Still languishing at Ravensbrück, Geneviève’s friends did what they could to survive. Rumors spread around the camp that the Rabbits would be killed. When the SS began rounding up prisoners during work hours for reasons that were not clear, some of the women sought to protect their Polish friends, because there were at least six of them who could no longer walk due to the experiments that had been performed on their legs. A band of prisoners hid them in the sick bays for contagious internees because they knew SS nurses would not go in there. A few days later it became clear that women were being sent off to the gas chamber.
In early February there was another roundup of prisoners in Block 32 and an order that the Rabbits could not leave the barracks. Six women in the barracks offered to switch numbers with the invalids and die in their place. In the meantime Russian prisoners cut the camp’s electricity in an effort to slow down the SS. In the confusion the Rabbits were able to hide, but the prisoners had to continue to find ways to conceal the women every day. The SS suspected that the women were being hidden and organized surprise roll calls to get around the subterfuge. Other prisoners stood in for them anyway and never turned them over to the Germans.
In March a Polish internee in one of the more privileged blocks sheltered Jacqueline for two hours a day. She helped her sneak in through the barracks window so that she wouldn’t be noticed. She gave Jacqueline paper and a pencil to write down all the poems she could recite from memory, among them works by Paul Claudel and Pierre de Ronsard and passages from the Song of Songs. Jacqueline hid in a corner when she created these little books, writing painstakingly small to conserve paper. After poetry Jacqueline created recipe collections, which she believed were no different from fairy tales given the dearth of food. A prisoner had begun asking around to see who Jacqueline was and whether she lived in the block. Before having to admit she really belonged in Block 31, Jacqueline jumped out the window and hid.
Electric power had been cut off and daily rations arrived after dark. In the dark, as frigid air blew into the glassless windows, prisoners fought for food and stumbled back to their beds to eat, trying not to spill what was in their bowls. Dysentery was rampant, and the washrooms smelled like sewers. At night two to three women shared one blanket unless they lived in the nicer barracks. The guards had been conducting selections, and they were on the hunt for the weak or Verfügbar to send to the gas chamber, on death marches, or on a deadly work assignment.
“Constantly on the alert, we formed a team of five comrades and each morning we thought up all sorts of stratagems to escape the horrible manhunt that rounded up victims for the gas chamber,” Jacqueline recalled, adding that they jumped out of windows or hid in the block’s false ceilings or under its bunk beds. “Survival depended on the speed of our reactions,” she said.
A Czech prisoner named Anicka got Jacqueline assigned to a work group that sorted clothes that prisoners handed over upon their arrival at the camp. At the end of her shift, she returned to Block 31 with a hidden stash of skirts and sweaters that her fellow inmates could wear underneath their uniforms.
On the morning of March 2, the siren sounded for roll call. The ritual did not happen as it usually did. As Soviet cannon fire blasted in the distance, women were asked to march past the SS, who would assign them to a line on the right or the left. No one knew what would happen to anyone standing in either of those lines, but Jacqueline assumed that the camp would be evacuated ahead of the Russian advance. Jacqueline and her friends decided they would try to escape any selection that required them to leave.
“We would meet the same fate if, at the end of our strength, we were forced to go on foot day after day,” she later recalled. “Our only hope was to wait on the spot for the liberation that seemed so close.”
They continued to work as if the war would never end. All around them women died of starvation, exhaustion, gassings, and lethal injections. They believed that pressing on in the camp would be better than being thrust out into a seemingly never-ending march.
“Here, we knew our hell,” Jacqueline said. “Who could tell what the next one might be?”
As the guards sorted people into lines, Jacqueline saw that they weren’t paying attention to the women who were waiting to be sorted. She disappeared in the crowd and crept back to Block 31 to hide in the false ceiling. As she climbed up to her hiding place, she discovered that some of her friends were already there. They stayed there for fifteen hours, trying to stay still and hold their breath. All day long they heard crowds marching outside and then silence, except for the guard who paced outside their block. There was a gunshot and then nothing but the sentry’s soft steps. Then it sounded as if the barracks had been invaded. The throng that assembled beneath them was a group of Russian women who had been deported after a German attack.
“We were obliged to reveal our presence to the new female guard,” Jacqueline said. “She was hesitant; the situation was dangerous for her as well as for us. Because we were not listed on the roll for the block, she could not justify our presence. We no longer had the right to daily food rations, but if we provided them, she was willing to close her eyes and not denounce us.”
Meanwhile Germaine and Anise were transferred from the Night and Fog block to the bunker, which was half full. As they walked toward the bunker, monitored by police, Germaine snuck into her mother’s bunker and told her to come with them. There was no way she was leaving Émilie there alone. The first night in their new surroundings they were confined with a group of Gypsy women and their children, so Anise knew they were destined to be gassed. Germaine was suffering from a high fever and pain in her jaw. Anise vowed to herself that if she survived and returned to France, she would “tell everything I had seen until my last breath.”
