If This Is a Woman: Inside Ravensbruck: Hitler's Concentration Camp for Women (82 page)

He told me he’d been my father’s valet in the First World War and that my father was good to him. He said: ‘So you come with me and I’ll see you’re all right.’ I could have gone, as nobody was really watching. But I thought we were only going to a labour camp and I’d be strong enough for that. I believed in my own strength. It was a hard decision, but I was worried about my mother; I didn’t want anything to happen to her if I did something wrong.

After her father’s valet had loaded her bag with quinces, Eva walked on.

Several days later the marchers reached the Danube and walked down planks to ferry boats. ‘People lost their footing and fell off the plank. We saw the drowned corpses in the water but I kept on going and didn’t fall.’ Somewhere near Vienna the marchers were put in trains, locked in closed wagons, and the trains continued west. ‘A guard asked if anyone spoke German and I quickly said yes, so I was made his interpreter and sat on a ledge where I could see out. I knew how to navigate by the sun, so I told the others the direction we were going.’

When the train pulled up at Jena, south-west of Leipzig, the men were taken out and sent to Buchenwald, but the women stayed on. ‘We passed a medieval castle and I thought I must bring my parents here after the war.’ About two days later the train pulled up at
a tiny station
called Ravensbrück. ‘I’d heard of Auschwitz, Dachau and Mauthausen, but not Ravensbrück.’

After the departure of Eva’s convoy from Budapest the final phase of the forced marches out of Hungary accelerated. The weather worsened, and of the many thousands of women marched towards Ravensbrück at least a third are thought to have perished. An envoy of the International Red Cross, sent to observe the exodus, was overwhelmed: ‘The idea of standing by helplessly, powerless to do anything, is almost impossible to bear,’ he wrote in his report to Geneva.

Deportations from other eastern countries that bordered the Reich accelerated too. Hitler was taking his last opportunity to clean out camps and ghettos ahead of the Russian advance. These Jews were still being deported in trains that criss-crossed what remained of Nazi-occupied lands, often
stopping for days in sidings, as lines were bombed or communications broke down.
On one of the trains
was nineteen-year-old Basia Zajączkowska, who had survived the Kielce ghetto, in central Poland, because she worked in a gunpowder factory. As the Soviets approached, the workers were sent to Auschwitz. Basia escaped into the woods but was caught and sent to Ravensbrück instead, because by that time Auschwitz was beginning to shut down.

On 2 November 1944 Himmler halted the gassing at Auschwitz, but in the chaos some trains continued to turn up, including one from Slovakia whose passengers arrived in abject terror having received a graphic account of what to expect – two Slovakian men who had just escaped from Auschwitz and made their way back home told them about the gas chambers just before their transport left. On arrival at Auschwitz, one of the Slovakian women even asked an SS man where the gas chambers were. He replied: ‘They aren’t working any more. You are not to be gassed.’

The Slovakians were put on another train, which arrived on 10 November at Ravensbrück, where they once again expected to be gassed. The women were herded towards the Ravensbrück tent but they refused to go inside. ‘
Entering the tent
the women were convinced they were entering a gas chamber,’ said Halina Wasilewska, the tent Stubova. ‘Many of them asked the tent personnel to tell them the truth – when could they expect to be gassed? – and they didn’t really believe it when they were assured that there were no gas chambers at Ravensbrück at all. Although at that time there really were no gas chambers at Ravensbrück.’

With the arrival of thousands of Jewish women in the late autumn of 1944, Ravensbrück was once again swamped; squalor and disease spread on an unimaginable scale. First all new arrivals were herded into the tent, where neither straw nor blankets were any longer provided, so women who had marched in the snow now slept on cold wet cement blocks. Most of those who marched from Budapest had contracted pneumonia, gangrene and frostbite on the road. Many had the symptoms of
typhus
too, and were suffering from high fever, vomiting and diarrhoea.

