If This Is a Woman: Inside Ravensbruck: Hitler's Concentration Camp for Women (57 page)

Yevgenia Lazarevna told us we should protest if we were ordered to make munitions just as we did at Soest, but we shouldn’t protest so much that we were shot. She said what she always said: ‘Stay together. Don’t break the circle. Remember that.’ And we talked about how we would stay in touch with her by smuggling messages back, wherever we went.

The women were put on a train, which headed not to the Baltic coast but almost due south, which was unexpected.

After two days or so we were taken off at Buchenwald. So we wonder, what are we doing here? Then we’re called down from the train and an SS officer goes along our line and picks out ten of the best-looking girls and brings them to the yard, and a man – a German prisoner – comes up to us and tries to be friendly and says, ‘Hello, I’m a German communist,’ but we think this is provocation. So I tell him: ‘Get lost.’ Then he starts laughing with an SS officer. And then another prisoner comes up and throws us a piece of bread, and inside is hidden a small note.

While the second prisoner talks to the guards we read the note. It’s a warning to us, saying: ‘You have been brought here to work as prostitutes for the SS officers.’ So I step out of the line and tell the SS officer I would rather die than that. No single SS man is going to come close to me. And the others say the same. But they didn’t believe us. They didn’t yet know what they were dealing with, so they took us to a room. It was big. And we were told to take our clothes off. There would be lots of men coming, they told us.

We looked at each other and then an SS man comes up and touches my breast and says how beautiful I am, and I spat at him and pushed him away. We all say again we would rather die than let anyone touch us. So they beat us up for that. Then they put us back on the train and we went back in the other direction.

Several days later the train reached another small station and halted again. Bars were cranked open and women stared out. On the ground were the Ravensbrück ‘crows’, but this was not Ravensbrück. The air was different; they guessed they were close to the sea, as the wind smelled of salt and silt. This was Barth, on the northern tip of Germany, by a Baltic lagoon. As they marched, it began to snow and they were harried into a run. It was 23 February 1944, Valentina’s birthday again. She was twenty-five.

‘
Girls, look, it’s an airport
,’ someone whispers. Approaching the lights of the small camp, they make out a tall electric fence, watchtowers and barracks, and
then, not far away, a vast flat space – an airfield. Snowdrifts are whipping up around a hangar. So it’s true, they tell each other, they’ve been brought here to build German warplanes. They are marched into a squat brick barracks. It is freezing cold, there is no heating, and they sleep in three-tiered bunks under a single blanket.

Next morning, at
Appell
, they are standing outside in the snow when an elderly German in civilian clothes calls out numbers from a list and says in Russian: ‘You are about to do important and responsible work. The management will give food bonuses for those who’ll do good work. You might even go home on holiday. But we will punish careless work very severely.’ He raises his finger and barks, in a military fashion: ‘Right about face, at the double, march.’ Nobody moves.

The Yugoslavs and Czechs refuse first. A young Czech simply steps out of line and makes a short statement, saying that she and her group ‘will not make bombs to kill our families’. The guards set upon the woman, kicking and beating her until she falls to the ground. Two Yugoslav girls go to her aid, but dogs are set upon all three. They are badly mauled, and dragged off leaking blood across the snow. One is certainly dead, maybe all three.

Now it is the turn of the Soviet group. They have done it before, they can do it again. ‘Nobody must break the circle.’ Those were Klemm’s words and they repeat them under their breath. There’s safety in numbers, they tell each other, and standing alongside the Soviets is a big group of Ukrainians, mostly captured labourers, but some partisans who have also just arrived. The Red Army girls spread the word down the Ukrainian lines: they too must refuse to work making the enemy’s planes. The Ukrainian girls signal that they too will refuse. So when the order comes to move forward, the whole line stands stock-still, as if frozen solid in the icy wind.

Now comes the commandant. A fat man in his sixties, angry at being brought out into the snow, he bellows until his glasses steam up, and he’s red in the face, looking for ringleaders. Maro Lashki, one of the Georgians, catches his eye. He shouts at her to step out of the line and stand to attention. She refuses. He shouts: ‘You are an officer. A soldier. Show some respect to another officer.’

