If This Is a Woman: Inside Ravensbruck: Hitler's Concentration Camp for Women (55 page)

‘
The conditions
she worked in were appalling. She had no proper room and the bandages were piled up all around her as women queued up between the mass of bunks.’ So well did Inka and Grete get along that Grete returned several times, partly to hear Inka’s gossip about the camp communists, and
one day Inka told Grete that there was a new communist leader in the camp called Yevgenia, who in Grete’s words ‘gave everyone the party line’. Grete never met Yevgenia Klemm. Had she done so her prejudices might have been dispelled.

Of all the prisoner doctors recruited into Treite’s
Revier
in the summer of 1943, it was Zdenka Nedvedova who became the most popular of all. ‘Zdenka, where is Zdenka?’ was now a familiar cry around the
Revier
, and it was one that went out on the night when a new French arrival collapsed in her block. The number of French had been rising during the year, and in October Germaine Tillion arrived with a group of fifty women from Paris. Germaine fell sick at once, and could not eat or speak. Her Blockova took her to the
Revier
, where she waited, slumped on the ground, until a doctor in a white coat, whom she later learned was Percival Treite, came along and nudged her with his foot – not brutally, but to make her get up. ‘
And looking at me
with a distracted air he said: “
Kein Scharlach – raus
” [no scarlet fever in here – out],’ and she was sent back to her block.

Germaine’s Blockova made contact with the Czech prisoner doctors, and in the night they took her to Zdenka – ‘she had a young, serious face and white hair’ – who diagnosed diphtheria. The women exchanged no words, but the Czech doctor treated the French ethnologist – Germaine was a wellknown expert on African tribes – with a serum.

Germaine was admitted to the diphtheria ward of the infectious diseases block. Later she would reflect on how lucky she had been to go there at a rare moment when lives could be saved. ‘And one could see the power of small groups of courageous women who were able to save a life of another without even exchanging a word with the person they saved, because they probably didn’t even speak the same language.’

Throughout these weeks arrivals from more and more countries continued to pour in. They included a contingent from Norway, among them the fifty-year-old Sylvia Salvesen, not a doctor herself, but the wife of a wellknown Oslo physician. Whereas Zdenka, arriving from Auschwitz, had been pleasantly surprised by her first sight of Ravensbrück not long before, the same scenes horrified Sylvia, arriving from prison in Norway. Giving evidence at the Hamburg trial in December 1946, her account of her first impressions was so vivid she held the court spellbound:

This for me
was like looking at a picture of hell. Why should I use this word? Not because I saw anything terrible happen at that time, but because for the first time in my life I saw human beings that I could not judge if they were men or women. Their hair was shaved, they were thin, unhappy
and filthy. But that was not what struck me most. It was the look in their eyes. They had what I would call dead eyes.

Sylvia was lining up with other new arrivals for the ‘medical’ when a trolley brushed past bearing a body wrapped in a white sheet. The sheet pulled back and she saw the face of a seventeen-year-old Norwegian who had arrived with her. The girl had died of typhus. This place was like ‘
no other hospital on earth
’, she thought, resolving to try and do something to help, when a man in a white coat approached, and she found the courage to speak up, asking if she might be given work.

Treite stopped in amazement and said, ‘What impudence,’ but Sylvia said: ‘I am not impudent, I am Norwegian and I am a doctor’s wife. And while I am here I would like to help.’ In this tall, elegant woman, with large blue eyes, grey-white hair and impeccable German, Treite recognised a prisoner of some breeding. He ordered her to report to the
Oberschwester
, who gave her a job bandaging wounds.

On checking her husband’s credentials, Treite discovered that Dr Harald Salvesen was physician to the ousted King Haakon VII of Norway, and the family had strong connections to the British aristocracy. Furthermore, it soon became apparent that Sylvia had contacts high up in Germany too. A glamorous young woman came to visit her one day accompanied by Gestapo officers; the rumour among the SS guards was that the visitor had been given permission to come by Himmler himself.

