The Women who Wrote the War

by Nancy Cladwell Sorel

  After lunch came the dancing. All around them were sounds of the harmonica, accordion, or mandolin, Avery reported. A Russian major grabbed her and whirled her into the circle. “At first I thought etiquette would compel me to try the leaping and boot-slapping step that seemed customary,” she said, “but my partner compromised on a rather elaborate form of ballroom dancing.” In a moment Coyne and Virginia Irwin were dancing too, while Russian women soldiers and nurses cheered. Lee Miller ran up to photograph the event, and someone had a news-reel camera going (the footage was included in the movie “The Last Days of Hitler,” with Alec Guinness, providing a rare immortality for that day in their lives.)

  “It was a day of laughter,” Coyne said in concluding her story:

  American soldiers laughed when they danced Russian and hillbilly dances. They laughed when they crossed the river in the frail craft, they laughed as they skirted mines on our side of the Elbe ... and they laughed almost tearfully when they met half-starved Americans escaped from prisoner of war camps like Pfc. Frank Bartz, machine gunner with the Seventh Armored Division captured in the December breakthrough, as he crawled into my jeep. Bartz struggled to keep back his tears when he asked between laughter and sobs: ‘Say, is this war over or has everybody just gone crazy?’ “

  30

  The Month of April: The Gamps

  The day was fast approaching, all the women were aware, when the Allies would liberate one or another of the concentration camps known to be scattered about Germany, and going in to report what they found would be that day’s job. Buchenwald, on a wooded hill outside Weimar, was the first. It was freed by the Eightieth Division of the U.S. Third Army on April 10, 1945. Reporters at the Air Power Press Camp in Frankfurt were flown there at once.

  Who among the women had not dreaded what she would see, worried how she would bear up under it, wondered from what inner resource she would find the strength to write her story? In the end, as they discovered, it was their professionalism that carried them through — that and the realization that it was up to them to record for posterity what had happened, against any denial in times to come. They had no choice but to take in the smell — stench was a more accurate term — and the sight of living men and boys who were all eyes and bones and gaping mouths, who looked and talked, walked or crawled or lay in the barracks, four or five to a bunk, too weak to raise their heads in greeting. Perhaps a little wave of the hand, a tiny smile. These were men multiplied by thousands: 20,000 at Buchenwald, not including the 6,000 who had died the previous month alone. Battlefield dead had become a familiar sight to women reporters, but to move about among 20,000 living dead, that was new to their experience.

  Sigrid Schultz, Helen Kirkpatrick, and Marguerite Higgins went in that first day. From her post as Berlin bureau chief for the Chicago Tribune, Schultz had been among the first to warn the world of the existence of the camps; nothing at Buchenwald was likely to surprise her. In fact, she had a private mission: Paris academicians of her acquaintance had begged her to try to locate certain promising young students who had been arrested and taken right out of school to slave labor camps. She had a long list of names. Ascertaining who in the camp were French, she selected a young man and showed him her list. He was amazed at being spoken to in French. “I think I knew two of them,” he said. “They will not be coming home.” When Schultz asked what had been his work in the camp, he replied, “Madame, j’ai ete un cheval.” He described nearby stone quarries where inmates had daily loaded huge stones onto a special contraption which they were then ordered to pull to one work site or another. “When a man fell because his back was broken by the weight and effort, he was shot.... When we suffered internal injuries, we tried to hide them. Somehow I survived, but so far I have not been able to find any of my French fellow-horses.”

  This same young man suggested that it might do a lot of good for those in the “so-called hospital” to hear in their own language that they were free, and perhaps if she had the courage, she could do that. Sigrid followed him to “where men were dying on three-tiered bunks, with blood and everything else dripping from tier to tier.” Walking down the line of bunks, she delivered her message in French, assuring the men again and again that they were free, and that help was on its way. “One of the pitiful bearded creatures raised himself a little and stuck out a groping hand, which I took,” she recalled. “ ‘C’est vrai, qu’on est libre?’ he whispered. I talked about the chestnuts that were in bloom in Paris, and of the planes that were being readied to take prisoners home with all the semblance of optimism I could muster. I was rewarded by a wonderfully peaceful smile as he let go of my hand and sank back on his bunk.”

