If This Is a Woman: Inside Ravensbruck: Hitler's Concentration Camp for Women (77 page)

Under interrogation after the war, Fritz Suhren denied there were any British women at all in Ravensbrück. It was one of his many blatant lies: he knew that by September 1944 the camp held at least twenty British prisoners, or women who were British by marriage. And not only had
die Engländerin
, Mary Lindell, caught his attention, so had a woman called Odette Sansom, whom he believed to be related to Winston Churchill.

Odette Sansom, who was French by birth and married to an Englishman, was another SOE agent. When she was captured in southern France in 1942, Odette was in bed with her SOE circuit organiser, Peter Churchill, a very distant relative of the British prime minister. Hoping it might help her, Odette told her German captors that she was ‘Mrs Churchill’. Her deception afforded her little protection at first, but on arrival in Ravensbrück in July 1944, Suhren questioned her about her family connections. ‘
I told him
that “my husband” was a distant relative of the prime minister, but I could see he thought I was a nearer relation than that,’ she said. Suhren put Odette in one of the ‘privileged’ bunker cells, with a bed, blankets and SS canteen food. He also visited her regularly to check that all was well.

To be British in Ravensbrück in 1944 was certainly unusual, but it was not unheard-of. The numbers were small because the British Isles were not occupied. Mass deportation never happened. Nevertheless, several hundred British men and women did find themselves in Hitler’s camps. Those we know most about were captured while working with the resistance in occupied countries on the continent, either for British intelligence or guerrilla cells such as those organised by SOE.

Less well known are the hundreds of ordinary British men and women who simply happened to be on the continent when war broke out and were then captured. Many British women – nurses, nuns, governesses – were captured in France, Belgium and the Netherlands, where they were living and working, perhaps married to a Frenchman. Those captured and sent to Ravensbrück had often helped a local underground cell and had been rounded up like any other resister.

The stories of the SOE women taken to Ravensbrück were investigated after the war, but most of the other British prisoners at the camp have remained largely anonymous. Hints of who some were and what became of them appear from time to time in the testimony of other survivors, in letters, or occasionally in post-war reports filed by Allied officials who investigated the camps. One such report shows that among the motley British group were a former British golfing champion called Pat Cheramy, who worked on a resistance escape line, a sixty-year-old Scottish nurse called Mary Young and the Irish-born governess Mary O’Shaughnessy, who had an artificial arm and came from Leigh in Lancashire. Two Irish nuns who hid Allied airmen in their convents were also loosely joined to the British group.

There were also women who claimed to be British, but who probably were not. One, a journalist called Ann Sheridan, with Swiss connections, was distrusted by the rest of the group for being ‘
too close to the Germans
’. On the other hand Julia Barry, the camp policewoman, whose claim to be British was also doubtful, was well liked and said by others to have been cheerful, and ‘intensely patriotic about Guernsey’.

Born Julia Brichta, her father was a Hungarian Jew and her mother American. In the 1930s she married an Englishman called Barry and went to live in the Channel Islands, where she had made several applications for a British passport, which were always refused. In 1942 she helped British intelligence by sending signals to London about German shipping movements in the Channel, for which she was arrested and sent to Ravensbrück.

Julia’s own story emerged in more detail than many others after the war, in part because she gave evidence at the Hamburg trial. As a camp policewoman she might well have faced accusations of collaboration with the SS, but Julia had made good use of her policing role to get around all parts of the camp, gathering vital information as she went. At the same time she became known to the other British women because she was the only one of the group who seems to have tried to keep an eye out for the rest. Leaders are usually easy to identify amongst other national groups in the camp, but the small number of British women seem to have been unusually disunited and diverse. Amongst them only Julia Barry seems to have displayed any ‘British solidarity’ and tried to follow what happened to them all.

For example Julia quickly heard when Pat Cheramy, the golf champion, was bitten by a guard; Pat even went to Julia ‘to show me the teeth marks’. Julia heard about a British woman called Sylvia who was beaten up so badly her face was covered in blood. And when Mary O’Shaughnessy was beaten so hard across the face that her front teeth were knocked out, Julia learned of it. She also learned that after Mary was knocked down for the first time, she stood up and was beaten down again, and smashed in the face so that her nose was broken.

