic sauna, Odette and the Ukrainians were loaded onto a train bound for the one place feared by every woman in Europe.
Ravensbrück.
Created by Heinrich Himmler himself, the notorious labor camp for women had been opened in May 1939 to house up to 4,000 political prisoners. Now it held more than 36,000, including criminals, prostitutes, Jehovah’s Witnesses, and Resistance agents. Roughly 25 percent of the inmates were Poles, 20 percent were Germans, 15 percent Jews, and 15 percent Russians, with the remainder composed of French, Ukrainians, Belgians, Czechs, Yugoslavs, Dutch, Italians, Spanish, English, Norwegians, and others. By the end of the war, some 133,000 women would pass through its gates, as many as 40,000 of whom would perish.
Odette’s train arrived at the Fürstenberg Station the following day, July 27, and a group of SS guards—men and women35—supervised the disembarking. The charming village on the banks of the Schwedtsee could not have been more different from the Ravensbrück community across the lake. Because the Havel River connected the Mecklenburg chain of lakes to the Schwedt, Fürstenberg was a popular boating destination and had become something of a resort area. Quaint cottages dotted the lengthy waterfront and quality homes built for camp employees attracted many SS officers and their families.
When the guards were ready, Odette and the Ukrainians left for the two-mile trek to the camp. It was impossible not to notice the town’s many flowers, including white gardenias, which adorned Fürstenberg windowsills. Such was the visual delight that one prisoner later remarked, “Is there really a prettier village on earth?”
After they had marched a few minutes the lake appeared on the right, SS homes on the left, and then they could see it: Ravensbrück’s fourteen-foot walls and gargoyle-like towers beckoned the damned and almost dead.
They continued alongside the tranquil Schwedtsee and were led through the massive iron gates and into the roll call area. The misery had been carefully planned, it seemed: the grounds were set into a man-made valley and there were no trees, bushes, or grass. The ground was cinder and, like the crop-wielding guards, hard and cold.
All around, Odette could see skull-and-crossbones warning that the triple barbed wires atop the concrete walls were electrified. In front of her was a sea of bullet-grey barracks—acres of them, perfectly aligned, perfectly dreary. To one side was what appeared to be a large canteen for the guards; to the other, an administrative office, another building, and the crematorium. More barbed wire, also electrified, separated the prisoner area from the canteen.
From what Odette could tell, it appeared that the camp was unprepared for their arrival, and the guards herded them down the main street to the washroom. The women showered and drank from the spigots and were told that they would be spending the night there—on the concrete floor. Odette was so tired it didn’t matter; she was asleep in seconds.
* * *
RAVENSBRüCK PRISONER INTAKE NORMALLY occurred in several stages. First, newcomers were taken to a desk to give up their personal belongings—jewelry, books, diaries, and purses—and then herded to another to give up their clothes. Stark naked, they would walk past a dozen leering SS men to the showers. After the icy cleansing, prisoners were inspected for lice—which infested the camp—and if any were found, the woman’s head and pubic area were shaved. Traumatized by the experience,
many cried; others committed suicide by throwing themselves on the electrified wire.
Still naked, the women then stood in line—often for hours—to receive a medical exam. The examination each group received, however, varied greatly. For some, a doctor simply inspected their throat and a dentist peered at their teeth; others received a gynecologic exam, the same instrument being used on every woman without disinfection.
Prisoners were then given a thin dress36 and directed back to the SS men, who would roam their hands over every woman—front, back, and sides—in case she had pilfered a Luger or Schmeisser from a showerhead or the doctor’s office.
Finally, inmates would receive a barrack assignment, but before exiting the building, female guards would search them again.
Perhaps because Odette was considered “on death row” and would not be mingling with others, she was spared the processing indignity. Around ten the next morning a Gestapo agent came to the washroom and called for her. He would be escorting her, he said, to see the commandant of the camp, Sturmbann-Führer (Major) Fritz Sühren.
