If This Is a Woman: Inside Ravensbruck: Hitler's Concentration Camp for Women (33 page)

Wanda saw that Krysia couldn’t make it. A huge hound was straining to maul her the minute she fell, so Wanda walked behind her and didn’t see that she was crying until they reached the top. It was then that the barrow slipped from Krysia’s hands and a guard fell on her with a horsewhip. Instinctively Wanda stepped in and put up an arm to shield her, shouting to the guard:
‘Can’t you see
the child is all in?’ The guard looked at her, astonished, and walked away. From that moment on Wanda vowed never to leave Krysia’s side.

After six months in the camp, the Polish students were learning how to get round some of the rules. For example, the rules against friendship were drawing the women closer, into ever smaller, safer groups, and forcing them
to show their friendship in new ways. In the blocks, late at night, or perhaps at mealtimes, the school-age Poles attended lessons organised for them by older women, often teachers, so that they would not be behind in their studies when they went home.

Zofia Pociłowska, a sculptor, started making
tiny little gifts
for her friends, chiselling with broken sticks on anything she could find. One day, someone outside the block organised a knife for Zofia. Now she could sculpt much finer objects, like a crucifix on a piece of coal, or a Mother Mary on the end of a toothbrush, the size of a thumbnail. Overnight, Zofia became the most popular woman in the block. Everyone wanted a sculpture of their own, which they could admire and hide in a crack in the wall. The most sought-after sculpture of all was a ring engraved with the prisoner’s camp number.

Grażyna composed
more poems and ‘gave’ them to her friends – though she had no paper, so to record them safely she composed at roll-call, standing in the centre of her rank of five and thinking up lines that were passed along to those closest, and each remembered a line or two – ‘Rambling bird, passing birds, why are you flying here? This is no path for you; it is a camp, a place condemned and forgotten by God’ – as the count went on. Janina Iwańska, another friend from Lublin, could remember the whole lot. Sometimes they managed to organise scraps of paper to write the poems down.

Then came a move to stamp out Polish friendships another way, by splitting up the Polish group and sending them to different blocks. Wanda and Krysia’s new block was ‘full of prostitutes and thieves of every nationality, coarse, screaming harridans’ who ‘spat on our sheets and stole our few treasures’, as Wanda recalled it later. Two weeks later the girls were transferred to Block 11. Here women, many of them Gypsies, performed what Wanda called
ugly and inhuman acts
of lesbian love.

Sitting in her Kraków apartment, overlooking the central square, I asked Wanda about the ‘inhuman acts’. A portrait of Pope John Paul II stared down on us from the wall, and Wanda stared too, saying nothing. She asked if I had travelled all the way to Kraków to ask her that. But there was a time when Wanda Wojtasik was haunted by the ‘inhuman acts’ of lesbian love as much as she was by other acts the camp was known for. In her memoir, published in 1948, she said that Block 11 was where she ‘lost her innocence’ and where this thing called ‘LL’ – lesbian love – acquired ‘a grotesque human reality’.

It would take Wanda ages to get to sleep. ‘At first I couldn’t believe what was happening and watched wide-eyed, torn between curiosity and despair.’ Wanda managed to shield Krysia from seeing some of what took place.
Krysia, she says, was ‘a quiet, pretty, graceful girl, not only innocent but also naive and credulous’.

Wanda wondered, however, ‘whether one day we will be like that too’. A note was pressed into Wanda’s hand by a Gypsy called Zorita, who was tiny and very thin. ‘If you want to, come to the corner of Block 12,’ it said.

Zorita had seemed like a gentle girl, with great black velvety eyes. Only now did I understand the meaning of those inviting glances. My first reaction was to laugh. So I was to play the man was I? But it was horrible, and sad. I wanted no part in it. But sometimes I would accidentally catch Zorita’s eye, and what I saw there made me frightened. I recoiled at first and felt pity.

Propositions came ‘thick and fast’. Wanda found herself in demand as ‘woman and as man’ as lesbianism ‘spread like a plague’. She would have none of it, she said, but it destroyed her faith in the innocence of even simple human gestures. And Krysia saw, ‘of course she did. How could she not see those awful scenes when they were actually being enacted by our own bedside? She cried for a long time that first night and never again came to say goodnight to me in bed, at least not in the same way as before.’