Pedigree influenced Treite’s decisions on other appointments. Not long after Sylvia arrived, a Swiss prisoner in the TB block – Block 10 – was sent to Treite for diagnosis. Her name was Carmen Mory, and he asked: ‘
Are you the daughter
of the Swiss doctor Mory?’ She replied that she was. Treite told Carmen, a journalist, that her father had treated his mother in Switzerland twenty years before, and, seeing that Carmen had worked once for the
Manchester Guardian
, he mentioned his English connections too. Treite treated Carmen for her sickness and later used his influence to secure her a job as Blockova of Block 10, one of the new
Revier
blocks.

Even the Russians’ background was of interest. When Antonina Nikiforova, the Red Army pathologist, arrived a few months later Treite was impressed with her dissection skills and asked who had taught her. She had trained in Leningrad, she replied, and when she named her professor, Treite asked: ‘
Was he a Jew?
’

Treite encouraged this coterie of like-minded intelligent women to gather around him, and he liked them to help with his work. ‘
Treite often came
into the operating theatre and said he felt like operating,’ said Zdenka. ‘He would observe a woman waiting to give birth, and without any warning he then
performed Caesarean sections, and deliveries using high forceps and other instruments.’ He sometimes invited Sylvia Salvesen into the operating theatre just to watch him at work. ‘
I thought it might
interest you, Sylvia,’ he once said to her.

To the rest of the prisoners, the women who staffed the
Revier
were an elite. Nelly Langholm, a young Norwegian who arrived at the same time as Sylvia Salvesen, said that the ordinary working-class Norwegians had little to do with those who worked in the
Revier
. Sylvia, a fellow Norwegian, and friend of the Norwegian king, lived ‘in a high-class part of the camp’ and never went to the Norwegian block.

‘
Except one day
she came with a big box of chocolates,’ Nelly recalled. ‘I was lying on the third mattress of the bunk and I remember the smell of those chocolates. But she didn’t offer us any.’ I asked why Sylvia would have brought the chocolates if she hadn’t meant to offer them round, at which Nelly scoffed, and said that Sylvia probably ‘just wanted to show us she had got them’. True or not, Nelly’s explanation revealed how the deepest class hatreds could survive in the camp, even within a small national group. ‘I think she got them from some high-up visitor,’ said Nelly, ‘and my friend Margrethe was so angry she went up to her and slapped her face.’

The
Revier
women certainly enjoyed a certain protection under Treite; after the SS staff had left the
Revier
for the day the prisoner staff might even find a chance to meet and talk. One such discussion took place in the early autumn of 1943, when according to the Czech communist Synka Suskova, a bitter row broke out involving Milena. ‘
The conversation turned to
sharing news from the war outside and guessing whether the Americans or the Soviets would reach the camp first, and which country offered people a better future.’ Synka recalled two Poles – non-communists – ‘saying they expected freedom from the Americans, while we Czechs saw freedom being given to us by the Soviet Union’.

Pela [one of the Poles] said, ‘For us Poles, Hitler is better than Stalin,’ to which Hanka Housková replied, ‘But that’s incredible,’ and we all agreed and protested. ‘Who annexed Europe and murders and exterminates everywhere he goes? How could you say something like that here, when you can see so clearly what Hitler is?’ Then we started shouting, as we were enraged, when Milena got up and separated us. She was pale, and evidently sickening again. ‘Enough. Stop it,’ she said. ‘If the
Oberschwester
and the doctors hear there will be trouble.’

And someone else then said: ‘Milena, how can you talk like that? Is that the most important thing?’ Milena said: ‘Here and now it is,’ and she
spoke matter-of-factly. Hanka then said to her: ‘Milena, you can’t remain neutral. You must say which side you are on. You can’t stand in the middle.’

‘Oh,’ said Milena, quietly. The older partner, she was trying to calm the young Hanka down. ‘Side? Side? Why do you have to be one or other side of the barricade? No, Hanichka. You don’t understand a thing.’ But Hanka didn’t want to be quietened and ran out into the corridor, shouting: ‘I don’t understand! What is it I don’t understand? It’s you I don’t understand. Milena, I don’t understand you. Who do you belong to? Which side are you on? Tell me. Tell us. Who do you belong to?’

Lyuba Konnikova had always known exactly which side she was on. Whatever changes Treite might have made for the good, Lyuba saw only the mounting horrors; if the
Revier
had been reorganised to save lives, why were patients in some wards left to die? So crammed were the patients in the dysentery ward that those on the upper level, too sick to move, had to lie in their own excrement until it flowed onto those below.

