If This Is a Woman: Inside Ravensbruck: Hitler's Concentration Camp for Women (30 page)

In 1967 the Ravensbrück guard Ella Pietsch spoke before a German inquiry about Bernburg. In 1941 and 1942 Pietsch was a guard in the camp’s straw-weaving workshop, where prisoners were suddenly called out alphabetically and told to leave. This riled her, as it left her weaving shift short-handed. ‘There were always two to six who didn’t turn up the next morning,’ she said. So put out was Pietsch that she asked an SS officer where the women had gone, and was told ‘to a new camp’.

Guards were forbidden to ask such questions, but Pietsch persisted. ‘I learned that the new camp was the camp of Bernsdorf in the region of the Halle. They gassed people there.’ The day after making this statement Pietsch corrected herself, saying: ‘The name of the new camp was not Bernsdorf, it was Bernburg.’ Evidently an SS officer had let the secret slip.

Many families of those killed at Bernburg never learned the truth; many had no idea how to find it. Ten years after the war, however, Lina Krug, Else’s mother, was determined to learn more. Like others, Lina had learned that her daughter had died of heart disease in a concentration camp, but the news made no sense. For one thing, she still didn’t see why her good Catholic daughter, who had left home all those years ago to seek work, should have been taken to a concentration camp. Doubting the story of her death, Lina therefore wrote in 1950 to the VVN survivors’ organisation asking if they knew why Else had been arrested and how she died.

As a communist body, the VVN was unused to receiving inquiries from the families of prostitutes, but Else was an exception. The story of the Düsseldorf prostitute’s courage was well known in the camp, as was the manner of her death. The VVN survivors therefore wrote to Lina Krug, informing her that Else wore the black triangle of an asocial. This told Lina, perhaps for the first time, that her daughter had become a prostitute. The VVN were also able to tell Lina that her daughter’s courage was
‘exemplary’
.
Else had stood up to the SS on several occasions. She had refused to beat comrades, and for that she had been sent to her death.

Soon after the war, Käthe Leichter’s husband and two sons, Franz and Henry, visited Vienna and learned the truth about her death. They also learned that not long after receiving the news about their mother, Aunt Lenzi – the go-between – had been sent to Auschwitz and gassed.

Fritzi Jaroslavksy, the Viennese resister taken to the camp as a teenager, had never learned the fate of her friend Fini Schneider, who befriended her in the camp. She last saw Fini smiling bravely at her from the back of a truck. She had always assumed she must have died, but never really knew.

When we met in Vienna, I showed her a list of names of Austrians whose ashes had been returned to relatives in Vienna, and a cemetery list showing where the ashes were buried in a Viennese cemetery. On the list was Fini’s name, as well as Käthe Leichter’s. Fritzi took the list in her hand, and stared at it in silence for some time. Then she said she couldn’t understand how the ashes had got back to Vienna. Her mother had had to pay for her father’s ashes when they were returned. Who would have paid for Fini’s ashes? By then all her family were dead.

No urn or official notice announcing Olga’s death ever arrived in Rio, and it was not until the end of the war, when Carlos came out of prison, that he learned for sure that Olga had died, although he must have guessed as much, as her letters stopped in February 1942. If an official notice was sent to Olga’s mother in Munich we will never know, as Eugenia, along with Olga’s brother, Ernst, was deported to Theresienstadt concentration camp in 1942, and both were later gassed at Auschwitz.

PART TWO

Chapter 10

Lublin

T
he German police came for Maria Bielicka in the middle of the night, when she was asleep at her parents’ Warsaw home. She was nineteen. It was January 1941, and for the past eighteen months – since the Nazi invasion of Poland – Maria had been helping the resistance in and around Warsaw by delivering underground newspapers. Then one of her group betrayed her. A woman she knew was tortured into talking.

‘The police just beat down the door, walked into the flat and ordered me to go with them. So as they stood there I got dressed and my mother quietly went to the kitchen and packed my school briefcase, full of things I might need in jail: cold meat, sanitary towels and a loaf of bread. That’s a Polish mother for you.’

Maria talked to me at her flat in London’s Earls Court in 2010. She said she had rarely spoken of the camp before. When she first came to live in England after the war nobody believed what she had to say. ‘Nobody here even wanted to know about the camps.’ Since then she had ‘got on with life’, working for Barclays Bank. Now, aged eighty-nine, Maria wanted to talk. She had been diagnosed with pancreatic cancer and had not got long to live.

