If This Is a Woman: Inside Ravensbruck: Hitler's Concentration Camp for Women (60 page)

All this time Wanda was learning from her contacts at Sachsenhausen of other camps, unknown outside Germany, where other Norwegian nationals had been sent. Ravensbrück kept cropping up, but the women’s camp was not on the suburban lines and by early 1943 the railway tracks around Berlin were often bombed so it was hard for her to reach.

In the summer of 1943 Wanda received a letter from Norway asking if she had come across ‘Aunt Sylvia’. The letter was signed Uncle Harald. It had passed through the censor. At first she was unsure who Uncle Harald might be, but after she spoke to her parents it became clear that he was the Norwegian doctor Harald Salvesen, whose wife, Sylvia, was in Ravensbrück. There was a distant family connection, as the professor’s brother was married to one of Wanda’s many aunts, but Wanda had never met Sylvia or Uncle Harald.

Now she had a new reason to reach Ravensbrück, and resolved to take
Sylvia a package. The railway line had reopened. The journey was still risky and long, but Wanda reached Fürstenberg station. She made her way on foot to Ravensbrück, through flurries of snow and icy wind from the Havel River. Near the gates came a now familiar sight: stooping figures in striped clothes, bare feet inside wooden clogs. Knowing that they were women gave Wanda a particular shock. Some were pulling huge road-rollers as guards cracked whips. Others were labouring in fields.

Wanda approached a sentry at the gate, but this was not Sachsenhausen: there were no smiles, and although the package for Sylvia was accepted, Wanda was quickly sent away. But she had to return, and the only way would be to approach her Gestapo minder and say she wished to visit her aunt. She knew it was quite likely that the request would go to Himmler himself, which was hazardous: not only would he probably refuse, but the request itself might draw attention to all her secret work. On the other hand, if it would take her into the women’s camp, Wanda was willing to pull strings, even the Reichsführer’s.

She had requested a favour of Himmler before. Soon after arriving in Germany she had felt so miserable she wrote directly to him asking for permission to be sent home. She received a reply, couched in the politest terms, saying she could return if she agreed to renounce all political activity, but Wanda could not accept and stayed on in Germany. The request to visit her aunt in Ravensbrück, however, was granted.

‘
Die Salvesen
, nach vorn, aber schnell
’ – ‘Salvesen, out front, be quick’ – was the first Sylvia knew of her visitor. She was given soap and told to wash, then ushered into a room near the commandant’s office. A guard told her to speak in German and not to say a word about conditions in the camp. Before her in the room stood a group of SS officers, and a pretty, well-dressed young woman in civilian clothes.

As Sylvia eyed the SS men, warily expecting their commands, the woman turned towards her. ‘I was looking into a pair of smiling blue eyes, and a young voice said in Norwegian, “Good morning, Aunt Sylvia”,’ at which the guards repeated that they must speak only in German.

Wanda’s main fear was that Sylvia would suspect some sort of trap and deny all knowledge of her. After all, they had never met. She continued, ‘Mother sends her love,’ and saw Sylvia look puzzled, so she explained:

‘Mother has just heard from Aunt Ellen. She’s been to see Uncle Harald, and they’re all well at home.’

The mention of these names led Sylvia to realise that Wanda must be the daughter of Johan Hjort, who was a distant relative. She had heard before her own arrest that he had been put under house arrest in Germany. Seeing that Sylvia didn’t remember her name, and this would look odd to their German
minders, Wanda said: ‘My name is Wanda. It’s such a long time since you saw me, Aunt Sylvia, that perhaps you’ve forgotten my name.’

‘Yes, you’ve changed a lot,’ replied Sylvia, who now began to grasp how imperative it was that she convey a sense of what was happening in the camp. Wanda helped by saying: ‘Mother told me to ask whether you needed anything we could send you.’ Sylvia looked nervously at the Germans and said: ‘I don’t know if it would be allowed, but perhaps a pair of pyjamas and some underclothes.’ Wanda explained a little of her own circumstances. When she asked her ‘aunt’ if she was sleeping well, Sylvia said yes, ‘considering I sleep with between four or five hundred other women’. Here the guard said: ‘Nothing about the camp.’

