If This Is a Woman: Inside Ravensbruck: Hitler's Concentration Camp for Women (92 page)

‘Now we knew the war was drawing to an end and that we were to be exterminated completely. The experiments done on us and others were a crime against mankind, and as witnesses we had to be destroyed,’ said Wanda. That evening rumours spread that they were to be evacuated to Gross-Rosen, not executed, but everybody knew this was a lie, as Gross-Rosen was already liberated.

All night the block held feverish meetings as prisoners discussed what to do and messages of support poured in from around the camp. Some passed the time ‘waiting for death’ by writing letters to their loved ones, which they handed to fellow prisoners to pass on. Other rabbits sang patriotic Polish songs.

One group made plans to resist by all means possible. It included stalwarts of earlier protests – Wanda, Krysia and Dziuba Sokulska – and many others. The leaders were Jadwiga Kamińska and Zofia Baj, who proposed a two-point plan. First, a delegation would make a statement to Fritz Suhren, challenging him to admit that the suggestion that they were bound for Gross-Rosen was a lie. They would then demand that their alleged crime be read out to them before their executions. ‘We agreed that we would tell him
that we had a duty to return to our motherland, or, if we were going to die, we wanted to die like soldiers on the battlefield,’ Wanda said.

While the statement was made, the other rabbits would do whatever it took not to be taken and shot, which would mean hiding around the camp. One scheme involved smuggling themselves into work gangs of the
Zugänge
– newcomers – who did not yet have camp registration numbers.

They knew from experience that the first attempt to round them up would probably take place at morning
Appell
, so they had only hours to prepare. For the plan to succeed, the rabbits needed volunteers to take their places in line while the Poles hid. The word went out at once to friendly Blockovas, and by the time the siren sounded at 4 a.m. the volunteers were primed. Support came from the Red Army women, also in Block 24, some of whom gave the rabbits their ration of soup, saying: ‘You’ll need all your strength now girls.’ Szura, a Soviet electrician, promised to turn the lights out during
Appell
to cover the rabbits’ disappearance. Two other Red Army girls sought out Karolina Lanckorońska and told her: ‘Miss Karla, we won’t surrender the rabbits.’

‘
An incredible, unheard-of thing
happened – the whole camp decided that we were to be saved,’ said Dziuba Sokulska. One rabbit was to be replaced by a Red Army doctor, another by a Yugoslav. A Norwegian prisoner told her rabbit friend that she would insist on being executed in her place. ‘You should be the one to live to tell the world about the crimes committed against you. I am older. I can perish,’ the Norwegian wept. Many Poles also came forward. An old Polish woman called Władka begged to replace Wanda, claiming she had cancer and was going to die soon anyway. If not Wanda, then Krysia, she insisted, so she should survive to tell the tale. Neither Wanda nor Krysia would agree.

Twelve rabbits offered to hide first, and by 4 a.m. they and their stand-ins were ready. As the parade got under way, the twelve slipped away and their replacements filled the gap before the guards began to count. Roll-call started, and then prisoners heard a murmur from the far end, followed by voices shouting: ‘
They’re coming for them!
They’re coming for them!’ Wacława Andrzejak saw Suhren in the distance, surrounded by guards with dogs, walking down the Lagerstrasse. One of the guards held a sheet of paper with a list of names. The siren had not yet sounded for it, but the shout
Arbeitsappell!
– ‘Work roll-call!’ – rang out from within the lines of prisoners, and they all broke ranks. Some shouted: ‘We won’t let you take them.’ The guards tried to retake control, but at this moment the Red Army electrician threw a switch and the camp was
plunged into pitch-darkness
.

Columns of prisoners collided blindly with each other, while more rabbits were collected and hidden by prisoners from other blocks. The guards held
back, waiting for order to settle. Suhren had clearly ordered them not to shoot. By the time the grey light of dawn broke, the confusion was total. Work groups began to form up for the day with the wrong prisoners, while several rabbits succeeded in joining the unnumbered
Zugänge
groups of new arrivals. Others swapped numbers, preventing the guards from keeping track of prisoner movements.

