Ravensbruck

by Sarah Helm

  Hanna Sturm came up with a plan. Some weeks after her release from the bunker she had been sent to work in the SS supplies cellar, where asocial Kapos were in charge. Prisoners in the cellar were often accused of theft. Hanna proposed framing one of the asocial gang leaders there. She and a group of others set about stealing cigarettes and alcohol from the supplies and planted the loot on a prominent green-triangle block leader. They made sure Langefeld got to hear of it.

  The plot worked better than they’d hoped. Furious at the betrayal of trust by her asocial Kapos, Langefeld removed almost all of them from their jobs and threw Margot Kaiser into the Strafblock. By late spring it was the political prisoners who held most of the influential camp posts, and a communist called Babette Widmann replaced Kaiser, securing the top prisoner post of Lagerälteste. No thought was given to the fate of those ousted; the communists were too busy helping their own.

  Barbara Reimann, a young communist from Hamburg, had been arrested in 1940 for writing letters to German soldiers at the front, urging them not to fight. She arrived at the camp just after the communist prisoners seized power and found many comrades ready to help her. Minna Rupp, now Blockova of the newcomers’ barracks, signalled to the new Lagerälteste that Barbara had arrived, and through Langefeld it was fixed to move her to the political block. Here older German women, some of whom she had once known as mothers of school friends, took her under their wing.

  Not surprisingly, the newly empowered communists were determined not to see their influence undermined. When in August word spread that Grete Buber-Neumann had arrived and was telling lies about Stalin, a decision was taken to condemn her as a Trotskyist. The communist women said later that the SS brought Grete out before them one morning like a trophy, saying: ‘You want to know how bad a concentration camp can be? Ask her about Stalin’s camps.’ According to Maria Wiedmaier it was Olga Benario who proposed that Grete be blackballed, and the communist committee agreed.

  Grete’s daughter, however, doubts that Olga was the one who blackballed her mother. The two women had met briefly in the Hotel Lux in Moscow in the 1930s. ‘My mother only ever expressed admiration for Olga,’ says Judith Buber Agassi, sitting in a blaze of sunshine in her villa on the Israeli coast. Judith nevertheless makes clear that her mother was always bitter about her treatment by the rest of the communist clique.

  For my mother it was the worst thing. She saw the communists as bigots. Anyone who was not a communist was of less value, even in the camp. If someone was in the camp because she was a prostitute, or a Jehovah’s Witness or a Jew it was all the same. The communist women were a narrow-minded bunch. My mother couldn’t stomach it. After the war they made out that they had helped the Jews in the camp. But of course that was not possible. They couldn’t help.

  It was not entirely true that the non-Jewish political prisoners were unable to help the Jews. Through Langefeld and those in her inner circle, the new political Kapos gleaned intelligence that they could pass on to the Jewish women. Maria Wiedmaier continued to smuggle Olga’s letters out, so she could write to Carlos and Leocadia more freely than through the camp mail. Furthermore, the Jews themselves clearly believed the new red-triangle Kapos could help them, which was why not only Olga but other Jewish leaders in Block 11 supported the political prisoners’ grab for power.

  Käthe Leichter had delighted the Jewish block with her poems and story-telling from the moment she arrived in the autumn of 1939, and had since made a name for herself in the camp. A social democrat, Käthe was not privy to the communists’ intelligence, but she had her own contacts, and in April she heard that an old friend from Vienna, another social democrat called Rosa Jochmann, was being brought to the camp. Käthe arranged to meet her as soon as she arrived. She told her that she, Rosa, was to be a Blockova.

  Rosa recalled later: ‘We weren’t allowed to talk with Jewish people, but of course we did. On my first day Käthe and I walked all over the camp and she told me what I was going to do and gave me my instructions.’ Käthe was sure that Rosa was cut out for a Blockova job, because she knew her strength of character of old.

