Sometime during those closing weeks of July, or perhaps in early August, Violette Szabo scratched her name into the wall of cell number 45 at 84 avenue Foch.
Beyond that, few details are known for certain about Violette’s imprisonment and interrogation in Paris. Some chroniclers have claimed she was atrociously tortured but managed to stay silent, even defiant. Others have found no evidence of torture. Certainly she was severely abused, menaced, and malnourished. Survivors who were imprisoned with her attested that her fortitude and inextinguishable hope were inspirational.
Violette was incarcerated at Fresnes Prison south of the city, an immense, forbidding structure with 1,600 cells and dungeons in the basement. It was there that the SS housed captured SOE agents and members of the French Resistance. Periodically Violette was driven into Paris to be interrogated at the building on the avenue Foch—nicknamed the “avenue Boche” during the war—the incongruously lovely boulevard, lined with gardens and Second Empire mansions, that runs from the Arc de Triomphe to the Bois de Boulogne.
Violette endured seven weeks of this treatment. There is no suggestion that she gave up any useful information. The interrogators were done with her by the first week in August. On August 8 she was led to the prison yard, where three small coaches waited. Male prisoners were put into the first two, and female prisoners—about a dozen, including Violette—into the third. They were driven to the Gare de l’Est railroad station and put aboard a train bound for Germany.
The train was a short one, with several cars containing wounded German soldiers, a car carrying an antiaircraft gun, and, bringing up the rear, a prison car. This was divided into three compartments off a corridor. Two had their seats removed and were fitted with iron gates, like stalls for animals. The men were crammed into these, with no room to sit. The women were put into the third compartment, which had seats, and chained together by the ankles, in pairs. The car had a guard station and, for the guards, a lavatory.
The prisoners included several SOE agents besides Violette. Notable among these was Wing Commander Forest Yeo-Thomas, known to friends as Tommy, and to the Gestapo as “the White Rabbit” for his elusiveness. Famously brave, Yeo-Thomas had undertaken hair-raising missions in France for SOE’s F Section—at one point having to conceal his identity from Klaus Barbie while the two took tea together in a railroad dining car—and had risen to the top of the Gestapo’s most wanted list. Betrayed in Paris, he had been imprisoned at Fresnes and horribly tortured at avenue Foch. Now, as the ranking officer aboard, he took command of the prisoners on the train.
Late in the afternoon the train pulled out of the Gare de l’Est bound for Saarbrücken, just over the border in Germany. It crept slowly through the French countryside. When night fell, Yeo-Thomas arranged for the men to take turns lying down, four at a time, while the rest remained standing, as that was all the space permitted. The men had some bottles of water supplied by the Red Cross, but it was all gone by sunrise.
In the morning the heat grew stifling, and by afternoon it was unbearable. The men clamored for water, but the guards gave them none.
At around 2:00 P.M. the train was approaching Châlons-sur-Marne, about halfway to the German border, when a pair of RAF warplanes appeared overhead. They flew down low and released bombs. The front of the train erupted in a tremendous explosion. Seventeen Germans were killed. Glass shards from shattered windows flew in all directions. The train lurched to a stop.
As the airplanes banked to make another run, guards scampered off the train to take cover in fields, leaving their captives locked in the prison car. The guards took a machine gun with them and trained it on the carriage in case any prisoners tried to make a run for it. The train’s antiaircraft gun began firing.
The RAF planes made another pass, flying very low. They dropped more bombs and strafed the train with machine-gun fire. The prisoners heard the screams of wounded and dying Germans. Already half crazed with thirst, the men locked in the stalls began to panic, fearing that they would be burned alive—the ammunition aboard British warplanes, they knew, frequently included incendiary rounds.
At that moment, Yeo-Thomas saw an astonishing sight: Violette, on knees and elbows, coming toward him, bearing water. As he told one of her biographers afterward: “We all felt deeply ashamed when we saw Violette Szabo, while the raid was still on, come crawling along the corridor towards us with a jug of water which she had filled in the lavatory. She handed it to us through the iron bars. With her, crawling too, came the girl to whose ankle she was chained.”1
The two women took the empty jug and crawled back along the corridor for more water—over and over again. “My God, that girl had guts,” Yeo-Thomas said.
The warplanes flew off, leaving the train a smoking ruin, unable to move. The guards transferred the prisoners to trucks requisitioned from nearby farms. They drove to Metz, where the prisoners spent the night in stables attached to the German barracks. Over the next several days they made their way to the frontier and crossed into Germany. On reaching Saarbrücken they were interned at an especially gruesome Gestapo facility called Neue Bremm, a transshipment depot for prisoners bound for concentration camps. Because it was a temporary holding area, the place had no heat, no proper shelter, and hardly any food for captives. Violette was held there, in a pen exposed to the weather, for ten days.
Violette and Yeo-Thomas parted ways at Neue Bremm. She was sent to Ravensbrück, the concentration camp for women; he was sent to Buchenwald. Yeo-Thomas had no expectation that he would survive Buchenwald. He was sent there in a group of thirty-six SOE and Resistance captives; not long after they arrived, sixteen of them were hanged in a basement. Yeo-Thomas, figuring that he would soon follow, wrote a farewell letter to his commander, Lieutenant Colonel Leonard Henry (“Dizzy”) Dismore, in the hope that it might be smuggled out of the camp and delivered to Baker Street. It reads:
14 September 1944
My dear Dizzy,
These are “famous last words” I am afraid, but one has to face death one day or another so I will not moan and get down to brass tacks.