When the Lagerstrasse finally cleared, only the two guinea-pig leaders, Jadwiga Kamińska and Zofia Baj, returned to their original block to coordinate the resistance. During the next hours they carried messages between prisoners in hiding and acted as public spokeswomen for the group while putting the second part of their plan into action. Zofia and Jadwiga confronted Suhren, challenging him to admit that the claim to be sending them to another camp was a lie. Sticking to their script, the women said if the rabbits were to be executed, it should be ‘with honour’. Suhren refused to yield, and issued a fresh order for all prisoners to assemble. Out went the order from Zofia and Jadwiga: Stay in hiding.

Each day at roll-call, the same stand-ins took the places of the missing rabbits; each day, Szura managed to switch off the lights just as the counting began. Suhren demanded extra roll-calls, more searches and closer surveillance of the camp exits, but to no avail. Some rabbits left with the
Zugänge
for munitions plants many miles away; the rest were scattered across the whole camp. One of the rabbits, Maria Cabaj, was hiding on a hospital ward amid the sick and dying. Still in terrible pain from her own ‘operation’, she feared that she’d quickly be found because she couldn’t move, and was terrified that she might then be thrown alive into the furnace. She found new energy – ‘from where, in all my pain, I don’t know,’ she said later. ‘I only know that in spite of everything I didn’t want to die.’

Antonina Nikiforova, the Red Army doctor, hid Wacława Andrzejak on a typhus ward, registered as a Hungarian patient who had just died. Wacława lay for two days in terror, feigning unconsciousness. When she dared to see, she witnessed worse horrors than any in the guinea-pig block. ‘Forty to fifty women died around me every day. There were women here who were no more than skeletons. They were starving and ate what was given to them but could digest nothing as they excreted it all immediately. The smell in the ward was almost unbearable.’

At first Wacława didn’t dare go to the bathroom. At last she plucked up the courage, and found the bathroom heaped with corpses. ‘After a few days I became indifferent to the sight of these naked corpses who had died of dysentery or typhus, and I got used to washing without glancing at them.’

All the time more women were entering the ward, where selections for the gas chamber were now regularly taking place. ‘I couldn’t hide there any longer
in case I was selected myself – or else I lost my mind.’ So Wacława returned to her own block, where other rabbits were hiding in the gap between the floorboards and the earth foundations. Maria Cabaj was equally appalled by conditions in the
Revier
. ‘One day I felt I couldn’t stand it any longer, so I jumped out of the window and went back to my old block. I’ll stay here even if it’s the end of me, I told myself.’

Wanda Wojtasik likened the rabbits’ manoeuvring to ‘a fearful game of hide-and-seek. The watchword “They’re after the rabbits” was understood by everyone and warnings went out in a flash.’ Leokadia Kwiecińska, another rabbit, looked back on those last months as a ‘strange incomprehensible dream – a tragic dream, but one that had its comic aspects’.

Normally the rabbits took pride in their ‘upstanding behaviour’ and neat appearance. Now, ‘as if a magic wand had been waved’, they disguised themselves to ‘look like the masses’, while striving to conceal disfigured legs. Joanna Szydłowska cut off her magnificent long hair. Wanda and Krysia dressed up as
Goldstücke
, tying scarves under their chins ‘Ukrainian fashion’, plaiting hair over their foreheads and scrapping for food.

Krysia looked suddenly quite different. ‘Without her glasses she had a pleasant little face and a look of uncertainty and excessive seriousness,’ said Leokadia. As Leokadia couldn’t manage without her spectacles, she covered half her face with a black kerchief.

Over the next two weeks, while the rabbits continued to live ‘like hunted animals’, not one of them was betrayed or captured. Some prisoners noticed that the guards didn’t seem to rush to find them either, backing off ‘perhaps because they were beginning to think about themselves and how to get out alive’.

Then came a new initiative from Suhren. Clearly exasperated, he summoned one of the rabbits, Maria Plater-Skassa, and offered her the chance to sign a declaration stating that her scars were caused by an ordinary accident in a workshop, not by experiments. Sign, and he would free her. She refused. Flanked by the ‘delegation’ women, Jadwiga Kamińska and Zofia Baj, Maria told Suhren that he should understand the whole world now knew their names, and killing them would simply exacerbate his crime. Suhren then indicated that he was aware the news had got out. It would not in principle be difficult for him to execute sixty women, he said, except in the rabbits’ case, because ‘the details are known in America, Britain and, more important, in Germany’.

