58. Women At War 5: The Survivor II (Marie-José Wilborts)

by Diana S. |
A young Marie-José Wilborts, schoolgirl Résistante

 

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 58: “Women At War 5: The Survivor II (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

In March 1944, 4,052 new prisoners arrived at Ravensbruck. The camp was at four times its intended capacity, and chaos reigned. There weren’t enough guards, and it was easier than ever to evade them by disappearing into the crowds. The German guards cared less and less about camp discipline, distracted by concern for the safety of their own homes and families. That summer, new German prisoners arrived, punished for expressing doubts about Germany victory, or performing sex work to feed their families when German shops ran out of food. By the summer of 1944, Ravensbruck was a microcosm of the Third Reich’s terrible path of destruction, containing prisoners from no fewer than 22 countries. In August 1944, the Western and Eastern front collided in the camp, and all hell broke loose.
 
It was the story of two rebellions. Following the Allied landing at Normandy, Hitler had to cut out the middleman. No more farming out Resistance fighters to French prisons, run by the French administration. With the Allies only days away, French civilians joined the Resistance by the thousands, and Occupation leaders began looking for the exits. Hitler ordered all political prisoners sent straight to German factories for forced labor. While American tanks rolled towards Paris, German cattle cars rolled towards camps like Ravensbruck. As Paris steeled herself for the final fight and Germans weighed whether or not to raze the city, electricity flickered off and bombs blasted the train stations. But even this wasn’t enough to stop the trains from making their deadly route. In one of the last convoys from Paris, 500 women arrived at Ravensbruck on August 21st. Only a few days later, the Allies liberated Paris.
 
Other rebels weren’t so lucky. Just as the French resistance counted on the Allied army for support, the Polish resistance knew the Red Army was on its way and seized their chance. Like the French, Polish men and women emerged into the open to face their occupiers head on. Unlike the French, they were crushed. In between the failed rebellion and the arrival of the Soviets, Hitler decided to evacuate his entire, vast network of Polish concentration camps and prisons. Every camp closed, and every prisoner boarded a train headed deeper into Germany. At Ravensbruck, the Polish prisoners hit the camp like a tidal wave. In the space of only a few weeks, more than 12,000 Polish prisoners entered Ravensbruck. Camp administrators balked at the sea outside their gates. As disease broke out, the leadership gave up and shuffled the new prisoners through the usual arrivals process as quickly as they could. In the chaos, many things were possible. Jewelry could make it through the gates. A fur coat. A child.
 
 
What was to be done about the children? Women and children were usually separated early on, with any child too young to work usually sent to a gas chamber. But the children were here, and Ravensbruck’s gas chamber was still under construction, and all of the other camps were too full to accept prisoners from Ravensbruck. At other camps, women with children were simply shot at the camp gates. But for whatever reason, the camp commandant at Ravensbruck decided to build an enormous tent to house the Polish women and children. The tent was squalid, disease was rampant, but at least they were alive. At first, 100 children moved into the camp. But after the rush to process new arrivals, hundreds of pregnant women were now walking around Ravensbruck. Before long, the camp had a whole new category of prisoner: newborns. One camp employee estimated that 1 in ten Polish women arriving that fall was pregnant, meaning more than one thousand babies were due in the next year. Since Ravensbruck first opened, all pregnant prisoners received the same treatment: a forced abortion. To the astonishment of long-time prisoners, however, in the fall of 1944, Ravensbruck officials shrugged their shoulders. There were simply too many pregnancies to abort, and only one camp doctor. The babies would be born, and then they would need a place to go. In October, camp officials cleared out one of the barracks and set up one of the most macabre spaces in all of Ravensbruck: the Kinderzimmer. A Nazi concentration camp had a prisoner’s nursery. 
Back at the Siemens factory, Marie-Jo had had enough. It was one thing to build airplane parts for Nazis when they were occupying her own country. The Nazis weren’t dropping bombs on French soil. But now that Charles de Gaulle was leading a new French army and a liberated capital? Marie-Jo couldn’t bear to build the planes which would bomb her own compatriots. When word spread that the camp doctor needed trained assistants with medical experience to run a nursery, she volunteered immediately. A few days later, she met with the camp doctor:
 
“Your father is a doctor specializing in children. Do you know how to take care of children?”
“Yes”
“Good”
He adds:
“It’s pretty, Paris. You’ll be home soon.” Then he laughs. He laughs at me. He still does not believe German defeat is possible.
 