‘I see no one to respect,’ she says. ‘Russian pig!’ he yells, and lashes out at her, then kicks her several times with his jackboots, until she lies limp and is also dragged away from the group.

It is Valentina Samoilova’s turn to be picked out, probably – as happened at Soest – because she stands out as tall and blonde. The commandant asks her why she refuses to work and she says: ‘This is an armaments factory.’

‘Yes. So?’

‘We are members of the Soviet military and we refuse to produce weapons
to murder fellow soldiers. According to the Geneva Conventions you cannot force us to do such work.’

Now the fat officer goes red with rage and howls like an animal: ‘Oh, so you remember the Geneva Conventions, then I’ll beat you until you forget them.’ He starts to beat on her wounded breast. ‘And you’ll even forget your own name when I’ve finished with you.’ But he soon tires of this, and walks off leaving the fifty-four Soviet POWs to stand where they are on the yard in the sub-zero temperature until they change their mind.

Evening comes and lights are turned on in the barracks. Groups of forced labourers – men and women – walk past and ask: ‘Who are these people?’

‘They’re Russians. They’re refusing to work,’ says someone. ‘Bravo Russians,’ say the workers, and a piece of chocolate lands at a girl’s foot. She bends to pick it up and is smashed in the face by a guard.

The women are still standing as night falls. It is near minus 20. The girls have thin cotton clothes. Each tries to lean close to the person next to them for warmth, but as soon as a girl moves, a figure like a ghost in a black raincoat appears. A whip hisses and burns the face.

Morning comes and they are still standing there, although several have collapsed by now and the snow is falling on them. Then Ludwig Ramdohr appears. The Gestapo chief must have been alerted about the protest at first light and sped north to deal with it. He walks towards the stricken figures and orders that they all be stripped nearly naked and left to stand there again as temperatures plummet further.

After several hours more, the German civilian boss returns, and walks up to Valentina, pokes her in the chest and says: ‘Her.’ Then he points at three others nearby, including Lyusya Malygina. He lights a cigarette and tells the other protesters that the lives of these four are in their hands. He doesn’t raise his voice. ‘If you still refuse to work the four will be shot before your eyes,’ he says.

The four are taken away and put in a bunker, expecting to be shot, but the women outside can’t allow it – ‘Yevgenia Lazarevna said don’t get shot.’ They debate what to do and then agree that they might all be shot. They must do the work after all, they decide, and they march to the hangar. But all of them know that part of the agreement with Klemm was that if they were forced to work, they would open another front, and sabotage the German planes.

‘So we made planes that blew up in the air,’ says Valentina.

Of all the subcamps opened in 1943, Barth was surely the most desolate, perched on the northern tip of Germany on a stretch of coastline lashed by storms and often flooded. The little town itself was never hospitable. Local history books tell how it was punished over the centuries by invaders, ravaged
by cholera and the Black Death, and visited by witches. Three witches were even burned at the stake here in 1693.

For the prisoners, Barth quickly became a hell worse than Ravensbrück itself – a kind of mini-hell, smaller, more isolated, more brutal. The daily routine was much the same as at the main camp, but everything was harder: it was colder here, and roll-call more of a torture. The food was of even poorer quality. One Russian recalled the day the soup arrived so
thick with maggots
that the whole camp came out in protest.

The routine was relentless, as there was no work but the endless factory shifts; twelve hours a day of tedium, soldering small springs while
Meister
moved among them with stop watches and a guard sat at the end on a table with fist clenched ready. Others were assigned to work with metal lathes with no goggles; the fine swarf either gradually turned them blind or the acid vapour gnawed at lungs and hands, or both.

After a while, Ravensbrück was remembered as lavishly equipped by comparison. There was green paint on the barracks at the mother camp and trees all around, but here the landscape was grey or black and the barracks black brick. At the main camp it was now and then possible to organise a comb or maybe a woollen vest from the stores, but here there were no stores. Prisoners got a bowl and spoon, but if they lost them there were no spares, so women foraged in rubbish and bins for rusty tins to put their soup in or go without. The women walked around with their bits of cutlery tied around the waist with string.

