They thought they would be home for Christmas, but as the holiday approached, Geneviève realized it was not to be. She had been marking the days on a newspaper page. One Sunday afternoon the woman who brought her meals told her that the SS were having some sort of celebration. They were so drunk that she wanted to take the opportunity to bring her material to repair the holes in her stockings. Geneviève accepted the wool yarn and scissors and put the mending and darning skills she learned at boarding school to use. When the Jehovah’s Witness returned to collect the supplies, she was impressed by Geneviève’s mending work and offered to bring her more to do.
“Please call me Anna,” the woman said.
Geneviève decided to embroider her a napkin for Christmas. After finishing her needlework on Christmas Eve, she sat in her cell, listening to slamming doors and screams all around her and then sudden silence. The stillness frightened her even more than the commotion did. Then a woman’s voice began to sing, “Silent Night, Holy Night. All is calm, all is bright.” The carol brought Geneviève some comfort, so she began to sing a few others to herself before falling asleep.
When Anna delivered her coffee the next day, Geneviève slipped her the handkerchief and wished her Merry Christmas in German. Anna didn’t respond or smile. As she walked away Geneviève sipped her coffee and cried.
The day after Christmas Anna arrived with a box that she placed on Geneviève’s mattress.
“A Christmas present from your friends,” Anna told her. “I couldn’t bring it any sooner because we were being watched by the SS guards even more closely than usual. But now they are sleeping off their long night of heavy drinking and debauchery. I managed to get ahold of the key. Take everything out of the box. I’ll stop by later to pick it up.”
Geneviève opened the box to find a pine tree branch, the Christmas carol “Away in a Manger,” four star-shaped cookies, an apple, a piece of pork fat, and two squares of sugar. Jacqueline had made her a marquise doll dressed in pink with curly white hair. At the bottom of the box was a neatly folded brown shawl made of wool that Geneviève wrapped around her shoulders. She curled up on her bed and fell asleep.
When Anna returned for the box, she told Geneviève that it hadn’t been a good holiday for the rest of the camp.
“Last night was so sad, the air filled as it was with all the screaming and moaning,” she said. “Here in the solitary section you were spared, but your neighbors in the camp were not. For Christmas Eve, beatings were the order of the day.”
Anna walked away with the box, and Geneviève was left alone with the mental image of what might have happened to her friends the night before. Distressed, she wrapped her shawl around herself tightly again and drifted off. She dreamed she was a little girl of nine and that she was walking through a field of daisies and then a forest of pines in the summer. One of her uncles twisted together a crown of leaves and placed it on her head before telling her, “You’re the queen of the flowers, Geneviève.” She was happy in her reverie, and she saw her brother, Roger, and sister, Jacqueline, there too, looking at her with adoration. When she woke up she remembered that Jacqueline was dead, and she had no idea whether Roger was still alive. She was cut off from everyone and everything she cared about.
Throughout the camp there were holiday celebrations, some of which were SS approved. One group of prisoners formed a committee to organize a party for children at the camp, which would include extra food, gifts, stories, songs, a puppet show, and a visit from Santa. The prisoners received approval to host the gathering in an empty, newly disinfected block and went to work building and painting the puppet stage, sewing costumes, and decorating a tree cut down from the nearby forests. Women saved their food and made gifts from fabric scraps and other found items so Santa could leave them under their pillows at the end of the night. Polish prisoners decided to throw another party too, and Binz made appearances at both of them to remind them to finish the festivities as soon as they could. Carolers filed into the infirmary to sing to the ill before fanning out across the camp to sing to other prisoners. The SS doled out even more food to the children.
“Some of us thought we would get caught for celebrating,” one prisoner wrote. “But it seemed that even the grace of Christmas could touch the German heart.”
Across the camp Margarete Buber-Neumann received a large package of gift-wrapped food and sweets from her brother-in-law, Bernhard. When she removed the contents of the box, she turned it over to find color reproductions of Vincent Van Gogh’s Three Ships on the Strand and Sunflowers and Pierre-Auguste Renoir’s The Country House.
“Those three pictures gave us a tremendous amount of pleasure,” she recalled. “They spoke of another world and another life and they fortified our belief that one day we should be free to enjoy all the things they symbolized.”
It was impossible not to dream of that other life. Bernhard, a doctor, understood this because he had once been interred in a concentration camp. Now that he had been released, he knew how to send prisoners secret letters that censors couldn’t decipher. One day he sent Margarete a dozen eggs, each of them decorated with an intricate miniature of flowers, birds, children, and other images. The supervisor at the parcel office was suspicious of the contents but couldn’t figure out why, so she refused to hand them over. Margarete begged, and the woman changed her mind. Margarete ran off with the box and sat on the ground with friends to inspect what was inside. All of the paintings were harmless, except for one: Bernhard had re-created the legend of Perseus and Andromeda on one of the shells. As Margarete looked at the egg closely, she could see that Bernhard had painted a tiny “You” onto Andromeda and an “Us” onto Perseus. She was convinced Bernhard was trying to tell her that the Nazis would soon be defeated.
