by Kit Sergeant
“Can we get some water?” a woman begged one of the men standing outside the car.
“Nein.” The man slammed the door shut, ending the little breeze.
“Now you’ve done it,” a man’s gruff voice chided the woman. “Did you really think the Nazis were going to give you something to drink?”
“We’ve been here for almost two hours already,” the woman said, folding her arms in front of her.
“Well, there are no bathrooms, so be glad you don’t have water,” the man replied.
“I would have sweat it out anyway,” the woman said, fanning herself. “It’s so hot.”
Didi wanted to save her strength for whatever was in store. I’ll escape, she decided. Just as soon as the train stops. The thought cheered her, and, as the train started moving, she closed her eyes.
As darkness descended outside, the temperature inside the cattle car fell to a more tolerable level, but soon climbed again the next morning. At that point, they had been on the train for nearly 24 hours without food, water, or a place to relieve themselves. Some of the older prisoners looked near death.
Didi worriedly eyed a sweating, gray-haired woman whose breath was coming out in gasps. The woman swayed as the train slowed.
Didi felt a blast of cool air as someone opened the car door. “Raus!” a soldier commanded, gesturing for them to exit the car.
The prisoners got to their feet unsteadily. When Didi walked out into the sunshine, she saw the reason they had to evacuate: the track in front of them had been blown to pieces.
Her legs, after sitting so long in the same position, felt numb. As she shook them out, she noted the large field that lay beyond the train tracks. Without thinking, she started running.
She soon heard rapid footfalls behind her. Someone was chasing her. “Halt oder ich schiesse!” a voice commanded.
Didi didn’t need a translator to know he was threatening to shoot her. She kept up her pace, convincing herself she could still make it, even if she were in desperate need of both food and water. But then there was the unmistakable crack of a pistol firing. A bullet whizzed past her and blasted a hole in a nearby tree.
She stopped.
A guard grabbed her arm. “You’re lucky I didn’t kill you,” he said in clumsy French. “I will, though, if you dare try that again.”
He brought Didi back to the rest of the prisoners, who were ordered to march beyond the demolished part of the tracks.
Didi met the eyes of a farm worker, who paused in his hoeing. He picked up his thermos and, ignoring the guard’s orders for him to stay back, approached Didi. “Here,” he said, shoving the thermos at her.
“Thank you.” Didi took a gulp before relinquishing it to a pale-faced woman across from her.
“Move on now or you will join these prisoners!” a guard shouted.
The farmer tipped his hat before walking away, but other field workers repeated his kind gesture, handing off their own supply of water to the prisoners. “Good luck,” one of them said. “God will be with you.”
Soon, another train arrived and the prisoners were once again herded aboard. The guard barked something in German and once again used his rifle to underline his point.
A young man next to Didi translated, eyes down. “If anyone else tries to escape, we will shoot them and everyone else in their car.” With that, Didi knew her plans were finished—even if she did manage to get away, she’d never be able to live with the guilt of causing someone else’s death.
The young man now looked up at Didi. She expected him to scold her for daring to put their lives in danger. But all he said was, “You almost made it.”
She attempted to smile.
“I don’t know if you know this, but I saw two other women sneak away while they were dealing with you.”
Now Didi’s smile was genuine. Though she was still a prisoner, thanks to her, two others were not.
The young man stood up and tried to peer out of the small opening at the top of the wagon.
“Do you recognize where we are going?” Didi asked.
“Toward Germany.”
She swallowed back her terror. They were taking them to the heart of the Third Reich: the homeland of these monsters. How could she possibly escape now? Even if she did manage to get away from the guards, she would not know where to go, and she couldn’t speak the language.
When the train stopped again and the doors were opened, the same young man from before stated, “We’re in Weimar.”
“Near Buchenwald,” someone else replied.
“All men, off now!” a guard commanded.
“What’s Buchenwald?” Didi asked.