From the moment Marie-Jo first stepped into the Kinderzimmer, she began a desperate struggle against impossible odds: how to save the most vulnerable humans from a system that wanted them dead? The nursery was a sick joke: instead of aborting the babies, the camp guards would simply let them die: slowly, in pain, in hunger, alone. “One by one, we put the children on the table. I have never touched such tiny beings, it hurts me to do it. They are barely clothed in a shirt, a diaper and a shawl.” Most of the mothers are too malnourished to breastfeed, so Marie-Jo prepared bottles of milk mixed with oatmeal. She had no shortage of help: mothers separated from their children are desperate for the chance to be close to babies, anyone’s babies. “Mamoutchka, rolled up in a blanket, stands guard. She is a Russian who, having lost her child, remains there to be of service to the little ones. She does the housework, lights the fire and, when she can, breastfeeds two children.” Marie-Jo and the other prisoners at the Kinderzimmer seize every opportunity they can to provide their charges with warmth, love or food, but it is almost never enough.
 
“Almost every day, newborns are brought in, generally quite beautiful, but they quickly take on the appearance of little old people. One of them dies. I’m starting to get used to this daily tragedy. It seems preferable that these suffering children do not live. We try to alleviate the grief of the mothers by explaining this to them.” Every morning, mothers arrived at the nursery to feed their children only to learn they have died in the night. One woman stuck out in Marie-Jo’s memory: “A young Russian girl, standing outside the door, is waiting with eyes wide with concern. Another woman gently leads her by the wrist, so she understands. She wants to see. We put in her arms the stiff little being that she embraces, sobbing. We cry with her. What to say in the face of a mother’s despair? Suddenly, she hands us her child and runs away, her head in her hands. She will never come back. The other woman takes the child’s body to the morgue. We continue our exhausting day, without a moment’s pause.”
 
All of the prisoners did what they could to save the babies. Rags became diapers, rubber gloves became pacifiers. But the collective humanity of Ravensbruck’s prisoners are no match for the inhumanity of Ravensbruck’s officials. Every day, babies would arrive, and babies would depart, and Marie-Jo would feel utterly unable to do anything about either fact. “Their number is increasing. The situation is becoming impossible.” Thirty days after opening, the first 100 babies brought to the Kinderzimmer were all dead.
 
Outside the camp, the Germans were losing, and everyone knew it. As one of the women from the last French convoy remembered, “Do you know the feeling of delivering good news? It was like that. We had come straight from Paris with news that the war was over.” But the war wasn’t over. It would drag on for almost another year, every day worse than the one before. Prisoners in eastern camps were forced deeper into the Third Reich. Any able-bodied women at Auschwitz were ordered on a staggering 420 mile march to Ravensbruck, only a few weeks before the camp was liberated. With its most efficient killing center now closed, Himmler encouraged his camps to dispose of unproductive prisoners within their own grounds, and Ravensbruck was no different. “Living conditions are getting dire,” according to Marie-Jo. “Power outages are increasing. The soup is lacking, the bread is smaller, everything is disorganized. The water pipes are blocked, the camp is just rotten and flooded. Women are fighting for nothing…To what level of human degradation have we descended!”
 
