If This Is a Woman: Inside Ravensbruck: Hitler's Concentration Camp for Women (73 page)

When the first group were herded inside the tent, they were told that this was Block 25. Like any other block, it was assigned a Blockova and two Stubovas – both of them Polish camp veterans. The tent was cordoned off and strictly patrolled by camp police, as if what happened here was all a secret, but the tent was to become the worst-kept secret of all. Soon brown liquid started oozing from under the flaps, and at night came screams and moans.

One of the tent Stubovas, Halina Wasilewska, made sketches of the structure and notes of how it looked, keeping a grid of who arrived and when.
The original tent
, she said, was an army tent about 10 by 40 metres and 3 metres high, held up by a pair of central posts, which meant that the walls kept drooping lower and lower. There was no lighting and no source of water. With no access to latrines or lavatories, wooden boxes were put around the tent perimeter, with buckets inside. The first 900 occupants arrived on 23 August. Problems began at once because they had not been taken to the bathhouse first. They were all filthy and lice-infested and had to lie in the same clothes they had worn in the cattle trucks and outside the camp gates.

The women were ravenous, but food distribution was almost impossible, as camp utensils were not provided, so they had to eat from their own dishes if they had any – often just jars or tins – but with no chance to wash anything, the pots turned rancid from the food left on them.

Only after two days were the women taken off to the bathhouse for a shower, and now any last belongings they had managed to cling to were taken away, and they were put in cotton camp dresses. But then they were sent straight back to the tent and forced to sit or lie on the same stinking straw. Every day the SS guards would come to carry out random searches for more valuables, snatching the last rosaries, photographs and wedding rings. In mid-September the days were still hot and stuffy but the nights were starting to grow cool. Rain started to pour through open sides and the wind pulled the tent poles so that the structure swayed and the whole tent very nearly collapsed.

Although the tent was supposed to be a no-go area for the rest of the camp, other inmates stared at it with growing disgust, saying ‘They’re for the corpse squad’, though many others tried to help. When the word spread that the women inside were starving, prisoners from the kitchens and the offices tried to get inside to give out soup and bread. The Austrian prisoner Anna Hand was horrified by what she found. ‘
The strong snatched
bread from the weak and many prisoners got none at all. There were 1000 women in there, crammed like sardines in a space so small that many could only squat. Some were already being trampled to death.’

All this time, at the gates, more women from the Polish capital continued to arrive, along with transports from other places too. A group from the Łódź ghetto were put in the tent, along with the latest arrivals from Auschwitz. It was still the Warsaw women that flooded in fastest; the city now seemed to arrive area by area, as if methodically snatched from the flames and transplanted here. It seemed that the whole of Warsaw had been scooped up – rich and poor, educated or not, women from old people’s homes, children from orphanages, teachers, countesses and more; all milling around, trying to find mothers, sisters or children separated on different trucks or, more likely, killed in Warsaw’s flames.

The behaviour of some of their Polish compatriots horrified the political Poles. Wanda and Krysia observed that many wanted to please the Germans, believing that they really had been brought here for their own protection. ‘
They seemed to have
no understanding of their predicament,’ said Wanda. With the latest contingent came wagonloads of goods looted by the Germans from ransacked houses, churches and offices in Warsaw. So lavish was the haul that special warehouses were opened just outside the walls, and prisoners assigned to sort it out. One woman recognised her own curtains from her apartment in Warsaw.

The sight of the Warsaw women caused more and more consternation among other prisoners, particularly the Russians. Antonina Nikiforova stared in disbelief at the fur coats and the cases full of gold.

They had brought everything because Hitler had promised them houses. They had put themselves under the protection of the fascists and thought they had nothing in common with us, so they looked at all of us with disdain.

I saw nuns with big flowing black robes and gold crosses shining on their chests … They lay down on the ground, their arms over the cross, refusing to take them off. But soon all the camp understood how you take off the robes and crosses of the devout. The SS pulled them up with a kick and tore them off. A few days later you couldn’t tell them apart from the other prisoners. Only once or twice you would notice a woman raise her eyes to the heavens murmuring a prayer, and we knew this was a ‘sister’.

