International Women’s History: The Convoy of 31000

There is a station where those who arrive are those who are leaving,

a station where those who arrive have never arrived. For those
who have left, never came back. It
is the largest station in the world. This is the station they reach
from wherever they came. All of them took what was most
valuable because you must not leave what is valuable when you take a long trip.
All of them brought their life because above all, it is your life you must take with you.
They had no idea you could take a train to hell. But since they were there, they got
their courage up and got ready to face what was coming together with their children, their wives,
and their old parents with their family memories and family papers. They
did not know. There is no arriving in this station. They expect
the worse. Do not expect the unthinkable.
In this episode of Death the Numbers, part of a series on international women’s history. We
talk about French author Charlotte Delvaux. Charlotte Delvaux narrates the
experience of being deported to concentration camps during the Holocaust.
She was born on August 10th, 1913, in. Her son just outside
of Paris. Her parents were Italian immigrants and members of the working class.
Although she was a bright student, she never received her baccalaureate degree, the equivalent of a high school
diploma in France, and said Delvaux furthered her education by studying
under renowned sociologist on Rela Fadhila from 1930 to 1934.
She took classes at a technical college studying stenography and learning English.
Politically active from a young age. Charlotte Delvaux joined the French Young Women’s Communist
League as a teenager through the organization. She met her husband, George Dudack.
She later became involved in theater, serving as an administrative assistant to famed director
Louis Jouvet. While working for Jouvet Delvaux travel to Buenos Aries,
Argentina, during the visit. Nazi forces defeated the French army occupying
northern France. Although she could have remained safely in Argentina, Delvaux told
Jouvet she had to return to France. I can’t stand being safe while others
are put to death. I won’t be able to look anyone in the eye. We’re turning
to France Delvaux join the resistance movement, distributing pamphlets and publishing the
underground newspaper French Letters on March 2nd, 1942.
Five French policemen followed a careless courier to Dubbo’s house. They
arrested Delvaux, her husband and several other resisters.
After being interrogated and presumably tortured to death and elbow were transferred to
La Santé Prison. On May 3rd, 1942, Delvaux
said goodbye to her husband. Police executed him shortly after.
Delvaux was then transferred to Rome N.V. on August 24th and then Campagna.
The morning of January 23rd, 1943, Delvaux and two hundred and
thirty female political prisoners were deported by train to Auschwitz.
Known as the convoy of 3 1 0 0 0, because
the prisoners serial numbers ranged from 3 1 6 2 5
to 3 1 8 5 4. The train was the only transport
of non-Jews to go to Auschwitz. Birken now from France.
Trapped in cargo containers, the women spent three days and nights aboard the train journey, and
while over a thousand miles to Poland, no stops were made for prisoners to use restrooms
or replenish food and water supplies. Little did they know those three days were only
the beginning of their torture. Of the two hundred and thirty who boarded the train,
only forty nine of the women would return to France. Eighty five percent were political
prisoners or resisters. The women aged and ranged from 19
to 68. Over the next two years, the convoy’s
number dwindled. Often the result of typhus or selection for gas chambers,
Delvaux identified a serial number 3 1 6 6 1
was one of the few to live until April 1945, when the Red Cross evacuated
the camp. Delbar would later grapple with communicating the
unimaginable. The horror of the Holocaust and a series of works,
including Auschwitz and after which has divided into three volumes.
None of us will return useless knowledge and the measure of our days.
She also decided to write a rather unique volume, which she published 20 years after the war.
Convoy to Auschwitz begins with a section titled Departure and Return. Opening the morning
of January 24th, 1943. As we came into town,
we noticed a few pedestrians. We sang and called out trying to startle them.
We’re Frenchwomen political prisoners were being deported to Germany. They would
stop for a moment at the edge of the sidewalk, raise their eyes quickly, lower them
and continue on their way. We continued on ours and soon lost sight of them.
The trucks stopped near a railroad siding far from the docks. The freight cars formed
a long train. They contained twelve hundred men. The last
four cars were empty. As we jumped down, German soldiers directed
us into the train. We settled in for a long journey.
Wednesday, January 27, 1943, the cars were
cries, shouts, incomprehensible orders, dogs, SS machine guns,
the clanging of weapons. A roadside. That was not a station.
The cold was piercing. Where were we? We found out only two months later.
One hundred and fifty women died without knowing they were at Auschwitz.
By August 1944, the surviving convoy members were transferred to Ravensbruck,
a camp located approximately 50 miles north of Berlin. They joined the over 50
thousand prisoners, mostly women, coming from over 30 countries
with the largest numbers from Poland, the Soviet Union and the German Reich. Only
was entirely female. In addition to being a labor camp with jobs like the production
of latex, Ravensbruck was also a site of medical experimentation
and it served as a brothel for neighboring male prisoners. Most of the remaining
women from Delbert’s convoy, however, were placed in the night and fog block the codename
Night and Fog refer to a degree by Adolf Hitler. On December 7th, 1941,
which demanded political resisters be captured and brought to Germany under the cover of Night and Fog,
this degree circumvented traditional conventions for treatment of prisoners of war.