In October 1944, an order from Heinrich Himmler crossed the desk of a secretary at Ravensbruck. “In your camp, with retrospective effect for six months, 2000 people need to die each month.” Ravensbruck stepped up their efforts. Fifty women were shot every night, but it wasn’t enough to reach Himmler’s quota. With no access to the gas chambers of Auschwitz and Mauthausen, camp directors knew, Ravensbruck would need a gas chamber of its own. As historian Sarah Helm notes, “the entire context of the gassing at Ravensbruck was new. For the first time, Nazi extermination had no stated ideological objective; it was impossible for the SS to persuade themselves or others that what was being done here was the cleanse the gene pool or to further the welfare of the master race. At Ravensbruck killing by gas in the closing months of the war was done to make space and save food.” The gas chamber site sat beneath an old youth camp near the camp grounds, across from the entrance to the Siemens workshop. All afternoon, the German factory managers who managed the enslaved laborers need only look out the window to catch a glimpse of the gas chambers staring back at them, inarguable, undeniable, and unbearable. Even the gas chamber didn’t work fast enough to satisfy Himmler’s quota, and women brought to the Youth Camp to wait for death were put on starvation rations and injected with poison. Other women simply died from the cold. “Around us, little by little, the camp is emptying,” Marie-Jo observed. “Whole blocks are now deserted. Convoys leave for unknown destinations. We say ‘black transport’ but will they even go anywhere?”
 
Back at Ravensbruck, everyone was looking for an escape route: Nazis and prisoners alike. Camp guards listened to the BBC to learn the truth about German losses, too distracted by their coming fate to pay attention to the camp’s operations. Some prisoners were able to hide from roll call. When the camp commandant announced a new transport for young mothers, pregnant women, and children, some of the women looked forward to it, thinking conditions had to be better somewhere else. But the transport took them to Bergen-Belsen, and every baby was dead by the time the train arrived. The mothers and children soon followed. The Kinderzimmer sat empty, scrubbed clean by Marie-Jo and her fellow prisoners. It was Ravensbruck’s turn to evacuate, and everyone knew it. In March 1945, the French Nacht und Nebel prisoners all received a summons. As walking, breathing violations of the Geneva Convention, they were too dangerous to be allowed to fall into enemy hands. “Should we try to flee or hide, while waiting for the Red Army,” Marie-Jo wondered, “or should we leave in what could turn out to be a black transport? What is the riskiest choice? With my work, I can easily hide and escape this departure. But I know my mother is too weak to survive on her own. She will need me wherever we go. I say goodbye to my friends, and I slip with my mother into the midst of those who are leaving.” Marie-Jo, her mother, and 1000 other women passed through the camp gates. They left behind 36,700 prisoners, in a camp only built to hold 3,000. In the weeks after Marie-Jo and her mother left, Ravensbruck killed faster than ever before. By the end of March, the locals began to complain: there was too much ash in the lake.
 
By 1944, the International Red Cross had been twiddling its thumbs in Switzerland for more than two years. Even after other aid groups expressed their horror at the conditions at Ravensbruck, the ICRC insisted they had no jurisdiction over such a place. Their job was to monitor conditions of prisoners of war, and women and children were civilians, not soldiers. The fact that, of course, thousands of Soviet women at Ravensbruck were members of the Red Army did nothing to change the Red Cross’s mind. For two years, internees smuggled out messages to their family and friends, begging for help. Their accounts made it into reports and radio broadcasts. Everyone in France knew where Hitler kept his least favorite women because the newspapers printed letters from prisoners still trapped in the camps. Each morning, French households whose family members had disappeared without a trace read about the work camps, the starvation diets, the crematoriums. Over and over again, however, the International Red Cross refused to do anything. National Red Cross chapters considered breaking away to stage their own interventions. Finally, the Swedish Red Cross stepped up to do what its Swiss counterparts would not: they were going to rescue the women in the camps.
 
By the time Marie-Jo and her mother began their march, Heinrich Himmler was managing two contradictory initiatives: how to kill prisoners, and how to keep them alive as leverage. By no means did Himmler slam on the brakes – to the contrary, he picked up the pace of the murders, eager to demonstrate to his now unhinged Fuhrer that the cleansing of the master race was coming along nicely. But Himmler was no fool and he could see which way the wind was blowing. If he could manage some discreet prisoner exchanges, or release a few prisoners with the right people watching, perhaps he’d survive the post-war tribunals which were sure to come. The Swedish Red Cross saw an opportunity.
 
