If This Is a Woman: Inside Ravensbruck: Hitler's Concentration Camp for Women (50 page)

However, Suhren then made an interesting concession – also as ordered. When the Red Army women were given numbers to sew on (theirs were in the 17000s) along with the red triangles that classed them as political prisoners, they might have expected to wear the simple letter ‘R’ to mark them as Russians, like other Russians in the camp. Instead, the Red Army women were given the letters ‘SU’, Soviet Union, which at least allowed them to continue to claim that their special status had been recognised and they were still being treated as prisoners of war. Certainly the rest of the camp would always call the women with the letters SU ‘prisoners of war’.

Despite attempts to conceal the Red Army’s arrival, prisoners on night duty in the offices saw everything and spread the word next day about how the Soviets entered the camp moving as one, with heads held high. They were obviously under the command of a powerful leader, everyone said. Not only had they arrived in uniform, but some were still bloodied from the front.

The Soviets were put in a special barracks, apart from the rest of the camp, ringed by barbed wire. Their block was guarded by the newly formed ‘camp police’ – the
Lagerpolizei
(LAPO) – made up of inmates, armed with whips and truncheons. The Soviets were also to be kept in quarantine for twice as
long as anyone else. The whole camp eyed their quarters. For ordinary Russians, brought here as slave labourers, the presence of these ‘
official
’ Russians caused nervousness. Some tried to smuggle in messages of praise for Stalin, giving their camp numbers and offering help.

For the communist leaders in the camp – Czechs, Germans, Austrians and others – the arrival of the Red Army was momentous, and plans were made for making contact. ‘
They came from
a country that carried hope,’ said Dagmar Hajkova, one of the Czech communists. Another Czech, Helena Palevkova, volunteered for delousing duties, hoping to be able to greet her Russian comrades.

And it was not only prisoners who were impressed. Johanna Langefeld, still in her post when the Red Army arrived, was overheard admiring their ‘discipline’ and said the behaviour in the bathhouse of the commandant and his men was ‘
contemptible
’. Langefeld also said the women were clearly controlled by a high-ranking leader, but as far as we know neither she nor any SS officer ever found out who that ‘leader’ was, or learned that she had no rank at all.

I first heard Yevgenia Klemm’s name while sitting on a bench by the Schwedtsee, outside the Ravensbrück camp walls, in April 2008. A woman wearing a thick woollen hat pulled over her ears was throwing red roses into the lake below in remembrance of lost comrades. She was here to commemorate the liberation. She didn’t wish to talk, but when I asked who the Red Army leader was in the camp she looked at me and said: ‘Yevgenia Lazarevna Klemm. She was the reason we survived.’ Then the woman turned away. It would be hard to find out more.

Red Army survivors alive today were too young to know Yevgenia Klemm’s detailed story, and the older generation were dead, their official testimony censored, as I learned from Maria Vlasenko, one of the Odessa nurses. Maria pulled out a newspaper article she’d written in the early 1970s describing her experience in the war. It might be interesting she said, ‘but they cut a lot out’.

What had they cut? I asked.

‘The truth,’ she answered. ‘When we wrote about the camp we couldn’t say anything that might suggest the fascists were not evil all the time. We couldn’t say we had Sundays off or that we had a spoon of jam at weekends. We couldn’t write about our real suffering. We always had to be standing up to it and being brave. Any weakness was cut out.’

Nobody experienced
post-war censorship
more painfully than Antonina Nikiforova, another Red Army doctor, who arrived at Ravensbrück in March 1944. Antonina worked as a pathologist in the
Revier
, and collected material in the camp that she hid and hoped to use in a book. After the war,
however, SMERSh confiscated her materials and her manuscript, which even today cannot be found in Russian archives.

