She was equally shocked by their bodies, especially those of the seventy-four formerly healthy young Polish women known as lapins – one of whom was just fourteen – who had been used for medical experimentation by Nazi doctors, subjected to up to six operations each, including having the bones and muscles in their legs broken, cut out or otherwise damaged. Their wounds were then deliberately infected with bacteria, with the sickening ‘justification’ that they were experimenting in order to find a cure for battle wounds. The daily sight of these brave, young, suffering women, hobbling around the camp, kept alive for nefarious reasons, was something never forgotten by other prisoners.
Geneviève, prisoner no. 27372, recognized that, as her physical resources were destroyed, her survival would depend on her ability to draw on her inner resources. ‘I was obsessed by the certainty that much worse than death was the destruction of our souls, which was the agenda of the concentration camp world.’ But she was determined that, if she endured, what she saw would inform the remainder of her life. Nothing in her previous existence could have prepared her for the back-breaking, twelve-hour shifts to which she was now allotted, smashing boulders for road-building wearing only flimsy shifts. Worse was to follow as she was switched to more gruesome tasks, saw friends dying of exhaustion in the night, witnessed beatings and torture and was herself deliberately knocked to the ground and savagely attacked with kicks and blows. As she became progressively weaker, in unbearable pain from untreated pleurisy, scurvy sores and ulcerations to her cornea, she believed her death was imminent. Like everyone in the camp in 1944, she also knew that Germany was going to lose the war, but not when. Support from friends was crucial in remaining alive until that time. On 25 October, her birthday, these friends gathered together all the breadcrumbs they could, mixed them with some sticky mess resembling jam they had been given as part of their rations, and made her a cake decorated with twigs for candles.
By that time, Himmler had realized the significance of this prisoner who was related to the French General. He also erroneously assumed that Odette Sansom, an SOE agent captured in April 1943, was a relation of Winston Churchill. To protect herself, as a cover story when she was arrested, she called herself Mrs Churchill, claiming that her husband, Peter Churchill, the British agent captured with her, was a nephew of the Prime Minister. But having worked as Peter Churchill’s courier since November 1942, the couple were by this time indulging in a love affair, a distraction which some in London believed had resulted in security lapses which led to their arrests.* For the moment, Himmler wanted both of them to receive special treatment so that they might recover adequately to be used as possible bargaining chips.
On 3 October, returning from work exhausted one day, Geneviève had been summoned to Kommandant Fritz Suhren’s office and asked how she was. ‘Very ill, as you can see,’ she told him. In response he told her she was moving to a different block and would in future work in the relatively comfortable infirmary instead of undertaking the harsh outside labour she had been given. When Geneviève protested that she did not want to be separated from her friends, Suhren told her it was an order. So, for a few weeks, she lived in a privileged block – the ‘show block’ which could be displayed to the few visitors – where she had a mattress to herself covered with a blue and white checked eiderdown, her own towel and a clean camp dress with a jacket and scarf, and she had her scurvy sores disinfected in the infirmary. Crucially, she received the surprising bonus of a few vitamins. At the end of the month she was moved again, to an isolation cell this time, in the Ravensbrück bunker. But even here she was, she was told, not being punished, and soon received a package of medicines including vital calcium tablets. She was hardly well, but she no longer believed she would die.