Five Days That Shocked the World: Eyewitness Accounts from Europe at the End of World War II (22 page)

As in so many camps, Ravensbrück was strewn with dead bodies dumped in piles because no one had had time to get rid of them. But it was not an extermination camp. It had been designed for slave labor originally—a distinction lost on the many thousands of women who had been shot, strangled, gassed, buried alive, or worked to death in the nearby Siemens plant, making parts for V2 rockets. Others had been tricked into sterilization or used for medical experiments, crippled for life in the interests of science.

Gypsy women had been sterilized. Polish girls, some as young as fourteen, had been used for experiments. Known as rabbits, they had been held down while their legs were cut open and infected with bacteria from shards of wood or glass, to test the efficacy of the latest sulfonamide drugs for the Wehrmacht. Others had had nerves cut or bones fractured to test their powers of recuperation. Some had died as a result; others had been killed later when their wounds failed to heal.

The rest had faced execution, too, as the Germans sought to destroy the evidence of their crimes. Ordered to report to camp headquarters a few weeks before the Russians’ arrival, the remaining rabbit girls had vanished instead, tearing off their identification numbers and losing themselves in the crowd. They had been shielded by the other prisoners, as the whole camp combined to ensure that some at least should live to bear witness after the war.

Wanda Poltawska had been one of the girls who vanished. Having survived an injection of diseased bacilli into her bone marrow, she and five others had barged through the SS guards coming to get them and then fled for their lives:

We all six ran through the sudden gap in the SS ranks like bats out of hell. I’ve never in all my life run faster. Like greased lightning we sped into the middle of a crowd of Auschwitz prisoners who had been watching through a crack in their hangar wall. They rose splendidly to the occasion. Never have I undressed and dressed again with such lightning speed (the Auschwitz women were in civilian clothes). Someone handed me a red coat, gave me a quick change of hairdo and rapidly inked a tattoo mark on my forearm—the number of someone who had died on the long death march out of Auschwitz camp. I was safe.
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OTHERS WERE NOT SO LUCKY.
The elimination of witnesses had been stepped up as the Russians drew closer. Special prisoners had suffered the worst: saboteurs and Resistance members held in solitary confinement in a punishment block known as the Bunker. They had been taken out and shot in ever increasing numbers as the Germans hurried to eliminate the evidence before the Russians arrived.

Odette Sansom had been one of the prisoners in the Bunker, perhaps the most important of all in German eyes. A Frenchwoman working for the British, she had been betrayed to the Gestapo in 1943, along with her fellow agent Peter Churchill. To save their lives, they had pretended to the Germans that they were a married couple related to the British prime minister. That hadn’t prevented the Germans from pulling Odette’s toenails out or sentencing her to death, but it had probably prevented the sentence from being carried out. She had been sent to Ravensbrück instead, held in solitary confinement as Frau Churchill, a special prisoner in condemned cell No. 32.

The final days at Ravensbrück had been the worst for Odette. Knowing that the Germans were killing their special prisoners, she had had a nerve-racking time in her cell, listening to the footsteps along the corridor as other people were led away to execution. The Bunker was close to the crematorium, so close that Odette had heard some prisoners putting up a fight as they were clubbed unconscious and then shoved alive into the flames: “The last few days of the war, I saw people being driven to the crematorium. I could hear them screaming and struggling and I could hear the doors being opened and shut.”
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Odette’s adopted name had saved her from the flames. There had been a mass exodus of guards from Ravensbrück as the Russians approached, a headlong rush to the west of SS men and women stripping off their uniforms and fleeing the enemy advance. Among them had been Rudolf Höss, the former commandant of Auschwitz, and Fritz Sühren, the much-hated commandant of Ravensbrück. Sühren had taken Odette with him as insurance, a hostage to trade with the Allies in due course. While the Russians were liberating Ravensbrück, Odette had just arrived at Neustadt-Glewe, a much smaller camp on the road to Hamburg. After months of solitary confinement on death row, she was back in a hut with other women while Sühren waited for the Americans to appear from the west, so that he could hand over “Winston Churchill’s niece” in return for his own life.

