If This Is a Woman: Inside Ravensbruck: Hitler's Concentration Camp for Women (51 page)

As their quarantine time drew to an end and the women tried to see beyond the wire, they noticed a new building rising behind the wall: a giant chimney. They saw how a wagon, pulled by six women, would pass by each morning piled high with bodies. And they saw new arrivals marched towards nearby quarantine blocks. They made up nicknames for the guards, ‘black ravens’ who all had ‘
extremely beautiful clothes
’ with belts and shoes ‘of finest leather’. One guard in particular would come up to the block to shout at them. Lyuba Konnikova, ‘the fiery one’, called this guard ‘the beautiful blonde’.

Prisoners outside still peered towards the Soviet block and saw the shorn heads of the women, ‘
always held high
’. Sometimes they heard them singing. Looking back later many survivors would say – in fact many would insist – that the Red Army women wore uniform while in the camp. Perhaps the growing disorder outside simply served to emphasise the order of the Red Army when they first arrived.

The winter of 1942–3 was hard and long, leaving the women exhausted and diseased. Early in the year longer shifts were instituted. On 20 January 1943 Richard Glücks, the new chief of Himmler’s camp administration office, wrote to all commandants requiring them to ‘exhaust every opportunity to maintain the prisoners’ ability to work’. The dearth of German labourers had reached crisis point. Although slaves were being herded from the East, they were not enough. Even Ravensbrück prisoners deemed too old or sick to work were now to be used to knit socks for soldiers.

Himmler had promised industrial chiefs that he could fill the shortfall in labour with concentration-camp workers. A network of new satellite camps was planned, each with a factory where prisoners would work.

Ravensbrück, designed originally for 3000, now held 18,000 women, and
more were arriving every day
. Not only did they come from the East, but numbers from the West were mounting too. In April 250 Frenchwomen arrived and were given numbers in the 19000s.

More barracks went up, but no amount of building could keep pace; each time more women arrived everyone was packed tighter. Where sand wore away, cinders were spread on the walkways. A new painting gang was formed and shabby blocks painted green. The sewage system overflowed, and a new prisoners’ plumbing gang was formed, as well as a new delousing gang. All over the camp, placards declared ‘Lice = Death’. Prisoners were regularly forced to stand outside naked, even in the snow, while clothes and blankets were burned and blocks fumigated with gas.

When Langefeld was sacked,
her favoured Blockovas
– experienced hands, who knew how to keep control – were thrown in the bunker, including Grete
Buber-Neumann, who was given several weeks’ ‘dark arrest’. With these women gone, Ramdohr, the Gestapo chief, asserted his own form of control by posting spies to penetrate deep inside the barracks. According to the German communist Maria Apfelkammer, Ramdohr would walk straight into a block and ask: ‘Is anyone interested in their freedom?’, at which point one or two women would break ranks and follow him – his new
Lagerspitzel
(camp spies). ‘Then we never spoke to them again,’ said Maria.

These new
Spitzel
would never be posted back to their own block, however; instead they’d be sent to another and do their spying there. Prisoners working in the camp office would know who the spies were, as they’d have to adjust the paperwork. They’d try and warn women in the new block, but the camp offices were penetrated too, so this was dangerous.
Spitzel
informed on people for anything, particularly organising. With the growing overcrowding, organising thrived, as there were shortages of everything – straw for mattresses, bowls for soup, and even clothes.

By early summer 1943 the camp had entirely run out of striped prison clothes. Dead women’s clothes replaced them. Each week trucks arrived from Auschwitz delivering the clothes of the Jews, removed before they entered the gas chambers. These garments were given to new Ravensbrück arrivals, so that when Grete Buber-Neumann eventually emerged from the bunker she noticed prisoners ‘
strolling up and down
the camp streets dressed in coloured clothes of all kinds and not in stripes. The Gypsies in particular were as bright as tropical birds, with all sorts of coloured scraps.’ She also noticed that ‘the regulation step the SS had taken so much trouble to teach was disappearing too’.

For the prisoners the worst effect of overcrowding was the increased torture of
Appell
. Whereas once they rose at 6, now it had to be at 4 just to get through the count, which could last three hours or more. And such was the size of the camp that the new chief guard would often appear down the Lagerstrasse on a bicycle, black cape billowing behind her. This was the ‘
beautiful beast
’. The Soviets would soon find out her name was Dorothea Binz.

