by Alex Kershaw
Then there was SS sergeant Wilhelm Dreimann. Phillip often saw him riding around the camp on a bicycle with a leather whip, beating the prisoners as he went on his way. He also loved to watch the prisoners take off their clothes and stand nude, shivering with cold and terror, before being killed.
“Get a move on,” Dreimann would shout. “The quicker you are, the quicker you will be dead.”
—
PHILLIP NEVER knew how much his father was suffering, how agonizing his ordeal was, for Sumner never exhibited a moment of weakness before his son. There were to be no tears, no self-pity. Only the most determined, the most positive and focused, could hope to stay alive.
Among Phillip and Sumner’s fellow inmates at Neuengamme was forty-six-year-old Michel Hollard, founder of the Agir resistance network, who had provided crucial intelligence about the Germans’ V-1 rocket program. Hollard remembered Dr. Jackson as being “very upright, with white hair, strong features, and a stern, almost hard, expression—he appeared as a person of great energy and forcible character.” That winter Hollard became part of a tight-knit group that included Jackson. He recalled that Jackson never spoke about his activities in the resistance, nor why he and his family had been deported. He was no doubt afraid, as was Toquette, that the Gestapo had placed spies in the camp and that any information he revealed would endanger other captured members of the Goélette network.
Sumner was determined to contact his family and Hollard was able to help, managing after several attempts to smuggle a postcard from Sumner to one of Toquette’s sisters in Switzerland. At least her relatives would learn of his and Phillip’s fates.
What about Toquette? Was she still alive? Sumner knew better than anyone that she had immense inner strength, but in the end she was, like everyone else at the mercy of the Nazis that winter, very much human. There seemed little chance of her having survived.
NINETEEN
DELIVERANCE
A SIREN HOWLED, waking Toquette and the women of Ravensbruck. Aching from the cold, the women stirred in their bunks, spooned together, sharing each other’s lice and body warmth. It was three in the morning, the time of the daily wake-up call. Near the kitchen, forlorn parties of emaciated women waited for the doors to open. A couple of them soon returned to Toquette’s barrack with tureens filled with the bitter-tasting liquid they called coffee. Meanwhile SS soldiers arrived in the camp’s central square. Some were holding the leashes to snarling dogs. Whistles blew and another day began with the formal roll call.
This morning, late in March 1945, Toquette Jackson was feeling terribly weak. She knew she had a high temperature. Perhaps, if she was lucky, it would be high enough to avoid work. She found her block senior, a brutal Polish woman, asked if she could report sick, and was allowed to go to the infirmary, where she joined a line of women waiting to be inspected. Only a temperature of 102 degrees Fahrenheit would allow Toquette to escape the fatal cold. Thankfully, hers was more than high enough. She was indeed fortunate: the doctor on duty that morning was not Dr. Benno Orendi, a Romanian who had volunteered for the SS and despised the French-speaking women in the camp and usually barred them from treatment.
The cold and hunger had taken its toll. Toquette’s upper body was covered in countless lice bites. She had open sores and was suffering badly from dysentery. In the infirmary, through early April, her condition grew steadily worse. There was no adequate medical care, little water, and a pitiful ration of watery soup. The bunks, which patients were forced to share, were infested with lice. The infirmary was in fact a giant incubator of disease. But at least Toquette did not have to work in the numbing cold, watching young women freeze to death. Her last strength was no longer sapped by hard labor, clearing a nearby forest, cutting down trees in the icy darkness wearing just a summer dress and thin shawl.
Even if she survived the brutal conditions, it seemed highly unlikely that the SS would spare her life. Indeed, around the same time that Toquette was admitted to the infirmary, the head of the SS, Heinrich Himmler, issued an order to all concentration camp commanders: “Surrender is out of the question. Camps are to be evacuated immediately. No prisoner is to be allowed to fall into the hands of the enemy alive.” All across what was left of Nazi Germany, death marches began, with thousands dying each day as the inmates in camps closest to the Soviet advance were herded west and the survivors then crammed into already overcrowded camps such as Ravensbruck and Neuengamme in north-central Germany.