Other Polish women, asked today about the lesbianism they encountered, talk more easily than Wanda Wojtasik. Most say they were propositioned at some time. And some talk, like Wanda, of a time when lesbian sex seemed to explode in a wave of promiscuity throughout the camp – but only amongst the Germans, Gypsies and the Dutch, they insist, never among the Poles.

‘There were these women,’ said Maria Bielicka, ‘and it was a shock to all of us students as we knew nothing of these things. We were brought up so very strictly.’ But it was not as dramatic as some made out, suggests Maria. ‘It happened rarely at night as women were too tired. Mostly at weekends. But discreetly. They kissed. Licked each other. Touched each other. Whatever they normally do. There were many couples. It was their kind of friendship but not one that we could understand at that time. And in any case we had more important things to worry about.’

In the early spring of 1942 the women were worried they were
beginning to starve
. The bread allowance was cut from 250 to 200 grams and the soup got thinner. A disastrous harvest had affected supplies across the whole of Germany and all prisoners’ rations were cut. Wanda tried to protect Krysia from hearing the ‘morbid, drooling’ conversations starting up around them as ‘gaunt-faced women, eyes glistening, hallucinate about food’. It would start
with a conversation about a trip to the theatre and end with ‘Where did you eat afterwards?’ and details of their imaginary feast would spill out.

The newcomers were starting to grow hair on their faces, hands and legs, and their expressions were grey and dull, except when the talk was of food. Irena Dragan saw a woman catch a bird that flew through the rafters, and eat it raw.

Now there were
Goldstücke
inside the Polish blocks. ‘There were some in every block,’ says Maria Bielicka. ‘When the food came you’d see them. They would always be pushed to the end of the queue and never managed to have anything at all. And the room leaders would always go for them. And they were in all classes, all nationalities. I knew one who was quite well off before the war but the change was so colossal she could not adapt. She was a landowner’s daughter.’

‘What became of them?’

‘They wandered out of the block one day and disappeared – probably picked up and taken to the punishment block.’

‘Did anyone in your transport end up like that?’

‘No, we were a strong group. They were one here, one there,’ and she points around the corners of her Earls Court flat. ‘And the difference was that when we arrived in the camp we arrived with nothing. Everything was taken from us except perhaps our glasses or sticks for the very old. And they carried on taking things. But after six months we had started to get something back again.’

Some time in early 1942 Maria Bielicka was picked out of the
Verfügbar
lines by Langefeld herself and sent to the bookbinding workshop. The camp was so self-sufficient now that it was binding its own ledgers and records. ‘She walked down the queue of women asking if anyone had ever learned bookbinding. I had once done a term of it at school, so I put my hand up.’ Working here, Maria was out of the cold, and she picked up news from Czech friends working in the nearby
Effektenkammer
.

Others were getting better jobs too. Another Polish
Verfüg
was assigned to one of the rabbit hutches, where the job was to clean out cages and collect angora fur that they could sometimes organise. Several Polish women, including Wanda and Krysia, were taken out of the
Verfügbar
and sent to the straw-sewing and weaving shop, which made straw shoes used as warm overshoes for camp staff, and also for soldiers in the Waffen-SS. The work was unpleasant and the manager of the workshops, a tailor called Fritz Opitz, was a brute. The women choked on dust as they sat at tables plaiting and pulling at large bundles of straw, which cut into their hands. But at least they were inside a barracks, with a better chance to survive.

Nobody had any doubts that the better jobs for the young Poles derived
in part from Helena Korewina’s influence. It was six months since the
Sondertransport
had arrived, and in that time Korewina, the Polish countess-interpreter, had won Johanna Langefeld’s trust. The two were rarely apart. ‘
Langefeld was full of affection
for Korewina,’ recalled another woman in the chief guard’s office. ‘Langefeld depended on her absolutely and followed her judgement. One time, when fifty-two teams of outside workers had to be organised, Langefeld told Korewina: “You do it, and tell me what you’ve done.” It was like that. Needless to say the
Kolonki
[gang leaders] on the work teams were largely Poles.’

