When we came back, nobody wanted to know. ― Loulou Le Porz, Ravensbruck survivor
It’s the two-part conclusion of the miniseries: Women In War. This episode was a long time coming. I struggled to read the stories of Ravensbruck concentration camp. How can I pay tribute to these brave women? But I knew the story of French women during World War II would be incomplete without confronting the truth of the camp.
Note: This episode is much darker than any previous episodes of this podcast. Please consider this a content warning for, well, just about everything. If you just discovered the show via the newest issue of France-Amérique Magazine, welcome! You might want to start with a lighter episode, like this one or this one.
Episode 57: “Women At War 5: The Survivor I (Marie-José Wilborts)”
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Marie-Jo, the children’s guardian
Marie-José Chombart de Lauwe, a.k.a. Marie-José Wilborts, grew up determined to “do something with my life.” She certainly did: fighting in the Résistance, protecting the children of Ravensbruck concentration camp, and devoting her entire life to the study of childhood, and the advocation of children’s rights. She is an incredible woman, and at the age of 96 she is still going strong!
Above: Marie-Jo tells the story of her years in Ravensbruck and Mauthausen concentration camps.
I adore this recent interview with Marie-Jo – look at her cozy home! Here, continuing her lifelong advocacy of children’s well-being, she discusses the state of children’s education today:
Transcript
Bienvenue and welcome back to the Land of Desire. I’m your host, Diana, and if you’re just discovering the show from this month’s France-Amerique Magazine, welcome! I wouldn’t start with these episodes, as they’re the end of a miniseries, and pretty different in tone from the rest of the podcast. Instead, consider episode 22, “The Sweet Life of French Bees” or episode 6, “Manet & Morisot & Manet”. I hope you enjoy!
At long last, we’ve reached the end of Women at War, my look at French women’s experiences during World War II. It took months before I could release these episodes, for one simple reason: it was too painful to research. I couldn’t possibly tell the story of French women during World War II without covering the story of Ravensbruck, but I want to warn my listeners now: this is a gruesome episode. I am not interested in sugar coating the experiences of concentration camp victims. If they can bring themselves to tell their stories, I can bring myself to listen and share with you. However, I want my listeners to know that this story is very upsetting, and just about every trigger you can imagine is here. It is not appropriate for children. With that said, learning about Ravensbruck deepened my understanding of the female experience of World War II, and of concentration camps in general. I am particularly grateful to the writers Anne Sebba, author of Les Parisiennes, and Sarah Helm, author of Ravensbruck, for their dedication to tracking down Ravensbruck survivors in the 21st century. It is a testament to how deeply women’s roles in the Resistance have been overlooked that so many participants have never had a chance to tell their stories before now. I would encourage anyone interested in learning more about womens’ lives during World War II to begin with those two books. With that disclaimer, here’s part one of the conclusion of Women At War: “The Survivor.”
In the northeastern corner of Germany sits an expanse so beautiful it is often called “the land of a thousand lakes.” The ancient Havel river originates here, rising up from the earth and making its way to the river Elbe, but not before passing through lakes, streams, and towns, including, at one point, the village of Furstenburg. This small, ancient town drew a particularly lucky number in the geographic lottery. Furstenburg is surrounded on three sides by three different lakes, each one more picturesque than the last, with thick, endless forest blotting out all evidence of the world outside. In the 1930s, as more and more wealthy Germans acquired cars, Furstenburg developed into an obvious weekend getaway. Only an hour outside of Berlin, tired city dwellers could rent a house and spend a few days rowing boats. One of those city dwellers was a man named Oswald Pohl. A rising star in the political scene, Pohl was rich and influential, and used his connections to purchase a large country estate in Furstenburg. When one of his best friends asked him for a location suitable to build a new government facility, somewhere hidden, somewhere discreet, Pohl knew just the place. Next to Furstenburg was a bit of scrubland on the shores of the Schwedtsee lake. Surrounded by dense forest, it was close enough that government employees could commute from the town easily enough, but far enough away not to attract attention. There was even a nearby railway station. Pohl’s friend was delighted. He began construction right away, and began looking for local housing. Pohl’s friend, married with children, had recently fallen in love with his secretary. If he could find a house for her in this beautiful lake district, he could combine business with pleasure. And so it was that in 1938, the local children found themselves locked out of their traditional swimming holes. As a bunch of guards shooed the children away, their parents watched barges glide up the Havel river, carrying construction materials. That winter, if they looked closely, the residents of Furstenburg might have seen movement across the lake. The scrubland transformed into a series of buildings, shaped like army barracks, and train cars of workers in striped uniforms arrived to cut down trees in the Mecklenburg forest. Meanwhile, to the delight of the locals, job listings appeared all over town: women between the ages of 21 and 45, preferably single, were needed for a position requiring no professional skills. They’d be guarding prisoners, the work would be easy, and they’d be provided with free lodging. As women in Furstenburg lined up to apply for new jobs, Oswald Pohl’s friend began driving down to inspect the building site. Yes, this bit of scrubland would do nicely. For Heinrich Himmler, the leader of the SS, the second most powerful man in Nazi Germany and the director of the Third Reich’s system of international concentration camps, the tiny area of Ravensbruck was the perfect place for his new pet project: the first concentration camp for women.
