If This Is a Woman: Inside Ravensbruck: Hitler's Concentration Camp for Women (46 page)

As children, she and her younger brother Wiesław used to read the adventure stories of the Polish writer Kornel Makuszyński. A favourite was
The Demon of the Seventh Form
, in which the hero sent information in letters, concealed in code. The key was the word made up by the first letter of each line. Krysia’s idea was to make a reference to Makuszyński in her next official letter home. The family were bound to smell a rat, and her brother would get the hint.

The girls agreed that the plan might work. All four would write each letter together and nobody outside the group must know. When the next day came for an official letter home, they found a hiding space in the attic of their
block; the space was already used by smokers who organised cigarettes from the stores. Here they prepared their first secret letter.

First they wrote their visible sentences in German, and in them Krysia reminded Wiesław how they used to admire the ingenuity of
The Demon of the Seventh Form
. She arranged the lines in the letter so that the first letters of each line made the words ‘
list moczem
’ – ‘letter written in urine’. Then dipping a stick in urine, she wrote in the margins: ‘We have decided to tell you the whole truth.’

The first secret letter was to be brief, so there followed just a few sentences about the medical experiments. At the end, Krysia wrote, ‘More letters will follow’ and gave a code word for the family to use in their next official reply, to show they had received the secret message. The first letter went off, but part of the code that signalled the secret contents was rubbed out somehow by the time it reached Krysia’s family, so the trick very nearly failed.

Wiesław Czyż, Krysia’s younger brother, remembers well the arrival of the first secret letter at their home in Lublin. As always when a letter arrived from his sister, his father, Tomasz, read the contents out loud to Wiesław, then aged fifteen, and his mother Maria. Till now the family had tried to read between the official lines for any hint about Krysia’s well-being, but the formal language was always the same. Then one day in early 1943 a letter mentioned a story by Makuszyński.
‘It seemed out of context,’
says Wiesław. ‘But as I was still very young the story was fresh in my memory, and straight away I remembered that the high point was a tale of children sending secret messages hidden in texts. So I quickly guessed what she was trying to tell us. Krystyna was a quiet girl but smart, and always full of bright ideas.’

Wiesław and his parents deciphered the code, but due to the missing letters they read the instruction as
list mocz
– wet the letter – instead of
list moczem
– letter in urine. So the family sprinkled water on the letter, which revealed the secret writing, but only in time to decipher it and then it disappeared. Guessing their mistake, they rushed out and took the letter to a trusted chemist to ask how to reveal text written in urine. He told them to apply a hot iron. This they did and the words appeared again.

‘It was an extraordinary thing to get this information from my sister straight from a concentration camp,’ said Wiesław. ‘There were only three people at this operation with the iron, my mother, father and me. You are speaking to the only living witness.’

I asked if the family were worried by the risks Krysia was taking.

‘Yes,’ said Wiesław, ‘but nobody questioned it. We knew she was doing what she had to do – keeping up her resistance. It was instinctive. It was what we all did. It’s hard for you to understand today, but you see, resistance was all that kept us going at that time. We were living under a cruel and brutal power. The only thing that mattered to us was mutiny.’

After this first letter, more arrived, packed with more information about the camp, though all these years later Wiesław could not remember the details. He did recall that their mother, as a major in the Lublin ‘Home Army’, was able to pass on the reports to her underground chiefs in Lublin: ‘By sending the messages Krystyna knew that she would immediately be linked up to the wider Polish resistance network because of her own mother.’

Wiesław knew that the commanders in Lublin had sent the information on by signal to stations in Warsaw, who in turn passed it on to stations in Sweden, from where, the family hoped, the messages might even reach the Polish government in exile in London, though whether this ever happened, nobody had ever found out.

Was Krystyna particularly courageous? Not especially, said Wiesław.