In the later transports from Warsaw came more and more women with young babies and children. The sight of women with babies in the camp enraged some of the SS men. Sara Honigmann, a Polish prisoner, saw a group of Warsaw women standing near the bathhouse one morning. One of them was carrying a baby. ‘The deputy camp commandant strode over to the young woman, grabbed her baby from her arms and beat it against the camp wall. The mother collapsed on the ground weeping.’ After this another SS officer remonstrated with the first, who drew his gun, and the commandant himself had to settle the disturbance.

Karolina had won permission from Dorothea Binz to walk among the crowds, and she found many women so distressed about what had happened to them that they couldn’t even answer questions. Often they’d been forced to leave children behind, or seen them killed. One woman told Karolina that she had left behind two children as the Germans had snatched her away without them. Another whispered to Karolina that she had seen the same woman’s son blown up by a bomb.

For Suhren the arrival of the children presented another logistical problem. Since the winter of 1943, when the special Jewish group arrived from Belgium and Holland, the camp had always held a few young children, and more had arrived with a Gypsy transport in July. But for the most part, careful screening prevented young children from boarding the trains that headed for Ravensbrück because they were no use for work.

The groups of Jewish prisoners now being transported here from Auschwitz were the most carefully screened of all: any very young children would certainly have been picked out on first arrival at the Auschwitz ramp and sent
for gassing, probably by Josef Mengele, the doctor best known for his experiments on twins.

In September a sixteen-year-old girl called Pola Wellsberg, a Polish Jew, arrived at Ravensbrück.
She had faced Mengele
at Auschwitz just two weeks before. Imprisoned first in the Łódź ghetto, her parents and four brothers had all been sent to the Chelmno death camp, but Pola and her younger sister, Chaya, survived because they were sent to a ghetto factory to make soldiers’ shoes. When the ghetto was emptied in August 1944 she and her sister were taken to Auschwitz, where everyone from Łódź was lined up before Mengele. He pointed to each of them so that one group, chosen for the gas chamber, formed to his left and the other, chosen for work, to his right. Pola and Chaya were sent left, ‘but I was pulled out at the last minute,’ says Pola. She was judged fit for work, which was why she was sent on to Ravensbrück.

Regina Minzburg was also at Łódź before being sent on to Auschwitz, where she too was selected to live – ‘We were on our way to the gas chamber when they suddenly decided to pick out 500 more to work. I was fourteen but they thought I could work.’ But most of the Warsaw women had undergone no such preselection. These women often came straight from their homes with their goods, chattels, grandparents and children – and many of them were pregnant too.

Faced with this ever-growing crowd – many of them women who couldn’t possibly work – Fritz Suhren’s options were limited. At other camps thousands had been turning up from Warsaw too. The commandant of Stutthof Camp, which was overwhelmed by new arrivals, received an order from Richard Glücks, head of the camp inspectorate, on 14 August 1944 that Warsaw women with children under fourteen should not be admitted to the camp – they should
not be ‘recorded on the lists
’. The order almost certainly meant that the Stutthof arrivals were taken off and shot. It seems highly probable that a similar order was sent to Fritz Suhren.

Suhren’s other solution to the overcrowding was to send for a bigger tent. According to Halina’s report, the new one was about 20 metres wide by 50 long, twice as wide as the first, and its sides more than three metres high, with a two-peaked roof. The second tent had a gutter and a light, but it had no natural light, so it was darker, especially as the electric light was feeble and barely lit up one end. The gutter leaked with the first rains. It leaked more or less in the middle, forming, on top of the groundwater below, a permanent puddle of about 100 square metres. Halina reported the leaking gutter several times, but it was never repaired.

From the start there was not enough straw for everyone in the second tent, and still nowhere for the new arrivals to wash, or to cleanse their dishes. A lavatory was sited outside, but it wasn’t possible to go there except in groups,
escorted by a guard. Soon the lavatory broke down. With about 100 undertwelves now living in the tent, the conditions became unspeakable. Twenty buckets were put inside, which were emptied into pits dug right behind the tent that quickly began to overflow.

