If This Is a Woman: Inside Ravensbruck: Hitler's Concentration Camp for Women (2 page)

Yvonne was one of Vera Atkins’s SOE women, captured while helping the resistance in France, then sent to Ravensbrück. Yvonne had always willingly talked about her resistance work, but whenever I had broached the subject of Ravensbrück she had said she ‘knew nothing’ and turned away.

This time I told her I was planning to write a book on the camp, hoping she might say more, but she looked up in horror.

‘Oh no,’ she said. ‘You can’t do that.’

I asked why not. ‘It is too horrible. Couldn’t you write about something else? What are you going to tell your children you are doing?’ she asked.

Didn’t she think the story should be told? ‘Oh yes. Nobody knows about Ravensbrück at all. Nobody ever wanted to know from the moment we came back.’ She looked out of the window.

As I left she gave me a small book. It was another memoir, with a particularly monstrous cover, twisted figures in black and white. Yvonne hadn’t read it, she said, pushing it on me. It was as if she wanted it out of her sight.

When I got home the sinister jacket fell off the book to reveal a plain blue cover. I read it without putting it down. The author was a young French lawyer called Denise Dufournier who had written a simple and moving account of endurance against all odds. The ‘abomination’ was not the only part of the Ravensbrück story that was being forgotten; so was the fight for survival.

A few days later a French voice spoke out of my answering machine. It was Dr Louise Le Porz (now Liard), the doctor from Mérignac whom I’d assumed was dead. Instead, she was inviting me to stay with her in Bordeaux, where she now lived. I could stay as long as I liked as there was much to talk about. ‘But you’d better hurry. I’m ninety-three years old.’

Soon after this I made contact with Bärbel Shindler-Saefkow, the author of the ‘Memory Book’. Bärbel, the daughter of a German communist prisoner, was compiling a database of the prisoners; she had travelled far afield gathering up lists of names hidden in obscure archives. She sent me the address of Valentina Makarova, a Belorussian partisan, who had survived the Auschwitz death march. Valentina wrote back, suggesting I visit her in Minsk.

By the time I reached Berlin’s outer suburbs the snow was easing. I passed a sign for Sachsenhausen, the location of the men’s concentration camp, which meant I was heading the right way. Sachsenhausen and Ravensbrück had close contacts. The men’s camp even baked the women’s bread; the loaves were driven out on this road every day. At first each woman got half a loaf each evening. By the end of the war they barely received a slice and the ‘useless mouths’ – as the Nazis called those they wanted rid of – received none at all.

SS officers, guards and prisoners were frequently moved back and forth between the camps as Himmler’s administrators tried to maximise resources. Early in the war a women’s section opened at Auschwitz – and later at other male camps – and Ravensbrück provided and trained the women guards. Later in the war several senior SS men from Auschwitz were sent to work at Ravensbrück. Prisoners were also sent back and forth between the two camps. As a result, although Ravensbrück had a distinctive female character it also shared a common culture with the male camps.

Himmler’s SS empire was vast: by the middle of the war there were as many as 15,000 Nazi camps, which included temporary labour camps and thousands of subcamps, linked to the main concentration camps, dotted all over Germany and Poland. The biggest and most monstrous were those constructed in 1942, under the terms of the Final Solution. By the end of the war an estimated six million Jews had been exterminated. The facts of the Jewish genocide are today so well known and so overwhelming that many people suppose that Hitler’s extermination programme consisted of the Jewish Holocaust alone.

People who ask about Ravensbrück are often surprised that the majority of the women killed there were not Jews.

Today historians differentiate between the camps but labels can mislead. Ravensbrück is often described as a ‘slave labour’ camp, a term that lessens the horror of what happened and may also have contributed to its marginalisation. It was certainly an important place of slave labour – Siemens, the electrical giant, had a factory there – but slave labour was only a stage on the way to death. Prisoners at the time called Ravensbrück a death camp. The French survivor and ethnologist Germaine Tillion called it a place of ‘slow extermination’.

Leaving Berlin, the road north cut across white fields before plunging into trees. From time to time I passed abandoned collective farms, remnants from communist times.