She was just a normal girl like the others. The only thing you might say about Krystyna was that she had a special innocence. You see she was particularly young. At the time of her arrest all she had known about was her schoolwork, and her patriotism. Her friends were the same. But she was younger somehow. More innocent.

His sister never talked about the letters after the war: ‘When Krysia returned home in 1945, all she wanted to do was to forget, and to get back to school. She refused to speak about the camp ever again.’

When I spoke to Wiesław in 2008, Krysia was still alive and living with her daughter, Maria, in Lublin. Maria might know where the letters were, thought Wiesław, but Krysia herself had now lost her memory and was unable to talk.

Krysia’s daughter, Maria Wilgat, said she knew nothing of the surviving letters and knew little about the camp, as after the war Krysia had never spoken of it to her either. But Maria did offer to help. Twenty years after the war her mother had agreed to write an essay about the secret writing, as it was special to her. ‘
This was the only story
she wished to tell,’ said Maria, and she sent me a copy of the essay.

The letter writing began
, wrote Krysia in her essay, in order to tell the world of ‘the shameful acts of the German doctors’ and in the hope that if the world spoke out about it, the Germans might halt their crimes. ‘Several of us died as a result of these operations, many were crippled for life and all of us, regardless of the degree of damage done to our health, suffered mental torture that cannot be forgotten.’

From the start the project was undertaken with the utmost seriousness.

After we received a sign from my family that the first secret letter had been deciphered this dangerous game absorbed us completely. We began to
work on improving and expanding our correspondence. The first improvement we made was to stop writing between the lines. Instead we used the inside of the envelopes of the camp letters. This way we gained some extra space, because we could write more densely on clean paper. It was also safer. In the first period of our correspondence we put a successive number on each envelope so that our families in Poland could know if they were receiving all the letters we had written.

In order to send longer letters, the girls had the idea of sending part of each letter to each of the four families, who had to meet in secret to join them up and read them. A sign was given to show what had been done. These joint letters were ‘less personal’, as they were to be read out to other families. All four agreed the facts that went in and the letters were usually composed by at least two people. The system was also improved by asking the families to conceal their ‘receipt’ signs in the food parcels they were now sending – a thread of a certain colour left in the package, or the number of a received letter inscribed on a food tin.

‘Once we realised what the methods in the camp were for checking food parcels [SS women inspected them in front of the prisoners] we even got secret notes from our families, usually concealed in toothpaste tubes. This accounted for the frequent reference to toothpaste in our letters.’

Later the girls received food packed in pages of books. ‘In this way our families managed to smuggle to us
Pan Tadeusz
and Zeromski’s
Forest Echoes
,’ said Krysia. After a while the group expanded, adding four more who included Dziuba Sokulska, the Lublin lawyer, and the young Warsaw student Wojciecha Buraczyńska. There was a further group who knew about the letter-writing and assisted, but did not write letters themselves.

For Krysia the letter-writing became a mission to which she now devoted herself, planning what and where to write and how to divide the letters, devising signs and working out how to hide the evidence before climbing into the attic late at night and silently squatting to collect the urine – she doesn’t offer details – and to write. Furthermore, the facts had to be as accurate as possible, checked and double-checked, as this was first-hand evidence of atrocity; no time or space was wasted complaining about conditions or giving general descriptions of the camp.

In her essay, Krysia quotes from her own letters, apologising to readers for failing in some places to include all names, or getting them in the wrong order. ‘There was room only for the briefest description of operations,’ she explains. She also apologises for the fact that some of the women named in the letters as alive were already dead, but this was because they were executed a short while after the letter was written. Looking back at her
own letters, Krysia is struck by their childlike qualities. ‘We must remember that they were written by young girls. Our age and lack of perspective accounts for the way the events are described and for the interpretation of the facts.’

She has even censored the letters she chooses as illustrations for the essay, to remove ‘irrelevant detail’ or ‘optimistic postscripts’. These were little phrases inserted to give a positive view of the camp – ‘we wanted to cheer up our parents after reading the contents of the letters, which brought such dreadful news’. Other bits and pieces she quoted had also been self-censored, and it was obvious from the essay that somewhere most of the original letters must have been preserved.