She pulled out a photograph of her father, arrested by the Soviets for his part in the fight for Polish independence in 1917. Her mother sold everything and took Maria, a toddler, with her to Moscow, in order to bribe the Soviets and get him out of the Russian jail. ‘And she succeeded! How to fight for Poland was passed on through generations. My parents met smuggling secret books.’ She points to a crowd in the background of the photograph.

‘And that’s the Russian Revolution going on.’

I asked if her mother had not cautioned her against joining the resistance when the Second World War broke out, and she smiled. ‘You must understand that for a century and a half Poland was wiped off the map. Our mothers raised us to understand that the country must never be annihilated again. They raised daughters to believe that resistance was a role for young women as much as men.’

When Hitler’s blitzkrieg against Poland began on 1 September 1939 it swiftly became clear that Hitler was set not just on military victory but on killing Poland as an entity and absorbing it into Germany. Behind the tanks came SS Death’s Head units, under orders to sweep up, by stripping Poland of all possible leadership, as well as burying its history and cultural identity. In every town, city and village that lay in the path of German armies, schools, universities and town halls were closed and often burned, while teachers, priests, doctors, community elders were rounded up, tortured and shot.

Among those targeted were women as well as men. Whatever reticence the Nazis felt at first about brutalising German women, there was little restraint in Poland. In fact, so violent was the treatment of women during the German assault that after the war, even those later taken to Ravensbrück would recall what happened to them in Poland in these first days more vividly than anything that came later in the camp.

Stanisława Michalik was captured at her home in Terespol and taken with her brother, a priest, to the local Gestapo office. Here she found the town’s stationmaster, the headmaster of a primary school and ‘all the city’s intelligentsia’. For days she listened to the screams of the men being interrogated, and saw them return, broken and bleeding. Men were told to cut off their hair and eat it. Then came her turn.
‘They couldn’t
get anything from me, so they ripped my clothing off and laid me on a block, as two held me down the others beat me on the breasts, and all over with rubber clubs. When I passed out they poured cold water on me and beat me again.’

Stanisława saw her brother pass by, his cassock ripped to shreds. Many other women were brought in, including a friend from Terespol, a corpulent woman. ‘She was terribly beaten, until her beaten flesh began to fall off. The pus literally ran off her body in streams, so the entire cell was filled with the stench of decomposing flesh.’ The Gestapo torturers were often ethnic Germans, called
Volksdeutsche
, who lived in the Polish regions and made willing collaborators.

Women prisoners might sometimes be spared physical abuse, but instead were forced to watch at close quarters what happened to men. One woman watched a doctor she knew reduced to a ‘bloody scrap’. Jadwiga Jezierska, a
sociology student imprisoned in Warsaw’s Pawiak jail, saw the Gestapo chief shoot a man then tell women prisoners to go and look at the body. ‘
He took off his clothes
and paraded naked in front of them.’

As the German advance moved deeper into Poland, Lublin, 100 miles south-east of Warsaw, braced for the onslaught. It was among the teachers and their pupils of this university city that some of the strongest resistance was now born. When the news spread that
St Adalbert’s bookshop
in Lublin’s old quarter was on fire, students ran to fight the blaze. Wanda Wojtasik, a wiry seventeen-year-old, shouted orders to others to form a human chain and to pass the books on to the next. Krysia Czyż, just fifteen, had the idea of taking the books for safety to the vaults of the nearby monastery. From then on both girls were active in the underground. Wanda distributed leaflets, while her new friend Krysia helped at a children’s bomb shelter, once using her scout’s ingenuity to tie an umbilical cord during an emergency birth, with a shoelace.

Secret cells were organised by the students’ own teachers, and by parents. Krysia’s mother, Maria, took a senior post as a major in Lublin’s Home Army, the AK (Armia Krajowa). During the First World War her mother had served in a field hospital with ‘the legions’ – the armies that brought about an independent Poland in 1918 – and she passed on all she knew to Krysia. Krysia’s father, Tomasz, a teacher, joined the secret teaching programme in which teachers held clandestine lessons for children whose schools were closed. Teaching became a form of covert resistance, a way of ensuring that however many died, Poland’s history and culture would live on.