“A concentration camp,” the young man said before walking down the ramp.
The train rolled on for a few more hours before it once again stopped to allow a few Red Cross nurses to come aboard. They handed Didi a small bag. Inside was an apple and some bread. She took a large bite from the apple as the woman next to her eagerly opened her own bag.
“What’s that?” Didi expected to see similar items, but the woman held up a nurses’ uniform. A pass fell out. The woman started crying as she stripped off her own clothes and put on the uniform. She tucked the pass into her pocket.
“Hold on,” Didi told her. She felt immensely overlooked for not being given such a prize bag, but she wouldn’t deny the woman’s chance at freedom. She spit on her thumb and wiped at a smear of dirt on the woman’s face. “There,” Didi said. “Now you look the part.”
The woman’s eyes were still red as she thanked Didi.
“Good luck,” Didi called as the counterfeit nurse left the train.
Didi managed to fall asleep again, using the woman’s discarded clothes as a pillow. This time when the train stopped, the women were ordered off. They’d arrived at Ravensbrück.
Chapter 74
Odette
Despite the ubiquitous black curtain of her cell, Odette found that she was still able, vaguely, to distinguish time. It helped that every morning, or what she presumed was morning, the door was opened and a blinding light filled her eyes, reminding her of the flashlights of her supposed interrogators during SOE training. A mug of thin, bitter-tasting coffee and a slice of crumbly bread were dropped on the floor before the door slammed shut once again. A few hours later, the routine was repeated, this time with a bowl of watery soup, and another mug of coffee, signaling evening.
Odette surmised that her cell was next to the “beating room,” for not long after the last delivery of the day, the night’s gruesome entertainment started with the creaking of an iron gate, followed by the marching of several competent jackboots and the dragging of another’s feet. Soon the repetitious sound of a German voice counting numbers was heard, accompanied by the maniacal screaming of a tortured female.
Forced to listen, Odette concentrated on the German’s detached monotone. “Eins, zwei, drei…” she counted along, touching her indiscernible fingers. It was rare that the voice would announce, fünfundzwanzig, German for twenty-five, without a lull in screaming. Odette took the pause to mean that the victim had fainted. She would then hear the metallic clang of a bucket and a splashing of water, and the flogging would continue where the count had left off.
On one particularly disturbing evening, the counting went all the way to vierzig. Forty. She detected the tinny voice of Sturmbann-Führer Sühren in attendance that time.
Odette felt a tightening of her stomach every night this scenario was repeated, trying to muffle the screaming with her extra shirt, but to no avail. When she finally fell into a fitful sleep, the wailing of innocent women haunted her.
Though she couldn’t see her body in the blackness, she felt it getting thinner. When she first arrived at Ravensbrück, she could encircle the forearm directly above her wrist with her other hand. As the days crept slowly by, Odette could fit the space just below her elbow in between her forefinger and thumb, and then above her elbow, and then her upper arm. Soon she could do the same to he
r calf and she knew she was on the brink of starvation. The glands in her neck felt like rocks and her throat was always parched.
One morning—or was it afternoon?—the door burst open and the light was switched on. Odette shielded her eyes as the unmistakable voice of Sühren asked in English, “Is everything all right?”
Odette’s voice hadn’t been used in months. “Yes, thank you,” she managed to reply.
“Do you wish for anything?”
“No, thank you.” Odette refused to ask anything of these monsters. She could feel him make a sudden movement, probably a salute, before he turned off the light and shut the door.
It must have been the end of summer when Odette felt her room become insufferably hot. It wasn’t from the heat of the August sun, Odette surmised, but more like they had turned the furnace on full blast. Odette groped for the sheet and pulled it from the mattress before saturating it with cold water. She sat on the bed, wrapping the wet sheet around her. In no time, the intense heat had dried the sheet and she repeated the process.
