If This Is a Woman: Inside Ravensbruck: Hitler's Concentration Camp for Women (71 page)

Brother and sister were both born in New York, the children of Italian immigrants, but Gemma had married a Hungarian Jew, Hermann Gluck, and in the 1930s went to live in Budapest. In 1934 Fiorello La Guardia was elected New York’s mayor, warning in one of his first speeches that Hitler’s intention was to annihilate the Jews. Ten years later Fiorello’s sister, aged sixty-three, was spared annihilation because she shared his name.

Learning of her capture, Himmler at once sent orders that Gemma be treated as a hostage, and on arrival at Ravensbrück she was allocated to Block 2, one of the most privileged barracks, where she didn’t have to work and where she had her own mattress. In nearly all other blocks prisoners were by now sleeping three to a mattress and bunks were pushed so close together that the women had to walk over dozens of bodies before finding a gap to
squeeze down. Bunks were also crammed in all the day rooms, so there was nowhere to eat or talk.

In August more women started turning up from Auschwitz and in greater numbers – usually young Jewish women, spared the gas chambers for slave labour. One August transport from Auschwitz also brought fifty Frenchwomen, the only survivors of a group of 250 non-Jewish women who had been sent from Paris to Auschwitz eighteen months earlier.
Among the group was
a prominent French communist called Marie-Claude Vaillant-Couturier, who gave the most compelling account of Auschwitz yet.

Her vantage point was unique. In the 1930s Marie-Claude had worked as a photo-journalist for the French newspaper
L’Humanité
, and was one of the very first journalists to report on Hitler’s camps, secretly taking photographs of prisoners through the wire at Dachau and Sachsenhausen. When war broke out she was arrested for her work on underground communist publications, and found herself a prisoner in Auschwitz. So valuable was Marie-Claude’s testimony considered after the war that she was called to give evidence at Nuremberg.

On arrival at Ravensbrück she told the French how their compatriots who had travelled with her to Auschwitz had first been spared the gas chambers, as they were not Jews, but many had weakened fast and were soon being killed instead as ‘useless mouths’. First they were deprived of food and water and then, if starving didn’t kill them fast enough, they were gassed. Soon Ravensbrück was awash with stories of the Auschwitz horror, and some saw familiar patterns, predicting that before the end, similar atrocities would be enacted here.

It was not only the women who came from Auschwitz, or other eastern camps, who had premonitions of things to come. Louise (Loulou) Le Porz, a doctor from Bordeaux, arrived at Ravensbrück in June, having travelled via the men’s camp of Neue Bremm, a Gestapo punishment camp. Here her transport was held over for some days, and during this time the women were often marched past the men’s camp, where – deliberately it seemed – they were given the chance to observe the brutality meted out to male prisoners. Among other tortures, the men were shackled to one another naked, and made to jump up and down going round and round a ring while guards whipped them, until they were bloodied all over and dropped. Then they were beaten again, and made to jump some more, until by the end several were dead.

Loulou would say later that she never forgot the shock of Neue Bremm, and that because of what she saw there she always had a dread of what the future might yet hold for those at Ravensbrück.

Soon after arrival, Loulou’s group was lined up on the Appellplatz for a selection; that day factory managers from Leipzig were choosing slave
labourers. Loulou’s cousin Françoise Couëron, who was arrested with her in Bordeaux, was standing at her side when a man in a white coat appeared and asked if any present were doctors. Loulou did not at first raise her hand – she didn’t want to be separated from Françoise, and Leipzig was bound to be better than this. Nor did she like the look of the doctor. ‘
But I thought
, even so, perhaps I could help in some way. So I raised my hand.’

Loulou’s first task in the
Revier
was to check arrivals from Auschwitz for infectious disease, and on the list she was astonished to see the name Vaillant-Couturier. Marie-Claude’s family were well known in France before the war, not least because one of her uncles was the creator of Babar the Elephant. And she herself had become famous through her photography as ‘the lady with the Rolleiflex’.

