If This Is a Woman: Inside Ravensbruck: Hitler's Concentration Camp for Women (66 page)

The freezing winter melted into a cold, wet spring. Water poured through the roofs of the slums, and at work, sodden sand caked on women’s feet. Denise, Christiane and Suzanne began to hate the sand and the lake. Their legs had broken out in boils, but they wouldn’t go to the
Revier
. They had seen the doctor – a new man, called Orendi – when they first arrived, and would never go back. He clearly loathed the French. When they went for their inspection on arrival he had made them undress and stand outside in the freezing cold ‘as if it were the most natural thing in the world to undress in a public place, in the open air, in temperatures below zero,’ wrote Denise. The SS dentist, Martin Hellinger, checked teeth for gold ‘so he could recover it later’.

All the French women’s periods had stopped, and some noticed symptoms of early menopause. Gynaecological tests were carried out to see who had venereal disease, and the same instruments were used without cleansing for each woman, so many caught diseases from others. Some were made to swallow a substance that made them break out all over in septic spots.

Older women and the very sick went back to the hospital, nevertheless, in the vain hope of treatment. ‘Where do you work?’ Orendi would ask them, and if the woman had a job at Siemens or in the sewing shop she might get an
Innendienst
, a permit to work indoors.
^*

Usually, however, at his
Revier
‘surgery’ Orendi just walked past the sick or kicked the patients out. ‘
Es ist für das Reich. Sie müssen arbeiten gehen, krank oder nicht
.’ (‘
It is for the Reich
. You must go to work, sick or not.’) On other days, he walked past the queue of sick, turned and grinned, drew his gun from his holster and pretended to take aim and fire. He laughed and shouted: ‘It would be better if I just shoot a few.’ The women screamed and he shouted again: ‘Why not? You’ll die anyway.’

When Amanda Staessart was taken in sick from the latrine gang she heard that her mother was in the
Revier
.

Someone said
: ‘Come and see your mother, she is very bad.’ So I was taken to her and she said I’ll get better if you give me a little milk. And then she died. I stayed with her. I stayed for hours. A nurse came and told me: ‘Take your mother away.’ I had to drag her to the washroom.

Yes, I did it myself. I had to drag her. I don’t know how I did it. And I stayed with her in the washroom until the truck came. It was a truck with thirty dead bodies on it. And they put my mother naked on top and took her away.

Every nationality in the camp seems to have noticed how quickly the French began to fall. Some said they had only themselves to blame. The Czechs grumbled that if only the French had learned to wash they could have prevented the scabies, the swollen legs and the boils. The French were afraid of washing in cold water, said one Czech woman, ‘but we Czechs had known nothing else before the war’. Even when they fell sick the French would pretend it wasn’t happening, and claim that they were suffering from a lack of vitamins.

A Red Army doctor, Ida Grinberg, noticed the French ‘
were very emotional
and shouted a lot’. Others said the French spent too much time trying to beautify themselves by putting grease on their faces, or making bows out of rags or arranging their clothes in stylish ways. The Russians remembered that they often managed to look ‘quite chic’. Some of the old hands noted
that the French had no organisation, no leadership. In any case, they had no time to organise before their health began to fail, and then it was too late.

The French had no support on arrival: no French Blockovas to watch out for them, no one in the kitchen to slip them extra food. They had no influence at all; they had arrived too late, when the good jobs had gone. And anyway, they didn’t want the Germans’ jobs and spurned other prisoners for working for the SS, like Countess Karolina Lanckorońska, who became Blockova of Block 27.

After several months in the privileged bunker, Karolina Lanckorońska had requested to return to the normal camp, believing that her place was with the other Poles, but instead she was sent to rule over the French. At first she looked forward to meeting other women of ‘
high culture
’, as she knew the French to be. Instead, she complained, she found ‘a rabble of women who refused to do anything to help themselves’.

