A Lesser Evil - Lesley Pearse [152]
Orphans who lived on the streets were picked up too and several girls had been brought over from North Africa. The African girls were the most pitiful of all as they were often unable to communicate with anyone else.
New acquisitions were kept under lock and key, controlled by fear until such time as they accepted that they were now whores, and were grateful for their board and lodging. But for the Jewish girls there was an extra dimension of fear, for they were told daily what would happen to them if they didn’t please the men who came to use them. Enough information crept in from outside for them to know that trains left every day for Poland or Germany crammed with Jews being taken to labour camps.
In time, after many beatings and being starved and locked up naked in a cold room, Yvette knew the only way she would survive was to learn to smile and even pretend she liked what those terrible men did to her. Whether it was Nazi officers or slimy French collaborators she had to entertain, she stifled her feeling until eventually she felt she had none.
Most of the rooms had locked shutters on the windows, but not the attic rooms where the girls slept. Yvette would stand for an hour or more at a time staring out over the rooftops, looking for a landmark she recognized. But she couldn’t see the dome of the Sacré Coeur or the Seine, so she had no idea what part of Paris she was in.
Occasionally one of the newest girls would escape, but word always got back that she’d been shot or found drowned in the river. It wasn’t just trigger-happy German soldiers gunning down someone with no papers either; often the execution was carried out by one of the men who owned this place and others like it. So the girls didn’t dare trust anyone, not even one of their own, for anyone might be tempted to turn informer if it got them out of a night with one of the more brutal or perverted customers. Yvette became outwardly like all the other girls, docile, amenable, grateful for any little kindness.
‘But I was not like them in my ’ead,’ she said with a sharp edge of defiance in her voice. ‘I knew they would stay whores when ze war end, but not me. I kept it in my ’ead that I would come to England. In that house I did ze sewing, I knew I was good at it. If I had not had ze dream of England in my head I would have gone mad.’
Fifi could say nothing. She had profound sympathy and admiration for the inner strength Yvette must have had to live through such terrible experiences. Yet at the same time she could see that her friend hadn’t really won her freedom by coming to England. She had remained in a kind of prison, exchanging the men who ruled her life back in France for equally demanding women here whom she served by making their clothes.
She had no real life of her own. She went out only to visit her clients, and her cluttered flat was probably very similar to the apartment she’d shared with her mother back in her childhood. An empty life without any love or joy.
All at once Fifi felt a surge of shame that she had so often felt hard done by. She really had nothing to complain about – she’d never known hunger or real fear until now. Poverty, sickness, homelessness, she’d never experienced any of them, or even true loneliness. No one close to her had ever died, and she was born into a good, loving