Sühren was a prototype Nazi: Aryan as they came, fervent as ideologically possible. He had joined the Nazi Party in the early days, 1928, and volunteered for the SS three years later. While trained as a soldier, he was ushered into administration and in 1941 joined the staff at the Sachsenhausen concentration camp. The following year he was named deputy commandant and began to establish his reputation. In May he ordered Harry Naujoks—a Communist prisoner who was assisting as a camp Lagerältester37—to hang a fellow inmate. At the risk of his own hanging, Naujoks refused and Sühren made him stand by the prisoner and watch the execution up close and personal. To extend the suffering, a winch had been fitted on the gallows to raise the victim slowly.
In the summer of 1942 Sühren became commandant of Ravensbrück and his operating policy quickly became evident: exterminate prisoners by hard labor and starvation. And while he formally objected to the SS order to provide inmates to Dr. Karl Gebhardt38 for gruesome medical experiments (fearing legal repercussions), he nevertheless complied when the SS overruled his complaint. These experiments were conducted on dozens—including seventy-four Poles—and more than one hundred Romani were sterilized by various methods, including exposure to X-rays.39
Ravensbrück Commandant Fritz Sühren. CORRIERE DELLA SERRA
This was the man who would be responsible for Odette’s welfare.
He was strikingly young, Odette noticed—midthirties—with a baby face, fair hair, and blank blue eyes, almost without pigment. His lily-white skin shone bright against the green and silver SS Penal Section uniform, his elegant hands dangling like those of a mannequin.
“Sprechen Sie Deutsch?”
“Non, Monsieur.”
Sühren frowned. “You are relation to Mr. Winston Churchill?”
“My husband is a distant connection of his.”
In the camp she would be known as Frau Schurer, he said.
It was logical; the Churchill name would have been a distraction—half the guards wanting to know details about the British Bulldog, half wanting to beat Odette with vicarious blows.
He also told her that she would be put in the Bunker, the prison of the camp.
“Very well. As you wish.”
Odette’s mild response reflected ignorance about her new home. The Bunker was Ravensbrück’s most severe punishment, reserved only for the most incorrigible prisoners. It was actually a building located near the camp entrance and was composed of seventy-eight cells—thirty-nine on each of two floors. Each cell was about the size of a closet—four and a half paces long by two and a half paces wide—and contained a plank bed, folding table, stool, and toilet.
To send an inmate to the Bunker, a guard was required to submit a written report to the Camp Leader for Protective Custody, and any sentence longer than three days required the commandant’s approval. During winter, cells generally were unheated, though they had heating panels. Bunker inmates often went days without food, and most were beaten. One prisoner, a twenty-year-old pregnant woman, was found dead in her cell, frozen to the floor. She had been beaten.
As one condemned to death, Odette would receive special attention. Sühren spoke to the Gestapo agent, saying that Frau Schurer was to receive the normal ration of the punishment cells, no exercise, no books, and no bath.
The agent escorted her across the compound to the Bunker and turned her over to Margarete Mewes,40 a beady-eyed guard with a beak nose engulfed by thick, black tussled hair—a bird chirping from her nest.
Odette drank in one last swallow of the peaceful blue sky and followed Mewes into the compound and along a short passage. They came to a security gate for the inner Bunker, which Mewes unlocked, and went down a flight of stairs. Vestiges of daylight vanished, the corridor now illuminated by overhead lamps. Mewes unlocked a cell and Odette stepped in, the door slamming behind her.
It was pitch dark. Odette stretched out her hands—which she could not see—and gradually probed the confines of her compartment. She would live in utter darkness, unable to distinguish night from day.
As it was during her childhood blindness.
She closed her eyes.
* * *
SOMETHING MOVED.
The sound of a latch. Odette got up and shuffled across the cell. A sliver of light slipped through the food hatch and she retrieved a cup of weak coffee and slice of bread.
It must be morning.
The hatch closed and darkness returned.
