If This Is a Woman: Inside Ravensbruck: Hitler's Concentration Camp for Women (61 page)

The most important surviving document is a coded telegram, a terse sevenline summary of Krysia’s long letters. Krysia’s mother, a major in the Polish Home Army (AKA), had evidently sent on the information in her daughter’s letters to the Home Army in Warsaw. From there details were passed to a
Polish cell in Sweden, where a Polish signaller, code-named Lawina, tapped out a message for London. The resulting telegram reads: ‘
In the concentration camp
for women in Ravensbrück, from July 1942 to July 1943 the German doctors, under Professor Gebhardt, were forcibly performing experiments on Polish women, namely surgical operations on legs, muscles and bones, as well as infecting with tuberculosis, tetanus and gas gangrene.’ The message states that there were seventy-seven victims, of whom five had already died.

This single sheet of faded, flimsy paper is testimony to the courage of the Lublin students, whose smuggled letters told the outside world of one of the most shocking Nazi medical atrocities of the war, and disclosed it just weeks after the events. The telegram – probably not the first to have arrived about the rabbits – even named the Nazi responsible for the atrocities: Karl Gebhardt.

The related correspondence, however, shows how ‘the world’ they had hoped to prompt to act instead ignored them. Horrified by the ‘atrocious’ and ‘unthinkable’ practices at Ravensbrück, Polish government officials in London wrote at once to the ICRC in Geneva and to the Vatican, calling on both ‘to intervene against this massacre’. The experiments were ‘not only against the morality of Christian beliefs but against medical ethics, which allows only animals to be used for experimental purposes’. Moreover, the experiments breached the Hague Convention of 1907.

The Polish correspondence then describes Geneva’s response:

Regarding experiments
at the concentration camp Ravensbrück, where several hundred Polish women are being held, the Ministry of Foreign Affairs has taken steps to induce the International Red Cross to examine the case for intervention, but did not receive a positive result. The ICRC has explained that the German authorities do not allow their representative to visit this type of camp, and insist that such camps are not subject to the rules of the Geneva Convention of 1929.

With that excuse Geneva refused not only to intervene with the Germans, but also to publicise what it had learned, or to take up the matter with Allied governments, or with the new War Crimes Commission that by then was actively gathering evidence in New York.

The Red Cross reaction is doubly shocking given that they were informed not only of the atrocities but of the name of their perpetrator, Karl Gebhardt, a man they knew full well to be a close associate of Ernst Grawitz, president of the German Red Cross, and the most powerful medical figure in the Third Reich. As the Committee must therefore have understood, Grawitz, their main interlocutor in Berlin, and the man refusing them entry to the
concentration camps, was also the man who had authorised the medical atrocities described by the Polish telegrams.

Within weeks of Krysia’s revelations reaching Geneva, Grawitz authorised new experiments. Throughout the early summer of 1943 the Polish women in Ravensbrück had found reason to hope that they were over, but no one could be sure, and when ten rabbits were suddenly summoned again and told to report for work at a subcamp, everyone recognised a trap. A tip-off had come from friends in the
Schreibstube
and the women therefore refused to appear.

Dorothea Binz then came in person to the block and ordered the women out, but again they refused. Each in turn spoke out, telling Binz they knew they were to be experimented on again and would refuse to leave the block even if it meant execution.

According to Dziuba Sokulska, the Lublin lawyer who had led the earlier protest and who was named on the list of ten, Binz then ‘gave her word of honour’ that the women were simply being sent on a labour transport and they should go to her office to confirm their details. ‘We decided to go, but on condition that we would run if we saw any threat to take us by force,’ said Dziuba later.

While they stood in front of Binz’s office, near the
Revier
, the women were warned by Polish friends that SS men and guards with dogs were on their way. ‘
We could hear motorbikes
arriving and dogs barking from the other side of the wall. We started to run along the camp like hunted animals to show all the prisoners what was happening. When we got back to our block we stood still among the others to hide.’

