Again and again, those who survived cite the importance of female support systems operating within the barbarity. Germaine Tillion, using her training in the systematic study of human beings to try to understand what made the Germans operate in the way they did, was always writing on whatever paper she could find, every day, determined to bear witness. She was also creating a darkly comic operetta, Le Verfügbar aux enfers, inventing words and scenes for existing music, but later refused to have it performed lest the world conclude that life in the camp had been soft, with opportunities to make music.* She was a source of great strength to twenty-one-year-old Anise Girard, repeatedly telling her that as she was young she would survive and have many children.? Other women used scraps of paper to write out favourite recipes, even while starving. One of the extraordinary aspects of this barbaric life, when they ate nothing more than watery soup, wild dandelions or stolen bits and pieces, was the need to discuss food – food that they longed for and dreamed of but had not seen for months or even years. In fact, the hungrier and more deprived they became, the more a longing for food appeared to have seized their imagination. Micheline Maurel, a literature teacher, kept a small notebook diary, which she used when she came to write of that first winter: ‘Ate nothing … first snow. Ate nothing … very cold. It is freezing, so sad.’ A few weeks later, trembling, dizzy and short of breath, she wrote: ‘I wished I could let myself go and disappear completely. From the depths of this barrack, I prayed God to let me die on the spot. I also called for my mother.’ Since soup aggravated her dysentery, it was only tiny morsels of bread from her friend Michelle which sustained her.
Virginia was deeply grateful for the friendship of Toquette Jackson, the French head nurse at the American Hospital picked up in May by the Milice, along with her husband Sumner, Chief Surgeon at the hospital, and their only child, the sixteen-year-old Phillip. The Jacksons had endured numerous French prisons that summer until Toquette was finally deported in the same August convoy as Virginia. By the time she arrived in Ravensbrück she had no idea what had happened to either of her menfolk. ‘I have never known a woman with such courage, willpower and vitality,’ declared Virginia. Courage helped in facing the daily fear of selection for the gas chamber, but courage alone failed to combat illness, and by the time Virginia was moved to the infirmary she was close to death. Her mother, Eleanor Roush, was writing to the US State Department begging for help, pointing out that ‘Virginia is a Gentile, which may be in her favour in view of Nazi standards.’ Washington responded that the Swiss-based International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) was insisting it had no access to the Gestapo-run camps as its remit was to look after the welfare of military prisoners rather than civilians and, scandalously, therefore could not intervene.
One of the most powerful protests in Ravensbrück involved the spirited Jeannie Rousseau, who (as seen in earlier chapters) had managed to survive a previous spell in prison at the beginning of the war by outwitting the Nazis. For the previous four years Jeannie had been responsible for sending precise reports on the development of Germany’s V-1 flying bombs and V-2 rockets, transcribing all she had seen and heard at the house on the Avenue Hoche where she worked with German officers and French industrialists. After work she would go directly to George Lamarque’s safe house at 26 Rue Fabert on the Left Bank and write it up. Even if she did not understand the significance of the Raketten, Rousseau knew she was party to highly sensitive information and so helped create one of the great intelligence documents of the Second World War.
She admitted later that she felt lonely at times doing this work. ‘It’s not easy to depict the chilling fear, the unending waiting, the frustration of not knowing whether the dangerously obtained information would be passed on – or passed on in time – recognised as vital in the maze of the couriers.’ But her reports helped convince Churchill to bomb the test site at Peenemünde in the Baltic, thereby blunting the impact of a terror weapon the Nazis had hoped would change the course of the war, and were considered so crucial that the author had to be brought to London for questioning. Betrayed by the French guide paid to lead her and other agents through minefields to a waiting boat in a cove, she was arrested and, even though she fabricated a story that she was just there to make money by selling two dozen pairs of French nylon stockings on the black market in Brittany, she was sent to Ravensbrück.
When she arrived at the camp, she knew about the D-Day landings and was determined to give existing prisoners some hope by telling them the war would soon be over and they would all be free. Still only twenty-four, she believed it was her duty to boost morale; with two friends, the older countess Germaine de Renty, who had been working in various resistance activities since 1941, and a communist from Montmartre, Marinette Curateau, they made a pact that they would not carry out work that might support the Nazi war machine. If they were sent to such a factory or work camp, they would organize a protest. Jeannie had been arrested under her false name, Madeleine Chauffeur, which helped her since by now she was insisting that her name was Jeannie Rousseau and that she was not a spy, thereby confusing her captors who did not realize she was the same woman arrested and then released in 1940 in Rennes. ‘Fortunately it was a bad interrogation,’ she explained coolly.