In 1938, while Heinrich Himmler was driving out to the countryside to inspect the scrubland of Ravensbruck, a young girl named Yvette Marie-Jose [JO like ‘zhuzh’ zho-zay] Wilborts busied herself getting ready for her high school exit exams. Known as “Marie-Jo” to her friends and family, she was an ambitious, independent teenager with one life goal: “I want to do something with my life.” Marie-Jo was a bit of a tomboy, who dreamed bigger dreams than marriage and babies. Raised on the rocky island of Bréhat on the coast of Brittany, surrounded by her large family, Marie-Jo dreamed of the wider world. As a young child, she’d heard stories of women like Louise de Bettignies and Edith Cavell, resistance heroines and nurses who took action during the great world war, just before Marie-Jo was born. Her own mother was a fiery, political spirit, and her father was a physician who maintained a lifelong distrust of the Germans following the Great War. Even as a small child, Marie-Jo was tuned into the political unrest taking place across the German border in the 1930s.
“Papa had sensed early on what the rise of Nazism meant, even before Hitler took power. My grandmother was a fervent pacifist, who supported the rapprochement with Germany. My grandmother still wanted to believe that things would work out, that men of good will would prevail. As an eight year old, I heard this stormy conversation…The following year, we were at the table when the radio announced Hitler was entering the Reichstag. My father’s beliefs were validated. ‘Hitler,’ he said, getting up from his chair, ‘will be war.’”
In 1940, Marie-Jo spent her weeks at boarding school, preparing for her exams, returning home to the island of Bréhat on weekends. “I was preparing for my first baccaleureate exams. I had received my summons for the day of the exam when the German offensive came. Until then, I had only somewhat been interested in the upheavals on the news, which arrived in muted echoes on my island like all the news before. The Popular Front, the Spanish Civil War, Hitler’s expansionist will had thus seemed to me to belong to another universe. I did not know how I would soon find myself immersed in the heart of the Nazi monstrosity. I was just a young girl in bloom, a carefree kid who was about to celebrate her seventeenth birthday when the Wehrmacht launched its tanks across the Ardennes.”
Unlike so many others, Marie-Jo and her family didn’t join in the Exodus of 1940 – instead, the Exodus came to them. In the weeks following the German invasion, refugees streamed into Brittany, looking for a way to the coast, a way to England, a way out of the path of the panzer tanks. “In Brittany, the exodus brought cars with mattresses piled on the roof. The fugitives told how they had been machine gunned on the way by the planes. I especially remember a couple from the North who arrived with their twelve children to take refuge in town. People ran around in all directions, frantic.”
When the radio broadcast France’s surrender to the Germans, Marie-Jo knew her life’s entire direction had changed course. Through tears, the teachers sent everyone home, and Marie-Jo rode her bicycle home as fast as she could. By the time she arrived, her father was already busy setting up a makeshift clinic to welcome the refugees already streaming onto the island. Meanwhile, her mother began ushering refugees into their home, including an entire Belgian family, now occupying the attic.
Like so many children and teenagers in 1940, Marie-Jo watched her parents transform into unrecognizable selves – the versions of themselves they’d been during the previous war, now brought out of hibernation. “My parents buried their family treasures and our savings. We hid my father’s revolver in a piece of tier hanging from the top of a tree. Papa built a hidden cabinet in one room, where he hid the radio behind a wooden panel, so we could listen to underground broadcasts of the BBC. We sat, listening, waiting for the Germans to arrive.”
Marie-Jo’s parents weren’t the only ones bringing old habits and attitudes out of hibernation for the first time since World War I. In the 1920s, after Germany’s crushing defeat and even more crushing reparations, young men and women tried to break from the nation’s past. It was the dawn of Germany’s jazz age, full of scandalous new ideas. Women got the vote, and put it to use, ushering in the socialist Weimar Republic. Like their counterparts in the United States, young German girls bobbed their hair and danced in cabarets, when they weren’t busy participating in labor movements. German society was turning upside down, and the “Golden Twenties” ushered in an age of incredible creative output: the Bauhaus school designed everything from pamphlets to buildings, Fritz Lang filmed Metropolis and a young actress named Marlene Deitrich got her start. 1920s Berlin had Bertholt Brecht, Walter Benjamin, Carl Jung and Albert Einstein. Berlin also had a particularly scandalous nightlife, dominated by sex workers and a thriving gay community. Meanwhile, across the country, the conservatives of Germany nursed their humiliation and rage. They were revolted by the new Germany, borne of defeat, and dreamed of a return to Germany’s REAL Golden Age – some ancient mythical Teutonic homeland, a mixture of Wagner and dirndls and schnitzel and military dominance. One such conservative would claw his way to the top in an effort to turn back the clock and restore Germany to her rightful supremacy. Adolf Hitler was willing to do anything to cleanse Germany of her modern sins, and he was more than willing to wipe away those who committed them.
