If This Is a Woman: Inside Ravensbruck: Hitler's Concentration Camp for Women (111 page)

While many older Soviet women were reluctant to talk of the rape, younger survivors feel less restraint today. Nadia Vasilyeva was one of the Red Army nurses who were cornered by the Germans on the cliffs of the Crimea. Three years later in Neustrelitz, north-west of Ravensbrück, she and scores of other Red Army women were cornered again, this time by their own Soviet liberators intent on mass rape.

Nadia was one of those who accompanied Yevgenia Lazarevna Klemm on the road to Neustrelitz, where they ran into more Russian soldiers. ‘At first they greeted us as sisters,’ said Nadia. ‘I remember a soldier came up to us and said: “It’s OK now; you can come with us.” We saw our own tanks on the road and we were overjoyed.’

Soon the soldiers’ behaviour changed. It was dark when the column got to Neustrelitz, and ‘they started walking beside us, chasing us and goading us, and wouldn’t leave us alone. Then they turned into animals. They were drunk.’

It became obvious that there was nowhere for the women to sleep in the town.

There were many
other women here too, not just the Red Army girls, so we were taken to a big building like a warehouse. We were led into a big room and all the time they were harassing us but we were tired and needed to sleep so we went into the room. It was on the first floor. The soldiers followed us. We shut the door, trying to keep them out. Yevgenia Lazarevna tried to barricade us in. They shouted to us to come out. They asked for the youngest women. It was terrifying. I was one of the youngest in the group. Then they said: ‘Anyone who’s a virgin come out to us.’ They started banging at the door and on the window and I saw one man swing in at the window and fall into the room drunk. They were starting to break down the doors and Yevgenia Lazarevna tried to do everything she could to protect us, telling them we were Red Army women who had been at the front at Stalingrad, Leningrad and the Crimea. We had been in the concentration camp for two years. ‘You can kill me but don’t touch the girls,’ she said.

Another of the Odessa nurses, Ilena Barsukova, remembers the women screaming and crying and Yevgenia Lazarevna calling for calm and trying to reason with the soldiers. But she couldn’t hold all of them back, and several got in.

Then a major
came and threw out the drunk ones and Yevgenia Lazarevna pleaded with him to stay and protect us from our own soldiers. And he agreed. Then in the morning the commanding officer came and restored
order. All the girls there would have been raped that night in Neustrelitz if it hadn’t been for Yevgenia Lazarevna. Yevgenia Lazarevna defended us in every way she could. But I know lots of girls who were raped by our soldiers; even girls who stayed in the camp were raped, and not only in our group.

Olga Golovina, the Red Army radio operator, now living in Moscow, described how her group, which had split off from Yevgenia Lazarevna’s column, found themselves in a deserted village already taken by Soviet soldiers.

They allocated a house
for us and gave us food, but then the soldiers started making advances. They hadn’t had a woman for ages. My friend Masha was so strong, like a man she defended us and beat them off. We went to the commandant to complain and he gave us two soldiers, who guarded us. They sat outside at first then we took pity on them and asked them to come inside and have some tea. In the morning they told us that only now did they realise what we have been through. ‘One of you was singing in her sleep and another crying out loud and another one sobbed. What we heard made our hair stand on end,’ they said.

Other women make no excuses for the Soviet rapists. ‘They were demanding payment for liberation,’ said Ilena Barsukova. ‘The Germans never raped the prisoners because we were Russian swine, but our own soldiers raped us. We were disgusted that they behaved like this. Stalin had said that no soldiers should be taken prisoner, so they felt they could treat us like dirt.’

Like the Russians, Polish survivors were also reluctant for many years to talk of Red Army rape. ‘We were terrified by our Russian liberators,’ said Krystyna Zając. ‘But we could not talk about it later because of the communists who had by then taken over in Poland.’ Nevertheless, Poles, Yugoslavs, Czechs and French survivors all left accounts of being raped as soon as they reached the Soviet lines. They talked of being ‘hunted down’, ‘captured’ or ‘cornered’ and then raped.