Deep into the forest the snow had drifted and it became hard to find the way. Ravensbrück women were often sent out through the snow to fell trees in the woods. The snow stuck to their wooden clogs so that they walked on snow platforms, their ankles twisting as they went. Alsatian dogs held on leashes by women guards pounced on them if they fell.

The names of forest villages began to seem familiar from testimony I’d read. Altglobsow was the village where the guard with the bobbed hair – Dorothea Binz – came from. Then the spire of Fürstenberg church came into view. From the centre of the town the camp was quite invisible, but I knew it lay just the other side of the lake. Prisoners talked about seeing the spire when they came out of the camp gates. I passed Fürstenberg station, where so many terrible train journeys had ended. Red Army women arrived from the Crimea one February night, packed inside cattle wagons.

On the other side of Fürstenberg a cobbled forest road – built by the prisoners – led to the camp. Houses with pitched roofs appeared on the left; from Vera’s map I knew these were the houses where the guards lived. One had been converted into a youth hostel, where I would spend the night. The original
guards’ decor had long since been stripped away, to be replaced by pristine modern fittings, but the previous occupants still haunted their old rooms.

The lake opened out on to my right, vast and frozen white. Up ahead was the commandant’s headquarters and a high wall. A few minutes later I stood at the entrance to the compound. In front lay another vast white expanse, dotted by trees – linden trees, I later learned, planted when the camp was first built. All of the barracks that once sat under the trees had vanished. During the Cold War the Russians used the camp as a base for a tank regiment, and removed most of the buildings. Russian soldiers played football on what had once been the camp Appellplatz, where prisoners stood for roll call. I had heard about the Russian base, but hadn’t expected this much destruction.

The Siemens camp, a few hundred yards beyond the south wall, was overgrown and hard to reach, as was the annex, called the Youth Camp, where so much killing had happened. I would have to imagine what they were like, but I didn’t have to imagine the cold. The prisoners stood out here on the camp square for hours in their cotton clothes. I sought shelter in the ‘bunker’, the stone prison building, its cells converted during the Cold War period into memorials to the communist dead. Lists of names were inscribed on shiny black granite.

In one room workmen were taking the memorials down, and redecorating. Now the West had taken over again camp historians and archivists were working on a new narrative and new memorial exhibition.

Outside the camp walls I found other memorials, more intimate ones. Near the crematorium was a long dark passage with high walls, known as the shooting alley. A small bunch of roses had been placed here; they would have been dead if they weren’t frozen. There was a label with a name.

There were three little posies of flowers in the crematorium, lying on the ovens, and a few roses scattered on the edge of the lake. Since the camp had become accessible again, former prisoners were coming to remember their dead friends. I needed to find more survivors while there was still time.

I understood now what this book should be: a biography of Ravensbrück beginning at the beginning and ending at the end, piecing the broken story back together again as best I could. The book would try to throw light on the Nazis’ crimes against women, showing, at the same time, how an understanding of what happened at the camp for women can illuminate the wider Nazi story.

So much of the evidence had been destroyed, so much forgotten and distorted. But a great deal had survived, and new evidence was becoming available all the time. The British trial transcripts had been opened long ago and contained a wealth of detail; papers from trials held behind the Iron
Curtain were also becoming available. Since the end of the Cold War the Russians had partially opened up their archives, and testimony never examined before was coming to light in several European capitals. Survivors from East and West were beginning to share memories. Children of prisoners were asking questions, finding hidden letters and hidden diaries.

Most important for this book would be the voices of the prisoners themselves; they would be my guide as to what really happened. A few months later, in the spring, I returned for the anniversary ceremony to mark the liberation and met Valentina Makarova, the survivor of the Auschwitz death march who had written to me from Minsk. She had blue-white hair and a face as sharp as flint. When I asked how she survived she said, ‘Because we believed in victory,’ as if this was something I should have known.

The sun broke through briefly as I stood near the shooting gallery. Wood pigeons were hooting at the tops of the linden trees, competing with the sound of traffic sweeping past. A coach carrying French schoolchildren had pulled in and they were standing around smoking cigarettes.

