If This Is a Woman: Inside Ravensbruck: Hitler's Concentration Camp for Women (65 page)

It was the sight of the dogs on arrival at Fürstenberg that made Rosa shriek, thinks Stella. And when the truncheons hit her mother on the platform she collapsed and was immediately taken away, but Stella didn’t know where.

Left alone, someone must have taken her hand and led her on, she thinks, because somehow, later, she was in a block. Her plaits had been cut off. There were other children there, and many were very sick. Older women looked after her. And Stella remembers that when it grew back, a French woman combed her hair.

Chapter 22

Falling

‘R
aus raus, Franzosensäue. Links rechts, links rechts
,’ shout the guards, but the French can’t march. Only Christiane the general’s daughter can keep in step; most don’t even try. As they leave quarantine the women are herded down to their new blocks at the back of the camp. ‘
Links rechts, links rechts
.’ A straggler is kicked. ‘It’s the maquis down here,’ says Denise as they approach Block 27. Some call this line of blocks – 27 to 31 – the slums. With peeling paint and broken windows, they stand so far back in the compound that they are built on sand.

As they enter, the women recoil. Arms blotched with sores reach for the evening soup. In quarantine the French had at first refused the soup. Four weeks later they grab bowls along with the rest. Suzanne’s bowl is snatched. She complains to the woman serving, a Pole, who answers in French: ‘So what are you going to eat with then?’ Suzanne is shoved aside. ‘Typical Slav,’ says Denise. ‘Just because she’s been here four years already and we haven’t.’

Someone shouts at the thief, a Russian, who shouts back, ‘
Ne ponimayu, ne ponimayu
.’ The French girl throws herself at the Russian, shouting, ‘
Ne ponimayu
yourself, you brute,’ but someone else explains that ‘
Ne ponimayu
’ means ‘I don’t understand’.

‘This is not so funny,’ says Christiane. A Stubova tells Suzanne to go and look in the bins for an old tin discarded from a prisoner’s food parcel. ‘So others get food parcels?’

The French stare and the other slum-dwellers stare back: ‘A bowl for a piece of bread?’

‘
Du Scheisse Franzosen
,’ shouts someone in the crowd. ‘A nice welcome,’ whispers Christiane, not noticing that a woman dressed as a man is watching her with hungry eyes. These are the
Jules
they heard about in quarantine. The Belgian Amanda Staessart takes her mother’s arm, promising they’ll stay together. Their numbers are consecutive, so they can’t be split up.

Denise exclaims, ‘Look at that’ as she catches sight of another group of repellent creatures, but these speak some sort of French. They are what the
jeunes filles bien élevées
call
les volontaires
– French women who had ‘volunteered’ to come and work in Germany. The
volontaires
had been brought to Ravensbrück too, accused perhaps of a ‘crime’ – stealing bread or having sex with a German – or more likely to be used for slave labour in the subcamps. ‘So we are in with the French gangsters too,’ says Denise.

In the next block – Block 26 – the women are also lining up for soup when a guard comes in; she is young, pretty and blonde, and carries a stick. ‘She looks OK,’ says one of the French girls, then the guard shouts, ‘
Ruhe du alte Sau, ruhig toi, cochon
’ – ‘Quiet you old pig, quiet you pig’ – and the pretty pale face snarls and her stick comes down on one of the French ‘volunteers’. The girl had tried to style her hair in a knot on top of her head.

‘
Französin
?’ She nods. ‘Who is this?’ asks the blonde guard, turning to her interpreter, a prisoner, who gives a name then explains in French, trembling, that hair must be pulled back and flat, and anyone who disobeys will be beaten to death. Observing the effect of these words on the French faces, the guard turns and leaves. The Polish Blockova shouts: ‘
Achtung, alle ins Bett
’ – ‘Attention, everyone in bed.’

So tightly packed are the bunks that to climb to the third tier you clamber like a monkey. At night it’s impossible to reach the lavatories without walking over hundreds of others, and many don’t bother, as is obvious from the stench.

Denise, Suzanne and Christiane share a single mattress. There is one blanket between them and they lie in the mould left in the straw by the night workers who slept here in the day. Christiane’s nose nearly touches the roof. If she straightens an arm she touches the French peasant in the next bunk who is shouting for her daughter.