This went on for six days, though it was hard to mark the time as no food was delivered. She could feel her already fragile will disintegrate. Her skin became bumpy with scabs and her hair fell out by the handful. Though she hadn’t eaten, her bowels emptied themselves hour after hour and she knew she’d contracted dysentery.
Just as she thought she’d succumb to her misery, Sühren reappeared. “Have you any complaints?”
Odette swallowed. “Yes, I have. For no reason that I am aware of, the heat was turned on in my cell and I went a week without food.”
“There was a reason,” Sühren replied. “The so-called Allies have liberated Fresnes Prison, where you once were held as a British spy. By order of the Gestapo, you were punished for that exact crime.”
She licked her dry lips and steeled herself for the effort of what she was about to say. “The Gestapo ordered the deprivation of food from a woman in solitary confinement because the Allies released prisoners from a place where she’s no longer being held captive?”
“Yes.”
She gave a weak chuckle. “Monsieur, I find the actions of the Gestapo rather droll.”
She could hear him shuffle his feet. “Do you wish for anything?”
“No.”
Chapter 75
Didi
Although Didi was dehydrated and hungry, the five-kilometer march to the concentration camp did not seem to take long at all. She inhaled each breath as deeply as she could, knowing these might be her last gasps of freedom for a long time. Or possibly her last gasps at all.
They traipsed past a pretty village, which someone said was called Fürstenberg, and then a lake bordered by a heavy forest. Didi filed the deep woods away as a place to hide for when she escaped.
But, just as when she arrived at Fresnes Prison, Didi realized she’d probably never be able to break free from Ravensbrück. The camp was surrounded by a brick wall more than twice as tall as herself and seemed to extend from one horizon to the other, a maze of barbed wire covering the top.
They were marched through the camp, which mostly consisted of wooden huts and a huge open space, before entering a long cinderblock building. Here they were told to strip naked. All of their clothing and anything else on their person, including their wedding rings, went into communal paper bags. The woman next to Didi kept on her sanitary belt, but a guard walked up to her and snapped, “Alles aus!” Everything had to come off.
They were then forced to walk past a dozen sneering male guards—some of whom ogled the women while others shouted insults—to the showers. The water was freezing cold and they were given tiny shreds of soap and dirty, threadbare washcloths. After that, they were subjected to yet another humiliation: the lice check. If any trace of lice was suspected, the woman’s head and pubic area were immediately shaved.
Didi mercifully escaped this indignity. Naked and shivering, she was told to stand in line for a medical examination. After what seemed like hours, a man in a white coat shoved an icy metal clamp into her privates. He barked something and Didi was pushed off the table. The man then inserted the clamp into the next girl without cleaning it.
Didi was given a striped dress made out of a paper-thin material. “Sew this onto your left shoulder,” another prisoner said, handing her a needle, thread, and a small red triangle.
After she’d finished sewing, another male guard ran his hands all over her, searching her, as if she could have found the opportunity to steal a weapon from the infirmary and hide it underneath her ragged dress.
The same guard escorted her to one of the long wooden huts where hundreds of women were packed into bunks three beds high. He led her through the maze of women until he located an empty bed. “This one’s free,” he said in broken French, pointing to the lower bunk. The sheets were stained—probably with bodily fluids, and, in a few spots, with what looked like blood.
As the guard walked away, Didi set her parcel down and then collapsed onto the hard bed.
The next day Didi was awoken by a blaring sound broadcasted over the loudspeaker.
“Appell,” one of her fellow prisoners said as she shuffled to the door. “Vernichtung durch Arbeit.”
“What does that mean?” another new recruit demanded.
“Extermination through work,” someone else replied. “Appell is where they line us up to count and make sure no one has escaped.”
Didi slipped her feet into her scuffed, prison-issued clogs before trailing the others to the open clearing, where thousands of women were already lined up in rows of five, standing as still as possible. Didi followed suit and forced her eyes to stay forward, even when a fat man on a bicycle rode past her. He carried a whip and occasionally lashed out at the prisoners as he shouted, “Achtung, achtung!” Didi had gathered enough German words by now to know that he meant ‘caution’ or ‘be careful,’ which was odd considering that the only immediate danger came from him and his whip.