Binz now brought reinforcements. As well as SS officers, she had with her a group of prisoner policewomen, who dragged the ten women to the work office, ‘biting and punching us until they had dragged us as far as the bunker’. The fresh assault on the rabbits, horrifying enough, was made worse by the brutality of these fellow prisoners, working as ‘police’. Of all the women who took SS jobs, this newly formed group was naturally the most despised by ordinary inmates. As the ten rabbits were dragged off and locked in bunker cells, the ‘police’ barricaded prisoners inside Block 15, which had its windows blacked out, without food or electricity. Any who wished to disassociate themselves from the ten could be let out of the stifling block, said Binz, but none did. Even the Czech Blockovas and Stubovas pledged their support, and for four days the block was locked down, surrounded by the prisoner police. ‘Bribed by an extra bowl of
Judas soup
they carried out their duties with great zeal,’ said Stanisława Młodkowska, one of those locked up.

Inside the bunker one of the threatened ten rabbits, Bogna Bąbińska, had the idea that they should commit suicide in protest against medical
experiments, and Dziuba agreed, but others were against and they gave it up. After twenty-four hours the first five in the bunker were taken to another cell and questioned one by one by an SS doctor, one they didn’t recognise. In a bizarre charade, given the previous atrocities, the doctor asked the women if they would agree to a ‘small operation’. All refused, saying they had already been operated on. The SS man then told the women it wasn’t true. Even when they showed him their scars, he continued to deny it, saying the scars were not from operations at all.

Five more SS officers and doctors came in, overpowered the Polish women and held them down as they kicked and screamed, before gagging them and pouring ether on their faces until they passed out. When they woke next day they found their legs, dirty and black from dust and dirt, had been butchered again as they lay there on the cell beds. All were moved to the
Revier
and locked up on a ward. Helena Piasecka was particularly badly mutilated; a liquid had been injected into the bone marrow so that the leg looked as if it was crumbling. When Helena tried to walk on it some weeks later, the
shinbone snapped
.

Winter was approaching, and once again the killing was stepped up. Whatever orders had been given earlier in the year to kill only the ‘mad’ had been superseded by new commands to save on feeding useless mouths, especially those who wouldn’t last through winter. In Ravensbrück the killing spree was first apparent in the
Revier
, where lethal injections became common again, ordered by Treite, as Sylvia Salvesen observed when her friend Emma Brundson, a Norwegian Red Cross nurse, was taken ill. She had been suffering from cirrhosis of the liver and Treite had shown sympathy at first, attempting an operation to save her.

Sylvia, still hoping her friend would live, was called one day to the
Stübchen
to find Emma lying ‘
crumpled up in the bed
as if someone had struck her brutally’. She was ‘dead but still warm’. Sylvia pulled up the sleeve of Emma’s jacket and found a deep injection with blood and mucus running from it. A prisoner nurse told her she had seen one of the camp nursing staff leaving the
Stübchen
carrying a hypodermic syringe.

Treite called Sylvia in to see him. ‘Emma is dead, Salvesen,’ he said. ‘It is better that way. Don’t you agree?’ Sylvia had counted twelve women murdered by injection in the
Stübchen
that day. ‘Emma was the thirteenth.’
^*

By the end of the year the
death rates were rising
not only in the
Revier
but throughout the camp. A woman in the sandpit who could no longer work was shot and killed on the spot. Tuberculosis was rampant; many in the sewing shop were afflicted, but it spread especially fast at the Siemens camp. Prisoners said that the
five stretchers
kept at Siemens and used to transport sick women from the plant to the main camp were not enough. Richard Mertinkat, a new civilian manager, was shocked by the ‘
pitiable
’ and ‘lamentable’ state of the women’s health. ‘Siemens could have intervened to insist on better food and decent barracks for the women. But these good gentlemen of Siemens didn’t bother counting the number of dead.’

Rita Sprengel, a secretary in the
Spulerei
hall, recalled: ‘
Many women had to be
struck off the lists as incurable. Many died before they were even struck off the lists – usually of tuberculosis.’ Under the Siemens contract each woman struck off the lists must be replaced with a healthy one, but these were in short supply, and such was the overcrowding that even when new transports of fresh workers were brought in there was nowhere to put them.