Within 10 weeks of taking power, Hitler opened the first Nazi concentration camp in Dachau. Right from the start, Hitler removed his opponents: communists, socialists and social democrats went out of sight and out of mind. These camps were strictly political and focused on one great crime: opposing Hitler. In order to run this operation, Hitler appointed the chief of all things punitive in Germany: the head of the SS, the head of the police, the head of the Gestapo, Heinrich Himmler. Himmler scouted out the site of the camp, selected the first commandant, and set the goal of the camp: make life hell for Hitler’s enemies. Dachau became an example for the camps to come, almost a sort of franchise model to be copied and pasted across the Third Reich. In one respect, however, Dachau was different from the camps of the future: in 1933, it only contained men.
At the beginning, Hitler was only interested in political threats, and he simply didn’t consider women to be political creatures. Women got arrested in the early days, especially if they were in trade unions or the Communist party, but they’d get put in the local jail, not a concentration camp. As his power grew, however, Hitler expanded his conception of an “enemy of the state.” As he said in a 1937 speech: “I always know that I must never make a single step that I may have to take back. You have to have a nose to sniff out the situation, to ask: ‘Now what can I get away with and what can’t I get away with?’” Jews weren’t the only ones Hitler considered detrimental to the German race. He was just as concerned with what he called the “asocials” – men and women who lived on the margins, the mentally ill, the homeless, and perhaps most of all, the sex workers. By 1938, Hitler had rounded up more than 20,000 asocials and he wanted them out of the way. But this left a problem: now that he’d expanded his focus from political enemies to social enemies, he had a lot more women to incarcerate.
So: if Hitler wanted his social enemies out of sight, out of mind, he’d need to move them out of jail – but none of his concentration camps were built to accommodate women. The order went out: find the Fuhrer a suitable location for a women’s camp. As the mission filtered through the ranks of Nazi leadership, Oswald Pohl knew just the place. He didn’t hesitate to reach out to his Heinrich Himmler with the news. Within weeks, the children had been shooed away, the prisoners had been force-marched in, the lumber had been floated up, and Ravensbruck was open for business. With the town’s Jews already kicked out, and any alternate political leadership replaced with Nazis, the village of Furstenberg put up no resistance to the horror show being built in their backyard. On the contrary: they only hoped they’d be selected to work inside its walls.
On May 15th, 1939, a series of buses pulled up to the camp. Hundreds of German female prisoners, a few political resisters but mostly asocials, poured into the camp grounds. They were the first wave. Over the next six years, as Hitler invaded neighboring country after neighboring country, he sent the undesirable, difficult women of Europe to Ravensbruck. One of them would be brave, young Marie-Jo.
“Resistance was a feeling in the air, before it was a fight” Marie-Jo wrote. “People looked at each other, sniffed each other out. We must act. But with whom, where, how? For me, as for so many others, it was an almost imperceptible slide. I fought the occupier out of duty, as something necessary, even normal. I never felt like a heroine…what is courage at seventeen? Do we even know what death is? I had a unique opportunity to achieve my greatest wish: to do something with my life.”
At first, like the rest of her compatriots, Marie-Jo could do nothing but sit in stunned silence as a wave of German tanks rolled over the nation. Before long, they rolled right onto Mary-Jo’s little island, Bréhat, situated on the Breton coast just 114 miles from England. Surrounded by soldiers, Marie-Jo tried to adjust to a new normal. Like any seventeen year old girl, she spent her time studying, swimming in the river, and falling in love with boys in her class. “Seventeen is an age on the brink – I was a young woman, but in the company of my friends I was childish. We played pranks on our neighbors, and my first acts of resistance were similar in nature. Like the other girls, I wore le tricolore – blue, white and red. We listened in secret to the BBC, and when it told us to draw victory Vs in chalk on the walls, we did it. We were lectured by the authorities. These were the first small gestures, ridiculous and touching, like an initiation ritual into the underground.”
Before long, Marie-Jo’s community began enacting its first real acts of resistance. The first order of business was rescuing British soldiers who were unable to escape the beaches of Dunkirk. These stranded sailors, as well as any RAF pilots shot down by the Germans, crept along the coast, hiding in local farms along the way, making the three hundred mile journey to Brehat. Entire networks emerged to help: local fishermen who knew how to get around the German patrol ships, photographers and clerks who could drum up fake paperwork, and of course, couriers to ferry resources and information back and forth. Marie-Jo was the perfect courier. Still enrolled in her boarding school off the island, Marie-Jo had a special, locals-only pass to travel on and off the island every day. Like so many other female resistantes, she exploited the fact that German soldiers were too busy flirting to pay attention to what she was doing. “Sometimes soldiers wave to me when my skirt flies up while riding my bicycle. ‘Ah, mademoiselle! Beautiful legs!’ It makes me furious. I glare at them. But ultimately so much the better. Let them focus on my legs and let me do what I have to do!”