The serious young Catholic doctor Loulou had little obviously in common with the fervent communist intellectual Marie-Claude. But as they crossed paths in the
Revier
they were able to exchange a few words and quickly understood each other well. Before they had a chance to cement their friendship, however, Loulou had been sent to the
Strafblock
for lashing out at a guard, who had punched her for being outside during an air raid. The guard also accused Loulou of being ‘too proud’.

Tall and strong, Loulou was then set to work unloading bricks and coal. ‘I remember a little French girl called Raymonde Sauvage, who had no strength left. So I said hold on to my belt and I’ll pull you, and she did, but it was extraordinary because I felt nothing at all. She had the weight of a soul.’

As the summer heat beat down ever more intensely, an inexplicable excitement broke out in certain quarters of the camp, particularly among the German political prisoners. It was a sense – nothing more at first – that before the liberating armies arrived, the nightmare might come to a very sudden end.

The German people were growing restless. Life expectancy on the eastern front was less than three months; almost every family had lost sons, brothers or fathers. Bomb damage was crippling the country, and women and children had been evacuated from Berlin. Food shortages were acute, and women were now being asked to clear away rubble in the cities. In Fürstenberg locals talked openly now of what would happen when the Red Army overran the town, and many were already making plans to move.

Behind the wire, the concentration camps were not immune from this general sense of panic and unrest. Talk of an implosion of some sort was rife among the guards and the civilian workers. Air-raid sirens blasted out almost every day, and prisoners were assigned to building ditches around the camp.

Nor was it only the guards who brought news from the German street.
Among the new arrivals were many German prisoners – women who had insulted the Führer or complained about the length of the war, or asocials caught in a round-up. From these women, the German political prisoners were able to glean a great deal, and the best-connected amongst them passed on rumours that many in Hitler’s inner circle were restless too.

In the early summer of 1944 Grete Buber-Neumann received a coded letter from a well-connected relative that there was about to be an attempt on Hitler’s life. Grete was in regular correspondence with a brother-in-law, Bernhard, who had been a concentration-camp prisoner himself in the 1930s, and knew how to beat the censors. Various clues convinced the women that the army was about to strike against Hitler. Bernhard had clearly got wind of the growing reports in military and diplomatic circles that revolt against the Führer was reaching its climax.

On 20 July 1944 Claus von Stauffenberg walked into a military conference with the Führer at his eastern military headquarters, the
Wolfsschanze
, or ‘wolf’s lair’, and placed a briefcase containing a bomb under the table, as close as possible to Hitler; but a stout table leg deflected the bomb, and Hitler survived, suffering only burns and shock.

In a little-noticed footnote
to the affair, at Hohenlychen Clinic, a few miles up the road from Ravensbrück, a baby called Nanette Dorothea Potthast had been born just before the assassination attempt – an event that has some significance in relation to the plot. Nanette was born to Heinrich Himmler and Hedwig Potthast on 3 June. It is not, however, the date of her birth that is of historical interest, but the date and the place it was registered – 20 July, at Hohenlychen – and the fact that the father had to be present. Speculation has always surrounded the whereabouts of Himmler on the morning when Hitler was nearly killed; some have even suggested that his absence from the scene implicated him in the plot. Nanette’s birth certificate provides strong evidence that he was at Hohenlychen on that day, attending the registration of the birth of his child.

Himmler would soon have further reason to return to the area. The Reichsführer was put in charge of the investigation into the 20 July plot, and the police operation was based at the SS training centre at Drögen, just five miles from Ravensbrück. The Ravensbrück bunker was even used to hold many of the plotters while they were under interrogation. Prisoners remember a ‘great commotion’ when the culprits were driven into the camp in
cars with covered windows
.

Isa Vermehren, the cabaret singer, who had been in the bunker’s privileged cells for nearly nine months, observed the plotters as they awaited their fate. The first she saw was Count Wolf-Heinrich von Helldorf, the Berlin police chief, who had masterminded the expulsion of Berlin’s Jews. So angry was
Hitler at von Helldorf’s betrayal that he forced him to watch his co-conspirators hanged before being hanged himself. One day Isa caught sight of him in the little yard outside. ‘
He sat on a chair
in the sun, more dead than alive, with an expression of endless sadness on his face’.

