If This Is a Woman: Inside Ravensbruck: Hitler's Concentration Camp for Women (102 page)

A young American diplomat sent to report on the French Ravensbrück arrivals related those details – his shock evident in every word. He described ‘
a convoy of martyrs
, frightfully mutilated, skeleton like – a terrifying spectacle … The looks of pity and horror on the faces of the doctors responsible for the medical examination spoke more than all the speeches professional secrecy forbade them to make.’

The most significant account of Ravensbrück to emerge from this French convoy came from the only non-French prisoner in the group: Karolina Lanckorońska. During the negotiations on the prisoner swap, Carl Burckhardt, the ICRC chief, had again appealed to Himmler to release her, and on 2 April 1945 SS General Ernst Kaltenbrunner wrote to Burckhardt saying that Himmler had agreed on condition that the countess stay silent on the camp. Or, as Kaltenbrunner put it, ‘
conduct herself loyally
’ in respect of the Reich. Lanckorońska, however, had no intention of keeping quiet. In a twenty-two-page report written largely in the present tense, she described for Burckhardt and his Red Cross Committee exactly what she had seen, and, more important, what was still going on at Ravensbrück. In particular, she
wrote of the danger still facing the Polish rabbits. ‘
They are under threat of death
’ and ‘are in hiding as I write’. The rabbits ‘are therefore in extreme danger and an intervention of the ICRC on their behalf is of the greatest importance’.

Karolina said that even as she was writing, the SS was clearing away the evidence of its crimes. Just before she was evacuated, she says, ‘the gas chamber was dismantled and all evidence of what happened there destroyed’. She also tells the ICRC that ‘A little before April 5th – the day our transport left – a machine appeared which resembled a bus and was in the forest near the camp. It was a mobile gas chamber and was painted green.’

Chapter 39

Masur

I
n the days after the Swiss and Swedish convoys left, prisoners working outside the walls peered into the trees wondering if more White Buses would appear. None came. Instead the women saw more gassing vehicles, like the green-painted bus that Karolina Lanckorońska had described when she arrived in Switzerland.

Many women later confirmed what Karolina said on the timing of the destruction of the main gas chamber. According to Zdenka Nedvedova a group of women from Lidice were the last prisoners to be gassed there. They went to their deaths singing the Czech national anthem. ‘
After the gas chamber
was destroyed and the place flattened, came the visit of the International Red Cross,’ said Zdenka. Hanna Sturm, the Austrian carpenter, who had helped convert the shed into a gas chamber in the first place, helped dismantle it.

Suhren now knew the killing could not be finished in time. By the second week of April the Americans had reached the Elbe, seventy-seven miles west of Berlin, while the Red Army under Marshal Zhukov were massing at the Oder, ready to attack the capital from the east. On Zhukov’s right flank General Rokossovsky’s forces had taken Danzig and were marching west, so Suhren had perhaps a week or two to remove the evidence of extermination before Rokossovsky reached his camp.

The gassing, however – though reduced – hadn’t stopped. From now on it was done in these green or black vehicles, which could be taken away when the order for evacuation came. Meanwhile, the process of clearing up accelerated. More trees were planted, more blocks painted, and pits were dug where bodies were burned because the three furnaces (and the two in Fürstenberg) could not burn them fast enough.

At the end of March and into April the clearance was done most urgently at the Youth Camp. Since the Uckermark Youth Camp first started operating as a death camp, at least 6000 women had been sent there, most of whom had been exterminated by the start of April. Arrivals had already slowed down. According to Vera Salvequart, the Youth Camp nurse, the last annihilation transport was brought here in early April. She remembers it because a Russian girl escaped, and everyone had to wait until Koehler found her. He brought her before the others and beat her to death with a piece of timber.

Selections for gassing at the Youth Camp continued, as did starvation and poisoning, but as killing was taking too long, more and more remaining prisoners were sent off to subcamps or marched back to the Ravensbrück main camp. As Neeltje Epker saw it: ‘The enemy was fast approaching and they could not complete their plan.’

