If This Is a Woman: Inside Ravensbruck: Hitler's Concentration Camp for Women (41 page)

Friends are now appearing more and more often at the infirmary window. Word has got out that Alfreda from Zamość is in a dreadful state. By a miracle someone hands a spoonful of jam in a mug to Stefania Łotocka and Stefania now tries to persuade Alfreda to eat it, as she remembers her mother telling her it helps stop hiccups. Alfreda refuses the jam. ‘It won’t help me anyway,’ she says. ‘I shall die whether I eat it or not.’

For four days the women are delirious with fever and are regularly taken to the operating theatre, each time for more injections. They cry out for water, with lips so parched they bleed. Eventually Oberheuser orders water to be brought and the women drink thirstily, but it makes their cracked lips sting. The water has vinegar in it, which gives them a greater thirst, as Oberheuser knew it would.

On the fifth day the injections stop. A big commotion erupts in the next room, where Weronika Kraska gives out a terrible moan and makes a loud rattle. Weronika, who few had worried about because she seemed so strong, is complaining of a stiff neck. Dr Schiedlausky is on duty and says there is nothing to be done for her, so the ward is shut down for the night.

Jadwiga Kamińska hops into the other room and returns to report that Weronika looks strangely stiff and horrible. The code on her leg is E11. Jadwiga and some of the stronger ones are beginning to realise that the codes must specify a bacterium of some sort, and some have been given a stronger dose than others. A stiff neck could mean tetanus, which will kill Weronika, although she is still fighting it.

By morning Weronika is dying. She knows it herself. She can barely speak and water has to be poured into her locked jaw. Summoning a last ounce of strength, she manages to utter words through clenched teeth about her two small children. As her words fade, there is a harsh rattle in her throat and her face contorts. She gives out a final, terrible scream, unlike anything human that anyone has heard. Her face twists in a fearsome grimace and her head coils around on her stiffened neck.

Gerda Quernheim runs in with a needle, and inserts it, gently, releasing Weronika from her misery. Her face softens and the tension in her body eases swiftly. The hospital falls silent.

News of Weronika’s death spreads fast around the Polish blocks, while inside the
Revier
the girls are now worrying about Alfreda Prus, who grows paler by the minute. Her code is K1, and someone says she seems to have gangrene. Still hiccuping, she keeps saying: ‘I’m dying. I’m dying.’

Outside, everyone waits to hear news of Alfreda, and Eugenia Mikulska, who comes from the same town of Zamość, runs to the infirmary window as soon as she can. Before the war she trained as a nurse with Alfreda’s sister. Alfreda turns and sees Eugenia’s face smiling encouragement. The next day Eugenia returns to the window and Alfreda lifts a hand and says: ‘Remember me to our friends in Zamość.’

Soon afterwards Alfreda is taken away for a new incision, and when she is returned to the ward her wound is bleeding heavily. Her straw mattress turns red and a pool of blood collects beneath the bed. A camp nurse seems to take pity and gets a mug of coffee for her from the officers’ mess, but this of course does no good, so the nurse calls Oberheuser. Oberheuser clearly knows that Alfreda is close to death, as she tries to inject her with something to stop the bleeding. The doctors don’t seem to want her to die yet. Perhaps the experiment is not complete.

Complete or not, next morning two nurses come and take Alfreda away. When she is carried out on a stretcher she turns her head towards Stefania, her companion on the next bed, and smiles and says: ‘You see, I told you I was going to die.’

A moment later the others hear more terrible, inhuman screams – this time from Alfreda Prus. So piercing are Alfreda’s screams that other guinea pigs tell each other the whole camp must have heard her die.

Chapter 14

Special Experiments

I
found Zofia Kawińska in her tenth-floor flat overlooking the cranes of Gdansk shipyard. She was one of the second group of victims of Himmler’s sulphonamide experiments. A tiny, bent figure, she walks with difficulty, and has done since the war. I ask if she still suffers pain from the experiments.

‘A little,’ she says, as she offers tea and biscuits.

She stoops to show the scars on the sides of her legs. ‘They put the bacteria in, and glass and bits of wood, and they waited.’ She looks up and fixes me with deep brown eyes, as if trying to see if there is any chance I understand. ‘But I didn’t suffer as much as some. Everyone in Poland came home with wounds.’

