If This Is a Woman: Inside Ravensbruck: Hitler's Concentration Camp for Women (59 page)

Before long it became clear to Blondine and Ramdohr that the prisoners were getting information about the advancing Soviet front. Somehow they were spreading leaflets giving news of how close the Red Army was. ‘He said the Bolshevik influence was taking over the whole camp.’ Now Blondine secured new informers whom she met ‘in a cinema’, and more chocolates arrived from Ramdohr.

Hermann’s interrogators reverted again to establishing the identities of her informers. They produced statements for her to read, made by the former Red Army prisoners at Barth, including Maria Klyugman, Tamara Tschajalo and Valentina Samoilova herself. The statements, taken in Moscow and sent on to the East Germans, were intended to help in their investigation, and were included in Blondine’s Stasi file.

At one point, according to the interrogation transcript, part of Valentina’s evidence was read out to Hermann. She was told that Samoilova had made a statement in which she ‘
agreed that she herself
was recruited as an “agent provocateur” at Barth and that she, Samoilova, had also suggested recruiting Lyusya Malygina, who was also at Barth. The informers were offered better food in return for their services.’ In this statement, Valentina twice named Lyusya Malygina as one of the Gestapo informers. ‘
I believe a Soviet woman
… Lyusya Malygina, did work for the Germans,’ said Valentina’s statement, as read out to Blondine.

These revelations in the Stasi documents were unsettling, especially as they contradicted everything that Samoilova had said about Lyusya Malygina. ‘Malygina was never a traitor, I knew her as I knew myself,’ she had told me. One explanation was that the testimony of the former prisoners was manipulated by the Stasi to support a pre-fixed case. Another was that both Valentina and Lyusya Malygina were so terrorised by Ramdohr, particularly as he erected the gallows, that in the very last weeks of the war, even these two strong spirits had indeed turned informer.

Further revelations in Hermann’s file gave the story another twist. When the former guard was shown photographs of Lyusya Malygina and asked if she remembered her as an informer, Hermann said that she didn’t remember Malygina at all. She was asked several times whether Malygina was one of those who agreed to collude, but again denied knowing her. However, when shown Valentina’s photograph, Hermann at once volunteered the information that Samoilova herself ‘might have been the prisoner “Valya”’ – one of her informers at Barth.

In our meeting I had asked Valentina if she was interrogated about collaboration with the fascists after the war, and she told me she was, though she was never charged. ‘They could see I had the scars, so they couldn’t accuse me of being a coward,’ she said. ‘Look: I have only one breast, you can see for yourself. I proved with my blood that I was innocent.’ She pointed to her breast, and the wound she had received at Stalingrad. Then she left the room, and returned carrying a box spilling over with medals, awarded to her by Stalin after the war.

After reading Hermann’s testimony I contacted Valentina once more and asked how she could explain it. She said again that she recalled being interrogated by Germans in the 1960s but had never spoken against Malygina. The statements were written down in German, which she could not understand, and had therefore been unable to verify.

All these years later, it is impossible to establish exactly what lay behind the allegations on Blondine’s file. Yet the essence of the Barth story seems clear. On the outer periphery of Himmler’s empire, cut off from Yevgenia Lazarevna Klemm, the Red Army’s circle had fallen apart. At Barth the strongest spirits were broken, many by hunger, disease and despair, others by Ludwig Ramdohr and
Blondine
.

But the story did not end there. When Stalin’s secret police set out after the war to accuse Soviet prisoners returning from Nazi camps of ‘collaboration with the fascists’, they probed and blackmailed survivors in every way they could, trying to turn them against one another. In interviews with survivors I came across scores of examples of such intimidation – of friends
being pressured into betraying friends and of survivors who had been accused, tried, sent to Siberia and, in at least one case, shot.

Of these cases the most notorious centred on the so-called doctors’ trial at Simferopol in the Crimea.

Exactly what evidence first led to the Simferopol charges will probably never be known. Requests to Russian archives for the official trial transcripts remained unanswered. However, thanks to the letter that Maria Klyugman wrote in 1959 to Antonina Nikiforova we have a rare insight into how Stalin’s courts worked and of the tragedies caused.