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THE RUSSIANS
had taken Neubrandenburg as well as Ravensbrück, liberating thousands of Allied prisoners from the cluster of camps north of Berlin. But liberation by the Russians was a decidedly mixed blessing, as the American prisoners in Neubrandenburg were already beginning to discover.

Russian aircraft had dropped leaflets before their troops arrived, stating simply: “Rokossovski is at your gates.” The resulting pandemonium had been witnessed by Father Francis Sampson, a U.S. Airborne chaplain captured near Bastogne:

The reputation of Rokossovski’s army was enough to panic the Germans. The roads were soon jammed with wagons loaded with cherished family possessions, children, and old people. The Germans headed west, hoping to escape the Russians, preferring anything to falling into their hands.

Many of the guards in the camp deserted and fled in the direction of the American lines. Some asked me for letters stating how kind they had been to the Americans. A few of them had been decent, and a couple actually ran great risks to help us; to those I gave notes telling how they had aided us, and I sincerely hope that this benefited them. About a dozen guards, including the camp commandant, turned themselves over as prisoners and were locked up in the stone blockhouse.
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General Rokossovski’s troops arrived in the small hours of April 29 and lived up to their reputation. Less than an hour after its surrender, Neubrandenberg was a sea of flames as everything that couldn’t be looted went up in smoke. The town burned throughout the night, lighting up the Americans’ camp as bright as day. The Americans kept their discipline after the Russians’ arrival, but other prisoners did not. French, Italians, and Serbs left the compound as soon as the gates were open and hurried en masse into the town to join in the looting.

The mayhem was still continuing twenty-four hours later—worse, if anything, as the Russians drank themselves stupid. The first Russians to arrive at the Americans’ camp were all smiles as they strode through the gates, sorry for the death of President Roosevelt and grateful for all the American equipment used in the Russian army. But others stripped the American prisoners of their watches and ordered them at gunpoint to dig their latrines. Relations between the so-called Allies deteriorated so rapidly that Sampson was worried that one of the enlisted men might lose his temper and punch a Russian in the nose, provoking a drunken burst of machine-gun fire in response.

Thinking their services might be needed, he and a French colleague decided to go into Neubrandenburg that day to see the destruction for themselves:

An old French priest-prisoner asked me to go downtown with him. He wanted to see how the German priest and the German people who had not fled were making out. I certainly admired the old man’s courage; he apparently feared no one. Expecting the worst, we were still shocked beyond words by what we saw. Just a few yards into the woods from the camp we came across a sight that I shall never forget. Several German girls had been raped and killed; some of them had been strung up by their feet and their throats slit.
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It was the same when they reached Neubrandenburg. The streets were piled with debris and most of the buildings were still burning. Bodies lay everywhere, ignored unless they were blocking traffic. The stink of burned flesh was stomach-churning. When Sampson and his colleague got to the Catholic church, they found the German priest slumped on the steps of the rectory in a state of catatonic shock. His mother and his two sisters, both nuns, were indoors. The family had gathered together for protection when the Russians came, but their God hadn’t saved them. All three women had been gang-raped while the priest and his father were forced to watch. Standing there amid the flaming ruins, surrounded by dead bodies and violated women, the biblically-minded Simpson didn’t know what to say. All he could think of was that Neubrandenburg that day looked just like the end of the world and the Day of Judgment rolled in to one.

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THE AMERICAN PRISONERS
had been left in their compound as Neubrandenburg fell, but others had been force marched to the west as the Russians approached. Thousands of prisoners from all over Europe were on the road that day, stumbling forward at gunpoint rather than dropping out and being shot without compunction. Among them was Micheline Maurel, a member of the French Resistance before her arrest.