Soon wives, sisters and daughters of von Stauffenberg and his relatives were arrested and shot too. More distant female members of the family were brought to Ravensbrück. Towards the end of July, one of Hitler’s senior generals, Franz Halder, arrived at the bunker along with his wife. Though kept in separate cells, the couple were allowed to meet to say ‘good morning’ and ‘good night’.

During this time Helmuth von Moltke, the other bunker hostage, began to realise that he too was doomed. Though not directly involved in the 20 July plot – he had been held in the bunker since February on unrelated charges of treachery – he knew, nevertheless, that Himmler’s investigation would link him to the conspirators. Discussing his future with Isa, he said he was no revolutionary and was against assassination. ‘He was smart enough to see that a successful assassination wouldn’t have had a better outcome than a failed one,’ Isa recalled. ‘He was of the opinion that Hitler had to destroy his system himself, in order to leave the other National Socialists no arguments for their defence.’

Von Moltke also told Isa he sympathised with the women prisoners here, but was fearful for their future. ‘Hope is not my métier,’ he said once.

In the last days of July, Isa was interested to observe ‘the three Hoepner women were brought in – all of them dressed in pure Potsdam style’. General Erich Hoepner, who had led the assault on Moscow as part of Operation Barbarossa, was already under interrogation at Drögen. ‘The aunt told me she found it quite annoying that this had happened just now, when she and her husband had just received confirmation for a three-week reservation at their favourite sanatorium. And now this, just because of her brother.’

Hoepner’s daughter wondered if there might be a way to deliver a pistol to her father, so he could take his own life. He was tried on 7 and 8 August, after which he too was hanged on a wire noose – another execution that Hitler watched on film.

After this, the Hoepner aunt was soon released, but the daughter and her mother were sent to the
Strafblock
for four weeks for further punishment. The mother suffered badly, and next time Isa saw her she was shaved, pale and skinny. ‘Rumour had it that her husband had incriminated her heavily under interrogation.’

Frau Hoepner, was, however, able to find friends in the
Strafblock
, among them Loulou Le Porz, the doctor from Bordeaux. By this time Loulou had made firm comrades there, particularly a French woman called Madame
Lelong and a Polish countess called Maria Grocholska. Maria spoke impeccable French and German, so when the Hoepners came to the block she was able to interpret as they met on Loulou’s bunk before going to sleep.

Looking back, says Loulou, it was in the
Strafblock
that she made her best
camarades
. In the camp in general there was not so much friendship between nationalities, but in the
Strafblock
there was, perhaps because the block was closed off from the rest of the camp:

Outside women
sometimes had the mark of education, but they had fallen in amongst the masses. In the
Strafblock
one could often get to know their names and situate them somehow. I found out that Maria Grocholska was the daughter of a Polish prince. And Madame Lelong’s husband had worked with de Gaulle. Madame Hoepner was adorable too. They were my lice-picking syndicate. They picked the lice out of my hair for me and out of the hems of my clothes. I thought at the time, nobody is ever going to believe this. A countess and two generals’ wives picking my lice.

One day the Hoepners left the
Strafblock
and Loulou didn’t know where they went. ‘But it was like that in the camp. You were always uncertain. Someone would tap you on the shoulder and you didn’t know what might happen next.’

In early August uncertainty infected the whole camp. The Poles were waiting desperately for news from Warsaw, where an insurrection was said to have begun, and the French heard news that Paris might be liberated any day, but they couldn’t be sure. Denise Dufournier and her Parisian removal gang – some of whom had meanwhile been transferred to the painting gang – were sent off to yet another block, where the overcrowding was such that they were four to a bed and had to crawl to their mattress on all fours, lying flat on their stomachs to eat their soup.

At the end of August another big convoy from France arrived and the women spread the word that Paris was liberated at last. The veterans of the
vingt-sept mille
observed these new French arrivals with fascination. They were cheerful and wore ‘
ridiculous dresses
they’d concocted somehow’. One even had an Hermès scarf, and another a powder compact that she’d smuggled through the showers.