Yet her morale was good because she believed her husband and son were still alive. In June, however, she learned the truth. Sumner and Phillip had been taken from Neuengamme concentration camp and, along with 2,000 others, herded below deck on the SS prison ship Thielbek, which was strafed by the RAF. Phillip survived by clinging to a piece of wood, searching for his father, who eventually drowned in Lübeck Bay. By July, Toquette was writing to her sister-in-law explaining that as soon as she was able she was going to look for a job, adding: ‘Life is very expensive in France and we [she and Phillip] have not the means to live on our income. I want you to know that I never ceased to be in love with Sumner, for whom I had moreover a great admiration and respect. He had such big qualities.’
Toquette was one of the ‘lucky’ ones. But the outlook was grim for the remainder as the Germans began to force-march as many of their starving captives as could walk, and shot them if they faltered. Jacqueline Marié and her mother were among those, usually in groups of two or three hundred at a time, forced to march westwards as part of the evacuation of the camps undertaken by the Germans, partly in the hope that prisoners would die of exhaustion and partly so that the camps would be deserted when the Allies eventually arrived, leaving no one alive to reveal the barbarity that had taken place within them. The weakened prisoners were hopelessly ill equipped for the evacuation, having suffered months of poor rations, leading to painful hunger and thirst, and having inadequate clothing. The Marié women, feeling like zombies and with bleeding feet, walked from 13 April to 9 May, scavenging herbs where they could. Occasionally, they encountered French prisoners of war, abandoned by their captors and struggling home, who handed them morsels to eat. Or they sucked grass and drank water from puddles, tiny amounts, which ultimately saved them. Too much, and their stomachs could not have coped. But Jacqueline recognized that they would soon collapse and then be beaten to death. They passed Leipzig, followed by Wurzen, Oschatz and Meissen; until they arrived at Dresden, completely flattened by bombs, with escape seemingly impossible. And then in early May they reached the Czech border and saw soldiers of the Red Army. As Jacqueline wrote laconically, they were ‘our saviours but also, hélas, violators of our friends’. She was fortunate not to be one of the thousands of cadaverous creatures now brutally raped as the advancing Red Army indulged in an orgy of uncontrolled sexual rampage.
The former teacher and communist Micheline Maurel, who after two years as a prisoner including days when she ate nothing at all, suffered from constant dysentery – and, according to her own description, was little more than stretched skin over painful bones covered with scabies and sores – reported graphically on the Russian soldiers who raped Ravensbrück survivors and who saw even women like her as sexual objects. ‘They had no evil intent, no animus whatever against us. Quite the contrary, they were filled with extreme cordiality brimming over with an affection which they had to demonstrate immediately.’
‘French? You French, me Russian, it’s all the same! You are my sister. Come lie down there!’
Maurel described how they would swiftly have their way with the sick and emaciated women ‘with a hearty brotherly laugh’ and then be off across the fields. More Russians would find the women and they would have to explain all over again how, in spite of loving the Russians very much, they were ill and exhausted and neither fit nor willing ‘to make love’. Only the ulcerated condition of her sores, which she insisted were contagious, saved Maurel herself from being raped. After the war she remarked that the question she was most frequently asked was whether or not she had been raped. ‘In the end I regretted having been spared this. Seemingly, by my own fault, I had missed one part of the adventure, to the great disappointment of my audience.’ As she astutely explained, the people who posed such questions were little different from those who inflicted the torture. ‘Men and women who have forgotten they have a soul.’
Paris itself in 1945 was a very different city without its occupiers. By the time the women who had survived the camps reached the capital, it had been liberated for some nine months and many of its inhabitants were determined to get on with their lives, which meant ignoring these skeletal figures, all too grim reminders of the war they believed was over, suddenly appearing in their midst. Some concentration-camp survivors, returning with heads shaved and camp numbers tattooed on their arms, women so painfully thin and ill that even their families could barely recognize them, found themselves in a city that did not want to acknowledge them.