If This Is a Woman: Inside Ravensbruck: Hitler's Concentration Camp for Women (81 page)

Loulou and the French nurses remembered another occasion when, after a commotion in the ‘mad room’, Mory called for all the lunatics to be killed. She asked Loulou, Jacqueline and Violette to help her kill them. On that occasion, said Violette, the block was woken by terrible cries in the night. ‘We got up, so did Carmen Mory and Anne Spoerry, and when we went in we saw the cries came from a woman, probably a Russian, who was fighting with another among the prostrate bodies. There were sixty-seven women in the room that night. Mory hit them with a leather strap but failed to quieten them.’ Mory’s version was that Anne Spoerry had come to her one morning and said that a Polish woman, ‘Paulina’, who had ‘Herculean strength’, had killed one of the others by banging her head against the wall. Mory went to Treite and said, ‘I’ve found two more dead in the room,’ at which Treite laughed and replied, ‘Better two less than two more.’

On another occasion, so Mory said, Spoerry took all the other block workers to see another dead body in the mad room. It was terribly mutilated and had marks around the neck. Part of the head ‘had been literally scalped, with big blue marks all over’. Spoerry looked at Paulina’s hands and under the nails, finding traces of blood.
Oberschwester
Marschall was brought to see and ‘thought the situation was as appalling as we did’.

Violette said that Mory went to the French group and asked for their support, saying the lunatics should be killed rather than live in those conditions. ‘But we refused to agree.’ Jacqueline said Treite then appeared and told Mory to choose the maddest, as he was going to inject them. ‘Mory chose them and the women disappeared.’

Loulou remembered nothing of the scalped head or the traces of blood, but she recalled Paulina, who had a ‘superb singing voice’ and had sung out loud all night. ‘She was in a kind of hallucination. A delirium.’ The next
morning Mory came up to Loulou carrying a syringe with something in it. ‘She said: “We can’t go on, we must execute her.” I said I couldn’t do that. She threatened me. Menaced me. At that point Claude volunteered. Anne Spoerry took that syringe and injected Paulina right there in the heart and she died immediately.’

Soon after Paulina died the
Idiotenstübchen
was cleared out again, but this time it wasn’t only the ‘idiots’ who went, but many of Dr Loulou’s patients too. As always it was the office workers who found out first that a new black transport was planned, when lists were called for, and secret plans made for a medical commission to come from Berlin to oversee the selections. The selections began in Block 10, and all the prisoner medical staff had to be there too.

There was the usual utmost secrecy about the destination, but this time more questions. It couldn’t be Majdanek, where the last gassing transport had gone – it was now in the hands of the Russians. Nor could it be Auschwitz: the gas chambers there had been dismantled ahead of the evacuation. The office workers were simply told to write beside the selected names: ‘sent to a new camp’.

Once a list was drawn up, the final selection took place. Violette Lecoq was called to one of the big rooms in the main
Revier
block, where a large table had been placed, behind which stood Drs Trommer, Treite and Orendi, and a ‘psychiatrist from Berlin’. Also present, she recalled, were ‘
Oberschwester
Marschall, Carmen Mory, Dr Le Porz, Jacqueline Héreil, Anne Spoerry and myself’.

Lists for selection had been prepared, and now the prisoners were called by name. ‘Thus began a march-past by which with a simple gesture the women were chosen either for transport or for return to their block,’ said Violette. Many of the names were well known to the Block 10 staff. The French woman Marie Leger was among them. Loulou tried to persuade Claude to use her sway with Mory to take Marie Leger off the list – she was only on it ‘
because Mory detested her
’. But Claude refused to help.

Julia Barry, the ‘British’ camp policewoman from Guernsey, was called to guard the women in the
Idiotenstübchen
the morning before they left, and she later recalled that one of them was English. ‘
When they passed
, a young girl spoke English to me. She said she was going away now and would soon be home. I asked if she was an English girl and she said: “Of course.” That was all, and I never saw her again.’

According to Violette Lecoq, those selected remained in the block that night, and the following evening at seven ‘we started to dress them’. At 4 the next morning, Bräuning and Binz appeared at the block along with the prisoner camp police chief, Elisabeth Thury, and several women guards, who
began to round up the women and pile them onto lorries. Violette was ordered to accompany the transport as far as the station, along with Carmen Mory.