  That Rosa Jochmann should have joined Käthe Leichter in Ravensbrück was in itself extraordinary. The two women knew each other on the Vienna workers council in the late 1920s, battling to improve the conditions of women at work. Their backgrounds were very different. Rosa, born in 1901, the daughter of a washerwoman and a steelworker, started work in a factory at the age of fourteen. By her twenties she was active in Austrian trade union politics, and became head of the Socialist Women of Austria, a social-democratic body.

  Four years Rosa’s junior, Käthe Leichter, born in Vienna in 1905, came from a prosperous, cultured Jewish family, but rejected her bourgeois roots and went to Heidelberg in Germany to study sociology under the philosopher Max Weber. When the First World War broke out Käthe organised pacifist protests and was sent back to Austria; when the Nazis came to power her doctorate was annulled.

  As women’s rights rose up the agenda of Austrian liberals, both women were at the forefront of the campaign, though Rosa, who believed in industrial action, did not always see eye to eye with Käthe, who called for negotiation and tried to tell the working classes what to do. Nevertheless, the two became friends and worked together until Austria’s new fascist leaders banned their activities. In early 1938, by which time Hitler’s annexation of Austria (the Anschluss) looked inevitable, both women were active in the anti-fascist resistance and were at risk of arrest; neither took her chance to escape.

  Käthe Leichter’s husband Otto, editor of an anti-fascist newspaper, and their two boys left for France, expecting her to follow but for reasons her family never quite understood—probably because she found it hard to desert her mother, still living in Vienna, and because she didn’t believe she’d be caught—Käthe delayed her departure. Eventually she booked her train out but was arrested the evening before she was due to leave.

  When Rosa Jochmann arrived at Ravensbrück about six months after Käthe she was astonished to see her friend there, and even more astonished by what she said. She later recalled Käthe’s briefing word for word, giving a rare insight into the desperate rationale behind the prisoners’ decisions to cooperate with the SS in the early years of the camp.

  As soon as she heard of Rosa’s arrival, Käthe negotiated her appointment as a Blockova, and this alone shows the influence that certain prisoners—even Jewish social democrats—had managed to secure. She told Rosa:

  Don’t forget that it isn’t like being on the trade union works council back home. You will be an extended arm of the SS. And you always have to agree with the SS. And if they beat somebody to death in front of you, you have to ask the person who’s being beaten: Why did you do such a thing? And so on. At the same time you have to do what you can to try to prevent the guard from giving a report. And as block leader you must stand in the corner and shout at everyone during roll call: ‘Attention. Everyone look towards the guard.’

  Käthe told Rosa it often happened that a guard would beckon somebody out of line with their stick, perhaps because she hadn’t sewn something on right, or for some other irrelevant cause. ‘And she beats the woman nearly to death under your eyes,’ said Käthe.

  You are standing next to the scene and you are forced to pretend to be outraged by what the prisoner has done as well, and you say: ‘Why have you done this, who do you think you are?’ And you have to pretend to be outraged as well. But you have to try to take the guard to one side and say to the guard: ‘Frau Aufseherin, I cannot understand this, she is normally such a well-behaved person.’ And you say, so don’t give her a report. I will put her on lavatory duty. Or make her carry the food for two months. You must always agree with the SS. Always.

  Käthe’s brutal pragmatism about the position of the Jews shocked Rosa most of all. At the end of her speech Käthe turned to her and said: ‘Rosa, and if the SS want you to say, “Stinking Jewish women,” what are you going to do?’

  I sai
d: ‘No I will not say that, Käthe. You can do what you want but I’m not going to say that.’

  And Käthe said: ‘Then you can’t become a leader of the block. You will be unable to do it. You have to say it.’

  So Käthe gave me my instructions. She said: ‘You cannot contradict the SS. They are all stupid, evil and cruel. But you might just be able to help if you cooperate with them a little by being diplomatic and agreeing with them.’ And that was the truth. Käthe Leichter was right.