Hitler felt that capture and resisters and clandestinely deporting them, unbeknownst to friends
or family, would dissuade future resistance. It also served as a no
marje to one of Hitler’s favorite composers, Richard Bogner. In Mein
Kampf, Hitler recalled how, quote, At the age of twelve, I saw the first
opera of my life, Varner’s Lo and Green. In one instant,
I was addicted. I’m quote. Bogner, 2, had been an anti-Semite
and fervent nationalist with writings that later inspired Hitler’s racial policies.
And fog, a reference to a cloak of invisibility and Bogner is the ring Opra describes
clandestine actions often concealed by the darkness and fog of night. It was merely
one of many instances when Hitler paid tribute to his favorite German predecessors.
Although the women deported under the night and Fog decree on January 23rd, 1943
were not Jewish. They were treated the same as other inmates. However, they were not permitted
to be transferred to other sites. Often they could not work and they could not send
or receive mail. Not that it mattered as postal service to France had been cut off.
Despite these restrictions, mortality rates for the prisoners was high, as Delvaux
explains, in Convoyed Auschwitz. After twenty seven months of deportation, forty
nine of the convoy remained. Why this blessing? We have to admit
we still don’t know. One can always guess or simply imagine that
one fine day some bureaucrat discovered that contrary to regulations,
non-Jewish French citizens were being held at Auschwitz. No convoy of politicals
was sent to Auschwitz after hours when the evacuation of the camps began.
The survivors of the convoy were scattered for all of us. This is still a miracle
we cannot fathom. Over the course of the following two hundred pages,
Double writes an entry about each of the two hundred and thirty women deported alongside her
with the aid of her comrades, say Sue Matalan, she’ll bear Maria Luisa,
Olga and two events. Delvaux compiled information about as many as possible,
interviewing survivors as well as their friends and families and mining archival research.
The entries begin with the women’s names, often accompanied by a maiden name or nickname.
The vignettes include details about the women’s birthplaces, their occupations, their families
and the circumstances of their resistance and arrest. Although trials were not commonplace
before deportation, the stories often include details about loved ones similarly arrested
and killed. Marcel Buco. Born on April 7,
she became involved in the resistance. She was arrested on August 6th,
man confronted with Marcel. A member of her group named her after hours
of torture. Her outfit’s number is unknown, but begins with 3
She had just turned 20 years old, Marcel Bureau’s young fiancee
was arrested when she was. He came back from the camps. The young man survived
only because he was buried under a heap of corpses. Marcel Bureau’s mother was broken
by her daughter’s death. So if he brought Bander and her daughter, then
Madame Brabender was first for the shower and the sharing
as ordered. She stripped and sat on a stool to have her hair cut by
another inmate. l.n., standing naked to was waiting her
turn. She sat down in her mother’s place. Her mother took the scissors
and cut her daughter’s hair herself. Sophie Brabender was caught in the race
on February 10th. Nineteen forty three. She died several days later in
block twenty five, and then died in the revelry on May 12th or 13th.
Nineteen forty three. Those who survived the initial selection
at Auschwitz were tattooed with an inmate number on their forearm. Delvaux
often includes this number, followed by the details of their survival or death when possible.
Sometimes little is known about the woman leading Double-O to wonder where did she come from?
Why was she arrested? Yvonne Bernard born
on August 5th, 1899. We found her at Roma Vae, where
she’d been since August 7th or 8th, 1942, and nicknamed her
Grandma Yvonne when she told us she’d married very young, already had a married
daughter and had just become a grandmother. Her Auschwitz number
is unknown, but begins with thirty one. We do not know her number because
we have no photograph. One evening after the roll call, she fell in the mud.
Friends carried her back to the block. She died during the night around
February 15th, 1943. We have not been able to locate her family.
Depot provides each woman the dignity of being remembered for resisting the Nazi occupation
and for risking their lives in doing so, she also documents the Holocaust.
Whenever Delbar presents jargon from the camps, she divides the term and offers further context
by presenting the rhetoric of the concentration camps. Alongside these women’s stories, she testifies
to the atrocities of the Nazi regime and French collaborators. More importantly,
she honors the lives united by this journey to hell. After
the morning roll call, which had lasted as it always dead from four to eight hours.
The SS made all inmates leave in columns. A thousand women already numb
from standing still. It was minus 18 degrees centigrade. Women were falling
in the snow and dying around five o’clock in the evening. The whistle blew
the order to return. When you get to the gate. Run. Yes. We had to run.
Armed with sticks, lashes, canes and belts, the SS beat the women as
they went by the race. That is what we called it took place on February 10th. Nineteen forty
three, exactly two weeks after our arrival. Marto.
She came directly from the cells to the convoy on January 23rd, 1943,
the eve of departure. She was probably in the train car with a group of women who all
perished. She must have die in the first few days. No one had time
to get acquainted with her. None of the women surviving today remembers her.
Sharla Dubbo continue to write until her death in nineteen eighty five. She never
remarried, but was survived by her son. Today, a plaque hangs on her farm
home. It reads here were arrested on March
Dudack, resister, dead for France and Charlotte resister
deported to Auschwitz and Ravensbruck.
This has been Death in Numbers, a podcast created and produced by the Humanities Media Project
and the College of Liberal Arts at U.T. Austin and Liberal Arts Instructional Technology Services.
We are Amy Vidar and Caroline Baarda. Notes for the show, including links and photos
can be found on our Web site. Humanity’s media project dot org. Our theme music
is enthusiast by Tourre’s. Thank you for listening.