Each morning a gang from every block went to the
Brotkammer
(bread store) to collect the block’s bread, but the French could never get there in time. ‘One had to literally throw them out of the block or we all went hungry,’ said Lanckorońska, though she conceded that the containers were heavy and the French prisoners were weak. ‘But there was nothing to be done about it.’

Furthermore, the French ‘set out to cause trouble’. Getting them out for rollcall was ‘a hideous affair’ because French ‘agitators’ deliberately confused the count by whispering ‘Form ranks of nine, form ranks of eleven’ when they knew perfectly well it was supposed to be ranks of ten. Binz would turn up and say to Lanckorońska, ‘
Natürlich die Französinnen!
’ and she would order two hours’ standing punishment, ‘which meant another few cases of pneumonia’.

No prisoners in the camp observed the new French arrivals more intently than Germaine Tillion, the French ethnologist, and her friend Anise Girard, who had both spent four months in the camp by the time their compatriots of the
vingt-sept mille
arrived. ‘When they first entered the camp the sight was so optimistic and gay that it gave us hope – they were a ball of oxygen,’ said Anise Girard. ‘But at the same time we were full of dread. They arrived thinking the war was over. They were so unprepared. It was tragic what happened.’

By early 1944, however, Germaine and Anise were arguably even worse off than the newcomers. In February both were assigned to a mysterious new block, Block 32. It lay in the very back of the camp, near the slum blocks, but was even more isolated, set right back against a rear wall. About 300 women were selected without warning for Block 32 and told they would have to obey an entirely new, draconian, set of rules.

No contact was allowed with those in Block 32; there was a no-go area around it and it had its own cordon of barbed wire. Prisoners there were not allowed outside the camp walls and forbidden to send or receive mail. None of them knew it, but they had been designated as NN –
Nacht und Nebel
– which meant they were supposed to literally disappear into the night and the fog, and nobody would ever know where.

The Norwegian visitor Wanda Hjort had first discovered the existence of this sinister category in 1943 when she heard that Norwegian prisoners held at Natzweiler in Alsace were designated NN, and she passed the information on to the International Red Cross. But nobody knew that in January 1944 an NN block was opened for women at Ravensbrück.

Hitler passed the so-called ‘Night and Fog’ decree in 1942, and intended it to terrorise and deter resisters in western European countries. In the first years of Nazi occupation, resistance ringleaders were executed, but Hitler thought that created martyrs. Under the NN decree, dangerous resisters were to be sent to concentration camps instead, and executed in secret, their names and whereabouts never to be made known. In this way, Hitler intended that their families and friends would suffer as well, by living in perpetual uncertainty.

Some time in the winter of 1944 the same order was applied to a small number of Ravensbrück women, mostly prisoners from France, Belgium, the Netherlands and Norway, as well as a few Yugoslavs and Poles. Also held in the NN block were the Red Army women and the Polish rabbits.

Neither Germaine nor Anise understood why the rules of their imprisonment suddenly changed. ‘It all seemed random,’ said Anise. ‘Why did they shave one head and not another? Why shoot one woman one day and another the next? We never knew. In the end we understood that there was no logic to anything they did. Our stories were not much different to other French who arrived.’

Germaine’s mother, Emilie Tillion, who had arrived with the
vingt-sept mille
, was not designated NN, though she and Germaine were in the same resistance cell. It had horrified Germaine to learn her mother had arrived at Ravensbrück, and now she couldn’t cross the no-go area to see her.

At first the NN women were afraid. ‘We realised they wanted us to stay inside the walls so that we were available for execution,’ said Anise. But then nothing much seemed to happen, and they found there were advantages to being NN. The prisoners were all ‘political’ and well motivated, able to keep an orderly block – ‘We didn’t need to be told how to queue for food.’ And those kept inside were spared the hardest labour. Germaine Tillion even found time to continue her ethnological research: instead of studying African tribes she started to study the camp.

‘What you must understand about Germaine is she had
une énorme tête
[a terrific mind],’ said Anise, who first met Germaine on the platform of the Gare de Lyon as both were waiting to leave for Germany.