The buckets overflowed. The canvas structure stank. Mothers tried to feed children, as well as feeding themselves. Amid this horror typhus broke out on a scale not seen here before. The SS sought desperately to control the killer disease by vaccinating not only SS staff but key prisoners – nurses and office staff, some of whom were too weak to endure vaccination, and caught typhus instead and died. A new rule was instituted that thirty patients from the tent could visit the
Revier
each day, but it was too few, and the rest were just sent
back to die. Dead bodies mingled with the living and could not be easily extracted. Then when the corpse gang came to the tent they refused to take bodies because they didn’t have numbers. Many in the tent were admitted without them, and died before the numbers were given out.

According to Halina, a new phenomenon specific to the tent broke out – ‘feverish conversations of agitated people, complaining, fights over sleeping space, moans and screams of the sick, shouting back and forth in the crowd creating a constant deafening din, non-stop day and night’. Yet the tent ‘block’ nevertheless still had to stand for
Appell
like all the others. Those who couldn’t stand were laid out to be counted on their backs in rows of ten.

After they had been in the tent a few days the first Hungarians to arrive were moved out to blocks; the healthier among them went to munition factories at subcamps. Straight away a new group of 1000 Poles (Aryans this time, noted Halina) came in from Auschwitz and refilled the tent. What made matters worse was that more and more sick women were returning from satellite camps. And not only were Ravensbrück subcamps sending their sick women back; more distant ones that had long ago been placed under the administration of men’s camps such as Buchenwald were returning their sick (and pregnant) too. These camps had for many months been sending their exhausted women workers to Auschwitz, but this was no longer an option.

Closer at hand, Siemens too was sending more and more unsuitable women back to the main camp. Its few surviving monthly reports detailing prisoner turnover show a remarkable upturn in 1944. In October the company sent fifty unsuitables back to the main camp from the finishing shop alone. This compared with an average of three returned from the same small section eighteen months earlier.

Women rejected by Siemens went straight to the
Revier
blocks or joined others working outside in the labour gangs. Betsie ten Boom, sent back in October, worked levelling ground for a few more weeks before being admitted to the
Revier
, where she died in early December. Corrie saw her sister’s naked body on a mattress: ‘
a carving
in old ivory, I could see the outline of the teeth through the skin’. Then she caught sight of Betsie’s body again, stacked up with other corpses against the
Revier
washroom wall, ‘her eyes closed as if in sleep, the deep hollows of hunger and disease, simply gone. Even her hair was graciously in place, as if an angel had ministered to it.’

For the Siemens managers, replacing exhausted women was harder than ever, but young Jewish women were now pouring into the camp, some still agile and strong enough to work. Siemens had employed Jewish women at its Berlin factories at the start of the war, before the mass deportations, and valued their skills, so when Basia Zajączkowska, the Kielce ghetto
survivor, appeared on the ‘cattle market’ they were swiftly put to work making electrical parts.

Throughout November and December more Jewish women continued to arrive from the East; most had to fight for their lives in the tent. A teenager called Sarah Mittelmann entered it to find ‘
women all around
me having fits and beating each other. There was no room for anyone even to stretch out.’ A new transport of Polish Jews arrived talking Yiddish, which the Hungarian Jews didn’t understand. Selma Okrent, another young Hungarian, remembered the smell in the tent. As she stood in line for soup someone said: ‘
If you don’t behave
, you’ll smell like that as well.’

They took away my clothes and broke my earrings to get them out. I was given a red triangle and the number 79706 and told to watch out for green triangles, as they were thieves. I was made to work pulling stones and sometimes we had to schlepp out the dead. I had a skirt and was playing with the hem when I felt something in it and it was somebody’s wedding ring.

Selma and Sarah got out on to good labour gangs by making sure the
Meister
chose them first. This was what Eva Fejer did almost as soon as she arrived. The man from Daimler-Benz snapped her up. ‘He asked who spoke German and I said I did, so he said, “Yes, you’ll do,” and I became his translator at the factory in Berlin.’ Before Eva left Ravensbrück she spotted her best friend arriving on the next transport from Budapest and shouted to her: ‘“Martha, whatever you do, get out of here as soon as you can,” but she didn’t believe me and died.’

Rosza and Marianne Nagy also managed to ‘get out’ to a munitions plant near Chemnitz, but at the last minute their mother Margit, who had been with them ever since Budapest, was made to stay behind. ‘
We were put
in the back of a truck and driven away, and that was when we saw her for the last time.’

