Chapter 18
The Story of Marianne
I thought brave was not being afraid.
Bravery is being terrified and doing it anyway.
- Laurell K. Hamilton
Marianne soon grew too exhausted to try to escape. She slumped back down in the seat and eventually slipped into a semiconscious state. The black Mercedes wound its way through the French countryside on the mean dirt roads, heading towards the Alsace region.
After several hours the car began to climb through the Vosges Mountains on crude winding roads. The temperature in the car began to fall as the temperature outside became colder and colder. The trees had already begun to change color and the grasses had turned brown.
The car slowing caused Marianne to awaken. She wiped the moisture away from the side window and could see a crude wooden gate, barbed wire stretched in three stands across the top extending along the fence, and a small shack and tower on the right. Above the gate was a small sign, “Konsentrationslager Natzweiler-Struthof.”
The car slowed to a stop and a uniformed guard came from the shack and confronted the driver. After a short conversation in German, of which she could understand little, the gate opened and the Mercedes drove inside. As it turned to the right, she could see the imposing sight of a single gallows in the center of the courtyard.
When the car stopped, the door was opened by another guard and she was grabbed and dragged roughly out of the car. The air was crisp and cold, the wind penetrating the thin sanitarium tunic. Marianne looked around in a panic, but saw no one save for her guard. The Mercedes drove away through the opened gate, and it was closed tight behind. No one spoke to her. The guard prodded her with a large wooden stick, sharpened at the end, towards a small building.
Once inside, she was confronted by a guard who had the task of registering her.
“Your name?” he demanded. She refused to answer, and was struck across the top of her shoulders by the guard with the stick.
“Answer, Jewess,” he demanded, and struck her a second time.
“Bouchard,” she spit out. “Marianne Bouchard.”
“Where were you illegally living?” What did he mean, illegally living?
“I am a citizen of France ... .”
She was again struck even harder across the back of her shoulders.
“Shut up, Jewess, and answer the question! I will ask you only one more time. Where were you illegally living?”
“Pont-Aven,” she spit out.
“So you admit that you were illegally living in France. As a Jew, according to Le Statut des Juifs of 1940, all Jewish immigrants were ordered to leave France or face arrest.”
“I am not Jewish. And I am no immigrant!” she spat, and was again rewarded with a sharp crack across the back.
The clerk finished his accounting, and stated nonchalantly, “Send her along.”
She was again prodded in the back by the guard with the sharp stick even harder than before. Shoved into a cold room with a long table on the side, she was ordered to strip off her clothes by another guard - this one with a menacing staff with a barbed steel end that looked more like a mace. She knew that a strike by this monster could be fatal, so she stripped and threw her rude tunic on the table.
The guard with the mace prodded her into the shower, which was cold. A caustic chemical was poured over her head to kill any lice, and she was then pushed through to the next room. There, another guard waited with shears, and her beautiful auburn hair was clipped rudely from her head. She was given a striped dress of thin cotton, wooden sandals, and a triangular black head cloth. She was then ushered outside into the cold wind and marched along down the hill to one of several barracks stretching below her.
The guard opened the door and shoved her inside without so much as a word, and she stood staring into hundreds of pairs of eyes peering from gaunt, skeleton-like faces. The smell inside made her wretch, but she managed to keep from vomiting. She stared in horror at this incredible sight, until another woman inmate slowly approached her. She grabbed her by the arm and said quietly, “Come with me. Do not look at them.”
She was pulled through the tightly packed barracks into an anteroom where the only inmates were eight women. While it was not as crowded as the main room, with its four tiers of wooden bunks, it was crude nonetheless, and there was no door to separate them from the men on the other side.
“Stay here,” the woman said. “My name is Gela. Listen to me carefully, and do as I do, or they will simply kill you.”
R
Winter in the Vosges Mountains was brutal. Marianne would huddle close together with the other women inmates for warmth, and the small group would help rouse each other when the waking hour came. The penalty for not rising in time could be a severe beating, or worse. A survivor’s account written after the war recounted the morning routine.
During summer, we get up at four o’clock in the morning; during winter, when days are the shortest, we get up at six. We go to the washrooms where, half naked, we have to wash ourselves with freezing water, we dress, then we receive a pint of infusion or of a beverage they call coffee. Then we go, five abreast, to the roll-call place ... The roll-calls often go on for hours, and there we stand still, in the snow during winter, under the rain during summer, without any coat of course.
R
Today the daily roll call lasted longer than usual. The count was short and the guards were furious. They hit one inmate with a baton and demanded to know where the missing prisoner was. The inmate fell to the round and was kicked repeatedly in the stomach until he lapsed into unconsciousness.
They found the missing inmate in the barracks, still stiff from his death rigor. Two inmates were pulled out of the line and had to carry the corpse from the barracks to the crematorium on top of the hill while the rest stood in line, forced to watch. The scene was repeated so often it scarcely was even noticed by the long-term inmates.
Marianne watched everything, unwilling to spend even a single moment passively in this evil place.
Eventually, the line of inmates was ordered to Platform I where the daily work squads were formed. The inmates had to labor for the Third Reich to stay alive. Once they could not produce more than their cost to maintain, they would be eliminated, and replaced by others capable of work. The Thousand-Year Reich would survive only through slave labor.