While Marie-Jo hated her German occupiers, women in the so-called “free zone” in Vichy were hardly better off. The new government set up under Marshall Pétain saw an opportunity to right the wrongs of modernism. The Vichy government encouraged a return to religion, morality and above all, traditional gender roles. Before long, Vichy brought back an old law from 1907 which made it frowned upon to find a job, difficult to obtain a divorce, impossible to obtain an abortion, and illegal to be a sex worker. Just like Germany, France’s social pendulum was swinging backwards, and the victims would be the same. As we’ve covered throughout this series, French women were in dire straits. If they had men, those men were in prison or a camp. If they had children, those children needed food. With no access to jobs, many women turned to sex work or theft to feed themselves and their families. Other women responded to their desperate circumstances and restricted rights by radicalizing and joining underground movements. Across free and occupied France, more and more women were rounded up and imprisoned for petty theft, sex work and Communism. Like their German counterparts, these so-called “asocials” were kept out of sight, out of mind. Before long, prisons in 1941 France looked like prisons in 1938 Germany: stuffed to the gills with asocials, including millions of women. Before long, French authorities began transferring those troublesome prisoners into German hands, so they could be deported away, leaving behind the traditional, wholesome France the Vichy government so desired.
Somehow, despite the distractions of war and resistance, Marie-Jo passed her exams at last and enrolled in medical school in the city of Rennes. Her locals-only travel pass was still good, and Marie-Jo now had the means to ferry documents back and forth from the coast to the interior, smuggled inside her dense medical textbooks. Back at home, Marie-Jo’s mother was hard at work in the Resistance as well, moving refugees and building up networks of contacts and go-betweens. When a handful of their comrades got caught, London sent a warning: “Group fully identified by the enemy, stop all work.” But that wasn’t enough to stop the Wilborts women. “My mother sent back the following message: We put our lives on the line from the very start. We will continue to work as before.” Marie Jo’s mother and father were now hiding British soldiers in their own home, helping them get in contact with Resistance networks. But the Nazis – as well as French collaborators – were getting closer and closer. Marie-Jo and her mother had to take a gamble every time they met a new contact – was this person really a resistance agent? Or were they a spy? On May 22nd, 1942, on a Friday when her landlady was out visiting friends, Marie-Jo spent the morning reading alone in her bedroom.
“I hear noise downstairs. I look out the window and I see a black car parked at the entrance to my dead end street. I understand immediately. The doorbell rings. I open. Two Germans enter.
‘Miss, you are arrested.’
‘Why?’
‘You know only too well why!’
Marie-Jo scribbled a note to her landlady informing her of the arrest, returned her copy of the house keys, and followed the Germans to their forbidding black car.
“As I get into the car, I am as lucid as ever. I feel that an iron wall cuts my life in two, that this moment will have a perfectly distinct before and after.” When she arrived at the prison, Marie-Jo discovered no fewer than 14 other members of her network. They had been sold out. Passing through the prison gates, Marie-Jo spotted her friends, her colleagues…and her parents. That day, she entered solitary confinement. To her astonishment, she could hear the outside world from her cell. “I hear a woman humming as she walks down the street, just over there. Her voice is close by and at the same time from another world…A wall separates us, but it is more than a wall.”
Interrogated, brought to court, and sentenced in a show trial, Marie-Jo and the rest of her network were driven to the notorious Fresnes prison. But when the truck pulled up, only the men were allowed off. Marie-Jo watched her father step off, and they exchanged a look. He walked away, carrying a small suitcase in his hands. It was the last time Marie-Jo would ever see her father again.
Again and again, Marie-Jo was hauled out of her cell and interrogated, but still she refused to give up any information. After months of this, Marie-Jo and the other women in her network had one last show trial. Just as before, they weren’t allowed to testify. They were simply condemned to death. “But,” the judge said, “since we don’t execute women, you’re going to be sentenced to hard labor. In Germany.” On July 26th, 1943, after a year in prison, Marie-Jo woke up in her cell to find the letters “NN” written on her door. She, her mother, and sixteen other women were rounded up into the courtyard to be driven to the train station. The next morning, a letter for Marie-Jo arrived at Fresnes Prison written by her grandmother, but it would be returned, unopened. Marie-Jo and her mother had left without a forwarding address. They were “NN” now: “Nacht und Nebel” – Night and Fog. Imprisonment wasn’t enough. Marie-Jo was about to disappear.
When Marie-Jo enrolled in medical school, a big change was taking place in the streets of occupied France: the Germans were dwindling. Hitler was secretly preparing to invade the Soviet Union, and he needed as many men available for the new Eastern Front as possible. As fewer and fewer Germans patrolled the streets, French resistance fighters grew more and more bold. It wasn’t just about distributing flyers and chalking a victory V on the side of the wall – it was about cutting rail lines, bombing ammunition depots and even killing German soldiers outright. Suddenly, on June 22, 1941, Hitler invaded the Soviet Union. It was a turning point not only in the war, but the Résistance itself. Until now, Communists had been torn between fighting the hated German fascists and supporting the Soviet Union’s pact with Hitler. Now that Moscow was finally at war, French Communists were free to rise up at last. French Communists naturally assumed a dominant role in the Résistance: they thrived underground, they were disciplined by their common cause, and many of them had experience on the battlefields of the Spanish Civil War. In the six months following Hitler’s invasion of the Soviet Union, French Communists set off 41 bombs, derailed 8 trains and carried out 107 acts of sabotage. Resistance groups would assassinate a Nazi soldier, which would spark the Germans to retaliate by killing 50 French civilians. All this did was radicalize the locals further – back in Berlin, Nazi leadership heard rumors that things were falling apart in France. As harried Gestapo agents rounded up more and more resistance fighters, the courts were utterly overwhelmed. The prisons, already filled with asocials, had little room for political enemies. Something must be done. On December 7, 1941, while Americans woke up to the bombing of Pearl Harbor, Hitler signed the Nacht und Nebel, or “Night and Fog” decree. As Heinrich Himmler explained to his Gestapo forces: “An effective and lasting deterrent can be achieved only by the death penalty or by taking measures which will leave the family and the population uncertain as to the fate of the offender. Deportation to Germany serves this purpose.”
