The Angel of the Prison

The Angel of the Prison

Blanche Néel writes these few pages in the year following the liberation of Normandy. The Angel of the Prison is a title we chose simply taking a few words from Blanche Néel’s account.

I was arrested on 3^rd February 1944 in Mortain, instead of my husband who had been able to escape when the Gestapo agents showed up at our temporary home¹. I was first imprisoned in Saint-Lô and then transferred to the prison in Caen forty-eight hours later.

My first cell, I have now forgotten the number, was next to the German female guard’s cell. It had previously been occupied by Ms Desbouts, whose place I took. My cell-mates were a young girl from Holland, Miss Dreabeck, Ms Caby from Villers-Bocage and a young Polish girl whose name I have forgotten. From then on, the guard made me change cell regularly, but my consolation was that I was almost always in a cell with Miss Dreabeck.

Ms Caby was freed in April 1944, but her husband was shot dead on 6^th June 1944 in the prison in Caen².

On 7^th June, as the Germans freed us, Miss Dreabeck was kept in prison and deported to Germany. She died in Ravensbrück, the same day the camp was freed by Soviet troops³.

On 6^th June, whilst doing chores, I saw a French woman in the corridor held up by two German soldiers. Faltering, she said to me: “They are going to shoot me”⁴. She was dragged towards the courtyard where the Germans would beat up some prisoners. This woman, whose name I don’t know, must have lived on rue d’Auge, a street in Caen. She would have been, or so it would seem, in a relationship with a Gestapo agent.

P.S.⁵ To my knowledge, in the women’s quarter, the Germans did not assemble the women who were to be shot. They were not lined up. It seems that the prison authorities chose those who had to be executed and then went to get them individually, one by one, from their cells. I know this because I met one woman who was being lead to her death. We were told that two or three women had been shot; I was not able to receive any confirmation of this.

The one I saw had previously told prisoners: “I was arrested by mistake. I am not worried. I am not going to be here for long; my “friend” is in the German police in the Gestapo. He left to Germany with permission a few days ago. On his return, he will certainly free me.”

There is every reason to believe that this Gestapo agent had committed a few errors or mistakes that he was sent back to Germany, whereas his “girlfriend” was arrested and “eliminated”, maybe because they feared that she had access confidential information.

After the executions, the German guard, needless to say without giving any explanations, offered us the woman’s personal possessions. We, of course, refused them.

I didn’t see the executions, but like the other prisoners, in the morning I heard shots fired, and again in the evening at around 4 or 5 pm (they had taken our watches from us…)⁶. After the last gunfire in the evening, Miss Dreabeck and I were able to open the small window and look into the courtyard where the executions took place. We saw the German soldiers, under the watch of an officer, washing a wall and a gutter with a lot of water to make any trace of blood disappear. The officer, raising his eyes, caught sight of us; he yelled words that we didn’t understand. Needless to say, he ordered us to close the window and to disappear. During the executions, the victims did not cry out, except for one. A man taken into the courtyard – and undoubtedly seeing the bodies of his friends who had already been executed – wailed with a weak, desperate voice: “No! No! My wife, my children… my children.”There was a quick salvo…

In the evening, the German guard opened our cell doors. This woman, who was utterly barbaric towards the prisoners, now looked pale and was clearly terrified.

In the morning, she had told us haughtily, but also with certain shakiness in her voice: “The enemy have landed on the coast, but they have been pushed back…” In the evening, she was almost friendly; she gave us back a few personal possessions, insisting: “The German army is honest”.

We therefore knew by the “telephone” of the prisons, through words whispered in the corridors, that the Normandy Landings had taken place. We actually heard gun shots, bombings and the immense roar of the battle nearby. In the afternoon, a restlessness mounting into a panic took hold of the prison. The Germans were relocating archives and documents. It was clear that they had been taken by surprise. Lunch had been served very late. The evening meal was not served, as the cells doors had been opened; we were being driven to the round hall of the prison (with its glazed dome). We were lined up in a circle facing the wall, forbidden to speak. We experienced hours of unbearable anxiety. Miss Dreabeck was praying in a quiet voice. The prisoners were replying to the invocations.

That night, I cannot recall at what time exactly, Caen underwent a terrifyingly violent bombing⁷. They made us go downstairs, with the armed guards and the female guard, into a sort of cellar, lit by a lantern. There was some straw. We were allowed to sit down. A few men were brought to the cellar – prisoners. One of them told us: “They drove some buses to the station to make us board them... They undoubtedly wanted to take us all to Germany⁸. We f...⁹ the engines up. They are not leaving”.

The bombs did not stop, the noise of the battle lasted all night.

