If This Is a Woman: Inside Ravensbruck: Hitler's Concentration Camp for Women (6 page)

Like most small German towns, Fürstenberg had suffered badly in the slump, so the arrival of a concentration camp meant jobs and trade. The fact that the prisoners were women was not controversial. Valesca Kaper, the middle-aged wife of a shopkeeper, was an effective leader of the local
Frauenschaft
(Nazi women’s group) who often lectured women on the evils of make-up, smoking and alcohol, and explained the burden that ‘asocials’ placed on the state. Josef Goebbels even made a speech in Fürstenberg telling the townspeople: ‘If the family is the nation’s source of strength, the woman is its core and centre.’

In the spring of 1939, as the date of the camp opening came nearer, women were urged to ‘serve on the home front’ – which included working as concentration camp guards, but nothing official was said about recruitment; in fact, nothing official was said about the camp at all. Only a small reference in the
Forest News
to ‘an accident near the large construction site’ provided a hint that the concentration camp was even being built.

In early May a concert of music by Haydn and Mozart was performed and the local Gestapo hosted a sporting event of shooting and grenade-throwing.
The cinema showed a romantic comedy. The paper reported that, after a hard winter, charitable donations were sought and bankruptcy notices appeared.

All this time, the lock on the river was opening constantly for barges bringing materials and the camp wall became easily visible from the town side of the lake. Several local women put their names down for a job, including Margarete Mewes, a housemaid and young mother. On the first Sunday of May Fürstenberg held its traditional Mother’s Day celebrations. Frau Kaper handed out Mother Crosses to those who had borne more than four children, thereby answering Hitler’s call to multiply the Aryan gene.

On 15 May
, a bright sunny morning, several blue buses drove through the town and turned towards the ‘construction site’. Just before dawn that day the same blue buses had pulled up in front of the gates of Lichtenburg Castle, 300 miles to the south. Moments later female figures streamed out over the castle drawbridge, clutching little bags, and climbed into the vehicles. It was a clear night, but inside the buses it was quite dark. No one was sorry to see the black, hulking fortress disappear behind them into the darkness, though none had any idea what awaited them.

Some of the women dared to hope that the journey would lead them somewhere better, and a journey – any journey – was itself a taste of freedom, but the political prisoners warned there was no chance of anything better. Hitler’s next advance into Czechoslovakia was only a matter of time. Husbands, brothers, fathers, sons were dying faster than ever in Buchenwald, Sachsenhausen and Dachau. Several women carried official notifications of such deaths in their bags, along with pictures of children and packages of letters.

Jewish women here thought of those rounded up in the Kristallnacht pogrom.
^*
Yet paradoxically, precisely because they were Jewish, these women had more reason to hope at that moment than many others. The horror of Kristallnacht six months previously had traumatised German Jews and shocked the watching world, not into intervention, but into offering more visas to those now desperate to flee. The Nazis were encouraging Jewish flight so that they could snatch the property and assets of the leavers. Six months after the November pogroms more than 100,000 German Jews had emigrated, and many more were still waiting for papers to do the same.

Jews in prisons and camps had learned that they could emigrate too as long as they had proof of a visa and funds for travel. Amongst those hoping to receive their papers soon was Olga Benario. Although her own mother was estranged, Olga’s Brazilian mother-in-law, Leocadia, as well as Carlos
Prestes’s sister Ligia, had been working tirelessly on Olga’s case ever since securing the release of her baby Anita.

Just before leaving Lichtenburg, Olga had written to Carlos in his Brazilian jail. ‘Spring has finally arrived and the light green tips of the trees are looking inquisitively over the tops of our prison yard. More than ever I wish for a little sun, for beauty and luck. Will the day come that brings us together with Anita-Leocadia, the three of us in happiness? Forgive those thoughts, I know I have to be patient.’

As dawn broke over the Mecklenburg countryside, sunlight streamed through the slits in the tarpaulin, and the prisoners’ spirits rose. The Austrians sang. When the buses neared Ravensbrück it was midday and stifling hot. The women were gasping for air. The buses turned off the road and stopped. Doors swung open and those in front looked out on a shimmering lake. The scent of the pine forest filled the bus. A German communist, Lisa Ullrich, noticed ‘
a sparsely populated
hamlet situated at a small idyllic sea surrounded by a crown of dark spruce forest’.

