If This Is a Woman: Inside Ravensbruck: Hitler's Concentration Camp for Women (68 page)

‘
Sometimes they would
just come and find me and ask me for a hairdo,’ Edith said. ‘But I told this girl I refused to do her hair. I told her I didn’t like what I’d seen, and she should think about how what she had done would affect the unborn child, and the physical and moral wellbeing of that child. She was very upset and began to cry.’

Lotte Silbermann, the canteen waitress, noticed that the behaviour of the SS men was worsening too. Nowadays there were always drunken orgies after the execution squad – Pribill, Pfab, Schäfer and Conrad – came into the canteen for their bonus food, which was usually a giant schnitzel, wine, schnapps, and cigarettes, ‘as much as they wanted’.

The prisoners serving them were terrified, said Lotte, who recalled an occasion when the executioner Pribill came behind the counter and took a small revolver ‘
and put it at the back
of my friend Lottie Guttmann’s neck and said: “Shall I pull the trigger?” They went away and carried on drinking in another room. They opened the window and one after the other threw up on the grass outside. The Jehovah’s Witnesses had to come and clear it up.’

Edmund Bräuning, Suhren’s deputy, held his own orgies in the canteen and his favourite women guards were always there – particularly Rosel Laurenzen and Dorothea Binz, who were ‘fierce rivals for his affection’, said Lotte. ‘And we had to witness everything. They smoked, drank and ate only the best. We had to fetch the drinks discreetly so the other SS men wouldn’t notice. That’s why we covered everything with cloth.’

One Sunday morning Bräuning went to the bunker to collect a group of male prisoners who were held there as they waited to be hanged. Bräuning led the men to a green wagon, then climbed up himself, at which point Binz appeared. ‘Binz came running out shouting out: “Wait for me, wait for me, I want to come and see it.”’

The SS
Kameradschaftsabend
– comradeship evening – was held once a month. Suhren would open the evening with a few mumbled words, ‘but he couldn’t speak, and the master of ceremonies for the rest of the evening was Bräuning, but he soon got completely drunk, going from one table to another always followed by Binz, because she was so jealous – and Bräuning was married and father of three children’. Most of the leading SS men brought their wives to these occasions, but not Bräuning.

After a short time everybody was drunk and lost control. ‘We, the waitresses
at these occasions, were subjected to disgusting things. And Suhren would stop the party, but the other men went on drinking till morning.’

After their day’s work the French removal squad retreated as usual to their slum blocks, where by early summer lawlessness was growing and a Ukrainian gang of ‘street urchins’ had staked out territory beside a pile of cabinets that lay rotting in the sun. Inside the blocks the straw was sticking out of the mattresses, making the bunks ‘look like a sty’, but to cheer things up, the
groupe de comtesses
put red rags up at the broken windows. There were advantages to the worsening conditions, even here.

Such was the crowding inside the blocks that no guard could fit between the bunks, so there were rarely any checks and the French girls could safely keep a store of treasures – a scarf, a potato from Katya, a pencil – in their mattress. Before they went to sleep they sat cross-legged, one in front of the other, picking out lice from the scalp in front, which they crushed with their nails while relaying gossip.

The older French women also began to organise, and a group of intellectuals emerged, including Emilie Tillion, Germaine’s mother, who gave talks from her bunk on the history of French art and culture. Meanwhile, Annie de Montfort (born Arthémise Deguirmendjian-Shah-Vekil; her parents had fled the Armenian genocide in Turkey in 1915) held seminars on the history of Poland. In 1919 Annie had founded the French-Polish society in Paris and under Nazi occupation had co-founded – with her husband Henri de Montfort – a clandestine magazine,
La France continue
, which led to her arrest. The French intellectuals joined forces with like-minded Poles to create an ‘
international association
’ inside the camp, aimed at promoting cultural ties between every prisoner group. The chaos allowed the women to build a greater sense of community than ever before, said Maria Moldenhawer, one of the organisers of the new association. The ‘delegates’ from each country made plans to continue their work after the war, ‘but due to the deaths of some of the most outstanding individuals in the group, and for other reasons, this was not possible’.

