If This Is a Woman: Inside Ravensbruck: Hitler's Concentration Camp for Women (85 page)

Naomi remembers a few big events: the Gypsies arriving in the summer, for example, and being told they were thieves. ‘They came into our block and I remember thinking they were very dark. We were dark but they were darker. I don’t know if they were really thieves, but I know my mother made a little bag to keep our bowl and spoons in and hid it under the pillow.’

In the autumn of 1944 the Hungarians arrived, and everyone was amazed by the state they were in. ‘It was a terrible sight – they’d had no preparation, unlike us. We’d been in a camp before we got here – in Holland – but they had come straight from home or from the ghetto. They were in total shock and filthy.’ Chaya interrupts to ask something about the camp and explains that she is always learning new things, ‘because I never knew anything at the time – just that I was there, but where was it that I was? All I remember is sitting on a floor. When I came out I didn’t know about most normal things. People always made fun of me and said – oh, you know, she’s like that because of the camp.’

When the big groups began to arrive from Hungary and Slovakia, their mother, being Slovakian and her husband a Hungarian, would go and see if she knew anyone, ‘and of course she spoke Hungarian’. One day she found her husband’s sister, Aunt Chaya (Chaya was named after her), in the tent.

And so my mother told our aunt that we couldn’t get her out but we’d bring her things when we could. One day my brother comes and says: ‘I think they are killing Aunt Chaya.’ So my mother went to look, and because my aunt had tried to get out of that tent they hit her badly, and so we got her out somehow. Don’t ask me how. I don’t know how my mother managed that either, but Aunt Chaya came to the block and lived with us, so we stayed together as a family from then on.

After Naomi had talked a while longer she paused and looked at me, as if there was something specific she wanted to say. Then she asked if I knew about the children’s choir. I said I didn’t.

So I was in this choir. It was the end of forty-four and they made a barracks for the children to go to. They said at Christmas we’d go there and we learned Christmas songs in German. Both my brother and I were in this choir. We both sang well, like our father. And we went to this barracks and there was a big Christmas tree and they said after the singing they would make a party and give us something. So we sang opposite the Germans and the women with the dogs.

After the singing stopped my mother came and stood outside the window, and I don’t remember exactly how this happened, but she must
have shouted to my brother and said we had to come out straight away, because this was not our religion and we couldn’t stay to celebrate and we had go with her back to the block.

And my brother took me by the hand and we climbed out of the window. I didn’t know, but it was after that they said everything exploded and there were no barracks any more. So my mother saved us. And in the place where the barracks was, the next day was just water all frozen over. I didn’t think about it, just that where the barracks was there was nothing any more. When I met some of the other kids years later I said I was in that choir and they said but how is it possible – how did you stay alive? These others told me that the Germans threw hand grenades in the window and that was how they wanted to finish off all the children.

I asked Naomi if she thinks it really happened, that they blew up the children in the barracks at the Christmas party. ‘That is what I remember about what happened and what people say. I can’t explain it all but that’s what I know. And in Belsen it was terrible too.’ She was talking now about what happened to the Ravensbrück children who were taken to Belsen a few weeks after the party. ‘It was cold and we were in bags on the floor, no beds, no nothing. People were dying everywhere. And I remember my mother got typhus and my aunt saying look, we have three little children and everyone who schlepps out a dead body from the block should get an extra bit of bread.’

I wondered if Naomi had talked much about the bombing of the barracks when she went back to Holland after the war. Most people in Holland had not been in the camps, she said, and ‘you didn’t talk about it with children of your own age. A lot of people don’t want to talk about what happened at the camps. My brother has never talked about it even to me, and won’t talk now.’

Naomi Moscovitch’s account of the bombing of the Ravensbrück Christmas party is not supported in any written testimony, and yet several other surviving children remember something similar. Stella also believes the story to be true.

Stella says she wasn’t at the party herself because she was sick and unable to go. Her information came from her last camp mother, a Russian called Aunt Olympiada, who helped Stella in the final days. Aunt Olympiada told her that she’d once had a son, and that ‘
she’d lost him in the bomb
’. She knew no more than that, but she is sure that Aunt Olympiada meant the bomb at the children’s party.

