If This Is a Woman: Inside Ravensbruck: Hitler's Concentration Camp for Women (32 page)

After roll-call the group are back in the block, queuing for coffee, but they haven’t yet learned to eke out their bread, and the 250 grams shared out the night before has already gone, so there is nothing to eat before work starts.

Out on the Appellplatz again, for labour roll-call, they learn they are
Verfüg
s
. As a
Sondertransport
, the new Poles are banned from working outside the camp, although no one tells them why. So they have to join the line of the
Verfügbare
, literally availables or leftovers, though to the Poles it appears to mean rabble – prisoners who have to pick up any work left over when all better jobs are allocated.

So as other gangs leave the camp gates, heaving kettles for lunchtime soup, the Poles join up with the
Verfügbare
and a
Kolonka
(short for
Kolonnenführerin
, forewoman) calls out their names. Certain
Verfüg
s seem to fix with the
Kolonka
to get the plum jobs, but the new arrivals get to clear cesspits, shovel mud or throw bricks. The overcrowding has
brought new rules
for the gangs. Bricks, tossed from person to person, are counted so that a certain number is put in each cart; the amount of sand that goes on a shovel is checked, even if hands are bloody and raw.

There are those who know the ropes and those who don’t – the new Poles don’t. On the brick-throwing gang, for example, if one woman faints the
others are not allowed to move her, so the bricks have to be thrown right over her to the next in line. But the German women, who are now experienced, throw fast, and if the Polish newcomer doesn’t catch it, the brick falls on the legs of the one who passed out.

The Poles have also yet to learn how to catch the bricks but avoid the sharp edges. Soon Wanda’s hands are a mass of bleeding flesh – so bad is the pain that she lets them drop and watches the blood drip down. ‘What’s going on?’ Wanda lifts her hands to show the guard. After lunch break – watery soup in the block – the same guard quietly pulls her out of the line and sends her to carry baskets for a day or two.

At 7 p.m. the siren sounds and they rush to queue again for swede soup. At 8.15 it sounds for bed and at 9 for silence, except that now a guard with a dog comes poking at the bodies to see who has put on extra clothes. Culprits are turfed out onto the floor and are set upon by the dog. The guard leaves for the night shouting out: ‘
Alles in Ordnung
.’

In the block the girls try hard to understand the rules, if only so as not to break them. Clearly, German property is sacrosanct, so a scratched cup means a report, and probably a beating. Initiative brings the cruellest punishment. A woman makes toe warmers out of scraps against frostbite. She gets twenty-five lashes, even though now she can’t work. Another alters a dress to fit her better. She is whipped. And all rules must be followed at once: on the order you leave the block ‘like fleeing a burning building’ or else you get a dousing, which in winter means frozen clothes all day.

But the rules have no logic. They multiply by the day. The cleanliness they welcomed at first is enforced not for hygiene but as a crazed obsession. For example, the women are told to wipe glasses with a dirty apron because the clean dishcloth might leave white fuzz. And the rules on folding blankets have now run riot. Not only are bedclothes folded and refolded, but so is everything. Much of Sunday is spent folding beds, blankets, towels, dishcloths, napkins, into ever more intricate triangles.

Yet enforcement is entirely arbitrary, depending on the whim of the Blockova. One has a rule that says windows must be left wide open all night, so the women wake up to find hoarfrost on the ceiling, dropping onto beds and melting. Sometimes they have to yank frozen hair off their pillows. Another Blockova likes to spot-check knickers for extra padding. To do so she suddenly locks the dormitory door and forces everyone to march in front of her holding their skirts up their back.

Another goes wild if a prisoner tries to improve the look of her hair. Often punishment is given to teach a lesson, as the camp is now so big that not all offenders are caught. So a seventeen-year-old suffers two weeks in the bunker simply because she tried to trim her fringe. The cell is freezing and her legs
turn gangrenous, so she is taken to the
Revier
for amputation, but surgery comes too late and the girl dies.

By the winter the new arrivals’ shaved scalps are beginning to sprout new hair. Grażyna Chrostowska, the Lublin poet, tries to make a hairstyle with her tufts, but a guard spots this and Grażyna is shaved anew as a punishment. The largest number of new rules are designed to stamp out friendship, or in camp-speak, association. The Poles, as a group, are particularly guilty of friendship and association, so they are told there can be no meetings, and one day that they can’t exchange looks through a window. They can’t shake hands in greeting, or speak to each other without permission.