Until then what would become of them? By the end of 1944, Nazis were emptying German prisons and sending convoys of women and children to Ravensbrück. Anise watched them arrive and didn’t believe they were in any state to survive. Trucks came to take the sick from the infirmary blocks. The official word was that these women would be transported to the camp at Uckermark to make room for new, able-bodied prisoners. But behind the scenes Suhren told his men that anyone who couldn’t march or was too sick to work had to be exterminated. At Uckermark nurses gave ailing prisoners a mysterious white powder that killed them within twenty-four hours.
Some blockovas thought the story behind the Uckermark evacuations was suspicious. When guards asked them for their lists of ill prisoners, they would tell them that everyone in their barracks was healthy and able to work. But one blockova admitted that she turned over a total of 132 names to her superiors before she realized these women were to be murdered. She stopped after that. However, other blockovas continued to comply with orders, allowing women to be taken away. Those prisoners were never seen again.
Anise wondered where the trucks were going. She and others got as close as they could to the entrance gate to see whether they could determine in which direction the departures were headed. Because the trucks returned within ten to fifteen minutes, Anise knew they couldn’t have gone far.
The US Seventh Army captured records from the Struthof concentration camp in Alsace and determined how many people had died behind its electric fences. Records indicated that at least fifteen thousand died between April 1941 and November 1944.
The camp had what Nazi officers described as a “fumigation unit,” which was outfitted with fire extinguishers and a gas outlet. Witnesses disputed that characterization, saying that they heard the screams of eighty women coming from the so-called unit late one August night in 1943. Two Germans witnessed the mass killing, which was said to be a test of a new gas’s effect on the human body.
At Ravensbrück, camp officials had built a gas chamber just outside the facility’s gates so that no one inside the camp could see it. Suhren appointed SS officer Johann Schwarzhuber to be in charge of selections for the chamber, and each afternoon he visited Uckermark for meetings about who should be gassed. Those who were selected were told that they were being taken to a camp called Mittwerda. It was a ruse. The camp did not exist. The women were taken to the gas chambers in the evenings. When they stopped outside of Ravensbrück, guards told worried passengers that it was because they needed to be deloused before the rest of their trip.
After their arrival Schwarzhuber ordered 150 women at a time into the chamber, where they were told to undress so they could be deloused. They were directed into the gassing room, and the door was closed. A male inmate donned a gas mask and threw a gas canister into the room via an opening in the roof. Moans and screams began as soon as the room was sealed shut.
“I can’t say whether the women were dead or unconscious because I was not present when the room was cleared out,” Schwarzhuber later said.
Prisoners began gossiping about possible gassings on-site, and their fears became stronger when they saw mountains of clothing returned to the camp, some of it recognizable. In the middle of the night, the bodies were brought to the crematorium, which was just inside the front gates.
“These bodies would be a big problem for them,” Anise recalled. “It helped that the ovens weren’t too far away.”
After hearing about the horrors that had begun unfolding outside the camp’s gates, Germaine Tillion couldn’t help but write a dark comic operetta, called Verfügbar in Hell, in one of her hidden notebooks. In it one of the characters talks about being shipped off to a model camp with all the comforts of water, gas, and electricity. The choir chimed in, “Gas, above all!”
The smell of the crematoriums became intolerable. Smoke began filling Geneviève’s cell because of its proximity to the ovens. One of the furnaces, which had been packed with bodies, caught fire. The death toll kept rising, and there was no way to hide that.
“They’re all going to die,” Anna told Geneviève, as she handed her coffee.
Geneviève couldn’t bear the prolonged separation from her friends, especially under these circumstances. For several nights she had a recurring dream that she was taken from her cell and put into a car that kept driving into the night. Suddenly she was facing a tribunal. Dressed in dark robes and magistrate hats, the judges asked her to describe life at Ravensbrück. She knew they were asking her to do something important, but as she began to speak there were gaps in her testimony.
She had already forgotten.
Each time she woke up from the dream, she felt like she was not up to the task of testifying.
“I only want to share what I saw with my own eyes, what I personally experienced . . . and that is atrocious,” she said. “Little by little, my memory reconstitutes what until now I have done my best to forget simply in order to survive.”