At about the time of her promotion,
Binz paid a visit
to her home village of Altglobsow driving a horse and carriage. The villager Ilse Halter remembers her appearing on the main street, her black cape flaring out behind her, with a dog and a whip. ‘She thought she was very grand,’ said Ilse. ‘I think she came back to show us all how well she had done. People were scared of her by now.’

‘Why were you scared?’ I asked.

‘Because they all did such terrible things up there,’ and Ilse paused. ‘You know what they did? You have read about it? They threw babies into the air to shoot them’ – she made a throwing gesture with her arms.

I asked where Ilse had heard that. Did she believe it?

‘I think so,’ she said. ‘Oh yes, I believe it.’

In mid-April 1943 the wire around the Red Army block was taken down and the women were marched outside for their first
Appell
. ‘
It was 4 a.m.
It had been snowing. We lined up outside in ranks of ten and tried to stand close to each other like a flock of sheep does in cold weather,’ wrote Tamara Limakhina, one of Antonina’s correspondents.

The Soviet women were then lined up again for the labour-gang selections, and feared they might be posted to Siemens to do munitions work, but like all newcomers before them, they were sent to the
Sandgrube
. If these Soviets were to be put to useful work, their strength and spirit must first be broken, and the best place for that was the sandpit. On the first day Nina Kharlamova slipped and her trolley, full of wet sand, stuck in the mud and tipped over, so a guard set about her with a truncheon until she filled the trolley again. But it again stuck and tipped over, and this time Nina was kicked and beaten to the ground.

The Soviet women worked longer shifts than other prisoners and were not allowed to enter their block until after the evening
Appell
, so that after twelve hours’ labour they had to
stand outside in the cold and rain
until after nightfall, their wet clothes clinging to them.

When they were let back in, Klemm and the poet Alexandra Sokova were waiting for them. As older prisoners, they had been put to work as knitters inside the block. Yevgenia Lazarevna found scraps of rag to wrap Nina’s sores and blisters, and told the women to look out for each other: ‘Don’t put yourselves in danger. Look for small things you can do to help us all. If a guard is eating breakfast, steal a newspaper and bring it back.’ And she told them not to believe the Germans when they told them they had lost the battle of Stalingrad. ‘She knew before any of us that we won,’ said Nina Kharlamova.

The Red Army doctors were left toiling in the sandpit for many weeks, but some of the other Soviet women were soon sent to the sewing shops, where they encountered Gustav Binder, whom they called the Giraffe. ‘
Suddenly from machine to machine
there is a whisper: “Giraffe is coming,” and every woman now trembles, turns pale, and shivers low over her machine,’ wrote Tamara Limakhina, recalling the scene for Antonina Nikiforova.

There is complete silence. You can only hear the noise of the machines. Then on the threshold emerges this tall SS with the long neck of a giraffe. Having slowly scrutinised all the working women he goes to the table where there is a pile of finished items and he takes a pair of trousers and starts scrutinising them and all the women’s hearts are beating like a bird’s
in a cage and in everybody’s head there is a thought: now he is going to beat up someone. Then he screams ‘
Kolonnenführerin
[squad leader], what’s that, what’s that?’ pointing to the item.

A little woman with a pale, sickly face, slowly but steadily, without betraying her fear, is moving towards the table. Nobody can protect her. Everybody knows she is going to be beaten up. Maybe until she is half dead. ‘What’s that?’ And he stares with this face red from hate into the face of the woman. ‘What’s that?’ and he starts beating her with hands and with boots with metal studs. She tries to protect her face and save herself, but this enrages this beast even more, and red from rage and with foam on mouth he incessantly beats her on her back, face and chest. The woman is suffocating like a corpse and she is lying on the floor and bleeding from her nose and mouth and then he grabs her stool and by this time nobody was sewing any longer. Everyone was standing and with hate and terror stared at this beating up. In their heart there were tears of hate and impotence and humiliation and inner pain. And then there was a scream from the floor, a heart-breaking scream from the woman who could not resist any longer, and the beast, completely startled, stops and puts the stool down. He looks around at everyone scrutinising, gives her a last kick and then shouts: ‘
Arbeit schnell
.’ And leaves. Those were the frequent scenes. And we, the girls who fought at Stalingrad, could only look on.

