Chapter Thirty Chloe
Chapter Thirty
Chloe
Chloe froze, along with the other women around her, when shouts echoed through the factory.
They’d been waiting for this. Ever since Aletta had told them what she’d heard a few days earlier, they’d started to believe that they might make it out.
It had only been a flicker of hope in the darkness, but it had kept them going.
But this couldn’t be anything good.
The last time there had been a roll call during the middle of the day, the women taken were never seen again.
‘Beeil dich! Beweg dich!’ came the shouts again.
Hurry up! Move! They were words Chloe hadn’t known before coming to Ravensbrück, but they’d been shouted at her so many times over the years she’d been held in the camp that she knew she’d never, ever forget them.
She sought out Aletta, slowly moving closer to her so they could walk out together. Chloe reached for her hand once they were close, and she saw from Aletta’s sorrowful stare that she knew what was happening, too.
This was the end. No one ever came back from impromptu roll calls.
There was no more hope, no more belief in the war ending and the Allies coming to save them. It was over.
She held tightly on to Aletta as they shuffled slowly forward, and she only wished that Emma was with them so they could have this last moment together. They hadn’t seen her since that morning, when she’d gone to the factory office.
‘Your mother,’ she whispered.
Aletta had tears slipping furiously down her cheeks, and Chloe held her fingers even tighter.
What was she supposed to say? Maybe this meant that Emma would be saved, that she’d been spared? Or maybe she was already standing out in the cold, awaiting her fate.
Maybe she’s already been taken.
Anger speared through Chloe’s chest, and she wanted to scream and charge at the guards.
She wanted to snatch a gun from them and make her final moment mean something, but even if she’d truly wanted to, she couldn’t.
She was too weak to run fast; she was too slow to reach them before they shot her; she was too exhausted to do anything other than shuffle along behind the others.
She had lasted longer than most, but in the end, her fate was to be no different from the thousands of other women who’d been killed before her.
When they stepped outside, Chloe lost her grip on Aletta as they were jostled apart, and she was distracted by the sun. The sky was covered in clouds, but they’d parted for a moment, making way for a warm ray of sunshine, and she lifted her face to it, savouring the warmth and closing her eyes.
Chloe smiled as she saw her brothers, watched them as they laughed and talked, and even when she was prodded to move on, she held that memory in her mind. But she was forced to open them when numbers and names were called, and it wasn’t until she looked towards Aletta that she saw the white buses.
It felt like her heart had stopped beating.
The white buses were marked with red crosses, and there were people waiting on the other side of the fence who were very clearly not guards. Who are they?
Aletta’s eyes met hers again over the top of other prisoners’ heads, and that little flicker of hope that Chloe had thought lost, ignited inside her once more. What Aletta had overhead that day hadn’t been a mistake – maybe there was a chance for them, after all.
She watched, wide-eyed, as all of the French women who’d worked in the factory were called, forming a crude line away from the others; women, she was beginning to realise, who were going to be left behind. It appeared that they were only calling for the French.
And that was when Chloe heard her name and number.
That’s me.
She frantically looked around for Emma, trying to see her among the hundreds of women standing in attendance. Chloe couldn’t leave without her. She couldn’t.
There she is.
Emma’s smile was sad. ‘Go,’ she mouthed, from across the line of women stretching between them.
Chloe looked at the white buses, at the Red Cross workers waiting, leaning against the wire fence as if they couldn’t believe what they were seeing. Some of them looked to be crying, others were blank-faced.
But no promise of life after Ravensbrück was worth it if she had to leave Aletta and Emma behind.
Aletta moved towards her, reaching for her hand, urging her on.
‘Just go,’ she whispered. ‘Please.’ Aletta’s voice cracked. ‘Save yourself, Chloe.’
Chloe lifted her chin as her voice and number were read aloud again, shouted this time.
She knew what she had to do.
‘I’m here,’ she said, calling out loudly and stepping forward.
She kept her fingers looped tightly around Aletta’s though, not letting go even when her friend struggled to pull away.
A guard pointed for her to join the others gathered at the side as another name was called. She’d already been forgotten.
‘I won’t leave without my sister,’ she said, bravely facing the guard who was staring at her and telling her where to move. ‘Or without my mother.’
It was the first time Chloe had ever stood her ground in the camp.