Some four hours later—who could know for sure?—the hatch opened again and a bowl of turnip soup was inserted. A light in her cell was turned on for a few minutes, maybe five, and then extinguished. Hours after that, perhaps dinnertime, a second cup of coffee was presented.
Days went by and nothing changed. This was life in the Bunker—coffee, soup, and five minutes of artificial light a day. It was a black hole, this cell. Like the space-time phenomena, it absorbed everything—time, individuality, hope, sanity.
All except sound.
Odette’s cell was next to the “punishment room,” and she heard everything. Originally used for beatings about the head, the room adopted a formal procedure in 1942 when Heinrich Himmler ordered more brutal tactics—caning or whipping.
Sühren, who supervised the floggings, would instruct the prisoner to step up to a rack where her feet would be shackled in a wooden clamp. She would then be bent over the rack, strapped down, and her dress would be pulled over her head. Since she had been instructed to remove her underwear before leaving her barrack, her buttocks was bare. A blanket was then placed over her head to help muffle the screams. The prisoner would be instructed to count aloud the lashes—twenty-five being the norm—and if she could not, they would be counted for her. So that his hands would not be sullied, Sühren had an inmate—bribed with cigarettes or food—deliver the blows.
Ravensbrück whipping table. NEW BULGARIAN UNIVERSITY
Every night at eight Odette would hear them. First the strokes—“elf . . . zwolf . . . dreizehn . . .”—and then the cries and pleas to make your skin crawl. Sometimes there was a pause when the prisoner fainted but—like the brandy trick at Avenue Foch—there would be a splash, and the beating would continue.
Unconsciously, Odette counted every stroke with them.
This was hell.41
In our darkest moments, Aristotle had said, we must focus to see the light. Odette did her best. To ward off madness, she began conjuring up images, vivid and colorful, and reliving memorable events. She had done this during her childhood blindness and that experience, she believed, prepared her for this life without light. She thought of her girls, dressing them and considering each outfit—accessories, color, cloth—and the outings in Somerset. In the meadows of her mind, she strolled with the girls and marveled at sunsets.
Reality, though—screams or otherwise—eventually would disrupt the pleasant thoughts and she would start anew every few hours.
Already thin from
the meager rations at Fresnes, Odette’s body began to take the shape of the skeletons who had died overnight and were put on the charrette—the wooden handcart which hauled bodies to the crematorium each morning. Without proper nutrients, sunlight, and fresh air, she became sick, her glands again swelling. A guard took her to the prison infirmary and on the way back, something spectacular happened.
She found a leaf.
There were no trees in the compound, so it had blown in. She scooped it up and carried it back to her cell. When the light came on for her five minutes she looked at it, a solitary but profound example of something—God, creation, life. In a small way, it gave her a glimmer of hope.
At the end of the month her light was suddenly switched on and the door opened. It was the commandant. He asked if everything was all right.
“Yes, thank you.”
Did she wish anything?
“No, thank you.”
Sühren saluted, shut the door, and turned off the light.
* * *
IN HER LIFE OF darkness Odette began to despair. She was sick, starving, lonely, and in a very real sense, dying. She prayed to God, saying that she had done all she could, now “you must take over.” Almost immediately the food hatch was opened and a plate of food inserted.
It was the first plate Odette had seen in months.
Bunker life continued to take its toll, however, and scabs soon began to appear on her skin. Her glands festered.
A few weeks later, August now, Odette noticed that her cell was becoming unbearably hot; not summer heat, more like a Dutch oven. She felt for the central heating panels—they were on full blast. Pulling the blanket from her bed, she soaked it under the tap and wrapped it around her. This worked for the time being, but the heat from her body and the furnace eventually dried the blanket and she had to resoak it again and again.
No food came that day. Or the next. Or the next.
For six days and nights she was given no food and fought the inferno. Already deathly ill, she developed scurvy and dysentery. Her hair was falling out—she was almost completely bald—her teeth were loose, her skin was covered in scabs, and her gland was again the size of a grapefruit.
