If This Is a Woman: Inside Ravensbruck: Hitler's Concentration Camp for Women (90 page)

Sometimes mothers and daughters were murdered together. Gisela recalled one invalid mother in the
Revier
with her seventeen-year-old daughter, who was deaf and could not communicate. Vera gave both of them the powder. The mother died quite fast. The daughter lasted forty-eight hours and was given another dose. Still she lived on. Salvequart then gave her a
lethal jab direct into the heart, saying, within Gisela’s earshot: ‘This one gets on my nerves.’

Another of Vera’s ‘favourites’ was a French prisoner called Irène Ottelard. Irène was so disabled that when selected for the Youth Camp in early February she was pulled through the muddy wood track on a cart with sixteen other sick prisoners. ‘
It took a long time
to get there,’ she told the Hamburg court, ‘because the road was very bad and it was raining and very cold.’ On arrival, Irène was put in an ordinary block where ‘most inmates had dysentery so could not move at all and were just going to die. They were left there without being attended to in the slightest way.’

Irène was transferred to the
Revier
with some thirty other prisoners. She slept in a bed with her friend Madame Gabianuit and recalled the
Revier
had a washroom ‘with a nice china basin’. But when she entered the washroom she saw three or four women lying there on the floor. ‘They were quite naked and were moaning and groaning. I think they were Polish. I could only hear “water” but that was all.’ Later Irène heard that Salvequart had injected the women. ‘I saw her walk to the washroom with a syringe. I saw her give out some sort of white powder.’

Irène testified at Hamburg that Salvequart would tell women they needed the white powder to regain their strength, as they were going ‘on a convoy’. ‘The great majority who took it slept and snored, and by about three or four o’clock in the morning they were dead. Even my friend Madame Gabianuit took the white powder and I saw her dead at my side.’ Irène’s friend Madame Ridondelli suffered very badly from dysentery and was told if she dirtied her bed once more she would be given an injection. She could not help soiling the bed another time. ‘Later I heard her calling out, “Irène they’ve killed me,” and I never saw this lady again.’

Many other prisoners, particularly those working as Kapos, runners or clerks, saw Dr Vera killing. Lotte Sonntag, the Austrian camp runner, said Salvequart told her that fifty lethal injections were given each day. She then showed Lotte the powder. When word spread that the white powder meant death, Salvequart found new ways to entice prisoners to take the poison. A former Auschwitz prisoner, Gerda Backasch, described an unknown woman staff member giving her a slice of bread with butter and honey one morning. Amazed, Gerda offered half to a friend. At that moment Salvequart, who was outside the block, knocked on the window and warned Gerda not to eat it, as it was poisonous.

The corpse commando woman, Jozefa Majkowska-Kruszynska, went to take away bodies from the
Revier
one day and found the corpse of her sisterin-law, Stanisława Pozlotko. Jozefa discovered that Stanisława had been fed the bread and honey that contained the white powder.

After that I paid
attention and ate no bread prepared by others. I also warned my suffering fellow prisoners. Not all of them wanted to believe me. One day we were offered bread and honey, and twelve of the 120 block inmates with me refused to eat it, and only the twelve survived. The others were all poisoned and died.

When Vera established that we had survived she brought us bread, honey and margarine in their original packaging. She said this was extra rations for the heavy work that we did. I was extremely hungry, especially looking at the food that lay before me. Finally I cut myself a sliver of bread and spread margarine and honey over it. My comrades did the same. Soon afterwards I was sick. I had a fever and my body started shaking. Two of my female comrades who had also eaten the bread had red foam coming from their mouths. The watching prisoners suggested that I drink my own urine. I overcame my aversion and did. After that I repeated this therapy and my stomach was soon quite empty. Someone gave me three cups of milk to drink. My friends who ate the bread died that night.

As the poisoning continued, selections for gassing mounted and Mary O’Shaughnessy started to live in constant fear of Neudeck’s cane. Given her artificial arm and her pink card, she was convinced she’d soon be selected. After about two weeks, however, it was Cicely Lefort’s number that came up. Clearly her name had appeared on the day’s ‘Mittwerda list’.

