claim to have such talents, though, I’ll speak to the kapo who’s in charge of allocating workers to the textile factory. Perhaps they can put your special experience to good use there.’ Her tone was cutting, but she kept her word and two days later Claire and Vivi were ordered to join the line of textile workers.
The factory floor had been a shock to Claire at first, but slowly she’d grown used to the noise and the unremitting workload. Vivi had seemed more at home from the start, and Claire remembered what she’d said about working in the spinning mills in Lille before the war.
The factory made the shirts and trousers for camp inmates as well as manufacturing clothing for the German military. Claire was set to work stitching grey army trousers. Vivi made socks for the soldiers, setting up the machinery and keeping it running at its maximum capacity all day long. Glancing up from her work, every now and then, Claire would notice how Vivi would talk to the other workers, and especially to the factory foreman who allocated the jobs, and how everyone warmed to her friendly manner and easy competence.
As the summer wore on, conditions became more and more unbearable in the barracks. The stench of the nearby latrine block mingled with the smell of sickness and decay which hung heavy on the air in the oppressive hut. The overcrowded bunks crawled with fleas and lice, which feasted on the wasted bodies of the prisoners. Infected bites became festering sores, and every morning the hut’s senior would select a couple of the more able women to carry the bodies of fever-ridden inmates to the hospital block. Some mornings, for some of the women, it was too late: their corpses would be removed, wordlessly and unceremoniously, by the prisoners whose job it was to pull a handcart to the crematorium where the chimney cast its pall of grey smoke over the camp from dawn until dusk each day.
In the textile factory, the noise and the heat were merciless. One day, when the foreman’s back was turned, Claire managed to smuggle a pair of scissors from her workbench back to the hut. That evening, she cut off her hair. As the pale strands fell to the floor around her feet, she experienced a searing pang of shame. She remembered pinning up the blonde lengths in front of the mirror in her room, wearing the midnight blue gown with the silver beads, preparing to go and meet Ernst on that New Year’s Eve so long ago. Her need to feel loved, to enjoy the sense of luxury and plenty that she’d so craved, had been her downfall, bringing her here, in the end, to this living hell. She hacked viciously at her hair and angry tears ran down her face.
Then Vivi appeared at her side and took the scissors from her. ‘Hush,’ she said. ‘I’m here. We’re still together.’ She wrapped her arms around Claire’s shaking shoulders and whispered in her ear, ‘Don’t cry. You know the ones who cry are the ones who have given up. We won’t ever give up, you and I.’
Then Vivi had handed back the scissors and said, ‘Cut my hair off, too.’ She’d turned to face the rest of the hut, summoning up a smile. ‘Who else would like to join us? It’s cooler, and it’ll make it much easier to comb out the lice.’ A queue of women had formed of those who still had their hair, and afterwards they helped one another to clean their shorn heads. The differentiation between those who’d had their heads shaved and those who hadn’t was erased. And to Claire, it seemed that the stench and the degradation seemed a little less pervasive that evening, displaced by a sense of camaraderie that had flickered into life.
1944
The city froze that January. It was one of the coldest Mireille could remember, and now that supplies of food and coal were at their lowest ebb she felt that her body and her mind had frozen as well. She sleepwalked through her days in the sewing room, wrapped in a blanket as she tried to stitch together the pieces of the few items that were still being ordered. Many of the girls had left the atelier. Some – the Jewish girls and one or two others – had simply disappeared, as Claire and Vivi had done. Others had decided to go back and struggle to survive with their families in