Many of the French at the Youth Camp had been returned to Ravensbrück over the Easter weekend. A few days later the Youth Camp guards had a bonfire of documents and logbooks. Polish prisoners in one block were told to destroy their bunks, ‘which we did with enthusiasm,’ said Natalia Chodkiewicz. A selection was then held and Natalia, with 200 others, was marched back to Ravensbrück. ‘
I stood with my eyes closed
and hoped today that the black staff of the chief guard would choose me,’ said the Polish woman Janina Habich. ‘But at the end of the selection I was returned to Ravensbrück.’

Mary O’Shaughnessy still expected daily to be chosen. ‘By this time we thought we were all going mad. All we did was wait on parade – or rather wait for orders to die.’ Another mass selection was held, and the women chosen taken to be gassed, or possibly shot. But Mary O’Shaughnessy was selected to return to the main camp. In the end her false arm had proved irrelevant to her selection for life or death, as all that the selectors were interested in was the state of the women’s legs.

As Mary lined up to walk back, Ruth Neudeck passed by and struck her across the mouth with her silver-handled riding crop. ‘There was no reason. Two of my teeth had already been knocked out.’ With a group of about 200 she headed back through the woods towards Ravensbrück, still bleeding from her mouth.

Numbers at the Youth Camp now rapidly thinned out and prisoners from the male camp were sent in to clear up more of the evidence. They burned rotting bodies and turned the starvation room in the
Revier
back into a normal day room.

Before Auschwitz was evacuated in January 1945, the SS had gone round shooting any Kapos who might have evidence of what had happened. All of the
Sonderkommando
– those prisoners who had worked in the Auschwitz gas chambers and the crematorium – were to be executed. Just before their execution, the
Auschwitz
Sonderkommando
had revolted. Though the revolt was put down, several men had escaped. Presumably to forestall any similar rebellion here, the eleven men who had worked in the Ravensbrück crematorium and gas chamber were taken to the camp bunker in early April and locked up. Also in early April, Vera Salvequart, the Youth Camp nurse, learned that she was to be shot.

Salvequart said later that it was Rapp who told her first that she would ‘never get out alive’. It was probably after this that her behaviour changed. She was almost certainly under instructions to poison all those who remained in the
Revier
. Instead she was kind to them and tried to save some of them.

‘
When the first warm rays
of the sun appeared Vera told sick people that they could go outside into the sun, and she arranged for the TB patients to be carried out,’ said Irène Ottelard. ‘She even went for walks with the patients, without the SS guards.’ Many prisoners appreciated Vera’s ‘kindness’, and on her birthday – 12 April – they gave her presents. By now Salvequart had a number of prisoners helping her in various ways; a Frau Schaper was her dressmaker.

‘She invited people into her room and gave them bread and honey from her parcels,’ said Irène – but this time there was no white powder in the sandwiches. In desperation, Gisela Krüger told Salvequart one day, ‘If this fear and hunger doesn’t stop soon, it’s best to take the powder,’ but Salvequart refused to kill her, saying: ‘You can still have it, but you love life.’ According to Gisela, Frau Schaper was to have been given the powder before the end, but she hadn’t finished making Vera’s clothes, so she was spared.

Salvequart also saved prisoners from death by swapping names on the death list. ‘I must say that the behaviour of Vera Salvequart was a paradox,’ said Irène. ‘She did save some women, but she killed a large number too.’ To save someone, she would replace the intended victim’s name with the name of someone who had already died. Later she would claim she saved scores of women in this way, but Gisela Krüger said it was more like four or five.

Salvequart’s own descriptions of her last days in the Youth Camp came in three
rambling depositions
made in 1946 before an assiduous British war crimes hunter called Charles Kaiser. An Austrian Jew who had parachuted behind the lines for SOE, Kaiser was renowned for getting his subjects to talk. Salvequart told him that towards the end, pregnant women were brought to the Youth Camp
Revier
to give birth. The women were mostly Jewish prisoners and their babies were killed by Rapp. Vera tried to save them, she said, by hiding them in the washroom. Some she adopted for herself and tried to raise, including ‘the child of a Jewess called Weinert – a boy – which I brought up secretly’.

