If This Is a Woman: Inside Ravensbruck: Hitler's Concentration Camp for Women (67 page)

Prokesch told Mory how during ten days in February a lorry had come every evening and taken away seven or eight idiots; sometimes it had come twice in one evening. When Mory asked how the women died, Prokesch said she had been told that the first groups were beaten to death and then burned.
But Suhren was worried that the beating made too much noise, so the rest were killed first by injection and burned. Lists of the victims were
promptly destroyed
.

By April the French were dying faster than any other national group. Germaine Tillion would say later that the reason was simple: they couldn’t eat the food, so they lost their strength, and with it the will to live. Karolina Lanckorońska observed that there was something ‘hideous’ about the way the French suddenly started to die.

They perished without a struggle. No death throes. Often in their sleep. Increasingly often at dawn. Just before roll-call. A neighbour would come running with the news. ‘Madame X has died.’

‘When?’

‘When I don’t know. I know we were chatting together at dawn. I got up and now I’ve just found her body, already cooling.’

Chapter 23

Hanging On

I
t wasn’t until early April that the Mecklenburg sun provided any warmth, and even then it was not felt at the Neubrandenburg subcamp until late in the day. ‘We still shivered for hours in the morning in sleeveless dresses as we stood in the wind,’ recalled Micheline Maurel, ‘but it was warm and clear later. And the sky, Neubrandenburg’s one real beauty, was superb.’

The sunniest place was behind the delousing barracks. Crouching here, just where the heat of the wall met the warmth of the earth, Micheline’s friend Odette remarked: ‘Yes really, I think I’m getting used to this. I think now that maybe I could even hang on for two months if need be.’

Close by, the women found mushrooms, which they picked and crunched together with sorrel and dandelion, and ate, imagining lashings of olive oil. Russians watching on were puzzled about the French delicacy, so they rooted up the lot, and when the French went back for more there were none left – the Russians had been selling them in exchange for bread.

The talk of two more months was spread by new arrivals who said it might be as short a time as that before the Americans and British landed in France.

By the spring of 1944 prisoners were pouring into Ravensbrück in astonishing numbers. In March alone, 4052 women entered the camp – three times the rate of the previous year – raising the population to 20,406, the size of a large town. Poles rounded up ahead of the Red Army advance still comprised the largest group, and if proof were needed that the Soviets were getting nearer it came with the arrival in March of prisoners from Majdanek concentration camp, near Lublin. So close was the Red Army to Lublin that
Hitler ordered the camp to be evacuated and prisoners transported further west.

In April another big convoy arrived from Paris, 500 strong. Once again the newcomers brought hope that the British and Americans were to land any day on the continent – another ‘ball of oxygen’. Knowing that Allied armies were closing in, both to the east and the west, gave some prisoners new strength to hang on.

Micheline Maurel remembers that the kindness of a stranger helped her find strength. One evening, when the prisoners were being served soup with semolina – which, unlike the cabbage soup, she could drink – a woman came up to her and said: ‘“Micheline, I think this is a soup you can eat. Here, take mine too.” She emptied her bowl into mine and went without food that day.’ The woman knew Micheline’s name, but Micheline didn’t know hers, just that she was ‘a French prostitute – a group that kept to themselves’.

A stranger helped Denise Dufournier to ‘hang on’ too. Twice Denise had escaped selection for a subcamp, but the third time her luck ran out; she was called for the required medical inspection, which she was bound to pass. As she awaited the results at the
Revier
, a Belgian prisoner nurse whispered to her: ‘It isn’t every day that one does a kind act, but I’ll strike your name off the list. It will be the first time I’ve done such a thing.’ The nurse, not long in the camp, added: ‘But don’t say a word because it could be very serious for me.’

Denise worried about the morality of dodging her turn, as someone weaker might be sent instead. But she didn’t worry for long, and returned to join her friends, Suzanne and Christiane, shovelling sand – which suddenly didn’t seem so bad: at least they weren’t making German guns. More important, the Belgian nurse had taught Denise that there were loopholes in the system. Even in a concentration camp, it was possible to break the rules.

