Ravensbrück was the largest women’s concentration camp in Germany. Helene was deported there in November 1943. Prisoners included women from all over Europe and consisted of Jews, political prisoners, and groups that Germany considered criminals or undesirable.
Lucienne Simier was a teacher at a girls high school in Angers, France. She and several of her colleagues were arrested by the Gestapo for spreading anti-German ideas and sent to Ravensbrück in May 1943.
Helene and Lucienne became good friends. I assume their common language was English. They went through hell together and had a very special bond which can be seen in what Helene wrote. Only they could truly understand what they had been through.
In very few words, this letter tells us a great deal about their cruel and heartbreaking life in Ravensbrück.
I do not know how I have this letter. Did Helene write it and not send to Lucienne? Did Helene write two copies and keep one? Did Lucienne read it and then send to Eva and Harry to San Francisco? In January 1946, Helene had been in Istanbul for nine months and has not been able to find a way to join her children in San Francisco. From this letter we learn that Lucienne helped Eva and Harry reconnect with their mother. Helene did not know their addresses in San Francisco and had not been able to reach them. It appears that Lucienne asked a friend in San Francisco to find them and tell them of Helene’s address.
Istanbul, 1-22-46
My sweet Lucienne,
You can’t imagine how glad I was receiving your affable letter and hearing from you that Harry, my boy has come back to Frisco. By chance I learned that Eva is married and that my son had been in the South Pacific. That was all I was acquainted with.
Lucienne, my darling, will you believe me when I assure you that I am longing for you just as if you were one of my nearest relatives? You little know how close you are to me! Goethe has written a roman Wahlverwandtschaft. I can’t translate the sense of this expression, but that what we are feeling one to each other is the definition of that. Deepest, sympathy, unselfishness, understanding, an affection for a person you are not related with by blood, and this sense so true and so profound.
I was touched by your description of your miraculous deliverance, and so happy knowing you in the middle of all your dears, especially that you have found your dear mother in relative good condition. Please kiss her hands for me and tell her that by your relating I always thought it was my mother you were speaking of, and thinking about her I see her clad in the garments of my own mother. Strange, is it not? Please, my dear write me all about your dear family and accept my best congratulation for the last coming baby. Lucienne, there are not many families whose number of members were enlarged during the war and for this luck you my dear friend had to pay like me. In this world everything has its price and I have paid for my lucky home the same price, that means we paid twice, for Vitali has paid even more than me, for he is still living in Germany, if he is living. Lucienne I am always hoping he is alive, and yes I am feeling so sorry about him.
Lucienne my ducky my odyssey was not less adventurous than yours. To be sure our physical sufferings were finished as soon as we arrived in Denmark, but all about that, my impressions, experiences, disappointments and so on I will picture if I am reunited with my children and my poor head has had a little rest. All my thoughts - you can understand - are concentrated upon my good Vitali, and not a moment I cease hoping him alive. I cannot believe nature so irrational to destroy a subject after saving it so many times….
Lucienne, I thank Heaven for saving your family and share with you the joy as we have so often shared our bread and the contents of our valuable parcels. Do you remember? Let us forget the miseries of the camp but not our deepest friendship. Let us believe hunger, cold, ill treatment as a bad dream, dreamed at 42degrees, a cruel nightmare. Recovering from this fever-dream we will see the smiling face of one another, will we not?
Please give my thanks to your friend Germain. Her name I recalled is Malhabre (I am sure it is wrong, but under this name I imagined a kindly looking face like Lucienne’s) and every night when I was lying on my bed I whispered her name always in connection with my children, foreseeing that from her I shall hear of my children. You couldn’t remember her address in R and therefore I must keep my thanks till my arrival in San Francisco. My first call will be to her who has so kindly informed my family about me.
Please excuse my confused letter, but how can it be otherwise? Yonder in America I will bring order into my brain. Hoping you and all yours in best health I remain loving your sister in exile.
Helen
Lucienne did not want the world to forget the atrocities of the war and wrote a memoir of the experience entitled “Deux Ans au bagne Ravensbrück” (Two Years in Ravensbrück prison) soon after she was liberated.
Copy of cover from US Holocaust Memorial Museum