by Sarah Helm
At one point Doris asks: ‘Are the parents relaxing as they should? I imagine roses blooming there and every day something else to harvest in the garden,’ but by the next letter she has learned that her mother and father are ‘crossing the Channel’ and she hoped for news.
‘As for me, I’m fine,’ wrote Doris to her sister, and it is almost tempting to believe her, because she went on: ‘I wear my hair long and neatly knotted and I’m noticeably blossoming inside and out’—though what she meant by ‘blossoming’ is impossible to say. We know from her later testimony that by late June temperatures in the Sandgrube were soaring and the women Doris was treating had burned skin, sores and boils. Worrying the prisoners even more were the terrifying screams now coming from the Strafblock. The prisoners had recently discovered that Olga was being held in one of the stifling wooden cells. Doris wrote in a letter home: ‘My darlings, it’s so hot.’
—
It was Ilse Gostynski who first discovered that Olga was in solitary confinement. Ilse had the job of emptying the cell buckets, and managed to pass a few words with Olga, whom she had got to know at Lichtenburg and whose story had made a deep impression. Ilse remembered Olga as ‘a young woman from Munich, very beautiful, very intelligent. In Ravensbrück, she was treated badly, she got almost nothing to eat.’
The cells were made of thin wood, just two metres long by two metres wide, and had no ventilation. Olga had nothing except a straw mattress and a bucket. Ilse made sure that Hanna Sturm knew about Olga’s plight and Hanna managed to get together biscuits and bread for Olga, which Ilse smuggled in next time she emptied the buckets. Comrades sent messages. If Zimmer had seen her, Ilse would have been locked up too. ‘I left some sweets for her or a slip of paper with comforting words from her fellow prisoners…She was in a very bad way,’ Ilse recalled.
Not long after finding Olga, Ilse was told she was to be released, so Olga’s go-between was gone.
Perhaps the most startlingly ‘normal’ aspect of the camp was that even as the brutality increased, prisoners were regularly being freed. Ilse’s English contacts had secured her a visa. On being told she could leave, she was sent first to the Effektenkammer, where the clothes she arrived in were retrieved, along with her valuables, and then she was free to go. The same day Ilse was on a train to Berlin, and within a week or two she was on another train heading for the Hook of Holland, from where she caught a ferry across the Channel to Harwich on the Essex coast. Here she was met by communist friends, the ones who had secured the papers necessary for release.
Safely in England, Ilse told her friends about Olga Benario and urged them to reach her husband’s family in Brazil; Ilse believed her own case would give Olga’s family hope that they could secure her release too, but they had to secure a visa before war broke out. A few months after arrival in England, Ilse, as a German, was declared an enemy alien and sent to an internment camp on the Isle of Man.
After the war was over Ilse married and had a daughter, Marlene. She was also reunited with her twin, Else, who had sat out the war in hiding in Norway. Over time the sisters found out that their parents had died in Auschwitz and that many friends had shared the same fate. In 1951 Ilse tried to write down her story, describing briefly her years at Moringen, Lichtenburg and Ravensbrück. Dissatisfied by her inability to describe ‘the endless fear and suffering’, she wrote a postscript apologising to readers: ‘Rereading my report I feel sorry that I don’t seem to have been able to depict the real tragedy of the concentration camp.’
According to her daughter, Marlene, after writing her report, Ilse never spoke of the camp again. ‘She suffered from the particular pain and guilt of those who had been lucky enough to get out before the worst began.’ Sitting in a north London café, Marlene, an artist, held up a picture she had painted showing Ilse and Else as bourgeois German girls with muslin frocks ‘before they rebelled and went off camping in the woods to read Marx’, says Marlene.
In another picture, called Bars, Marlene shows her mother in her last days, lying asleep in bed. ‘She has become beautiful again in old age,’ says Marlene’s inscription. ‘She is cared for like a baby and never speaks or smiles. I see the shadow of her imprisonment falling across the end of her life, unfinished business. In another place or time the shadow could have fallen on me or my child. Would I know how to be brave?’
—
After Ilse left for England, the number of arrivals began to rise. Among the newcomers was a Czech journalist called Jozka Jaburkova, arrested in Prague the day after the Germans invaded, 16 March 1939. As soon as the Czech capital fell, all resistance was rooted out, intellectuals were targeted and newspapers shut down, including The Soweress, a communist feminist magazine, which Jozka edited.
