If This Is a Woman: Inside Ravensbruck: Hitler's Concentration Camp for Women (70 page)

The reason for the sudden anxiety is not immediately clear, but a clue comes in a further letter in which she talks for the first time of the possibility of receiving Red Cross parcels. Krysia, like all prisoners in the early summer, became aware that certain women in Ravensbrück were receiving parcels sent by the International Red Cross in Geneva. She also knew that this could only happen if Geneva already had their names and numbers.

She was particularly interested in the fact that another group of Poles – non-rabbits – had received such parcels. Like the rabbits, these women had made contact with a group of POWs at a nearby Oflag, who had offered to send their names and numbers on to Geneva, presumably via their own Red Cross mail. Krysia tells her family: ‘
These other women’s
names have been handed in by the Oflags.’

As Krysia obviously understood, the arrival of the parcels demonstrated not only to the prisoners, but to the SS, that the International Red Cross had a list of certain women who were in the camp. Such a list would clearly be some kind of insurance against ‘disappearance’. The question that came to mind was why were the Polish rabbits not receiving parcels? They had sent on information with their names and numbers over a year ago. Had these lists not, after all, been received? Had they not been passed on to Geneva? It is vital that they are passed on, writes Krysia, and she explains why:

If the names of those who have had operations could be given there [i.e. to the ICRC] it would be a great help to us; it is not a matter of food but the moral significance the parcels have. The parcels are signed for meticulously,
and if they came for all those who have been operated on it would make some impression on our keepers – it would look as though they [the ICRC] had a list of us there, which could have an influence on our fate. We constantly have the feeling that they will want to liquidate us as living proofs.

Krysia then tells her family to seek further contact with Niuś (‘Apollo’), the POW go-between, who could provide another copy of the list, assuming it had got lost. Niuś ‘has our list’, she writes, and she seems to think that Niuś has the means to send the list straight to Geneva, as the Oflag boys did for the other Poles. Krysia signs off saying: ‘
If the idea
with the parcels is possible to carry out, write “the whims of the girls can be satisfied” or “cannot be satisfied” if nothing can be done.’

There is an added urgency – almost panic – to get an answer because the Red Army have now almost reached Lublin and she thinks the mail really is now about to be stopped. ‘Dearest! We predict contact with you is about to be cut off …’

Once again, however, Krysia finds that communication has not yet been cut off, because a reply clearly comes back with more positive news, and in April she responds, mentioning a mystery ‘cousin in Sweden’. She writes: ‘I’m really glad you got the letters from … Niuś … The correspondence with a cousin from Sweden brought us even more joy.’ As Krysia knew, the Polish Home Army used Sweden as a signalling base. Her reference to the correspondence with a cousin from Sweden shows she has now been reassured that Warsaw sent the information to Sweden, which has sent it on to the Polish government in London, which in turn will have sent it to the International Red Cross in Geneva.

At this point Krysia’s correspondence with home was finally cut off, but at least now she had the joy of knowing that her information had almost certainly got through to the right place, and parcels should follow. Yet nothing arrived from the Red Cross, either in the summer months or at any time later. Why not?

We know the ICRC had received the information, so that was not the problem. Furthermore, not only had the necessary details of the girls come in from the Polish government in London (and perhaps direct from Niuś as well), but the ICRC’s own delegate in the field was now picking up confirmation of the medical atrocities at Ravensbrück and passing what he knew back to Geneva.

By 1944 Roland Marti, and his colleagues at the ICRC’s Berlin delegation, were collecting more and more information about Nazi war crimes. Among their best sources were Allied prisoners of war, held in POW camps that
were by now dotted all over Germany and Poland. The POWs were increasingly used as slave labourers, and often found themselves working alongside concentration-camp prisoners in factories. They therefore gleaned a lot from these prisoners, and passed on what they heard to Red Cross delegates who, under the terms of the Geneva Conventions, regularly visited their camps.