Michał Chrostowski
, a radical intellectual, hosted a salon for Lublin’s musicians, writers and artists. His two daughters, Grażyna, aged eighteen, and Pola, aged nineteen, were in the flat when Hitler’s forces reached the city, making plans for an underground newspaper:
Polska żyie
– ‘Poland’s Alive’. Pola, dark and tall, was a journalist, while Grażyna, with fair tumbling curls, had turned to poetry and art.

Such resisters stood no hope against Himmler’s local police chief, Odilo Globocnik, who by early 1940 was smashing all Polish opposition and sending the men to the first Nazi concentration camp on Polish soil, established at Auschwitz, in Silesia. Amongst those taken there was Michał Chrostowski. Soon Pola and Grażyna were arrested too, and taken for interrogation ‘under the clock’, as prisoners called Globocnik’s police HQ, with its seventeenth-century clock. Other women were rounded up in distant villages and then brought to Lublin across the snow in sleighs, driven by Germans in sheepskin coats.

By May 1941 Krysia and Wanda were also captured and imprisoned in
Lublin Castle. Grażyna and Pola were kept there too. Nazi judges heard spurious charges against them and then passed sentences of death. From time to time a name was shouted out and a woman was called for execution. On 21 June 1941 both Grażyna’s and Pola’s names were called, along with eighteen others, but as a guard led them away to be shot the prison’s commandant passed by. A Silesian who spoke Polish, he angrily ordered the women back to their cells, saying this was not a day for such things; the German invasion of the Soviet Union was under way.

The women passed the time waiting for their names to be called or watching out of a window where men – often a brother, father or husband – were lined up below to be taken to Auschwitz. Or they composed poems and drew portraits of each other on paper smuggled in by friendly Polish guards. Grażyna wrote in a note to an aunt: ‘
Write if you know something
about Papa, he left on the 22nd to a camp.’ Krysia too smuggled out secret messages to her mother, who sent messages back.

Some of the girls’ messages, so tiny they could be rolled into nothing and
hidden in a palm
, have recently come to light and are displayed in a Lublin museum, ‘Under the Clock’. Krysia’s daughter, Maria, found the tiny notes hidden in her grandmother’s old sweet tin. A handful of portraits are also displayed on the museum walls, including one of Krysia Czyż, drawn by Grażyna in the castle prison, her spectacles perched on a freckled nose. Drawings by Krysia are here on the museum walls too, including several maps, meticulously drawn, showing countless routes home to Poland, from Ravensbrück.

In September 1941
a train left Lublin
for Germany packed full of women prisoners. As they climbed into comfortable passenger carriages, they felt happy for the first time since the start of the war, believing that change must be for the better. Zofia Stefaniak remembered: ‘
We were all pleased
to leave the castle. We didn’t know what was next but it was a change and it felt peaceful.’

They were leaving at a pivotal moment in the war to the east, and the signs of what was happening were all around, although they couldn’t read them. On the truck taking them to the station they had seen vast crowds of Jews herded into Lublin’s caged-off Jewish ghetto. On the edge of town they saw a massive construction site at the suburb of Majdanek; they had no idea that Majdanek would soon be the site of a new concentration camp.

Whatever the future held, these Lublin women felt that at least their lives had been spared. They were going to Germany, but what could be worse than what they had been through? Why transport them hundreds of miles to their death? If they were to have been executed it would have happened at the castle, of that they were sure.

On the station platform, relatives tried to pass last-minute packages. It was only when the speed picked up that the girls understood they were leaving Poland, with no idea if they’d find a way back, so they threw hurried notes out of carriage windows – to a mother or a sister – hoping the finders would send the messages on. Above the noise of the train, Wanda shouted to Krysia: ‘We’ve got to hold on, do you hear? We’ve got to come back.’ Grażyna held on to Pola. She told a friend that from this moment on, she would never leave Pola’s side.

Within a few hours the bombed-out skyline of Warsaw came into view, and here more carriages were attached, containing women from Pawiak jail, among them Maria Bielicka, the girl with the school briefcase, packed by her mother. ‘Later my mother sent another package on to Pawiak jail. It had my winter coat and ski boots, which I was able to take with me when we left for Germany on the train.’