Evidently – contrary to what Suhren believed – by no means all the Poles disliked the French, although as a national group they still puzzled other prisoners. Even the Francophile Maria Moldenhawer seems to have been unable to make up her mind about them. Some of the French were ‘the worst street types’, she said, whereas the French political prisoners, ‘coming from a nation that had not known captivity, often, very audaciously, though unwisely, opposed the authorities’ orders and with a great deal of bravura’.

Maria Moldenhawer may have been thinking of Jacqueline d’Alincourt,
one of the
groupe de comtesses
, who in the early summer of 1944 had the ‘audacity’ to oppose the authorities’ attempts to send French prisoners to work in brothels.

In the summer of 1944 Himmler’s three new camp brothels were up and running, but the shortage of good recruits had become acute; the pool of German asocials arriving at Ravensbrück were now almost all too decrepit for the job. In December the Poles had protested over attempts to recruit them,
^*
as had groups of Russians and Ukrainians. Such were the horrors now circulating about what happened in the male camp brothels that few were tempted, even if it meant getting away from Ravensbrück, and nobody believed the lies that they would be released after six months.

A woman who returned in 1944 after just six weeks in a brothel told Anja Lundholm of a horror of rape and abuse. ‘
Every morning
the prostitutes had to get up and let themselves be cleaned by female guards. After the coffee the SS men would come and start to rape and abuse the women. It would go on for sixteen hours a day, and only two and a half hours for lunch and dinner.’

Friedericka Jandle, an Austrian working in the
Schreibstube
, had a Viennese friend in the office who volunteered. ‘
She believed
she’d be released if she agreed. I tried to stop her but she told me, “I have nothing to lose.” Six months later she returned. She was finished. Totally used up. Destroyed. She said she wished she’d listened to me.’

The new French arrivals, however, had not yet learned the truth, so among the
volontaires
and the prostitutes brought from French brothels, the SS found ready recruits.

‘
At first
they didn’t understand, these women,’ said Jacqueline d’Alincourt. Just nineteen when she arrived – tall, elegant and of aristocratic stock – Jacqueline was horrified to discover that she shared her block not only with ‘brutal Russian peasants and thieving Gypsies’ but ‘an entire brothel from Rouen’. ‘They were uneducated,’ she told me.

They had nothing to hold on to – no religion, no values. I remember one of these poor creatures lying on her mattress saying: ‘Why am I here, why am I here?’ We in the resistance, we knew why we were there. We had a superiority of spirit, you understand. We had the desire not to die in
Germany and to see France again. But these creatures had no idea why they were there. It was a question of spirit.

So we political women got together and decided to make a list of everyone who had volunteered to go. And we told them not to take this work. We said:
Non! Ce n’est pas question de ça!
[There’s no question of that.] We were very severe. And we watched carefully what they did.

I asked Jacqueline, meeting in her apartment near the Arc de Triomphe, if she ever knew the names of any of the French prostitutes – those from Rouen perhaps – but she looked astonished at such a suggestion and said no.

‘They didn’t write their memoirs, these women,’ she said. ‘And after the war they were certainly not invited to join any of the associations of deported women. They were not in the resistance.’

The French prostitutes in Ravensbrück are as thoroughly forgotten as the Germans; not a single published French memoir mentions the name of any of the French prostitutes there, or of the
volontaires
, though there were probably thousands. The resisters’ testimony may recall acts of kindness or even acts of courage from ‘a prostitute’, but even then, none thought to ask or remember the woman’s name.

The only known exception is a schoolteacher called Marie-Thérèse Lefebvre. She remembers meeting a prostitute called Simone (not her real name) who arrived in Ravensbrück in mid-1944. Like Marie-Thérèse, Simone was sent to the subcamp of Zwodau, where she was put on laundry duties, and smuggled extra garments to prisoners to keep out the cold. We only know this because one day she gave a warm vest to Marie-Thérèse, who was so grateful that she spoke a few words to Simone and the two women discovered they were both from Le Havre. Marie-Thérèse recalled:

I asked her
why she was here, and she said she was not arrested for prostitution but because she’d been hiding American pilots in the brothel where she worked. There was a room above the cabaret where the Americans were hidden, while the German officers were with women in the next room. And she told me she’d fallen in love with one of the pilots, who had promised to come and find her when it was all over.

