If This Is a Woman: Inside Ravensbruck: Hitler's Concentration Camp for Women (99 page)

At Neubrandenburg Micheline Maurel had been slowly starving for many months. In March she was sick again and back in the
Revier
. ‘All morning we waited for soup. Near the bunks of the dying those who could still eat lay in ambush.’ SS selections were still made at the subcamps too. At night the trucks arrived, the numbers were read out, women were hoisted onto trucks and taken back to Ravensbrück to be gassed.

By the end of March the food at Ravensbrück too was running out. Meals were given out at random times and prisoners provided their own security squads to protect the soup gang from attack. Sanitation had largely broken down, walkways were littered with excreta, the washrooms in the sick blocks could hold no more dead bodies, the mortuary was overflowing and the crematorium working to capacity. A new death block was established to hold the excess corpses. Patrolling near by, Julia Barry saw inside the ‘death block’ where bodies were stacked high ‘with eyes out of their sockets’.

Pflaum, Winkelmann and the posse roamed the camp, selecting people almost at random, but at least in the chaos it became easier to hide. The painting gang hid in the infectious diseases block; lying in a bed with a sick person was the safest of all places to hide.

By late March everyone seemed to know someone chosen for the Youth Camp or for another transport; mothers, daughters, friends were all trying to get names off lists, or onto a better list, or to find a way to hide. Some time in mid-March Mary Lindell heard that Yvonne Baseden was on a list. She rushed out onto the Lagerstrasse to find that Yvonne was already lining up to be taken away, probably to the Youth Camp. Yvonne stood ‘
skinny, hollow-eyes
, morose and without hope’, so Mary went to Micky, in Pflaum’s labour office, for help. Mary had smuggled painkillers to Micky in the past; now she called in the favour. ‘What’s her name and number?’ asked Micky, and struck off Yvonne’s name.

As soon as Yvonne heard she’d been spared she pleaded that her friend, whom today she remembers only as Marguerite, be taken off too. Mary again asked Micky, who ‘with a flick of a pen’ erased Marguerite’s name as well, and told Mary: ‘Quick, get them away. Now it’s your risk.’ Mary hid the two women on a safe ward in the
Revier
, under Treite’s protection.

Mary’s relations with Treite were closer every day. She wrote affectionately of him in her memoir, saying how on one occasion, as he treated her for pneumonia, Treite injected her with a serum. ‘I flinched, for everyone knew that injections in Ravensbrück were usually lethal,’ wrote Mary. ‘But Treite bent down and whispered in English: “It’s all right Queen Mary. The seals are intact.”’

Towards the end of the month Violette Lecoq, the Block 10 nurse, noticed that the rules of
la chasse
had changed again. A truck that came to Block 10 to load up the sick returned empty just minutes later for another load. Next time the truck appeared Violette used a stopwatch, organised from the store, to time the round trip. It took just seven minutes, the time it would take to go to the gas chamber and back, which proved what Violette had suspected: that those chosen for gassing no longer went via the Youth Camp but went straight from their beds to the gas chamber.

It was ‘bedlam’ in Block 10 towards the end, said Loulou Le Porz, who was spending much of her time trying to move her sick out of Block 10 to avoid being selected. ‘Most of our patients had no mattresses at all, no running water, nothing worked at all. We thought we were in hell. But our strategy was to concern ourselves with our block and our patients. And there were things we could suddenly do as well – things happened that didn’t happen before. I remember getting a whole loaf of bread one day. It was
incredible. A lorry came and someone said – do you want bread, just like that.’

I asked Loulou if she was sure she would survive until the end.

I didn’t know. For me it had always been obvious we would win the war, but when? We could see they were clearing us all out. We were isolated out there and forgotten by the entire world. People knew nothing about us. They didn’t know where we were.

‘Did you think they might never find you?’

We thought we might die there, yes. My patients were dying in my arms. Madame de Lavalette-Montbrun told me she knew she wouldn’t be going back, but she was still smiling. She was a fatalist. We all were by then. Claude Virlogeux was a physics teacher. I saw her pass me by on the back of a cart one day, quite dead. But we tried to help people hold on. On one mattress we had Madame Tedesco, she was well connected in the world of theatre and she got on very well with our
camarade
Zim. Then Madame Tedesco died of exhaustion in my arms, saying she would do it all again. I told Zim that she could still last out, it wouldn’t be long. And she agreed to let us smuggle her to a safer block. Zim wanted to live so I persuaded her to take the risk.

