Avenue of Spies : A True Story of Terror, Espionage, and One American Family's Heroic Resistance in Nazi-occupied Paris by Alex Kershaw

Author:Alex Kershaw [Kershaw, Alex]
Language: eng
Format: mobi
Publisher: Random House Digital
Published: 2015-08-04T04:00:00+00:00

NINETEEN

DELIVERANCE

A SIREN HOWLED, waking Toquette and the women of Ravensbruck. Aching from the cold, the women stirred in their bunks, spooned together, sharing each other’s lice and body warmth. It was three in the morning, the time of the daily wake-up call. Near the kitchen, forlorn parties of emaciated women waited for the doors to open. A couple of them soon returned to Toquette’s barrack with tureens filled with the bitter-tasting liquid they called coffee. Meanwhile SS soldiers arrived in the camp’s central square. Some were holding the leashes to snarling dogs. Whistles blew and another day began with the formal roll call.

This morning, late in March 1945, Toquette Jackson was feeling terribly weak. She knew she had a high temperature. Perhaps, if she was lucky, it would be high enough to avoid work. She found her block senior, a brutal Polish woman, asked if she could report sick, and was allowed to go to the infirmary, where she joined a line of women waiting to be inspected. Only a temperature of 102 degrees Fahrenheit would allow Toquette to escape the fatal cold. Thankfully, hers was more than high enough. She was indeed fortunate: the doctor on duty that morning was not Dr. Benno Orendi, a Romanian who had volunteered for the SS and despised the French-speaking women in the camp and usually barred them from treatment.

The cold and hunger had taken its toll. Toquette’s upper body was covered in countless lice bites. She had open sores and was suffering badly from dysentery. In the infirmary, through early April, her condition grew steadily worse. There was no adequate medical care, little water, and a pitiful ration of watery soup. The bunks, which patients were forced to share, were infested with lice. The infirmary was in fact a giant incubator of disease. But at least Toquette did not have to work in the numbing cold, watching young women freeze to death. Her last strength was no longer sapped by hard labor, clearing a nearby forest, cutting down trees in the icy darkness wearing just a summer dress and thin shawl.

Even if she survived the brutal conditions, it seemed highly unlikely that the SS would spare her life. Indeed, around the same time that Toquette was admitted to the infirmary, the head of the SS, Heinrich Himmler, issued an order to all concentration camp commanders: “Surrender is out of the question. Camps are to be evacuated immediately. No prisoner is to be allowed to fall into the hands of the enemy alive.” All across what was left of Nazi Germany, death marches began, with thousands dying each day as the inmates in camps closest to the Soviet advance were herded west and the survivors then crammed into already overcrowded camps such as Ravensbruck and Neuengamme in north-central Germany.

The Red Army was advancing so fast that, just a fortnight later, on April 15, 1945, a rumor began to circulate in Neuengamme that the camp would also soon be evacuated as Himmler had ordered.

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