On arrival at the camp Jozka was suffering terrible headaches, having been badly beaten about the head under interrogation, but she soon found communist comrades to take care of her. Her arrival boosted morale in the political block, where her name was already known. For her part Jozka was delighted to find Olga Benario was here in the camp; she had worked on Olga’s release campaign.
Hanna invited Jozka into the Tolstoy reading group, and Jozka entertained them not only with her predictions of the coming communist revolution but also with her fairy stories; she had once published a collection of fairy tales, called Eva in Wonderland.
On 28 June came the biggest convoy of new prisoners since the camp opened two months earlier. In the middle of the night 450 Gypsy women, from Burgenland in Austria, were marched through the gates, many shivering in nightgowns, some chained together, and others pregnant or carrying children. Most had long black plaits and all seemed to be screaming and crying.
With full-scale war now imminent, Hitler opened a new front in the racial war, ordering the roundup of 3000 Austrian Sinti and Roma, most of whom had lived in Burgenland for generations. Women and men were dragged from their beds, and hauled away with no warning, then the sexes were separated. A fifteen-year-old teenager called Bella was still in her nightgown as she was driven away; ‘my pregnant mother ran down behind the car, screaming to stop’. Most of the women were herded together, first in a village hall at Pinkafeld, where local thugs, posing as police, were waiting for them as well as German SS. Many were raped ‘by the village SS’, as they called Hitler’s local stooges. Lorries took the women to a prison near Graz. Before they left, a police commander accompanying the convoy offered Bella a sandwich. ‘He said, “Here, take it,” but I said, “No I won’t eat.” He said, “Yes you will. I know how hunger hurts,” so I took it.’
At Feldbach prison in Graz, there were guards with police dogs. The women gathered here had been snatched from countless Burgenland villages and all talked of the same terror. Gisela Sarkozi was captured with her sister: ‘They came in the middle of the night, everywhere, the SS, and the village mayor came too; he was a Hitler “high up”. They knocked down the doors and just took people out. They didn’t let us dress.’ Gisela was taken to the town of Oberwart where her mother brought her clothes; from there she was taken on to Graz.
Theresia Pfeifer and her sister, Anna, were chased from their house, then tied up and put in fetters after some tried to escape. They were put in cattle wagons and sent off on a train for two days and two nights. The men had been sent to Dachau, the women to Ravensbrück. When the train stopped at Fürstenberg it was pitch-black and nobody had any idea where they were. The SS were standing around with dogs.
‘We had to line up in pairs and we were led to the bath. First we had to strip naked in front of the SS. Everyone was weeping and crying out. People said you have to be silent or you’ll be shot.’ Theresia’s plaits were cut off, her body hair shaved. She was given a black felt triangle and told to sew it on to her striped prison dress. Several screaming women were taken to the Strafblock, where Zimmer dealt with them. Others were put in blocks, and marched out next morning to the Sandgrube with the rest.
—
By July everyone in Germany knew the i
nvasion of Poland was coming. Ethnic Germans living in Poland poured back into Germany and Goebbels’s propaganda war against the Poles intensified as camp guards whipped up hatred against ‘filthy Slavs’. The women guards also talked of husbands, brothers and sons called up to serve at the front. Even Pastor Märker, the Fürstenberg priest, had volunteered to serve.*3
As if the camp itself was on a war footing, military top brass regularly inspected, putting Langefeld on her mettle. After she had kept the entire camp on parade for several hours during a Luftwaffe inspection, an officer was heard to ask: ‘Where is the commandant? I hear no commanding voice,’ to which Langefeld replied that she had no need to shout.
Ahead of the war, security tightened across the camp in case of ‘mutiny’. The Strafblock filled up and all around the Appellplatz women stood, hour after hour, barefoot, facing the wall as ‘standing punishment’ for ‘crimes’.
In the political block it was hard for the communist group to talk, as Koegel’s spies were all around. Jozka Jaburkova was betrayed by a spy one day after dropping her rag down a lavatory, which caused the sewage system to block up. Hated for her ‘arrogant face’, Jozka was always given the filthiest jobs. Now she too was made to stand for many hours, face to the wall.