By the end of March the camp was ‘like a mysterious planet’, said Denise Dufournier, ‘where the macabre, the ridiculous and the grotesque rubbed shoulders in a fantastic irrational chaos’. Karolina Lanckorońska, watching the crematorium flames shooting higher every night, was reminded of the beginning of the
Iliad
. She was still giving lectures on Charlemagne and Gothic art as children in Block 27 played a game of selecting for the gas chamber. In the Red Army block the women were making red flags to hang out to welcome their liberators, while the painting gang had been sent to redecorate the maternity block, where, according to Zdenka’s lists, 135 more babies were born in March, of which 130 died.

Hitherto servile Blockovas turned courageous, and might suddenly decide to save an entire column of prisoners by leading them out of line for the gas chamber, pretending they were a unit needed for work. Meanwhile, all around the camp groups of haunted women – faces never seen before in Ravensbrück, brought in perhaps from subcamps – were seen waiting for something and then being marched off. ‘We sometimes saw passing by our workplace a small group of women we didn’t know,’ recalled Grete Buber-Neumann. ‘Quite terrified, they passed about thirty metres away from us. We supposed they were taken straight to the gas chamber.’

Anna Stekolnikova, the Muscovite, remembers seeing ‘women standing in a queue waiting to be burned, holding bundles of clothes’. Such was the chaos that by March no attempt was even made to issue these new arrivals with numbers, and any numberless woman was liable to be simply rounded up and sent for gassing. So when the German communist Änne Saefkow arrived – transferred from a Berlin prison at the end of the month – a communist friend in the
Schreibstube
gave her the number of a dead woman, 108273. Änne’s was the last number issued in the camp.

As the Easter weekend approached the weather was warming up. Gypsies sat outside their blocks in the evenings singing, and the painting gang was sent to drag rowing boats out from a shed onto the lake. The guards wanted to go boating over Easter.

News reaching the prisoners was of a slowdown in the Russian advance, but the Western front was closing fast. ‘We knew that victory was close at hand. We thought perhaps we only had to stand fast for a few days,’ recalled Denise, whose strength was suddenly fading; her civilian boss remarked upon it as he fed her with cooked potatoes.

Rumours came and went. The camp secretaries had heard that the French were to be exchanged, but at the Youth Camp the only rumour was of a mass selection. The Easter weekend was coming up and the SS wanted a
final clear-out
. Several prisoners recorded the sequence of events.

On 28 March – a Wednesday – the Youth Camp prisoners were ordered to line up barefoot. Neudeck and an SS man carried out a selection, examining faces and legs. Those selected were sent to one side. Amongst them was Elise Rivet – otherwise known as Mère Elisabeth de l’Eucharistie, a Mother Superior from Lyon, brought to Ravensbrück for hiding resisters in her convent. The victims were stripped of everything except shirts and loaded on the trucks, their shoes and underwear left lying on the road. At least six women died in the line-up, and were hauled onto the lorries by their legs.

Two days later, on 30 March, Good Friday, the guards announced another mass selection, this time at the main camp. The women were told to line up with bare legs and torso and then they had to ‘keep jackets on’ but ‘take shoes off’. As they stood for the selection, Russian guns were just audible for the first time in the distance. Winkelmann appeared. When he signalled, the women had to walk rapidly past him as he bent double and peered at their legs. When he raised a hand a prisoner was taken away to a waiting lorry. When a lorry was full it drove off to the Youth Camp. At Block 10 Violette Lecoq was ordered to help load women direct on to a truck, then she was chased onto the truck herself and driven off. At the Youth Camp her name was not on the guards’ list so she was sent back.

