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The taxi bumped along a track just off the main road heading south from the Auschwitz Museum, past a row of bungalows with straggly November gardens. It crunched to a halt in front of a pair of rusty gates, hanging half open, their padlock dangling. Dilapidated and overgrown greenhouses could be seen inside.
Stepping out of the taxi, I pushed open the gates and entered. I approached the greenhouses, trying to reconstruct in my imagination the forced labourers from the nearby Nazi concentration and extermination camp at Auschwitz-Birkenau who built and worked in this place from 1943.
This was the remains of the Rajsko subcamp, one of over 40 satellite concentration camps of Auschwitz.
It was once a Nazi experimental botanical station and was intended to boost the work of the IG Farben factory by growing and extracting latex from a type of Russian dandelion (Taraxacum kok-saghyz) to meet the Nazis’ ever-increasing war need for rubber. The camp was the dream-child of Heinrich Himmler, a key architect of Hitler’s genocidal programmes.
Despite Himmler’s intentions, Rajsko produced no rubber, and was liquidated by the Nazis in 1945. The botanical station sank into disrepair before being turned into a private commercial garden centre. It was largely forgotten about and was very hard to find – even the customer service staff I spoke to at the Auschwitz Museum had no knowledge of it.
Much of the village of Rajsko was cleared for the SS to establish this botanical research station as well as an SS Hygiene Institut. This was a clinic which screened blood and other bodily fluids for signs of typhus (a major killer in the camps), malaria and syphilis.
Later, notorious Nazi physician Josef Mengele, who had an interest in racial genetics, carried out experiments on Roma and Sinti twins at the SS Hygiene Institut, and from May 1944 subjects for Mengele’s experiments were also picked from the unloading ramps at Auschwitz.
Despite this history, there were no signposts, guidebooks, or visitor centres at Rajsko. This concentration camp has been largely forgotten as a historic site. Finding it had been far from easy. After letting myself in, I came upon the elderly husband and wife who owned the garden centre, bent over wheelbarrows and plant pots. As I speak no Polish and they had no English, we communicated through their English-speaking son, who the woman called on her mobile.
I stated my purpose and, via him, they permitted me to look around. The son, a man in his late 30s, arrived a short time later, back from his night shift and ready for bed. I did not catch his name, but he was kind enough to take me through a wall of overgrown bushes to the site’s central building from which the greenhouses extend in ordered rows to north and south. It stands locked and inaccessible.
There, written in Polish and affixed to the wall, obscured by trees, is a plaque. It is the only on-site information and commemoration of Rajsko as a Nazi forced-labour camp. It reads:
From 1942–45, the Rajsko garden area was a place of slave labour for male and female prisoners of the Auschwitz concentration camp.
The hunt for Convoy 31000
I went to Rajsko at the end of 2023 as part of a doctoral research trip to the Auschwitz archive. I was on the trail of Convoy 31000. This was the only transport to Auschwitz-Birkenau that was made up entirely of 230 women deported from France for political activities, rather than for being Jewish.
But only snapshots of them have been captured by the archival record.
What we do know is that the group was made up of women from across society, and included teachers, students, chemists, writers, seamstresses and housewives. There was a singer at the Paris Opera, a midwife, and a dental surgeon. These brave women had distributed anti-Nazi leaflets, printed subversive newspapers, hid resisters and Jews, transported weapons, and conveyed clandestine messages.
The youngest was Rosie Floc’h, a schoolgirl of 15 who had scrawled “V” for victory on the walls of her school while the eldest, a widow in her sixties named Marie Mathilde Chaux, had harboured members of the French Resistance. The Gestapo and the French police hunted down all these women and imprisoned them in Fort de Romainville on the outskirts of Paris, before putting them on a train – Convoy 31000 – to Auschwitz in 1943.
In particular, I was seeking traces of the people and places which Charlotte Delbo records in her literature. Delbo was a non-Jewish participant in the French Resistance and is the subject of my doctoral research, which examines how Delbo’s representations of clothing uncover all sorts of extraordinary and forgotten stories about women’s experiences of the occupation of France and the Holocaust.