  Maggie Higgins, with her fluent French, might have performed a similar function, but she did not. Her celebrated lack of sensitivity was never more obvious than in the skepticism with which she entered Buchenwald. Like many in the U.S. military, she seems to have doubted, not the existence of the camps, but that they were as bad as rumored. Determined not to be handed, or to hand on, an “atrocity line” she could not verify, she put her emotions on hold and set out to interrogate those prisoners in condition to reply. She was after the facts: names of victims, names of guards, dates, details of mass executions. Perhaps she saw this as an angle that no one else would think of, that would set her story apart from the others. When it became abundantly clear that the deprivation, torture, and deaths were not exaggerated, she was, to her credit, deeply ashamed.

  Photographers Margaret Bourke-White and Lee Miller were present to chronicle the reactions of the citizens of Weimar to a special tour of their “neighborhood camp.” General Patton was so angry at what he had seen there, Bourke-White recalled, that he ordered a thousand civilians to attend, and the MPs, equally enraged, doubled that number. They ushered the townspeople past the heaps of dead, more than twelve hundred still unburied; Margaret said that the women fainted or wept and the men covered their faces, but Sigrid Schultz, who scolded a group of women who persisted in looking at the sky, said she didn’t see anyone faint. Maggie Higgins wrote that a few put their hands over their eyes when confronted by the sight of half-burned human bodies still in the ovens, but an officer had ordered them to look because, he said, it was they who were responsible. Lee Miller noted that, in any case, much of it had been cleared away by then. She and Margaret had photographed the horror in all its starkness.

  Perhaps to atone for her initial callousness, Marguerite Higgins gave an exhaustive accounting of what had occurred at Buchenwald. She noted that four French generals and a number of European diplomats had died there, as well as Allied fliers who had bailed out over Germany, thirty of them American. They had been hanged, she reported: the Gestapo forced the prisoners to hang their own comrades. There were also children at Buchenwald. Maggie asked a boy of eight, in charge of his three-year-old brother, why he was there. “I am Jewish,” he replied. When she enquired about his parents, he said with no sign of emotion, “All the older people were burned up.” She found Jewish boys, now sixteen, who had been there since they were eight or nine.

  Higgins also reported the memorial service held one evening for the dead. The prison band, in grim remembrance, played the same tune they had played twice each day under the Nazis. Each man stood by the flag of his homeland, fifteen flags in all, including the prewar German flag for the anti-Nazi inmates of that country. A large American flag was draped on the platform, and behind it a wreath to commemorate the dead with the inscription: “Buchenwald Concentration Camp — Fifty-One Thousand.” After brief tributes and the playing of taps, the once prisoners, led by the children, filed silently away.

  Twelve days after the camp’s liberation, Helen Kirkpatrick was able to report that the thousands of skeletons there were returning slowly to life under the care of the 120th Evacuation Hospital, assisted by inmate doctors. The death rate was down from a hundred per day to thirty. Most men were suffering from starvation and dehydration, she said, but there were also cases of tuberculosis and typh
us. Helen ran across a German Jew who had been a professor in Geneva when she was there; he recognized her, but had to tell her who he was. “It was pretty awful,” she recalled.

  Janet Flanner waited almost three weeks before going to Buchenwald. It was quieter by then, and she knew from reports what to expect. Her guide, a gentle young Jewish inmate from Prague, took her from building to building, pointing out the crematorium and gallows as well as the primroses growing in abundance. She had not expected still to see corpses, but a dozen had been discovered in some forgotten nook only that morning, and were lying in a heap, stiff and naked, their mouths open as if they were hungry. She and her guide sat down on the steps. Neither of them spoke.