Meanwhile at a farmhouse two hours southeast of Paris, the men who had handed Geneviève de Gaulle over to the Germans were about to be brought to justice. A police scout dressed as a hobo had been monitoring the farm and had information that Pierre Bonny and Henri Lafont, chiefs of the gang behind Geneviève de Gaulle’s arrest, had been holed up there with their families since the liberation of Paris, trying to avoid capture. One day later, thirty French Forces of the Interior fighters descended on the farm and found Lafont there, repairing a chair. When he and Bonny were told they were under arrest, Bonny asked for a warrant. The officer in charge showed Bonny his machine gun and said, “Here it is.” Bonny was taken away, along with one of his mistresses, her son, her daughter, and Bonny’s actual wife.
When the gang was brought in to the prefect of police, he expressed his disgust.
“You Frenchmen, who have been sold to the enemy, you carry on your shoulders all the hatred and contempt of the French,” the prefect told them.
Their trial began in September. It began with a Mme Lascaut telling the courtroom what Bonny, “a monster,” did to her two impressionable nephews, Jacques and Jean. Bonny, she said, lured the boys into his gang and coerced them into denouncing resistance members. The boys had been raised by a woman who had become widowed very young and who sacrificed mightily for her three children, one of whom was a girl, Lascaut said. Mme Lascaut had educated them well, but the boys were soon lured down a slippery slope.
Jacques, twenty-four, was the handsome one, and he hated his less attractive younger brother, who limped through life, drinking heavily. But what he lacked in polish, Jean had in intelligence and drive. Although Jean spent a lot of time with his older brother, he loathed him as well. Their contempt for each other was such that they almost stabbed each other to death over 1,000 francs. They joined the French Gestapo under Bonny on the sole condition that their brotherhood remain a secret. Bonny honored that.
Jacques changed as soon as he began working with the rue Lauriston gang, Lascaut testified. He carried on like the men around him, taking three mistresses in Montmartre and acting as their protector. Before long he earned his stripes among this tough set. They trusted him in the confession room to use whatever force necessary to get subjects to speak. Many times he would return to one of his mistresses after a brutal session, drunk on alcohol and another man’s blood.
“I drank to give me heart,” he told his women. “I had a funny job to do.”
He loved blood, Lascaut said. But the two brothers had a falling-out with Bonny. Jacques went to Brittany, and Jean worked with the German paramilitary group the Nationalsozialistisches Kraftfahrkorps (National Socialist Motor Corp), or NSKK, in Cherbourg. Both boys testified in the trial to give inspectors information on the main players who were arrested.
On the first day of the trial, Henri Lafont’s attorneys described his life as one full of setbacks and condemnations until 1941, when he joined the Gestapo. He became a naturalized German in 1942 and then a very wealthy man as a result of his work with Bonny. Lafont had turned over several names to the police.
Bonny and Lafont had to answer for their group’s betrayal of patriots, especially Geneviève de Gaulle. Three days into the hearing, Lafont said he couldn’t remember anything that had happened with General de Gaulle’s niece. Bonny knew he had given information to the Gestapo, but Lafont added that they weren’t the informants. A young resister who had been arrested at the same time as Geneviève de Gaulle then testified that Geneviève herself said that she had been arrested by Bonny and turned over to the Germans.
The reporter covering the trial wrote “all of the accused had short memories.”
On December 5, 1944, Bonny admitted to a packed courtroom that he did hand the general’s niece over to the Gestapo, but he said that she had a false ID with the name Garnier on it. He testified that he had been asked to monitor Défense de la France and that they paid a young medical student to infiltrate the group and find out who was involved with it so the Gestapo could make arrests. Bonny discovered that the Défense de la France members made their drops at a bookstore on the rue Bonaparte. Bonny got hired as a salesman there, he admitted, and arrested Geneviève on his second day of work. He told the courtroom that he took her to a building on the Place des États-Unis where she was questioned and punched in the jaw. She refused to speak, he told the courtroom.
“You struck a young girl?” the judge asked, horrified.
The audience hissed in disgust.
By December 28 both Bonny and Lafont had faced the firing squad.
France was punishing the worst of its collaborators, and General Charles de Gaulle assured the French that their country was about to emerge “stronger and more glorious than before.” He had been assured Allied aid and planned to recruit, train, and arm a large number of units that could play a part in “this decisive phase of the war.”
France, he said, was “a country confident of herself, master of herself, wounded, but on her feet.” It had been welcomed into the United Nations and would become an eminent country once again, “that of a power without whom nothing can be decided, neither victory, nor order in the world, nor peace.”
