Page 41 of The Dressmaker's Gift
Vivi continued, as though her friend hadn’t spoken. ‘But I don’t intend giving them that satisfaction, Claire. Now I’m back with you, I’ll be stronger. We’ll keep each other going, you and I, won’t we? Just as we have always done?’ Vivi smiled at her, but even in the darkening hut as night fell, Claire could see that her eyes were deep pools of sadness.
Claire couldn’t bear to remain at her job in the reception centre, sewing the numbers and triangles on the uniforms of new prisoners. After another month, she plucked up her courage and spoke to the senior in the hut, asking to be transferred to work with Vivi.
The woman regarded her with surprise. ‘Do you know what you are asking? Your friend has been allocated to the women’s heavy labour detail, by order of the camp’s Kommandant. It’s a wonder she is still alive. It’s only because the summer has been kind that any of those poor souls have survived. But winter’s on its way now. It will decimate them.’
‘Please,’ Claire said firmly. ‘I want to be transferred. There are plenty of others who are desperate to have a job in the sewing room. Let me be with Vivi.’
‘Very well. But don’t come and ask me for your comfortable job back when the snow begins to fall and you’re expected to spend ten hours a day shovelling the roads clear. I hope you know what you’re doing.’
Claire did indeed realise that it was very likely that neither she nor Vivi would survive the winter working with the cohort of prisoners assigned to hard labour duties. But as she’d watched the work take its toll on Vivi she’d had time to think about what it would mean if Vivi were no longer here. And she knew she wouldn’t be able to live with herself if she had to spend those long, dark nights in that crowded bunk without her friend there to whisper, ‘I’m here. We’re together. Everything will be alright.’
Claire had no choice. She would rather die with Vivi than live on without her.
1945
The city had been liberated and Paris returned to French governance, but Delavigne Couture had closed its doors for the final time. Mademoiselle Vannier announced to the seamstresses on the first floor one morning that there would be no more work coming in once they’d finished the commissions they were working on. She told the girls, though, that Monsieur Delavigne had asked around on behalf of his workers and there was an offer from a larger couture house which still had plenty of work coming in. Anyone who wanted to could begin there the following week.
Later that same day, she had a quiet word with Mireille, telling her that the building would be put up for sale, eventually, but that she could stay where she was for the time being, as it would be good not to leave the place completely deserted while things were still so unsettled in the aftermath of the city’s liberation. ‘I hope you will be coming with me to work at Monsieur Lelong’s? You are one of our best seamstresses, Mireille. I know you will be welcomed there.’
Mireille considered for a moment. She longed to go home and see her family, but the war continued to rage across Europe, and there were still skirmishes on French soil as the last of the German troops moved to consolidate their final defence of the eastern border. Travel was risky and the railways were largely destroyed where Resistance fighters had sabotaged the lines to prevent the efficient movement of German troops. It was probably safer for her to stay where she was for now ... and if she was completely honest with herself, there were other reasons why she was reluctant to leave. She waited, daily, for news from Monsieur Leroux of Vivi and Claire. And then, what if the airman came back to look for her ...?
And so she agreed. She would work for the new couture house and stay put in Paris for the time being.
Lucien Lelong’s couture house had survived the war and was now thriving, thanks to a designer with a reputation for brilliance whom he’d employed.
Mireille’s knees shook when she was introduced to this same designer, a Monsieur Dior. He was working on some new looks to mark a new beginning, he explained to the team from Maison Delavigne, as they were being given a tour of theatelieron their first day. ‘I am pleased to welcome you to Lelong. Maison Delavigne’s seamstresses have a reputation for perfection,’ he said. ‘And I expect nothing less.’
Mireille enjoyed her work with her new employers. It was still hard to come by some fabrics, but Monsieur Dior made the most of what was now becoming available. His ideas included softer outlines and subtle embellishments, and there was a little more fullness in the skirts of the gowns Mireille stitched. Theatelierhummed with the sound of sewing machines and a sense of busyness that had long been absent at Delavigne Couture. Monsieur Dior’s reputation was growing rapidly and wealthy clients from around the world had begun to demand Parisian couture once again.
She couldn’t help thinking how much Claire and Vivi would enjoy working here, using their skills to breathe life into Monsieur Dior’s stunning evening gowns, as they painstakingly worked on their intricate beadwork. She wished they were here now, sitting at the sewing table beside her, exchanging an occasional smile when they looked up from their work, pausing to stretch cramped fingers and aching necks.
When would the war finally end? Much of France had been reclaimed now, but the Germans had consolidated their remaining forces in the Vosges Mountains in the east. The radio broadcasts that she listened to avidly announced that, despite last-ditch attempts by Hitler’s troops, the Allies were fighting their way across Belgium into Germany now. As she listened to the news each night, she wondered when she would hear the news she really longed for: news of her friends.
Monsieur Leroux still worked unceasingly to try to find them, through his contacts in the army and in the Red Cross. Surely he would track down Vivi and Claire soon, she told herself. Only then would she be at peace.