The Red Army was advancing so fast that, just a fortnight later, on April 15, 1945, a rumor began to circulate in Neuengamme that the camp would also soon be evacuated as Himmler had ordered. But where would the inmates be taken? What other camp could absorb them? Most of Germany had been overrun.
Sumner had by this stage gained considerable sway within the infirmary at Neuengamme. He also had excellent contacts within the broader camp through his friendships with Prominenten such as Jacques Sauvé, key Kapos like André, and others within Neuengamme’s administration. When he learned of the pending evacuation, he again acted decisively, arranging for Phillip to be readmitted to the infirmary as a patient so that he could watch over him. For all he knew, he was Phillip’s only surviving parent, and he was determined to be right beside his only child come what may. It was all that Toquette would have asked for.
—
IT WAS a special date in the Nazi calendar: April 20, 1945—Adolf Hitler’s birthday. At Ravensbruck the SS allowed each woman to have a small piece of meat in their daily soup to mark the occasion. In Berlin the fanatically loyal propaganda minister, forty-eight-year-old Joseph Goebbels, urged his fellow Germans to greater feats of resistance, to fight harder than ever to defeat the vast armies storming across Germany from east and west. A miracle was at hand. One just had to believe: “Our Führer has not deserted us. This is our victory.”
That same day, fifty-year-old Swedish nobleman and diplomat Count Folke Bernadotte, chairman of the Swedish Red Cross, arrived in Berlin. He had a long, serious face, thin lips, and unnervingly wise eyes. He knew the Nazi capital well, having visited many times during the war. In previous years, the twentieth of April had been a time for massive celebrations by Berliners, an opportunity for full Führer worship, but now the rubble-strewn streets were deathly quiet.
Bernadotte met with Himmler at a hospital north of Berlin the next day, April 21, at 6:00 a.m. The bespectacled forty-five-year-old Himmler with his neat little mustache looked like a rather portly schoolmaster, not the monster who had overseen the systematic killing of millions of enemies of the Reich. “The Head of the Gestapo was a very tired and weary man…” recalled Bernadotte. “Himmler ate with a good appetite. Occasionally he tapped his front teeth with his finger nail…” This was a sure sign he was feeling extremely stressed. They did not talk about the end of the war, or the fighting, or whether Bernadotte could help broker a peace agreement between the Western Allies and a Nazi Germany run by Himmler. “This time our talk was entirely about humanitarian measures,” recalled Bernadotte.
Himmler agreed to some of Bernadotte’s requests. Crucially, a number of prisoners could be transported to Sweden with the help of the Swedish Red Cross. Among these fortunate souls were to be the women “interned at Ravensbruck concentration camp,” recalled Bernadotte, who remained pokerfaced, wanting to wring more concessions from Himmler, who continued to tuck into his breakfast.
“The military situation is grave, very grave,” Himmler confided before Bernadotte left to make arrangements for Toquette and other women at Ravensbruck to be rescued.
That same day, Phillip and Sumner were marched together out of the gates of Neuengamme under heavy SS guard to a rail siding where they boarded a boxcar. It was loaded with sick and dying men. When Sumner asked for water for his new patients, an SS guard lashed out and beat him. Sumner took the blows stoically. Along with some 15,000 other Neuengamme inmates, Sumner and Phillip were to be transported to the Baltic port of Lübeck, where they were to be placed on prison sh
ips. What would happen then was anyone’s guess. Some feared the SS would sink the ships, killing all aboard, while others hoped that they were bound for freedom in Sweden.
The train left Neuengamme and passed through Hamburg, making its way the hundred-odd miles to Lübeck, the windswept city of some 150,000 whose historic center, dating back to the eleventh century, had been severely damaged by the first large-scale RAF bombing of a German civilian target in 1942. Conditions on the transport were atrocious. There was no food or water, and soon men began to die. Sumner did what he could for them in their last moments and also tended to Phillip, who had developed a worrying abscess on his leg. Somehow he obtained a small penknife. From his time working in a quarry in Maine, he knew how to sharpen blunt metal, and he opened the abscess and let it drain as Phillip lay down amid his other new patients in the boxcar at a siding on the docks at Lübeck, thirty-five miles northwest of Hamburg. The able-bodied on the train were then taken to a ship anchored nearby called the Thielbek, while Phillip remained with the sick and his father in the boxcar, whose doors were left open so they could smell the Baltic Sea air. They knew the Allies were advancing fast into Germany. The war would soon be over.