The Allies had no time for prisoners, issuing a statement that prisoners should “stay put, await the arrival of allied forces and be prepared for an orderly repatriation after the end of the war” – even though hundreds of prisoners were entering the Ravensbruck gas chambers every day. But as a neutral country, Sweden didn’t take orders from Eisenhower. Count Folke Bernadotte, the grandson of the last Swedish King and a trained diplomat, negotiated with Himmler directly. If Bernadotte could move discreetly, if he could do it without Hitler noticing, in small numbers, Himmler would allow the Swedish Red Cross to evacuate a number of concentration camp prisoners. Departing at once, Bernadotte assembled a fleet of buses, painted white to distinguish them from army vehicles, and set out on the road. With Hitler determined to scorch the earth and kill every prisoner before surrendering the war, the Count knew he was racing death. Could he make it in time?
 
The night of their departure from Ravensbruck, Marie-Jo, her mother, and 70 other women squeezed onto another cattle car. With only bread, a little margarine and a sausage to sustain them, the train carried them over Germany for five more nights. If Marie-Jo were able to see out of the cattle car, she would have had a panorama view of the end of the Third Reich, as the train passed through bombed out cities and burning fields. Finally, the starvation journey came to an end. Marie-Jo had no idea where she was, or whether her arrival meant life or death. Just as they had at Ravensbruck, SS guards pulled the women out of the car onto the ground, screaming at them to stand up or die. In the middle of the night, the 1,000 women from Ravensbruck trudged through the snow. “Five kilometers separate us from the camp…Our feet knock against stones and sink into the snow. We are exhausted. We see the lights of the camp in the distance, but they approach so slowly.” At long last, Marie-Jo learned her destination: the enormous, sprawling camp of Mauthausen. In the final months of the war, as the outer borders of the Third Reich retreated further and further, Mauthausen became a camp of last resort. Situated in Austria, as far from the Allied forces as possible, Himmler redirected excess prisoners here. By the time Marie-Jo arrived, Mauthausen held 84,000 prisoners – nearly twice as many as the group left behind at Ravensbruck. Right away, Marie-Jo picked up where she left off, working with other prisoners to form a sort of ersatz hospital wing. In those final day, the only food available was watery soup with uncooked rutabagas, which the weak prisoners couldn’t digest. While Marie-Jo kept her patients alive, her mother harvested dandelions on the outskirts of the camp – anything for a tiny sliver of nutrition.
 
The Allied army was on its way, and the evidence was right in front of them: every day, more and more prisoners arrived bleeding or dead, killed by air attacks on the road. The prisoners weren’t the only ones caught in the crossfire – Bernadotte’s white buses took fire from both sides in the fog of war. Despite the obstacles, the delegation from the Swedish Red Cross pressed on, determined to reach the camps before Nazis had a chance to liquidate them and destroy the evidence. 
 
“What will the SS do to us before the end?” Marie-Jo worried. One afternoon, a female guard came running and shouted, “Everybody who can walk, get up.” As she lined up with the others, she beheld a sight she couldn’t make sense of. “There we see two men, not two SS, two real human beings with human expressions. They wear a white armband marked with a red cross. They speak to us in French: ‘Ladies, you are going to be repatriated by Switzerland, you are leaving tomorrow morning.”
 
At first, everyone was silent. Was it a trick? Slowly, the women began to allow themselves to hope. The next morning, a convoy of 300 French women boarded the white buses. For three days, the buses drove through Austria. For the first time in years, Marie-Jo was able to look out a window during a journey: “I observe the magnificent landscape without realizing that we are driving towards freedom…When we reach our goal, it’s nightfall. The border is closed. All night long, the convoy waits behind a barrier while the Red Cross officials try in vain to get permission to pass. We’re anxious, and my mother is in despair. So close to freedom! Rather than return to where we come from, we would rather rebel and die here. Finally, in the morning, the barriers are raised. When the last of the thirteen buses arrives on Swiss soil, we burst into tears and then sing the most beautiful, the most incredible rendition of La Marseillaise.”
 