In 2010 Krysia’s daughter, Maria Wilgat, told me that her mother was now critically ill, with little time to live. So Maria had been spending more time in her mother’s house and had taken the chance to look around. She had discovered secret letters and other documents hidden in her grandmother’s old rolling pin, and in a carved-out hole in a chopping board. When we met again Maria produced the secret letters – all twenty-seven of them, some just crumbling parchment, barely legible, and in various shapes, including triangular. Some were obviously the backs of envelopes and others had words round the edge of other words. All were lovingly preserved.

The earliest letters were mostly long lists of names of the executed women and of those operated upon, some with black crosses against them, which the four families meeting in Lublin must have pored over, before passing on bad news. There were also detailed accounts of operations, dates and more names. On 24 March Krysia wrote:

Up to January 16th 1943, 70 persons were operated on altogether. Out of this number 56 were from the Lublin September transport, 36 of these operations began with infection (3 without incision) and 20 bone operations. In bone operations, each incision is opened again. No more new operations since Jan 15
.

Then follows an almost complete list of surgery dates, with the women’s camp numbers: ‘Infection operations August 1st 1942: Wojtasik Wanda 7709, Gnaś Maria 7883, Zielonka Maria 7771 …’ Here too are the names of the doctors, who at that very moment were still operating and hiding behind sheets.

Apart from Professor Gebhardt, operations are also performed by his two assistants, Fischer and Stumpfegger
.

As a sign that you have read this letter, send me a blue thread in a parcel …

You can send a note hidden in the double bottom of a tin. Write at least once, describe the political situation. I am waiting for that! Message continued in letters from Wanda and Janina Iwańska
.

In several letters Krysia writes how eager she is to know if their messages are reaching London and the rest of the world.

Reading on we found some of the ‘silly postscripts’ Krysia had written to cheer up her parents. ‘We are not doing badly. We are all together,’ she wrote in one letter. ‘All is fine with us. We get up early so I am grateful to papa that from childhood he got us used to that.’ In another letter: ‘We have the chance to wash and the cold water is healthy and really quite pleasant.’

Later, reading the letters more carefully, I found several that Krysia didn’t mention in her essay. One begins:

Mama dear, from yesterday I am depressed and I cannot stand it, so I have to write to you my thoughts and imagine we are close and that I can feel you near to me. I feel how nice it is and I start to cry. Sometimes it is so bad I have to talk to you in my head or write, or I have to start thinking about something else because otherwise I collapse
.

Another letter, the date of which has faded but which was probably written at the end of March or in early April, has an entirely different tone; it talks of how the first real camp protest began: ‘The first protest against the lawless acts … On March 12th 1943 five healthy women were again taken for operations. They put up resistance. No physical force used against them. One of them, Zofia [Dziuba] Sokulska strenuously protested.’

Krysia had told her parents in an earlier letter that since 15 January 1943 ‘nobody has been taken for an operation’, but by the time they received that letter, the information was already out of date. In the first days of March the
Revier
was said to be preparing for more operations, and anger reached boiling point again. Five women already cut open once or twice were recalled, among them Dziuba Sokulska.

Events in Block 15 unfolded fast. As Wanda Wojtasik put it later: ‘Suddenly we had the suicidal courage of those who knew they could act as they chose today, because they would be dead tomorrow. Wordlessly we all reached the same conclusion at the same moment: enough was enough.’ Dziuba, once again, made the first stand. Summoned to the
Revier
, she asked Dr Oberheuser to explain the reason for operations on healthy prisoners. Oberheuser ignored her. Dziuba now told her that she had had two operations and would refuse a third. She walked out of the sickbay and back to the block, where word had already arrived of what she had done and there was great excitement at her courage.