If This Is a Woman: Inside Ravensbruck: Hitler's Concentration Camp for Women (91 page)

Irena started talking to the women, who asked her how much prisoners at the main camp were getting to eat. ‘They yelled that they were hungry. They started giving me scraps of paper with the names of people they knew in the main camp, to help them. On one piece of paper someone had written that she wanted bread because she was hungry, but there was no name.’

Irena went to find a Polish Blockova who she knew was working at the Youth Camp. The Blockova told her that most of the women who had arrived in the first transports were already dead. Those still in her charge were almost naked and she had no clothes to give them. ‘So she clothed them in paper and straw taken from the mattresses. I saw a woman dressed like that who reminded me of a fish caught in a net.’

As Irena chatted with her friend, Neudeck appeared, and a hush came down. ‘
She was smiling
and holding a cane in her hand with a bent nickel tip, and she came up to the women standing in front of the block and started pointing at them.’ The Blockova asked why she was selecting women now, as it wasn’t the usual time.

Neudeck said they were going to knit, and had them stand under the tree where one dead woman was lying already, looking more like a lump than a woman … in the distance, other corpses, almost naked, were visible.

While Neudeck was choosing, some women tried to smile at her and Neudeck said to them ‘Why are you smiling at me?’ and made them stand under the tree with the others.

As Irena loaded the blankets onto carts she saw another Polish woman she knew who was working here at the Youth Camp, and spoke to her. ‘She told me that during the night there’d been an air raid and she had gone out behind the kitchen to try to find some potato peelings to eat. She saw lorries there and crouched down to watch as SS men got out and entered the
Revier
block. She saw young girls with bandaged feet and heads being brought out.’

This acquaintance explained that the girls were prisoners from subcamps who had been badly injured in bombing raids and were now useless for work. Their factory managers had sent the girls back to Ravensbrück to be killed. They had almost certainly not been registered in the main camp, and were
being killed right here in a specially adapted truck, made for gassing. The Poles knew about these gassing trucks, which the Nazis used widely across Poland during the first years of the occupation. Irena’s acquaintance described how they worked here at the Youth Camp.

Young girls in bandages were pushed out of the
Revier
and into the truck by the SS. When the truck was full it was locked. The truck was completely covered. The SS man threw a tin can through the little window by the engine inside and only the clatter of the can hitting something could be heard. It lasted about a minute. There was a deathly silence. There were several trucks like that.

Irena had to leave the Youth Camp in a rush, as her friend had collected the clothes from the crematorium and was waiting to go. ‘There were so many lice on the clothes that it looked as if someone had shovelled them on.’ Back at Ravensbrück, Irena returned to her block and told everyone what she had seen. Soon the news was all over the camp.

It was now four months since Himmler’s order to shut down the Auschwitz gas chambers – or, as Höss put it, to ‘discontinue the Jew-exterminations’. With the end of the eastern death camps, however, the use of gas was not entirely ‘discontinued’: by mid-February 1945, at least 1500 women, Jews and non-Jews, had been gassed at Himmler’s newest death camp, right here on German soil.

That mass murder should continue even now came as no surprise to those who had direct experience of the Nazi machine. In her evidence at Nuremberg, Marie-Claude Vaillant-Couturier, a prisoner at both Auschwitz and Ravensbrück, described the extermination programme at Ravensbrück as ‘the systematic and implacable urge to use human beings as slaves and to kill them when they could work no more’. Rudolf Höss, the former Auschwitz commandant, spoke of ‘the implacable urge to kill’. As he awaited execution, Höss wrote that this urge was nurtured for so long in the Nazi psyche that it eventually ran of its own volition, impossible to extinguish.

As far as the women themselves were concerned, the main aim of the killing was to destroy evidence of what had happened here well before the Allies arrived. Some feared they’d all be gassed by then. Others said this was impossible. Having heard rumours of what happened at Stutthof concentration camp, where a few weeks earlier 5000 male and female prisoners had been marched into the Baltic and machine-gunned, some said they’d all be shot out at sea.