I was looking straight across the frozen lake towards the Fürstenberg church spire. In the distance workmen were moving around in a boatyard; summer visitors take the boats out, unaware of the ashes lying at the bottom of the lake. The breeze was blowing a red rose across the ice.

PART ONE

Chapter 1

Langefeld

‘T
he year is 1957. The doorbell of my flat is ringing,’
writes Grete Buber-Neumann, a former Ravensbrück prisoner. ‘I open the door. An old woman is standing before me, breathing heavily and missing teeth in the lower jaw. She babbles: “Don’t you know me any more? I am Johanna Langefeld, the former head guard at Ravensbrück.” The last time I had seen her was fourteen years ago in her office at the camp. I worked as her prisoner secretary … She would pray to God for strength to stop the evil happening, but if a Jewish woman came into her office her face would fill with hatred …

‘So she sits at the table with me. She tells me she wishes she’d been born a man. She talks of Himmler, who she sometimes still calls “Reichsführer”. She talks for many hours, she gets lost in the different years and tries to explain her behaviour.’

* * *

Early in May 1939 a small convoy of trucks emerged from trees into a clearing near the tiny village of Ravensbrück, deep in the Mecklenburg forest. The trucks drove on past a lake, where their wheels started spinning and axles sank into waterlogged sand. People jumped down to dig out the vehicles while others unloaded boxes.

A woman in uniform – grey jacket and skirt – also jumped down. Her feet sank into the sand, but she pulled herself free, walked a little way up the slope and looked around. Felled trees lay beside the shimmering lake. The air smelt of sawdust. It was hot and there was no shade. To her right, on the far shore
lay the small town of Fürstenberg. Boathouses sprawled by the shore. A church spire was visible.

At the opposite end of the lake, to her left, a vast grey wall about sixteen feet high loomed up. The forest track led towards towering iron-barred gates to the left of the compound. There were signs saying
‘Trespassers Keep Out’
. The woman – medium height, stocky, brown wavy hair – strode purposefully towards the gates.

Johanna Langefeld had come with a small advance party of guards and prisoners to bring equipment and look around the new women’s concentration camp; the camp was due to open in a few days’ time and Langefeld was to be the
Oberaufseherin
– chief woman guard. She had seen inside many women’s penal institutions in her time, but never a place like this.

For the past year Langefeld had worked as a senior guard at Lichtenburg, a medieval fortress near Torgau, on the River Elbe. Converted into a temporary women’s camp while Ravensbrück was built, Lichtenburg’s crumbling chambers and wet dungeons were cramped and unhealthy; unsuitable for women prisoners. Ravensbrück was new and purpose-built. The compound comprised about six acres, big enough for the first 1000 or so women expected here, with space to spare.

Langefeld stepped through the iron gates and strode around the sandy Appellplatz, the camp square. The size of a football pitch, it had room enough to drill the entire camp at once. Loudspeakers hung on poles above Langefeld’s head, though the only sound for now was the banging of nails. The walls blocked everything outside from view, except the sky.

Unlike male camps, Ravensbrück had no watchtowers along the walls and no gun emplacements. But an electric fence was fixed to the interior of the perimeter wall, and placards along the fence showed a skull and crossbones warning of high voltage. Only beyond the walls to the south, to Langefeld’s right, did the ground rise high enough for treetops to be visible on a hill.

Hulking grey barrack blocks dominated the compound. The wooden blocks, arranged in a grid, were single-storey with small windows; they sat squat around the camp square. Two lines of identical blocks – though somewhat larger – were laid out each side of the Lagerstrasse, the main street.

Langefeld inspected the blocks one by one. Immediately inside the gate, the first block on the left was the SS canteen, fitted out with freshly scrubbed chairs and tables. Also to the left of the Appellplatz was the camp
Revier
, a German military term meaning sickbay or infirmary. Across the square, she entered the bathhouse, fitted with dozens of showerheads. Boxes containing striped cotton clothes were stacked at one end and at a table a handful of women were laying out piles of coloured felt triangles.