Joe put the shop desk back as normal, and took the photograph of Valérie out of the desk
drawer, replacing it on the table. “Well, my darling, I think I shall be seeing you soon.”
He clutched his side, and took one of the pills Doctor Knowle had prescribed. “These are strong, Joe” the doctor had warned. ”Use them carefully.”
Joe’s mind drifted to the tale of Valérie’s life she had related to him, piecemeal, over the years.
She came from Marseille; her father was Jewish, her mother Catholic. She didn’t feel particularly religious either way, but probably in emulation of her mother, wore a cross. At the outbreak of war she was in Paris, studying medicine at the Sorbonne. Her parents suggested she stay there after the fall of France as they feared the Vichy regime would not be kind to Jews. She struggled by in Paris for the next two years keeping up her studies, working part-time as a waitress, and contributing to the production of a clandestine news sheet to counteract nazi propaganda. She was arrested as part of the round-up of Jews in 1942 - she had never announced her Jewish heritage to any but a small number of close friends: she wondered if this knowledge had come to the authorities’ attention via Marseille, but she had an uneasy feeling that she had been denounced in Paris. She was shocked that it was the gendarmes who had come to arrest her, not the nazis.
“But comrades” she had tried, “we are all French, aren’t we? . . .”
She was sent to Auschwitz by rail in cattle trucks. The journey had been terrible. Some old people had died, of cold, of shock. Some folk had leapt out of the fast-moving train in desperation, to almost certain death. No-one knew the fate, or destination that awaited them. They had heard rumours of ‘resettlement in the east’ - what did that mean? She had done her best with her incipient medical knowledge to help those in need in her rail truck. This was rendered a sad irony when, on arrival at Auschwitz she saw some of those people separated and marched away - to a fate she soon learned meant stripping off for showering, which was actually extermination: to be herded into a locked chamber and put to death by poison gas. She had been selected to work due to her youth and relative vigour. She was permitted to carry out duties in a forced labour camp at the site, assisting in the medical hut. Why the nazis had established this facility she did not know, when all inmates who were not actively exterminated were being gradually worked to death. She did her best. Valérie also had a hand in producing forged documents for some of the very few who planned to make an escape attempt. Her steady hand and youthful eyes commended her to this work.
In 1945, when the Russians were closing in, she, with as many of the inmates who could walk, was marched out of the camp by the guards. The bedraggled mass spent about ten days on the move: many were so weak that they fell beside the way and were shot by the guards bringing up the rear specifically for that purpose. Some just lay down and died. Some ran away. Valérie knew they were heading west, by the sun. One morning, as the sun rose, and the weary, freezing bodies slowly started to move under their paltry blankets, it became clear that the guards had gone: vanished into the night. Shortly after that, military trucks appeared in the distance heading towards them. American? British? Russian? Valérie hoped they would not be Russian; she had heard concerning reports about the Russian army.
It was the British. She heard them saying “It’s more of the Belsen lot”. They took the former extermination camp inmates to a resettlement camp nearby - one with beds, and food, and warmth, and doctors. She stayed there a few weeks or months, she did not know, regaining some little humanity, as well as a moderate liking for, or at least tolerance of, British tea. The war had ended. But she was not well.
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