A woman pushing a wheelbarrow emerged in Didi’s field of view. Her stomach turned as she saw the cargo: a pile of dead bodies. They were partially covered by a blanket, but some of their lifeless eyes stared at Didi as the corpse cart passed by.
Finally Appell was finished and they were released back to their hut for breakfast: bitter acorn coffee and a piece of bread. The siren sounded again. This time when they lined up at the Appelplatz, they were given their tasks for the day. Some were commanded to go to the nearby Siemens plant, shovel sand, or build roads. A corpulent woman guard barked at Didi to report to the camp garden, and Didi understood her well enough, even down to the final, “Move it, you lazy bitch!”
It was back-breaking work, and Didi could only assume the vegetables she tended would end up on the SS guards’ plates, not her own.
After a while, Didi was conscious that another woman had moved over to the spot next to hers. “How goes it, Didi?” the strangely-familiar voice asked.
Shocked to hear her name after so long, she glanced up from her work. Even though her head was shaved and her once-womanly frame had disappeared, Didi could easily recognize the woman was Yvonne Baseden, her roommate from Fawley Court. She too wore a red triangle on her left shoulder.
Didi longed to embrace her old friend, but knew that would attract the guards’ attention. “How long have you been here?” she asked instead.
“Too long,” Yvonne responded through a half-hearted whack of her hoe. “A week, maybe more. It’s hard to keep track. You?”
“This is my first day.”
“Well then, welcome to Hitler’s female slave camp.”
The guard shouted and waved at them, her meaning all-too clear. “Schnell, schnell.”
Yvonne and Didi bent down and continued hoeing, this time with renewed vigor. After a few minutes, Yvonne nodded toward three women pulling weeds a few meters away. “They’re SOE too. I’ve been with them since Saarbrücken.”
“What are their names?”
“They tell everyone they
’re Nadine, Ambroise, and Louise,” Yvonne said, nodding at each one in turn.
“That’s Violette Szabo,” Didi whispered, gazing at the still beautiful, dark-haired woman. “I met her in London once.”
“The other prisoners call them the ‘Little Paratroopers.’ Brave as they may be, they’ve let on that they’re British. I think that’s a bad idea,” Yvonne added and Didi nodded in agreement.
She squashed down a pang of familiarity at the sight of Violette, who seemed fervent in her duty and had a bag of weeds that was twice as full as her companions. Didi had only met her briefly in Leo Marks’ office, but she had liked her immediately. She also knew that Violette must have been a favorite of even her famously aloof boss, considering Marks himself had written her poem code. But Didi vowed to keep her distance from Violette, sensing it would be dangerous for the guards to catch on to their acquaintance. If they did, she’d have to abandon her alias of Jacqueline du Tetre.
While Violette appeared in good health, it was obvious that Nadine, who was also raven-haired, but much thinner than Violette, was not doing well. She could barely walk.
“She won’t eat,” Yvonne whispered to Didi as she struck the earth with her hoe. “She says she doesn’t like the food. Nobody does, but everyone else knows that you need to force it down anyway.”
“Halt die Gosche!” a deep voice shouted.
Didi bit back a shriek as a stream of cold water showered her, causing her to shiver in the summer sunshine. The guard, holding a hose with one hand, gestured to the garden. Didi and Yvonne had no choice but to continue their work in silence.
Chapter 76
Odette
It would be autumn now in Somerset, and mist would cover the woodland paths next to the creek. Odette pictured herself raking the leaves and dumping them into a bonfire. But the smoke wafting into her nostrils now was not the pleasant smell of burning leaves. She tightened her eyes against the darkness, knowing the acrid odor was coming from the ovens in the crematorium.