After months of slave labor in an aircraft factory, Micheline was so ill with stomach pains and ulcerated sores that she could barely climb the steps to her hut, let alone join the march to the west. But she had been rousted out of her bunk a few hours before the Russians arrived and ordered to join the other Frenchwomen outside as they prepared to evacuate the camp. Micheline had gone with them, supported by three friends determined not to let her die this close to the end of the war.

Jettisoning her clogs and a blanket, she had marched through the night and for all of the following day, wearily putting one foot in front of the other as she struggled to keep up. It had rained throughout, and many prisoners had died along the way, but Micheline had somehow managed to keep going. The horizon had been in flames, and the roar of guns had drawn ever closer as the Russians approached. The column had been overtaken by increasing numbers of German troops in retreat, so many, eventually, that the prisoners’ guards had panicked. Breaking into a run, they had hitched a ride on a passing truck and fled, abandoning the prisoners to their fate.

Many had scattered at once, heading for the safety of a nearby wood. The four Frenchwomen had lacked the strength to walk that far, so they had spent the night in a field before finding shelter in a barn next day. When the Russians failed to appear, the women had continued westward on the morning of April 30, against the advice of friendly German farmers. The farmers warned them that they would be shot if they were caught wandering the countryside in prison uniform. They did come across some dead prisoners, but kept going anyway, desperate for something to eat. At length, they reached the outskirts of Waren, a village twenty-six miles west of Neubrandenburg. It seemed to be deserted, so Micheline selected the first likely looking house on the left and led the way in:

The table was still laid, there were cups and saucers, plates with the remains of food on them and, in the middle of the table, a huge pot of strawberry jam. With one bound, and without thinking, I clutched the pot of jam in my arms and began to eat, while the others rummaged in cupboards with little cries of joy. At last we would be able to eat and to get a change of clothing. Then we explored the rest of the house, calling to each other from one room to another, “Michelle, come and see. Look at the childrens’ cribs! Do such things still exist?”
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The women were still rummaging when the house’s owner appeared. He was a policeman. He disappeared at once and was back in five minutes with four young soldiers. Before they knew it, Micheline and the others had been hustled outside and were lined up against a wall, waiting to be shot. Micheline was so exhausted by then that she really didn’t care anymore:

The four soldiers took their places and aimed their rifles. Calmly, I saw they were about to shoot us, and my soul, or what was left of it, accepted the fact, I suppose. It must have been floating above me like a balloon on a string, for I could see everything from without and from above, and yet I was part of it. But I participated with extreme indifference, like an unconcerned spectator. The only question in my mind was whether it would be possible to see the bullet.
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Luckily for them, an officer appeared, shouting something about the Russians that Micheline didn’t catch. The soldiers lowered their rifles and let the women go. They were taken in by a German woman, who found them some shoes to wear and opened her cupboards to show that she had no food to give them. Then she begged them to leave, saying that the police would shoot them all and her, too, if they were found in her house.

That night, they came to a farmhouse and asked permission to sleep in the barn. The farmer was busy tying a bedsheet to a pole to make a white flag. He told them that the Russians had reached Waren and would be at the farm by dawn. Sure enough, there was a battle during the night as the Germans fought a rearguard action around the farm buildings. But Micheline was too far gone to take any notice. She lay fast asleep in the straw, dead to the world, only vaguely aware of men’s voices and the occasional rattle of bullets above her head.

All was quiet again when she awoke next morning. It was already full daylight as the barn door swung open and her friends Michelle and Mitzy told her to come and have breakfast. Stepping outside, Micheline saw to her delight that they were free at last. The Germans had all gone. The yard was full of Russian soldiers: big, friendly men with gifts of honey and chicken for them. As if in a dream, Micheline noticed that the weather was perfect for their liberation. The pear trees were in blossom and there was a heavenly smell of lilac in the air. The Russians could hardly have been kinder as they watched the women bustling about, getting breakfast ready. The Russians had evidently been there some time, because Michelle had already been raped.

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THE AMERICANS TAKE MUNICH