The next day, April 22, 1945, SS-Obersturmführer Franz Göring arrived at Ravensbruck, met with the commandant, Fritz Suhren, and ordered him to evacuate the camp. The women were to be marched to another site where the Swedish Red Cross would then take them into its care.
Suhren refused to do as instructed. Himmler had ordered him to kill the women as the enemy neared the camp. That day had not yet come. There was to be no last-minute reprieve for Toquette and her friends.
Göring found a telephone and reported the situation to an associate of Himmler. It wasn’t long before Suhren received a telephone call from Berlin. He was to release the women. Suhren reluctantly agreed, but what about the fifty-four Polish and seventeen French women who had been the subjects of gruesome medical experiments? Surely Himmler didn’t want them to be found by the Allies? The answer came later that day: even these women, so-called Versuchskaninchen—experimental rabbits—were also to be freed.
Meanwhile, Phillip and Sumner’s wagon still stood on the quay in Lübeck. Three SS prison ships—the Athen, the Thielbek, and the Elmenhorst—lay at anchor close by. The ships had been loaded with prisoners from other convoys as Phillip and his father tended to the sick and dying around them. Those still alive were in a pitiful state, lying in their own feces, unable to even crawl to a small barrel to defecate.
One of the able-bodied men taken on board the Thielbek spotted the ship’s captain. He was reading a newspaper that had a thick black border all around the front page. The headline exclaimed: OUR FÜHRER HAS FALLEN.
Hitler was dead. The war was surely over. Some inmates who were taken into a hold below celebrated. Others did not trust the SS. They might still be killed.
Deep in the bowels of the Thielbek, resistance leader Michel Hollard, the forty-six-year-old founder of the Agir network, was crammed amid hundreds of others. Men were barely able to breathe, corpses beneath their feet, the stench of human waste and rotting corpses lacerating their throats, forcing some to vomit, others to scream as they lost their senses.
Hollard would never forget how he was saved. He heard a German cry from above: “All French-speaking prisoners on deck!”
Hollard heard something being lifted above him. It was a hatch.
“French speakers up!”
For some reason, the SS were allowing men who could speak French to leave the hold. The Swedish Red Cross had apparently arranged for the French to be spared. Hollard didn’t think twice, didn’t hesitate to wonder why the SS were letting some men leave the ship. All that mattered was getting off the Thielbek. He quickly joined a group of Frenchmen and climbed up a ladder and out of the hold. Soon he was back on the quayside, walking with others past a stationary train. Hollard spotted his friend Sumner and called out to him.
“Come on, come quickly!” Hollard urged. “We’re getting out.”
Hollard approached Jackson.
“Dr. Jackson, you are not French but you speak French. You’re a Westerner. You are eligible for being taken out by the Swedes. Come with us.”
Sumner faced the most difficult choice of his life, far harder than when he had been forced to decide between spending the future in the United States or with Toquette. Should he go with Hollard or should he stay with his patients?
“No,” replied Jackson. “I’ve got my patients and son here.”
Phillip was also French-speaking. He too could have chosen to leave with Hollard but instead decided to stay where he was, beside his father. Being together was all that mattered.
Hollard begged them to reconsider.
“Jackson made no answer,” recalled Hollard, “but, raising his arm wearily, pointed to the prostrate figures covering the floor of the wagon. They were the bodies of his dying patients.”
The column of prisoners selected for Sweden was moving on. Hollard ran to catch up with it. He joined the last rank and then turned and took one last look at his friend, Sumner, the “devoted American.”