Himmler was ready. As Marie-Jo, her mother and her fellow prisoners made their way out of Fresnes Prison to the train station, preparations were underway across the border. For its first two years, Ravensbruck concentration camp mostly held German asocials and political resisters. Following the invasion of the Soviet Union, thousands of Soviet women were sent to Ravensbruck, including female soldiers who should have been sent to POW camps according to the Geneva Convention. For the last year and a half, small numbers of French women trickled in from French prisons and French concentration camps. Following the Night and Fog decree, however, enormous numbers of women found themselves on a train bound for the German border, disappearing without a trace. Thousands of them would never return.
The first thing that struck the prisoners was the smell of the sea. At first, many women thought they’d arrived at a beach, confused by the shoreline of the Schwedtsee Lake and the briny air. The Baltic Sea was still an hour and a half away, but to Marie-Jo and her mother, it smelled like home. In every other respect, it was Hell. “If you try to flee, you will be hanged or shot.” These were the first words Marie-Jo heard after climbing out of the cattle car. Forced into 5×5 formations, the prisoners took in their new guards. Standing on the platform were an SS guard and an Aufseherin in her terrifying uniform: a jacket, wide-legged pants, black boots, a black cape, and a snarling German Shepherd on a leash. The entrance to the camp was disconcertingly pleasant: clean, well-kept, with beds of red flowers nestled at the entrance. Inside, however, all Marie-Jo could see were endless barracks. “We can see inmates carrying shovels or a pickaxe, pushing a wheelbarrow or dragging a cart. The Aufseherinnen pace up and down beside the column of prisoners, dragging their dogs. From time to time, they’ll yell, and beat a woman, at which point the dogs instantly throw themselves at the end of their leash, growling, fangs bared. This is the most pitiful assembly of human beings that one can describe. Thin bodies, sluggish movements, dead eyes, burned complexions, haggard features. The prisoners are almost completely shaved, or their heads are covered with a few inches of hair. They wear a blue canvas dress, with a colored triangle and a number. They go barefoot or wear huge slippers with wooden soles. We feel sorry for these prisoners who are not very human, without knowing that soon we will be like them.”
Before anything else could happen, the women were stripped of all traces of the outside world. “We are ordered to take our clothes off and put our things in piles. We enter the shower. We are humiliated, searched, even in our private parts. They tear off our wedding rings, it is the first stage of dehumanization.” Marie-Jo received the same uniform as the women she’d seen outside: blue and white striped dress and jacket, a white headscarf, socks and wooden clogs. To complete the outfit, she received a number printed on a piece of cloth as well as a colored felt triangle. The number and triangle would be sewn onto the left shoulder of their jacket. Black triangles were for asocials: sex workers, beggars, thieves, and lesbians. Green triangles went to serious criminals, lilac triangles were for Jehovah’s Witnesses, yellow triangles were for Jews and red triangles were for political prisoners. Marie-Jo had a red triangle, and her number: 21706. The numbers simply corresponded to the order in which prisoners entered the camp. Somewhere in 1939 had been a prisoner 1.
Once they were dressed, the new prisoners were shuffled into the quarantine barrack, or block. Here, they were assigned to a bunk bed, and handed a bowl, a plate, a cup, a knife, a fork, a spoon, a washcloth, a toothbrush, a small piece of soap and a tiny towel. These were their remaining possessions in the world. For the next few weeks, the new arrivals learned the written and unwritten rules of the camp, and struggled to adjust to camp conditions. After three weeks passed, Marie-Jo moved out of quarantine and into block 5 with the other French and Belgian prisoners. Here, Marie-Jo confronted the chaotic mix of everyone deemed undesirable by the Reich: sex workers, lesbians, and the nefarious “green triangles” – those French women who had volunteered to work in Germany and committed crimes after arriving there. “I learn to be careful around these morally dubious collaborators.” For a young girl from a small island, it was a new world. “Over time, I will get more used to living with pettiness, jealousy, messiness, and the debasement.” It was never a simple question of guards against prisoners: the Nazi reich understood the principle of ‘divide and conquer’ well, and the pre-existing social classes and distinctions of the outside world didn’t disappear within the camp gates.