Yet Antonina never gave up. Soon after her first manuscript was confiscated she asked all her comrades to write to her with their memories. With the help of these letters she began writing again, but her work was still censored. She carefully preserved the letters, however, though refused to allow anyone to read them until after her death, which came in 1994. They have only recently found their way to the Ravensbrück camp archives, waiting to be read. From four large boxes the voices of Red Army women whose accounts seem lifeless in official texts come spilling out – chatting, mourning, reminiscing, lying, accusing, laughing, and telling stories that dart back and forth, like the letter from Anya Munkina, who had lost an arm at the front, and had a special job in the camp mopping floors. Gladdened to hear from Antonina after the war, Anya writes:

I am crying for joy, I’d like to meet and hug you and talk of the concentration camp. Your work was terrible – I think a lot about you, especially in that dungeon, you and a corpse in front of you and you are working without any mask. During the day everyone goes in her direction and me I grab my mop and clean the courtyard and try to find a piece of beetroot or a potato. In the evening in the barracks it was cosy – every woman trying to warm the atmosphere with her heart. I listened to the newspaper readings by Yevgenia Lazarevna. After listening to her voice it was nice to fall asleep, if a bit frightening. Soon I was separated from my friends and sent to Bergen-Belsen. That was a real lice-ridden hole where I contracted typhoid and dysentery. I had no hope of seeing the sun again.

Ilena Vasilievna (who gives no surname) tells Antonina: ‘I bear no grudge that you don’t remember me – there were many of us. You helped me and two other Polish girls to leave for work. That is why I’m still alive.’ Digging deeper, there are more mentions of Klemm. ‘She cured my typhus by rubbing me with bark.’ One letter from a cousin of Klemm’s said that after the war, when she returned to Odessa, Yevgenia Lazarevna didn’t want to talk about the camp ever again. ‘She was nervous when it came up, so I tried to avoid the topic. But I heard her once saying that at the camp they put rubber pants on people and beat them. And there were things a thousand times worse than that.’

With Antonina’s names and addresses, it was possible to find more women who’d known Yevgenia Klemm and to learn something of her life. She was
born in Odessa
, probably around 1900. Her father was thought to have been a Serb, her mother Russian. Some said she was Jewish, others not. As a schoolgirl she developed a passion for history and trained to be a history
teacher in Odessa. In the early 1920s she joined the Bolshevik revolution by serving in field hospitals, mostly on the Polish front, which was where she nursed a wounded Latvian called Robert Klemm. They fell in love and on return they married, but soon after Robert died of TB. There may have been a son, but nobody was sure.

In the 1930s Klemm became a teacher trainer at the Odessa Pedagogical College and won the highest accolades. Her pupils adored her. Olga Khohkrina explained why:

In class she painted pictures for us of the past with her descriptions, and would produce marvellous materials so we lost ourselves in history. I remember a lesson she gave on greater Russia and she was using materials on the Tartars and the Cossacks to such effect that she had pupils in tears. There was a lesson on the Mongolian invasion when she described things in such a lyrical way that her pupils were open-mouthed. She would tell us that knowledge gave strength and understanding. She had an ability to inspire love and respect. It was a gift.

‘What was she like?’ I asked.

Very humble. She gave the impression of having no interest in material wealth. She would often invite her pupils to her flat and warm them with a cup of tea. It was very cold and she was very poor.

And I think she was an idealist who wanted to play her part. She told me when she was nursing in the civil war she had fallen sick with typhus and nearly died. When the Second World War broke out there was no need for her to volunteer again, as our teachers were all evacuated to safety, but she joined up again.

I wondered what sort of communist Klemm might have been. ‘The romantic kind,’ said Yevgenia Vladimimova, another former pupil:

I think that as a young woman she was probably attracted to the cause in a devoted but humanitarian way. Like so many young Russian men and women she probably became intoxicated with the Bolshevik dream. She would have seen it as a way to build a better world. I think a lot of people saw it like that at first. I remember hearing that when Lenin died she played Liszt for hours.

During the first weeks in Ravensbrück, Yevgenia Lazarevna’s gifts were badly needed. Women in the rest of the camp were impressed by the Soviets’
discipline, but inside the block many were sick with typhus.
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The SS took several to be shot, to prevent infection. Others were simply terrified. One of Antonina Nikiforova’s correspondents wrote:

I found the camp
so eerie with its black streets, the female guards in black cloaks and their wild dogs and orders, with all the people dressed in striped clothing and mostly with shaven hair that I am not even going to try to describe it on paper. Our terror – my terror – consisted at first in the fact that we did not know the language and didn’t even know what
Konzlager
[concentration camp] meant.

