Bridgette heard the bedlam coming from outside the window of her sewing room and thought she recognized its cause before getting up from the cutting table to peer through the small square of glass. The other internee, who’d brought in her supper last night, had warned her to expect it.
“Don’t look,” she’d advised. “The sight will just add to your nightmares.” But Bridgette was determined to record every incident of her captors’ brutality here in the SS-controlled internment camp, and someday, if she survived, bear witness of them to their judges and juries. Her diary would be a bolt of muslin on which she’d record dates, times, and names of those responsible for the monstrous offenses against human beings that went on behind the electric-wired fences where Jews were held until their transport to the extermination centers in France and Germany. Her roll of cloth might be the only surviving document of the kind of horror going on now.
The scene would be impossible to describe in depth on fabric. Under a rain of punches and kicks, truncheons, whips, and rifle butts, amid cries and wails of protest and pain from the recalcitrant and rebellious among the families wrenched apart, hundreds of Jewish men, women, and children of all ages were being packed into a string of city buses conscripted from the Paris public transit system. The buses were headed to the train stations, where the latest internees selected for disposal would be loaded into boxcars bound for the crematoria.
Bridgette drew away from the window, shaking, her stomach turning and ears ringing from the bawls of human suffering. Madame Richter had explained the deportation process to her the first hour of her arrival yesterday. Let me make one thing perfectly clear, Mademoiselle Dufor, she had said. There is no escaping Drancy, and if you do not do what you are told—when you are told—you will be on one of those French green-and-white transit buses that you will see pull out of here tomorrow, as soon as the gas chambers are ready to receive another load of Jews. As long as you are of use to me, you will live. Otherwise, you will not. Do you understand?
Bridgette had understood. By “use” to her, she was to design and sew Madame Richter’s clothes. She would require many garments for many occasions—to wear when my husband and I are safe in South America, she’d said, where we will reside should the Allied invasion prove successful. They dress well in the circles in which we will move, and I will not be outdone.
This was expressed on a tour of the deplorable facilities Madame Richter assured Bridgette would be her lot if she disobeyed. Over the past months, Bridgette had heard a smattering of stories spread by the French Red Cross of the camp’s squalid conditions and prisoners’ misery, but seeing evidence of them with her own eyes defied the imagination. The tour included a circuit of barrack rooms built for two but that housed twenty or more inmates. The prisoners slept on metal beds with no padding or blankets and lived without running water, working lavatories, or sufficient light. Bridgette’s stomach heaved from the stench that hung over the courtyard, lined with buckets to catch rainwater for drinking. Flies swarmed about open latrines, food tables, and clothes hung out to air for lack of water to wash them.
“Seen enough?” Madame Richter asked as Bridgette lowered her eyes to keep from looking at a man whose emaciated face was covered in boils.
“Oui,” she said.
She was given a tiny room at the back of the camp commander’s spacious house with the use of a latrine built on the side of the house for servants. It was an airless closet with a hole in the wood for elimination and contained no bathtub or shower. Adjoining her small living space was a larger room equipped with a table, chair, and Swiss-manufactured Bernina sewing machine. Piled in a corner were sewing materials and countless bolts of fabrics of every description—ransacked, Bridgette was certain, from French textile warehouses.
Bridgette knew that Madame Richter was right. There would be no escape from this place enclosed by barbed wire, overlooked by watchtowers, and patrolled by guards with machine guns and watchdogs. She was here for the duration of the German occupation when, but for the delay of only a few minutes—the cruel fate of it made her want to empty her stomach—she would have been set free and on her way to her safe house.