The next they know is the Polish Blockova shouting, ‘
Raus, raus, Achtung
,’ and the siren screaming for morning
Appell
.

So large is the camp now that the waking siren has been brought forward to 3 a.m. It takes a strong hand to beat these women out of bunks, washrooms and outdoors by 3.30. The 959 new French arrivals line up to be counted with their comrades in arms: Paris, Montluc, Fresnes, Dijon and Toulon, standing
motionless under the stars. Their triangles are red, for political prisoners, and their numbers run from 27030 to 27988. But they have not been given their ‘F’ for French, as the Poles have been given a ‘P’ and the Russians an ‘R’, or, for the Red Army, ‘S.U.’ This is deliberate, they say. The Germans want to crush French national pride. But the group is so large it soon gets its own name and becomes the
vingt-sept mille
, referring to the numbers given to this transport, all in the 27000s.

‘The bitches,’ one of the French girls whispers as guards appear wrapped in thick black capes, their blonde curls impeccable even at this hour.

It is cold and getting colder. Christiane is tall enough to see right down the Lagerstrasse over the heads of 18,000 others, lined up in an infinite throng of ghostly figures. Annie de Montfort has a shaved head, bare to the sky, and sparkling with a thin covering of frost. The red flame of the crematorium chimney lights up the end of the Lagerstrasse.

‘
Die Nase nach vorne, Franzosensäue
,’ yells a guard – ‘Noses to the front, French sows.’

‘
Les vaches!
’ retort the ‘volunteers’.

Guards thump those who stamp their feet for warmth. A blast of freezing air cuts through the women’s thin clothing, then a whisper passes down the line, ‘Stand firm
les françaises
,’ but someone is missing and the count starts all over again as a row of bodies collapses, one by one, ‘like ninepins felled by some invisible ball’. Among those down is the librarian from the Quartier Latin.

The missing woman is finally dragged out. Everyone watches her defend herself with flailing limbs against a corpulent figure with a red armband who grabs her by the hair, turns her over, pulls out a whip and gives her four lashes on her back. The woman no longer moves. Is she dead? The figure disappears into the darkness.

‘It’s Thury. Thury? Is she a guard? No, she’s another prisoner.’ The women are horrified to find they are guarded by prisoners too. An Austrian, Elisabeth Thury is head of the ‘camp police’.
‘La vache
,’ say the French, staring at Thury.
^*

From another direction comes a ‘crow’ on a bicycle, and as she pedals she sees a woman stick out her tongue at her. It is an old French peasant woman, and she’s yelling in a Pyrenean dialect that not even the other French can
understand. The crow dismounts and kicks her, and she falls. ‘
Alte Sau. Franzosensau
.’

A desk is erected on the Lagerstrasse where Binz sits to check the count. Eventually, returning to their block, the
vingt-sept mille
are stiff and silent, and the sobs start. An old woman implores Denise to rub her hands very gently as they hurt so. Amanda Staessart notices that her mother’s hair has gone quite white.

No sooner have they drunk their ‘coffee’ than the women are marched out again to join the
Verfüg
s, casual workers, for the labour roll-call.

The Parisian trio are set to shovelling sand. Denise suggests they try to build sand castles to help distract them, and as they walk back at the end of the day they feel fit enough to march around the block ‘for no other reason than to show off’. Other prisoners observe the French in astonishment, murmuring: ‘
Franzosen
.’

There had always been ‘slums’ of a sort in the camp – blocks more cramped and dirtier than others, usually towards the back, and occupied by asocials, Gypsies and others at the bottom of the heap. In early 1944 the slum area was so big it became official; blocks 27 to 32 were cordoned off behind barbed wire. Block 27, built for 200 prisoners, now held 600, and more were arriving every day.

Most Russians and Ukrainians were brought to the slum blocks, as well as the Jews who were arriving again at the camp. All the French were brought here automatically. There were no exceptions: the French countesses, teachers, generals’ daughters, ‘volunteers’ and prostitutes were all ‘
Franzosensäue
’.

Suhren had made sure to put Poles in charge of them as their Blockovas and Stubovas, thinking that they detested the French for leaving Poland undefended in 1939. Four years ago it was the Poles who had been at the bottom of the heap, hated and despised, but over time many had prised themselves out of the slums, and it was the French who were hated now – perhaps even more than the Poles ever were.

