The Slave

By Micheline Maurel

Micheline Maurel was a well-noted academic who had achieved a measure of recognition before the advent of the Second World War, she was appointed Professeur de Lettres at Lyon 1941-1942 in the Nazi-Occupied zone of France. However, by night, she was a clandestine member of the French resistance, acting as a courier and gatherer of intelligence; she was arrested in 1943 by the Gestapo and deported to Neubrandenburg, part of the Ravensbrück concentration camp complex. Through iron will she survived the torture, starvation, beatings and degradations of the SS for a horrendous twenty months. Even after the Russians liberated the camp the sufferings of the inmates were not over as they were forced marched and mistreated by their supposed liberators. In this stark memoir she recounts the inhumanity of the hell that was in her words “An Ordinary Camp”.
“The savage and sadistic clamoring for expression inside each human heart.”—N.Y. Herald Tribune

“A revelation of degradation and deliberate corruption. But it is also a noble affirmation of the human spirit.”—San Francisco Call Bulletin

“The most systematic horror ever imposed on women”—Nashville Tennessean

“Bestial and terrible...shocking and beautiful”—Chicago Tribune

“A magnificent memoir”—Baltimore Sun

“Better than THE DIARY OF ANNE FRANK”—Readers Syndicate

• Language: English
• Publisher: Normanby Press
• Release date: Nov 6, 2015
• ISBN: 9781786257130

Micheline Maurel

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Text originally published in 1958 under the same title.

© Pickle Partners Publishing 2015, all rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted by any means, electrical, mechanical or otherwise without the written permission of the copyright holder.

Publisher’s Note

Although in most cases we have retained the Author’s original spelling and grammar to authentically reproduce the work of the Author and the original intent of such material, some additional notes and clarifications have been added for the modern reader’s benefit.

We have also made every effort to include all maps and illustrations of the original edition the limitations of formatting do not allow of including larger maps, we will upload as many of these maps as possible.

THE SLAVE

BY

MICHELINE MAUREL

(Prisoner # 22,410)

TABLE OF CONTENTS

Contents

TABLE OF CONTENTS 4

PREFACE 5

1—RAVENSBRÜCK—THE INITIATION 7

2—NEUBRANDENBURG 11

3—OUR WORLDLY GOODS 14

4—THE BEST SOCIETY 17

5—THE DAILY ROUND 22

6—SUNDAYS AT NEUBRANDENBURG 25

7—CHRISTMAS 28

8—THE LITTLE FRENCH GIRL IS DEAD 33

9—THE REST CAMPS 35

10—FRAU SCHUPPE 38

11—GARDEN WORK 41

12—SUMMER 46

13—SONGS AND POEMS 51

14—CROSSES ON THE DRESSES 54

15—KVIETA 59

16—HUNGER 62

17—THE SECOND WINTER 67

18—MARCH 1945 70

19—APRIL 1945 72

20—THE OPEN ROAD 75

21—WITH THE RUSSIANS 79

22—ON THE HOME-BOUND TRAIN 84

23—WHAT OF THE FUTURE 88

REQUEST FROM THE PUBLISHER 92

PREFACE

The author of this book was a witness to an abomination that the world has resolved to forget. There are still in our midst many men and women who have come out of the hell which here is called Neubrandenburg. It was a branch of Ravensbrück.

From the time when men first inflicted torture on others, it has been thought that the extreme limits of savagery have been reached; so, at least, we imagined. It was given to our contemporaries to witness an attempt, unimaginable until our day, to subject the human being to the depths of abjection without completely killing him. Slaves, and even animals, have always received food in proportion to the effort demanded of them from their masters. The author of this book, a woman, was no more than an emaciated creature, weakened by dysentery, tormented by ulcerated sores, subsisting on a few turnips, and yet she toiled from dawn to dark subjected to beatings and outrages.

After two years of this she came back. For several weeks, this phantom caused a stir of curiosity. The questions I was asked were always the same, she writes. ‘Tell me, were you raped?’ (This was the one question that was most frequently asked. In the end, I regretted having been spared this. Seemingly, by my own fault, I had missed one part of the adventure, to the great disappointment of my audience. However, I could at least tell them of the rape of others.) ‘Did you suffer much? Were you beaten? Were you tortured? What did they beat you with? Were you sterilized? ... Do you mean to tell me you had no other clothing? How did you manage the periods?’

The persons who here ask such questions are no different from the ones who there inflicted tortures: they are men and women who have lost the feeling of charity because they have forgotten they have a soul, and that every human creature has a value that is absolute.

We no longer want to know what we are capable of doing. We do not want to face what we have become. It is a mistake to think that the public avoids accounts such as this because it has heard them too often. The truth is that it has never listened to a single one to the end, and it makes it clear that it does not want the subject brought up.

When a film called Nuit et Brouillard{1} was banned from self-righteous Switzerland, was it to spare the feelings of the Germans? It was indeed concerned with Germany, and yet it was also a denunciation of the whole human race. The camps of fear give the lie to each one of us, no matter what our beliefs may be. Every philosophy based on the inherent goodness of man will forever be shaken to its foundations because of them. Once again, Christians are confronted by the mystery of evil, although never before has it reared its head in such organized form as a tested method of torturing and vilifying God’s creature by using it to the last drop of sweat before throwing the remains in the crematorium. We knew of no other answer than that made by the Son of Man: In agony until the end of the world.

