If This Is a Woman: Inside Ravensbruck: Hitler's Concentration Camp for Women (31 page)

It was dark when the train pulled out of Warsaw, Maria recalled. ‘We sang to cheer ourselves up, and I remember one of the tunes delighted the guard, so we had some fun at his expense. When we were passing through Łódż we sang “Hitler hangs by his tie” and the guard still smiled because he couldn’t understand. We always found little things like that to keep us going. Girlish pranks you could say.’

As the train moved on, word spread from the Warsaw women that they were heading to a place called Ravensbrück. Others from Warsaw had already been taken to this place, and some had managed to smuggle information about it back to friends in the capital. They passed through Poznań. Someone threw another letter out of the window. ‘We are heading into the unknown.’

As they cross the German border, leaving Poland behind, Krysia is asleep but wakes to hear a friend cry: ‘Dear God let me die in Poland.’ Grażyna composes a poem as Wanda tries to see where it is exactly they are going. On the second night they pass slowly through Berlin, which is totally dark – the dark of the blackout.

At dawn on 23 September the girls wake from a half-sleep to find the train is pulling through woods and passing a glistening lake. Soon they see freshly ploughed fields where men and women are labouring. Almost in the middle of a field, the train pulls to a halt. There is a platform and a tiny station: Fürstenberg. A moment of silence, then shouting and screaming breaks out as ‘huge blonde giantesses’ appear on the platform below, with snarling hounds.

The noise gets louder, the giantesses throw open doors and pull the women to the ground, and down they tumble, suitcases and bags all around them. ‘Ranks of five, ranks of five.’ The snarling hounds are unleashed. Wanda, Krysia, Grażyna, Pola, Maria, everyone lines up, but someone at the
back stumbles and cries out. Nobody moves. The stumbler is kicked. Silence reigns. It is a dreadful sort of silence that they don’t yet understand, but will go through again and again. ‘Why can’t I lash out at these hideous women with my bare fists?’ Wanda asks herself.

Even the knowledge that they are all together doesn’t help. On the contrary it makes the humiliation more unbearable. Wanda thinks: ‘What the hell. I’ll go for the one that’s nearest and hang the consequences.’ The black cape comes nearer. ‘But what if she strikes me or Krysia? I’ll look her straight in the eye.’ The guard averts her gaze and passes on. As they march to the camp, the women pray under their breath. They stare at the woods and the lake and at the giant, sullen sheds in perfect rows, and as they get closer they notice symmetrical red flower beds around some of the barracks, and lines of small trees.

Waiting on the Appellplatz with their bags, they watch files of women in camp stripes, marching, carrying tools. The biggest shed sounds and smells like a kitchen. Skinny figures come dashing, hands to their mouths, signalling to the new arrivals that they should eat whatever food they have in their bags, as it will be taken from them. The arrivals signal back and offer their extra food. The skinny ones look terrified. They shake their heads, hissing ‘Bunker, bunker’ – but the new arrivals don’t know what it means.

As they wait in the heat, some sit down on bags and are set upon by guards. They wait until late afternoon, and through the evening. At four in the morning they are still waiting and are finally taken into the bathhouse. Male officers watch as they strip. ‘They came close to us, tall with their bayonets, and they laughed,’ Maria Bielicka remembered. ‘They enjoyed it. Of course they enjoyed it – to look at our young bodies – but I don’t think it was sexual, it was more about power.’

Maria describes what happened to an older, obese woman amongst them, whom they knew as Granny Fillipska:

After her shower she tried to put on a vest, which was far too small. She had an enormous bosom and these men just roared with laughter as she struggled. She was very bulging, you know, and one of these men came up to her with his bayonet and played with her breasts, lifting them up to see them swing. They all roared with laughter again.

Like those before them, the Polish girls were now shaved. ‘Is that you Wanda?’ said Krysia. ‘Is that Grażyna?’ Grażyna’s curls had all gone. ‘We looked like clowns, some with dresses to their ankles, some to their knees,’ said Maria.

In wooden clogs, they tripped out, trying to stay upright. More prisoners
passed, who did not seem to notice the newcomers at all. ‘They don’t seem to have faces,’ Wanda said to herself. ‘Oh God, if you have a care in the world, grant that we keep our faces in this dreadful place.’ Krysia was obviously thinking the same thing. She grasped Wanda’s hand. ‘They all look exactly alike,’ she whispered.

