The Point of Light by John Ellsworth

Author:John Ellsworth [Ellsworth, John]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 2019-03-14T16:00:00+00:00

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Claire was arrested in a trap by Marshal Philippe Pétain’s police, with other Resistance activists who had been active in the attack on the Commissioner for Jewish Affair’s building. Among them were Jacques Marseille, Georges Politzer, Georges Solomon, and Arthur Dallidet, all of whom were shot by the Nazis, most of them at Fort Mont-Valérien.

Claire was interned at the Dépôt de la Préfecture, then was secretly moved to La Santé Prison. Here she stayed until August when she was transferred to Romainville, an internment camp under German authority. Like her companions, she was deported to Auschwitz-Birkenau via the internment camp of Compiègne in the convoy of January 24, 1943. This convoy of 230 women, Resistance members, communists, and Gaullist wives of Resistance members, was illustrated in La Marseillaise; only 49 of these 230 women arrived alive at the camps.

Arguably, she was among the lucky ones who survived long enough to make it to Auschwitz. Equally arguable, she was not one of the lucky ones for she did survive and made it to Auschwitz. Maybe survival was the less acceptable fate, she thought as she rode inside the cold and drafty cattle car on her way through Poland.

She was surrounded by a crushing mass of bodies, many of whom were still standing after hundreds of miles of freezing days and nights, gray skies mixed with rain, sleet, and snow, and a hollowed-out feeling in the soul that said all is lost, survival is futile. Some took their lives inside the train car by wrapping one sleeve of their shirt around their neck, the other through the slats of the cattle car and then slumping forward. No one made any effort to prevent the suicides. Everyone understood, especially the elderly, who would die upon arrival at the concentration camp.

There were no toilets, no water, and not even a board to lie down on at night. Excrement piled up in all four corners. Some among them passed out from the smell and filth which began flowing across the cattle car’s floorboards. But the cattle car had seen all this before, both with animals and with humans and it was not deterred from reaching its destination in the heart of Poland.

On the sixth day, after layovers and unexpected stops and starts and loading and unloading, the train pulled in through the gates of Auschwitz concentration camp. The weather had flipped back to below-freezing temperatures and freezing rain, yet everywhere she looked people were dressed in paper-thin cotton shirts and pants.

Claire smelled the place before she saw it as they arrived at 3:20 a.m. in the midst of blowing snow and icy winds. Of course the slats on the cattle car in which she was riding were open to the elements and, as usual, there were deaths around the outside of the rectangle of people, usually the old and infirm freezing to death. Those cadavers remained on the train while the living disembarked among lunging, furious dogs and lowly Wehrmacht guards with whips and canes driving the refugees down a long, sandy path toward what appeared to be a barracks.

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