On one occasion a POW told Roland Marti that Jewish children at Ravensbrück were being sterilised, and another informant spoke of the medical experiments. As a result, in a report written to his chiefs in Geneva on 12 June 1944, Marti said he had just learned that at Ravensbrück the
conditions were ‘tragic’
. In particular ‘they are carrying out bone and muscle operations on the legs of Polish women and many can show their scars. As well, at the slightest thing, the women are shot, and recently at least ten Ukrainians have been executed.’

The POWs who passed on the information obviously assumed that it would be acted on in some way, or at least passed to Allied intelligence, but they were wrong. Marti certainly passed it on to Geneva, but he knew it would never be made public. ‘This information seems to be certain,’ he wrote in a report to his superiors, ‘but cannot be used. I pass it to you for your files and it will help perhaps to throw light on the situation.’

Nevertheless, combined with information coming in from the Poles in London, the pressure was clearly building on Geneva to respond in some way over the Ravensbrück rabbits, because in the second half of 1944 the Committee did decide at least to review the case, and one of the questions on the table was whether to send the stricken women Red Cross parcels. Given that they had the women’s names and numbers, that was possible and desirable, especially as – in Krysia’s words – sending parcels to all seventy-seven rabbits would ‘make an impression on our keepers’ and ‘might influence our fate’.

And yet the decision taken by the Committee was not to send the parcels, almost certainly because making an impression on the women’s keepers was quite simply the opposite of what the ICRC was trying to do: preserving ‘neutrality’ was so much more important. There may well have been those on the Committee who feared too that sending the parcels would offend Ernst Grawitz, head of the German Red Cross. In any event the decision not to send the parcels was one that the woman lawyer on the Committee, Margaret Frick-Cramer, found very hard to take.

So frustrated was Frick-Cramer at the grotesque absurdity of the Committee’s position that she proposed – perhaps ironically, perhaps seriously – that the foremost humanitarian body in the world should send the women the means to kill themselves to end their pain. She said: ‘If nothing can be
done, the wretched victims should be sent the means of committing suicide; this would perhaps be more humane than giving them food.’

While the International Committee of the Red Cross were hushing up the rabbits, however, the Poles of SWIT at Milton Bryan in Buckinghamshire were continuing to do all they could to publicise the women’s plight. Not only was news of the atrocities being transmitted from England to Poland, but it was now being sent out in translation on other clandestine networks to France, Germany and other countries too.

On the evening of 19 May 1944 at 19.10 hours, the SWIT staff went on air again with another warning to the German ‘war criminals’. After brief news reports on the role of Poles in the latest Italian offensive, and on the ‘puppet union of Polish patriots’ (the new pro-Soviet Polish government inside Poland), the station announced that ‘further gloomy details have been received from the women’s concentration camp at Ravensbrück’. Apparently drawing on Krysia’s account sent in a secret letter, detailing everyday life in the camp, the station reported:

The daily routine
starts at 3 a.m. After 3 hours mustering in the open, work starts for the rest of the day with half an hour’s break for dinner. The work consists mainly of breaking stones on the roads. Women are usually shot in accordance with prepared lists. Recently 176 Polish women were shot. Women are subjected to experimental surgical operations such as sterilisation and injections. When a few weeks ago describing the conditions in this camp we warned the German staff, we also appealed to the free world to voice this warning. The British radio has since taken up this warning to the German criminals by repeating it in a number of languages. In view of the fact that these crimes are continuing we repeat our appeal. The Germans will only react to force and fear, and perhaps a repetition of the warning will stay the hands of the criminal staff and surgeons at Ravensbrück.

Following earlier broadcasts, Polish women newly arrived at the camp reported that they had heard the ‘English radio’ broadcasts before their arrests. After this latest broadcast, Frenchwomen arrived at Ravensbrück saying they’d heard the reports on the French service of ‘English radio’ as well. Wanda Wojtasik, Krysia’s Lublin friend, recalled how at first the new French prisoners had not believed what they heard on the radio, and on arrival in the camp asked to see the rabbits for proof.

‘
At first sight
of our mangled legs they rubbed their eyes in horrified wonder. They had not believed the broadcasts, they said. When they saw
us they tried to put fingers in the holes in our legs and then they believed it.’