  Correspondents visited the newly liberated camps wherever they could reach them. At Lager Dora outside Nordhausen in central Germany, Iris Carpenter, accompanying the Seventh Corps of the First Army, found starving men and women lying two and three to a bunk, living and dead together. V-1 rockets had been made there, and hundreds of corpses were piled against the factory walls which, if bombed, might have buried them. But that had not happened, Carpenter wrote, so General Collins selected a peaceful green hillside for the burial site. When the burgomaster objected that the field was private property, he was informed that there was no more private property as such in that part of Germany. The general ordered the leading citizens of Nordhausen, appropriately attired, to bury the dead with their own hands. Iris described how American soldiers stood guard while black-coated men dug twenty-four long graves in regulation army pattern, wrapped the bodies in makeshift shrouds and, having been refused the use of army trucks, bore them on planks of wood or old doors or whatever could be found to the open graves. There were 2,017 dead. When all were interred, prayers were said, the graves were filled in, and the surface raked fine and sowed with grass seed. Not until then were the townspeople released.

  Ann Stringer also went to Nordhausen. It was a raw experience to go in just after the troops, she said; there was little to distinguish the living from the dead. You really had to grit your teeth to put what you’d seen into words, to set it down on the page.

  “The spring wind ruffled a white flag of surrender, nothing else moved.” That was Lee Carson’s first impression of the Erla work camp near Leipzig when she and Don Whitehead, Margaret Bourke-White, and Bill Walton arrived there on the afternoon of April 23. The work camp was not their planned destination, Bourke-White said; they had been looking for an aircraft small-parts factory in the suburb of Erla. Driving along a narrow country road with plowed fields on either side, they began to smell a strange odor unlike any they had smelled before. Across a small meadow they saw a high barbed-wire fence, which at first seemed to surround nothing but a flagpole with a white flag at the top. A soldier with them opened the locked gates with a hand grenade, and they found themselves standing at the edge of a carpet of bones. Along the barbed wire barrier were charred human figures in postures indicating they had been trying to escape. Scattered among the bones were nails from the building, dozens of little graniteware bowls, and a scattering of spoons. The ground was still warm, and the smell was overpowering.

  “We stood frozen with horror,” Carson reported. Walton recalled walking about with Bourke-White, both of them sobbing. Then he quietly threw up. Margaret got out her camera, but Walton could not bring himself to take notes. After a while, from across the field, they saw a skeletal figure in prison uniform coming toward them, and within a short time, perhaps seeing the American jeeps, others emerged. “They fell into each other’s arms,” Margaret said, “while standing up to their ankles in bones.”

  Charred human remains at the Erla work camp, Germany,April 1945.

  MARGARET BOURKE-WHITE/LIFE ,MAGAZINE. © TIMIE INC.

  Their story was simple. There had been about three hundred fifty prisoners, workers in the aircraft factory. Advised that American troops would arrive soon, the SS guards worked out a plan. They carried a large vat of soup into a wooden barracks to entice the prisoners inside, locked the doors, secured the windows, poured on some inflammable substance, and set the barracks alight. A few men, human torches, fought their way out somehow; it was they who were caught, charred but still recognizable as human, on the barbed wire. About eighteen — those now returning — were outside the enclosure, and escaped the grim fate of their fellows.

  Sigrid Schultz also went to Erla and reported additional details to the Chicago Tribune. The irony was that no one had known the camp was there. Had those correspondents not been out looking for the small-parts factory that afternoon, perhaps no one would ever have seen, or reported, or exposed that particular footnote of inhumanity.

  In fact, no one had been aware there were so many camps. At Landsberg, near the Austrian border, Eleanor Packard watched as inhabitants of nearby villages were brought to view the bodies of about five hundred males, most of them Jewish, all used as slave labor until they got sick and were declared not worth wasting food on. “Most were naked,” she wrote. “Their gaunt skeleton frameworks looked more like gruesome waxworks from a horror museum than human beings.” Another six hundred were still alive, if barely, while a detachment of four thousand had been moved back behind German lines. But with the Russians closing in, there wasn’t much space behind German lines anymore.