Marie-Jo had made the right choice to leave Ravensbruck that day. During her weeks at Mauthausen, Ravensbruck continued gassing, shooting and starving women to death until the very last minute. All over the camp, officials were busy burning paperwork and destroying evidence. Guards were figuring out how to get home. The prisoners waited, convinced the Americans and Brits would press on to Ravensbruck – but they didn’t realize Eisenhower had halted their progress. Despite the fact that half a million people still remained in the concentration camps, Eisenhower wasn’t interested in liberating German camps, or even granting safe passage to Bernadotte and his white buses. A few weeks after Marie-Jo’s liberation, Bernadotte forged his own way to Ravensbruck, where he conducted one of the largest rescue missions of the war. Without an American escort, the white buses were bombed, possibly by both sides, but he was still able to save 4,000 women from the camp. Unfortunately, that left behind thousands more. The Red Army was so close the battle could be heard from the camp. On April 28, the final death evacuation began. A great wave of misery flooded the road: 20,000 women condemned to one last, pointless march to nowhere. The guards closed the gates and walked away. Ravensbruck sat unguarded, waiting for liberation. Only 2,000 women and children, too ill to walk, remained. Marie-Claude Vaillant-Couturier, the focus of last month’s newsletter, stayed behind deliberately, in an effort to keep sick prisoners alive long enough to be liberated. She remembers a strange sort of limbo. For one day, the camp was theirs. The women excavated the cellars for any leftover food. They stared into the crematorium. They couldn’t help but look inside the gas chamber. They hung a red welcome banner across the gates for the Soviets. They waited. They prayed.
 
On April 30th, 1945 the first Red Army soldier walked through the Ravensbruck gates.  As Marie Claude recalled, “Seeing the first cyclist ride through the camp gates, my eyes filled with tears of joy and I remembered my tears of rage when I saw the first German motorcyclist ride through the streets of Paris five years earlier.” As more and more soldiers and tanks poured through the gates, the camp turned into a frenzied celebration. For that first day, the prisoners cheered, decorated the camp, began preparing the sick for travel. But that first night, the dream of liberation became a nightmare.
 
The soldiers of the Red Army raped their way through Nazi Germany, and there was no exception for the Nazis’ victims. One German woman was too ill to leave her bed when the soldiers entered the camp hospital. “And then it began. I had only one thought at that time – to die, because I was little more than a corpse.” Soldiers raped women who were sick, or dying, or days away from giving birth, or recovering from giving birth. One woman managed to flag down a senior officer. When he saw what was going on, he ordered the men out of the hospital barrack – and executed them. Other victims were not so lucky. Nationality made no difference. As one prisoner recalled, “The Germans never raped us because we were Russian swine, but our own soldiers raped us.” Even the surviving victims of Nazi medical experiments fell prey to the soldiers, “Suddenly we were walking towards a river and the Russian soldiers arrived. One soldier told me not to worry but others were dragged off and I could hear them screaming very badly nearby, crying and shouting. Then they attacked us all and raped us, even though they knew we were prisoners.” One French prisoner managed to fend off her attackers by convincing them her sores were contagious. At the time, she weighed only 77 pounds. 
 
Eventually, the Red Army moved on to finish the war, leaving the women behind. For weeks, these women, starved, beaten, raped, exhausted and sick, walked across Germany, unsure where to turn for help. The news reached them on the road piece by piece: Hitler was dead. Berlin had fallen. And then, at long last: Germany had surrendered. The war was over. The women nodded, and continued walking. They were a long way from home.
In their first days of freedom, Marie-Jo and her mother focused on their most immediate needs: a shower. A bit of jam, the only thing they could digest. A scarf. A telephone call. After years in the shadows, the Nacht und Nebel, the night and fog, was clearing away and Hitler’s secret prisoners reappeared to their friends and family. Marie-Jo’s grandmother, whose final letter to Fresnes prison had been returned to sender, couldn’t believe it when she received the phone call: her daughter and granddaughter were alive after all! But the joy of reunion was tempered by grief. Marie-Jo’s father died at Buchenwald prison, over a year earlier. Absorbing the blow, Marie-Jo and her mother prepared for the final stages of their journey: after two years, they were going home to France.
 
