If This Is a Woman: Inside Ravensbruck: Hitler's Concentration Camp for Women (69 page)

I remember Claire came and picked me up one day. And she asked me, ‘Would you like to see your mother?’ and she carried me out of the block to another block where behind a window my mother was sitting. I could see her. She looked the same to me, but she had fluffy hair.

And she’d made two little toys out of scraps of foil. We couldn’t speak through the window, but she smiled. Of course I didn’t really understand what was happening but I was very happy.

I saw her one more time. This was different. Someone came to get me – perhaps it was Claire again – and took me outside onto the Appellplatz and we stood, and she said: ‘Look, your mother is over there.’ This time I couldn’t see anyone who looked like her – a silhouette maybe.

Stella thinks now that the last occasion was just set up so that her mother could see her little girl for the last time, before she died. ‘I have a memory of Claire saying later: “You know your mother has been burned.”’

Claire was sent away to a subcamp, and another camp mother, called Rosanne Lascroux, looked after Stella for a time. Stella liked Rosanne. ‘She was from Paris.’ Later Rosanne jotted down her memories of their friendship, and Stella was sent a copy, which she read out.

Claire was Stella’s main camp mother. She loved the little girl and was with her all the time, but she couldn’t stay with her because she was sent to work in the mines in Silesia. It was then that Stella began eating and sleeping in our bed.

I remember well how we washed her face and curled her hair. She never cried and it seemed that she understood everything.

She was exceptionally intelligent for her age. I talked to her in French and I could understand Spanish. Once she declared to me that she never wanted to see the Germans again as she knew they killed her parents.

Like all the children she was scared of the guards, especially Binz and the policewoman, Knoll,
^*
who was always shouting angrily at the children.

Stella says she has no memory of most of these things. Almost all of what she knows about herself in the camp, she has been told by others.

She reads out a brief note that her mother wrote from the camp to a friend, Herr Lepage, in Belgium. Herr Lepage kept it, along with Rosa Kugelman’s rosary, and gave them both to Stella long after the war. The letter has clearly been smuggled out, as it is not on the formal camp paper. The postmark says Fürstenberg, and at the top Rosa has written her number, 25622, and Stella’s number, 25621.

Stella reads it: ‘I send you my greetings. I hope my letter will find you healthy. You will find a packet with this letter and I ask you a great favour’ – but the rest of the letter has been damaged and is impossible to read. Stella doesn’t know what the packet was, or what favour her mother asked. But the date of the letter shows that it was written just before she died, on 14 July 1944.

Chapter 24

Reaching Out

B
y early summer 1944, Bernard Dufournier was beginning to lose hope of finding Denise. It was nearly a year since his sister’s arrest and he still had no idea where she was. With both parents dead, he perhaps felt especially responsible for his only sibling, and pulled every string to find her.

As a diplomat Bernard was well connected; he had even managed to raise Denise’s case with the acting president of the International Red Cross, Carl Burckhardt, who wrote back saying he knew nothing of Denise’s whereabouts, but: ‘
We are in touch
with the German Red Cross and if we hear anything we will let you know.’

Given what is known today of Carl Burckhardt, the ICRC and the Holocaust, that two-line reply to Bernard Dufournier is chilling. Clearly he was correct not to make a special plea on Bernard’s behalf, yet Burckhardt had used his own unique position to appeal direct to Himmler for the release of his friend Countess Karolina Lanckorońska. Far more disturbing is Burckhardt’s readiness, even then, to refer so confidently in writing to the German Red Cross as a serious body that the ICRC could do business with.

By the summer of 1944, under mounting international pressure to get off the fence, the ICRC was trying harder to send parcels to concentration-camp prisoners, but the attempts were again easily blocked by Himmler: only 250 parcels had arrived at Ravensbrück, all of them ransacked by the SS. The only camp the ICRC delegates had been allowed to inspect was the so-called model camp of Theresienstadt. Here German Red Cross minders took their Swiss visitors to see show blocks and to talk to tutored inmates, ensuring that glowing reports went back to Geneva HQ.