In the morning Germaine could no longer stand up and was taken to the infirmary. Anise remained behind with Émilie. Soon they were ordered outside for roll call. Nearly one thousand women stood and waited for what might come next. Anise stood at the end of one of the rows and put Émilie on her other side to protect the older woman. A friend of hers told her that she and Émilie should hide because there would be a selection that day and anyone chosen would be shipped to Mauthausen, one of the worst camps. Anise grabbed Germaine’s mother by the arm and ran with her behind one of the blocks, alongside another prisoner named Simone. They hid there until they learned the selection would happen that night. Émilie couldn’t walk well, and her snow-white hair doubled her chances of being chosen.
“I told Mme Tillion that we could hoist her up into the roof to hide,” Girard said. “With a great smile she told me, ‘You’ve got to be kidding. I am not going up into the roof.’”
Desperate, Anise told Germaine’s mother that it would be easy to lift her and that she needed to hide because the selection was not looking good.
Émilie’s face turned serene.
“Listen my dear, I’m no acrobat,” she said. “I’ve always said I’d meet my fate head on. So I don’t want you to hide me. It’s not worth the trouble.”
Anise pleaded with her to hide, but Émilie would have none of it. She told the young woman that she wanted to meet her Lord. Anise took other measures. She marched the old woman around and pinched her cheeks to make them look rosy. Then she covered Émilie’s head with a purple scarf so the Nazis couldn’t see her silver hair. When the selections began a doctor approached Mme Tillion with his head held high. He held a machine gun in his right hand. With his left hand he pointed at Émilie. They took her away. Anise was shattered.
“Germaine was in the infirmary at this time and I had to go see her so I could tell her that they had taken her mother,” Anise recalled. “It was the worst. I cried by the window [before I could tell her anything]. A friend who was at the infirmary heard me and I told her to warn Germaine.”
Margarete Buber-Neumann was in the infirmary with Germaine and heard there would be another roundup of sick or missing prisoners. Margarete knew she had to hide Germaine and told her to climb under the covers with her and make herself as small as possible. The siren sounded for another roll call, and officers went through the camp looking for prisoners who might be hiding. They entered the infirmary; Germaine squeezed closer to Margarete, and three SS doctors entered the room.
“How many sick in this room?” one of them asked.
Margarete answered that there were only two. The woman in the bunk below her was on the verge of death. The officers looked at them both, then left the room.
Relieved, the women discussed how to sneak out of the infirmary. Then Anise’s face appeared at the window.
“Germaine,” she said. “They’ve taken your mother away to the gas chamber.”
Germaine jumped from the bed.
“My God,” she cried. “My God! How could I have thought only of myself? My mother. My mother . . .”
For Anise it was the worst night of her life. Germaine, meanwhile, had recurring dreams that she was in a café with her mother in Paris, drinking a cold glass of milk and eating a poached egg.
In the back of the camp, Jacqueline continued to hide with her friends in Block 31. A kitchen worker left a container of soup outside for them every day.
“We went to fetch it, but not without difficulty,” Jacqueline recalled. “Some of the captives, reduced to the state of starving dogs, attacked us. The container was overturned, the soup disappeared into the ground. From then on, we had to defend ourselves against these gangs.”
Other prisoners knew Jacqueline was in a dangerous situation. One of them moved the young woman into her block on the condition that she became a part of a regular work gang. She became the lone French woodcutter in the forest group, which mostly consisted of Russian peasant women. By the end of March, Jacqueline had become so ill and had been worked so hard that she could barely stand up straight. As cannon fire neared the camp, she thought that all she wanted to do was see her family before she died. At the entrance gate a French prisoner who worked in the infirmary approached her.
“She sized up my situation and whispered: ‘I’ll try to do something,’” Jacqueline recalled. “On the following day I was authorized to remain in the block without working. . . . Thus I survived for two weeks, motionless on my mat, not even moving my fingers, as if in hibernation.”
Prisoners working in the SS offices scoured copies of the Völkischer Beobachter for news from the front. Although it was a Nazi propaganda newspaper, one could tell that the Allies were advancing and the Germans were retreating. Anise and Germaine shared this information with others in the camp to keep hopes high. Crowds of emaciated women showed up outside the camp gates one day with tales of Auschwitz’s liberation and the Russian army’s westward momentum. Then there was the rumor that Red Cross trucks had been seen nearby. The internees struggled to believe it because the Germans at the camp were so convinced of victory. Behind the scenes one of Himmler’s men had been negotiating with the Swedish Red Cross to release thousands of captives. As the Russians closed in on Ravensbrück, the SS began destroying files and other evidence of their atrocities. They gassed the weak and infirm, sent other inmates on long marches into the unknown, and shipped women off on fatal work assignments. Dead bodies were piled like logs into carts, then dumped in a heap destined for the crematorium ovens, which no longer burned fast enough. Women schemed ways to escape this fate, jumping out of windows, hiding in false ceilings, or shimmying under bunk beds to avoid the roundups.