  Käthe’s conviction that cooperating with the SS was the only way to survive may have reflected her faith in negotiation, as well as her experience of the ‘celebrities’ work gang in the camp. The celebrities gang—so called because they had princesses and prima donnas amongst them—were at one point suddenly left to do as they pleased. Clara Rupp (no relation to Minna), the German communist and teacher, was one of the ‘celebrities’, and recalled in a memoir:

  Prisoners liked nothing more than to fool the guards, break the rules. Some groups were so good at it that they almost didn’t care about the SS at all. It once happened that a prisoner smuggled a wonderful azalea branch out of the nursery into the political prisoners’ block. The theft was discovered because the commandant’s fresh flowers were not delivered that day. But the theft was so well organised that the smugglers were not discovered, which gave them great happiness.

  Such tricks, she says, were far easier to get away with later on, when the camp numbers grew so vast that the SS reign of terror became more erratic, more diffuse. Like many women imprisoned there from start to finish, Clara looked back on the first years as the most terrifying, simply because the SS control reached into every corner: every individual ‘lived in imminent danger’.

  And yet, says Clara, back in 1940 one group of women briefly found freedom. They were building a new road to the camp when they were suddenly told to down tools because building materials had run out. As there was no work—and no chance of escape—no guard was assigned to watch them. A friendly green-triangle Kapo was left in charge, recalled Clara.

  So the Jewish prisoner Käthe Leichter starts to talk to the green triangle. And Käthe tells the woman the war will soon be over and that Hitler is finished and the Kapo—a good-natured woman arrested for carrying out abortions—believed her. Soon we were leading the green triangles and not the other way around. This turn of events was mostly due to Käthe from Vienna. She was the most prominent member of the group and developed the most particular abilities in this matter. She was very good at arranging things. Since she was Jewish she wasn’t allowed to have newspapers, but as I had friends in high places I got newspapers for her. When Käthe gets her newspaper she forgets the danger and flips it open, studies, and even forgets who and where she is.

  Another prisoner, a German called Elisabeth Kunesch, supported Clara’s report about the road-building gang. She was there from the start and remembers the gang to this day, in particular a woman called Käthe. ‘Käthe was Jewish and very intelligent and very kind. She used to sing to us as we heaved the stones and made us forget the pain.’

  According to Clara there was a real princess on the celebrities gang too; she had been denounced by her cook for saying bad things about Hitler and was very musical. ‘If you asked her she would hum any part of the orchestra.’

  There was another university doctor, Maria, ‘a walking encyclopaedia’ who taught Clara English history for an hour every evening:

  She herself was an original character: tall, with a lot of brown spots, often with lice, quite a big belly. She used to wrap herself in anything possible as protection against the cold, but usually lost it all again. Many stupid people made fun of her but the clever ones were her friends. I loved the way she longed for open skies, meadows and forests.

  There was Anni from Prague, once secretary to Tomáš Masaryk, president of Czechoslovakia between the wars. ‘She always knew the best rumours in the camp.’ Even when there was work to do the celebrities marched out singing. ‘If the Princess is in a particularly good mood she sings the “Rose” aria from Figaro.’ The friendly green-triangle Kapo gave out the tasks ‘with a wink from our side’. Then the women talked philosophy or literature.

  Every day there was discussion in some corner of our road which was under construction indefinitely. Once nearly all of us were in a trench laying stones, and as we had already sung Mozart, Beethoven and Bruckner, Maria began a lecture about Romanticism and we were so absorbed that we hadn’t noticed a guard coming from the laundry. I stepped on Maria’s foot and she started scolding me till she saw the expression on our faces. The guard chose to take it out on me and yelled ‘I will teach you how to work, just you wait,’ and I was put to work in the laundry, brushing dirty sheets and coal sacks.

  The celebrities talked of returning home soon, or they’d talk of Marx and about the dispute in the Jewish block between the communists and the social democrats. They would hear how Käthe argued with Olga about whether capitalism contained the seeds of its own destruction.

  Some say Hitler’s power has been underestimated. Sometimes we move out to work even though it’s raining because we’re in the middle of a topic that has to be finished. Ours was the best work gang of all; we worked for ourselves and not for the Nazis. Käthe was our real gang leader. She was always lively and gentle. She tells us one day she has a plan to fit a motor on her barrow. We laugh with all our heart. She shows us the letters from her two lovely boys.