After trying to convey a little more with hints and looks, Sylvia bent down to fix her wooden clogs and whispered, ‘It’s really terrible here,’ but she didn’t know if Wanda heard. As Sylvia left she was horrified to see Ludwig Ramdohr standing behind her, ‘devouring’ Wanda with his eyes. ‘Perhaps she seemed to me younger, purer and more lovely than she really was – but to me she had come as a messenger from a world I had almost forgotten, like a ray of hope in the darkness.’ Then Wanda was shown out and was gone, leaving a parcel with bread and real butter. ‘Never have I tasted anything so delicious,’ recalled Sylvia.

What she learned from Sylvia had been scanty, but Wanda had made a vital contact inside Ravensbrück and soon found out more of other camps. As her own knowledge grew, however, so did her frustration that the world seemed to be ignoring what was happening in the camps. Speaking in her Oslo apartment, she explained:

Nobody who saw what I saw would have been able to ignore it. Each time I went I felt guilty about how little I could do. There was I, well fed and well clothed, watching this terrible suffering. I thought that anybody who actually saw this would surely feel the same. And it was because of that guilt that I kept going back. I am still haunted by what I saw today. And I still feel guilty today.

The only reason I got away with what I did was because I was young and naïve and nobody took me seriously. But then I also realised that because of this I had a responsibility to try and find out everything I could and tell the world.

In the autumn of 1943 Wanda decided to seek help from the Berlin delegation of the International Committee of the Red Cross. Taking the train, she found the committee’s delegation to be housed in a luxurious villa situated in the prosperous suburb of Wannsee.

I rang the bell
, quite nervous, thinking they wouldn’t listen to me. But I had to tell them what I’d seen with my own eyes. The Red Cross would have to intervene. That was what I had to say, because it was the truth. In my innocence I felt sure they couldn’t possibly know how terrible it was, or they’d be trying to help and telling the world themselves.

From the earliest days of Nazi rule the Geneva-based International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC), guardians of the Geneva Conventions, had been unwilling to act against atrocities in the Nazi concentration camps and opposed even to telling the world what it knew. Members who inspected some of the camps before war broke out were duped into judging conditions as acceptable; others appeared to encourage Hitler in his wider work. Carl-Jacob Burckhardt, one of the most prominent committee members, and an eminent professor of history, visited the early camps and was also invited on a tour of projects across the Reich. After it he wrote personally to Hitler thanking him for his ‘
magnificent hospitality
’ and saying how impressed he was with ‘the joyous spirit of cooperation’ and ‘social thoughtfulness’ he had encountered. He signed the letter: ‘Your deeply devoted, deeply respectful, deeply grateful Carl Burckhardt’.

Later, as evidence of atrocity mounted, the twenty-three-member committee – all of them from Geneva’s oldest and wealthiest families, philanthropists and mostly Protestants – opted for ‘quiet diplomacy’ which took the form of
ingratiating letters
to Ernst Grawitz.

The hands-off policy remained in place throughout the euthanasia gassings, the growing Jewish persecution, the round-up of asocials, Gypsies and homosexuals, and the founding of a women’s concentration camp.

Once war broke out the ICRC took the narrow legal view that assisting civilians held in concentration camps – or death camps – was not within its mandate which was to assist uniformed prisoners of war. There were to be no Red Cross parcels for concentration camp prisoners and nor was there much attempt to inspect. Any proposal to do so was rejected out of hand by Berlin.

What was indisputably within the ICRC’s mandate, however, and enshrined at successive meetings of the entire Red Cross movement, was the duty to ‘protest against horrors of war’ and do all in its power ‘to mitigate murderous aspects’. In other words, even where it felt unable to act, the Committee was empowered, indeed mandated, to at least speak out. On this, by any view, it had failed, its failure all the more shocking given how much it knew by then. As the world’s chief humanitarian body, with contacts on the ground and in every capital, the ICRC had received more evidence of the unfolding catastrophe than any other single organisation.

The most appalling evidence of all had started pouring into the ICRC’s
headquarters since the Final Solution agreed at Wannsee in January 1942.

