Irene Awret was born and lived in Berlin until the late 1930s, when she and members of her family escaped to Belgium just as violence against and deportation of Jews was heightening in Germany. In Belgium she studied art at the Académie Royale, but was ultimately arrested and sent to the transit camp Mechelen, in Belgium. At the camp, her artistic talent became a method of survival; she painted the numbers on prisoner name cards as well as portraits for the camp commanding officers. Through her work she avoided transport to a death camp and was eventually freed when the camp was liberated in 1944.
Witnessing a transport of Jewish inmates from her camp, Mechelen, to the East and ways that inmates subtly foiled Nazi transports [from Awret’s autobiography, They Have to Catch Me First (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2004)]:
In the afternoon, when upwards of eight hundred numbers [of prisoners] had been called, the traffic suddenly stopped. The lists had become mixed up¾names did not correspond with numbers anymore, numbers not with names. Standing rigid with crossed arms like a tin soldier, the Gestapo boss from Brussels seemed to fix Boden with his icy glance, the latter bearing responsibility for the correctness of the lists. On those days when Max Boden must have imagined himself living in a dream world with a private secretary, he addressed Evi patronizingly in Saxon as “Miss Efa.” But now Evi and two other girls working on Boden’s lists [of prisoners to transport], running up and down the yard like three shooed hens, were … ‘useless Jew-rabble.’
Years later Evi told me what really happened. Though nobody could prove it, she was the one who caused the confusion, interchanging numbers and names. The majority of the mix-ups related to young people who had known each other, having once belonged to Jewish resistance groups. My new neighbor Monsieur Helber, also Albert Clement the yard worker, Egon, Arnold Dobruszkes the electrician, a young couple from Holland who served the officers in the casino¾all members of underground organizations¾were trying to help their comrades break out of the cattle cars once the train was underway. They furnished them with knives, files, small saws and screwdrivers stolen from the workshops and the storehouse, even giving them money so they could make do once they got to a town. In order to place those with necessary skills to help the others break out of the cars, a trustworthy person was needed in Boden’s office. The person was Evi. Her job was to combine names and numbers in such a manner that small groups of potential escapees met in certain cars. Breaking out was hardly easy. For each wagon, the Nazis appointed one Jew who had to answer for the others and was under the threat of dire consequences if anyone was missing on arrival, dead or alive. This meant that whoever wanted to try and escape first had to persuade the wagon foreman to flee as well. If the foreman refused, a fight would likely follow. Only after the foreman was overpowered would it be possible to file through the iron bars of the tiny window and then bend through them. The opening had to be sufficiently enlarged for a body to get through. Often those about to escape preferred sawing through the floorboards and slipping out between train and track through the bottom of the car. You needed great courage for that kind of escape, for even though the distant end of the tracks loomed dark and sinister, no one knew the whole truth of what was awaiting them there. Few of the prisoners were let into the secrets of the escape network before their actual departure. Trying to live in a world of my own, amidst gray reality, I had no inkling of organized resistance inside the camp until the day of liberation.