“I arrive in Paris on May 1, under a fine spring snow. At the Lutetia Hotel, we register and fill out endless paperwork. There is a huge crowd around us, but all the bodies are skeletal, the faces caved in. The walls are lined with portraits from desperate relatives looking for information from survivors. We say what we know, which isn’t very much.” After receiving a bit of help from an aid group formed by Ravensbruck survivors, Marie-Jo and her mother returned home to Bréhat at last. Walking in the doors of their family home, Marie-Jo slowly climbed the stairs to her old bedroom.
 
“I put on a summer dress and looked at myself in the mirror…I inspect my reflection, compare it to the one I contemplated in the same place in 1942…My face is thinner. My hair has darkened. But the essential change is not physical. At 21, it is no longer the same person who stands in front of this mirror. That young girl barely out of adolescence, has become Marie-Jo, the survivor of the camps, who has seen what it is to be human more than anyone could ever know.”
 
 
From the first day of the Exodus to the final day of surrender, French women participated fully in the Second World War. The Germans made little distinction between civilians and soldiers, and millions of French women faced prison, deportation, torture and death, just as men did. And like men, French women were often on the wrong side of history, too, just as likely to profit off the black market, betray their neighbors, and sleep with the enemy. While men were the only ones to experience the battlefields and prisoner of war camps, French women faced their own unique concerns, namely: how to keep children and older adults alive. How to earn money under a sexist government that denied them most work. How to protect themselves from their own liberators. How to tell their story to a world that didn’t want to hear it. By focusing on a few individual women, I hoped to paint a broader picture of French women’s lives during World War II. It is impossible to tell the full story of women at war, but we can start by telling the full story of these women: Elisabeth Kauffman, Berthe Auroy, Coco Chanel, Jacqueline Marié and Marie-Jo Wilborts. Their stories deserve an ending. 
 
Elisabeth Kauffman reunited with her parents after the chaos of the Exodus, and eventually they made their way to Vichy France. In November 1941, the Kauffman family received travel visas to America and arrived in Virginia the following spring. Her entire extended family managed to escape Europe, but her beloved older brother, Peter, died fighting the Germans on his own native soil in 1944. After gaining US citizenship, Elisabeth got married and became a librarian for the New York City Public Library. She donated her diary of the Exodus to the US Holocaust Memorial Museum in 1990. In 2003, Elisabeth Kauffman died at the age of 79, survived by her husband of 56 years, her daughter, and her granddaughter.
 
In 1944, after the Germans requisitioned the home of Berthe Auroy, the schoolteacher had to dig up a metal box in the backyard containing her diaries. She moved them to a secret hiding place, where they remained hidden until the liberation of France. Berthe witnessed the liberation of Paris first-hand, with a few holdout German soldiers firing machine guns on her very street in the midst of the celebrations. She caught a glimpse of de Gaulle driving past, and then shook her head at the young French girls throwing themselves at American soldiers. “It was inevitable that the youth should get carried away in the joy of the Liberation, but I would have liked a bit more discretion.” Berthe Auroy passed away in 1968, after enjoying twenty three years of quiet retirement.
 
