But on 8 March 1944 Hélène and her parents were arrested at their apartment on the Avenue Elisée Reclus. Most nights they had been sleeping at other addresses, Hélène going to the home of her housekeeper, Andrée Bardiau, to whom she handed her diary, a page or a section at a time, for safekeeping. As Mme Berr had often said to her daughter: ‘Things like that must be recorded, to be remembered afterwards.’ Hélène wrote a quick note to her sister before being taken to Drancy and then to Auschwitz, where her parents were murdered within weeks. She survived Auschwitz for eight months but was then shipped to Bergen-Belsen, where she contracted typhus. Too weak to work, she was beaten to death in April 1945, five days before the British liberated the camp.
Women political prisoners, often after several months in Fresnes or the slightly less harsh Romainville, were also now being deported to camps in Germany, a fate they all dreaded. The women rounded up in 1943, including Odette Fabius, Denise Dufournier, Geneviève de Gaulle and Jacqueline d’Alincourt, could only guess what lay ahead when they were transported early in 1944 from Paris to Ravensbrück, the all-women camp some sixty miles beyond Berlin where Jehovah’s Witnesses and ‘anti-socials’ from a variety of countries had been held since the beginning of the war. They knew enough, from rumours that had reached them, of the cruelty they should expect. As to survival, no one could assume that. But as it was theoretically a ‘work camp’ there was some hope that they might at least be given hard labour in the open air, surely better than being locked into solitary cells in Fresnes? The already weakened women were taken to the Gare de Pantin, a small suburban railway station on the eastern outskirts of Paris, used by the Germans to shift everything they were looting, and were then herded, sixty at a time, prostitutes alongside countesses, lawyers, teachers and cabaret dancers, into desperately overcrowded trucks for the journey north-east to the camp of Ravensbrück. The countesses ‘recoiled in horror’ from the prostitutes, who had been arrested for allegedly infecting the Gestapo with VD. But the women travelled in their own clothes, and some had been allowed to pack bags which contained luxuries such as powder compacts, eau de Cologne or sausages and cheese, smuggled into the Paris jails by their families. Many tried to scribble notes for loved ones and threw them out of a window in the hope they would be delivered, which, amazingly, they almost always were. But, for most, the journey to Ravensbrück meant enduring at least three days and four nights with neither food nor water and one overflowing latrine can. When they arrived at Fürstenberg, they were greeted by German guards who opened the train doors brandishing truncheons and shouting, ‘Quick, quick, five at a time, you filthy pigs.’ To reach the actual camp at Ravensbrück, the cold and hungry women had to march through snowy pinewoods, strengthened only by their conviction that the Allied landings were imminent and that the war would soon be over. As Denise Dufournier commented on seeing a German officer with a riding whip who had ordered everyone out during the journey, ‘He didn’t dare meet our glance for fear of seeing our confidence in our certain victory.’
When they first walked into the camp, before being humiliatingly stripped and often left standing naked for hours, having their heads shaved and all personal possessions seized, the other inmates, the half-starved creatures who seemed like wraiths from another planet, noticed these Franz?innen (French women) – the word, half whispered, raced around the camp – still erect and confident, different from the rest. Some had arrived in ski outfits, smart woollen coats or even furs, and some refused to eat the proffered food, thinking it would poison them, especially after at least one of them suffered severe stomach cramps from eating indigestible raw swede or rutabaga. Others tried to laugh at the mad reality of what they were witnessing. A Polish blockova, the block overseer chosen by the SS to police the camp from within (but not always a cruel SS accomplice), remarked how, just before an inspection visit from the Reichsführer of the SS, Heinrich Himmler, ‘the whole camp trembles but you French just laugh’. By late 1943 and into 1944, the Polish and Russian women had had years in which to accustom themselves to the barbarity of the regime and so, when French prisoners started arriving in significant numbers at the camp, the older inmates assigned the French some of the worst jobs. The French women thus suffered a double oppression – from the SS and from fellow prisoners. In addition, the French women seemed to lack the physical strength of their Polish and Russian counterparts, who ‘kept their flesh and colour and strength far longer as well as their bright, gay and brutal energy’.
Geneviève de Gaulle, on the same convoy as Denise Dufournier and Cecily Lefort, an SOE agent married to a French doctor who had worked alongside Noor, described her feelings on arrival:
When I was in Fresnes there would sometimes be a gleam of light, a response. But as we went into Ravensbrück it was as if God had remained outside. The women already there, some of whom had survived for two years, were living zombies drained of expression. In the glare of the searchlights we could see women carrying heavy containers. I barely noticed their wavering forms, their shaven heads. But I was shocked to the core by the sight of their faces.