The hearts of the women ‘leapt for joy’, Lisa recalled, but before all the coaches had drawn to a halt came screaming, yelling and a cracking of whips and barking of dogs. ‘A stream of orders and insults greeted us as we began to descend. Hordes of women appeared through the trees – guards in skirts, blouses and caps, holding whips, some with yelping dogs rushing at the buses through the trees.’

As the prisoners stepped down several collapsed, and those that stooped to help them were knocked flat themselves by hounds or lashed with a whip. They didn’t know it yet, but it was a camp rule that helping another was an offence. ‘Bitches, dirty cow, get on your feet. Lazy bitch.’ Another rule was that prisoners always lined up in fives. ‘
Achtung, Achtung
. Ranks of five. Hands by your sides.’

Commands echoed through the trees as stragglers were kicked by jackboots. Stiff with terror, all eyes fixed on the sandy ground, the women did their utmost not to be noticed. They avoided each other’s gaze. Some were whimpering. Another crack of a whip and there was total silence.

The well-rehearsed SS routine had served its purpose – causing maximum terror at the moment of arrival. Anyone who had thought of resisting was from now on subdued. The ritual had been performed hundreds of times at male concentration camps, and now it was being enacted for the first time on the banks of the Schwedtsee. It would be worse for those who arrived later, in the dead of night, or in the snow, understanding nothing of the language. But all Ravensbrück survivors would remember the trauma of their arrival; all would recall their own silence.

*

This first group
stands silent in the heat for perhaps two hours. As the count begins, Maria Zeh, from Stuttgart, looks up and sees the
colza rapeseed
is in blossom. She is slapped across the face. ‘
Die Nase nach vorne!
’ shouts a guard – Nose to the front.

The women are counted again and then again – another lesson to learn: if anyone moves out of line, collapses, or if the counting goes wrong, it starts all over. ‘And before we march a paper is handed to the head guard with the tally,’ recalls Lisa Ullrich. The head guard is Johanna Langefeld. She has been standing apart, and now checks the figures. She signals for the women to march on. The stout figure of Max Koegel is there too.

Heaving forward, the prisoners pass half-built villas to their left, but they are only dimly aware of their surroundings. They come into a vast clearing where every tree and blade of grass has been razed, leaving sand and swamp. In this wasteland stands a massive grey wall. The women pass through a gateway and realise they have entered the new camp.

‘
Achtung, Achtung
, ranks of five.’ They are standing on a desolate square of sand, marked out as a parade ground. They smell new wood and fresh paint. Stark wooden barracks are positioned all around. Some notice beds of red flowers. The sun beats down. The gate closes behind them.

Chapter 2

Sandgrube

‘H
ands by your sides. Ranks of five. Eyes ahead.’ In groups, the women prisoners are marched forward towards a new building to the right of the gate where the next ritual starts: the bath. The first group enters and sees tables with guards behind them and piles of striped clothes. Everything must come off. Women start to strip. ‘
Schnell, schnell
.’ Some stand there, sanitary straps and towels around their middles, and they look at the guards who shout back: ‘Everything off.’ And everything comes off, to be thrown into large brown paper bags, along with all clothes and all possessions. The prisoners give everything up: last letters, photographs of children, embroidered handkerchiefs, knitted hats, little baskets, poems, combs. ‘Until there is nothing left.’ Wedding rings too.

Stark naked, the women are staring at their feet again, but some look up and shriek to see that male SS officers have been present all along, standing and staring. They laugh and shout insults when they see the women’s humiliation.

Then the shavers come, and some of the women are pushed aside. ‘
Beeilt euch
,
beeilt euch!
’ – Get a move on – and the selected women’s hair is shaved off close to the scalp. Then another woman comes through. She makes the same women stand with their legs apart and shaves their pubic hair.

Within hours of their arrival, on 15 May 1939, the first of the 867 prisoners to be transferred from Lichtenburg to Ravensbrück had been stripped, washed, checked for lice, and in many cases shaved, as the
Oberaufseherin
would allow no vermin here. The prisoners were then issued new camp
clothes: blue and white striped cotton dresses and jackets, a white headscarf, socks and rough wooden shoes, like clogs.