After the new influx of prisoners from the main camp, seven empty lorries arrived at the Youth Camp that same afternoon. Each lorry was then filled with women, ready to go to the gas chamber. Then two more lorries arrived from the main camp, each loaded with about 250 women. When evening came all nine lorries prepared to leave, one after the other, for the gas chamber, but an air raid delayed departure. When the all-clear came, some of the lorries left in the dark while the rest stayed at the Youth Camp, and left for the gas chamber next day, Saturday 31 March. More gassing happened on Easter Sunday, and by the end of the Easter weekend all the prisoners on these lorries – as many as 2500 – had been gassed and burned and the air was thick with choking smoke.

At the main camp on Easter Sunday another order went out: all the French were to line up next morning at the camp gates. Groups met to discuss what it might mean. Some believed it meant liberation. Others feared wholesale extermination, while another group believed there was to be an exchange of prisoners. There was talk of buses in the woods, not green ones but White Buses – belonging to the Red Cross.

That evening, Easter Sunday, French prisoners from the Youth Camp were marched down to the main camp and told to join the other French on the Lagerstrasse the next day. The French workers at the Siemens factory were also ordered to join the line-up on Easter Monday.

The painting gang returned to their block on Sunday evening and found a strange atmosphere. ‘In the large room by candlelight couples danced languorously to the accompaniment of an accordion,’ recalled Denise. ‘The
Jules
dandled their girls, who were all dressed up, on their knees. There was a vague smell of greasy humanity in the air and in the darkest corners lovers were kissing. It was our last vision of Block Seventeen.’

Chapter 38

Nelly

A
s trucks queued outside the Ravensbrück gas chamber over the Easter weekend, a small Swedish plane flew over the German coast, and then seemed to stall in the air as the pilot throttled back and began to circle over Stralsund. The Allies had mounted a daylight raid over Berlin and a huge black cloud of smoke was unfurling on the horizon.

Count Bernadotte was flying in for a second meeting with Heinrich Himmler, hoping to persuade him to grant permission for the Swedish rescue mission to be extended to include not only the Scandinavians but other nationalities as well. Amongst those high on Bernadotte’s list were French women from Ravensbrück. Bernadotte had a particular concern for the French women’s plight ever since learning first hand of the mass deportations when in Paris in the autumn. De Gaulle’s government-in-waiting was also putting enormous pressure on Bernadotte to help the French prisoners.
^*
As soon as the smoke lifted Bernadotte’s plane flew on, landing at Berlin’s Tempelhof Airport just half an hour after the all-clear was sounded.

Since 10 February, when Himmler had given Bernadotte permission to rescue Scandinavians and hold them in a Swedish-run holding centre at Neuengamme, much had been achieved. By the second week of March more than 100 vehicles, mostly belonging to the Swedish army – trucks, buses, ambulances and motorcycles, manned by 250 Swedish soldiers, doctors and
nurses – had left southern Sweden, driven across Denmark and crossed into Germany.

Before the convoy left, the British, American and Russian delegations in Stockholm were all informed of the expedition. No objections were raised, but no guarantees of safe passage were offered either, although, just as the convoy was about to start boarding the Malmö ferry, the British sent out a last-minute request: all the vehicles were to be painted white with red crosses on the roofs and sides, so as to be easily identifiable by Allied aircraft. The job was done in haste on the ferry.

On 12 March the convoy set up its headquarters at Friedrichsruh, twenty-two kilometres east of Hamburg, near the Baltic coast, and instantly set about collecting up prisoners. By the end of the month nearly 5000 Norwegian and Danish men imprisoned at Sachsenhausen, Dachau and camps near Dresden had been brought to the Swedish holding centre at Neuengamme camp, close to the Friedrichsruh HQ.

The mission had run into many problems, including shortages of men, vehicles and fuel. The fronts were closing in so rapidly that the buses – all carrying at least one Gestapo man as minder – could only move through a sliver of land. Buses had been strafed by Allied planes, though as yet nobody was hurt.

Acute moral conflicts had arisen too. Each time the Swedes reached a camp and filled their buses with Scandinavians they left prisoners of other nationalities behind. At Neuengamme, they found themselves in a particularly invidious position when the commandant told them that only by helping clear out his sick and unwanted prisoners could room be made at his camp for the holding centre for the rescued Norwegian and Danes. After much debate, the Swedes did the SS commandant’s bidding and took away his ‘unwanted’ prisoners, driving them in their Red Cross buses to another far worse camp, where many almost certainly died.