  Kathy Leichter, Käthe’s granddaughter, and daughter of one of the lovely boys, says that even today the family still ask themselves why Käthe didn’t leave Austria when she had the chance. ‘She could have got out to safety with the others,’ says Kathy, a film maker, who lives on New York’s Upper East Side. ‘Most women didn’t think they were in danger. But Käthe knew. So as you trace her story you want to shout at her all the time: Get on that train. Go on, get on it. Why were you not leaving, for God’s sake? Leave, Käthe! But she doesn’t.’

  I asked what she thought Käthe was like. ‘She looked a little like me,’ said Kathy, who has long black curls tumbling around her shoulders and big dark eyes.

  But she was bigger. She was quite a manly woman. And like me, she was a woman with a job, juggling care of the children. She studied childcare and the rights of home workers and she talked to seamstresses and asked what their problems were. She had been trying to make a better world, especially for women, and in Ravensbrück too she tried to carry on. And she was cultured. She knew every painting in the Louvre. But she is also hard to know. I am searching always for her voice. It was blocked. I just get occasional glimpses. Through others’ memories, or her poems. Or the play.

  Thanks to Käthe, the celebrities knew all about the play. ‘Only the Jewish block could organise something like that,’ said Clara. The play was called Schumm Schumm and an entire script was written down, but it was fake, so as to seem harmless, in case the play was discovered. Käthe, along with another Austrian Jew, a lawyer called Herta Breuer, devised the real script; the words had to be learned by heart and spoken only on the day. The story was of a Jewish couple and their daughter who were released from a concentration camp. They were sent into exile on an island where Jewish features were seen as divine and Jews were treated as royalty. There were several allusions to the camp: the Jewish mother passed out on arrival and nothing would revive her until ‘Appell, Appell’ was whispered in her ear.

  Preparations for the play caused excitement, and many non-Jewish women helped the Jewish dramatists, particularly with the costumes, which ‘were made with love and care out of nothing,’ Clara remembered—from bits and pieces ‘organised’—filched—by other prisoners. The women had dresses made of lavender-blue headscarves brought in by Czech prisoners ‘and organised for us by friends,’ said Clara. Jewels and ornaments were made from silver and gold paper, also organised by friendly prisoners, as was the paper for the men’s tailcoats. The island savages wore sand couch-grass skirts; Gypsies in the matting workshop s
muggled the grass out.

  The play was staged in the Jewish block on a Sunday afternoon. Amongst those in the audience were many Blockovas and Stubovas from other barracks, and because they came, ordinary prisoners came too.

  The next day disaster struck. In Block 2, a separate group of prisoners were caught dancing, and when the guards reported them they complained that the Jewish block had staged a play so why shouldn’t they dance?

  At first it looked as if the entire Jewish block would be punished, along with everyone who attended, but ‘negotiations’ were carried out, and only those who took part in the production were punished. Clara doesn’t tell us who the prisoners were, but they were obviously all from the Jewish block, and must have included the creators, Käthe Leichter and Herta Breuer, as well as Olga Benario, the Jewish Blockova.

  There was nothing their non-Jewish comrades could do to help them now, whatever Kapo positions they held. The six were offered a choice of punishment: twenty-five lashes or six weeks in the bunker. They chose the bunker and all six were crammed into one small cell. They had food only every fourth day. The women were ‘deeply troubled on release’, said Clara. ‘One told us: “Being so hungry, I couldn’t stand hearing anyone chewing. The one who had something left while the others had already finished their food was hated most. Because they went on chewing.” They warned the rest of us to avoid the bunker at any cost. They were in a very bad way.’

  * * *

  *1 Neumann was Grete’s second husband. He was Jewish, as was her first husband Rafel Buber, the son of the Jewish religious philosopher Martin Buber. Grete’s sister Babette also married a Jew. ‘Maybe the fact that they both married Jews was some sort of protest against their father,’ says Judith Buber Agassi, Grete’s daughter. ‘Their narrow-minded father [the director of a Potsdam brewery] did not like the Jews.’