The Designer(70)

Catherine was cautious. ‘Do you mean for the newspapers?’

‘Well, I was thinking of a magazine article, with some photographs.’

‘Photographs of me? Now? In this condition?’

‘Yes, absolutely. You won’t always look like this, you know.’

‘I don’t think I want that,’ Catherine replied hesitantly. ‘Let me consider it for a week or two.’



But it was only a couple of days later that Catherine came back to Copper with her decision made.

‘Yes, I will let you write about me. And photograph me. Not because my story is unique, but because it happened to so many others, and so many others have not survived. People should know what happened to them.’

Catherine agreed to pose for some portraits that would unflinchingly show what the Nazis had done to her. Copper knew that it took courage for her to do this, knowing that she would be seen by thousands of readers; but Catherine Dior certainly did not lack courage.

And she was willing to talk about her experiences.

After her arrest, she had been interrogated with the utmost savagery, beaten with fists and a leather whip, her arms wrenched out of joint, her head held under water until she was drowning. She had said nothing, though she had heard others betraying their comrades.

When they’d accepted that she wouldn’t talk, she had been dispatched with two thousand others, packed into cattle trucks, to Ravensbrück. People started to die on the agonisingly slow train journey in the summer heat with no air or water. After a few days, they were jammed in with hundreds of already rotting corpses. Less than half arrived alive at the railway station of Ravensbrück, where women from all over the lands conquered by the Nazis were being shipped.

Ravensbrück had been touted as a ‘model camp’, a shining example of Nazi social engineering, where firmness and kindness were to heal those infected with diseases like religion or socialism.

In reality, it was a place of unspeakable horrors.

‘The women who didn’t die of typhus,’ Catherine told Copper, ‘were worked to death in the factories. They sent the young ones to what they called “the hospital” for medical experiments. They cut them up without anaesthetics, amputated their legs or took out their organs to see if they could survive without them. They injected them with chemicals, tested drugs on them. Every day we carted trucks of corpses and severed limbs to the crematorium.’

Copper could hardly bear to listen to all this. The fate of the children was too terrible for Catherine to talk about.

‘After that, they sent me to Buchenwald, to the explosives factory. They were pitiless there. They picked out the weakest ones every day. We could hear the firing squads every morning. Then I was moved again, this time to a potassium mine. It was really an underground slave-labour camp. The air was poisonous and I nearly died. And then they started moving us from place to place as the Allies came closer. To an aircraft factory in Leipzig. And then to Dresden, where the Russians liberated us. I think I was by then a month away from death. Perhaps less. The Russians had liberated other camps, so they knew what to expect. They were so kind – they fed us and clothed us, and handed us to the Red Cross. Do you know what kept me alive all that time?’

‘What?’

‘The thought of returning to Tian. I used to dream I was back with him in Paris, laughing, eating lobster. I hated to wake from those dreams.’

Copper was deeply moved. ‘Tian never stopped believing that you would come back. He consulted an astrologer about you every week.’

Catherine nodded. ‘He was forever hunting for four-leaved clovers as a child, collecting charms, dreaming up spells. I remember once, a gypsy at a fair read his palm. She said women would be lucky for him, and he would make a fortune out of them. He was so excited. How our parents laughed. The idea of Tian making money out of women – well, you know how he is.’

‘Yes, I know how he is.’

‘If he hasn’t exactly made a fortune out of women, he at least makes a living out of them.’

‘If he were to break away from Lelong and open his own house, he might make that fortune yet.’

‘He was the kindest and most loving of brothers to me, Copper. He made my childhood so happy when it might have been miserable.’

‘Why do you say that?’

To Copper’s surprise, Catherine portrayed her mother as a disciplinarian who was cold and remote with her children.

‘I am sure she loved us. But she was very strict. She was always busy. She didn’t encourage displays of affection. We weren’t allowed to just run up to her and hug her. If you dared crease her clothes, you would get a stern rebuke. You had to earn her affection, and that wasn’t easy. We all learned to tiptoe around her – all of us, except Tian. He followed her everywhere. He learned the names of every flower in her garden, even the Latin ones. Our brothers were cruel to him and called him a mama’s boy, but he didn’t care. He set out to win her love.’

Copper thought of Dior saying that he lived only to please others. ‘And did he win her love in the end?’

Catherine hesitated. ‘I think she let him get closer to her than any of the rest of us. He was the only one she took to Paris to see her modiste.’

Copper was interested. ‘Was that a special privilege?’

‘Oh, yes. Not even my sister or I were allowed that. Her name was Rosine Perrault, and she had her atelier right here on the rue Royale, a stone’s throw from this apartment.’