And yet, although this rush to exterminate had plunged the camp into new
depths of despair, at the same time, among some prisoners, it brought a surge of courage and of hope. This annihilation left no doubt that the Germans knew the end was very near, so all the more reason to try and hold on. Those with some remnant of strength knew they still had a chance of getting out alive, as long as they could withstand starvation, disease and random brutality.

It was plain that the SS and the guards knew the war was lost. Grete Buber-Neumann would sometimes prowl into the SS offices before
Appell
and look at the large-scale map of Europe pinned to the wall. On it were little flags marking the situation at the fronts – no longer according to official German reports, but placed according to news received by listening to enemy broadcasts. ‘During the day we could read on their faces what the news was, and as it grew worse they were correspondingly depressed,’ Grete recalled.

Discipline continued to crumble. It was even possible to miss
Appell
if you knew how, and those attending would often stand chatting or reading a newspaper. When an air-raid siren sounded the guards ran straight for cover. ‘Order throughout the camp had completely broken down,’ said Maria Moldenhawer, the Polish military instructor, who almost seemed to miss the old days of strict discipline. Germaine Tillion even found it possible to stage an operetta, which she’d secretly been writing for several months. A spoof of
Orpheus in the Underworld
, which she said was an attempt to help prisoners ‘resist by laughing’, the operetta was called
Le Verfügbar Aux Enfers
[The Verfügbar in the Underworld] and was staged secretly at the back of a block. A chorus of
Verfüg
s sang of ‘a model camp with all comforts, water, gas, electricity – above all gas’.

At Siemens relations with the plant’s civilians began to improve. ‘They sympathised with us more as they were being forced to work as well. They too had no food,’ said the Kielce ghetto survivor Basia Zajączkowska. In general, the guards seemed less present around the main camp and more inclined to let the prisoner Blockovas, the Kapos and the camp police take over. Elisabeth Thury, the Austrian head camp policewoman, became more prominent; Dorothea Binz faded from view.

It was the new SS doctor
, Franz Lucas, whose behaviour changed most dramatically in these final months. Like many of the other new SS arrivals, one of his previous postings had been at Auschwitz, and like the others he had been closely involved in the atrocities, including selecting prisoners for the gas chamber. Loulou Le Porz saw no reason to trust Lucas when he first appeared: ‘He wore the same SS uniform, the same cap.’ But Loulou soon noticed that Lucas quickly began to behave differently from the other doctors. ‘He brought us medicines, and he sometimes examined a patient. Treite used to touch them with his boot.’

One day Lucas examined a young Dutch woman suffering from TB, who was also pregnant. ‘He showed real attention for the little Dutch girl, and when the baby was born he brought milk for the baby too. The poor woman gave birth but died very quickly afterwards and we never even learned her name. And soon afterwards the baby died too.’

At about the same time that Vera Salvequart was distributing white powder at the Youth Camp, a poisoning experiment was conducted at the main camp in Block 10. Schwester Martha Haake told Loulou and the new Blockova Erika Buchmann to follow her to a part of the block where the critically sick women were lying. Haake told the prisoners she had a special powder that would help them sleep, and asked for volunteers. Loulou knew instinctively that Haake meant to poison the women. She tried to signal not to volunteer, with no success; some women even took a double dose of the powder. Haake then left, asking Loulou to observe their reaction. Half an hour after falling asleep the women began to vomit red mucus. Next morning Loulou and Erika found five women dead. The others were groaning and near to death, with blood pouring out of their mouths, noses and ears.

Lucas was called, and was angry. Prisoners in the main part of the
Revier
heard him protesting to Marschall, Trommer and Treite. Later, he told Loulou and Erika that the experiments had been ‘ordered by Berlin’ and he knew nothing about them.

Sylvia Salvesen had also grown aware of Franz Lucas’s readiness to help. In January Lucas informed Sylvia that her young Norwegian ‘relative’ Wanda Hjort and her father had visited the camp again. They were not permitted to see Sylvia, but left packages of medicines. Lucas passed the medicines to Sylvia, and offered to act as a go-between with the Hjorts.

