In Full Flight by John Heminway

Author:John Heminway
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group
Published: 2018-02-13T05:00:00+00:00

Were Anne and Carmen lovers? In testimony after the war, Anne denied a lesbian relationship. She claimed their friendship was altogether innocent, born out of common heritage and shared intellectual interests. Later, several Block 10 prisoners challenged her claim. Under oath in 1946 and 1947, six former Block 10 inmates insisted that the Blockova and the medical student were romantically involved. While no one had witnessed them “in the act,” they all believed the two were lovers because they exchanged presents and shared the same bed.

Fifty-six years after the war I visited the nurse Violette Rougier-Lecoq in her fin de siècle Paris apartment. Physically ailing, she riffled the pages of Témoignages, a book of thirty-six Ravensbrück drawings she had had privately published first in 1948 and later in 1982. When I uttered Anne’s name, she lay the book down and shook her head in seeming disdain. The bunk beds Violette shared with two others, she said, were up against the thin wall separating them from “Claude” and Carmen. They heard much. “The little one, Claude, Dr. Claude, followed her [Mory] around. It was so troubling. They were lovers. Lesbians. Dr. Claude would do everything Carmen Mory asked.”

Block 10’s doctor Louise Le Porz, separated by the same thin wall, also confirmed “Claude” and Mory slept together. She could not verify with absolute certainty they were lovers. She was analytic: “Their room was obscured by a curtain. I did not see them together making love. I don’t know…In the camp there were many accusations…Still, Claude…was completely besotted by Carmen Mory.”

Sitting in her elegant Paris penthouse, Odette Allaire Walling told me that it was common knowledge Anne was in a lesbian relationship. After her first encounter with Anne outside Block 10 late in 1944, when Anne walked off, saying, “Don’t worry,” Odette called after her, “But I do worry.” It was no use. Odette explained, “Anne, you see, was vulnerable. She wanted love so much. She wanted recognition.”

Dr. Louise Le Porz had an explanation for Anne’s submission to Mory: “You see, I always thought I was condemned to death, so I did not care. I was going to die. Not Anne. I think she suffered from incredible fear. Fear explains her attitude. Anne was intelligent, but she was scared about being badly treated or by being executed. I don’t think she had the ability to see beyond this and to realize Carmen Mory was fundamentally evil. There were many I knew, like her, overcome by fear, but none of them I knew was willing to do what Anne did to delay her own death. She must have been very scared, very scared.”

It is possible that in other concentration camps there were prisoners whose actions mirrored Anne’s. Auschwitz survivor and Holocaust chronicler Primo Levi wrote about the phenomenon in The Drowned and the Saved. He called these Nazi sympathizers “gray, ambiguous persons, ready to compromise,” and he asked his readers not to be shocked by their easy duplicity. Yet Dr. Louise Le Porz continued to be shocked half a century after being with Anne.

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