The real camp aristocrats at the top end of the camp kept away from the slums because of filth and disease, and also because of vigilante gangs.
^*
Even the guards had largely withdrawn from the area, leaving it in the hands of the prisoner police. Inside the blocks though it was often the powerful
Puffmütter
(brothel madams), like ‘
Clap’ Wanda
, who ran things.

Anja Lundholm, a German prisoner sent to Ravensbrück in 1944, wrote
later about a woman nicknamed Clap Wanda, who had worked in a military brothel before the war and was famous in the camp for infecting a whole troop of German soldiers with gonorrhoea. But Wanda had not been arrested for spreading disease, but because she strangled her newborn son, threw him in a bin and called out: ‘Here’s your present, my Führer.’

Characters like Wanda were useful to the authorities as informers, and also for helping pick out women for the brothels. She was told to look for new arrivals who were ‘healthy and well-fed’. According to Anja Lundholm, Clap Wanda herself was ‘flabby, with a bloated face and repellent appearance, always surrounded by a clique of submissive women – all German black or green triangles who she bossed around’.

Submissive women of the kind that Wanda might take under her wing were arriving every week at the camp, usually more German ‘asocials’ made homeless by the bombing. One such was Lydia Thelen. Arrested by police in 1943 for loitering in the waiting room at Cologne railway station, she told interrogators that her husband had served in the Sudetenland offensive and was now away serving in France. She said that their apartment had been destroyed in the Allied bombing and everything she had was lost. She lived on money from the war damages office. But the city police suspected Lydia of prostitution. They said she was a danger to the
Volk
and sent her to Ravensbrück, where she died in October 1944.

At night Clap Wanda would gather her clique around her to tell stories, Anja Lundholm recalled. ‘Wanda liked to be entertained by stories of love, sex or tragedy,’ and Anja herself became one of those storytellers. She was so good at it that Wanda rewarded her with bits of food, which made Anja hated and envied by others in the block.

The French general’s daughter, Christiane de Cuverville, who lived alongside such characters in Block 27 and lives today in the exclusive 16th district of Paris, visibly shudders as she remembers women such as Clap Wanda. ‘Yes, there were women like that –
quelle horreur
.’ It was
la pagaille
– bedlam – she says, and then she folds her long legs under her, laughs and talks about the
Jules
.

‘The first time I was propositioned by a
Jules
she offered me a piece of chocolate. They had trousers and jackets and walked around with cigarettes in their mouths looking for a fight or for sex. Block 27 was impossible –
affreux
, dreadful. This crowd you can’t imagine – the Russians, the Gypsies, and the criminals from German jails,
les Jules
,
les Charlies
.’

After the first few days in the sand the Parisians’ hands hardened as their skin turned grey – their clothes, their mess tins, mattresses, full of sand. Many of the sand gang now had diarrhoea because their stomachs simply couldn’t
digest the raw swede soup, which according to Denise Dufournier was ‘a yellowish liquid giving off a noxious smell’. Cystitis spread too, because there was no water to drink – only the ‘black stuff called coffee’.

Within weeks almost all the French of the
vingt-sept mille
transport were covered in boils and several had succumbed to TB. Those who said on arrival that they wouldn’t get lice were scratching sores.

Some believed that if they could just get work indoors things might improve. Everyone knew those chosen for Siemens were better fed to eke more work out of them, but they didn’t look much better off, coming off the night shift ‘like ghosts at dawn’. For the three Parisians, Denise, Christiane and Suzanne, the idea of making German munitions was the worst horror of all, so they kept their heads down and stuck with digging sand.

Others simply couldn’t bear the torture of
Appell
. One morning a woman standing close to Amanda Staessart collapsed. When a guard set her dog on the stricken woman, Amanda cried, ‘What are you doing you brute?’, so she was sent to the
Strafblock
and put to work shovelling excrement from the latrines, along with the Countess Yvonne de la Rochefoucauld.

The countess had been working in the
Revier
as a nurse when she was given an order she didn’t understand, so she shouted back, ‘The English are coming, so you’d better learn English. The Germans have lost the war.’ She might have got off with a punch, but Carmen Mory, Ramdohr’s informer, overheard and reported her. The French said Mory looked like a figure from Hieronymus Bosch.