In August 1944, knowing that rumours of the liberation of Paris were true, Odette, ‘an irrepressible optimist’, decided that she could not stand another day in the camp and would try to escape. She managed to get herself deployed on a work unit clearing rubble following an Allied bombing raid near Fürstenberg. She swapped four bread rations with someone in the camp who had a ‘civilian’ dress, identified a fellow prisoner who spoke German and, having arranged to go together and in the middle of the day, while the guards were having a siesta in the sunshine, they seized their moment and ran. Knowing there would be an immediate call for two fugitives, they decided to separate for the time being and made their way through the forest in the direction, they hoped, of Berlin. Odette survived for two days and three nights on the run, but then came to a police checkpoint where she had to present her papers. She had none. She tried to bluff but was recognized and taken back to Ravensbrück, where she was now tortured. Stripped naked, she was tied to a table and beaten with fifty lashes on her back before being sent to the bunker for further punishment of six days without bed, clothes or food. Her fellow inmates doubted she would survive. In addition, all French women in the camp were punished. They were ordered to spend twenty-four hours on their knees in the sharp, rough clinker with hands held in the air. Some women thought that the price of resistance in the camp was too high and that therefore compromise, even if it meant working in German factories, was not collaborating.
Geneviève de Gaulle’s staunch religious faith offered her a way through this dilemma; it was not unique, but it was unusual enough to be commented on by survivors. Jacqueline Marié, later Fleury, arrested in Paris in February, arrived in Ravensbrück with her mother later in the year and remembers Geneviève’s ‘extremely profound faith … that was the essence of her life. Although she was a militant with a very fiery temper she was not a political animal.’ Worrying about her mother gave Jacqueline Marié an additional reason to stay strong, as it did thirty-six-year-old Germaine Tillion. An ethnographer, Germaine was determined to document what she knew the world would find almost impossible to believe after the war, and she was desperately concerned about the survival of her art-historian mother, Emilie Tillion, who arrived early in 1944. Many in Germaine’s close group of friends tried constantly to protect Emilie, as survival for older women was naturally much harder. The Germans were eager to gas those with grey hair, swollen limbs or wrinkled bodies deemed too weak to build airport runways in the cold, damp weather, or to march to and from the munitions factory for ten-hour shifts. Whenever there was a selection a younger woman, often Anise Girard, tried to help Emilie Tillion hide, or else there was a deputation to a blockova with influence, begging to get names taken off lists. This worked for several months but was becoming harder and harder.
Ravensbrück was a form of hell on earth and not everyone could draw upon religion as a source of strength. Some used whatever means were at their disposal, including the sale of sexual favours, in order to stay alive. One of those who survived by questionable activities was Anne Spoerry, a wealthy young woman of Swiss ancestry, born in France, who at the outbreak of war was training in Paris to become a doctor. Spoerry came from a Protestant family whose wealth derived from textiles in Alsace. She was trilingual, having spent two years at a smart London school, Francis Holland, before embarking on her medical training. Working in Paris, she watched with disgust as the Panzer divisions arrived in the city in 1940 and, soon after, got involved in resistance activities. With a brother, Fran?ois, working for a resistance cell in the unoccupied south, she decided she could help British operatives in Paris and ran a safe house where they could stay for a short time. But she was betrayed and arrested in March 1943, before taking her final exams and, after months in Fresnes, ended up in Ravensbrück in January 1944.
Spoerry, a small woman with cropped brown hair, was assigned to Block 10, whose blockova was the notoriously powerful, cruel and untrustworthy Carmen Mory. It is hard to explain the twisted camp logic that enabled Mory to survive and prosper. She too was part-Swiss, but had lived in Berlin, become a Gestapo agent and been sent to Paris where the French had sentenced her to death in 1940, following a bungled attempt to murder a newspaper editor. However, she was freed after agreeing to spy for the French against the Germans, and in February 1941 was arrested by the Germans as a double agent and sent to Ravensbrück. She was protected in the camp by one of the camp doctors, Percy Treite, who apparently knew Mory’s father in Switzerland. By the time Spoerry arrived in the camp she had probably been beaten and raped, which made her additionally vulnerable. Several women testified after the war that Mory quickly became Anne Spoerry’s friend, protectress and lesbian lover in Ravensbrück. One of the last survivors of Block 10, the dignified doctor Louise (Loulou) Le Porz, a young tuberculosis specialist from Bordeaux, was disgusted by Mory’s behaviour and her total admiration for Treite. She recalled: ‘Mory used to receive medicine that she did not distribute … food she kept for herself … Anne Spoerry was Carmen Mory’s slave. She must have been very scared.’