More channels of communication were opening between prisoners and the outside world. The Poles received a letter from
Aka Kołodziejczak
, the friend who had been released in early 1944 and was now in America, and they learned something of what Aka had done to publicise their story in the United States.
^*

At last, significant numbers of prisoners were receiving parcels.
Denise Dufournier received a parcel
from her brother Bernard – the one arranged by his Spanish diplomat friend in Berlin. The same Spaniard used his connections with the German Red Cross to gain access to the camp. One day in January, to her astonishment, Denise was called
nach vorne
and told she had a visitor. Here was her brother’s friend, who was able to report back to
Bernard that she was, at least, alive. The rabbits suddenly started receiving small parcels too, containing sardines and religious ‘blessings’ – small emblems – which some believed had come from the Pope in response to their secret letters. In fact, the parcels seem to have come from Catholic missions in neutral Portugal, which had probably learned of the women’s plight from Polish missions who picked up the news on SWIT.

In early 1945 rumours floated around Ravensbrück that prominent prisoners might be exchanged for German prisoners held in Allied camps. The
Schreibstube
secretaries saw papers pass across the commandant’s desk. There were whispers that Geneviève de Gaulle and Gemma La Guardia Gluck, might soon be freed.

The signals remained very mixed. Elisabeth Thury, the camp police chief, told Sylvia Salvesen one day that she’d been instructed to compile a list of intelligentsia in the camp who it was supposed would be used as hostages. Nothing seemed to come of the plan. Several days later a group of prominent hostages who had been held in the bunker for some time were
taken away to be shot
. Among them was Helmuth von Moltke, the German pacifist and leader of the resistance Kreisau Circle.

Meanwhile, Suhren summoned the Polish countess Karolina Lanckorońska to his office. The commandant inquired after her health, and asked whether she had enough food and clothes. ‘He behaved like a shopkeeper offering his wares,’ she said. ‘I said there was nothing that I needed. At that, he grew impatient and repeated the question. At last I was taken back to my block.’

The sense that the wider world was throwing lifelines into Ravensbrück, even as selections for the Youth Camp redoubled, shored up some prisoners’ morale and encouraged them to take on greater risks. The Red Army women protested to Suhren when they heard that a group of Russian children had arrived at the camp to be killed. Suhren allowed the children to live, as long as they stayed in the Soviet block.

When a further round of selections happened in Block 10, Loulou Le Porz and her friends Marie-Claude Vaillant-Couturier and Jacqueline d’Alincourt discussed whether they too should approach Suhren to protest. The three women met during the Sunday walking period on the Lagerstrasse and talked of what should be done. Loulou recalled:

We were all in shock. We began to understand that they were out to annihilate all our sick and probably us too. Jacqueline wanted to go straight to the commandant and protest, and she would have gone to Suhren flying the French flag if she could. But I thought, what if I’m sent to the
Strafblock
, and I can’t care for my sick at all? Marie-Claude was cautious too. So we decided not to protest but to help our prisoners in our own way.

In the NN block some of the rabbits were even daring to hope that they might go home after all, simply because they hadn’t yet been shot. More than any other group, the rabbits had always had reason to believe they were to be killed, because they were living proofs. Just in case, one of them had recently secured a camera on the camp black market and persuaded Germaine Tillion to take photographs of their legs as insurance should the final execution happen.

Wanda Wojtasik, however, believed that if the SS had wanted to shoot them they’d have done it by now. ‘We had started allowing ourselves to think of the prospect of freedom,’ said Wanda. And Krysia Czyż, who could no longer write secret letters home, had instead been passing her time
drawing intricate maps
showing the roads along which she intended to walk home, all the way to Lublin.

When on 4 February, therefore, a messenger came with the news that all rabbits were to stay inside the block until further notice – this was a sentence of death, and all of them knew it – the shock was far worse than it might have been had they never begun to hope.

‘Total and unimaginable silence followed the messenger’s departure,’ said Wanda Wojtasik. She looked at Krysia’s face, which was grey – ‘not pale but ashen-grey’. In seconds the news had spread around the whole block, and others who had not been operated on broke down, wailing about injustice. A peasant girl called Lodzia began sobbing, which set everyone off, and the whole block wept.