In her memoirs Wanda Wojtasik, one of the rabbits, says it was impossible to encounter a single Russian without being raped. As she, Krysia and their Lublin friends tried to head east towards their home, they were attacked at every turn. Sometimes the approach would begin with romantic overtures from ‘
handsome men
’, but these approaches soon degenerated into harassment and then rape. Wanda did not say she was raped herself, but describes episodes where soldiers pounced on friends, or attacked them in houses where they sheltered, or dragged women off behind trees, who then reappeared sobbing and screaming. ‘After a while we never accepted lifts and
didn’t dare go near any villages, and when we slept someone always stood watch.’

Izabela Rek, one of the rabbits whose legs had been badly mutilated, had no hope of getting away from the Soviet soldiers. With the help of friends, Izabela tried to escape into the woods.

Suddenly we were walking
towards a river and the Russian soldiers arrived. One soldier told me not to worry but the others were dragged off and I could hear them screaming very badly nearby; crying and shouting. Then they attacked us all and raped us, even though they knew we were prisoners. When we reported what happened to another group of soldiers they said come with us and we’ll look after you. Two girls went with them but we never saw them again.

The French teacher Micheline Maurel, who by the end of the war weighed only 35 kilos and was ravaged by dysentery and scabies, described the systematic rapes in detail. On 1 May Micheline saw her first Red Army soldier. ‘
A big burly fellow
, gay and debonair’, he walked into the courtyard of the barn where she and her friends Michelle and Renée were hiding after escaping from the Neubrandenburg evacuation march. ‘He immediately raped Michelle and then left, running across country as bullets flew past him.’ Later that day, while looking for food in the burning town of Waren, Michelle and Renée were both raped again several times by Russians who were staying in looted houses.

On the second day of ‘liberation’ the three friends were still hiding in the same barn when a company of Cossacks arrived. ‘They looked just like their pictures – superb men, wearing high astrakhan caps, long, fitted coats and spurred boots and riding magnificent horses that pranced around the farmyard. They brought us a gramophone and played dance music. They offered us vodka in big cups and this helped our pains.’

Micheline says the only reason she wasn’t raped was that she persuaded the soldiers that her sores were deadly and infectious. But her friend Michelle had no sores. ‘I tried to protect her but it did no good,’ said Micheline. ‘Nor was it really a question of protection, for the Russians had no evil intent, no animus whatever against us. Quite the contrary, they were filled with extreme cordiality, brimming over with affection, which they had to demonstrate immediately. “French? You French, me Russian, it’s all the same! You are my sister. Come lie down here.”’

Each day the French trio’s health deteriorated; each day more Russians assaulted the women as they went on their way. The story was always the same. ‘Whether they were big blondes with drooping moustaches, little
yellow Mongols with bowed legs, superb dark Cossacks, to each we had to explain: “Two years in the camp, we are exhausted, leave us alone.” But they wanted to make love to their French sisters.’

One of the Russians, on hearing the women were French concentration-camp survivors, rose to his feet indignantly and declared: ‘You are one of the conquerors like ourselves and you sleep in straw, while a German family next door sleeps in beds.’ At which he picked up his rifle saying: ‘I’m going to kill them. You shall have their bed.’ The Russian then marched the French women to the house where a family of Germans, including several children, were eating. As the Russian pointed his rifle at the Germans screaming ‘
Kaput, kaput
’, Micheline interpreted for the family. The German farmer rose and led the women to a room that contained beds. The Russian then left, embracing the French women and taking one of the German girls with him. ‘Later that night she returned to the farmhouse sobbing.’

There is little doubt that the worst violence was meted out to German women. ‘I remember my mother held my little sister tight to her bosom as a kind of protection. She said the Russians have respect for little children,’ recalled Wolfgang Stegemann, then a twelve-year-old Fürstenberg schoolboy. The German soldiers had left Fürstenberg about one hour before. ‘It was very silent, then came a great noise, and the Russians came into the village on foot. Most were drunk and they came into the houses and destroyed everything. There were a lot of atrocities. A lot of rapes.’

Rudolf Rehländer, who grew up in the same village as Dorothea Binz, three miles away, remembered what happened when the Red Army arrived at Altglobsow. ‘The first ones rampaged through our houses. Everything was looted – boots, clothes. They left the village with five or six watches on their arms. Then they started to rape. The first troops were the worst. They were the ones who carried out most of the rape. Almost every woman in the village was raped unless she had managed to hide.’