Charged at Simferopol with Maria Klyugman were Lyusya Malygina, Anna Fedchenko, Valentina Chechko and Lena Malachova, all Red Army doctors and nurses at the camp. Maria’s letter begins by giving a bare account of her own story.

‘I was born in 1910 in Cernigov, then my parents moved to Kiev. I came from a big family. In 1931 I went to the medical institute in Kiev.’ She describes her medical career, her work at the front as a surgeon, her capture and her experience of Ravensbrück, where, along with several others, after some months she worked as a doctor in the Revier at the main camp and at Barth. After the war she worked again in Kiev and Moscow as a doctor, until in 1949 she was arrested by the Interior Ministry and taken to jail in Simferopol to face trial at the Military Tribunal of Tavrich Eskoje.

‘We were accused of helping the fascists liquidate people,’ wrote Maria. ‘I was accused of having injected people with lethal doses of pentothal [an anaesthetic] and of having infected prisoners’ legs with bacteria. Of giving women in the bathroom precious stones to hide in their vaginas.’ For these crimes the tribunal sentenced the women to twenty-five years in a Siberian camp. The trial took sixteen months, and while the women waited the verdict one of them, Lena Malachova, hanged herself in her cell.

Maria then named three of the accusers, all of them comrades from the camp: doctors and nurses. The first of their group arrested – Valentino Chechko – was the first accuser. Under interrogation Chechko ‘started accusing herself and us of having liquidated people’.

Two fellow nurses, Vera Bobkova and Belolipe Tskaya, also testified against them: ‘They came several times to Simferopol as witnesses.’

Maria said she had spoken out against the charges in court: ‘I told Chechko she would have to live with the consequences of making the daughter of Malachova an orphan. For that I had four weeks in solitary confinement. In December 1950 I was taken to a camp near Lake Taischet in the Irkutsk region.’

Red Army survivors today say they know of no good reason why the accusers should have betrayed their comrades who had been so courageous
in the camp. Chechko ‘lost her head’ under interrogation. Bobkova was frightened into making false accusations and was under pressure from her husband to say whatever the SMERSh wanted. There is no doubt that many Soviets were jealous of their women doctors and nurses who were deemed to have special privileges in the camp. Antonina’s post-war correspondents occasionally give their views. Tatyana Pignatti wrote of her admiration for Maria Klyugman who she saw ‘
at the operating table
in the burning fires of Cernigov’, but she added that in the camp some girls had suspected Klyugman of giving a fatal injection to one of their comrades who was dying from typhus, apparently to release her from the pain. The accusation was not true, wrote Pignatti, the injection was done by an SS nurse – ‘but it is so hard to get clear of the mud’. In the camp Klyugman did nothing wrong, ‘but the girls didn’t like her for her pride’.

As for Lyusya Malygina, she and Vera Bobkova had been the best of friends in the camp, ‘but Vera was a witness at the trial and Malygina was convicted’.

Pignatti could make no sense of it, saying to Antonina: ‘You must have seen how a storm brings all the dirt to the shore. Life clears away these people as the sea clears away the dirt.’

Chapter 20

Black Transport

T
he ‘glamorous’ woman who appeared at Ravensbrück to visit the Norwegian prisoner Sylvia Salvesen in the late summer of 1943 was a Norwegian student called Wanda Hjort. Blonde, blue-eyed and just twenty-one, Wanda had been visiting Norwegian prisoners at the male concentration camp of Sachsenhausen, near Berlin, for nearly a year. The prisoners there knew her as ‘
the potato-cake girl
’ because she brought them, home-cooked by her mother, in her backpack.

The idea of a foreigner, especially from an enemy nation, turning up at the gates of a concentration camp to visit prisoners seems beyond belief. No German civilian dared go near, and the International Committee of the Red Cross was banned. The only visitors were German dignitaries, and even they were not allowed past the show block. And the story grows all the more extraordinary in that Wanda was herself a prisoner of the Nazis: she was living in Germany along with her family under a rare form of house arrest.

Wanda’s unusual status came about as a result of her father’s arrest in Norway three years earlier. After German forces invaded and then occupied the country in April 1940, Johan Hjort, an eminent Norwegian lawyer, attacked the legal basis of the occupation. At the time, thousands of Norwegian resisters were being rounded up and sent to concentration camps, but Hjort was taken instead to a German prison from which he was soon released and placed under house arrest.

