Something similar happened to French-born heroine Odette Samson, (also known as Odette Churchill and Odette Hallowes) during her imprisonment in the Ravensbruck extermination camp for women north of Berlin in the Second World War. Sent to Occupied France in November 1942 as an agent for the British Special Operations Executive (SOE) with the given code name ‘Lise,’ Odette had a passionate desire to help liberate France from German enslavement. She was captured and interned as a spy. Repeatedly tortured by the Gestapo, she remained defiant. Despite having all her toenails pulled out one by one, she never revealed secret information entrusted to her, and was sentenced to death, and then sent to Ravensbruck. In his biography Code Name Lise, the American author Larry Loftis tells what happened when Odette found a leaf “blown into her cell by a kindly breeze.” As there were no trees in the extermination camp, this was highly unusual. Loftis’ narrative continues: “Light permitted the intrusion of a solitary example of something — God, creation, life. In a small way, it gave her a glimmer of hope.” Odette survived the death camp, was honoured both by Britain and France at war’s end for her heroism, and lived to the age of 82 before her death in 1995.
Such seemingly trivial events had an enormous effect on the spirits of both of these individuals.
What they each saw was a symbol of something bigger than themselves and their suffering that rendered their own plight easier to manage.
A third example, in this case the importance of routine, is conveyed in Sir Ernest Shackleton’s account of the loss of his ship Endurance, crushed by ice in the frigid waters of Antarctica in November 1915, a disaster that left its crew stranded on the shifting ice floes of the Weddell Sea, with limited supplies, only makeshift shelter, no method for communicating their distress to rescuers, with no way home, and the imminence of death apparent to them all. In his book South: The Endurance Expedition, Shackleton describes the scene before him on the ice shortly before Endurance’s sinking. His men are clustered around the cook, telling him how they liked their tea, then being prepared for them. “It occurred to me at the time,” says our author, “that the incident had psychological interest. Here were men, their home crushed, the camp pitched on the unstable floes, calmly attending to the details of existence and giving their attention to such trifles as the strength of a brew of tea.”
“Such trifles”: a log, a leaf, a cup of tea. But what power trifles possess! This particular trifle invites Shackleton to reflect: “Man fights against the giant forces of Nature in a spirit of humility. One has a sense of dependence on the higher Power.”
Shackleton was knighted for his own rescue of all of his men following a death-defying trip with five of his crew, rowing across 800 miles of sea ice from Elephant Island to South Georgia, where he was able to summon help for the remaining twenty-two members of the doomed Endurance expedition. His courage and strength of will, complemented by the trust his capable and imperturbable men placed in their indomitable ‘Boss’ surely merit the appropriation of the ship’s name to their own patient but superhuman endurance.
