January and February 1945 were among the coldest winter months of the twentieth century in Europe, with blizzards and temperatures occasionally as low as –13 degrees Fahrenheit (–25 degrees Celsius), and the bitter cold remained until the middle of March. Even if the war was nearing the end, some of the women in the camps felt they could not continue one more day. They were ill, underfed and suffering a variety of problems from painful sores to blisters, frostbite and gangrene. Sometimes a dead body would be discovered, frozen fast to the ground where it had fallen. One day Virginia found a friend crouching behind rubbish piles, sobbing, ‘I want to die. I can’t stand it any longer. I want to die.’ There was further panic in March for the Parisian workers at Torgau as the Gestapo made an appearance, interrogating them to see why they could not increase productivity. ‘While chaos reigned in Germany, the French women felt as if their very low yield was being held responsible for the end of the Great Germany.’
But then without explanation they were locked into cattle wagons and sent to yet another sub-camp. For Jacqueline and her mother, Markkleeberg, near Leipzig, was the fourth and harshest of all camps where, after several days of a cruel journey,
we were ‘greeted’ by beatings and the ranting of yet another commander who seemed even crazier than any yet endured … We (the 250 French) were parked in a miserable shack … The other barracks were occupied by 1,300 Hungarian Jews who had come from Auschwitz or Bergen-Belsen … With the French women, SS and kapos [guards chosen by the SS from prisoners] were particularly fierce: at dawn, still exhausted, staggering along, we would work under constant threat of blows as for twelve hours a day we tried to extract stones deeply embedded into a frozen earth. Sometimes we were harnessed to a huge roller that we had to pull on the roads near the camp. At other times, we had to cut down trees in the forest or, more terrible, unload coal trucks all day long. We had no gloves or stockings, no change of clothes, no soap! We were always wet and fed a meagre swede soup with a small, very small, ever smaller piece of bread! The days seemed endless and we often felt like we were about to die on the spot … We were no longer even ghosts of women, we were so ugly.
Here, too, they guessed from the bombing of Leipzig which lit up the camp that the end must be near. ‘But then the SS, reacting to the bad news, were increasingly fierce. We had little strength left as food hardly contained anything solid any more. How to hold on until our liberators came? Our universe was growing grey, miserable, and I dared not look at my mother and see the degree of physical deterioration.’ And yet the desperate desire to survive, in what sometimes felt like a grim race with her captors, persisted.
Geneviève de Gaulle was spared these bitter final months because in late February 1945 she was released from Ravensbrück. Suddenly one morning she was given some odd clothes to cover her emaciated frame: a navy-blue dress with short sleeves, canvas shoes and, extraordinarily, her own coat, handed in when she had arrived. She tied up the few special things she wanted to keep as mementoes in a piece of cloth she had been using as a towel,* and then was sent for an interview with a senior Gestapo officer ‘who talks to me about Paris, where he spent a few months and now remembers the time with great pleasure!’ The officer’s secretary similarly told Geneviève how much she adored Paris and asked her to write a few lines from a popular song in her autograph album – ‘for instance, the opening words of a Lucienne Boyer song, I admire her so much’. And then, flanked by two SS guards and a warder, holding hands silently with a fellow prisoner, ‘a terribly gaunt woman who seems very old … a few stray hairs have grown again on her shaven head’, Geneviève went through the camp gateway one final time, trying to ignore the snow and the icy winds. The little group eventually arrived at a Red Cross camp at Liebenau on the Swiss–German border, where she started the long process of recovery in a Swiss sanatorium.
Her companion, a woman who looked ‘like Gandhi during the last few moments of his life’, was Virginia d’Albert-Lake, released largely thanks to her American mother repeatedly pestering Eisenhower. Geneviève’s release had also been requested at the highest levels by her uncle, now head of the French provisional government, who had been informed of the situation by his elder brother, Xavier de Gaulle, the French Consul in Switzerland and Geneviève’s father. Geneviève always insisted that her uncle had nothing to do with her release, and indeed she may never have known of his actions. She always maintained he would never have used his influence to favour one member of his own family. But there is now evidence to suggest that he made his concerns known to the ICRC in Geneva in September 1944, who in turn wrote to the German Red Cross, requesting that she be sent to Switzerland to recuperate.