In all the time she’d been there, she’d gone where she was told to go, done what she was told to do.
But not today. And with the Red Cross workers looking on, she knew the guards wouldn’t strike her or take out their guns and shoot her.
There would be no games where savage guards told dogs to chase them as they mocked a prisoner to run; there would be no orders to carry a body that had been shot for the hell of it; there would be no beating her with a baton.
Because now they were being watched, and it reignited a bravery inside Chloe that she’d almost forgotten had existed.
‘Names,’ the guard said, holding out her list.
Chloe looked to Aletta and then turned to find Emma, holding out her other hand to her, seeing the flicker of hope on both of their faces.
‘Aletta Visser and Emma Visser,’ she said.
There was a long pause as the guard looked through the list, flipping the pages. ‘They are not on the list.’
Chloe held her ground, not moving as the guards looked between them. She saw it then – the way they looked at each other, the uncertainty in their gazes, something she’d never, ever seen before in any of them. Not once.
Except for the new guards who hadn’t lasted a day, the ones who’d doubled over and vomited at the sight of so many thin, dying women and paled at the smell of their barracks and the misery before them.
The guard inclined her head and then waved her hand. ‘Go,’ she said, before moving on to the next name.
Emma’s hand slid into hers, and Chloe felt as if her heart might explode, her pulse racing as they walked together and joined the waiting group.
If she hadn’t said their names, they would have been left behind.
If she hadn’t said their names, she would have lived, and they would have surely died.
‘Thank you,’ Emma whispered.
Chloe only nodded as tears streaked their faces.
But they didn’t embrace, they didn’t smile, they didn’t move beyond where they were told to stand, because there were hundreds of women still waiting for their names to be called, and they turned to watch them.
Women and girls who deserved to be saved just as much as they did.
‘Are we leaving?’ Aletta whispered, her voice barely audible as she leaned into Chloe. ‘Are we truly leaving?’
Chloe began to cry then. Big, gulping sobs that she could barely contain, as Emma’s hand found its way to her shoulder and Aletta tucked her body close. The three of them, together, not parted even at the end.
‘I think so,’ she whispered.
Red Cross workers came towards them, some carrying blankets and others stretchers, but the one thing they all had in common were the kind expressions they wore like a uniform.
‘Please follow us through the gate to the buses,’ a man said. ‘We will have food for you soon, and we ask that you share the blankets and share seats where needed.’
Another woman began calling out as she waved at them through the fence.
‘We are all from the Red Cross and we will be taking you first to a Danish camp, and then on to Sweden, where you will be safe. But first we need to load you on to these buses, and we need to leave the area as quickly as possible.’
It’s almost over. This nightmare is almost over. They can’t keep hurting us, they can’t touch us again. This is actually happening.
But Chloe knew that she wouldn’t truly believe it until they were all loaded on those buses, with Ravensbrück a speck of dust in the distance.
‘Please, any of you who are wearing yellow stars or triangles, you must remove them before you leave,’ someone else called out. ‘I repeat, you must not walk through this gate without removing the yellow star or triangle.’
Chloe watched as perhaps half of the women or more removed their yellow badges, throwing them to the ground.
A young woman close to her was so impossibly thin, her arms like twigs, fingers shaking so badly that she couldn’t remove hers, and so Chloe stepped forward and did it for her, passing it to her to throw away.
‘Why?’ Chloe asked, as she moved to help another woman.
‘Because no one can know that the guards here agreed to release Jews,’ the Red Cross worker said, her voice low. ‘Please, it’s imperative you do as we ask, for your own safety.’
Chloe ripped her own badge off then, no longer willing to be marked as a prisoner, holding it tight in her palm before throwing it to the ground. They’d taken her dignity when she arrived, but they weren’t going to steal it for another moment.
It was time to leave the hell that was this camp behind. She placed her hand to her breast pockets and then her hips, feeling for the paper there, the papers she’d been prepared to die defending.
‘I’ll never forget what you did for me and my daughter,’ Emma murmured beside her as it was finally their turn to amble through the gate towards the closest waiting bus.
‘We agreed to survive this place together,’ Chloe told her. ‘This was me fulfilling that promise.’
Because she would never have left without them. They were her family, just as her brothers were her family, and there was nothing she wouldn’t do for those she loved.