Ravensbruck

by Sarah Helm

  And yet, despite the despair, the sight of wounded German officers coming back from the front, and the troubled faces of the SS comrades posted to replace them, reminded the prisoners that the tide might at least be turning in the East. Olga still worked on her mini-atlas. Her latest maps showed Stalin pushing the Germans back at Rostov, and at Leningrad. On one page, she had a diagram from a newspaper showing the latest position of forces around Moscow; on the back of the cutting, the death notice for a German soldier was dated 10 December 1941.

  Olga’s letters to Carlos at this time were not all pessimistic:

  Very often I cannot help laughing when I think of the surprise you will have when you see the woman I have become. But one thing I have learned here is to know the true value of everything that is human, of the heights to which the human soul can raise itself…Do you have any new picture of Anita? She will soon also be able to write to us herself.

  In the same letter, however, Olga admits that the effort of believing in a better future is now often too much for her: she finds herself building ‘castles in the air about our future together’.

  By December there was still no news about the fate of those selected by Mennecke, and nothing had been done to choose the extra 1500 prisoners needed for his lists. One reason for the inaction may have been the departure from the camp of Dr Sonntag, who was posted as doctor to the front at Leningrad. In his place came the young woman doctor Herta Oberheuser, presumably too junior for such an important role as selecting for death. But the respite did not last.

  —

  A week or so before Christmas the pretence that a camp doctor was necessary to select for the lists was abandoned and Max Koegel was told to produce the names himself. His method was to delegate: he told his Blockovas to do it.

  Koegel took the unprecedented step of gathering the Blockovas together to announce what was to happen. Rosa Jochmann described the occasion as ‘an Appell for Blockovas’. It was certainly an unusual event—perhaps unique—and it caused considerable foreboding, which quickly changed to disbelief and horror when the women understood what he was telling them to do. ‘Koegel told us,’ said Rosa, ‘that we had to point out all the women who were sick or couldn’t work, because they were going to be sent to a sanatorium. He nodded his head towards the bunker and said: “If you fail to do this you’ll end up there, and you know what that means.” ’

  Before the commandant stood about twenty women, the camp’s most privileged prisoners, almost all of them beneficiaries of the political takeover of Kapo jobs earlier in the year. They faced an impossible choice. Koegel already had their cooperation, and was evidently confident that with a little subterfuge he could win them over to select for the gas chamber too. Looking on was Johanna Langefeld, with her two trusted Lagerälteste, Bertha Teege and Luise Mauer. These two had their own instructions: they were to collect the names from the Blockovas and pass them on to Langefeld, who in turn was told by Koegel that she was in charge.

  Precisely how the Blockovas reacted we will never know; survivors among them were the only witnesses, and precisely because they were there, and played a role, they were bound to have to juggle with the truth. Some admitted to handing over names, others rejected the suggestion, and some attempted to justify handing over names on the grounds that it was better they did the selecting than the SS.

  Nanda Herbermann, the Catholic writer, and Blockova of the asocials, said she chose ten to twelve sick asocials because she believed at the time that they were truly bound for a sanatorium. Rosemarie von Luenink, a Stubova, said that she and her Blockova refused to select anyone. Minna Rupp, the Swabian communist Blockova who had tormented Grete Buber-Neumann on arrival, also denied handing any prisoners over.

  Grete did not deny selecting names—she was Blockova of the Jehovah’s Witnesses at the time—but said she did so on the basis of Koegel’s assurances. ‘An order came down to us to give names of congenital cripples, bed-wetters, amputees, mental defectives and sufferers from asthma and tuberculosis. The SS assured us that they were being transferred to a camp where the work was easier.’ Grete’s statement, however, is uncharacteristically clipped. And it is hard not to wonder why it was, if she really suspected no sinister intentions, that Grete, along with Milena, had been fighting so desperately to have Lotte Henschel taken off the original selection list.