The Polish women with fluent German were also taking more and more positions in the offices and blocks. Maria Dydyńska sat in the Gestapo office, where she saw the prisoner transport lists and typed official correspondence that went to Berlin. The Polish dancer Ojcumiła Falkowska was working in the canteen. Poles were now working in every part of the camp, from the clothes store to the kitchen; they even cleaned SS houses. In the blocks, Polish Blockovas were now enforcing the SS rules.

But, also like their predecessors, few doubted that cooperating was the right thing to do.

The Polish military instructor Maria Moldenhawer even congratulated the Germans for their ‘honesty in finally seeing the worth of the Poles, who, as workers, compared with the asocial German women, who were depraved types, inspired trust in the camp authorities’.

Through her influence, by Easter 1942 Helena Korewina had even secured Langefeld’s agreement that the Polish prisoners be reunited in adjacent blocks. Most remarkably, she enabled the creation of a
Kunstgewerbe
, arts and crafts workshop, where young Polish artists could work, painting, embroidering and sculpting little artefacts. The workshop was based at the side of the straw shoe-making barracks, and, under Langefeld’s orders, was given special protection by friendly guards.

According to Zofia Pociłowska, many of the girls who worked on the shoes, including Krysia, Wanda, Grażyna and others, were transferred to the art workshop in the winter months of 1942. How Helena Korewina persuaded Langefeld to agree to an art workshop is impossible to say. Perhaps she showed the chief guard the exquisite miniatures the girls were already making out of nothing, and Langefeld saw a way to help them.

How Langefeld persuaded Fritz Opitz, head of the sewing workshop, to allow the art workshop is not so hard to explain: Opitz took the artworks for himself and sold them. ‘He even ordered objects especially for his girlfriends. So we made what he wanted and the guards came and packed them away,’ according to one survivor’s account. And other guards turned a blind eye, knowing that they would be given a beautiful portrait, or a
painted doll. Grażyna’s portraits soon hung in the SS houses, and officers’ wives flaunted exquisitely embroidered slippers.

Another of the Polish student group, Wojciecha Buraczyńska, remembers how Helena Korewina used to visit the art workshop and watch them at work. ‘Korewina was always elegant, even in her camp stripes. I don’t know how, but some people were.’ The Poles knew by this stage that Langefeld was to some extent protecting them. ‘We had always known she was our ally. She let us leave earlier from roll-call if it was snowing, and she never made us stand there longer than necessary. We knew she wasn’t 100 per cent SS.’

As she spoke, Wojciecha hunted for her copy of Grażyna’s last poem. It was about a sunflower, she said. Sunflowers grew outside the block, and through the window they could see their bobbing heads. She pulled out sheaves of papers, letters and drawings, including a sketch of herself as a teenage girl – ‘Grażyna drew that in the Ravensbrück art workshop.’ And Wojciecha found a tiny object and laid it in the palm of her hand, holding it under a light. It was a crucifix, carved out of the very end of a white toothbrush.

Chapter 11

Auschwitz

W
ojciecha Buraczyńska was not the first to observe that Johanna Langefeld was ‘not 100 per cent SS’. Like the Poles, Grete Buber-Neumann, the former communist who later worked closely with Langefeld in the camp, came to see her as a woman torn in two by her conflicting instincts and beliefs. On the one hand she fervently believed in the ideals of National Socialism, dreaming of the day when the Führer would make Germany proud and great again. She also admired Himmler to the very end, certain that the Reichsführer SS had no idea of the crimes his thugs committed in his name.

Yet Johanna Langefeld never gave up her religious faith, said Grete, and found it increasingly hard to reconcile her Lutheran values with the SS order of terror, in which she was forced to play a part: ‘So she came to the camp every morning praying and begging God for strength to stop evil from happening. What a
disastrous confusion
.’

Despite her confusion, however, Langefeld’s life at Ravensbrück in the early spring of 1942 seemed settled. She had made her own apartment, overlooking the lake, a happy home for Herbert, now fourteen, who was attending the local school in Fürstenberg along with other guards’ children, and played with them along the lake shore. And despite her disputes with Max Koegel, Langefeld could tell herself that at least Himmler still recognised her abilities, particularly her skill in keeping 5000 prisoners in line.