Born on the outskirts of Paris to a working-class family of Italian origins in 1913, Delbo worked as an assistant to the famous theatre manager and actor Louis Jouvet, and for the Jeunesses Communistes (the French Communist Party Youth division). During the early years of the Nazi occupation of France, she supported her husband Georges Dudach in producing clandestine texts and translating radio broadcasts from the UK and Russia.
She was arrested by a special division of the French Police in March 1942 and her husband was executed by the Wehrmacht in Paris in May of that year. She was held in two prisons in Paris before being deported to Auschwitz-Birkenau in January 1943, and then transferred to Rajsko in August of that year, before finally being moved to Ravensbrück concentration camp in northern Germany in January 1944.
Delbo was evacuated by the Swedish Red Cross in April 1945 and was repatriated to Paris where she spent the next 40 years writing about her experiences and other periods of oppression, as well as working as a translator for the UN and for sociologist Henri Lefebvre. She died in March 1985.
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Delbo’s work includes prose, poetry and theatre as well as documentary texts. It is important because her language draws attention to overlooked or hidden stories, including non-Jewish deportees to Auschwitz. It takes in little-known places like Rajsko, women members of the French Resistance, and the legacy of war on children.
She is one of the most brilliant and challenging authors to have survived Auschwitz, yet much of her writing remains relatively unknown.
Her most famous work is Auschwitz and After, which offers glimpses of her time in Rajsko. In another, Convoy to Auschwitz, Delbo writes biographies of each woman in the convoy. It is a compilation of memory, research and correspondence conducted by a team of survivors. The stories told highlight the heterogeneity of the women in the convoy, the destruction caused to the lives of the women themselves and their families and the complicity of the French police with the Nazis. In one passage in Convoy to Auschwitz, translated by Carol Cosman, Delbo writes:
Of the two hundred and thirty who sang in the train cars as we left Compiègne on Janurary 24, 1943, forty-nine returned, after a deportation lasting twenty-seven months. For all of us, this is still a miracle we cannot fathom.
Nazi lies in the Auschwitz archive
The morning after my visit to Rajsko, I was sitting in one of the brick barracks overlooking the infamous Arbeit Macht Frei gateway at Auschwitz I. This is the location of the Auschwitz Museum archives, and archivist Szymon Kowalski gave me an introduction to the history of the collection.
From the UK, I had pre-ordered documents pertaining to Delbo and other members of her convoy from Wojciech Płosa, head of the archives. I had no idea how many days’ work it would be to trawl through this material and connect it with Delbo’s texts. I hoped that I would have enough time during my four-day visit.
I was staggered to learn from Kowalski that a scant 5% of the records from the Auschwitz system survives, of which only 20–30% pertains to women. Previous research has also highlighted the issue of black holes in the archives.
The loss of 95% of the record is due to two different political systems trying to control information about the past. To start with, the SS destroyed tons of documentation as the Soviet Red Army approached in January 1945. And then, the Soviets confiscated records after liberating the camp and took them back to Moscow. Some were released in the 1990s during perestroika but the rest remain in Russia.
What chance, then, did I have of finding Delbo and the women who feature in her literature if such a tiny percentage of the records contained references to women?
Fortunately for me, Płosa had already begun narrowing my search. A large stack of ledgers weighed down the desk in front of me, each with bookmarks at relevant pages.
The archives contained two references to Delbo and both mentions attest to her presence in Rajsko. The first reference placed Delbo in Rajsko’s infirmary between 4-8 July, 1943, suffering from “magen gryppe” (stomach flu). I could not read the second entry, however. It seemed to be a reference to biological tests conducted on her at the SS Hygiene Institut but the volume was in the conservation department and not available to view.
Yet, I saw from Dr Płosa’s list that this unavailable volume also contained records of 11 other women in Delbo’s convoy, some of whom were members of the work group sent to Rajsko.
