Page 37 of The Dressmaker's Gift
Instead of the show being a welcome distraction, though, it only serves to remind me of the terrible ordeal that Claire and Vivi went through, sent from the city where they were tortured and imprisoned to the Nazi work camps in Germany. I feel the panic rising in my chest, squeezing the breath from my lungs. Suddenly the heat and the opulence of the Grand Palais become too much to bear and I pick up my bag, making my excuses as I slip away from the show early, hurrying back to the seclusion of my attic room across the river.
That night, I lie in my bed and wonder if I’m having some sort of a breakdown. I gaze at the photograph on the chest of drawers beside me. ‘Help me,’ I whisper.
Claire, Mireille and Vivienne smile back at me, reaching out across the years to comfort me. Three such different characters. And I remind myself that if Mireille and Vivi hadn’t helped Claire to keep going then I wouldn’t be here today.
‘You need to keep going too!’ I imagine I hear Mireille saying decisively, her dark curls bouncing.
‘It’s only when you know the whole truth that you will understand,’ Vivi’s calm eyes seem to be telling me.
And beside them Claire smiles her gentle smile, telling me that, even though she never knew me, she loves me. She is here with me. She will never leave.
1943
Paris was descending into chaos. As the war ground on and the Germans suffered more and more losses, the round-ups and deportations became more frequent, more random and more brutal. Most of the time, Mireille only left theatelierto go and get food, eking out the rations she was able to find for her ‘guests’ with the extra bits and pieces she was able to obtain on the black market which were paid for with money given to her by Monsieur Leroux. The two separate strands of her work, during the days and the nights as well, kept her busy. But whenever she could find the time, she would walk to the willow tree on the end of the island in the Seine and take refuge beneath its graceful arms.
One July day, as she sat watching the river flowing by and wondering what the ones she loved were doing at that moment, a smell of burning hung in the air. A plume of smoke smudged the sky over the Tuileries gardens and, loath to go back to the empty apartment just yet, she went to see what was happening.
A crowd had gathered in the park where she had taken Claire to meet Monsieur Leroux almost eighteen months ago. It felt like a lifetime had passed since that day. It had been winter then, but now it was high summer and the close, muggy air pressed in on Mireille, making little rivers of sweat trickle down the back of her neck.
As she drew closer to the Musée de l’Orangerie, she realised that soldiers were carrying framed pictures out of the gallery. She slipped into the crowd so that she wouldn’t be spotted. Appalled, she watched as one of the framed canvases was lifted high into the air and then thrown on to the bonfire which raged on one of the grassparterres. ‘What are they doing?’ she asked a man standing next to her, who was watching the scene in grim silence.
‘They have deemed these works of art to be “degenerate”.’ The man spoke with a quiet scorn. ‘Art threatens the Nazi regime by depicting the truth of subjects they find abhorrent, apparently. And so they are burning them. I have seen, with my own eyes, a Picasso thrown on to that fire. Anything they don’t like, anything that doesn’t fit with their picture of the ideal world, they destroy.’ He shook his head and his eyes burned with a passion born of fury. She noticed that his unkempt beard contained tiny droplets of paint and realised that he must be an artist. ‘First they burnt books, now they are burning paintings, and they burn people, too, in those prison camps of theirs, I’ve heard tell. Remember this day, young lady; you are witnessing a holocaust of humanity. Remember it, and tell your children and your grandchildren so that they never let it happen again.’
As another painting was hurled on to the pyre, she turned away and hurried home. But when she got back to the apartment, she couldn’t rid herself of the smell of the smoke that clung to her clothes and hair. And in spite of the heat of the July evening, she shivered as she remembered the man’s words: ‘They burn people, too, in those prison camps of theirs.’ For the millionth time, she prayed to any god who was left to listen that Claire and Vivi might still be alive and that they might be kept safe.Please. Let them come home one day soon.
As Claire began to get her bearings, she discovered that the camp at Flossenbürg was just one of many in the area, built to provide slave labour for the German war effort. The rough barracks, in which the prisoners were housed, occupied one sector of the central site. Factories had been established in the vicinity, manufacturing textiles, munitions and even Messerschmitt aircraft, making the most of the steady stream of prisoners for their workforce, who arrived on trains like the one that had brought them 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, orkaposas 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 claim to have such talents, though, I’ll speak to thekapowho’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.’