Hjort had powerful relatives inside Germany. Most influential was his sister’s husband, a man called Rudiger von der Golz, who was Joseph Goebbels’s lawyer. When Hjort was jailed, his brother-in-law struck a deal:
Johan Hjort was allowed to live under house arrest, provided his family lived with him. The idea was almost certainly dreamt up by Himmler himself. Through his studies of ancient Germanic customs, the Reichsführer had discovered the practice of
Sippenhaft
, whereby Germanic tribes made all clan members answer for the crimes of any one of them.

Wanda, charismatic and exceptionally strong-willed, was furious at the news that she was to be imprisoned – albeit only under house arrest – in Nazi Germany. At the time of her father’s arrest she was already working with the resistance, visiting captured Norwegians held in the Nazi camp of Grini, on the mountain slopes outside Oslo. She refused to go to Germany at first, but concern for her father caused her to change her mind, and with her mother, younger brother and sister Wanda went to live at a small estate near Potsdam, called Gross Kreutz. Once in Germany she set about looking for ways to continue her work with prisoners and began to trace the whereabouts of Norwegians held in concentration camps.

Despite the house arrest, and a Gestapo guard, the Hjorts lived with a degree of freedom. As long as she didn’t roam too far, Wanda could take suburban trains. One Friday morning, accompanied by her younger brother, also blue-eyed and blonde, she set off for the closest camp, Sachsenhausen. On reaching the gates, fair curls spilling out under a scarf, she approached a sentry and said in her best school German that she’d like to leave her parcels for the Norwegian prisoners.

‘The sentry was young like me. He looked at me suspiciously and asked me to fill in a form, saying he’d have to ask his boss, but then he gave me a smile and I smiled back.’ The sentry asked Wanda where she was from and she said Gross Kreutz, the name of the estate, which he seemed to hear as Rote Kreutz, or Red Cross. Unaware of any rules saying such visits weren’t allowed, the guard permitted her to leave the packages. She asked if she could return the following week to collect the boxes, and the guards said yes, as they had no rules against that either. From then on Wanda Hjort appeared each Friday at the Sachsenhausen gates.

At each visit she saw abuse heaped on terrorised, skeletal men. They were obviously starving. If there was one thing that must be done for them, she decided, it was to make sure that somehow they received proper Red Cross food parcels.

The Nazis had recently made an apparent concession to the International Red Cross on the question of parcels for prisoners in concentration camps. Himmler agreed in early 1943 that Red Cross food parcels could, in theory, be sent to certain categories of prisoner. The ICRC had even set up a ‘parcels service’, as had the national Swedish, Norwegian and Danish Red Cross societies. However, by the SS rules, the Red Cross were required to have the
name, number and camp of each recipient, which had to be printed on the parcels, or else they would not be given out. Furthermore, the recipient must sign a receipt. In a tiny number of cases the Red Cross had these details – perhaps because families had passed them on – but only Himmler’s SS knew who was in which camp, and requests for such information were always refused by Ernst Grawitz, head of the Nazi German Red Cross. That made the ‘parcels service’ almost meaningless from the start.

Wanda Hjort, however, saw a way to make it work. She set about tracing as many Norwegian inmates as she could, in order to build up a database of names and addresses. Word of her visits spread among the Norwegian prisoners in Sachsenhausen, who found ways to smuggle information to her, leaving names and addresses under stones, or whispering in Norwegian as she passed by the wire.

She then began making contact with the prisoners’ families in Norway. The Hjort family was barred from posting letters, and everything was censored, but when Wanda experimented by taking letters to the local post office near Gross Kreutz and asking to post them to Norway, she found the postmistress had no instructions to refuse and they went in the ordinary mail. Soon a flood of letters came back, not only from the families she had contacted, but from others who had heard of her work and were desperate for news of missing men and women; their names were now added to her database.

Wanda also sought out other Scandinavians operating covertly in Germany, including a group of Norwegian pastors working with Norwegian seamen in the port of Hamburg. She gave them the names and numbers she had collected and they passed them to the Norwegian Red Cross, which was now able to send parcels to the prisoners.