Reports from the World Jewish Congress, the Polish underground and other resistance movements, diplomats, escapers, churches, the press and national Red Cross societies painted a graphic picture of genocide. So overwhelming was the latest evidence, particularly from Poland, that the Allied leadership –
hitherto sceptical
about Jewish claims – had decided to make a joint declaration stating there was no longer any doubt that Hitler had begun exterminating Europe’s Jews, which was ‘cold blooded’ and ‘bestial’. A similar declaration by the ICRC, protectors of the Geneva Conventions, could have given strong, independent moral authority to the Allied protest, giving courage to others – even in Germany – to speak out.

At a
crisis meeting
held in November 1942 the Geneva Committee had a historic opportunity to issue such a declaration. On the table was a motion to make an unprecedented public appeal, revealing to the world what it knew, and calling for a halt. Those in favour argued that the most fundamental principles of humanity were being violated. Margaret Frick-Cramer, a lawyer and the first-ever woman member of the Committee, declared that not to speak out would be cowardly. Others, however, repeated arguments that had paralysed the Red Cross Committee from the start.

Carl Burckhardt, who had written fawningly to Hitler in 1936 and was now the Committee’s de facto president, given the illness of president Max Huber, argued that ‘work behind the scenes’ and ‘a few judicious letters’ would achieve more than public appeals. After a long debate, the proposal for a public appeal was dropped. Only Margaret Frick-Cramer remained in favour, declaring that by its silence the Committee was ‘abandoning the moral and spiritual values on which it had been founded’. She warned that doing nothing at this juncture would be a ‘negative act’ and would threaten the very existence of the ICRC.

Nevertheless, the policy of silence was agreed, as anyone who appealed to the body from now on was soon to learn.

When Wanda – an uninvited visitor – first knocked on the door of the ICRC’s elegant Wannsee villa, she was determined that they should hear what she had to say, and felt sure that once they knew, they would act to stop the horror. She was asked to take a seat and wait, and eventually shown up sweeping stairs into a large room.

They were all sitting round – all men in dark suits and all looking up towards me – staring. I said I was Norwegian and had been in touch with prisoners in the concentration camps. I noticed they were all quite young. They seemed to listen carefully. When I had finished talking they were silent for a moment or two.

The silence presumably meant that the men in suits were lost for words. Even the most senior among them, a delegate called Roland Marti, had failed to gain access to a single concentration camp, never mind to hand out food as this young woman had. And some of the places Wanda told them about, they had never heard of. She had even found out about a camp called Natzweiler, in Alsace, its existence so secret that it wasn’t listed on Nazi documents, but she knew about it from prisoners at Sachsenhausen. Natzweiler had
the designation NN
–
Nacht und Nebel
, Night and Fog – which meant that all the prisoners there were intended to disappear.

Then Roland Marti spoke. ‘He told me that they knew about the problems of the camps and were in touch with the Norwegian representative in Geneva. He said they were interested in any information I had, but they couldn’t make it public and didn’t want to know anything about how I had acquired it.’

Poignant though Wanda Hjort’s appeal to the Red Cross men was, an even more startling appeal, also from a young woman, had reached the Red Cross’s Geneva offices that same summer. This appeal had been written inside the camp of Ravensbrück itself and secretly smuggled out.

It was now eight months since Krysia Czyż and her fellow rabbits had embarked on their own campaign to tell the world about the crimes at Ravensbrück, and their methods had since grown more sophisticated. The rabbits knew that the information was reaching their families in Lublin because the secret signals came back – a blue ribbon, or a scratch on a tin – but could never be sure that it had been possible to send the information on, as they hoped, to those in London and Geneva who had power to raise the alarm.

Even long after the war it remained difficult to establish exactly how much intelligence information, signalled by the Polish underground to London about all concentration camps, had reached its destination. When the communists took power in Poland in 1945 much of the wartime underground material was destroyed, and thousands of Polish resisters rounded up and arrested.

Nevertheless, many wartime secret signals were salvaged thanks to a decision to preserve Polish underground files in London, and today they are still kept at the Polish Underground Movement Study Trust, based in a terraced house in the London suburb of Ealing. Amid the countless documents lies a file containing coded signals sent to London via Sweden. In this file is a message, dated July 1943, detailing the facts of medical experiments at Ravensbrück.