The final months in Ravensbrück were hellish for the Parisian women who remained. Everyone grew weaker, colder, sicker. At the same time, the air raids were more frequent, the guards even edgier, and whispers of the Allied advance grew louder as a smuggled radio had been rigged up in Ravensbrück. By mid-January, as the Russians advanced to within 400 miles of the camp, the killings intensified. And many were killed from sheer exhaustion while working in the polar cold. If the shootings were too slow, the gassings increased. After Auschwitz closed, starting in January 1945 Ravensbrück made use of a small shed as a temporary gas chamber near the crematorium. The women were pushed in, 150 at a time, and then a canister of Zyklon B gas was thrown in from the roof. Witnesses described hearing moaning and crying for two to three minutes and then silence.
This shed was dismantled early in April 1945 and then, according to Countess Karolina Lanckarońska, the Polish resistance fighter and prisoner, ‘a machine appeared which resembled a bus and was in the forest near the camp. It was a mobile gas chamber and was painted green.’ These mobile gas vans and trucks, painted green so they would be camouflaged in the forest, were a new mechanism in the Nazi machinery of death.
In April, at yet another Appell or roll call, both Anise Girard and Emilie Tillion were forced to line up, but this time Emilie was called for selection. Anise ran to tell Emilie’s daughter Germaine, successfully hiding under the covers in the infirmary, what had happened. But it was too late. She had been taken, they hoped, to the euphemistically named ‘youth camp’, merely an annex where prisoners were taken before being killed, but who knew where? In the next few days they heard that she had been gassed. Anise never stopped blaming herself and would weep whenever she spoke about what had happened. Jeannie Rousseau firmly believed that there was nothing anyone could have done. Emilie, she said, had insisted that ‘I have always looked my life in the face; I want to look my death in the face.’ Releasing her would only have resulted in someone else being substituted. There was much sympathy for all the French prisoners who had done their best to protect this dignified and courageous woman. But in the camp, as in life, there were divisions. Some, like Loulou Le Porz, believed it was for Germaine herself to have shouldered the blame for not staying with her mother until the end.*
By April, a few French women including Odette Fabius and Jacqueline d’Alincourt were released from Ravensbrück thanks to the efforts of Count Folke Bernadotte, a rich and distinguished member of the Swedish royal family and Vice-President of Sweden’s Red Cross. In late February 1945, with Hitler determined to exterminate all witnesses to his camps, Bernadotte undertook a risky operation and negotiated with Himmler to release camp victims. He transported them in white buses to recuperate in neutral Malm? in Sweden. Initially, the scheme applied only to Scandinavian citizens, but it was rapidly expanded to save as many victims as possible. Ultimately, more than 15,000 prisoners were released in this way. The last white bus left on 25 April. On that day another 4,000 women were loaded on to a Swedish train, used as a rescue vehicle in addition to the buses and bound for Hamburg, but it broke down outside Lübeck. By the time the freight cars were finally unbolted, four women were found dead inside.
Toquette Jackson, now fifty-six and desperately ill, also owed her rescue to the Swedish Red Cross, eventually sailing to freedom from Lübeck, along with approximately 223 other women from Ravensbrück, aboard the Swedish ship, the Lillie Matthiessen, as part of the same rescue operation. Once in Malm?, desperate for news of her husband Sumner and her teenage son Phillip, she trembled as she wrote to her sister that she had ‘open wounds on three fingers and no eyeglasses’, and could barely hold a pen. ‘I also have otitis and my ears run – I can’t hear on one side, my feet are swollen and I have terrible dysentery. But after all that my morale is good.’ An American Red Cross official reported on 29 April 1945 that, in addition, Mrs Jackson had ulcerated sores on her hands and legs, and required urgent hospitalization to have her ears drained. ‘She is little more than a skeleton,’ he added. She had been devoured by lice to such an extent that her skin was pockmarked all over from the bites.