Spoerry soon changed her name to Claude, sometimes Dr Claude. For Loulou Le Porz, the fact that a doctor could behave in the ways Spoerry did made her actions additionally shocking and unforgivable. A young Polish girl with a beautiful voice who was kept in the ward for lunatics ‘sang aria after aria, night and day’. This infuriated Mory, said Le Porz. ‘I think she must have asked the … head nurse [for] the authorisation to make her disappear.’ After Le Porz herself had refused to give the fatal injection, ‘Claude … took the syringe. Yes. She did not hesitate … I was dumbfounded. This was a discovery for me. That anyone who is a medical doctor or wants to become one could deliberately execute a patient … I can only explain it by her fear of reprisals.’
Violette Lecoq, a talented artist also in Block 10, had worked as a nurse at the front with the French Red Cross at the beginning of the war and joined the resistance soon afterwards. Like many, she had already spent a year in solitary confinement at Fresnes by the time she arrived at Ravensbrück. She, too, was horrified by Mory and Spoerry’s behaviour together. ‘Carmen Mory was a horrible woman and the little one followed her … They were lovers. Lesbians. Dr Claude would do everything she asked her to do.’ Once this involved administering a lethal injection to a hunchback. Another time the pair dragged a Polish girl recovering from surgery ‘to the toilets where they hit her, splashed her with cold water – all of which advanced her death’. As the Allies progressed towards the end of 1944, Mory was removed to another, less well-known camp. Spoerry never saw her again and was herself transferred to Block 6, where she resumed her real name, Anne, and tried to behave as nobly as she could, aware that the end of the war was approaching or because a woman who started out with noble intentions had finally freed herself from such a powerful and malign influence. She was now responsible for trying to cure typhus and dysentery patients, rather than administering lethal injections, and it was here that she encountered Odette Fabius, who later testified that Spoerry had saved her life by hiding her for three critical months in a sickbed when she emerged from her punishment. According to another account Spoerry opened a rear block window and, by pushing and shoving, helped six sick Hungarian Jews escape the gas chamber. But nobody could guarantee that this change of heart in the last few months would be enough to allow her to complete her medical exams in Paris once the war was over, as she so keenly hoped.
Not surprisingly, at Ravensbrück as in normal life, there were women prepared to steal bread and betray, as well as women determined to support each other; and there were divisions among various groups over who behaved selflessly by sharing food and who did not pull their weight, who could not summon the resources to deal with what faced them, often because their previous lives had comprised nothing but wealth and privilege. Among the new wave of Parisiennes who arrived in August there were some women wearing ‘ridiculous dresses they had concocted somehow’, including one sporting an Hermès scarf and another a powder compact that she had managed to smuggle through the showers. Yet on the whole these were cheerful women who spread the news that Paris had been liberated, and their compatriots, who had managed to survive the hell of the last few months, marvelled at such gaiety. ‘It was as if a little of our former life had slipped illegally into the camp. A breath of France,’ wrote Denise Dufournier.