Since September 1943 Jews had even started arriving again. Some were of ‘mixed race’, sent on from Auschwitz to work. Others were so-called ‘protected’ Jews – those from countries allied to Germany or from neutral countries that had opposed the gassing of their nationals. By early January huge numbers were expected from France. The need for space grew ever more acute, so the SS took more radical measures to dispose of useless mouths.

Treite announced that no bandages were to be issued to elderly women with leg sores, and no medicine given to those with TB. The camp’s old hands, recalling the gassing transports of early 1942, read the signals and knew that more concerted murder ‘by letting a certain amount out through the chimney’ was almost certainly being planned.

Since 1942 the removal of useless prisoners for gassing had continued with the ‘black transports’ or
Himmelfahrt
(‘heaven-bound’) transports in which from time to time lorries had taken away small groups of so-called lunatics as well as other ‘useless’ prisoners, probably to Auschwitz.

Block 10’s Blockova, Carmen Mory, knew as early as December 1943 that another far larger black transport was now planned, and she heard that it too was bound for Auschwitz. Mory often had good information, perhaps as an acolyte of Treite’s, but more likely because she had recently become one of Ramdohr’s spies.

Women at the subcamps knew about the plans too. In the Neubrandenburg
Revier
prisoners were quite openly being selected for death, and in January
1944 Micheline Maurel, the French literature teacher, had a near escape. After eighteen months at Neubrandenburg, Micheline’s health had collapsed and she was admitted to the subcamp’s small
Revier
, suffering from high fever and suppurating sores. She was pleased to be out of the snow, and soon made friends inside the little sickbay.

In the next bed a young Polish patient called Irenka was recovering from typhoid fever, which had left her paralysed in one leg. Also here was a group of young Russians who wandered from bunk to bunk exchanging recipes then broke into spasms of coughing and spat blood into jars. A Red Army prisoner doctor teased Micheline about her ‘
capitalist toes
’ (they’d been pinched by high heels). And even though they didn’t understand French, everyone listened to Micheline’s poems, written on scraps of paper provided by the friendly Blockova, an old hand of such long standing that she carried a number in the 3000s.

Towards the middle of January Micheline saw the Neubrandenburg chief guard enter the
Revier
followed by the prisoner doctor and the Blockova. ‘She pointed at the sick women saying, “This one, this one, that one.” She looked at me covered with sores and turned away in disgust, but she pointed at Irenka’s bunk and said, “That one,” then she left.’

The Blockova explained to those chosen that they’d be sent to a convalescent camp. ‘You won’t have to work any more.’ A covered truck came that night. ‘The little tubercular Russians, the lame Irenka and quite a number of others were loaded up. The tarpaulin was fastened and the truck departed, skidding a little in the snow.’ Afterwards the Blockova sat on Micheline’s bed and began to cry. ‘Irenka. Poor Irenka.’ Micheline asked why she was sad, as Irenka was going to a better place, to which the Blockova looked at Micheline ‘hopelessly, without replying’.

Back at the main camp attempts were also made by the SS to disguise what was about to happen.
According to Carmen Mory
, Treite sent for her and told her that her block, the TB block, were all to be sent to a convalescent home, but Mory already knew it was a lie, and that 1000 names were down for the
Himmelfahrt
transport yet, including women who were fit to work, as well as TB patients, epileptics, women with syphilis and other diseases, many of them ‘anything but incurable’.

With this intelligence, Carmen went to talk to Treite again. ‘
I asked him if
it was true that this transport was heading for the gas chambers of Auschwitz. Treite told me I was mad. There were no gas chambers in Auschwitz, he said.’

At about the same time, Germaine Tillion, the French ethnologist, secretly observed Dr Treite as he personally selected an infant for death. Germaine was lying in the infectious diseases ward, still recovering from diphtheria,
when to her surprise Treite came in. The SS rarely entered the ward for fear of infection, but Treite showed no fear and went over to a cot where a two-year-old Jewish child lay. The boy – a Dane, presumably separated from his parents – had arrived with the recent transport; one of Zdenka’s helpers had been caring for him. Treite picked the child up gently to examine him. Believing he was unobserved, Treite ‘
showed affection
to the child and even gave the little boy an apple’, but next day the boy was gone, and Germaine later learned that Treite had written his name, that very day, on the list for Auschwitz.