After a bit more digging I started to infer conclusions from these 12 records in the SS Hygiene Institut log book. The proximity of page numbers containing references to these women suggested that routine tests were conducted on them while they were in quarantine in Auschwitz-Birkenau prior to their transfer to Rajsko. The SS wanted only healthy women to work with the precious dandelion plants in Rajsko’s greenhouses and laboratories (for the sake of the plants’ health, not the workers’).
Later, at my hotel, I crosschecked the names of the women listed in the SS Hygiene Institut ledger with Delbo’s assertion that all of the women from Convoy 31000 who were transferred from Auschwitz-Birkenau to Rajsko survived the war. Most of the prisoners who were forced to stay in Birkenau died there within a few weeks of arrival in January 1943. In fact, by August that year there were only 57 of the original 230 still alive. Only 17 were transferred to Rajsko. Of those, five seem to have died before they finished their time in quarantine. The remaining 12, including Delbo, survived in Rajsko.
Delbo attributed her group’s survival to the transfer to Rajsko and the preceding period of quarantine. This subcamp in which forced labourers were executed seemed, paradoxically, also to save lives.
Finding Raymonde Salez
The following day I examined the logbook of prisoner death certificates and saw that one member of Delbo’s convoy, Raymonde Salez, was recorded as having died on 4 March 1943 at 10.20am of “grippe bei körperschwäche” (flu and general body weakness), the certificate signed by a “Dr Kitt”. Kowalski had previously explained to me that dates, times and causes of death were fabricated on death certificates and no mention made of Auschwitz in order to obscure the purpose of the camp from the general public.
Not permitted to take photographs, I diligently noted all details from Raymonde Salez’s death certificate in case they became useful. Although the name was unfamiliar to me, I knew that Delbo had recorded the names and nicknames of all the women from her convoy in Convoy to Auschwitz, as well as some of her other works, and I wanted to see if the name Salez was mentioned anywhere. So back at my hotel again later that evening, I began my hunt for Raymonde Salez.
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I gasped when I realised that Salez was a woman I have come to know from Delbo’s play Les Hommes, and her survivor monologues Mesure de nos jours (Measure of our Days). Delbo refers to Salez throughout these texts by her nom-de-guerre, “Mounette”, but her biography of this woman in Convoy to Auschwitz states that her real name is Raymonde Salez.
Delbo’s play Les Hommes is set in another lesser known Holocaust site, the Fort de Romainville Gestapo holding camp on the outskirts of Paris. This is where the women of Convoy 31000 were held immediately prior to their deportation to Auschwitz-Birkenau. In this play, Mounette appears as a rosy, blonde, pretty young woman, who wears borrowed luxurious and lacy raspberry-silk lingerie to star in a theatre show which the prisoners stage in the holding camp. She is described as “really cute” and her fiancé thinks of her “with ringlets and little bows in her lovely hair”.
Young, pretty and vibrant, Mounette was a committed member of the French Resistance, and was arrested in June 1942. She was deported to Auschwitz with the rest of Convoy 31000 on January 24 1943. Just six weeks later, here she is in the archive. Dead.
I wept when I realised who this person really was. I had known the character of Mounette so well, but the discovery in the archive brought her to life: she was a real person.
But when I compared Salez’s death certificate with Delbo’s text there was a discrepancy: Delbo records Mounette’s death as having occurred on 9 March due to dysentery whereas the Nazis recorded Salez’s death as happening on 4 March, due to flu and exhaustion. Delbo wrote about how inmates remembered key dates and details in Auschwitz in order to bear witness later. This discrepancy, it seemed, was evidence of Nazi lies (remember, concealing their crimes and removing evidence was standard operating procedure).
At the same time, while the Salez death certificate seemed to contain falsified information, it is significant as it is the only documented trace in Auschwitz-Birkenau of her presence there because there is no prisoner photograph of her.
So, there are still unanswered questions lost in the archive and these gaps call attention to how Salez and so many other people lost their lives and disappeared without a trace. Nevertheless, my historical trace is valuable, given that such a small percentage of records of women in Auschwitz remain.
Reference to Mounette and Salez lie in the ruins of the archive and demonstrate how the Auschwitz Museum is invaluable in both safeguarding history and highlighting the Nazis’ corruption of it.