I came onto
the platform and I saw this small woman with a very large bag – like a bag of potatoes. She told me that inside was her thesis on African tribes. She was planning to work on it in Germany, she said, but of course she had no idea where we were going, so she said she would find out and she pointed at one of the German guards. She said: ‘Look, Anise, I’m going to show you how to behave towards a savage. I’m going to ask him where we’re being taken. Germans love nature and animals. I’m going to show him a pretty photograph of a sand fox and see if he’ll talk.’ She took the photograph up to the German. Naturally he knew nothing and said go away – she spoke abominable German. But he loved the sand fox. And he wasn’t bad. He even offered to take a letter to my mother and I found later he had done it.

Anise had planned to escape that day. ‘I had made sure I had good shoes for running and a ticket for the metro. I could have done it.’ I wondered if she regretted not trying.

To escape you have to have a lot of courage. Leave the group and take risks. And I was afraid they would take my brothers. I knew if you escaped they took your family. But, yes, I have a sense of guilt for not doing it. And then there was Germaine too. I was big and strong. She was very small. She was not someone for escaping. She was a thinking person, not a runner.

So Anise helped Germaine carry her papers onto the train, and when they were in the NN block she helped her again. After suffering from diphtheria on arrival, Germaine had a limp. ‘So she leant on me. That’s when they started calling us Don Quixote and Sancho Panza.’

Germaine’s research on African tribes was confiscated immediately on arrival, but her studies of Ravensbrück were soon absorbing her instead. Early on she noted that the most frail and isolated prisoners were more
déracinées
, rootless, than any she had seen in Africa. The gap between the haves and have-nots – the
Schmuckstücke
– was wider than the gap between the Queen of England and a London street urchin.

Soon Germaine began to collect figures about arrivals and departures and tried to count the numbers of the dead – ‘and the living dead,’ said Anise. She quickly grasped that this was a place of slow extermination. She knew that the departure of the Majdanek transport on 3 February had been deliberately
timed to make room for the new shipment of the
vingt-sept mille
that arrived later the same day. ‘We were the new stock,’ said Anise.

Germaine also heard that black transports were continuing to leave the camp. The room in the
Revier
called the
Idiotenstübchen
was regularly being emptied. Trucks came for the ‘idiots’ at night, but no one knew where the trucks went or who the idiots were.

Several prisoners working in the
Revier
were by now collecting information about the black transports too. They spoke of women being thrown on lorries half naked, their number traced in purple on their backs. The destination of these transports was more mysterious than ever. Majdanek, destination of the last major death convoy, had now been evacuated.

After the uproar caused by the Majdanek transport, the convoys were being arranged with much greater secrecy. So well hidden were these smaller black transports that even today, little is known about where they went. A German nurse, Schwester Gerda Schröder, who arrived in April 1944, said in evidence later: ‘I knew that the mentally deficient went on transports and that they were exterminated, and I believe that the place of extermination was not far from Ravensbrück’. The camp informer Carmen Mory gave evidence suggesting that some of the black transports never even left the camp.

On the night of one February black transport, Mory was being held in a cell in the bunker, and overheard guards talking. ‘
From my window
in the bunker I could see the crematorium chimney, which suddenly began to smoke,’ she said. She heard an SS man talking to a woman guard about the smoke and saying: ‘They’re killing off the women from the
Idiotenstübchen
.’ The guard asked how they went about it. The SS man replied that every evening a lorry went to the
Idiotenstübchen
and women were chosen and driven to the crematorium. There they were killed ‘in some way’ and burned.

It came as news to Mory that the women had been killed right here at the camp. She sought to verify it when she returned to her block, and asked another prisoner, her fellow informer Giolantha Prokesch, what had happened. According to Mory, Prokesch confirmed much of the story and also told her that before the victims were taken away a medical commission had arrived to make selections: ‘The victims were first of all checked by a medical team, including Dr Treite, his boss Dr Trommer and a psychiatrist from Berlin. For over six hours the doctors selected sixty names, placing a black cross against each.’