Soon after her arrival Jeannie and most of the French women who had arrived with her were selected for work at one of the many sub-camps. She was ordered to Torgau, a Heinkel munitions factory 200 miles to the south. Conditions seemed better there but, having made her pact, Jeannie refused on principle to manufacture ammunition which would be used to kill her own people. She went to the camp chief, a fat-faced German, and declaimed in fluent German that, as the women were prisoners of war, the Gestapo had no right under the Geneva Convention to force them to make ammunition. The other women followed her example and said they, too, would refuse. The camp chief responded by threatening to despatch them back to Ravensbrück.
Even when several of the women, Virginia d’Albert-Lake among them, concluded that they were better off staying at Torgau than returning to Ravensbrück, Rousseau urged her fellow prisoners to continue with their gesture of defiance. ‘You see I was convinced somebody had to do something. Somebody had to stand up. I decided to do it.’ In the intervening decades, Jeannie avoided discussion of her resistance career, including this episode. She knew that some women may have died as a direct consequence of the protest she had fomented, that some of her comrades blamed her, and indeed still do today, for her actions. Yet, as she approached old age, she decided it was time to talk. ‘We were so childish, but there you are,’ she told one interviewer.
However, she was not alone. Jacqueline Marié was another young résistante at Torgau who ‘refused to participate in the war effort of a country that we were fighting, working 12 hours a day in a factory to clean shells in bins of acid. It was unhealthy work and exhausting.’ But after the protest Jeannie and others were cruelly punished. Jeannie spent three weeks in a punishment cell doused with cold water every morning, then beaten and led back to her cell. Every day the same. Eventually she was returned to Ravensbrück for questioning. If entering Ravensbrück the first time was bad, returning there was unimaginable.
‘I would have died that time,’ she said, but the Germans could not find the papers for Jeannie Rousseau, because there were none. When they asked her why she had been sent to Ravensbrück, she replied: ‘I don’t know!’ The Gestapo had concluded by now that, whoever she was, she was a troublemaker. So, papers or not, they sent her and her two compatriots as punishment to K?nigsberg in the east, her third and by far the worst camp. There the women worked outdoors in the freezing snow, hauling rocks and gravel to build an airstrip. They would stumble back to the camp after dark, bitterly cold, for a hot meal of soup. The soup was kept in great vats policed by the head guard – a fat beast of a woman the French called La Vachère, or the cowgirl. Being fat was enough of a provocation, but in addition she would taunt the hungry prisoners by kicking the vat of soup until it spilled into the snow and then watch them scavenge in the slush for tiny scraps of food. Jeannie now realized that her own survival depended, bizarrely, on an escape plan which reinstated her and her friends again in Ravensbrück. They hid in a truck taking TB-sufferers back to be gassed and managed to slip away when the truck stopped, and return to the main camp.
Jeannie, convinced that the war would be over by the autumn, did not have any doubts at the time that her protest at Torgau was the morally correct way to behave and would ensure the best outcome. But the cruel winter dragged on. If indeed Paris had been liberated, and the Allies had succeeded in pushing the Germans out of the rest of France while the Soviets were advancing across Poland and Ukraine, why was it taking so long for the women to be rescued? In fact, throughout 1944 even more women were being sent as labour for the hundreds of sub-camps upon which Hitler, ever more crazed in his determination to fight on, had decided his ability to continue the war depended. Even when, in October, French newspapers, no longer under Nazi control, ran interviews with a woman released from Ravensbrück who had directly witnessed fellow prisoners dying from starvation and bodies burned daily in the crematorium, it was proving hard to press for international action. As evidence accumulated in 1944 of gas chambers and other barbarities, the International Committee of the Red Cross continued to insist to those who expressed their horror at what they now knew was happening in Ravensbrück that it had no access to the camp and could do nothing. Its rules governing interference on behalf of civilians forbade it to publicize the women’s appeal.*