Women who had been there far longer than Denise observed that by the spring of 1944 it had never been easier to break the rules. Overcrowding meant that order was falling apart: there were too few guards, new conscript recruits were easier to fool, and during air raids – which happened often – the entire SS scattered in fear.

Prisoners were taking more risks. In March two more Poles escaped, this time from an outside work party. Later they sent a postcard to the commandant wishing him ‘further success in his work’.

In a letter home in early 1944 Krysia Czyż told her family of ‘changes for the better’. ‘Before you could go to the punishment block for anything – or to the bunker – but nowadays you can get away with a lot. And there are many more things that you can get on the side,’ she said, although as always there were never enough medicines for her mutilated friends. ‘Could you send Propidon for Nina’s leg.’

Despite the welcome change, Krysia had new fears. Her letters in early 1944 show her anxiety that with the advancing Soviet front all communication with Poland – legal and illegal – would soon be severed. As early as January she was thinking of new ways to keep channels open once the Red Army had reached Lublin. Perhaps Niuś, the ‘postman’, could find a replacement, she wrote on 28 January. She was sure her next letter would be her last. ‘If you can please send calcium as milk powder. For confirmation you’ve got Niuś’s address, send us toothpaste. We think about you all. I’m kissing and embracing you with all my love and saying goodbye.’

It was at the
Verfügbar
roll-call that Denise Dufournier and her Parisian friends first tried breaking the rules. With the rise in the camp population, the number of casual labourers often outstripped demand, and some days the girls could engineer things so that they had no work to do at all.

They also contrived how to shift to better work gangs. Most sought-after were the gardening and the removal gangs, but these were hard to get, and if they didn’t keep their wits about them the trio were chosen for the worst gangs, such as refuse-removal or coal-barge-unloading, whereas lice-picking and corpse-carrying were already sewn up, so they stood no chance of being picked for those. Most dreaded of all was the fuel gang, which involved entering a huge cellar piled to the ceiling with coal, climbing to the top and shovelling as avalanches fell on heads below.

The Parisians soon learned tricks to avoid the bad squads too. One ploy was to hide in the ever-longer line of the sick outside the
Revier
, or among the Siemens night workers, who were too exhausted to notice as they waited to return to their blocks to sleep. Or else the girls would wrap their heads in scarves stolen from the clothes store and stagger as if old and crippled, until the gang leaders chose stronger women.

Another trick was to hide in amongst the growing number of ‘pink cards’ – the women allowed to work in their blocks. At labour roll-call these women now had a special place to stand, and the very weak were allowed to sit on stools. According to Denise Dufournier there were even ‘sham’ pink cards who faked a disability and when selection was over ‘picked up their stools and skipped away’.

One day the Parisian
Verfüg
s were selected for the gardening squad. Armed with forks and hoes, they found themselves digging outside the house of Edmund Bräuning, Binz’s lover, and they watched his sons head off to Fürstenberg School, carrying tennis rackets and books.

The removal squad was best of all for getting around, and when they were assigned to it they didn’t let anyone dislodge them. The whole camp was on the move nowadays, with prisoners switching blocks, secretaries moving
offices, and guards transferring barracks, always to make space for new arrivals. The removal gang was therefore much in demand, moving bunks and stoves, filing cabinets and bedpans – anything and everything that could fit in their wooden handcart, which they pushed back and forth in endless journeys. Often it seemed they were pushing the same items round in circles and back again, several times a week, but at least it meant they could see new places, which they’d never dreamed existed.

At the top of the camp, they saw inside blocks 1, 2 and 3, where the privileged inmates lived ‘like the Queen of England’, as Germaine put it, with a mattress to themselves, neatly folded sheets, a pillow each, and two blue and white blankets. In the
Schreibstube
they saw the well-fed prisoner secretaries who lived in the same privileged blocks, wearing striped uniforms that looked immaculate compared with the Auschwitz cast-offs given to the ‘street urchins’. Under new rules all prisoners wearing the clothes of the dead were obliged to have a large black cross daubed on their backs, to deter more escapes.