As a camp policewoman, Julia Barry also saw when British women came and left the camp. She knew that the British SOE women had left for Torgau in mid-September, and on 6 October she saw Violette, Denise and Lilian come back. The three returned with the American, Virginia Lake, and a large group of French, all of whom had taken part in the Torgau protest. It was expected that they would now be punished, though nobody yet knew how.

Entering under the Ravensbrück gates was far worse the second time. The women were treated as if they ‘
already belonged here
’ and everything was eerily familiar. Even in a month things had got worse. The guards seemed more brutal, pulling hair, beating with sticks and ‘seizing our miserable little sacks that we had made of whatever we could’. The food rations were smaller and there was less bread. The morning
Appell
was much worse too. At 4 a.m. in mid-October it was far colder than it had been in early September, and the women had no coats. There was a ‘black-haired Gypsy – a witch’ who kicked and shoved them out into the cold. After a few days, some of the younger women were issued with coats while the old were left shivering with no coats at all, ‘but still we clung on to ours,’ recalled Virginia.

The Norwegian prisoner Nelly Langholm remembers meeting Violette in October, when she was sent to work with Norwegians in the fabric store. ‘
She talked of
her little daughter and was so beautiful and cheerful and full of life.’
A guard came and took Violette away, but before she left, she was ordered to remove her number and triangle, ‘which made us all very scared, as it only happened when prisoners were going to be shot,’ said Nelly.

Yvonne Baseden also saw the women when they returned in October. The three sought out Yvonne in her block, probably on the direction of Julia Barry, and they told her they were leaving for another subcamp. This would explain why Nelly saw Violette take off her number. Prisoners were always given new camp numbers when they went to subcamps. Violette, Denise and Lilian also told Yvonne something of their time at Torgau:

They said they’d taken part in a protest. They told me they’d met with POWs and given everyone’s names, which the POWs had promised to send on to London, so London would know where we were. They were pleased to be leaving to another subcamp. They’d been lucky with the first one and they hoped they’d be lucky again.

Chapter 28

Overtures

I
f anyone in London had picked up messages sent by the French POWs on behalf of the three SOE women, it would have been Vera Atkins, the SOE desk officer who helped train them and saw them off to France. But after the women disappeared, the SOE signals room in London’s Baker Street remained silent.

Soon after Paris was liberated,
Vera Atkins travelled
over to France by naval gunship, to begin the hunt for the missing. She visited French jails where once the women had been, and saw scratches on cell walls – ‘
Vive la France
’ – and calendars with dates crossed off, but no trace of where they’d gone. Only in one case was there a lead. Cicely Lefort’s husband received a note from her in the summer of 1944 giving an address: ‘Konz Lager, Ravensbrück, Fürstenberg, Mecklenburg’. Vera had heard talk of Ravensbrück, but when she asked the War Office in London what they knew of the camp, they replied: ‘Ravensbrück camp as such is comparatively unknown to us and we have no record of any British civilian internees being in Brandenburg now.’

Had War Office officials wished to learn more about Ravensbrück they need only have walked around the corner, where on 4 October 1944, in a Westminster meeting room, a group of women’s leaders were hearing a report, ‘
delivered to this country by hand
’ and listed under urgent business, on every aspect of the camp. The Liaison Committee of Women’s International Organisations, representing women lawyers, peace-makers, nurses, doctors and others, heard about the medical atrocities – ‘the pus is collected in sealed vessels’ – and about the perpetrators – ‘two professors from Berlin and a camp doctor who is a woman’. They learned about the executions and the torture:
‘Women are confined to a dark cell for 42 days and beaten with a metal rod.’

A Polish lawyer, Barbara Grabińska, presented the report but did not reveal who it was who had brought it to the country. It may have been Aka Kołodziejczak, a Polish-American prisoner released in December 1943.
Born in the United States
, Aka was with her family in Bydgoszcz, Poland, when war broke out and was arrested trying to flee. Her release was probably part of a prisoner exchange, secured through contacts of Aka’s father, before the war a businessman in Poland and the US. When she left Aka promised her comrades to tell the world about the camp, and in early autumn 1944 she passed through London on her way to the United States.