After the war Stella met some of the grown-up party organisers, including the
German communist Erika Buchmann
. ‘Erika would say to me: “But
Stella, you must remember how we gave you bread and everything at the party,” but I didn’t remember that at all.’

As no written evidence survives of the bombing, and the adults didn’t talk of it, it is hard to believe the story, and yet, as this is the way the children remember things, for them it is clearly true. The horrors the same children went through in the weeks that followed were arguably far worse, and better-documented. The first of those horrors began a few days after the Christmas party.

In the last days of December prisoners in the
Revier
began to talk about another of the new Auschwitz men, one of the two doctors. He was ‘
a little man called the professor
,’ said Sylvia Salvesen, and not long after he arrived Gypsy children were called up for sterilisation. Their parents were told that if they agreed to the operation they would be freed. The man was Carl Clauberg, the doctor ordered by Himmler early in the war to find a means of mass sterilisation, as part of the drive to create a master race. For three years Clauberg had been experimenting at Auschwitz, maiming and killing hundreds of women, but all his experiments had failed. Now, in what he must have known were the last months of the war, he wanted to experiment again on new ‘material’ at Ravensbrück.

In the
Revier
, the message got out that Treite was to carry out the surgery under Clauberg’s supervision. According to Sylvia Salvesen, Treite’s secretary, the Belgian Emmi Gorlich, suddenly turned ‘pale as death, with dark rings under her eyes – she knew what was going to happen’. The prisoner staff in the
Revier
all told Emmi to plead with Treite not to cooperate with Clauberg. ‘And through the thin partition we heard her begging him. Voices rose, the door flew open. But Dr Treite stormed out saying: “Orders from Berlin.”’

Emmi Gorlich said later that the sterilisation started with children aged eight to ten.

All the Gypsies
came into the hall. They were small children. They called out to me as I passed. I went to try and find them some sugar; they didn’t understand what was going to happen. My friend, an Austrian doctor, often helped on operations. She was forced to do this. I told her you must not do this, they can kill you. She came back green in the face, saying Dr Treite had sent her away.

According to Zdenka Nedvedova, Clauberg carried out the sterilisation by spraying a substance into the womb under pressure and watching the effect on the fallopian tube through an X-ray screen.

Sylvia remembered two Gypsy girls coming into the
Revier
aged eight and ten – both called Elisabeth. ‘They were asking: “We are already sterilised, why
are we called in?” They put them in the room behind me and I asked to see Dr Treite to ask him to do nothing more to the children. Dr Treite said again: “It’s no use. It’s orders from Berlin.” A child came out crying in a hysterical way.’ Zdenka said the eight-year-old’s screams went on for two hours after she was operated on.

As more and more children were sterilised, prisoners in nearby blocks also heard the children screaming and weeping. The prisoner medical staff became more and more desperate to find a way to stop it, and a German nurse called Gerda Schröder, who had recently joined the staff, offered to help. ‘We pleaded with her to give them at least a painkiller, and she did this,’ said Zdenka.

Afterwards we took the children from the X-ray room and we put them in bed in a small treatment room where they lay bleeding from the uterus. Their poor little female bodies made a distressing sight, and at least two of the little martyrs died. In these cases both children suffered further from inflammation of their abdomens, which meant they died in desperate pain.

According to figures later discovered in the German records, between Christmas 1944 and February 1945 500 Gypsies were sterilised at Ravensbrück, including 200 young girls.

Chapter 32

Death March

G
rete Buber-Neumann said that you could always tell women who had arrived at Ravensbrück from Auschwitz, as they had a special hardness about them – especially those who survived the death march of January 1945. The Jews among the 20,000 women left at Auschwitz at the end were still there because they were ‘lucky’ enough to be young and fit when they arrived and so to be selected for work. Allegra Benvenisti was eighteen when she came from Thessaloniki in Greece to Auschwitz with her parents, sisters, brothers and cousins. At the first selection, the SS officer pointed her one way while almost all the rest of her family went the other way, to the gas chamber.