She received food for the baby from a prisoner in the male camp called Franz Eigenbrodt. Salvequart had struck up a friendship with Eigenbrodt when he came with one of the work gangs to carry out repairs. The existence of the baby became known in the male camp, and other male prisoners
smuggled milk for the child. ‘But Neudeck took the child away from me and threw it on the food wagon like a parcel of cloth. The wagon was dirty with spilt food. She also said to me: “A little Jew will be a very big Jew one day.”’ Salvequart told Kaiser that after this, she tried to poison Neudeck. The chief guard came to her complaining of a headache, and so she gave her the white powder, but Neudeck took too little to kill her.

After the killing of the Weinert baby all the babies born in Vera’s
Revier
were taken away by Koehler, Rapp’s colleague. Salvequart said she knew her days were numbered by then, as Rapp was following her around, saying that the
Oberschwester
suspected her of tampering with the death lists.

On one occasion, she said, a list of 180 women had been selected to go on a work transport to Belsen, but as the train lines were destroyed they were to be shot in the head instead. She took the chance to switch several names on the list with prisoners who were already dead, and as a result was called before
Oberschwester
Marschall and Dr Trommer to explain herself. They suspected Salvequart of keeping the original lists, which had their signatures on and would therefore incriminate them, so they ordered her to hand over the originals. It was at this point that she overheard Trommer saying, ‘This woman mustn’t fall into enemy hands,’ and decided to escape.

A further horror strengthened her resolve. According to Salvequart a group of fourteen Polish nuns arrived at the Youth Camp in the final days. One of them was a Mother Superior called Isabella Mozynska. Salvequart told Kaiser that she remembered the name because the Mother Superior had asked for some tablets for her nuns, who were suffering from diarrhoea. Vera gave them the tablets and told them not to come to the
Revier
again, it was too dangerous. The Mother Superior thanked her and gave her a medallion, saying: ‘May God protect you.’ Vera told Kaiser that she had put the medallion on a necklace, which he could look at, if he liked, as it was in the personal effects safe of the Hamburg prison.

Next day when she was in one of the
Revier
rooms, sorting out gold teeth, Rapp and Koehler came in drunk.

Rapp left the room and Koehler, who was very drunk, came over and tried to kiss me. I resisted, he … threw me on an examination bed and tried to rape me. I resisted with all my force, and bit and scratched and kicked him with my feet. I kicked him in the abdomen, which must have hurt a lot as he fled into a corner of the room.

Salvequart escaped from the room and told one of the women guards, Erna Kube, what had happened. Kube was about to take a pile of liceinfested clothes to Ravensbrück for washing, so Salvequart asked her if she
would take her too. While this conversation was going on, Rapp had fetched the fourteen nuns and brought them into a disused kitchen near the
Revier
.

Suddenly we heard shots. When I was walking away with Kube I was called back by Rapp. He ordered me to bring the teeth pliers into the kitchen. When I entered the kitchen I saw a horrible picture. Some of the nuns were dead and some were severely injured by the shots and in great pain. I still remember the horrible picture of a nun whose eyes were shot out.

Vera ran out to join the guard, Kube, and the two of them went back to Ravensbrück, where Salvequart hid in a hospital block for two days until someone gave her away to Koehler. ‘I was just lifting a corpse when Koehler came in, so I jumped out a window.’ Prisoners helped her to hide, first in the rabbit hutches and then in Block 19, where the Swiss-American Blockova Ann Seymour Sheridan kept her in the roofspace. Salvequart gave Ann a sample of the white powder to smuggle out and asked her to give it as evidence to the Allies. An analysis of the sample – a cyanide poison – was presented to the Hamburg court.

Both Koehler and Rapp were now pursuing Salvequart. Koehler found her first and took her back to the Youth Camp. He was worried about the attempted rape. ‘Koehler was terribly afraid that I had reported the matter to Schwarzhuber, as he asked me immediately whether I had seen Schwarzhuber and tried to apologise to me, saying he was drunk.’ Again she escaped Koehler’s clutches, this time by fleeing to the men’s camp. Her friend Eigenbrodt had managed to smuggle some men’s clothes to her through a group of male prisoners who were cleaning drains at the Youth Camp, so Salvequart got out disguised as a drainage worker.

Asked by Kaiser if she knew what happened to Koehler and Rapp, Salvequart said she’d heard Koehler was hanged by prisoners before the liberation, but she didn’t know about Rapp. Asked what happened over the murdered Polish nuns, Salvequart said she’d heard that Ruth Neudeck ‘dealt with it’.