Quick thinking saved lives. Yet not everyone escaped these summons. Prisoners were gathered and marched past the SS, who determined their fate. Jacqueline stood in one selection, watching as hundreds of women were sent to the showers. They returned, clothed in new dresses without prisoner badges. After waiting for several hours, they left through the camp gates. They were placed on a Paris-bound train. When they arrived at the Gare de Lyon in mid-April, they were greeted by General de Gaulle and excited crowds. The excitement gave way to speechlessness once onlookers saw the skeletal women leaning out of the windows to wave. No one, not even General de Gaulle, could comprehend the suffering and pain that these women had faced. Seeing it for the first time, there on the platform on that spring day, was an overwhelming experience for many spectators, who struggled to conceal their emotions during a homecoming that should have been joyful.
At Ravensbrück Jacqueline was desperate to leave. She was chosen twice but called back each time just as she reached the gate. Twelve other women were being treated this way, and they confronted Dorothea Binz about it, who could not believe they had the audacity to speak to her.
“We are keeping you as hostages,” she told them. “You will be executed if there is any trouble.”
Binz demanded that the women sign a paper certifying that they had always been well treated. If they signed, Binz said their lives would be spared. Jacqueline and her comrades said absolutely not, and Binz dismissed them, furious with their refusal to comply.
On April 22 a column of fifteen Danish ambulances and twenty buses left for Ravensbrück. Felix Kersten, an intermediary working on behalf of Himmler, arranged for the release of seven thousand women to the Swedish Red Cross. The ambulances arrived first, and drivers found Suhren very conciliatory. Suhren said he had orders to evacuate the camp, so why not take fifteen thousand women instead of the seven thousand already agreed to? After Red Cross officials discussed it, they decided most of the prisoners would be marched thirty-seven miles west to the Malchow subcamp. Then they loaded the ambulances with sick women and took them to the Danish border town of Padborg, while others stayed behind to prepare for the next departure.
The buses arrived later that night. Suhren was nervous and eager to load the transports, but the drivers had been driving nonstop for three weeks, so their boss told Suhren that he would not allow them to leave without a rest. The commandant opposed this at first but ultimately relented.
In the middle of the night, someone emerged from the shadows to present the head of the Red Cross delegation with a letter before disappearing. In the letter were the names of French, English, and American prisoners who the letter’s mysterious author suspected Suhren of wanting to hide. The buses were due to leave at 4:00 AM on April 23. Eight hundred women were gathered in the heart of the camp at that hour. When they walked through the gate, they had no idea that it was toward their freedom. Anise and Germaine were among these prisoners, and when they looked back to see that Jacqueline and others were being held behind, they alerted the Swedes.
The night of April 23 the convoy arrived at the Danish border safely. Anise was preoccupied with the prisoners who remained behind. She gave a list of those people to the head of the column, explaining that she believed Suhren would beat them or use them as pawns for prisoner exchanges. She begged the Swedish lieutenant to return to Ravensbrück to help these women. He agreed but not before inviting her to dinner. That night Anise’s hair was messy and she was covered with a piece of dirty blanket as the officer took her to a Gestapo-run establishment to eat. Over dinner Anise begged him to save her friends because conditions at the camp had been horrible and promised to get even worse. After her entreaties the lieutenant returned to Ravensbrück and presented Suhren with the list that Anise had given him. The commandant claimed he had no idea about anyone being held hostage and instructed one of his men to get to the bottom of things. Suhren’s henchman returned to say that the prisoners in question did not exist. Sensing the seriousness of the matter, the lieutenant pressed the situation and was eventually able to wrest the final internees free. Jacqueline looked at Suhren as she passed through the camp gates. He pointed at the crematory ovens, then laughed.
Jacqueline piled into one of the Red Cross trucks and stood silently as she rode into the forest, away from the camp. She looked up through the branches to see diamond-like stars and thought that it was a beautiful evening. On April 25 her convoy arrived in Lübeck, then headed to the Danish border. Young girls in spotless white welcomed the women and offered them milk and cookies, clean blankets, and fresh straw to lie on. They boarded a train to cross Denmark. Although the war was not over yet, the internees looked out the windows to see people gathered together, cheering them. They sang “La Marseillaise” in gratitude. They reached Copenhagen on April 27, boarded a ferry for Malmö, Sweden, and were welcomed there with such respect that they were filled with wonder. The sea sparkled as the women ate the first real meal they had had in months or even years. Gulls followed the boat, swirling in its wake. The birds rushed toward the boat and the internees threw them bread. “Was it possible?” Jacqueline wondered. “We were still alive. We were free.”