The general said that few were guilty of collaboration but acknowledged that some took the “wrong road.” Already some Parisians had been publicly shaving the heads of French women who were suspected of sleeping with German officers. Some suspected male collaborators were shot in secret, but other vengeful acts were more brazen. In one southern French town, fifty armed men stormed a prison after disconnecting its telephones. The gunmen ordered the wardens to release three Vichy militiamen being held so they could lead them out and shoot the militiamen in the jail’s courtyard. In another town collaborators were shot after receiving a pardon from General de Gaulle. In each case the shooters claimed to be acting on behalf of the resistance because collaborator trials were proceeding too slowly. The newspaper Le Monde decried the killings, saying that the shooters were “assassins and agents of anarchy” who hid behind the resistance and compromised the country’s progress. The National Council of Resistance apologized for the slayings, and others within the movement disavowed the groups behind them.
Other paybacks were said to be fueled by people who were jealous that their neighbors ended the war in better financial shape. Or they were based on denunciations from collaborators who were eager to direct attention away from themselves. General de Gaulle argued that it was too easy to find fault, “for who is exempt from error.” But it was time to set aside these internal quarrels in the name of unity. After all, the country had a lot of work ahead of it between rebuilding and welcoming home its prisoners of war.
One of France’s most famous prisoners of war was Geneviève de Gaulle, and at the beginning of 1945, the twenty-four-year-old was struggling with her health in the dank confines of the Ravensbrück bunker. After spending one night shaking with cold and fever, Geneviève struggled to get up for roll call the next day. A guard looked in her cell and asked her if she was feeling well. She could barely reply that she wasn’t. A few hours later an SS doctor stood in the doorway and asked her about her symptoms. Geneviève told him she was feverish, with terrible pain in her right lung. For the next two days, the doctor gave her pills and let her stay in bed. The fever went down, and her pain subsided.
As her health improved Geneviève was allowed to go on two walks a day. She left for one of her walks and saw soldiers moving furniture into the upstairs cell across the corridor from hers. The guards brought in a uniformed man without SS insignia and Geneviève could tell that he was receiving more than the typical camp rations. When she returned from her walk, she noticed the soldier’s cell was closed. As she entered her own cell, the guard handed her a letter. It was from her father, which meant he was alive and he knew where she was. Her hands shook as she opened the note, which was written in succinct German. In it he let her know how everyone in the family was doing, including her brother, Roger, who was fighting with the Free French forces.
She celebrated her first letter from the outside world by trying to eat some of her soup to build up her strength. She fell asleep and dreamed of lying on her stomach in a flat-bottomed boat that drifted through dark water. The stream was narrow, surrounded on both sides by steep black rocks that descended sharply to the edge of the water. She sailed toward a seemingly endless tunnel, then saw a faint light at the end of it. She woke up feeling hopeful and sang some Franz Schubert songs that her father had taught her in German: “The Trout,” “The Linden Tree,” and “The King of Aulnes.”
As she sang a female guard entered her cell and gave her some calcium tablets and three boxes of vitamin C. Anna brought her some mending work and a pair of scissors. She cut tiny playing cards out of the cardboard box that held her medicines, using her pencil to mark them with their numbers and suits. It might be fun to play a game of solitaire every now and then, she thought.
Outside in the corridor Geneviève heard movement. She looked through her cell door and saw her upstairs neighbor being led from his cell by two SS guards. He had a resigned look on his face, and Geneviève had the feeling that he wouldn’t be coming back. Later in the day one of the guards came to Geneviève’s cell and told her to gather her things because she was being transferred to another cell. When the female guard returned for Geneviève, she looked down at one of Geneviève’s cockroaches and crushed him with the heel of her shoe. She led Geneviève upstairs to the cell of the soldier who had been led out just a few hours before. The window of her cell looked out onto the crematorium ovens, and the smell filled the room. She noticed a piece of paper sticking out of the cell window and climbed up onto the stool to fish it out. The paper was hastily addressed to “General von.” Geneviève realized she would never learn this person’s full name, his reasons for being incarcerated in a women’s concentration camp, or his fate.
Once Geneviève settled into her new room, she was taken outside for the third time that day to have a walk in the courtyard. The sky was blue and the air was cold, but Geneviève felt stronger and more eager to survive this ordeal. She wanted to see her loved ones again and wanted to experience another spring with all the trees in bloom. She could think of Paris, with its watercolor skies and the gardens of the Tuileries in full color. She imagined herself walking along the gravel pathways, past the fountains and the flower beds, until she reached the Orangerie. She envisioned Monet’s water lilies surrounding her in the circular rooms of the gallery, and she felt awash in their pastels. By forcing herself to think about their cloudy petals floating across the soft blue pond, she could fill her dreams with them. The blooms covered silent lakes and filled her reverie with light. These visions would keep her going until she could get back to Paris and see the lilies for real, with her own eyes.