As Allegra noticed, many of these healthy girls then died of sickness after two or three weeks. She too fell sick and nearly died, but a Ukrainian nurse saved her by smuggling her out of her hospital block just before a truck took all the sick away – ‘dead or alive’. Susi Bachar, another Greek, was also selected for work, along with her two sisters. One quickly died of typhus and the other of dysentery.

Throughout the summer of 1944, Susi, Allegra and other ‘working’ prisoners watched as Auschwitz reached the zenith of its power, exterminating 400,000 Hungarians in just two months. But during the autumn the churning of the trains back and forth, bringing victims for slaughter, was slowing as the Soviet advance continued and the camp prepared for evacuation. By October those still alive at Auschwitz dared to hope that they might survive, especially when on 2 November the furnaces stopped smoking. Lydia Vago remembered a civilian boss in the factory where she worked
whispering to her: ‘See to it that you get home now – there are no more chimneys.’ For Lydia, home was in the Transylvanian mountain town of Gheorgheni, in Romania, where her father was a doctor and her mother a dentist. The whole family – Hungarian Jews by origin – had been rounded up in 1944 and Lydia, aged twenty, with her younger sister, Aniko, ended up in Auschwitz.

Late that year Auschwitz’s blocks and streets began to thin out as prisoners were transferred to camps in Germany. Some of the most hated guards left too, among them Irma Grese, the farmer’s daughter who had trained at Ravensbrück and risen to the post of chief woman guard at Birkenau. Now Grese and several of her Ravensbrück cohort were reassigned to Belsen.

With fewer guards, Maria Rundo, a Polish student, recalled an ‘idyllic period’ in Auschwitz in late autumn when the prisoners had more freedom of movement and were left to some extent to their own devices. The weak, old and sick went to the former Gypsy camp, where Maria found work as a nurse. ‘We were saving the sick with our own hands; we cooked soup for them, bathed and combed them, deloused them.’ Here babies were even born and could be looked after.

The divisions between Jews and non-Jews began to relax. A Polish-Jewish doctor, Alina Brewda, recalled being sent to live in a mixed block of Jews and ‘Aryans’. ‘It had been a strict rule that we be kept separate, but now we were living together.’ The brothels closed down and one of the prostitutes asked Alina to treat her, as she was dying. In return she gave Alina a knitted black dress, felt shoes and a warm jacket, which served her well on the coming march.

In January 1945, with the Russians just a few days from Auschwitz, the SS began to prepare frantically for the evacuation. It soon became clear that anyone fit enough to walk was to be forced on the march, but anyone too weak was to be killed. As the moment came the guards began to cull the sick and dying by shooting. They also prepared to blow up the camp. Lydia Vago, who had fallen ill, was in the sickbay and she remembered a nurse shouting at her to get out now. Lydia left the
Revier
, and as she walked away she saw a truck arrive to take those too feeble to move, to be shot.

On 18 January work continued normally, including construction of a new block. As night fell, the call came to clear out. Maria Rundo remembered a total blackout in the hospital where she worked, and then the lights came back on and an SS man ordered the nurses to collect all the cards of the sick, which he took away. On the Lagerstrasse people shouted that all those able to march should return to their blocks, as the evacuation was to start. It was snowing, and as prisoners ran back to the blocks those too sick to march
panicked. ‘There was no doubt about their fate, as the SS would not let the sick be liberated,’ said Lydia Vago.

Some didn’t want to leave, hoping to greet their Soviet liberators. Alina Brewda, the Jewish doctor, hid with the sick, but an SS officer found her and threw her out. Some made for the clothes stores and collected whatever they could for warmth – blankets, coats, sweaters. Allegra, the girl from Thessaloniki, was on the night shift at the factory when the call came. She had no time to eat or get warm clothes and went straight to the line now gathering at the gate. Lydia Vago found time to get into the pharmacy of the small factory
Revier
and put aspirins and bandages into her small bag made of blue-grey uniform cloth. She and her sister Aniko carried extra clothes and blankets strung in bundles on their backs, the string clasped tight in their hands.