‘We were standing that day at
Appell
when two SS men guards came up with a list. Neudeck was present. She spoke to the SS man and he called Cicely out. In Cicely’s case there was no reason for the selection. She had no pink card and no particular disability. Her physical appearance was better than many.’

Like many other prisoners at the Youth Camp, Mary O’Shaughnessy had understood by now that the lists were drafted largely at random. Neudeck would pick people herself, because she felt like it.

When the selections began the prisoners didn’t know where the lorries went, but they did hear talk. Guards and Kapos told each other: ‘She won’t feel it soon,’ or ‘She won’t need a blanket where she’s going.’ The Dutch woman Stijntje Tol was walking to the latrine ditch one night when she met a Yugoslav prisoner who worked in the gymnasium. ‘She told me: “Tonight, about 500 were taken.” We spoke in German and I asked where these 500 had gone and she said: “
Zur Himmelfahrt
[On the heaven trip].”’ It wasn’t long, however – and certainly well before Cicely Lefort was selected – before everyone knew that heaven was the gas chamber, because the whole camp was talking about it, including the guards.

During German investigations held in the 1960s and 1970s, these same guards either denied all knowledge, or stuck to the Mittwerda cover to explain their ignorance, or resorted to other lies. At his Hamburg trial, Josef Bertl, the truck driver, said he ‘wasn’t interested’ in what happened to the Youth Camp prisoners and ‘didn’t ask’.

Ruth Neudeck, however, identified Bertl as the driver, saying he was ordered by Schwarzhuber to have a daily lorry ready for Uckermark, ‘and every day he drove into the camp at 6 p.m.’. Bertl must have known that the transports were going to the gas chamber, said Neudeck, because of what Schwarzhuber told him. ‘I heard Schwarzhuber speaking to him one day, saying: “Bertl, you do know about this gassing, this evening again.”’

Neudeck described what happened from her point of view when the truck arrived at the Youth Camp. ‘At first I stood down below to count the prisoners, so that there were not too few or too many. It did actually happen that a daughter wanted to travel with her mother or vice versa.’ Neudeck said that she, Rapp and Koehler usually had to beat the women to get them onto the truck. ‘Rapp and his friend also often stayed at the back of the truck, so that no prisoners would jump off.’

The truck then drove off towards the main camp, carrying the prisoners, Neudeck and other women guards, and Rapp and Koehler. It turned left towards the crematorium and gas chamber, always halting fifty metres short of the destination. Rapp was friendly with Alfred Cott, the man who ran the crematorium, and he and Cott usually fetched two women each from the truck and led them into the building. Neudeck and her fellow female guards stayed with the truck until the last prisoners had been unloaded. On one of the early trips, she said, Rapp told her what happened next.

‘I had been at Uckermark three or four days before Rapp told me that the women we were selecting were gassed in the Ravensbrück crematorium. Rapp told me that when on account of the small number of victims [selected on a particular day] it did not pay to gas them, the women were simply shot in the crematorium.’ On those occasions, said Neudeck, ‘I myself and the other guards could hear the shooting. On the whole, however, most of the prisoners were killed by gassing.’

In her usual candid manner, Neudeck told the court that Mittwerda was ‘an invention of Schwarzhuber, so that the prisoners would not know that they were to be gassed’. She could not tell the court what happened inside the gas chamber because she wasn’t allowed to get close, which seems to have angered her. But Schwarzhuber himself gave an unusually detailed description in a statement at the trial. Although he minimised numbers his testimony was broadly correct. He said:

The gas chamber itself was about 9 metres by 4.5 and could contain about 150 people. It was about five metres from the crematorium. The prisoners had to get undressed in a shelter situated three metres from the gas chamber, from where they were led into the chamber via a small room. I was present at a gassing. They pushed 150 women at one time into the gas chamber. Hauptscharführer Moll ordered them to get undressed and told them that we were going to treat them for lice. One prisoner carried a gas mask and went on top of the roof and threw a box of gas down through the opening, which he closed very quickly. I heard the moaning and the crying. After about two to three minutes there was silence in the room. I didn’t know if the women were dead or stunned. I wasn’t there when they opened the doors.