  Virginia Irwin, traveling with Third Army troops, stole a visit up a winding wagon trail to Hitler’s great “abortion camp” high in the Neideraula Staatsforst. To this clump of flimsy wooden structures enclosed in barbed wire were sent pregnant Russian and Polish women who, as slaves, were not permitted to have children. They came and went, Irwin discovered, to undergo “operations” that were less often abortions than induced deliveries in which the baby always died. Each woman had already signed a paper giving permission for her baby to be killed. The death rate for the mothers was estimated at sixty percent.

  Irwin visited the delivery room. Pine planks set on two-by-fours and covered with filthy oilcloth served as the delivery table; recovery took place on a metal cot covered with coarse straw-filled ticking. Instruments “of dark ages crudity” were arranged in rows on open shelves. Hands were washed and utensils “sterilized” in a couple of dishpans into which was poured water and a little disinfectant — “when disinfectant is available,” she was told. The induced delivery of women in the later months of pregnancy had been described to her, Virginia said, but was “too barbaric for print.”

  In the “recuperation wards,” the odor of infection lay heavy, and the pall of death was almost perceptible. Downhill from the camp, surrounded by pines, was the graveyard, “probably the most unpretentious in all of Europe,” Irwin wrote. The mothers that died were buried with a number. The babies were tossed into any open grave.

  Janet Flanner did not go to Ravensbrück; lying as it did in the marshes north of Berlin, it was liberated late, and fell into the Russian zone. But a young member of the French bourgeois resistance movement was in a group of three hundred Frenchwomen exchanged for four hundred German women early that April, and agreed to talk with her about it. Colette (not her real name) shrank from revealing too much, for fear of reprisals against the thirty thousand women still there, but she said quite a lot, which appeared in Genet’s “Letter from Paris” for April 25.

  Colette had been arrested in May 1943 at age twenty-five. Friends described her as a “big-boned, attractive, still adolescent looking brunette, individualistic, healthy, strong-willed.” When Flanner met her nearly two years later, her torso seemed all shoulder bones. Her mind was clear, but starvation had resulted in loss of memory, which embarrassed her. She talked mostly about the other women, and answered only some of Janet’s questions about the camp itself. Colette told her that Ravensbrück was made up of twenty-five buildings, each supposed to house up to five hundred women, but housing twelve hundred while she was there. There was one bunk for every four women, so they slept on their side, head to foot to head to foot. Between thirty and fifty died every day, but the same number of replacements
always seemed to arrive. A corpse would be carried by her bunkmates to the washroom and piled on the cold tile floor; some women had the job of disposing of them further, but Colette worked elsewhere.

  Wake-up call was between two and two-thirty, after which came morning count, lasting two hours. You had to stand without moving or talking, even should the person beside you faint or fall dead. When Colette first arrived, there was a breakfast of ersatz coffee and a bit of black bread, but later this was omitted. The workday began: some women dug drainage ditches in the sandy marshes; others sorted uniforms taken off dead or captured Russians, which were always full of lice and probably typhus and cholera as well. Colette worked in the Siemens electric factory two miles away. At first the women working at Siemens marched there each morning, back to camp for the midday meal, once more to the factory, and back again in the evening. There was no supper. When the women trained for the factory began to die too fast, a unit was set up nearer the camp to conserve their energy.

  Since she could not eat at night, Colette told Janet, she washed herself, which helped to keep her going. Her will, and later her hate, worked in her favor as well. Punishment for possessing a piece of jewelry, or a prayer book, came in the form of a beating on the bare buttocks with a heavy stick. The top number was twenty-five strokes. Some women died outright; others developed septicemia from unhealed flesh wounds. As at all the camps, Ravensbrück was run by SS men; there were German women under the SS, and Polish women under the German. Colette’s mother mailed her a parcel every day, but in a year only ten reached her. They were usually consumed by various persons in charge.