—
TOQUETTE WAS dying. The end would come in a matter of days, not weeks. It was April 25, 1945. Swedish Red Cross buses and trucks had for three days been ferrying women to Padborg, on the Danish border, and now officials were trying to evacuate hundreds more women, listed as “political,” from Ravensbruck. The SS denied that any Americans or British women were in the camp. It looked as if Toquette would be left behind in the squalid horror of the camp’s overcrowded infirmary. But then one of the inmates, a fifty-year-old British-born nurse called Mary Lindell, produced a list and was able to persuade the SS to allow those on it to board a white bus belonging to the Swedish Red Cross. Lindell had been deported to Ravensbruck in 1943 for organizing an escape line.
Among the women saved at the eleventh hour was Toquette Jackson, skeletal, wracked by dysentery and covered in open sores, boils, and lice bites. She was barely able to stand as she joined other women and then sat down in the clean Red Cross bus. Two days later, on April 27, she and the other women traveled north on a train guarded by several Gestapo agents wearing trilbies and long overcoats. Spring had finally arrived. There were bright green buds on the trees. They were bound for freedom—Sweden. Shawls wrapped around their shaved heads, they held tight to each other and staggered or were carried onto a boat docked in Lübeck. Toquette had no idea that her son and husband were now so close, in fact in the very same port, less than a mile away. Then, finally, the Gestapo men who had guarded her reluctantly departed.
On April 28, the Lillie Matthiessen left Lübeck with 225 women aboard, including Toquette Jackson. Incredibly, from the deck it was possible for her to see the Thielbek, the prison ship in whose hold her husband and son had been placed that same day. She of course had no idea that Sumner and Phillip were still alive, let alone that they were so very close, aboard a blacked-out ship across the swelling waters of the Bay of Lübeck, which Toquette and her fellow survivors were so glad to be leaving behind.
The Lillie Matthiessen crossed the gray Baltic to Malmö, arriving several hours later. There were no more Germans. No more Gestapo men in heavy overcoats and stained fedoras. Finally, the women of Ravensbruck were free. Yet, most were too tired and traumatized to feel much more than profound relief.
It was a beautiful spring day as the boat docked in Malmö. The women were seated on pathetic little bundles of belongings. Red Cross officials announced that they would have to discard the bundles because of fears of contagion. Out of habit, many women hid small items of sentimental value. Their long ordeal then ended as it had begun at Ravensbruck: they were taken to a building and disinfected in large shower rooms. This time there were no leering middle-aged SS men but there was, remarkably, a film cameraman who recorded the women as they lay and shivered in severe shock and trauma at the touch of the water.
Toquette and her friends were then taken in groups
and placed on a white bus that wound through the streets of Malmö, neat and prosperous, untouched by war, utterly surreal. The bus stopped in heavy traffic. The women looked out of the windows, some staring in wonder at a bakery. In the shop window were beautifully iced cakes and cream puffs.
One woman spoke up. “Who’ll trade me a cream cake for four potatoes from Ravensbruck?”
Civilians in the street gathered and began to stare at the women, not knowing where they had come from. The Swedish shoppers looked scared, as if they were encountering ghosts.
Toquette should have been long dead. Of the 550 women deported with her from France on August 15, 1944, she was one of just seventeen who had survived—an extraordinary victory over Nazi bestiality. But what about her husband and only child? Later that day she summoned the strength to write a letter. Her hand was shaking, she was so weak. She had to know if Sumner and Phillip had lived.
The letter was to her sister, Tat, in Paris.
Malmo, 29 April 45
My Sister,
I know nothing about you since we saw each other at Romainville. Do you have any news of Jack or Pete?
If my handwriting seems to tremble it is because I have open wounds on three fingers and no eyeglasses.
I also have otitis and my ears run—I can’t hear on one side, my feet are swollen and I have terrible dysentery.
But after all that my morale is good.
It is a miracle I am not dead; and to think that I will see you soon.
No time for more.
Kisses,
Your Sister
Glen Whisler of the American Red Cross reported on April 29, 1945: “Mrs. Jackson is being hospitalized today for draining ears and ulcerated sores on her hand and legs. She is little more than a skeleton.” Most of the other women, he noted, were also in a very “nervous” condition and severely malnourished. Hardly any of them were older than forty. It was incredible that Toquette, at age fifty-eight, had survived.