Moving on to the camp kitchen, the removers saw gleaming machines and kitchen workers who ‘seemed to have contempt for anything but pots and pans’, but one of them, Katya, took a liking to Denise, and asked if she’d teach her French. They passed the dog kennels, which were overcrowded too, especially as the number of dog-handlers was increased – another move to stop further escapes.

Most marvellous of all was the sight of the
Bekleidungswerk
, clothing store, which Christiane dubbed the Galeries Lafayette. The store contained possessions taken from prisoners on arrival. There was everything one could wish for, said Christiane: underwear, shoes, silver, books, medicines, often of French or Polish origin, all of which could be readily ‘organised’ by prisoners working there.

The removers’ last stop was usually the main
Revier
barracks, where they would often bump into the corpse cart, just starting its round. The corpse gang first loaded bodies from the
Revier
, before moving off to the bunker and then to other blocks, collecting more bodies, which they stacked like a pile of logs outside the crematorium that lay just beyond the camp wall, beside a hill of ash.

Within weeks, the Parisian removers had observed the camp from every angle. One day they were even sent to move furniture into a new guards’ barracks, where they caught a glimpse of life for newly conscripted women. These new barracks were nothing like the well-appointed apartments offered to earlier volunteer recruits; in layout they were similar to those lived in by the prisoners, with two rows of three-tiered bunks. In one barracks the French saw bunks crammed almost as close together as theirs, and
tables littered with stale bread, half-smoked cigarettes and curling tongs.

The next time the squad were sent to the guards’ barracks their task was to move cupboards so that even more conscripts could squeeze in. This time the French girls took delight in ransacking the German women’s possessions by opening cupboards and throwing the contents – ‘common clothes and cheap perfume’ – all over the floor.

Who these German guards were is impossible to say, as most of their camp identity cards were destroyed in the last weeks of the war, but a card belonging to Elfriede Huth survived, and shows she was hired to work at Ravensbrück as a dog-handler in June 1944. Huth’s home address was Holzhauser Strasse 36, Leipzig, and – remarkably, given that Leipzig was flattened by Allied bombs – the building still stands today. Leonore Zimmermann, aged eighty-eight, comes to one of the apartment doors and remembers Elfriede Huth’s friendly smile.

‘
Oh yes, Elfriede
was a pleasant girl – not remarkable in any way – but always friendly. She was chubby with blonde-reddish hair – and she used to stop at our flat to pass the time of day on her way out to work. She always asked if we needed anything from the shops. Her father was a carpenter – but quite hard up I remember.’

Leonore says Elfriede worked as a seamstress for a Jewish fur trader before the war, then in 1942 Leipzig’s Jews were force-marched through the streets and out to the death camps at Treblinka and Auschwitz. ‘We all saw them leaving,’ says Leonore, who is sure that Elfriede would have seen them leave too. ‘We didn’t know where they were going though – but we had our suspicions.’

With the fur traders gone, Elfriede took in sewing. Her records show that her next job was as a supervisor in one of the city’s munitions factories, which employed Ravensbrück slave labour. From here she was conscripted for Ravensbrück. After a few days’ training as a dog-handler she started work.

The removal gang were not the only prisoners to scorn the conscript guards who appeared at the camp in 1944. Krysia Czyż told her family that the new guards were less and less well qualified:

A skilful gang leader can often win them over. Many complain now about the job and the food and they talk to us because they are afraid. You can’t imagine how the guards try to flatter the Polish cook so they get more food. They steal asparagus from the garden and apples from the orchard. They fight for better work gangs and the guards in the workshops steal slices of bread given at midnight to the prisoners.

Prisoners overheard the guards talking about how they’d lost their homes
in the bombing, or a father or brother or husband at the front. Guards even arrived pregnant, recalled Edith Sparmann, the prisoner hairdresser, who saw one pregnant new recruit pick out a Jewish prisoner at
Appell
and kick her senseless. Afterwards the same guard came to Edith and demanded that she do her hair.