Zofia Kawińska said all she could remember of the arrival was the din of the constant screaming of the giantesses. As they waited outside again, a handful of Polish prisoners came up and spoke to one or two of them, whom they knew from Warsaw. ‘Prepare yourselves. Stand firm,’ they told the newcomers. Maria Bielicka recognised a friend from Warsaw called Maria Dydyńska. ‘Maria looked terrified to see us and that frightened me – as if she knew something.’

Another figure rushed out at them and hissed: ‘
Sondertransport
’ – special transport. Sinister whispers echoed: ‘
Sondertransport
,
Sondertransport
.’

At first, nothing special seemed to happen to this
Sondertransport
. After the ‘bath’ they were given red felt triangles stamped with a black P. Almost all foreign arrivals were designated political and a letter printed on the triangle denoted nationality. The Warsaw–Lublin women were given numbers from 7521 to 7935. Wanda made sure her number was next to Krysia’s; they were 7708 and 7709. The new arrivals were marched in ranks of five to two quarantine blocks, set back behind a wire. Quarantine had been normal practice for several months, amid SS fears that arrivals from Poland would bring typhus.

Increasing overcrowding had made cleanliness harder to maintain, so extra rules had been introduced: the soles of shoes were checked for specks of dirt, a lice-checking gang was formed. As the Poles were seen as dirty the new arrivals had to scrub their block several times a day with a brush made of rice stalks.

To begin with the cleanliness was a thrill. At Lublin Castle fleas had massed in black heaps, but here there were white sheets and every woman had her own utensils, as well as a cloth for cleaning them. One of the quarantine Blockovas, a
Volksdeutsche
called Hermine, constantly harassed the women, but at least her bullying produced order, which they hadn’t known for months.

There was no work in quarantine. Days passed sitting around in the block. They had been stripped of everything by now – snow boots, sketchpads, pencils – all taken away on arrival to be labelled and stored. Crosses were yanked from necks. Those with toothbrushes could keep them. And if they had them, sanitary towels were allowed; the knitted ones, supplied by the camp, had run out. But most of these women had stopped menstruating long ago, with the shock of the first imprisonment.

Now they lived in boredom, doing nothing, sitting in the ‘day room’ squashed on benches, or on the floor. They made up games and listened to
the rhythm of the camp – the sirens, the tramp of feet, the shouts of ‘
Raus! Raus! Achtung!
’ and the howling of dogs. In the mornings and evenings they got half a beaker of coffee, which Wanda and Krysia guessed was made with acorns or from some part of a turnip. The bread had the consistency of clay and was mixed with wood shavings. The midday meal was a bowl of potatoes in their jackets with mashed swede or mangel-wurzel.

When the 9 p.m. siren rang for sleep, and Hermine drew the curtain around her Blockova’s cubicle, the girls lay close and whispered about their families, wondering what was to come. Prayer was forbidden. The wake-up siren sounded at 4 a.m. The quarantine blocks were counted indoors, but through the windows the women glimpsed women pouring from other blocks, standing for hours, often in rain. Krysia called these ‘deathly parades’. ‘But at least they can look up at the stars,’ said Wanda.

From time to time the girls saw grey figures flit past the block. Suddenly these same grey figures would appear from all corners and run towards something and pick at it, stuffing their mouths. Or they sank on all fours and licked the ground, then ran back to where they came from. These figures always seemed to be alone. Krysia and Wanda called them – ironically –
Goldstücke
: ‘gold coins’. As the
Goldstücke
wandered around, other prisoners passed them by and sometimes pushed them out of the way.

Every group arriving from now on would describe similar figures in the camp as their numbers steadily grew, but the Poles seem to have been the first to view the
Goldstücke
as a category. The guards had another name for them:
Schmuckstücke
, by which they meant useless, dirty ‘pieces’.
^*
In fact these prisoners were simply the poorest of the poor in the camp. Denise Dufournier, a French prisoner who arrived in 1944, described the
Schmuckstücke
as ‘the most wretched, dirty, and ragged’. Always holding out empty mess tins, ‘they resembled the poor of every country in the world’.