By early October the nights were damp and cold. There was no medical help for the sick. The tent staff brought water from other blocks to wash the children, but it was almost impossible. There were more and more children and the fights for space increased. Within days of the new tent going up at least two women had given birth.

Every night the other prisoners heard dreadful high-pitched screams coming from the tent. One morning a prisoner was seen emerging and crouching just outside. Anja Lundholm saw the figure resting her head against a wooden pole.

Her long hair
was in disarray, spread over her head and shoulders. It was probably once blonde hair, but was grey with dirt. In her skinny arms the woman held something, but we couldn’t see what it was. Slowly, carefully, she lifted her head, and saw us staring as we walked past with the kettle. She nodded and reached out her bundle towards us, smiling with an elated look. It was a baby. Rather, it was a baby’s dead body.

Chapter 26

Kinderzimmer

K
arolina Lanckorońska was one of the first to notice how many of the Warsaw women were pregnant. Some of those pregnant were already mothers, and came with other children. Others were expecting their first child. Some gave birth outside the camp gates. Karolina asked Binz if she might give out milk to the pregnant women and Binz – perhaps a sign of pity – said yes ‘
on the grounds
that they are not criminals like us’.

The presence of so many pregnant women among the thousands who arrived from Warsaw was no more surprising than the presence of children. These women were a cross-section of Warsaw’s population, so many would naturally be in various stages of pregnancy. There had been no chance to screen the pregnant out before putting them on the trains. And yet the high number of pregnancies was especially striking. Karolina noticed large numbers vomiting. Many of these women were not sure yet that they were pregnant, but feared they might be, because during the German onslaught on Warsaw they had been raped.

Many women in the crowd spoke of rape, as Karolina and others heard when they walked around. One woman waiting at the gates screamed all night, every night. When Karolina asked what troubled her, the woman told her that her home had been ransacked, and she’d seen her daughter raped by Vlasov’s forces. Andrei Vlasov was a Soviet general who defected to the Germans, and who on Himmler’s orders led rogue Russian brigades into Warsaw, where they raped thousands of women, nuns and schoolchildren among them.

On arrival at Ravensbrück many of the pregnant Warsaw women were put inside the tent, but they were terrified of what would happen next. Eighteen-year-old
Stasia Tkaczyk
, two months pregnant, easily hid her pregnancy and took the chance to get out on a work gang leaving for a subcamp. Those closer to giving birth were unable to leave.

Nor was it only the women from Warsaw who were arriving pregnant. The screening of new arrivals in general was less thorough now, and pregnancy amongst other newcomers more common. A Breton woman who gave birth on the Lagerstrasse became infected and bled to death. Women were also more likely than before to fall pregnant at the camp itself; prisoners had more contact with men, particularly in the subcamps where German civilians and male POWs often worked alongside the inmates.

Nevertheless, it was the arrival of the Warsaw women that raised pregnancy rates to unheard-of levels. According to the office staff, one in ten of the Polish women arriving at the gates by September were pregnant. As a total of 12,000 women arrived from Warsaw by early October, this meant as many as 1200 babies were likely to be born in the camp over the next nine months.

The need to respond to the growing number of pregnant women in the camp was obvious to the SS; they could see the women all around and hear the sound of babies crying as well as anyone. In October women started going into labour at
Appell
, in the bathhouse and in the tent. When Leokadia Kopczynska
felt contractions
and collapsed at morning
Appell
, the guards, instead of kicking her, allowed her friends to take her to the
Revier
.

Perhaps it was Leokadia’s collapse at
Appell
that prompted Suhren to call through to Richard Glücks at the Central Camp Inspectorate (IKL) for further instructions, or perhaps the new instructions had already come. In any case, we know what the new orders were from what happened next: for the first time in the history of the camp, permission was given for babies to be born. A room in the
Revier
was designated, with midwives to assist.