At the top of the pecking order were the blockovas, the prisoners-turned-guards, who were granted special privileges in exchange for watching over their fellow inmates. The blockovas were obviously despised. Next were political prisoners of various ethnicities, whose relative power swung back and forth over the course of the war. Near the bottom, always, were the asocials.
Political prisoners like Marie-Jo and her mother may have been middle class, they may have been lower class, but they always considered themselves superior to the asocials. Despite the sexual liberation movements of the 1920s, for many prisoners, Ravensbruck was their first time encountering lesbianism. Some women exchanged food for sex, many others were simply lonely. Many prisoners recall couples struggling for privacy in the crowded camp, but their narratives are always told from a perspective of disgust, never pity for anyone struggling for human affection in the midst of misery. Sex workers received even less sympathy, as likely to be beaten by fellow inmates as the guards. It is nearly impossible to find any narratives of asocial prisoners. Even writing after the war, prisoners would refer to asocials in the same language their captors used, referring to them as “pests” or “hags” or “wild animals.” Asocials made up one-third of the population of Ravensbruck camp, received the hardest work assignments, lived in the most overcrowded barracks, were most likely to be beaten, and were the least likely to tell their story if they survived the war. Only the Roma and Jewish prisoners experienced worse. Any asocials who survived the war didn’t write a memoir for fear of revealing the reason they’d been imprisoned. They were not asked to testify. Survivor organizations after the war excluded asocials from support or compensation. Those with black triangles suffered a lonely war, and their story still has yet to be told with the respect it deserves. As Sarah Helm notes, “not a single published French memoir mentions the name of any of the French prostitutes there…though there were probably thousands. The resisters’ testimony may recall acts of kindness or even acts of courage from ‘a prostitute’ but even then, none thought to ask or remember the woman’s name.” For many of these prisoners, the only traces of their story are the few letters they were able to send. As one woman wrote: “Dear Mother, I know I’ve been a great shame to you but do write me just a word. I’m so unhappy. When I come out I will make a fresh start; really, I will. Send me a mark.” Most of them never heard back.
By the end of August 1943, Marie-Jo was ill. Suffering from a heart condition, overwhelmed by fever, Marie-Jo made an understandable but terrible mistake: she went to the camp hospital. For three days, Marie-Jo lay in bed with nothing to help but a few doses of aspirin smuggled to her by others. Meanwhile, she took in her hellish surroundings: “I rub shoulders with horror, with skeletal beings covered in wounds, bodies riddled with edemas, people who are dying. I discovered one of the rules of the hospital: you should only go there when your illness is not too serious. Otherwise, you are lost. The worst off are left to die, or they leave in a ‘black transport’. That’s what we call the convoys which take the sick or the weakest. We know the fate that awaits them, but we won’t learn their exact destination until later.”
When Hitler came to power in 1933, he immediately turned to one field in particular to help him achieve his goals: eugenics. Hitler wanted a pure, master race of blonde, blue-eyed white people with conservative values and discreet sexuality, and he knew at least one other country as obsessed with racial purity as Germany: the United States. In the 1920s and 1930s, the United States was hellbent on preventing anyone undesirable from reproducing. Scientists across the country, but particularly in California and the Deep South, engineered programs of mass sterilization, institutionalism and deliberate death. Hitler had been taking notes from his jail cell, and wasted no time enacting similar policies in Germany. Within months of rising to power, Hitler enacted a law legalizing mass sterilization of anybody considered weak, idle, criminal or insane. But that wasn’t enough. In October 1939, Hitler launched his first foray into so-called “euthanasia” and he launched his program under the perfect camouflage: hospitals. Inside a network of German and Austrian hospitals, doctors would diagnose the supposedly ‘incurably ill’ and ‘insane’. But how to get rid of the patients without attracting too much notice?
To disguise what was happening, Nazis constructed gas-chambers inside the hospitals. But it wasn’t enough: after gassing over 10,000 mentally ill men and women in a single year, locals began to complain. “For several weeks,” wrote a local judge, “gossip has been circulating in the village that things cannot be right…patients arrive but are never seen again, nor can they be visited, and equally suspicious is the frequently visible smoke.” Even the Nazis began to protest that such visible genocide was hurting morale. Wrote one supporter to Nazi leaders, “Surely you know about the measures currently used by us to dispose of incurable mental patients. Still, you may not fully realize how it is accomplished and the vast scope of the undertaking, nor the terrible impression it leaves with the population!” Hitler knew the public didn’t really want to know the truth about the Third Reich they supported, so he moved the killing sites even further from the public eye: to concentration camps. Some camps, like Auschwitz, were extermination camps with no other purpose than to facilitate as many murders as possible. Other camps, like Ravensbruck, were work camps which deported their prisoners when they grew too weak to perform forced labour.