At the station Violette saw the women put into cattle trucks ‘that contained nothing but a truss of straw’, about fifty crammed into each truck, under an armed SS guard. A Gypsy convoy left at the same time. Even then nobody knew for sure where the women were going, but Mory knew more than the rest: she told
Oberschwester
Marschall that she had heard they were going to Linz, in Austria.

In evidence for the trial in Hamburg in 1946 Percival Treite said at first that the women were sent to a health spa at Thüringen. Questioned again, he said: ‘We supposed that they went to a psychiatric hospital at Linz, but later a nurse told me that it was a transport for the gas chamber.’ Where exactly the gassing took place at Linz did not emerge until SS truck drivers gave evidence in a separate trial, relating to Mauthausen concentration camp. The drivers were questioned about gassings of male prisoners at Castle Hartheim near Linz.

Castle Hartheim was one of the first euthanasia gassing centres, opened in 1939, and had remained operational as a gassing centre until 1944.
^*
One of the SS drivers, Georg Bloser, said he drove women as well as men to be gassed at Castle Hartheim. He picked them up from a local station. ‘They were always in a terrible state. When I got to Hartheim the staff there took them away. Sometimes I was taken to a waiting room where they gave me a cup of tea.’

Karl Wassner, a crematorium worker at nearby Gusen concentration camp, also accompanied prisoners to Castle Hartheim, and on one occasion, as he waited, he saw inside the gas chamber. ‘I had a glance through the judas window. I could see that the prisoners were already lying down in this inner room. It was the gas chamber and was lit on the inside. I noticed that inside there were many more people than those we brought from Gusen. I was able to observe that there were women amongst them.’

In December 1944, as the Russian front approached Austria, Castle Hartheim was closed on the orders of the Führer, and the institution restored as a normal sanatorium. Those given the task of destroying evidence of the gassing were a group of prisoners from Mauthausen, amongst them Adam Gołembski, who described what the castle was like inside.

From the entrance, he said, you went deeper into the fortress. Eventually you came to a room for photography that led on to a room that ‘gave the
impression of being a bathroom; the door was cast iron, with rubber around the edges and in it was a little peephole’. Inside were six showers. From this room a door led to a further room, where bottles of gas and other gassing equipment were stored. And there was yet another room hidden beyond, which was clearly a laboratory of some kind, as there was a large table. When Gołembski reached this room he found some papers, which appeared to be a report on research done on a body. From this room another door led to the crematorium, with two furnaces.

Once outside again, looking to the left of the entrance, Gołembski found a pile of ashes with bones ‘enough to fill sixty bins’. He also found an electric mill for crushing bones left over after the burning. Finally, in the castle garage ‘we found clothes of children, women and men – enough to fill four horse-drawn carts’.

How many of the Ravensbrück black transports were taken to Schloss Hartheim is impossible to say, but the November 1944 transport of 120 women – mostly from Block 10 – was probably the largest. The Ravensbrück staff would also have known that this transport was the last to the castle gas chamber, which was about to be dismantled for good.

For the most part, the deaths at Castle Hartheim remained anonymous, as nearly all German records about the castle were destroyed, as well as the camp records about the transports. The only women victims from Ravensbrück whose identities are known for sure are those few whose names were known to Loulou Le Porz and the other ‘staff’ in Block 10.

In 2012, I tried to find out more about some of the women Loulou remembered. One was Marie Leger, and in order to help my research, Loulou’s son, Jean-Marie Liard, tracked down a copy of the book that had led to Henriette and Marie Leger’s arrest. He found it in the Bibliothèque Nationale in Paris. Entitled
Les Voix du Drapeau
(Voices of the Flag), the book is a collection of patriotic ballads, written in praise of French military heroes of days past, and is dedicated ‘to all those whose voice of agony and glory speaks to us down the years’. The introduction, written by the twins, speaks of ‘those who fertilised our soil with the holiness of their blood – the heroes of the trenches of Ypres and Furnes’, and implores readers to remember ‘all the cruelties and betrayals of the Great War and the terrible use of gases in that war’. Marie and Henriette dedicated their book ‘to those whose feet passed down the “road of blood”’.