But Halina Chorążyna, a chemistry professor from Warsaw, knows ways around these rules, and on Christmas day she defies the ban, calling the girls together to sing Polish Christmas carols.
‘But don’t
sing out loud,’ she whispers. ‘Sing inside your heads.’ They sing in silence, mouthing words in unison, and somehow it works. Halina has only been in the camp as long as the young girls, but she is already an ‘old man’ in terms of wisdom. Like many of these girls’ mothers, she fought in the First World War.

Each day, under Halina’s direction, the women decide to do something, however small, to help each other, perhaps a smile for someone like Grażyna, who worries about her sister Pola, who is sick. Friends notice that neither girl has smiled since learning that their father died. Or another day Halina might say: ‘Befriend another who seems alone.’ On the bunk below her, Stanisława Michalik finds a new arrival, a
Polish farm girl
, who is in great distress. On her first night she confides in Stanisława that she is pregnant, and terrified about what will happen.

The next day the young Pole is taken to the
Revier
. Later that night she returns to the block and weeps in Stanisława’s arms, saying the baby has been ‘cut out of her’.

By the winter of 1941 everyone in Ravensbrück knew that babies were being aborted in the
Revier
. The rules were that babies must not be born here. In the early days those arriving pregnant were so few that they were simply sent off to give birth in a hospital at Templin, a nearby town. Two years later, however, the number of pregnant women had multiplied, due almost entirely to the arrival in Germany of thousands of Polish slave labourers.

Since the invasion in 1939 Hitler’s forces had rounded up Polish men and women, to work on German farms and in factories. In 1940 Himmler issued a decree ruling that any German woman who had intimate relations with a Polish man must have her head shorn in public, and then be led through the streets ‘as a warning to others’. But the stigma of public humiliation did not stop the contacts, and pregnant German women – as well as Polish slave
labourers made pregnant by German men – were brought to Ravensbrück and forced to have abortions. All were given the red triangle of political prisoners, but to distinguish them from other ‘true’ politicals, the other camp women labelled them, cruelly,
Bettpolitische
, bedpoliticals. Like the Jews who were rounded up for having sex with Aryans, these women were also accused of committing
Rassenschande
.

The abortions were usually carried out by one of the new camp doctors, a former naval surgeon called Rolf Rosenthal. Every prisoner who worked in the
Revier
recalled his butchery. Hanka Housková, a Czech prisoner nurse, recalled how on one occasion Rosenthal cut out a five-month foetus from a woman’s body with a medical saw. Dr Bozena Boudova, a Czech pharmacist, heard groans from the operating theatre one day and saw a dead baby with its bloody umbilical cord in a bucket.

Rosenthal was assisted in his work by the prisoner
Gerda Quernheim
, known as ‘the little ferret’. Quernheim, born in Oberhausen in the Ruhr Valley, was thirty-four when she arrived at Ravensbrück in the spring of 1941. An experienced nurse and midwife, she had been arrested for carrying out abortions, which outside the camp were illegal: good German Aryans were supposed to do everything they could to raise the birth rates, not lower them. Illegal abortion would nevertheless not normally lead to a concentration camp, but Quernheim had compounded her crime by insulting the Führer during her trial.

When she first came to Ravensbrück Gerda was assigned to the delousing gang, to shave heads, but it was when she joined the corpse gang, which collected bodies and took them to a collection point for onward transport to the Fürstenberg crematorium, that her attitude first attracted attention. Helena Strzelecka, a Pole on the same gang, recalled going with Gerda to the bunker to collect the body of a Jehovah’s Witness from a cell. ‘Actually it was just a skeleton,’ recalled Helena, ‘lying in water.’

Under Mandl and Binz the horrors of the bunker had mounted and water torture became common. There was a tap in Cell 64, known as the death cell. Prisoners who passed out after beatings were laid on the floor and the water was turned on. They were left there lying in the water so long they sometimes froze to death. This was what had happened to the Jehovah’s Witness. ‘The guard Hasse, was playing with the keys and making fun of the dead woman,’ said Helena. ‘When they put her in the coffin Quernheim said: “Oh you stupid Jehovah’s Witness. Now you’ll go to your Jehovah.” The dentist then pulled the gold teeth out. They went in large quantities to Berlin.’