Thus, when Marie-Jo checked into the hospital at Ravensbruck, she didn’t enter a facility intended to heal or treat. It was simply a pit stop on the road to death, to assess whether a patient could recover and go back to work for the Reich, or whether they should be shipped off. But there was also one more sinister option: for Nazi scientists, these camp hospitals were in fact testing grounds for ghastly human experiments. For those prisoners assigned to black transports, the destination was clear: Bernburg euthanasia center. For hundreds of others, the destination was the hospital basement. Here, the Third Reich tried to figure out the secrets of the human body, improving the Aryan race by experimenting on all the others. 74 young Polish women, nicknamed “Rabbits” because they were test animals, were used to test the efficacy of early antibiotics after being infected. They were involved in horrific experiments around bone transplantation. Five died from their operations, six were executed, and the rest survived with the assistance of other prisoners, who hid them in the barracks for the duration of the war. The rabbits weren’t the only ones experimented on. Over 500 Romani women and girls, some as young as 8, underwent horrific experimental sterilization procedures. They were told they’d be released in exchange for volunteering. They were not. Over and over, Nazi doctors delighted in the opportunity to experiment on unwilling bodies, or simply inflict abuse. One early camp doctor, Walter Sonntag, was simply a sadist, fond of extracting healthy teeth without anaesthesia, and poking open wounds with his cane. The only sanity or kindness to be found in the hospital walls was that of the nurses, who were often prisoner volunteers. While the prisoners received special privileges for the hospital assignment, they often volunteered to try and do something for the suffering of the patients. As Marie-Jo would later discover, sometimes nothing was possible, but one had to try anyway. For the time being, however, she focused on getting better and getting out of the hospital. She was desperate to demonstrate to the Nazis that she was not a useless mouth, destined for a black transport. Instead, she was the Nazi’s most precious asset, one in dwindling supply, more necessary than ever: a healthy worker.
By the middle of 1943, the tide of war had turned. After defeat at Stalingrad, the German army found itself running low on munitions – but running just as low on fighting men. With industrial workers drafted for the front lines, Germany needed more workers to fill their place, preferably for free. It didn’t take long for Heinrich Himmler to volunteer his concentration camps as a solution. Enslaved laborers were now building military equipment, uniforms and even munitions, working under horrific conditions. When Himmler came to inspect one workshop producing fabric, he found women strapped to weaving machines for eight hours a day. He was horrified – at the laziness. Before he left, he increased the length of a shift to eleven hours.
In September 1943, Marie-Jo was assigned to one of the workshops set up just outside the camp walls: she’d be working for the electrical giant, Siemens. Yes, that Siemens. The same company at the forefront of long-lasting lightbulbs and refrigerator technology was also at the forefront of Nazi enslaved labor. Never one to miss a good opportunity, they began relying on enslaved Jewish women as early as 1940. By 1942, they wasted little time before setting up a workshop outside the concentration camp. Surrounded by electric barbed wire, the camp was constructed by men from nearby camps, 300 of whom died during the process. From the beginning, the enslaved laborers exceeded expectations. Working 12 hours a day, the women made copper coils, microphones, and more. Just a few days before Marie-Jo began working at the factory, the CEO of Siemens donated 100,000 Reichsmarks to Heinrich Himmler’s friends, as a thank you for the return on his investment.
Every morning, Marie-Jo and 200 others trudged up the hill to begin their shift at 5:30 AM. She made tiny audio switches for airplanes. The work was tedious, and she was exhausted. “I let my imagination wander,” she recalls, “Several times, after falling asleep, I would smash my nose on my machine.” Marie Jo and her partner took turns looking out while the other could catch a few more minutes of sleep. One day, when she worked too slowly, an SS guard dealt a crushing blow to the back of her head. Women who failed to hit their daily quota were reported and given lashings or solitary confinement. Nevertheless, Marie-Jo continued working at the factory, because the alternatives were worse. Elsewhere in the camp, other women were assigned to “work duty” in camp brothels. Seeking out women who were “pretty, with good teeth, and with no venereal infections or skin disease,” as one camp doctor recalled, prisoners would be selected from the asocials and sent to brothels at male camps like Dachau and Buchenwald. With that ever-present threat, Marie-Jo continued her work for Siemens for almost a year. From there, she’d have a front line seat for the collapse of the German war effort.
When the whole world is your enemy, how do you round up all of your enemies? As early as 1942, Nazi leaders observed overcrowding at Ravensbruck. The commandant of Auschwitz himself called the camp conditions “atrocious” – much worse than those of the men’s camps. A year later, the camp strained at the seams. Marie-Jo was lucky to get a set of blue-striped prison clothes when she arrived, as the camp ran out completely a few weeks later. Women arriving shortly after Marie-Jo were forced to wear the clothes of the dead, stripped off the bodies of gas chamber victims at Auschwitz. The agonizing roll call grew longer each morning, and rations were utterly insufficient to feed the growing camp population. By the time winter rolled around, the Siemens factory faced unprecedented turnover. Unable to sleep in overcrowded barracks, unable to digest the undercooked vegetable stew, Marie-Jo’s fellow enslaved laborers collapsed in greater numbers every day. Many suffered mental breakdowns. As terrible as conditions were, they were about to get far worse.
