there. She picked up these snippets of information from one of the girls in the bunk above the one that Claire and Vivi shared, who had spent a few months in the much larger camp at Dachau. There, she told them, she had worked in the brothel supplied for SS personnel. ‘They would talk among themselves while they waited outside the cubicle, as if we weren’t capable of understanding what they said while we were lying on our backs,’ she said, scornfully.
‘It must have been horrendous for you, being subjected to that,’ Claire had said.
‘Oh, it’s not so bad once you get used to it. You get better food over there. Until you get ill and your hair and teeth fall out, that is.’ She opened her mouth to display her gaping, bloodless gums. ‘That’s when they send you back here and you have to go and work in the factories again.’ She’d looked at Claire appraisingly. ‘They’d like you over there. A true Aryan, with your colouring, would be very popular. And you were one of the ones who didn’t have your head shaved when they processed you. That means you could be on the list.’
Claire had shivered and pulled her headscarf down a little lower over her forehead to cover her hairline. The girl’s eyes had a deadened, soulless look to them, a look which was shared by many of the inmates who’d been in the camps for a while.
Each day, after the morning roll call when they were forced to stand for an hour or more in the central square outside the barracks, Claire and Vivi would follow the guard who was in charge of the workers in the textile factory. They would file silently past the end of the alley on one side of the camp which led to the squat brick building whose tall chimney belched thick grey smoke into the sky day and night. Everyone knew what it was for. Sometimes they would hear stories of bodies piled up outside, a tangled heap of naked limbs and faded blue and white striped clothing, a scene from the inner circles of hell.
Some of the men who worked in the aircraft factory wore the blue triangles of voluntary labourers. Although, as Vivi remarked, ‘voluntary’ wasn’t a very accurate word to describe people who’d been ordered to leave their homes and come and work like slaves, under the command of an enemy power. Claire often thought of her brothers, Jean-Paul and Théo. Had they worked somewhere like this? Were they here, perhaps, somewhere amongst the sea of sunken-faced inmates in one of the satellite camps? If so, Jean-Paul would wear a blue triangle on his clothing and Théo the red triangle, like hers and Vivi’s, worn by political prisoners and prisoners of war.
It was Vivi who’d worked out the code that the triangles represented, through talking to the other women in the barracks. Yellow ones were worn by Jews, and sometimes a red inverted triangle was overlain by a yellow one the opposite way up, indicating a dual categorisation. Green triangles were worn by convicted criminals, who were often put in charge of work parties as they were prison-toughened which made them ruthless overseers, or kapos as they were known in the camp, prepared to mete out punishments to their fellow inmates. Black was for those classed as mentally ill, or as gypsies, vagrants and addicts.
Claire had been deeply shocked at seeing her camp-mates labelled in this crude and shameful manner, just as she, herself, was labelled. But as the months went by, she’d almost grown accustomed to it and scarcely registered the triangles of coloured material any more.
Vivi had managed to get them work in the textile factory by talking to the senior, the woman who oversaw their particular hut. Claire had heard her asking how they could get jobs in the sewing room at the reception centre that they’d passed through when they’d entered the camp.
‘Those are jobs for privileged workers,’ the woman had replied. ‘You can’t just walk into them. Everyone wants to work in such easy conditions sitting at a sewing machine in the warmth.’
‘But we are experienced seamstresses,’ Vivi had protested. ‘We can work fast and accurately, and we know how to fix those sewing machines when the bobbins get tangled or the needles jam.’
The woman looked her up and down. ‘That’s as may be, but you still can’t walk into one of those jobs so easily. Since you and your friend