The Girl in the Blue Beret - Bobbie Ann Mason [105]
They sat on a divan, side by side, and she resumed her telling. It seemed that she was telling her past to him as she had told it to herself for years. It came even more easily as they became more comfortable together. Intermittently, her expressive hands touched him, making contact, drawing him in.
“I don’t speak of it,” she reminded him. “But now I tell you. I want to tell you. I trust you, and you are part of my past. A good part.
“I know you are well aware of the Jews, their terrible fate under the Nazis. There were also thousands of résistants like us sent to Germany during the war. We were sixty women in a train carriage that had room for forty. The train journey was five days, with little food or water or other necessities—space, air.… On the way, through the small vents on the wooden sides of the car, we glimpsed the bombing damage to Germany.
“We expected to go to a labor camp. We also expected that the war would end soon. Maman reassured me. She said, ‘We’re strong. We can work. It won’t last. The war is almost over.’ Her reassurances gave me strength, and my acquiescence and obedience gave her strength.
“We still had not heard what had happened with my father and Robert and the priest and the two aviateurs. Fear for our men had haunted me all the while we were at Fresnes. If the aviateurs were lucky, they would go to a stalag as prisoners of war. But I had a profound apprehension about the others. I did not know what might happen. My mother insisted they would not be shot, but I had seen the posters on the street stating clearly that anyone caught helping aviateur evaders would be punished; the men would be shot, the women would go to prison. At Saint-Mandé we had lived under this threat, and we took the risk willingly. But now the reality of our situation was very bitter.”
Annette fell silent for a moment. Then with a shake of her head, she said, “Others suffered so much worse than we.”
She clasped her hands together, as if to squeeze something out of her memory. “We arrived at Ravensbrück, a camp for women north of Berlin. Ravensbrück was in a beautiful part of Germany. There was a lake and beautiful trees. But then the sight of the camp struck us with terror. We could not comprehend what this place was. There was a high wall all around it, with electric barbed wire strung along the top. Inside were many long rows of rough wooden buildings—like warehouses, with bars on the windows. They were overflowing with thousands of women—women starving, despairing, fighting for survival. It was shocking and so bewildering that we thought we must have lost our sanity.
“The prisoners worked in the Siemens factory, which made armaments. And there were many workshops. We were put to work first filling in a swamp with sand, then hauling wagons of manure to a field. The barracks was terribly overcrowded, and there was not enough food. We were slaves. Women were dying. And more kept arriving.
“I didn’t expect Ravensbrück. The world didn’t know of such places. We didn’t know.
“We were in the night and the fog—la nuit et le brouillard. We were meant to disappear.” She stopped. “The résistants were supposed to vanish.”
She rubbed the material of her sleeve.
“There were no uniforms,” she went on. “We had to sew a cross on the front and back of our clothing, to identify us as prisoners, and we had to sew our numbers on our clothing. I still have my number. I often thought about being a number, whether a person can be reduced to a number—at once the most specific and the most abstract of designations.”
She clasped his knee and continued, “I wasn’t tortured. I was beaten, but … oh, that’s no matter. So many women suffered more.
“The women SS guards, the Aufseherinnen, were monsters. They were brutal. Well, I won’t go into that. Those women—they had a cruel sense of humor. They laughed at us, knowing how that would humiliate us. We were in Block 22, with the French, and the other blocks were Poles,