Nor did she understand why her erstwhile ‘good friend’ Fernand de Brinon, the influential Catholic aristocrat with a Jewish wife who was Vichy’s Ambassador to the occupied zone, did not come to her rescue. ‘She went on her knees at Ravensbrück repeatedly protesting that she wasn’t Jewish even though her former husband was,’ Fabius recalled.
But that wasn’t why she was there; it was for her disagreeable attitude towards Madame Suzanne Abetz during a fashion parade at Schiaparelli. In the company of one of her relations, she took the liberty of changing places to take herself further away, knowing the Allies were at the doors of Paris and perhaps belatedly trying to distance herself from her earlier connections. But she mistimed her actions and that evening Otto Abetz had her arrested. I had told her to shut up, telling her all the world could hear her and judge her, except the Germans, who did not understand and who found her exasperating.
The final convoy from Paris which left the city on 15 August, a swelteringly hot day, brought to the camp another 603 women – including the British SOE members, Violette Szabo, Lilian Rolfe and Denise Bloch – packed into wagons for deportation, just ten days before the city was finally liberated and the same day that the Allies landed on the Mediterranean coast. Many of these prisoners, women such as thirty-four-year-old Virginia d’Albert-Lake, the only American-born woman in the camp, Catherine Dior, sister of Christian; Jacqueline Marié and her mother Maisie Renault, sister of Colonel Rémy, one of de Gaulle’s top secret agents inside France; and Jeannie Rousseau, who had been arrested some months earlier – but, as the war dragged on, the Nazi hierarchy concluded that the women were badly needed to work as slave labour in Ravensbrück’s dozens of satellite camps. The Allied invasion, far from convincing Hitler it was all over, stretched weary Axis forces in yet another direction.
Virginia had been picked up on 12 June as she escorted downed airmen to safety as part of her work with the Comet escape line, just days before the liberation of Paris. Everyone involved in this work knew that, as the Allied invasion neared, such work had become ever more critical – and dangerous – not only because a trained airman was a valuable commodity but because his successful return was a huge morale booster for pilots back in England waiting to fly. As Virginia commented later, if she and her friends had known how long they would be held and how brutally they would be treated on arrival, they wouldn’t have struggled with all the boxes and luggage they tried to carry with them on the train journey to Ravensbrück but would have ditched them on the journey. By this time the camp was so full – it now held about 40,000 women, rising to 65,000 by the end of 1944, having been designed for approximately 10,000 – that there were no more uniforms for them and they wore whatever was doled out to them, however unsuitable; this rarely included underwear and never an outer garment of any sort. Jacqueline Marié was issued with a long dress with just one sleeve and a pair of galoshes – size 41 when she was a 36. The clothes had a large X sewn or even painted on, to denote prisoner status. Virginia had her money – sixty francs – confiscated but her jacket, in which she had hidden her engagement ring in a shoulder pad, was, amazingly, kept for her. The flea-infested bunk beds were now occasionally shared by as many as seven women, although some of the new arrivals were not even assigned a place in one of these but were forced instead to sleep on the floor of a hastily constructed tent, where up to 7,000 malnourished women were crammed together, oozing misery.