There were
more locals
around in the subcamps, moving around on the outskirts or even working alongside the prisoners, and sometimes they helped by smuggling bits of food, or in other ways, but mostly they walked on past.

The camp of Neubrandenburg, twenty-five miles to the south, where the new French arrivals were taken at about the same time, was run on much the same lines, but the French fared worse, as none had been battle- or faminehardened like their Slavic comrades. Micheline Maurel was teaching in a school in Lyon when Valentina Samoilova was fighting at Stalingrad, and within days of arriving at Neubrandenburg she was thinking not of protest but simply of staying alive. Micheline’s friend Denise Tourtay, the student from Grenoble, had a weak heart and could not keep up with the work, so her soup ration was withdrawn and she was beaten so badly at the subcamp that she could no longer work or even stand. Within weeks she was critically sick with dysentery, and then typhus, and died in the Neubrandenburg
Revier
. ‘
She was the first
of our convoy to go,’ wrote Micheline. ‘She was only twenty years old.’

Blockovas were chosen for their cruelty. At Neubrandenburg a Blockova called Charlotte Schuppe loved to swat at the French with a soup ladle and wake them in the morning with a bucket of ice-cold water. At Barth the
Soviets all remembered a German Blockova called
Julie Wolk
, a beater who stole food from prisoners to give to her favourites and who would torment the women for nothing.

Guards here seemed little different from at Ravensbrück at first, and they soon had nicknames –
the Hangman, Baba Yaga, Squinty Eye
. And yet as a group, these guards were more slovenly, and there was special barbarity about the way they did things. One Russian saw a guard beat a woman on her
glass eye
until it fell out. Micheline Maurel saw an SS man feeding his dog with sugar lumps while nearby, at the water trough, two women guards held a prisoner’s head under water until she died.

At first there seems to have been no all-powerful Binz figure to oversee these women, though later at Barth there was a guard called Blondine who held sway of some sort, probably because the prisoners knew she worked for Ramdohr. She was young, with ‘a sporty physique’ and ‘big hair’.

The subcamp prisoners also suffered more than their comrades back at Ravensbrück in that they had been parted from their leaders, who were often older women and likely to remain in the main camp. The Red Army women were cut off from Yevgenia Klemm, though as Valentina explained, they tried their hardest to keep in touch.

Back at Ravensbrück Klemm had got to hear about the Barth protest and smuggled out a letter with the next prisoner convoy from the camp. By now, new prisoners were coming out to Barth all the time, as the sick and exhausted were sent back, often in the same trucks. ‘
We were never out of touch
for long, and this helped us. She could still advise us what to do,’ said Valentina.

This first letter told the Barth girls they were right to have decided to work, but resistance must go on by carrying out concerted sabotage. ‘And she said we must teach others to do the same, but we must not be fanatical. And we must stay together,’ said Valentina. ‘This was always Yevgenia Lazarevna’s advice, and it was good advice. I was taught the same as a child. If you are together, nobody will break you.’

The women then met in secret in their block to plan the sabotage. For example, women on one conveyor belt would agree to connect the wires on the engine parts the wrong way round. Women on another conveyor belt would solder connections so that they fell apart. ‘It was always risky, of course, because a factory supervisor might carry out spot checks,’ said Valentina. ‘Sabotage meant we always stood with a foot on the gallows.’ But the supervisors were often distracted and the female guards often bored, or flirting with these same supervisors.

German civilians, sometimes communists themselves, were employed at
the factory as skilled workers, and some tried to help the prisoners. Contacts with these men were not easy, but in slack moments it was possible to meet up in the lavatories, perhaps, or walking back to the blocks, when messages could pass.

It was one of these civilians who taught Valentina to sabotage planes so that they ‘blew up in the air’. He told her he knew how to make a bomber stall in mid-flight by drilling holes in the wings and filling the holes with metal shavings. The wings doubled as fuel tanks, so the shavings would soon clog up the fuel pipes, causing the engine to stall. Valentina then collected metal shavings, found lying around the factory floor, and hid them in a tiny box that she inserted into her vagina until a moment came when she could pass them over to the civilian worker.