Meanwhile, the ICRC was being inundated with pleas for help from terrified relatives all over Europe. The approach of D-Day had exacerbated fears that once the Allies landed, Hitler would retaliate against his prisoners, even slaughtering them. Relatives who wrote to Geneva asking for news, however, all found the same: Geneva could tell them nothing at all.

As families tried to reach out to their missing relatives, so the women in Ravensbrück were increasingly trying to reach out to them. It was clear to all in the camp that Hitler’s days were numbered and that liberation was within sight, but the women had never been so afraid.

New arrivals from Poland brought good news about evacuations from the eastern camps ahead of the advancing Soviet front. And yet these same prisoners also spoke of further atrocities enacted by the Germans before the camps were evacuated. A Pole who arrived from Majdanek had witnessed the shooting in November of 17,000 Jews in a single day. Gypsies arriving from Auschwitz described the burning down of their entire Gypsy camp and the murder of 20,000 men, women and children.

The prisoners understood far better than the world outside that when Hitler felt the end was coming he would massacre them too, or hold them hostage. And if this happened they would be on their own, as nobody knew they were here.

Every national group sought news from its own war front, listening to the guards or trying to glimpse a German newspaper. Ojcumiła Falkowska, the Polish dancer, had a new job cooking for
German officials evacuated
from Berlin and relocated to temporary offices in the Ravensbrück woods. Here she heard snatches of the BBC news as the Germans tuned in, and she passed on what she learned.

Those lucky enough
to receive post from their families looked for clues in censored letters. Micheline Maurel had written to her father in Toulon every month since arriving in 1943, but never heard back. Then in May 1944 she received an envelope postmarked Toulon, but found when she opened it that the censor had snipped out so much that just a corner remained, and on it one word: ‘Papa’.

Two food parcels then came from home for Micheline in quick succession. The first had been torn open before it reached her, and all that was left was a small tin of meat spread and some chocolate bars. She shared the meat with her friends, and hid the chocolate bars in a bag beneath her mattress to eat the next day, but by then the bag had gone. In the next parcel came six eggs, only one left unbroken, so she and her friend divided it in two and ate it raw.

Others had heard that it might now be possible to receive Red Cross parcels if the International Red Cross knew their names and numbers. A
group of Poles had managed to smuggle their names and numbers out through yet another group of friendly POWs whom they met on an outside work gang. Parcels had come, with their names on, but like all parcels they were rifled before the women got them. Guards were seen eating the Red Cross chocolate and smoking American cigarettes.

Most women, however, knew that even now nobody had any idea where they were. With the fronts advancing, even their official mail would soon be cut off and their families would simply think they’d disappeared. That was their greatest fear, so while they looked for news, prisoners also looked for ways to preserve their stories. Many tried to bury precious items with notes or photographs around the camp, in the hope that one day someone would find them, or else they told their stories to a friend, hoping the friend would survive if they did not.

Milena Jesenska had entrusted her story to Grete Buber-Neumann long before she realised that she was going to die. Throughout the winter of 1943–4 Milena’s health had continued to fail; then in April she was diagnosed with an ulcerated kidney. Dr Treite operated again, but it was too late. One day Milena said she wished to get up and go to her office in the hospital, to snatch a last look at freedom, just visible through the camp gate, but she was already too weak to move. Then her other kidney failed. ‘
Look at the colour
of my feet. They’re the feet of a dying person,’ she told Grete. ‘I shall go on living through you.’

With her Czech friends around her, as well as Grete, Milena died on 17 May 1944. She was given a coffin, and when the corpse squad came, Grete was allowed to accompany the body through the drizzle to the crematorium. Here, male prisoners, both green triangles ‘with faces like executioners’ assistants’, lifted the body out and said to Grete: ‘Don’t be frightened of grabbing her, she can’t feel anything any more.’ Dr Treite later wrote to Professor Jesensky, saying he could arrange for Milena’s ashes to be sent to Prague.