I wondered if Dorothea’s mother was still in the village. Rudolf thought she was, because his family ran the village bar where Rose Binz drank. ‘I had the job of filling glasses and I couldn’t fill Rose Binz’s glass quick enough.’

It was the same everywhere, says Rudolf, and there were hardly any men in the village at the time; either they were at the front or they had fled or killed themselves. Rudolf, just seventeen, was one of the oldest left behind, so he and the other boys had to bury the bodies. The mayor and three other top Nazis in the village killed themselves.

I remember we were burying
the mayor when someone shouted, ‘Come quick,’ because they’d found the Ortsbauernführer [the peasant leader]. We
ran there and it was a horrible sight. Both he and his wife had been hanged, but their bodies had been taken down and were lying on the ground. The woman was naked from the waist down and had a stick up her vagina. She was just lying there in the forest and I had to bury them.

I asked the Red Army intelligence officer Yaacov Drabkin what he thought of the atrocities.

Yes, everything happened
. After what our soldiers had seen and been through it was difficult to tell them not to kill every German they saw. When the war was over I had to talk to the German population, explaining that the Red Army was not so bad. I had to respond to the German nation for all our crimes and I always heard in reply about the rapes.

I asked him about the rape of the Ravensbrück prisoners. At first he expressed surprise that it had happened, ‘as they were in such a terrible state’. He said:

One should understand that it was a terrible, terrible monstrous war and everyone had gone completely inhuman. The soldiers had just fought their way through the fires of Danzig. The whole city was in flames. After that they just wanted to stay alive until the end. And remember that at Fürstenberg it was not yet over. Berlin had not been taken yet. There were still several days to go.

By early May, the fighting troops had largely moved on past Ravensbrück but Major Bulanov stayed behind to impose order, moving into Dorothea Binz’s villa. He ‘behaved decently’ and tried to help the women, but the camp was now in chaos, with male and female prisoners roaming around looting and destroying. He and his staff could not determine how many prisoners were here, or who they were. They could not keep track of the death toll. ‘Women started dying faster than ever after the Russians arrived,’ said Kamila Janovic, a Pole who stayed behind to help. ‘I think they had tried so hard to hold on until the liberation that when they relaxed they died.’ There was no means to burn or bury them, so the corpses continued to pile up. Many prisoners died miles away from the camp, possibly because they ate and drank too much for their emaciated bodies to digest.

Prisoners began wandering around Fürstenberg. ‘I remember them sitting in the street and under trees,’ said Wolfgang Stegemann. ‘They seemed very quiet. Very shy.’ Major Bulanov ordered local people – now mostly women – to go to the camp to help clear up and bury the dead. ‘When my mother
came back she was very sad and depressed, but she never told me what she saw,’ Stegemann recalled.

The Soviets brought in better food, as well as blood and medicines, and restored the electricity. Camilla Sovotna remembers a French priest arriving, and a British woman called Pat turned up to help.

One day Marie-Claude went looking for mattresses in the SS houses, and found a male prisoner asleep in a big bed, ‘his head on a feather pillow under a pink satin quilt’. Another day she entered Suhren’s house. She found a piano and played on it for hours. ‘I felt welling up in me hopes and desires that had so long been buried.’

Fifty miles north-west, Fritz Suhren was fleeing for his life.

Suhren’s gamble that the subcamp of Malchow would be a last safe haven for the SS had backfired. By 2 May it was clear that the Red Army, not the Americans, were closing in on Malchow, which would be overrun within hours. According to Odette, held hostage there for the past four days, the camp was littered with bodies as the SS periodically opened fire on the prisoners.

When more prisoners poured in and the carnage mounted, Odette asked Suhren to open the gates and let everyone go. She described the scene outside Suhren’s office to her biographer. A radio was blaring out the news that Berlin had fallen, the Germans had surrendered in Italy, and the British had taken Lübeck. Inside, she found Suhren in tears. ‘Adolf Hitler, the Führer of Germany, is dead. He died as a hero in the forefront of battle,’ Suhren told her, ‘his mouth twitching in ungovernable grief’.