Then on 18 July word got out that Olga Benario’s cell was empty; she had been taken from the camp under Gestapo escort. Her comrades in the Tolstoy reading group believed that she must have been taken to Berlin for reinterrogation by Hitler’s secret police. The fact that she had been picked out in the run-up to war demonstrated just how much the fascists still feared the communist resistance, they told themselves, and how high a price they still placed on Olga’s head. More recent evidence points to a different explanation: she probably left the camp in July 1939 not for further questioning but because the Gestapo had agreed to release her.
The evidence that Olga was about to be released comes in part from a surviving Gestapo report on the circumstances of her leaving Ravensbrück, including a curiously detailed description of what she was wearing: ‘A multicoloured dress with red belt, black three-quarter-length coat, beige-coloured sneakers, pale socks and she carried a yellow handbag.’ Clearly, before departure she had been taken to the Effektenkammer and dressed in civilian clothes; the only prisoners who left Ravensbrück in civilian clothes in 1939 were those about to be set free.
Anita Benario Prestes, Olga’s daughter, who lives today in Brazil, a teacher at the University of Rio de Janeiro, has further proof that her mother was about to be freed. Anita was of course too young to understand the negotiations for Olga’s release, but her grandmother, Leocadia, and her aunt, Ligia, told her later what happened. They also gave Anita their correspondence with the Gestapo, as well as every letter written to them, and to Carlos, by her mother.
While Carlos Prestes had remained incarcerated in a Brazilian jail, Leocadia and Ligia had continued their campaign to get Olga out of Ravensbrück. At first they had little hope, said Anita, but they were encouraged by a letter received from Ilse Gostynski in England, persuading them to keep trying. So in June 1939, the Prestes women wrote again to the German authorities, pleading on Olga’s behalf. Soon afterwards they received a reply from the German-Jewish emigration office, saying the Gestapo was willing to free Olga ‘on the sole condition that she emigrate immediately overseas’. The letter even helpfully suggested that they should apply ‘as soon as possible to Mexico’ for Olga’s visa.
Leocadia travelled to Mexico, and after some delay she secured the visa and other official Mexican documents and posted them on to Germany, sending them via New York, as was necessary at the time. ‘She was hopeful that my mother would be released but she knew that time was very short. Once war broke out it would be impossible for Olga to reach us,’ said Anita. She stayed on in Mexico to await confirmation that the visa had reached Berlin, but by 25 August no confirmation had come through. ‘By now she was in despair,’ said Anita. ‘And so was my mother.’
Anita knows of her mother’s feelings from Olga’s numerous letters to Leocadia and to Carlos in which her desperation to be reunited with the child taken from her Berlin cell in 1937 is painfully clear. As if trying to mother Anita from afar, she inquires about every detail of her health and care, issuing instructions to Leocadia that Anita be exposed to the sun, have her hair cut short and wear plain clothes. ‘She must not think herself special.’ And Olga worried that Anita would not be able to learn her Brazilian family’s language. ‘In the prison I could at least have spoken French to her. You see I know the children’s language only in my mother tongue—and then again I guess my old optimism is to blame that made me hope we would not be separated at all.’*4
By mid-August 1939, a month after leaving Ravensbrück, Olga was still waiting in her temporary Berlin prison for confirmation that the documents required for her emigration had arrived. She was allowed to read the Nazi newspaper the Völkischer Beobachter, and knew war was imminent. Once hostilities broke out there would be no chance of leaving Germany.
‘Don’t be angry with me but I feel the deepest pessimism,’ she wrote to Leocadia on 15 August. In her next letter she seemed to lose the will to write at all: ‘Look, I was angry at first about this short sheet of paper but now I find I have nothing else to write. Kiss my beloved child a thousand times for me.’
—
As Olga waited in Berlin, her comrades back in Ravensbrück were facing new terrors. A short time after Olga had left the camp, Hanna Sturm and her reading group were caught red-handed reciting Tolstoy. Sent to Koegel for punishment, Hanna saw the spy who had betrayed them standing next to him, so she spat at her, at which Koegel hit Hanna across the face, promising to ‘teach her some discipline’. The next thing she knew, Hanna was locked in a dark, bare wooden cell, just as Olga had been.