No prisoners had better reason to fear they would disappear than those held in the NN block. Hitler’s express intention was that these prisoners would ‘disappear into the night and the fog’. Yet paradoxically – perhaps because they understood they would probably not survive – these women did more than any to preserve their stories and the story of the camp itself. Many of the NN women – Red Army, Yugoslavs, Belgians and Dutch – were gathering information and trying to analyse it. Germaine Tillion was continuing to treat her inquiries as if they were a piece of ethnological research.

Over the months, Germaine had secured a camp-wide network of informants. She could not have done this without her helper Anise Girard, who served Germaine not only as a physical prop, but as fixer and facilitator. A
fluent German-speaker and a communist sympathiser, Anise was able to win the trust of some of the camp’s most powerful and knowledgeable ‘aristocrats’, the prisoner secretaries. Some of these women had been here so long they were almost considered SS, and behaved as such, too busy surviving to leak information. But others observed the SS ‘like old rats’ and passed on what they knew: lists of arrivals, departures, the dead and the sick. Germaine in turn squirrelled the information away in hiding places whose whereabouts even Anise was not told. ‘It was a very big secret, but I discovered one hiding place was under a loose plank in the roof above her mattress,’ says Anise.

Before long, Germaine had set up a system whereby the ‘old rats’ were bringing camp lists to her every day, as were the prisoners on the hospital staff too, all of which she annotated, analysed and then hid.

First she received the number of women counted at the morning
Appell
, as well as the actual camp number given to the latest woman to arrive. One day in June 1944, for example, Germaine found out that there were 30,849 women in the camp and that the latest woman to be registered had received the number 42158. The difference between the two figures was presumed to represent the number of women sent to subcamps, or transferred elsewhere. But as Germaine had no means of gathering information on how many women actually arrived at subcamps, it was hard to be sure.

A second set of lists, one from the
Revier
and one from the office, showed numbers of deaths, but these figures also never matched. On one day in May, for example, a figure of 151 deaths came from contacts in the hospital, compared with a figure of 191 produced by the camp office. Germaine deduced that this difference of forty must represent the number of executions, because the hospital did not register executions – but again, how could she be sure?

What about deaths in the bunker? These were said to be rising again. And the ‘old rats’ had no lists of the women sent on the black transports. For information on these, Germaine had to rely on rumours from the
Revier
, where it was said that the
Idiotenstübchen
was being cleared perhaps as often as once every two weeks.

By this time Germaine Tillion’s reputation as an intellectual had begun to grow and other respected figures in the camp wished to meet her, among them Grete Buber-Neumann. Just as Milena Jesenska had entrusted her life story to Grete before she died, so Grete wanted to pass on what she knew to a trusted confidante, and she chose Germaine.

Just before D-Day, on the top mattress of a bunk, with Anise Girard squeezed between them as interpreter, these two camp ‘sages’ met. Grete spoke first and spent long hours relating to Germaine what she had experienced of the horrors of Stalin’s communism and of Siberian camps. The two then compared Grete’s experience with what was unfolding at Ravensbrück. With her
communist sympathies, Anise did not believe that Stalin’s camps could be as bad as Grete made out. ‘
But Germaine
was convinced that Grete spoke the reality, and retained every word in her head.’

Grete had related her story ‘paragraph by paragraph’, said Germaine, recalling the meeting after the war. ‘And like so many of us, she was haunted by the desire to ensure that what she knew survived.’

None of these groups had been as adept as the Polish rabbits at making what they knew survive, yet in the spring of 1944 the rabbits became haunted by a fear that the world might not have been receiving their information after all. The women had certainly learned that something of their story had reached England already, because Polish comrades newly arrived at the camp had heard reports about the Ravensbrück atrocities broadcast to the Polish underground on the clandestine English radio station Dawn Radio (SWIT).

However, Krysia remained anxious about exactly what information had got out and who might or might not have received it. In one letter she asked her family to tell her ‘which envelopes are missing’.