Zofia came back to find she had lost her father at Auschwitz. He had been arrested at the same time as her, at their family home in Chełm. ‘The last time I saw him was on the lorry to Lublin Castle. We shared a loaf of bread my mother gave us,’ she says, looking across at the cranes, eyes welling with tears.

Her memories of the camp emerge in a series of sharp images.

She remembers Binz. ‘She had a little dog that she caressed. Binz loved that dog, but liked to beat people. The guards were not educated women.’

She remembers the cold more than the hunger. ‘We made fur gloves for the pilots, but our feet were like blocks of ice. They took our shoes away in the spring.’

And when she talks of the experiments she remembers the smell of rotting legs. ‘We were locked in with it you see, and we couldn’t open the windows. It was worse than the smell of rotting corpses. Our own legs. It was Oberheuser who locked us in, because we weren’t allowed to see the
important doctors. The important doctors didn’t want witnesses because they knew they’d be shot for it.’

‘What was Oberheuser like?’

‘When it started, before we were too sick, I remember she came in and we asked her: “What have you done to our legs? We won’t be able to wear stockings now.”’

‘What did she say?’

‘Nothing. She smiled, a strange smile.’

After we had talked for some time longer, I asked Zofia if she had ever lost her faith in Ravensbrück. She paused and looked away. ‘No. I have no less faith. You see we came to the camp with an iron will to survive.’ And she clenches two tiny fists on the tablecloth and darts another look – again, as if to see if I can understand.

After hesitating a moment, she got up and fetched something to show me: a small silver medallion with an image of Christ. It belonged to a close friend who died at Ravensbrück. Zofia had kept it with her always. In the camp she hid it in a hundred hiding places, burying it in soil, hiding it behind planks in the walls, but she always found it. Even when she left the
Revier
she found it again, hidden somewhere in the block. It was a miracle that she didn’t lose it, she says. ‘It protected me.’

On 7 October 1942 another group of guinea pigs were called up to the infirmary. Maria Plater-Skassa saw autumn leaves falling as she was marched out. Genowefa Kluczek was woken that morning by the Blockova, Marta Baranowska, who climbed up with tears in her eyes to her third-tier bunk bed, saying: ‘Get dressed child. Come with me. Be brave.’ Pelagia Maćkowska still half-believed that the promise of return to Poland if she agreed to the operation might be true. She’d see her husband and sons again. Both had been sent to Auschwitz, as members of the Polish underground.

Everything happened as before. The new guinea pigs lined up, avoiding each other’s eyes, skin earthy grey, brushed with fine down. All delighted in having a bath until one of them started to cry, remembering her children. They were told to parade naked in front of a doctor, probably Rosenthal, who sat on a stretcher with a cigarette in his mouth, surrounded by German nurses. He was paying no attention to them.

As the new patients settled into their beds, they pleaded with Jadwiga Kamińska to tell them what had really happened to their friends Weronika Kraska and Alfreda Prus, but Jadwiga didn’t want to tell them in front of Maria Kuśmierczuk, one of Alfreda’s closest friends, who was lying on one of the beds. Maria, who knew Alfreda from school, had surgery a few days earlier and had the same code as Alfreda – K1 – marked on her leg.

Dr Rosenthal examined Pelagia’s arm for a vein to inject. ‘
Gut
,
gut
,’ he said.

She woke up two days later hallucinating. Her mother’s face was leaning over her, and she shouted out: ‘Why aren’t you helping me mother?’ Her leg was a bluish-black log. As before, the women heard others’ screams before screaming themselves. And as before some of the girls got hiccups and some got stiff necks.

Although procedures were the same, the accounts of this later group suggest that the doctors’ demeanour had changed. Eager at first to work on Professor Gebhardt’s experiments, now they all seemed bored. Observation of the guinea pigs had been left in Dr Oberheuser’s lowly hands.

Oberheuser comes around the wards every morning, sometimes to take blood, but usually for no reason. A camp nurse called ‘the duck’ always accompanies her. The prisoners call her the duck because she waddles, and another is called the rat. The nurses all pull faces at the stink, but Oberheuser ‘seems used to it and just smiles, looking so pleased with herself,’ says Pelagia.

It is the day for dressings again and Stefania Łotocka peeks out from under the sheet and sees the doctors amusing themselves. On the left of the table stands Fischer. In his right hand he has a gleaming metal hook. On the right side stands Oberheuser, holding a large kidney-shaped bowl. She is wearing a white, rather transparent silk blouse, through which her pink underwear can be seen. She has gold bangles on her arms and rings on her fingers. They stand there smiling at each other and Pelagia sees they are flirting.