Lyuba was not the only one to be revolted by what she saw in Treite’s
Revier
. Maria Klyugman had seen different horrors. As a skilled surgeon she was given dog bites and battered flesh to mend. Women beaten on the
Bock
were brought in with burst kidneys or haemorrhaging. Treite, however, was never in the
Revier
to sew up these beaten women because he had attended the beating: like his predecessors, one of his duties was to take the victim’s pulse and tell the SS officer how many more lashes the woman could stand.

During the course of 1943 the manner of the beatings worsened and a new sort of
Bock
was introduced. Women were put in special rubber pants in case they urinated and told to lie face-down on the table, which was indented like a trough, edged with wooden rods, and had iron stirrups for the legs, placed below knee level.
Two inmates
, usually green or black triangles, put the woman into the stirrups and fastened a leather belt that went around her shoulder blades. As the beating began they held on to the rubber pants, pulling tight as an SS man or another prisoner beat her with a leather riding whip. Near the end of the beating the woman would always pass out. Then the green triangles would lift her off the contraption and push her through the door where others were waiting their turn, fainting and
urinating in terror
.

The new beating procedures would all have been approved by Himmler. In evidence later the camp staff all said that Himmler insisted on approving every individual beating and the manner in which it was done. A document unearthed in the papers of the SS Administration Headquarters by war crimes investigators in 1945, entitled ‘
Flogging of Female Prisoners
’, showed
this to be the case. It confirmed a verbal order issued by Himmler in July 1942 stating that ‘orders for punishing female prisoners should be reported to him for approval’. The orders ‘must be numbered in red pencil in the right hand top corner consecutively’. In order ‘to save time’ Himmler also wanted the names and numbers of each woman to be flogged printed on a separate list, so he could notify his approval of the flogging by referring just to a number. In 1942 the flogging was to be done ‘with strokes to follow quickly after each other with a single-lash leather whip, the strokes being counted. Undressing and baring of certain parts of the body is strictly forbidden.’ From the evidence of Maria Klyugman in the
Revier
and countless flogging victims, by 1943 Himmler had updated the procedures, ordering that the beating should be done on bare buttocks.

While Maria was kept busy sewing up her patients, Lyusya Malygina, a gynaecologist, had the job of assisting with abortions carried out on the
Bettpolitische
and of examining the women selected to work in brothels at the male camps. Before they left she checked them for syphilis and was told to improve their appearance, by dyeing their hair and disguising their sores.

Nor was it only the Russian doctors who recoiled at what they saw in the
Revier
. Zdenka Nedvedova was increasingly revolted by Treite’s experiments, with which she had to help. One day Treite told Zdenka to collect cockroaches, found scuttling around the
Revier
, which she had to boil up and then feed the juices three times a day to patients suffering from swollen legs. The experiment was pointless and dangerous, and when Treite wasn’t looking Zdenka would pour the liquid away and serve up water instead.

In another experiment Zdenka had to collect the urine of pregnant women and inject it into another group of pregnant women, but this time Treite caught her cheating. He raged and shouted, and threatened to send her to the bunker with twenty-five lashes, but Zdenka stood her ground, saying that as a student at Charles University she had been trained to have respect for patients. Treite relented, ‘
perhaps because he was
taken aback by my fearlessness’, she said, though she realised it was more likely that to report her would have disclosed his secret scientific work to the camp authorities. It was clear to Zdenka that Treite’s operations and experiments were mostly done with a view to his professorship at Berlin University and he certainly didn’t want Ramdohr to find out.

The prisoners all knew that Treite was terrified of the Gestapo chief. When Ramdohr demanded narcotics to help with his interrogations, Treite had strongly disapproved – or so he said – but was too great a coward to refuse.

Sylvia Salvesen was also increasingly horrified by Treite’s
Revier
. Not long
after her arrival she saw inside the
Idiotenstübchen
– or ‘madhouse’. It was perhaps as a result of Himmler’s April order that only the insane should in future be selected for death – or, as he put it, ‘selected in the context of operation 14f13’ – that Treite had decided to set aside a special room for the ‘mad’. Perhaps it was also part of Treite’s attempt at reorganisation, given the growing number of ‘idiots’. When, periodically, trucks came secretly to take them away, it was practical to have all the women in one place.