Chapter 34

Hiding

O
nce things at the Uckermark Youth Camp were running smoothly, the SS made little effort to prevent news of the horror reaching the main camp. Runners came and went between Ravensbrück and the Youth Camp, passing messages and carrying lists of the dead or of those selected for extermination. Bloodied clothes from the mass shootings piled up all the time at the
Effektenkammer
. The Jehovah’s Witnesses, always willing to run errands, acquired a stash of cod liver oil and delivered it to the
Revier
at Uckermark. They returned with stories of white powder and poisoning.

The SS required Blockovas at the Youth Camp to pass on the numbers counted at each
Appell
to the main camp secretaries, who then matched the figures with their own records. By the middle of February, with selections increasing, as many as 1500 women had already been gassed. ‘
When we checked
up on the death figures we realised with disgust what was going on there,’ said Hermine Salvini, the Austrian prisoner now in charge of collating camp numbers. Prisoners in the slum blocks, which backed up against the interior wall on the south side of the main camp, could hear the trucks pull up outside the crematorium, which was just the other side. At first the prisoners wondered why the engines were left running for so long, then someone said it was to cover the screams from the gas chamber.

The bunker, just over the wall from the crematorium, was by now often engulfed in stinking smoke that billowed into the cells. A prisoner cleaning the bunker told Geneviève de Gaulle one day that the bodies had been packed too tightly in one of the ovens and the chimney had caught fire. Walter Schenk, the crematorium boss – a fire brigade man before the war – gave a further
explanation for the blaze. In order to burn the ever-increasing pile of bodies the temperature had been turned up, and as a result, on the night of 25 February the crematorium roof was set alight.

Schenk said it was impossible to say how many were burned at this time because he was responsible solely for burning the bodies during the day and these were not those who were gassed. ‘
The bodies of the gassed
were burnt at night. They were burnt by the Auschwitz gang. I had to requisition the coke for burning. In February 1945 the consumption went up.’

The plan to hide what was going on from the Siemens women by moving their barracks out to the plant had failed as well. The women enjoyed their clean new accommodation: food at the Siemens kitchen was better, the plant had its own doctor and sickbay, and everyone was delighted that they didn’t have to march to and fro each day. However, as the plant was perched on a hill, it was bound to give prisoners a view of what happened below. Without even leaving the plant, everyone could hear the noise of trucks moving back and forth along muddy tracks. And those who cared to peer through the trees – leafless in winter – could see the little wooden watchtowers of the Youth Camp in the distance, and watch the trucks, loaded with half-naked women, heading towards the gas chamber.

Just before reaching the base of the Siemens hill the trucks swung round towards the main camp walls to stop outside the gas chamber and the crematorium, which were only about 300 yards away. ‘
I often stood and counted
the vehicles loaded with bodies; they went one after the other, always following the same route,’ recalled the Austrian-Czech Anni Vavak. ‘We told the guards in the Siemens camp, who were concealing these facts from the civilian workers, and their hair stood on end with fear.’

Yvonne Useldinger, a Luxembourger, who started work at Siemens in January 1945, kept a diary. On 29 February she noted: ‘
Extermination transport
to Uckermark went by our camp. The sun shone warmly.’ Siemens women were also picking up news of selections from their contacts in the main camp, where prisoners were better informed by the day. The Polish woman Irena Dragan even volunteered to run an errand to the Youth Camp in order to see for herself.

Irena was a Polish student from Warsaw. After four years at Ravensbrück, including sessions in the bunker, she was ‘campwise’ and hard to shock. The wearer of a 7000 number, she had what she called ‘honorary
Verfüg
’ status, which meant she could play truant from the casual work roll-call almost without anyone caring, particularly during the chaotic final months of the war.

‘Sometimes I pretended to be a night-shift worker,’ she recalled. ‘I didn’t care about anything because I thought I was bound to die.’

One day in early March 1945 as Irena was sitting in her block, a Kapo came and asked for volunteers to go with a cart to fetch blankets from the Youth Camp. Irena stuck up her hand. A walk through the woods brought her to the gates, and the first thing she saw was a group of women standing in front of the blocks. ‘They were shivering with cold and there were mounds of blankets lying next to them on the ground that had been taken away three weeks earlier. They were not allowed to touch them, and slept without any blankets.’