Often Binz appeared outside the sewing workshop as the women queued to leave and lashed out at them – particularly the Red Army women – shouting: ‘Russian swine, you march your Russian march, now you march for us, you Russian pigs.’ One day she lashed out at Ilena Barsukova, the Odessa nurse. ‘She hit me over the head and back but I didn’t cry. I forced myself not to cry – not there outside the workshop. Then when I returned to the block Yevgenia Lazarevna was waiting for me. She had already been told. She knew. And as soon as I saw her, I started crying. And then everyone started crying. She cried too.
^*
She told me in future to avoid the SS eyes. And then we got together in a group and planned how to do small pieces of sabotage by sewing up openings in the arms or cutting away an elastic so the garment would tear but in a way nobody would notice, which was easy with the white camouflage coats.’

Soon after that, one of the Moscow family wrote a poem about Binz. Anna Stekolnikova kept a copy, and she pulled it out of a drawer in her tiny flat at the top of a Moscow apartment block, where it had been hidden for
seventy years. Anna said the poem was written by a friend called Lydia Gradzilowa, and she read it out.

‘A beautiful blonde’

You are so beautiful,

With shining blue eyes and locks of hair,

But if we could, we would tear the insides of your soul

And strangle your bloodthirsty heart.

Do you remember the girl you were whipping, Jacqueline?

How you stamped on Wanda, the Polish girl?

How you tortured the Russian girl Veronicka? You and the dog.

I asked Anna if Binz was actually called the Beautiful Blonde in the camp, and she said: ‘Beautiful bitch, more like. But she was beautiful – tall and elegant.’

‘Was she a sadist?’

‘We knew she hated us Russians. She treated Ukrainians differently, but if you were Russian you’d had it. Yes, I think she was a sadist, a real sadist. Her eyes almost shone when she beat people.’

One day, however, Binz spared Anna’s life by calling off her dog.

I’d been digging sand at the bottom of the lake and we were coming back to the camp in ranks of five and someone asked me a question and my lips moved. Binz saw and shouted my camp number and called me out to stand on the little mound outside the hospital for several hours. It was always windy there and terribly cold, so the girls in my barracks kept food for me, but then Binz came over with her dog and the dog bounded up at me with its paws and knocked me over. And I fell and it began to go for me but Binz pulled it back. It was as if she had pity on me and she shouted to me: ‘
Weg
’ – on your way. Soon after the dog died, and Binz buried it right there where it died in front of a block and planted the grave with flowers.

Olga Golovina shook hands with a young woman’s strength, then told more stories about Binz, and the Moscow family.

‘In the block we always stuck together, but it was hard,’ she said, tipping cigarette ash onto a dusty pot plant. Her voice was husky, her hair blonde and permed. Olga was in intelligence. Her mission was to drop by parachute behind German lines. She had never parachuted before and had no training. To lessen the impact on landing she had bark strapped to her feet. She pulled out photographs of Red Army friends. ‘In the block we all had nicknames. I was Pushkin because of my curly hair. And then there was the Cat, and
Vera Samoilova was the Bear, because she was grumpy. Alexandra Sokova was
Graf
[count], because for some reason she’d come wearing trousers and because she was so serious. We met in the evenings.’

Olga’s job at one point was to haul the giant
Kesselkolonne
(soup wagon) from the kitchen to the block. One day as they struggled the cart tipped over and poured boiling coffee over her friend Nadia’s legs, scalding the skin, but Nadia kept on walking all the way to the block, knowing that if Binz heard they’d all be in the bunker. On another occasion she and the other girls pushed the wagon into a pile of bodies, stacked like logs. ‘And they all fell down.’

She mentioned Lyusya Malygina: ‘You must write about Lyusya – so beautiful and brave, Lyusya saved many lives. She worked in the hospital and swapped names to save us from the death lists.’ Did Olga know about the Simferopol trial, I asked, referring to the trial in which Lyusya Malygina and others were accused of collaboration by Stalin’s secret police. She nodded, and asked me what I knew.