Each was given a number, printed on a small white piece of cloth. It matched the number they were given on arrival at Lichtenburg – from 1 to 867. The women were also given a coloured triangle made of felt. They were handed a needle and thread and told to sew these on to the left shoulder of their jackets. The triangle indicated which category the prisoner had been placed in: black for ‘asocials’ – prostitute, beggar, petty criminal, lesbian; green for habitual criminals; red for political prisoners; lilac for Jehovah’s Witnesses; yellow for Jews. The Jewish women were subdivided, depending on the reason for arrest. All Jews wore a yellow triangle, but those noted as ‘
Pol. Jude
’ – arrested for political crimes – wore their yellow triangle on a red background. The political Jews included the largest category, those arrested for
Rassenschande
, relations with a non-Jew; of these there were ninety-seven. Those Jews arrested as asocials wore their yellow triangle on a black background.

When numbers and triangles had been sewn on, the tannoy system screamed a siren as the women lined up again in the Appellplatz, before being marched, by category, to separate blocks, led by their
Blockführer
, block guard. The Jews were taken to the ‘
Judenblock
’, except for Olga Benario, who was taken the other way.

Inside the blocks everyone was allocated a bunk bed, a bowl, a plate, an aluminium cup, a knife, fork and spoon, as well as a small cloth for drying and polishing the utensils. Any fuzz on the implements would mean a report to Langefeld, who had given instructions on exactly how the polishing should be done. As agreed under the camp
Lagerordnung
, Langefeld had secured control over ‘feminine matters’, which included sole authority over the living blocks; Koegel and his
men were not allowed
inside them unless accompanied by a female guard.

For washing, everyone was given a toothbrush, tooth mug, nugget of soap and small towel. Any item lost would incur ‘a report’ to the
Oberaufseherin
. Each woman was allocated a tiny shelf to keep her items on; anything misplaced meant ‘a report’.

A mass of rules governed making the bed. It had to be done ‘Prussian style’, as required in all the camps, but on this Langefeld had her own particular instructions too: pillows to be puffed out so that corners pointed at right angles with the bed; the mattress to lie absolutely flat, which was impossible, as it was made of wood chips.

All the women recalled that particular precision was required when folding the blue and white checked blanket on the top. ‘
The blanket
had to be laid just over the pillow and arranged so it ran along the edge of the bed, with its line of checks absolutely straight,’ recalled Fritzi Jaroslavsky, an Austrian
prisoner, nervously folding the edge of a tablecloth as she spoke. ‘Even an inch overlapping the mattress meant the guard would come in shouting “Lazy cow, stupid bitch” and kicking or hitting you and shouting “Report!”’

Worst of all were the rules of the
Appell
, the roll-call. At 5 a.m. a siren woke the camp, and prisoners were marched outside their blocks to line up in ranks of five, hands by their sides, standing erect in military fashion while the count took place. Even in these early days it took as long as half an hour to get the numbers right, and at 5 a.m. a cold wind blew off the Schwedtsee, cutting through cotton clothes. ‘
Achtung! Achtung!
Hands by your sides, ranks of fives.’ Langefeld sometimes took
Appell
in person, but usually left the job to her deputy, Emma Zimmer, who had also come from Lichtenburg. Fifty-one-year-old Zimmer, who had a ‘loose wrist’ – she liked to slap – walked up and down the ranks carrying a large document file, with which she would beat inmates about the head at the slightest movement or sound. Sometimes, usually when drunk, Zimmer – nicknamed ‘Aunt Emma’ by the prisoners – lashed out with her jackboots too.

Langefeld never hit or kicked, though she would sometimes slap a woman sharply across the face, particularly while hearing ‘the report’. The offending prisoner would be brought to Langefeld’s office to answer the charge – losing a mug, failing to fold a blanket – to which the prisoner could reply. Langefeld then gave her decision, and if the charge was proven she slapped the prisoner’s face and announced the punishment, which might be cleaning lavatories, but Langefeld’s preferred punishment was forced standing for several hours without any food. If the standing woman fainted she’d be left lying for a while before being carried away. For serious cases Langefeld was trained in the use of straitjackets and water dousing.