“I do,” Fiona said.
“That means it’s about four o’clock in the morning there, does it not?”
Fiona looked around her dark apartment. She was sitting on the sofa, wearing a sleeping shirt and a pair of women’s boxer shorts, surrounded by the boxes from Idlewild. She’d given in and called England after fruitless hours of trying to sleep. “It is,” she admitted. “I just . . . It seemed urgent that I talk to you. Did my father tell you we found a body here?”
“Yes.” There was a rustling, as if Ginette Harrison was sitting down somewhere, getting comfortable. Perhaps she was putting sugar and milk in her tea. “A girl found in a well?”
“She disappeared in 1950,” Fiona said. “It was presumed she was a runaway.”
“I see. And no one looked for her?”
“According to the police record, no. Not after the first few days.”
“I see,” Ginette said again. “I’m intrigued. Not because I’m a ghoul, but because if you’ve found a verified Ravensbrück inmate, I’d like to add her to my research.”
“What do you mean?”
“The records from Ravensbrück were destroyed,” Ginette said, her voice clipped with calm anger. “They were incinerated right before the Russians liberated the camp in 1945. Records survive from many of the other camps, but Ravensbrück was obliterated. Willfully forgotten, if you will.”
“Everything?” Fiona asked, her heart sinking.
“I’m afraid so, yes. The Nazis dumped all of the prisoner records into the crematorium, alongside the bodies, before they left ahead of the advance of the Soviet army. And when the Russians took over the camp, they made no effort to preserve anything that was left.”
“I see.” Fiona looked around at the boxes from Sarah London’s shed. Willfully forgotten.
“Much of my research is focused on filling in those blanks,” Ginette continued. “I have spent years trying to find survivors, or any written records the survivors left. There are very few, and what still exists is hard to find.”
“Hard to find?” Fiona asked. “The history of concentration camps is taught in schools. I thought there was a large body of work, much of it written by survivors, or sourced from survivors’ interviews.”
“Most of the women who survived Ravensbrück didn’t speak of it,” Ginette explained. “They did their best to go back into the fabric of their lives and forget, which was all they wanted. A few wrote memoirs, but they’re long out of print. I’ve gathered what I can, especially from the few women left alive who are willing to talk about it. But Ravensbrück is a footnote. That leaves your dead girl as a footnote, too, I’m sorry to say.”
“How could that be?” Fiona said. “How can an entire concentration camp be a footnote?”
Ginette Harrison sighed. “It was a women’s camp, for one. And when the war ended and the Cold War began, it landed on the wrong side of the Iron Curtain. No one in the West had access to the site for decades. Scholars, survivors, writers—everyone was split, East from West. By the time the Cold War ended, many of the survivors had died. No one wrote about it except for a handful of scholars who have kept the hope alive that the story can be rebuilt. One of them is me.”
Fiona heaved herself onto her back on the sofa and ran a hand through her hair. She was tired, so tired. “So there is no chance that I’ll find a record of Sonia Gallipeau, who was there as a child, most likely with her mother.”
“I’m sorry,” Ginette said. “Almost none. Malcolm gave me the name Emilie Gallipeau, but that doesn’t match any of the records I’ve found. Tens of thousands of women died at Ravensbrück, you understand—in the gas chambers, or worked to death in the slave labor camp, tortured, executed, or simply starved. Most of those women became anonymous when the records were burned.”
Fiona stared at her ceiling in the dark, her eyes burning. It was incredible that tens of thousands of people could vanish from history without a single record. “Were the women Jews?” she asked.
“Very few, in fact,” Ginette said. “They were prisoners from countries occupied by the Nazis, communists, members of the Resistance, Gypsies, captured spies. There was also a certain type of prisoner the Nazis termed ‘asocial.’ ”
“Asocial?”
“Prostitutes, destitute women, addicts and alcoholics, the mentally ill. Women the Nazis simply didn’t want society to support anymore, or women considered of low morals.”
“Jesus Christ,” Fiona said. “How horrible.”
“So you see why so few survivors left records,” Ginette said quietly. “Some of the women at Ravensbrück were highly educated, but many were not. Many were simply powerless.”
“And some were children.”
“Yes,” the other woman agreed. “Some were children.”
Fiona thought about this, still staring at her ceiling. The story itself was a horror so large it threatened to overtake everything in its path. She had to try to control it, not to let the nightmare send her off the path of what she was really after. She had to remember Sonia. “What happened to the camp itself after the war?”
“It was mostly demolished over time,” Ginette replied. “The Soviet army took it, and there was no effort at historical preservation. Most of the buildings are long gone. There is a memorial there now in what buildings were left, including the crematorium. In the last days of the war, the Nazis who ran the camp fled, though some of them were captured, along with guards. There were two Ravensbrück trials in 1946, and the women—”
“The women?” Fiona interrupted. “The guards were women?”
“They were,” Ginette said. “The camp commander was a man, a member of the SS, reporting directly to Himmler. But the guards were women. Some were recruited from women’s prisons where they worked as guards, and some were from the local countryside, women who wanted a job.” She paused, listening to Fiona’s silence. “It’s a tad upsetting, isn’t it? We like to believe that women wouldn’t do such things to other women—send them into the gas chambers with their children, put them in the ovens. But I’m afraid there is no question that they did.”
“Sorry I interrupted,” Fiona said. “You were talking about the war crimes trials.”
“Yes. Even those were forgotten for decades during the Cold War. The records were sealed. There were a number of convictions, at least, and executions of guards. Many guards were never caught. It was the same with every concentration camp. There is a memorial on the site now, though Ravensbrück is out of the way, several hours from Berlin, over back roads. It was intentionally built on a remote site, on a lake with only a small rural town nearby.”
“It seems incredible now, that everyone let it go. That there wasn’t more outrage.”
“That’s because you think like someone of the modern generation,” Ginette Harrison said, and the gentle English chiding in her voice gave away that she was older than Fiona had thought, perhaps over fifty or sixty. “To do the research I do, you must understand the mind-set of those times. There was no Internet, no way to raise outrage via a Twitter campaign, no digital cameras with which one could take a photo and send it worldwide in seconds.”
And that left Ravensbrück abandoned and dismantled, forgotten. “This girl,” Fiona said, trying to stay on track again. “Sonia. The body we found. The coroner didn’t find any old injuries to the bones or the teeth.”
“Then she escaped some of the physical torture,” Ginette said. “But Ravensbrück, like many other camps, was a battle of endurance. It was a matter of living long enough while those around you died.”
“She was small for her age.”