Examining references to Mounette in Delbo’s literature was instrumental in bringing this ambiguity to light. Delbo’s literature also recuperates snapshots of Mounette, who otherwise has vanished without trace; it records fragments not only of her incarceration and death but also of her life before she was consumed by the Holocaust. As Delbo writes:
Dear little Mounette, how perceptive she is, how gifted she is, so curious about everything, avid to learn everything.
The Death Block
On the third day of my trip, I visited the extermination centre and forced labour camp at Auschwitz-Birkenau. I was overwhelmed by the magnitude of the site, the seemingly neverending rows of barracks. I was stunned by the incomprehensibility of the huge number of Auschwitz-Birkenau’s victims, the totality of their anonymity, the enormous absence that fills the place.
My visit focused, not on the gas chambers where incoming Jews were murdered, but on the barracks where the women in Delbo’s convoy were billeted: blocks 14 and 26 in zone BIa.
At block 26 I was brought face-to-face with horror: the adjacent block 25 was the Death Block. Here, women were left to starve to death. Delbo’s neighbouring block 26 had a line of windows looking into the Death Block’s unique enclosed courtyard, which means that she and her barrack-mates witnessed those being left for dead, crying out for rescue, being stacked both dead and alive into trucks to be carted off to the crematoria.
The Death Block features in many stark chapters in Delbo’s work None of Us Will Return, the first volume of Auschwitz and After, most shockingly in “The Dummies” and most affectingly perhaps in “Alice’s Leg”. Here she details the death of her comrade, Parisian opera-singer Alice Viterbo, who wore a prosthetic leg.
During a “selection” in early February 1943, just days after the women’s arrival and in which they were forced to run, Alice was one of a number of women who fell and she was abandoned by her comrades. She was hauled off to the Death Block. Through the barred window Alice begged for poison. Alice died on either February 25 or 26, Delbo cannot be sure which, but she did know that Alice “lasted longer than anyone else”. Her prosthetic leg lay in the snow behind the block for many days afterwards.
Alice Viterbo, an Italian born in Egypt in 1895, was a singer at the Paris Opera until she lost a leg in a car accident whereupon she left the stage and opened a speech and voice school. Delbo reports that the reason for Viterbo’s arrest was unknown but that she may have been involved with a resistance network. Viterbo made a “superhuman” effort to run during the Auschwitz-Birkenau selection, having already been standing at roll call since 3am.
How many others are waiting to be found?
Just four days led me to the discovery of Salez, Rajsko and Nazi lies. Who knows how many other women are lost, their stories waiting to be found?
My trip to the ruins of the Auschwitz camp complex emphasised even more for me the value of Delbo’s literature. It provides testimony of people, places and experiences that have become lost to history. It also points to historical gaps and lies. And it reminds us of those, like Salez, who vanished without trace, their death marked with no grave. In representing these forgotten people, Delbo’s literature marks their existence. The few fragments that remain of their lives are precious and they highlight even more the enormity of the loss of those people.
Visiting the places Delbo writes about in her startling and spare literature brought home to me the horror of what she and the other women in her convoy experienced, the disconnect between what they lived through and what remains on the ground, and the challenge of how to represent it in words; to try to bridge the gap of incomprehension of all of us who were not there.
It was a gap Delbo herself felt, as she wrote in Auschwitz and After:
This dot on the map
This black spot at the core of Europe
this red spot
this spot of fire this spot of soot
this spot of blood this spot of ashes
for millions
a nameless place.From all the countries of Europe
from all the points on the horizon
trains converged
toward the nameless place
loaded with millions of humans
poured out there unknowing of where
poured out with their lives
memories
small aches
huge astonishment
eyes questioning
bamboozled
under fire
burned
without knowing
where they were.Today people know
have known for several years
that this dot on the map
is Auschwitz
This much they know
as for the rest
they think they know.
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Kate Ferry-Swainson receives funding from the UK Arts and Humanities Research Council's technē Doctoral training partnership.