It was probably Ojcumiła Falkowska who first broke the news of the
Allied landings
to the camp. Ojcumiła said she heard about the landings on the BBC at 5 a.m. on 6 June 1944, while cooking breakfast for the Berlin government evacuees at their temporary camp in the Ravensbrück woods.

According to Karolina Lanckorońska, Dr Treite announced ‘
in a loud voice
’ at morning surgery that the Allied invasion had begun. Having made his statement, he clicked his heels and returned to the operating theatre.

At the Zwodau subcamp, a group of French prisoners learned about the landings from their Polish Blockova, whose husband was serving in a Polish regiment of the British Army. The French teacher, Marie-Thérèse Lefebvre, whose home was on the Normandy coast, recalled: ‘She called us together and said: “
Now ladies
, I have some very important news to tell you, but keep quiet about it. The Allies have landed in France.”’

At Neubrandenburg the news came just as the RAF bombed an airfield, and the explosions seemed so close that the Frenchwomen’s bunks rattled and shook, and someone joked: ‘
Mon Dieu!
The Allies have arrived here already.’ The next day, the Neubrandenburg women were all marched out to clear the debris from the airfield, and as they laboured the locals stared and the children spat. Suddenly Normandy seemed a world away.

Excitement about the D-Day news did not last long. For most Poles the capture in May of Monte Cassino, taken by a Polish brigade, had caused far more celebration. And the Russians were more interested in monitoring the rapid advance of the Red Army, now moving towards Belorussia.

In the hospital Dr Treite’s words were also soon forgotten. ‘Many of us had already realised that we would just be too exhausted to hang on,’ recalled Karolina, whose French friend Dora Dreyfus was dying from a lung inflammation. Dora heard the news and was cheered by it, ‘and we talked of how I would go to visit her in France after the war,’ said Karolina. ‘But in less than twenty-four hours she was no longer with us.’

Grete Buber-Neumann remembered that the news of D-Day came as ‘the first real harbinger of freedom – we were overjoyed’. But if only Milena had been alive to experience it. ‘For so many years all our desires had been in common and all our plans for the future made together. Now I wept in my pillow at night.’

The French removal gang rejoiced at the news, but they decided to defer serious celebration until the Allies reached Paris. Like the rest of the camp they were, for the moment, more concerned about food.

Ravensbrück was nearer to starvation than ever before, but at subcamps it was worse, as no food was getting through. At Neubrandenburg, Micheline Maurel stood at
Appell
behind a newly arrived ‘fleshy’ Czech. ‘The idea of that mass of meat in front of me drove me to desperation. My hands were shaking.’ Some days the camp kitchens had no food at all and so none was given out. On other days, dehydrated food was handed out, which made people feel sick and suffer even worse diarrhoea. The real aristocracy in the camp was now, without doubt, those few who received food parcels; they stood more erect and had a sheen on their skin. Many shared what they got in their parcels, dividing delicacies like chocolate or cheese ‘until they were the size of a nut’.

After D-Day there were more to feed, because the number of new arrivals continued to grow, and the camp began to feel utterly overwhelmed. The clamour for the lavatories and latrines was fiercer than ever, and the plumbing couldn’t cope. The women in the
Schreibstube
were unable to keep up with registering so many new arrivals, so that evening
Appell
was abolished and quarantine cut to two weeks to free up more space.

In early July more transports of French women arrived, and not all their news was good: there was fierce fighting in Normandy and the Americans and British were failing to break through. News from the eastern front was mixed too. In the sewing shop there was graphic evidence of slaughter in Poland, with several prisoners reporting that severed German fingers, or even whole hands, were found inside the sleeves of soldiers’ jackets brought in for repair and recycling.

A Hungarian Jewish woman
also appeared at Ravensbrück reporting that Hitler was beginning an entire new extermination drive, rounding up all Hungary’s Jews. The woman, Gemma La Guardia Gluck, had been captured in Budapest, where her name had come to the attention of Adolf Eichmann, the man in charge of the Jewish exterminations. Eichmann identified Gemma as the sister of Fiorello La Guardia, the mayor of New York.