At least the journey had ended. On arrival in the block Tamara Tschajalo found a space on a mattress next to Yevgenia Lazarevna and immediately fell asleep. And they were together under one roof where they could try to heal their wounds. Yevgenia Lazarevna went amongst them late at night, showing what position to lie in to ease the pain. She also chose helpers to tend to the needy, among them Alexandra Sokova, a poet and teacher, and Maria Klyugman, the surgeon from Kiev. It was significant perhaps that at least two of Klemm’s helpers, Sokova and Klyugman, were Jews, as was Lyuba Konnikova, and there were several other Soviet Jews who had remained unidentified to the SS.

The treachery of the last six months was not forgotten. The SS had already removed their spies: the Red Army women who had pointed out Jews to be shot on the journey were put to other dirty work. But much bitterness remained. One woman writing to Antonina said: ‘
I don’t see Lyusya
any more and I don’t want to see her, the same goes for Vera Bobkova, especially when I think how they grabbed the clothes of the Jews in Slavuta after their death.’ In the block Klemm urged the women to heal these wounds too. ‘Don’t let the fascists divide us. That’s what they want. Keep clean and tidy, it is possible even in the worst conditions. We are civilised people.’ Some women still had periods. ‘We were given nothing – not even underwear. It was a great problem for some girls but soon none of us had them of course. We washed a little bit with icy water, that’s all,’ said Ekaterina Goreva.

The Red Army women were cut off from the camp outside, so Klemm tried to gather information. Messages smuggled in through the Polish Blockova brought contact with the camp communists. Czech doctors, sent to the block to identify typhus sufferers, made themselves known to her. The
Czechs explained who else was here – the nationalities and numbers – how the camp was organised and what slave labour was done. They even smuggled in a German newspaper.

At night Yevgenia Lazarevna gathered the girls around her in groups and read the newspaper to them. Interpreting the Nazi news, she said the Red Army was breaking through outside Moscow and German casualties were high. She told them what she learned about the camp: they were to be fenced off for several weeks, but then they would have to work. Women here sewed clothes for the German army. There was a big factory making electrical components for weapons – the Siemenslager.

Klemm said that while in quarantine they must all learn German. ‘Girls,’ she said. ‘For now we’re surrounded by wire, but one day the Germans will take the wire down and then you will have to mix with women of other nationalities. You need to learn their language. This will help you in the struggle to come.’

All German-speakers were asked to raise hands and Klemm organised the block into eighty groups of three or four prisoners, each with a leader, and each leader took the day’s lessons from Klemm. Among the crammed bunks the learning began. ‘And she would tell Vera Bobkova, “Vera, keep in mind that the German sentence is built like this and that,” and Vera would whisper what Klemm had said to her small group,’ Ilena Barsukova recalled.

Klemm also befriended the younger women, some as young as sixteen and seventeen. She asked where they came from and what they had been through, and whether their parents were alive. ‘We will stay together, girls. You are with me.’ She remembered their stories. And she would know at once who were the daughters of commissars or kulaks,
^*
or whose father might have served under the tsars, and she understood the different camp ‘families’ as they were already calling themselves – the Moscow family, Leningrad family, Odessa family.

Sometimes she’d ask the girls about their favourite recipes and tell them hers. And then she’d read a poem that Alexandra Sokova had written and talk about it. Or she’d talk to them about the women who had been prisoners under the tsars and how they’d suffered and survived. ‘She told stories of the past so we would forget the present,’ said Tamara Tschajalo.

Lyusya Malygina, the doctor who dived into the Black Sea, organised a group to look after Klemm herself. Older than most, her legs were swollen, and her bout of typhus years ago had left her partially sighted in one eye. Her helpers dressed her sores and made space for her in the washroom. Some said these women were an elected committee, but most said they simply wanted to
take care of her and help. ‘She was the mother I missed,’ said Tamara Tschajalo.