After reading the report, the Women’s Liaison Committee sent a telegram to the International Committee of the Red Cross expressing their horror at what they’d learned of Ravensbrück and calling on the ICRC to ‘give all possible protection to the women imprisoned there’. The ICRC replied that it had no access to the camp and could not intervene; its
rules forbade
it even to publicise the women’s appeal.

It was now two years since the ICRC chose to stay silent about atrocities in the Nazi camps. It was also two years since the Allied leaders had spoken out forcefully against the ‘barbarous extermination’ in the Joint Declaration of December 1942, yet those words had not been followed by action to protect the victims. The Allied response had of course been to prepare to defeat Hitler militarily, but it had taken two years to put armies back on the Continent and in that time nearly a million Jews had been gassed at Auschwitz alone and hundreds of thousands of others exterminated.

Greater knowledge of the horror had not made intervention on behalf of prisoners more likely. Throughout 1944 the evidence had become more terrible and more incontrovertible. Advancing across Poland and Ukraine, the Soviets had overrun death camps and found the gas chambers. At Majdanek they found thousands of half-burned bodies and mountains of human hair and shoes. Over the spring and summer of 1944 Adolf Eichmann began the round-up and gassing of Hungary’s Jews, which was monitored by Jewish organisations, by Swedish envoys and by the foreign press, and reports sent to Allied capitals. Editors at SWIT, the clandestine radio station, received graphic new reports about Auschwitz, but managers banned their broadcast because ‘
The information is so terrible
it won’t be believed.’ Churchill believed it, calling the extermination ‘
probably the greatest
and most horrible crime ever committed in the whole history of the world’. Jewish organisations now advocated bombing the Auschwitz gas chambers as the only way to halt the nightmare, an idea which Churchill considered but which Washington opposed on the grounds that nothing should distract from the prime objective: winning the military war.

In other European capitals, however, ideas for helping prisoners were being discussed. A few weeks after Vera Atkins had been in Paris searching for her missing agents, the vice president of the Swedish Red Cross flew into the French capital. Count Folke Bernadotte of Wisborg, grandson of King Oscar II, the last monarch to reign over both Norway and Sweden, had failed as a businessman but shown a flair for humanitarian work, most notably in successfully negotiating with the Germans for the release of captured Allied airmen.

So pleased were the Americans that Bernadotte was invited to Paris in October 1944 to meet the busiest and most powerful man on the planet, General Dwight D. Eisenhower. Just five weeks after Allied forces had liberated Paris, the atmosphere at Eisenhower’s HQ at Versailles was buzzing and full of good cheer, according to Bernadotte. Eisenhower displayed immense confidence in the gargantuan task that lay ahead as his armies prepared to take back Germany. Bernadotte observed, however, that the general’s war plans took no account of the fate of prisoners, a matter that Sweden was now actively discussing.

After visiting Eisenhower, Bernadotte went to see an old friend, Raoul Nordling, the Swedish consul in Paris, to discuss Swedish prisoner rescue plans. Nordling’s attempts to halt French deportations ahead of the liberation had been widely applauded in Paris, and he continued to take an interest in the deportees.

Whereas in Britain and the US, prisoners were still a distant concern, France had lost many thousands of its citizens to the concentration camps. In October French newspapers ran interviews with a woman released from Ravensbrück in an exchange. She said women were dying of starvation on a diet of soup and cabbage. Bodies burned day and night in a crematorium. ‘Pretty flowers are planted around the blocks to fool the world.’

French families, silenced under Nazi occupation, were now clamouring for information, and through his private network Bernard Dufournier had a breakthrough, learning in October that Denise was in Ravensbrück. A Spanish diplomat in Berlin was sending her a parcel, telling Bernard: ‘In my experience the more desired articles are a tooth brush, toothpaste, soap, chocolate, Ovaltine and condensed milk plus vitamins.’