It used to be the new arrivals who stared in disbelief at the ravaged women in the camp. Now it was the other way around. Loulou Le Porz saw a group of new Hungarians. ‘One ran up to me pleading: “
Bitte Schwester, bitte Schwester
.” I could see from her face she was going to die and I ran away because I couldn’t tell her.’

Describing this period, survivors talk of seeing groups of newcomers, usually Jews, just wandering – perhaps detached from their transport – lost, around the camp. One day Nelly Langholm saw such a group on her way back from the kitchen, where she had gone to get water for women in the
fabric shop. Since the typhus outbreak the kitchen had been the only source of safe water.

I’d filled the jug
and was walking back when I saw this group of women – they were Hungarian perhaps or Polish. They were in a dreadful state and had obviously just been brought in from somewhere, and probably hadn’t drunk or eaten for days. They saw my water jug and swarmed all over me, so that most of it spilt and they fell on the ground to let some drops just touch their lips. I stood back and watched them.

As I turned to go I saw a woman on the ground and stared at her. She was giving birth to a child, right there, and I watched. I was only twenty, and had never seen a woman giving birth, and she was giving birth there in the filth of the camp street.

Nelly didn’t see the group again and doesn’t know where they went. ‘But the baby didn’t go anywhere. The baby died right there. Of that I’m sure.’

It was about this time that Violette Lecoq came across a group of Jewish women as she went to the
Revier
to collect index cards.

I saw in the yard
five wheelbarrows that were normally used to cart manure; each one contained one woman. They were Jews who had dropped from exhaustion in the road on their way from work at Siemens and who’d been beaten to the brink of death by the
Aufseherinnen
in charge of them. Their comrades had been forced to pick them up and take them back to the camp. The
Oberschwester
forbade anyone to touch them. Two of them were dead when I saw them, the others were on the point of death.

In December the snows began to fall, and a group of women arrived clad only in straw. The prisoners in the camp stared at the straw women; they were frightened by them, and tried to keep away. Even Percival Treite was struck by the vision of women dressed in straw, saying later that the condition of these 1300 new arrivals was the worst he’d ever seen. These were mostly Hungarian Jews who had been deported earlier in the year, and taken first to Auschwitz and from there to a subcamp called Frankfurt Walldorf, in west Germany, to work in atrocious conditions building an airport. When the American forces approached Frankfurt in November 1944 the camp was shut down and the exhausted women brought to Ravensbrück.

One of those who observed the ‘straw women’ closely was Julia Barry, who described what she saw in evidence given at the Hamburg war crimes trial. She was on patrol near the gate when she first saw them. ‘
The women arrived
dressed only in straw which was tied about their bodies.’ Julia observed the
women many times. ‘They were constantly dying about the camp. These women I have seen drop down in the camp and die.’ She also noticed that the women were regularly set upon by two German prisoners – not guards – and she took the trouble to investigate. One, it turned out, was a Pole called Anita.

She was aged about twenty-six, tall, a lesbian dressed like a man, and had her hair cut accordingly. The other prisoner was a German girl called Gerda. She was fat, aged about twenty-two, about five feet three inches tall, and looked very common. Both women were savagely brutal to the Jewish arrivals and beat them without mercy with sticks and anything else that came handy on numerous occasions.

Unlike other prisoners, Julia Barry – herself a Hungarian Jew – rather than fearing these new arrivals, reached out to them. ‘I met a Hungarian lady named Mrs Sebestyn. On her arrival her legs were in a terrible condition owing to her experiences in the wintry conditions on leaving Hungary.’ Mrs Sebestyn was ordered out to work, ‘and protested that she was unable to go’. Nevertheless she had to go, ‘and later lost both her feet and died in the hospital’.

Julia Barry’s evidence was always unusually detailed and frank, partly because as a policewoman she was able to observe a great deal that went on, and also because, unlike other camp policewomen, she was more than willing to describe what she saw, which in the last months of 1944 was death. Julia felt sure that the events she witnessed at that time were ‘definitely designed to bring about death’. For example, in the hospital blocks the SS doctors ‘put in one bed a patient with a foot injury and another with TB or typhus or other contagious disease, with the inevitable result that two deaths from the contagious disease would occur’.