Jacqueline d’Alincourt arrived at Ravensbrück a couple of months after Geneviève, at midnight, and was left to stand upright, frozen stiff, until morning.
The next day we were ordered by the male and female guards to undress. This was for the first time. We were stripped of everything linked to the human condition: clothing, wedding rings, the few books we had been able to save, the simplest keepsakes, letters, photographs, everything was confiscated. Heads were shaved at random. Naked, penned up, pressed one against the other, all ages thrown together, we went to the showers. We avoided looking at each other before being handed the striped bathrobe, before learning by heart in German the number assigned to each of us, sewed on the sleeve. We no longer had names. I had become number 35243. A red triangle was also sewn above the number: it indicated our category – we were les politiques, ‘political prisoners’. Now completely stripped, we were cooped up for three weeks in a quarantine block. We got up at three-thirty in the morning and left for roll call, which could last for hours, and stood in the cold of dawn, come rain, snow, or wind. When the siren sounded, marking the end of this torment, we returned to the block, but the space where we were confined was so small that at no time were we able to sit down.
Eventually Jacqueline met up with Geneviève and for the next few weeks – until the latter’s removal to the camp’s isolation cell for special treatment – these two were to share the same straw mat, buoying each other up as much as possible. ‘In this fierce determination to help each other, we found the strength to resist.’
For most camp prisoners, female solidarity was of key importance; a small group of about three to five was the best number for support. But what kept Odette Fabius, designated a ‘dangerous terrorist’, going was partly worry about her daughter Marie-Claude and partly the memory of her final half-hour at Compiègne with her lover Pierre Ferri-Pisani at the end of January. Pierre had told her he never doubted that after the torment ‘we would find each other again and that we would spend the rest of our lives together. “When two people have the privilege to discover each other it is a sacred duty for them to be united whatever damage the union might cause others.”‘ They exchanged trinkets and said goodbye. Had she known that Pierre was being sent to work in the salt mines of Magdeburg, where few survived, her memory of their parting, which she said ‘lit up the dark days that were to follow’, might not have offered the same solace.