She was the only member of the Rothschild family to be killed in the Holocaust. After the war Odette Fabius had dinner with Elisabeth de Rothschild’s sister-in-law, who asked her what had happened in the camp. ‘I told her about the work there but she understood nothing. When I said that for two years we had to build roads and clear up dead bodies and shit the sister-in-law said to me: “Hmm … she never even carried her own suitcase. How could she carry a spade?” Was she expecting me to smile?’
Many of the prisoners were given ill-fitting clothes for their return, items that had turned up in a hoard confiscated by the camp authorities, but Denise Dufournier, the lawyer, now desperately thin and psychologically damaged like all the others, arrived at the Lutetia via Switzerland in a ballgown. Later, she would enjoy making a joke of this, dark humour being part of her armour in postwar years, as her daughters would come to recognize. Dufournier was both a published novelist and a lawyer used to living independently when she was arrested, which gave her ‘a forensic ability to see things clearly and dissect them’. Within months of her return, recognizing immediately the total lack of comprehension on the part of other Parisians, who regularly told her that they had had a ‘jolly tough time in the city’, she escaped to a cousin’s house in Anjou where she had, before the war, written a romantic novel. There she immediately started writing about Ravensbrück.
‘She felt she was carrying a burden and had to get it all done before the stories were corrupted. She was determined never to forget.’ The book, La Maison des Mortes, published in 1945 by Hachette, was one of the first accounts of the camps and therefore bore an extraordinary and horrific freshness as well as being a solemn, factual account thanks to Dufournier’s legal training and good memory. She was ‘fortunate’, as publishers would soon stop accepting such manuscripts from deportees, believing that a largely indifferent public was not yet ready to hear, or would not believe. Dufournier was especially driven by a need to document the atrocious treatment of the so-called lapins. These were the young, formerly healthy, Polish girls who had been used for crippling and barbaric pseudo-medical experimentation, such as Hella, who continually suffered in the camp from bits of bone emerging out of her leg. But, having written the book, Denise now wanted to rebuild her life. ‘The one thing she longed for was normal family life,’ and in 1946 she married James McAdam Clark, a British scientist turned diplomat she had met in London in 1939 and who had served in the Royal Artillery in North Africa and Italy during the war. She even turned down an invitation to attend as a witness the Hamburg trials of Ravensbrück guards, which began at the end of 1946. She remained close to Hella for years afterwards; indeed, according to her daughters, all her closest friends after the war dated from that time and were in some way connected to these shared experiences.
Denise Dufournier on her honeymoon in Monte Carlo, 1946
Similarly, Germaine de Renty did not at first want to see any of her friends from ‘before’. She was one of those only just saved by the efforts of Count Bernadotte and the Swedish Red Cross, who took her, first, to recuperate in Malm? in May 1945, but then she also returned to the H?tel Lutetia with the standard Métro ticket allowance. Once home, she was unable for months to talk about the horrors she had witnessed.
‘She could not speak and I dared not ask,’ commented her daughter, Claude. ‘I respected her silence. She too slept on the floor at the side of her bed because she was unused to such comforts as a soft mattress and space to turn.’ In Ravensbrück she had shared her thirty-inch board with two others, a young student and a communist, and these at first were her postwar friends. ‘Slowly she started to recover what initially were automatic responses like getting herself dressed in the morning and making breakfast for her children and then the arrival of her first grandchild. She had to become mother and father as her husband (my father) had perished at Ellrich [concentration camp].’