Hortense Daman.
A TALL OFFICER in an SS uniform stepped onto a train car loaded with female prisoners, their hands and feet chained to their train seats. He glanced around the car until he noticed one particular prisoner, a pretty 17-year-old girl. He walked over to her.
“I’ll give you one last chance,” he said.
“I don’t understand,” the girl replied.
The officer almost smiled. “I’ll give you your freedom, set you free, if you can tell me where I can find your brother.” “I can’t help you,” the girl replied.
“Can you hear what I’m saying to you?” he asked again. “Do you understand?”
“I’ve nothing to say,” she replied.
The officer knew that this girl had been subjected to 30 days of beatings and interrogation by the Belgian SS. They were all looking for her brother, François Daman, a leading member of the local Resistance who had thus far skillfully evaded their grasp. The girl had taken beating after beating but repeatedly refused to reveal her brother’s whereabouts.
This officer was an experienced interrogator who had seen grown men break down and betray their associates under similar treatment. This young woman had been beaten day after day but had remained silent. He had great respect for her conviction.
“A pity, Hortensia,” he said. He stepped back, snapped his heels together, and saluted her. “I wish you had been a German.” Then he stepped off the train. The wheels of the train began to squeak. It was headed for Ravensbruck, a place called L’Enfer des Femmes or “the Women’s Inferno.” It was a concentration camp for women.
During the four-day journey, in which she was never unshackled from her seat, Hortense Daman had plenty of time to reflect on the events that had put her on this train.
Hortense had been only 13 when Germany had invaded Poland in 1939. Her brother, François, then 26, was a sergeant in the Belgian army. When Germany invaded and conquered Belgium in May of the following year, François began to work for the Red Cross, but that work was just a cover. In reality, he had joined the Belgian Army of Partisans, one of several large militant Resistance organizations in Nazi-occupied Belgium.
François asked Hortense to join the Partisans for two reasons. He knew that its work would not be successful without the help of female volunteers. He could also see that if he didn’t give her something to do, Hortense might get involved on her own. Franois would rather that Hortense worked closely with him so that he could keep an eye on her.
He asked her to distribute copies of Belgium’s most popular underground newspaper, La libre Belgique (Free Belgium). Then he asked her to deliver a letter to someone she would find sitting on a park bench. Soon, Hortense was doing regular courier work for Francois, delivering important items from place to place. Their mother owned a grocery store in their hometown of Louvain, so Hortense could perform these duties while riding her bike, supposedly delivering groceries. Some of the time she was actually delivering groceries, but they were black market groceries—obtained illegally, without ration cards—used to feed Allied airmen who were being hidden until they could be safely escorted back to England.
Soon, Hortense’s bike basket was filled with more than just groceries: she began delivering explosives for the Partisans. One day while transporting a load of grenades in her basket, barely hidden under a load of eggs, Hortense pedaled directly into a raid. The Germans were checking identification papers, looking for young men who had thus far avoided the enforced draft into German munitions factories. They were also checking for black market groceries. Hortense was stopped by an officer who gruffly asked her what she was carrying. As she came to a sudden stop, she struggled desperately to keep her balance as the front of her bike threatened to topple over at any moment.
“Just eggs,” she said. Eggs were rare and expensive in Nazi-occupied Belgium, even for the Germans. When she noticed that his eyes were fixed on her basket, she saw her opportunity and pulled a few of the eggs out. “Would you like some?” He snatched them from her hand before impatiently waving her away. She pedaled away from the raid until her legs began to shake uncontrollably and she had to stop to regain her composure.
After Hortense had delivered the grenades to their destination, she considered the circumstances carefully: while she knew she had escaped being more thoroughly searched largely because she was female, she also realized that she had kept her head in a very tense situation. This realization gave her the confidence necessary to take another, even more dangerous, mission. The Germans were moving successfully against the Partisans in the Louvain area. Leaders were being betrayed and then either arrested and interrogated or just assassinated on the spot. Changes needed to be made, plans altered, and files—which included the names and addresses of Partisan members—needed to be moved quickly and quietly before they fell into the hands of the Germans.
Hortense was to bicycle to a certain house to collect a bundle of these files. Then, in case she had been followed, she was to take the train back home instead of bicycling back. Francois knew by now that Hortense was very capable. Still, it was such a dangerous mission that he couldn’t help fearing for her safety.
“It’s vital that you don’t get caught,” said Francois to his sister as she was preparing to leave.
She smiled at Francois’s warnings. “Don’t worry, I’ll be all right. I’ve memorized all the contact details.”
“Well, anyway, they’ll think it’s Christmas if they find those papers. There’s everything about the Partisans in this whole sector. If you’re picked up with them you’ll be in real trouble.”
She smiled confidently as she straddled her bicycle.
“For God’s sake, be careful,” he said as he watched his young sister pedal away.
After Hortense had made the contact, received the package, and boarded the train, she noticed, to her horror, that the GFP (Geheime Feld Polizei, or Secret Field Police) were checking not only identification papers but also parcels and suitcases. The GFP was a branch of the German armed forces that, in Belgium and France especially, was used for stamping out Resistance activities. She couldn’t let her package be inspected. There was only one thing to do: move to another train car. She ended up in a car full of German officers.
A German officer politely offered Hortense a seat beside him. He took her parcel and set it on the rack above their heads. The letters GFP were emblazoned on his shoulder straps. He was obviously a senior officer.
“My word, that is a heavy thing to carry about. What’s in it to make it so heavy?” he asked.
“Magazines,” Hortense replied quickly.
For one terrifying moment, Hortense thought he was going to ask her to show him what kind of magazines they were. Instead, he began a friendly, if extremely one-sided, conversation with Hortense. He asked her where she was going.
She answered truthfully that she was headed toward her home in Louvain.
He became very excited and told her that he was traveling there too: he had been sent to take charge of the Geheime Feld Polizei there, and he was planning to have the area’s “terrorists” wiped out within two months. Then he warned Hortense that she should be careful to avoid them for her own safety.
“I don’t think they’ll bother me, will they?” Hortense asked, trying to make her eyes look wide and frightened.
“I doubt it,” said the officer. But to ensure her safety, and also to ask her out to dinner, he insisted on driving her home from the train station, politely handing her the package as she left the car and smiling when she told him that her mother wouldn’t approve of her going out with a German officer.
Although Hortense took some time off after her successful mission, the officer who had given her a ride home did not. He was successful in one respect: Hortense and her parents were betrayed and arrested one day when soldiers came crashing into their home at dinnertime. François was not there.
But the Germans were determined to find him. Hortense was interrogated every day for 30 days and beaten severely every time she refused to tell François’s location. This refusal landed her on the train headed for Ravensbruck.
Not only did Hortense survive the horrors of the Women’s Inferno for nearly a year—including attempted sterilization and being injected with gangrene as part of a medical experiment—but after her mother arrived there too, Hortense did everything in her power to see that her mother also survived, endangering her own life several times.
After the war Hortense married Syd Clews, a British army sergeant, and moved with him to England, where they had two children together. The Belgian government honored Hortense with top awards, and in 1989 Mark Bles wrote her biography, titled Child at War. Hortense died in 2006 at the age of 80.
LEARN MORE Child at War: The True Story of a Young Belgian Resistance Fighter by Mark Bles (Hodder & Stoughton, 1989).
“Hortense Clews: Belgian Resistance Courier Who Was Captured by the SS but Survived the Cruelties of Ravensbruck Concentration Camp.”
Times Online, 2007. www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/comment/obituaries/article1299135.ece