In Germany, the winter had been another cruel one. At first, when Claire had joined Vivi on the hard labour detail, they’d pulled a heavy roller over the roads that had been built to link the new, underground factories that were being constructed in an attempt to protect production against Allied bombs. Wagon-loads of rubble arrived by train on the siding that had been built alongside the camp – rubble cleared from cities which had been targeted in bombing raids. The starving, skeletal prisoners were ordered to ferry it, barrowload by barrowload, to the road site. Harnessed like horses between the handles of the roller, Claire and Vivi had to throw themselves forward to get it to move at all and then, for hours on end, they trudged over the rough mixture of clinker and rubble, crushing it and flattening out the surface.
Then the snow had begun to fall and the women had been set to work clearing it with shovels to keep the roadways open so that the prisoners could walk to the factories each day. It was hot work, which made sweat soak their striped jackets, rotting the fabric until the seams frayed. But at the same time their fingers froze around the handles of their heavy shovels, bleeding and turning black at the tips where frostbite nipped them.
As the ground froze and the snow continued to fall, the factories at Dachau had been commanded to increase their productivity. Like the crematorium, the munitions factory ran day and night. One day thekapoin charge of their work party told Claire and Vivi that they had been reassigned to work the night shifts there.
Their new job involved dipping metal shell casings in an acid bath to clean and toughen them before they were packed with explosives. The acid splashed and burned their arms, eating into what little skin still covered their jutting bones. Exhausted, they fell into their bunk each morning, just as it was vacated by its night-time occupants, pulling dirty, ragged blankets around themselves and huddling together for warmth. And each time they did so, they would whisper the words to each other that kept them alive, before falling into an uneasy, pain-wracked half-sleep. When she woke towards evening, Claire would lie listening to the labouring of Vivi’s breath, the faint rattle of her lungs mingling with the sound of the wind as it scoured the walls of the hut, and she would quietly pull the edge of her blanket over her friend, trying to will back her strength and protect her from the life-sapping harshness of the reality that surrounded them.
When they were roused from their bunk by the day shift workers who’d returned for the evening, the block senior made Vivi and Claire carry out the bodies of those who hadn’t made it to another night shift. They would add them to the piles on the wooden carts which did the rounds of the camp each morning and each evening, delivering stacks of corpses to the crematorium.
At last, the day came when the sun climbed a little higher above the razor wire surrounding the electrified perimeter of the camp, and patches of bare mud began to show through the snow covering the ground. As they trudged to their shift in the munitions factory one evening, Claire whispered to Vivi that they had done it: they’d survived the Dachau winter. Surely there wouldn’t be another one, she told her friend – the war would end and they’d be free by the time the next snows fell on the camp. Vivi had smiled and nodded but couldn’t speak, as a coughing fit seized her and convulsed her bones, rattling them like the bare branches of the trees outside the gates of the camp that shook and shivered in the wind.
New prisoners continued to arrive at Dachau, in greater numbers than ever. Some of the trains that pulled up alongside the camp pulled open-topped trucks filled with rubble and coal and raw materials for the factories. But others drew long chains of those wooden-sided cattle-cars, and when the guards drew back the bolts that fastened the sliding doors another human cargo was discharged. In the barracks, the new arrivals would tell of the head-high piles of dead bodies, which had to be unloaded from the train and stacked beside the tracks. Some of the prisoners said they had been brought to Dachau from other camps which were being evacuated as the Allies advanced. Wherever they came from, they all had stories to tell of torture and murder and starvation and slave labour. And every one of those camps seemed to have a tall chimney at its centre which breathed the stench of death into the skies over Europe.
The new arrivals also brought with them fresh outbreaks of lice and fleas and disease that spread quickly in the already squalid barracks. The women did their best to help each other, cleaning one another’s heads, offering water and tending the sick as best they could. But survival was becoming an impossible challenge. As the population grew, dysentery filled the barracks with its sickening stench and the milder winds of spring brought with them a resurgence of the deadly kiss of typhus.
It was April. Still cold enough to cause a frost to form on the roofs of the barracks overnight and to freeze Claire’s hands and feet as she and Vivi walked back to their block after another night shift in the armaments factory. Every bone in her body ached with cold, exhaustion and hunger, the Holy Trinity of the concentration camp. The sky beyond the watchtower glowed red as another dawn broke over Dachau, but the column of grey smoke rising from the tall brick chimney in the centre of the camp stained the beauty of the sunrise with its grim pall.
Vivi’s cough was dry and painful-sounding as she lowered herself wearily on to the bunk. Claire brought her a tin cup filled with water, but Vivi had already sunk into a deep sleep by the time she came back from the tap, so she set it carefully beneath the bed for later. She drew the edge of her blanket over her friend’s wasted, angular body, noticing a rash of dark bites on her chest where the blue and white striped over-shirt hung loose from the concavity beneath her collarbones.
Later that day, as Claire drifted in and out of a troubled slumber, a sudden commotion in the hut forced her fully awake.
Some of the women who were supposed to be out working the day shift had returned to the barracks and the noise of their boots hurrying back and forth across the floorboards made the hut walls reverberate.