Marianne had been lucky. Most of the prisoners who were sent to the French camp at Natzweiler-Struthof were transported by train to the nearest station at Rothau, 5 miles from the camp. From there, they had to walk up the 2,500 foot mountain to the camp. Le Struthof, as the French called it, was located about 20 kilometers from Strasbourg on a bald mountaintop, a former ski area for Strasbourg residents.
Prisoners entering the camp were marched past a large farmhouse with many annexes that held the gas chambers and the workshops used for medical experiments. A small villa with an oddly out-of-place swimming pool was on the left a few hundred yards from the gate - the dwelling of the commandant, a sinister man named Kramer.
As the days rolled into early December, the scene was an imposing spectacle, the snow covering everything from the living blocks, observation posts, and electrified wire fences. All this whiteness was violently lighted in the dark night by powerful searchlights. Compared to this man-made hell, God’s creation - the moon - looked pale.
Approximately 7,000 prisoners in the concentration camp system were in the Nacht und Nebel category - people who simply disappeared into the ‘Night and Fog’ as they called it - and most of them were French resistance fighters. The majority were sent to Natzweiler-Struthof. The camp, however, was not built by the Germans, but by the French and was administered by France before the collapse of the Vichy Regime in 1943. Inmates were isolated from the entire world and forced to work to survive in the nearby rock quarry.
“Stay clear of that one,” Gela told her, pointing to room number 1 in block number 5. “It is the ‘shot room’ where the sick and the wounded are taken for injections. No one ever comes out of that one alive.”
Blocks number 1, 10, 11, 12, 13, and 14 were for the prisoners who were healthy. The work in the camp was supervised by kapos, who were prisoners themselves. They were usually criminals who had the power of life and death over the prisoners. Marianne was housed in Block 14 with the few women who remained alive, and who managed to avoid being raped to death by the guards or the kapos.
R
It was April and in the valleys the spring rains warmed the earth and green returned to the fields. On the mountain top, however, the wind was still as cold as it was in January, and the snow clung tenaciously to the ground. The morning work crews formed after roll call each day, and trod off in groups of 80 or so looking like skeletons.
Marianne worked in the infirmary, among inmates suffering from typhus, dysentery, and a host of other diseases. She would watch helplessly while they were taken to Room #1 for shots, knowing they would simply be put to death.
The guards routinely beat and raped the women assigned to the infirmary. Marianne steeled herself to this abuse as best she could. Death awaited any inmate who became pregnant for it reduced their capacity to work - an instant death sentence at Natzweiler.
Prisoners who were not contagious would often be carried off to the medical annex. Rumors about human experiments abounded, told in secret whispers among the inmates, but anyone caught voicing such a thought out loud would be hung in the courtyard gallows.
She was weakened by hunger, and always cold. There was no heat, she had no coat, and she wondered how she had managed to survive the past winter. She knew she probably would not survive another.
While the weather moderated as the months dragged on through summer, they were forced to rise two hours earlier, and the work became harder. Inmates died by the scores each week, only to be replaced by more sorry souls forced to march up the 2,500 foot mountain. The supply of labor never dwindled.
Neither did the supply of subjects for the experiments. Dr. August Hirt, a Professor at the University of Strasbourg, was conducting research on racial characteristics. When he requested Jewish skeletons that were undamaged by bullet holes or body blows, Heinrich Himmler ordered that Jews should be brought from Auschwitz to Natzweiler so that they could be killed in the camp’s gas chamber and stripped of their flesh.
R
October 8, 1943
The inmates filed into the mess hall, exhausted from the hard day’s labors. Even though it was still early in the autumn, the mountain cold permeated everything, and Marianne struggled just to sit on the hard wooden benches. She had a terrible secret kept from the other women, but knew she could hide it for only so long.
The women whispered among themselves that today was the beginning of Yom Kippur. To keep the tradition, they should fast.
“We cannot fast. The kapos would punish us for that.”
Marianne heard them, and knew that today her journey into submission and humiliation was over. She had made a decision that she would not be broken, would not give them the pleasure of watching her dance on the gallows or of stripping her body of flesh for the mad doctor’s exhibits.
“They will kill me,” she told Gela, “but they will not break me.”
Her AriŽle had been taken from her. Antoine probably killed. She could feel the abomination growing inside her, impregnated by one of the kapos who routinely raped her - her death sentence. She would take not a single step further into the abyss.
When the meal was brought, as meager as it was, she pushed the bowl away. The guard struck her with his stick.
“Eat,” he ordered. Instead, she stood and faced him. An officer immediately stepped forward and unsnapped the cover of his pistol holster.
“It is Yom Kippur, and today I choose to fast.”
Gela cried out, “Marianne, you are not Jewish. Do not do this.”
She looked at Gela, and a quite resolve settled over her.
“The Boche says I am a Jew. They treat me like a Jew. Today, I will fast like a Jew.”
The officer drew his service pistol and placed it against her temple.
“You will eat, or you will die like a Jew.”
Marianne Bouchard closed her eyes and remembered the beautiful smile of her AriŽle, and a warm spring day when a shy fisherman entered her bakery and the picnic they shared on the grass.
She spit in the German’s face.
He pulled the trigger, and shot her in the forehead.
Her journey through Hell was over.
R