I do not know if the author shares this faith. What I do know, however, is that in the depths of her misery Micheline Maurel did not lose hope and, perhaps, that none of her companions did either.

Some carried this hope even into death. Others, like the author, lived on. But perhaps today, as she mingles in the world of men, she has more reason to lose heart than when she was that leper who wrote poetry and who, reduced to the utmost distress, still found strength to give her companions the balm of an inspired song.

In a book like this, the soul cries out with a simplicity and a humility so stirring that our pity is deflected from the victim to the executioner. For the worst evil that can befall us is to lose our soul and to ignore the fact that every being who has been entrusted to our care has a soul. This is the message that the survivors of the camps of fear have a mission to repeat untiringly to us, even if we shut our ears so as not to hear them. In the atomic age, man is inexorably going to his destruction, but until the final day, the human soul will have its spokesmen and its martyrs, and through them it will have the last word.

FRANCOIS MAURIAC

1—RAVENSBRÜCK—THE INITIATION

In the beginning we were knocked for a loop. This was the term used by Mitzy, who was the first of us to find words. I can still see her shaved head raised over the edge of the bunk across from mine.

Well! It really knocked us for a loop, didn’t it?

We had arrived the previous evening. By some lucky chance, we had made the trip in third-class compartments and not in cattle cars. When we left the train, we were greeted by cudgels, angry shouts and police dogs. Pushed and slapped, we were lined up in ranks of five and hurried on our way by more blows. The pace set was a fast walk, practically a run. We still had all our luggage. The women who had received many parcels at Romainville carried bulging suitcases. And yet the guards forced us to run. Barriers like the ones at level crossings were raised at our approach, we passed through a gate and ran over a stretch of black sand. We were marshaled into an immense hall, where we remained standing, panting, amidst our bags and our bundles. There were two doors in the wall facing us. One at a time, each of us was pushed through the door on the right. The woman who passed through that door was just an ordinary person, carrying her bags and her coat and wearing her everyday clothes. We heard screams and abuses in German. Presently, through the other door, a naked woman appeared, empty-handed, her head shaved.

Things happened fast behind those doors: a moment to set the bags down, to undress quickly, hastened on by hands that reached out to tear the clothing off; a moment to lie on a table, where one woman held us down while another passed an exploring finger into all our natural orifices; a moment to sit on a stool to have our hair cut off. A hand rumpled my hair, but on this occasion I was not shorn, though at least three fourths of our number were. Shouts of Raus! Schnell! and back to the main hall, where those who had not yet gone through the doors looked at us with dumbfounded eyes.

A scrap of soap, a towel no bigger than a handkerchief, a shower, and then we filed, naked and at top speed, past women who, with devilish yells, tossed gray drawers fastened with a string, gray shirt, striped dress and mismatched clogs at our heads. We slipped into these things. Schnell, schnell. Slaps were landing right and left and abusive language exploding all around us. Once again in columns, we were herded outside...schnell, schnell...we scurried...schnell...dragging the clogs over the black sand. A green barracks, an immense dormitory filled to the ceiling with iron bunkbeds, three tiers high, so closely stacked we could scarcely pass between their ranks. An angry voice yelled at us to lie down. Here and there a few sobs could be heard. But for a long time no one spoke.

I think that one of the first shocks, after the blows and seeing the police dogs, was having our hair cut off; and for those who had escaped it at this time, it was seeing the heads of those who had been shorn. Shorn, showered, beaten, jostled, stuffed into that beltless striped dress which was always either too big or too small, we were unrecognizable. For most of those who, at Romainville, had been coquettish enough to improve their appearance by wearing make-up and curling their hair, this experience was almost like a foretaste of death. There were no mirrors, but there were windowpanes, and that cold feeling of the scalp, that sense of something lacking around the head—and the stares of the others.

Little by little, conversations sprang up from bunk to bunk. The rumors were already beginning to circulate. Luckily the news is good. We’ll be home soon. We’ll have an unusual experience to talk about... But the thought of returning to France with shaved skulls dimmed the prospect somewhat. Nobody dreamed that our hair would grow and be shaved off ten times over and grow yet again before that day of homecoming....And so we gave each other advice: You can wear a pretty silk scarf tied like a turban. It would suit you very well.

A second shock awaited us at the meal hour. The stubova—our overseer and guard—shouted at us to make up the bunks and go to the dining hall. The hall contained a number of deal tables and stools, but not enough of these to go around: there were three of us for every two stools. We were given a large bowl of beet soup. The warmth of the liquid was comforting, but most of us found the uncooked beets, still covered with soil, quite inedible. Suddenly an outlandish figure appeared at the door of the dining hall. Gaunt, yellow-skinned, with wild eyes, head turbanned with dirty rags, arms and legs bandaged with torn, pus-spotted strips of paper, she held out an empty bowl, mumbling indistinguishable words. Another scarecrow joined the first, then another, until there was a whole mob of them. The ones who did not wear bandages revealed loathsome sores. The stubova yelled at them not to come nearer, but they held out their bowls and clamored still louder. We thought they were lepers or, at the very least, advanced syphilitic cases. As the stubova shouted at us, Ladies, if you think the soup is bad, here are some who would willingly eat it, one of our group approached her and said in a low voice so as not to offend the poor creatures in case they might understand French, But, Madam, surely these women are infectious. They should not be allowed to come so near us.

The stubova sneered. Those women are not sick. They’ve just been here longer, that’s all.

We poured the