Late in the evening we heard, in the distance, shots from automatic rifles. The prisoners said: “those are machine guns, the English are coming.” The Germans heard this too, and our guard – probably thinking that she was at risk of becoming a prisoner herself – had become very friendly!!

At around 4 in the morning, they made us return to the ground floor and line up in pairs in the corridor. The doors were opened. I gave my arm to Miss Dreabeck, who was praying out loud. They signalled to advance into the courtyard, towards the road… The German guard was standing near the last door and shook hands with passers-by. As soon as Miss Dreabeck and I were in front of her, she took Miss Dreabeck by the arm and said: “You, down here”. I didn’t have the time to hug this admirable and heroic young girl – a saint – whom I would, alas, never see again.

Is it because Miss Dreabeck was from Holland that the guard did not want to free her in France? I do not believe so. I rather think that the guard was seeking a final, hateful revenge. Miss Dreabeck was fluent in German. With extraordinary courage, she stood up for the protection of the prisoners, expressing complaints and protesting against the despicable behaviour of the guard.

She would hate this young girl from a family of the Dutch nobility (she was a member of the royal family), this young girl, whose class remained obvious even in the misery of our cells. She hated the moral force and courage of this one prisoner who, in extreme destitution, without power, without authority, dared to speak on behalf of justice. This is why the guard decided to do it – to send her off to other prisons and then to Germany. I knew that along the way, Miss Dreabeck tried to run away when a bus had exploded, but the guards caught up with her. If we are to pay a sincere homage to the victims of the shooting in Caen prison, we have to also consider paying the homage due to Dagmar Dreabeck, who during our time in those cells we called the “Angel of the Prison”¹⁰.

P.S.: The German guard had lived in Stuttgart, Germany before the war.

• 1 From the beginning of 1944, the number of arrests increased, notably in the region of La Manche, Normandy. 634 arrests were thus recorded in this region alone during these first months. These arrests were carried out with the aim of bringing the French Resistance to an end.
• 2 Jean Caby, a.k.a. Émouchet, from the French Resistance, was arrested 17^th March 1944 by two French assistants of the Gestapo. On 6^th June 1944 the security service of the German police, by command of its leader Harald Heynz, ordered the execution, which was called “preventive,” of the inmates in the prison of Caen. The prison housed approximately one hundred men and twenty women. Caen was only a dozen kilometres from the beaches of the Normandy Landings and the German authorities killed between 75 and 80 prisoners, for fear they would end up in the hands of the Alliance.
• 3 The camp was liberated on 30^th April 1945. On the death of Dagmar Dreabeck, Antony Beevor also finds the same details: A. BEEVOR, D-Day et la Bataille de Normandie, Paris, Calmann-Lévy, 2009, p. 165.
• 4 This sentence was underlined in the text by Blanche Néel.
• 5 We insert this post-scriptum here (Blanche Néel puts hers at the end of her text) as it brings points of information which tie in with the previous paragraph.
• 6 From the early hours in the morning, around 8 o’clock, the prisoners were brought into the courtyard in small groups. There, they were brutally beaten. The executions took place at the start of the afternoon.
• 7 On 6^th June 1944, the city of Caen suffered several lengthy bombings. The first occurred in the middle of the day and mainly affected the areas of Saint-Jean and Vaucelles. As these two areas were quite far from the prison, the bombing was not mentioned by the author. At around 4.25 pm, Caen was once again the target of allied bombings. The city centre was thereby annihilated. Within early hours of 7^th June 1944, the capital of Normandy was under a new airstrike. More than 700 citizens lost their lives in Caen during these two days in June.
• 8 The last convoy of prisoners that left Caen on 20^th May 1944, was transported towards Compiegne and then towards Germany. Then, the total evacuation of the prison took place on 7^th June.
• 9 An unfinished word in the text because it is considered too familiar. We suggest it reads as: “we have screwed up the engines”.
• 10 Dagmar Dreabeck was born in 1906 in Maastricht, in Holland. The Memorial Book of the Victims of Nazism in Calvados teaches us that Dagmar Dreabeck (Driebeck in the book) was a young, Jewish, Dutch refugee in La Manche. The Germans arrested her on 23^rd February 1944 in Vergoncey, near to Avranches, and imprisoned her for a few months in Caen, then deported her to Germany “in a car with a man and two women”. This information is presented in a portfolio in the Bureau of Archives of the Victims of Modern Conflicts (BAVCC) of the Ministry of Defence in Caen. She entered the concentration camp of Ravensbrück on 11^th August 1944 (cf. J. QUELLIEN (éd.), Livre mémorial des victimes du nazisme dans le Calvados, Caen, Conseil Général du Calvados, Direction des archives départementales, 2004, p. 73).