Within a short time Quernheim was selected to work in the
Revier
alongside the camp doctors. In return she was allowed to eat in the SS canteen, which was when Doris Maase nicknamed her ‘the little ferret’.

When the new woman doctor, Herta Oberheuser, arrived, she co-opted Quernheim to help with lethal injections, which Oberheuser had continued to administer after Sonntag had left.

The German prisoner Klara Tanke, another
Revier
worker, recalled that in early 1941 a transport of Dutch prisoners – mostly communists – arrived and amongst them was a dentist in her twenties, suffering from jaundice. Klara recalled: ‘
She asked me
for a pill to soothe her pain. I couldn’t help her. The Dutch woman complained to Oberheuser, who said: “I will give you an injection to give you peace.” Quernheim went off to fetch the syringe from the medical room and Oberheuser then administered a lethal injection. The body was taken to the room where corpses were kept.’

Klara also saw Dr Oberheuser give a lethal injection to an eighteen-year-old woman from Bremerhaven, which was her home town. The woman was injected for ‘bed-wetting’, said Clara. Again, it was Quernheim who fetched the syringe.

When Rolf Rosenthal learned that Quernheim was a trained midwife, he instructed her to help with abortions, which in the camp were legal because the prisoners were ‘lives not worth living’. Quernheim’s crime had now become a duty: she helped Rosenthal induce labour, and then killed the foetus either by strangling or by drowning in a bucket. In return she earned more privileges, wearing a clean white apron and sleeping overnight in the
Revier
.

Ilse Machova, another Czech
Revier
worker, described how Quernheim disposed of the bodies at night by placing them in cardboard boxes, taking them to the camp boiler and throwing them into the furnace. Prisoners also saw her walking to the boiler in broad daylight, usually carrying a bucket. In the words of the prisoner nurse Hanka Housková:

We often caught sight
of Gerda Quernheim’s pail, covered with a woollen cloth, that she carried back and forth daily, containing the dead newborn infants. Once she carried two pails. On another occasion, we convinced ourselves that we heard the cry of a newborn child coming from her pail. After this cry we ran out to the corridor. Dr Rosenthal came along and asked what we were doing and chased us back to work.

The identities of the mothers and dead babies were not recorded, and after the war the surviving bedpoliticals rarely wished to talk, such was the shame they still felt. The story of Leni Bitterhof, however, as she told it to an investigating police officer, was among the few Nazi police files that survived.

In 1939, after a tip-off, police opened a file on Leni, a farmer’s daughter
from Kleve, in north-west Germany. Leni lost her husband on the eastern front in 1941. According to her police interrogation, it was while her husband was away that she visited a friend who worked in an inn, and there met a Polish worker called Michał, whose wife also worked there. He smiled, but
‘I didn’t return the smile.’

When, two years later, they met again on the street they stopped to talk. A week later Michał visited Leni’s flat, where he kissed her. ‘Also the Pole touched me immorally during the fondling, which I did not resist.’ She went on: ‘After prompting [by the police] I admit that we had sexual intercourse during this meeting.’ There were further visits. The couple had sex, and ‘I have to admit I gave the Pole coffee and bread on two occasions.’ Once she went to the cinema with Michał and his wife, and afterwards ‘they went home to their place and I went home alone’.

Leni did not hear from Michał again for some time, though she sent him a Christmas card, by which time she knew she was pregnant with his child. ‘I knew that Michał was the father. I did not have sex with other men.’ Michał gave her a bracelet, ‘which I hereby give to the police’. In return for the bracelet, Leni gave Michał a little handkerchief. ‘I owned the handkerchief and did not buy it especially for Michał.’

She told Michał about her pregnancy, and he promised to divorce his wife and marry her. But Leni was soon brought to Ravensbrück, where the baby was aborted, probably by Rolf Rosenthal.

In the winter months of 1941–2 the Polish
Verfüg
s were given pickaxes and told to break up the frozen sand, chopping out a square, before moving it to another place. After a big snowfall, the gang was sent to pull barrows out from the edge of the lake, where they were half-submerged in mud and ice. They filled them with snow and pushed them up the muddy hillside to the SS houses at the top, then dumped the snow and came back down, watched by guards with dogs.