I will not attempt to make a report on my journey except to say that up to the very moment of my arrest it had been a success and I had got things cracking and woken up a number of slumberers. I was quite pleased with things—I took every precaution and neglected nothing—my capture was due to one of those incidents one cannot provide for—I had so much work that I was overwhelmed so I asked [a Free French commander] to provide me with a sure dependable agent de liaison, and he gave me a young chap called Guy, whom I renamed Antonin. He worked for me for a week, and then got caught; how I do not know, but in any case, he had an appointment with me at 11 A.M. on Tuesday 21st March at the Metro Passy [in Paris] and brought the Gestapo with him. He was obviously unable to withstand bullying and very quickly gave in to questioning. I was caught coming round a corner and had not an earthly chance, being collared and handcuffed before I could say “knife.” I was badly beaten up in the car on the way to Gestapo H.Q., arriving there with a twisted nose and a head about twice its normal size.
I was then subjected to four days continuous grilling, being beaten up and also being put into a bath of icy cold water, legs and arms chained, and held head downwards under water until almost drowned, then pulled out and asked if I had anything to say. This I underwent six times but I managed to hold out and gave nothing away. Not a single arrest was made as a sequel to my capture. The only trouble was that the party who was lodging me got arrested and will have to be compensated for losing liberty and home. The name is Mlle. Sandoe, 11 rue Claude Chahu, Paris, 16eme. . . .
I was interrogated for about 2 months, but dodged everything. . . . I nearly lost my left arm as a result of the tortures, as I got blood poisoning through my wrist being cut to the bone by chains and remaining unattended with handcuffs biting into them for about 6 days. Apart from that I was kept in solitary confinement for 4 months at Fresnes. I was very unpopular as a Britisher, and one of the German N.C.O.’s. . . . was particularly glad at every opportunity of punching me or slapping my face. He gave me 3 weeks of glass-house [punitive confinement] in a darkened cell, without mattress, blankets, deprived of all means of washing, and with about a 1/2 pound of bread per day as sole food. I was pretty weak when I came out, had lost about 2 1/2 stone in weight. I was sent to [an internment camp at] Compiègne on July 17th, whilst there recuperated a bit and had arranged an escape together with a chap. . . . whose name is Roberty, and got sent to Weimar on the eve of escaping. Roberty succeeded. Bad luck for me.
The journey here was an eventful one, it took 8 days. . . . We had various adventures, all were handcuffed the whole time, 19 men in one compartment and 18 in another. We could not move being packed in like sardines. The gates of the compartments were padlocked and we had very little air, no food had been provided for. We were given 1 day’s rations which had to last 5 days, luckily some had Red Cross parcels or we would have starved. The train was bombed and machine-gunned on the way and we had a very narrow shave. Our escorts ran and left us helpless, had the train caught fire we would have burned like trapped rats. We had to stop at Saarbrücken for 3 days in a punishment and reprisals camp, and were beaten up on arrival. As usual I seemed to attract particular attention and got well and truly slapped and cuffed. We were confined for three days and nights, 37 of us in a hut 9 feet by 7 feet by 7 feet. It was Hell.
We then came on to this place Buchenwald. On the way our escorts plundered and stole practically all our effects. Never believe about German honesty, they are the biggest thieves, liars, bullies and cowards I have ever met. In addition, they delight in torturing people and gloat over it. Upon arrival which took place about midnight, we were locked up in the disinfection quarters and next morning we were nearly hanged summarily, but temporarily reprieved. We were stripped, completely shorn and dressed in prison rags, losing our few remaining belongings, and 16 of us. . . . were told to report to a certain place. We never saw them again and found out that they were being hung without trial on the night of 11/12 September. They have been cremated so no trace remains of them. We are now awaiting our turn. There are 170 airmen (British and American) brought down and captured in France, but they are being treated as Terror Fliers and sleeping in the open, living under appalling conditions in violation of all conventions. They ought to be treated as POW. Men die like flies here. . . . The bearer of this letter will give you all details so I will not say more—whatever he tells you is Gospel truth. He is no romancer, and he will never be able to really do justice to the horrors perpetrated here. Dizzy, see to it that our people never let ourselves be softened to the German people, or there will be another war in 15 years’ time and all our lives will have been sacrificed in vain. I leave it to you and others to see that retribution is fierce. It will never be fierce enough.2
Yeo-Thomas’s letter was smuggled out of Buchenwald, and for decades it lay buried in the SOE archive. The White Rabbit himself, though barely able to walk, contrived to escape from the concentration camp and make it back to London. In 1946 he was awarded the George Cross—the U.K.’s second-highest honor, after the Victoria Cross—for conspicuous bravery. He was one of six SOE agents to receive it.
Violette was also one of the six, although her George Cross had to be awarded posthumously. She arrived at Ravensbrück in early September 1944. Conditions were horrific. Violette made plans to escape, but before she could act on them she was sent to work in a munitions factory at Torgau, in eastern Germany, and then on to a slave-labor camp at Königsberg, south of Berlin, where conditions were even worse than at Ravensbrück. Food consisted of watery soup with a few vegetable peelings, and scraps of bread. As winter set in, Violette and the other female slaves, dressed in thin rags, were made to chop down trees and dig in frozen earth to level ground for a new runway. There was no heat in their barracks; at night the women huddled together on thin, vermin-infested palliasses to share their body warmth. Many were worked to death.
Toward the end of January 1945, Violette was returned to Ravensbrück. There, one evening, she and two friends—Denise Bloch and Lilian Rolfe, also captured SOE agents—were taken to a spot between the camp’s gas chambers known as Execution Alley. A German guard murdered each woman with a single shot to the back of the neck from a small-caliber pistol. According to witnesses, Violette was the last to be executed.