Train in Winter by Caroline Moorehead

Author:Caroline Moorehead [Moorehead, Caroline]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Nonfiction
ISBN: 9780701182823
Amazon: 0701182822
Publisher: Random House Export
Published: 2011-09-01T04:00:00+00:00

As they neared the gates, Josée, who was walking at the front, sent back an urgent message down the lines: ‘When you get near, run.’ It was now that the women perceived that two rows of SS guards, men and women, and kapos as well, had formed, each holding a truncheon, whip or belt, leaving a corridor down which the women were to pass, shouting ‘Schnell! Schnell!’ Scrambling, jostling, holding their frozen arms above their heads to ward off the blows, the women began to run. Hélène Bolleau, standing near her mother Emma, took her arm to help her. As they ran, the stragglers were hooked out of the line by the guards and thrown to one side. Hélène Solomon was helping Alice Viterbo, whose wooden leg made running in the snow all but impossible. She told her to cling hard to her coat. But then Alice fell, and Hélène found herself alone. Looking back, she saw that Alice had been caught and pulled out of the line. She ran on.

In the barracks, there was a desperate count. ‘Who is back? Where is Viva? Is Charlotte here?’ They counted again and again: fourteen were missing. The other women, in silence, waited; no one else arrived.

The kapo Magda appeared and called for volunteers to collect the bodies of those who had fallen. She wanted to take Simone, but Simone, shocked and frozen, was in no shape to move. Cécile volunteered to take her place. She wanted, she said, to see what had happened to everyone. When she came back, she was crying. Collecting the bodies, in a long line of women with stretchers bearing away the dead, she had come across a woman who was still alive and who had clutched desperately at her ankle, begging to be saved. But then a guard saw her and cracked her head with his truncheon. As Cécile talked, her teeth chattering and tears running down her cheeks, the other women crowded around her, rubbing her back, to comfort and warm her.

That day, 10 February 1943, a thousand women died in Birkenau. It was later claimed that the course, the race, was an act of revenge on the part of the SS. On 2 February, Stalingrad had finally fallen to the Russians; 100,000 German soldiers and twenty-five generals had been taken prisoner.

Among the fourteen French women who died were Mme van der Lee, whose otter coat had long since gone to warm the guards, and who was said by those close to her to have lost her mind, standing all those hours in the cold; and Sophie Brabander, whose daughter Hélène could do nothing to help her; and Yvonne B., whose surname was never spelt out to protect her identity, and who was a farmer’s wife from Indre-et-Loire, aged only 24 and pregnant. Had Yvonne told the guards at Romainville that she was pregnant, instead of being too embarrassed to come forward, she might never have been sent to Birkenau at all; but Yvonne’s husband had been a prisoner of war in Germany since 1940, and she felt ashamed.

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