Hanna Sturm was as well equipped as any woman to survive these solitary cells. Born into a poor Burgenland farming family, of minority Czech roots, she had been sent to work in the fields at eight, and was banging nails into fences well before she learned to read. As a young woman she was drawn to ‘red Vienna’, and during Austria’s turmoil of the 1930s she joined a trade union and helped fight anti-fascist battles, frequently ending up behind bars. She’d been imprisoned in Lichtenburg’s dungeons too. But Hanna had never seen a cell like this, and when she wrote her story later, her memories of this first cell block were as vivid as anything that happened to her since. Hanna Sturm’s account is also invaluable, as only two prisoners left testimony of Ravensbrück’s first wooden cell block, which by the end of 1939 had been knocked down, and evidence that it had even existed, destroyed.
Apart from the few cracks in the wall, Hanna’s cell was completely dark. It was like ‘a small box’, she recalled, two metres in length and two wide. As she had been sentenced to ‘aggravated arrest’, Hanna had no bed, no mattress and nothing but the floor to sit on. A proper meal was provided once a week, on a Thursday. On all other days the only food was 100 grams of bread and a bowl of so-called coffee.
When Hanna was first locked up she closed her eyes to try and get used to the darkness. When she wanted to go to the lavatory she had to feel her way along the wall towards the bucket provided. But although it was impossible to see anything, Hanna could hear a great deal.
It wasn’t long before Hanna heard screaming and shouting in the yard outside. Peering through a chink in the wall she saw the screaming was coming from a Gypsy, demented with terror, who was being dragged inside the Strafblock opposite. Then came the sounds of beating and Zimmer shouting: ‘Wait till I get you into the straitjacket, you’ll shut up, you bitch.’ Hanna recognised another familiar voice: that of Margot Kaiser, a German prisoner who worked as Zimmer’s helper and was much hated throughout the camp. Kaiser went off to get the straitjacket. The screams suddenly stopped and Hanna could hear only whimpering and then nothing. Zimmer seemed to forget about the Gypsy until several hours later, when shouting began again and it became clear that she’d been found dead in
another cell.
Hanna heard Zimmer say: ‘She’s lying here dead like a dog.’ Zimmer yelled an order to Kaiser and others to help her. Hanna heard no more, but other prisoners saw the Gypsy’s body being dragged out of the Strafblock compound by the hair and pulled into the laundry room, her body covered in blood and pine needles.
The prisoners learned later that the Gypsy had been driven wild because her six-week-old baby had been torn out of her arms. The woman was breast-feeding, and her breasts had grown swollen and hard, which added to her pain. Nobody knew the Gypsy’s name and there is no official record of her death. She may have been the first prisoner to be murdered in Ravensbrück, although according to the camp records, another Gypsy from the Burgenland transport, Amalie Pfeiffer, fifty years old, was the first prisoner to die in the camp.
Amalie’s death was carefully recorded and even certified by a doctor, and the certificate survives. It says that on 24 August 1939 Amalie Pfeiffer, born Karoly, on 5 July 1890 (Gypsy), resident of Neustift an der Lafnitz (Austria), died at 4 p.m. in Ravensbrück women’s concentration camp. Cause of death: ‘suicide by stab wounds to the left cervical artery’.
After the Gypsy death, the cell block fell quieter. Hanna found ways of improving her cell. Zimmer hadn’t searched her thoroughly, and as always she had something useful concealed in her clothes, this time scissors. So thin were the walls that she managed to loosen planks, and soon found she could whisper to the women next door. One neighbour was called Lene who told Hanna she was a Jehovah’s Witness. Then Zimmer heard the voices and yelled: ‘Quiet, you monkeys.’
After a time Hanna heard peals of mad laughter from the cell on the other side. ‘This is what a lunatic asylum must be like,’ she thought, but then she noticed the ‘mad’ woman laughed every time she heard Zimmer’s voice. Listening to the gossip of the guards, Hanna discovered that the woman was Hedwig Apfel and she was a musician, perhaps an opera singer. Apfel was Jewish and her family had paid a fortune to the Nazis in an attempt to secure her release. Hanna knew also of an American in the cell block, who ‘prayed all the time very loudly, using unintelligible words’—presumably English. The ‘American’ may have been Olga’s fellow conspirator, Sabo, who had lived many years in Canada and was locked in the cell block in the summer. Every time Sabo prayed, she set off Hedwig Apfel’s hysterical laughter.