When Pelagia’s dressings are changed she hears the sound of metal instruments from under the sheet, and she hears Oberheuser saying: ‘
Gleich
,
gleich
’ – ‘Wait, wait.’

Back on the ward, Zofia Kiecol has hiccups and
Kazia Kurowska
, a sturdy country girl, lies unconscious, her grey-black legs swollen to four times their normal size. Maria Kuśmierczuk, Alfreda’s school friend, and the one with the markings Alfreda once had, is also dangerously ill.

To everyone’s surprise this group is suddenly given better food. ‘So the doctors don’t want us to die quite yet,’ someone says. But the smell of food, mixed with the stink of their legs, makes them retch. Zofia vomits and hiccups incessantly. Zofia and Leokadia Kwiecińska, who lie next to each other, are friends from the sewing workshop. Zofia used to ask Leokadia every day: ‘What do you think. Shall we get back to Poland? If only we could get back. Who will look after my girls if I don’t get back?’

Now Leokadia watches the nurses take Zofia away. And they take Kazia too. But Maria Kuśmierczuk, the one with the same K1 code as her friend Alfreda, is still miraculously fending off the infection. Only nine of their
group of twelve remain. ‘But we must hang on,’ someone shouts out. And they look at Maria, who was written off just a few days ago, but is still fighting for her life.

Dziuba Sokulska, the skinny lawyer, is told by Oberheuser that she’ll be better any day, and sure enough she is, and is sent to roll bandages on the other side of the hospital. And Stanisława Jabłońska has new strength too – enough to tell stories to the others, to give them something to think about, apart from rotting flesh.

More friends turn up to visit at the window. Everyone in the camp now calls them
Kaninchen
– rabbits. Those outside pass bits of food or crusts to the Poles who have contacts with the
Revier
, saying, ‘This is for the
Kaninchen
,’ and the gifts are smuggled in. At first the girls tried to discourage the name, but, as rabbits, they are famous. The guards call them rabbits too, so now the prisoners’ vocabulary is official.

It is not only by collecting food that others in the camp can help the rabbits. Prisoners are also collecting information. On bandage-rolling duties, Dziuba Sokulska is in touch with a Polish doctor, Zofia Mączka, from Kraków, who works in the
Revier
as a radiologist. Like all the prisoner nurses and doctors, Zofia is banned from the experiment wards, but she
spies through keyholes
, listens at doors and watches through windows, gathering information that she passes on to Dziuba. The doctors come and go in their cars from Hohenlychen. Each time they come they bring bacteria in little vials, which are labelled, and which Zofia sees later, lying around. She sees tubes of paper, covered with pus, which are used to insert the bacteria into wounds, and this tells her which patient had which dose.

Blood and urine samples are analysed in the lab by medical students, some of them Polish prisoners, who pass on what they learn. With all this information, Zofia learns that Weronika Kraska was infected with a lethal dose of tetanus well before she died, and that Alfreda and Kazimiera Kurowska were infected with gas gangrene bacteria in such massive quantities that their bodies could not put up a defence.

Zofia is able to monitor Kazia Kurowska’s death through a keyhole over several days, as the gas gangrene destroys her right leg and begins to infect the entire right side of her body. In the end the nurse, Gerda Quernheim, ends Kazia’s life with a morphine overdose.

Some weeks after the operations began, Zofia Mączka found a way to keep records, which she hid somehow with the help of friends in the sewing workshop. One day she would use the records to convict the murderers, she told Dziuba. Dziuba wanted to tell the world now, to stop the evil, but Zofia saw no chance of that. Soon after this, however, Maria Bielicka was presented
with just such a chance. Maria had been rejected as a rabbit and was still working in the bookbinding workshop in the autumn of 1942. The workshop was next door to the
Effektenkammer
where three Czech girls worked, and they and Maria Bielicka became friends.

Maria learned that the Czechs often sent the clothes of executed prisoners back to their families. The system was always the same. The clothes were brought down from the storage and packed up in a box, which was sealed by the SS guards. The guards never checked, but just looked at the label on the box and sent it off. The bereaved family received a separate letter from the commandant that informed them their daughter had died of natural causes.