With resources stretched thin, Ravensbruck officials had no incentive to keep so-called “useless mouths” alive. Patients who entered the camp hospital never came out anymore. Tuberculosis raced through the camp. Workers unable to finish a shift were executed on the spot. Every day, the list of women called to work at the Siemens factory had to be revised. As one secretary recalled, “Many women had to be struck off the lists as incurable. Many died before they were even struck off the lists.” Factory owners were outraged – not by the pitiable state of their employees, but at the hits to their bottom line. “Siemens could have intervened,” one manager recalled, “to insist on better food and decent barracks for the women. But these good gentlemen of Siemens didn’t bother counting the number of dead.” All winter, camp officials prepared for a huge transport, preparing a list of every woman no longer worth feeding. On February 3, 1944, over 900 prisoners at Ravensbruck boarded a black transport to a Majdanek [MY-dawn-ick] concentration camp, and then to Auschwitz. That very same morning, 960 French women arrived at the camp gates – an almost one-for-one exchange.
In a sign of the dwindling power of the Occupation back home, almost every woman on board received a red triangle. As the rumors of an Allied invasion grew stronger, more and more French women were fighting back. Despite their bravery, they were staggered by the sight greeting them at the camp gates. “The reality was so brutal and so hard we could hardly grasp it,” one woman recalled. Like all the prisoners before them, the first thing they noticed was the smell of the sea. “The air felt salty on the lips.” said one prisoner. “Just to breathe the Baltic sea air was good.” said another. But as soon as they passed through the gates, they performed the same descent into hell that Marie-Jo had experienced nearly a year prior. “It was obviously a place of death,” one woman recalled. “We had a sense of entering an abattoir.” Unable to adjust to their new surroundings, the French convoy collapsed within weeks. Everyone developed boils. Everyone stopped menstruating. Everyone had scabies. Before long, the French women were dying faster than any other group. As one Soviet prisoner remembered, “They perished without a struggle. No death throes. Often in their sleep.” The French women who survived with their sanity intact did so by simply refusing to accept their surroundings. “I remember the day soon after we arrived,” one member of the convoy recalls, “the prisoner-guard was ordering us to clean up because Himmler was coming to inspect. But we French refused to budge. So she was very angry and she said, ‘Himmler is coming and the whole camp trembles, but you French just laugh.”
If the French laughed, it was because they knew the end of the war was soon approaching. Facing an indestructible Red Army on the Eastern front, and an impending Allied invasion on the Western front, even Nazi leaders began harboring doubts about German victory. When Heinrich Himmler arrived for his inspection, he selected a few women from the French convoy for special treatment, including a young Resistance fighter named Genevieve de Gaulle. He kept the general’s niece in better shelter, with easier work and more food, as a handy bargaining chip. Yet conditions for everyone else grew more and more squalid. As the tide of the war turned, and the German Army began taking its first steps of retreat, Himmler’s system of concentration camps simply redistributed its contents across fewer and fewer locations. If enemy forces approached a concentration camp, the camp was simply liquidated, with anyone strong enough to work assigned to a different camp. Over the course of 1944, as the Germans lost ground, and the Allies got close, conditions for the women at Ravensbruck only deteriorated further. “When the French convoy first entered the camp, it gave us hope…but at the same time we were full of dread,” wrote one prisoner. “They arrived thinking the war was over. They were so unprepared.”
Sources
My primary source for this week’s episode is Marie-Jo’s own memoir, Resister Toujours. It’s only available in French right now. I find it particularly poignant that her memoir describes her entire life, not just her experience in the Résistance and Ravensbruck. The best revenge is a life well lived, and Marie-Jo has done just that.
A few other terrific, highly recommended reads:
- Ravensbruck by Sarah Helm – A fantastic work of scholarship and journalism. Helm did a remarkable job tracking down survivors for interviews, and helping survivors tell their stories after decades of silence. I particularly respect her commitment to telling the stories of the most marginalized victims of Ravensbruck. There is so much work to be done.
- Les Parisiennes by Anne Sebba – If I could recommend a single English-language book about French women’s experiences during World War II, this is the one I’d choose!
- Fighters In The Shadows by Robert Gildea – Recommended with a caveat: I don’t think Gildea is the most evocative writer, and this is shockingly poor editing for Harvard University. However, Gildea’s scholarship is tremendous especially when it comes to foreign or Jewish resistance networks.
- A Train in Winter by Caroline Moorehead – This author focuses on a different convoy of women deported to Ravensbruck. I first read this book years ago, and it’s stuck with me ever since.
- Sudden Courage: Youth in France Confront the Germans, 1940-1945 by Ronald C. Rosbottom – Rosbottom wrote one of my favorite books about the Occupation, When Paris Went Dark: The City of Light Under German Occupation, 1940-1944. This one is particularly poignant, considering the incredibly young ages of so many participants in the French Resistance. The photos alone will make you weep – they look like the babies they were. When Marie-Jo joined the Résistance at 17, she wasn’t alone.
Further Reading:
- Letter from Ravensbruck – Penned by The New Yorker’s famous Paris correspondent, Janet Flanner, this article was first published two days before the Red Army liberated the camp.
- Madame Fourcade’s Secret War by Lynn Olson – You’ve probably seen this making the rounds. I’m thrilled to see something about les résistantes making the rounds! I’ve heard good things but haven’t checked it out myself just yet.
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