PART SIX

Chapter 30

Hungarians

E
va Fejer was at school in Budapest in October 1944 when an announcement was made that all Jewish girls in her class should go to dig trenches because the Russians were coming. ‘
We were taken
out to a field and we had to start digging. We slept on an open football ground. A few days later we were marched out towards the west.’

The October order came from the office of Adolf Eichmann, the man sent to Hungary, after the German invasion six months earlier, to implement this last stage of the Final Solution by rounding up the country’s 750,000 Jews and sending them to Auschwitz. Time was pressing: the Red Army was closing in.

When the Hungarian round-ups began in late March 1944 most Jews were unprepared. They knew about the slaughter of Europe’s other Jews, but until now Hungary, a German ally, had been protected. Eva Fejer’s father, a prominent lawyer, told his family: ‘It won’t happen here. Hungarian law won’t allow it.’ Franz Fejer was a Hungarian patriot and a German patriot too. The family all spoke German; Eva had a German nanny, and spoke fluent German by the time she was ten. The family took no precautions. ‘I think my parents just didn’t want to accept it. And my father didn’t want to frighten his family, so he didn’t warn us. He wanted us to have as much of our childhood as there was left.’

This time, however, the world outside recognised the signs. The moment that Hitler invaded, the warning went out to Western capitals that Hungarian Jews were about to be exterminated too. Berlin barely attempted to hide it. The Swedes sent envoys to issue Jews with protective passports and
papers, and the International Red Cross tried to offer clothes and food to those forced into holding camps, but even as this went on, tens of thousands of Jews were being herded onto trains for Auschwitz, and one of the first to go was Eva’s father. ‘He was sixty-one but he was very fit,’ said Eva, ‘so we hoped he might have survived. He was a fine skater and brilliant pianist. Sometimes one hoped that someone might make it out in an air pocket or something, but not one of his transport came back.’

By July 1944, 430,000 of Hungary’s 750,000 Jews had already been rounded up and sent to Auschwitz, where all but 100,000 were gassed. The only Hungarian Jews who avoided transport to Auschwitz were those deemed fit for munitions work, and they were sent on to the concentration camps in Germany. Hungarian arrivals at Auschwitz were also sifted for any who might make useful slave labourers.

In July 1944, four months after Eichmann’s round-ups in Hungary began, the deportations were put on hold. Miklos Horthy, the Nazis’ puppet leader in Budapest, had shifted his allegiance to the Allies, refusing to cooperate with further Jewish expulsions. The 200,000 Jews who remained – mostly in Budapest – appeared to have been spared, including Eva Fejer and her mother. In early October, however, the Horthy government fell, and Eichmann was set to resume. By now Allied bombs had destroyed train lines and rolling stock across Hungary and Poland: trains could no longer be used. Furthermore, the Soviet front was driving forward so fast that even Auschwitz in southern Poland was preparing for evacuation; the gas chambers were about to be closed down, and the camp had stopped taking in more Jews.

Abandoning the round-ups, however, was not an option; Hitler had ordered that every last Jew be removed from Hungary before the Red Army arrived. The only way Eichmann could achieve this was to force-march the remaining 200,000 men, women and children from Budapest to the Austrian border, a distance of 200 miles.

It was 16 October and frost was already on the ground when women and girls between the ages of sixteen and forty received the orders to leave. Eva had managed to pack her girl guide’s rucksack – ‘1939 Jamboree’ emblazoned on it – with food and spare clothes, smuggled to her by her German nanny. But she was unable to see her mother again before she left.

Eva didn’t suffer on the march as much as most, she says. She’d learned first aid, and was sporty and strong. ‘My father used to make me learn to do everything myself. He’d mend my bike the first time, but I’d have to watch and do it myself the next time.’ She also knew the road the marchers set out upon, as the family used it before the war to visit relatives over the border. She marched all day and slept in football fields at night. It was cold, but Eva was wearing her culottes and had spare ski pants in her bag.

Most prisoners marched in families, or small groups. Margit Nagy insisted on coming with her daughters, Rosza and Marianne. ‘I think she knew we might die and she wanted us all to be together. We held hands all the way,’ said Rosza. Girls who were alone were ‘adopted’ by other families, but Eva preferred to march alone. Guards from the fascist Arrow Cross beat the stragglers. Passers-by stared, and sometimes offered food. In the Swabian mountains a man walked next to Eva and started asking questions about her father.