Coco Chanel, of course, survived the war. Following her arrest for treason during the Liberation of Paris, Coco pulled every string she could. While testifying in court that she had done nothing but help her beloved nephew, her old friend Winston Churchill is rumored to have intervened in her case. Whether it was because they were lifelong friends or because he was afraid she’d spill the beans about so many Nazi-loving British aristocrats, we’ll never know. Following the war, she and her beloved German spy, Baron Dincklage, moved to Switzerland. In 1954, she reopened the House of Chanel and reconciled with the same Wertheimer brothers she’d tried to sell out to the Nazis. She died in 1971 at the Hotel Ritz at the age of 87, after spending her final years in a haze of morphine. When the first lady of France, Madame Pompidou, tried to arrange an enormous tribute to her favorite designer, the French secret service informed her that it might not be such a good idea to honor a Nazi spy with a state funeral. When claims about Chanel’s espionage first surfaced in 2011, the House of Chanel issued a statement of denial. In 2016, the French government declassified Chanel’s most damning files, including her registration card for the Nazi secret service and a number of her most incriminating messages. The House of Chanel has had no further comment.
 
Jacqueline Marié spent a year in Ravensbruck, where she formed close ties with the two most famous survivors of Ravensbruck, Germaine Tillion and Genevieve de Gaulle. Jacqueline was part of the final evacuation of Ravensbruck. Along with 20,000 other women, she marched towards Czechoslovakia until she was able to escape the line. On May 9th, she was rescued by three young men. “They managed to get us some food, when they themselves had barely any, along with clothes to keep us warm. Above all, they hid us, not only from the clutches of the Nazis, but from the soldiers of the Red Army who were raping women.” On May 30th, she returned to Paris. Along with her friends Germaine and Genevieve, Jacqueline joined the fledgling survivors group: the  national association of former deportees and internees of the Résistance, or ADIR. Over the next forty years, ADIR provided support for female Resistance fighters and political prisoners from Ravensbruck. In the years immediately following the war, most aid for concentration camp survivors defined ‘the Resistance’ along narrow, military lines. Since most female resistance members acted as couriers, they were often excluded from government funds, even though they’d suffered terribly at the hands of the Germans. ADIR helped provide material support to survivors, while fighting for greater recognition of the role women played in the French Resistance. Jacqueline was stunned by the reaction she received after the war – a complete disinterest in discussing women’s participation in the Resistance, let alone their imprisonment at Ravensbruck. Following the end of the war, Charles de Gaulle designated 1,038 people as heroes of the resistance. Only 6 were women. He described the return of French prisoners as “a grand national event, charged with joy…when the nation recovered its two and a half million sons.” It took the work of his own niece, Genevieve, the first president of ADIR, to correct the historical record. On May 27, 2015, Germaine Tillion and Genevieve de Gaulle were interred in the Pantheon – the first women to join Marie Curie in the hallowed institution. Jacqueline Marié, the new president of ADIR, accompanied her two friends to their final resting place. She published her memoirs just this past autumn, and continues to speak about her experiences in the Resistance and Ravensbruck. She is 96 years old.
 
Marie-Jo returned to Germany in 1950 to testify against the commandant of Ravensbruck. In 1954, Marie-Jo resumed her medical studies and it was here that she met her future husband, a sociologist named Paul. Forever shaped by her experiences in the Kinderzimmer, Marie-Jo dedicated her career to the psychology of distressed children. She advocated for their welfare at every opportunity, even drafting resolutions for the UN Convention on the Rights of The Child, passed in 1989. Since 1997, she has been the president of the Foundation for the memory of the deportation, and visits high schools around the world to tell the story of her own unique adolescence. In 2012, she received the Grand Cross of the Legion of Honor, the highest rank of the highest order of merit in France. In 2015 she joined Jacqueline Marié at the interrment of Germaine Tillion and Genevieve de Gaulle in the Pantheon. At 96 years old, she’s still picking up the phone to give interviews. “Always, I remind those I talk to that the worst can start again. I don’t have to look at the news very long to be convinced. I hope that the young people of the 21st century will be able to avoid the tragedies that my generation could not avoid and had to overcome so painfully. Solidarity and dialogue with one another are vital. These, and these alone, allow you to build something new.”
 
Thanks for listening to The Land of Desire. Until next time, au revoir.

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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