A year ago, the SS would have cleared the Lagerstrasse of any such women; now they were mostly ignored. A collection of
Goldstücke
or
Schmuckstücke
always hovered at the kitchen block when the
Kesselkolonne
, the soup-gang, started its round through the blocks. The women were waiting for a spill, which often happened because these kettles – vast iron pots – weighed a ton and the carriers struggled to keep them upright on the barrow, shouting to the
Goldstücke
to keep away or they’d spill the lot, and they’d all be in the bunker.

Sometimes the
Goldstücke
came up close to the quarantine wire, and the
Lublin girls recoiled. ‘Look at that,’ said Krysia the first time they appeared. ‘She has given up the fight,’ said Wanda. And they prayed to God that whatever happened to them, they would never become like that.

A few days after their arrival, the Lublin and Warsaw girls see a quite different group of women appear behind their quarantine wire. Krysia, Wanda and the others hear talk that these are Polish friends, who have been in the camp a long time already. They have come to greet the new arrivals and to seek news from home. This contact breaks all the rules, but Hermine must have been bribed or received orders to let them approach the wire, because the Blockova says nothing.

These long-established Ravensbrück Poles seem strange and foreign at first. The new girls call them ‘elders’ or ‘old men’, as some have grey hair. Most have numbers as low as 2500, which means they’ve been in the camp nearly two years.

The fresh intake are suspicious of the ‘old men’ and feel superior to them. These early prisoners were arrested just for living in disputed parts of Poland, near the German borders. They weren’t in the resistance, they didn’t fight in the war. They’ve been here so long their skin is grey. Some have hair growing on their faces. And their accents are unfamiliar, they use mysterious words when talking about the camp –
Sandgrube, Bock
. And they speak German, the language of the guards.

But over the quarantine weeks, as the ‘old men’ return, suspicion subsides. They seem to have good advice for the new intake: ‘Always save half your bread till the evening.’ ‘Never drink the water.’ ‘Pick out your lice.’ Later the ‘elders’ bring bits and pieces they have ‘organised’ – the camp word for stolen or smuggled. A year ago the Poles were at the bottom of the social heap here, unable to organise anything, but by the time of the
Sondertransport
of September 1941 their position had started to change.

Exactly when these first Polish prisoners began to claw their way up the Ravensbrück ladder is hard to pinpoint, but it may have been thanks to a Polish countess and her fairy tales that their fortunes first changed. In early 1941 a group of Poles joined a gang of German asocials working in the vegetable cellar. During the long night shift they sat on top of mountains of swedes, peeling until each had filled twenty-five buckets – the quota the kitchen required for the next day’s soup. It was hard to keep awake, but no rest was allowed until they were done.

One day a group of the Poles began reciting poetry and
telling stories
. They captured the ear of every peeler, and as they spoke the buckets filled at double speed. One Polish teacher told fairy tales in the dialect of the Tatra Mountains, but the most popular storyteller was a countess from Poznań,
Helena Korewina
. Her Polish myths and legends filled the buckets faster
than ever. Noticing how fast a nearby Russian gang was peeling, the storytellers projected even louder, enticing the Russians over simply by the sound of their voices, and speeding things still further.

Even the guards seemed to listen, and word of the storytelling reached Langefeld, who was looking for a Pole to act as her interpreter. So fast had the Polish population grown that it almost outnumbered the rest of the camp, but most spoke no German and couldn’t understand orders, which were often beaten into them instead. Langefeld preferred to be understood, and hearing about the Polish storytellers she called Helena Korewina to see her, appointing the countess as her interpreter.

By the time the students from Lublin and Warsaw arrived, the Polish countess had not only impressed Johanna Langefeld, but won the German blacksmith’s daughter’s trust. On Korewina’s suggestion, Langefeld appointed several Poles as block leaders, as well as secretaries in camp offices. Korewina herself was one of the most powerful prisoners in the camp.

The moment the four-week quarantine is over the women are forced outside for morning roll-call. Krysia says it’s too cold to look at the stars. One of the girls puts a towel under her dress for warmth. A guard sees and smacks her in the face. Now it is they who are stared at. As the newest in the camp they excite a kind of jealousy, as if something of the outside world still clings to them. Other prisoners try to touch them.