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By Root 2564 0

she last saw them. With each passing day, the women prisoners listened for news of the Allied advance that would set them free. One French résistante, Yvonne Baratte, wrote on 14 August, the eve of the Feast of the Assumption, ‘I am full of hope. They will not have time to take us from here.’ The Abbot of Lilas was scheduled to say Mass for the women in the morning. But a German guard, who reminded prisoner Maisie Renault of an orangutan with ‘his gigantic size, his immense arms and his powerful hands that seemed always to want to crush someone’, woke the women early. He shouted, ‘Nicht Messe … Morgen, Alles transport Deutschland, tous mourir … tous mourir.’ This mixture of German and French meant, ‘No Mass … Morning, all [to be] transported to Germany, all to die … all to die.’ The women were herded onto buses. Virginia d’Albert-Lake slipped some letters to the French driver, who told her,

‘Since this morning, I have driven prisoners without stopping from Fresnes and Cherche-Midi to the station at Pantin.’

‘You mean they are evacuating all the prisons in Paris?’

‘Yes,’ the driver answered.

She asked, ‘And the Allies … are they advancing?’

‘Yes. They are at Rambouillet.’

As Toquette Jackson, Virginia d’Albert-Lake and hundreds of other women who had fought hard to liberate France rode in buses through Paris, they knew that the city would soon be free. From the pavements, people who had not resisted looked up, in shame, at the captives. Virginia wrote, ‘They pitied us. As I looked at them, the same thought went round and round in my consciousness: “These people will soon see the liberation of Paris. I’m going to miss the day of which I have dreamed for nearly five years and which was to be the greatest in my life.”’ The Germans took the women to the station at Pantin, where Sylvia Beach and the other American women internees had boarded the train to Vittel in September 1942. This train was not bound for a relatively comfortable mountain resort. Its destination was Germany.

The trains taking the prisoners to Germany were late, so the Germans ordered the women to stand in the hot sun. One of the women, knowing what lay in store for her in Germany, called out to some passers-by, ‘Hello, down there … Listen to me.’ They stopped, and she went on, ‘All the prisoners and the prisoners from Romainville are leaving … Warn the Resistance … Stop the train … You hear me? Stop the train.’ A woman passer-by waved a white handkerchief to signal that she understood. When the trains arrived, the Germans rushed the prisoners, more than 2,000 women and men, into crowded, airless carriages. Amid the wartime confusion, the train moved slowly east towards Nancy. It stopped in a tunnel near Nanteuil-sur-Marne for two hours, while the prisoners in the sealed carriages were nearly asphyxiated. The train could go no further, because the RAF had bombed a bridge a week earlier and the line was impassable. The SS guards marched the deportees out of the train into a field, where they were assembled in military columns. One woman tried to run away, but guards tracked her down and beat her severely.

They walked about five miles through fields to the town of Nanteuil-Saâcy, whose inhabitants called out to the prisoners, ‘Bon courage!’ and ‘Vive la France!’ Strangely, a contingent of Red Cross personnel was waiting at the train station with boiled potatoes and milk for the prisoners. A few hours later, they boarded a goods train. The train trundled slowly east for four days, until it reached the outskirts of Weimar. There, the SS separated the male from female prisoners. The women were taken off the train at Ravensbrück Konzentrationslager, built in 1939 to house slave labour for the Texled textile and leather factory and the Siemens armaments plant. The date was 21 August.

As soon as they entered the camp, the prisoners were forced to strip completely. The guards wrapped their clothes in brown paper, as if they would be returned one day. Each woman was forced to undergo a gynaecological examination for contraband, with no gesture towards hygiene.