After the war, Simone had no wish to tell her story back in Le Havre for fear of being reviled as a prostitute. Yet as we now know, prostitutes played a vital role in resistance work, particularly with escape lines. Allied airmen were often hidden in brothels as they escaped from France, particularly in port cities like Le Havre and Rouen, and in the city of Toulouse, not far from the Pyrenees. Such women took as many risks as any other resistance women,
yet none has ever been recognised. Some even met their future husbands this way.

Soon after she returned to France after the war, Marie-Thérèse bumped into Simone again in Le Havre and Simone told her that her American pilot had come back to find her. ‘She told me the American had asked her to go with him to America and marry him. What should she do? So I said: “You must go, of course. Go to America and start a new life!”’ Papers held by the Le Havre town hall show that this is exactly what Simone did. In the summer of 1946 she married the serviceman whose life she saved, and went with him to America to live.

In April 1944 the numbers rose again, with 4335 new prisoners registered and the recorded monthly death rate at the main camp put at ninety. Among recent arrivals was another group of evacuees from Majdanek, including more Red Army doctors and nurses, as well as 473 Gypsies transferred from Auschwitz. There were Italian partisans, Slovenians, Greeks, Spaniards and Danes, as well as three Egyptians and seven Chinese who, perhaps for reasons of marriage, or travel, or because they had volunteered to help the anti-Nazi resistance, found themselves swept up and brought to Ravensbrück. Two more British women had also arrived. A nanny, Mary O’Shaughnessy, was working with a family in Provence when she was arrested for helping hide Allied airmen. And a woman called Julia Barry, of Hungarian descent, was arrested on the Channel Island of Guernsey for sending signals to London about German troop movements.

By the end of the month the camp held a total of twenty-one nationalities and a babble of competing languages sounded on the Lagerstrasse; hardly anybody understood each other; the guards certainly didn’t understand the prisoners, or the prisoners the guards. The inability of guards to understand what prisoners said may explain why in the middle of 1944 prisoners started being hit more and more often across the face.

Soon after she arrived Mary O’Shaughnessy was called outside her block by a woman guard who spoke to her in German, ‘which I did not understand, and then she
punched me violently
on either side of my face, breaking some of my teeth. She then came back to me again as I was still standing up and hit me across the face with her fist, breaking my nose. I have seen many of the prisoners smacked across the face with whips by SS women.’ Mary added that the striking of prisoners by male and female guards ‘was too common an occurrence to be worthy of note at the time’.

It was the growing number of children in the camp that changed the atmosphere the most.

By early summer 1944 it was a common sight to see children at roll-call, ‘sometimes dressed like dolls’, said Maria Moldenhawer. Some of them came with the recent Gypsy transport from Auschwitz; others were children of the ‘protected’ Jews – sixty-four in total – who had arrived from Belgium and the Netherlands. During the week the children stayed mostly in their blocks, but on Sundays they played outside, throwing stones, perhaps, or chasing each other around. Guards sometimes joined in. Or else the children would lie with their mothers, watched sadly by other mothers who were longing for their own children back at home.

Micheline Maurel, a published poet, wrote poems for mothers to help them bear their sorrow. One woman who had left two babies behind in France asked her to write a poem about her love for them, and wept over the words. Another young mother was found in tears, clutching another of Micheline’s verses and yearning for her daughter.

Some grieving mothers adopted orphans in the camp and became their ‘camp mothers’, dressing them up in pretty clothes and jewellery, organised from the store. The French prisoner Odette Fabius adopted an orphan Gypsy girl with jet-black hair, whom she shared her mattress with. A Belgian woman called Claire van den Boom adopted Stella Kugelman, the darkhaired child who arrived from Antwerp in January, though Stella had several other camp mothers too. Later she remembered at least four.

In the early summer of 1944 Claire took Stella to see her own mother, who had been in the hospital since they arrived, and was now dying. ‘It was a grey day, like this,’ says Stella, who lives today on the outskirts of St Petersburg. Her small, simple apartment is full of dolls.