Suhren explained
that he could not take the initiative himself, but would ask Berlin what to do and ‘try to resolve the issue in a humane way’. He added that he couldn’t do so immediately as he ‘had other things to think about’.

According to another account by Janina Iwańska, it was as result of this meeting with Suhren that the girls now learned that the list of those to be executed had in fact been sent direct to Suhren by Karl Gebhardt, with instructions they be gassed. Suhren’s annoyance at Gebhardt’s interference was obvious to the rabbits at the time, and it was also obvious in his testimony after the war. Suhren evidently resented the fact that Gebhardt had used ‘his’ prisoners for these experiments in the first place, thereby implicating him and tarnishing his own record. Now, due to his friendship with the Reichsführer SS, Gebhardt was pulling rank on Suhren and ordering him to gas the women, which in the circumstances he was loath to do.

As Karolina Lanckorońska put it: ‘
The girls succeeded
extremely well in frightening the authorities, especially Binz, whose name, as well as Gebhardt’s and Suhren’s, had by now been broadcast.’

Meanwhile, the other rabbits stayed in hiding, desperately hoping that the Russians would get here before the SS found them.

Chapter 35

Königsberg

A
t the little camp of Königsberg, on the River Oder, Violette Szabo, the British SOE woman, was also clinging on to hope. She spoke of her baby, Tania, to friends in her block. ‘In a few months I’ll be able to hold her in my arms again.’

It was now nearly three months that these women, who had arrived together from Paris in September 1944, had been slaving at the Königsberg punishment camp – the result of refusing to make munitions at Torgau. After working on a frozen airfield, now they were digging a trench for a narrowgauge railway and laying the track. Grasping the heavy steel rods with frostbitten hands, and stumbling on frozen feet, was more than most could do. The guards put the stronger Poles and Russians at the head of the line, but the French and the small group of British and Americans couldn’t keep up with them.

At least on Sundays they could rest in the block and talk, which was when Violette befriended Christiane Le Scornet, a seventeen-year-old French girl. ‘Violette treated me like a little sister,’ Christiane remembered. ‘She had a rare loyalty and a rare courage.’

All the SOE women were in Christiane’s block. She recalled that Lilian Rolfe was extremely thin and shockingly pale, while Denise Bloch suffered terrible sores from malnutrition. The three Americans – Charlotte Jackson, Lucienne Dixon and Virginia Lake – were there too, and another Englishwoman called Jenny who kept aloof and didn’t like to say she was British. Of the group, Violette was in the best state of health and cheered them all. ‘She often spoke of Tania. She would say: “She’s in London with
my parents, loved and protected.” She was certain that she would find her little girl again soon in good health.’

That Christmas, as the women decorated their block with pine branches, Violette had sung ‘God Save the King’ and Christiane joined in. Christiane described how she then turned to another French woman, Mathilde, and said: ‘Now it’s your turn to sing, come on Mathilde, sing!’ But Mathilde said: ‘I’ll sing when I’ve found my children and my husband.’ When Christiane pressed her further, Violette, her eyes full of tears, said: ‘Leave it Crissi. I understand her, she can’t.’

‘Violette was like that,’ said Christiane. ‘She always had time for those suffering more than her, and tried to give them courage with her gentleness and her smile.’ Christiane also remembered Violette’s ‘absolute conviction’ that Germany had lost. ‘She spoke all the time about how the Allies were advancing every day. “We must all hold on, we must be strong,” she would say.’

Violette and all her fellow prisoners knew they were bound to be the first women of Ravensbrück liberated because of the subcamp’s location. Königsberg was just six kilometres to the east of the River Oder and lay right in the path of the Red Army. In January 1945 the First Belorussian Front army had begun the major assault that would lead it on to Berlin. The roads around Königsberg were already filling with refugees fleeing west, while civilians working at the airfield began to pack up and leave.

January was the coldest month at Königsberg. Each morning at
Appell
women passed out on the snow. If a friend failed to carry them to the infirmary they stayed there. Those still on their feet were now only interested in saving themselves. ‘One’s first reaction was “I won’t move, I can’t help anyone, I’m so weak I must save the little strength I have, or I shall fall myself,”’ said Virginia Lake. Jacqueline Bernard said many simply grew weaker and weaker, never realising they were dying. ‘Most who died this way were never admitted to the hospital hut and were compelled to stand up every morning at roll-call in the bitter cold. Many died before the roll-call ended.’