  Lotte Henschel was one of the three German communist prisoners who in the early autumn had been promised release because of TB, but who were subsequently selected by Walter Sonntag. Lotte, whom Grete first met in ‘the Alex’, the Berlin jail, before coming to Ravensbrück, had since grown close to both her and Milena. Milena had befriended Lotte at the Revier, where the young German communist also worked, and it was here that Milena observed Lotte falling sick. Knowing at this time that TB patients were being released, Milena devised a ruse to get Lotte out of the camp by swapping Lotte’s sputum sample for one that indicated TB. But the trick had gone horribly wrong, because when Sonntag started compiling the first selection lists he included TB sufferers.

  Milena, with Grete’s encouragement, tried in vain to get the decision on Lotte reversed. ‘Milena tortured herself with self-reproach,’ said Grete later. ‘She had more sputum samples made—which of course were negative—and pleaded with Dr Sonntag to have Lotte discharged [from the hospital] given her miraculous recovery.’ Walter Sonntag—just before he was posted to Leningrad—had eventually agreed, and did indeed remove Lotte from the list. ‘Only the fact that Dr Sonntag knew Lotte, who had worked in the Revier, saved her from death,’ said Grete, though of course Grete doesn’t tell us whose name was put on the list instead.

  The Lotte Henschel story later had a further twist. According to Lotte herself, it was probably Gerda Sonntag, Sonntag’s wife, who was really decisive in saving her life. Lotte had worked in the Revier when Gerda Weyand was still employed as an SS doctor, before she married Walter Sonntag. At that time Gerda was considered decent and had been friendly with Lotte.

  After the war Gerda, like her husband, faced war crimes charges, particularly in relation to the death transports, and in her defence denied all knowledge of them. Lotte gave evidence against Gerda, even though she’d saved her. The fact that Gerda had helped take her off the selection list, said Lotte, was evidence that she knew the truth about the transports. Furthermore, ‘If she [Gerda Weyand/Sonntag] had really objected to the crime she would not just have saved me, she would have saved the others’—a reference to the other two communists with TB who were to have been released, Tilde Klose and Lina Bertram. ‘And she would have left the camp and left her husband. But she didn’t. She stayed there and supported him.’

  Lotte Henschel’s case is not the only evidence that the Blockovas knew—or had good reason to know—that selection for the lists meant death. Even more damning is the testimony of prisoner secretaries, responsible for the death registers and other paperwork. The highly educated Polish countess Maria Adamska was valued enough by the authorities to be given the post of secretary in the camp’s political office, which was responsible for registering all camp deaths.

  Until the end of 1941 there had been no need for the camp to have its own registry. Deaths were recorded in the tiny public registry at Ravensbrück village hall. In December 1941, however, a new registry called ‘Ravensbrück 11’ was created and came under the direct orders of the commandant. Maria Adamska observed later that the registry was created at precisely the time that the order came to produce new lists of sick and disabled.

  Another secretary, an Austrian inmate called Hermine Salvini, produced even more evidence of what was coming. Hermine, who worked in the camp’s ‘welfare department’, dealt with the prisoners’ correspondence with next of kin. At the time the lists were compiled she was asked to draw up hundreds of forms giving false reasons for cause of death. According to Rosa Jochmann, Hermine told the other Blockovas what she had been told to do. ‘She told us that in the offices they had been told to make 1500 copies of a form
with the following words: “You are herewith informed that ‘blank’ has died at Ravensbrück as a result of a blood clot.” ’

  Rosa was one of those who said later that she knew from the start that Koegel was lying about the sanatorium, and she discussed what to do with others. ‘We understood that the situation was very serious. I talked about it with my political friends and we decided not to select anyone.’ Though she doesn’t say who the ‘political friends’ were it seems probable that Rosa would have talked it over with Käthe Leichter, just as she talked over everything else. After all, it was her old friend from Vienna, with whom she’d fought so many campaigns for women’s rights, who had first told Rosa to take the job of Blockova, as she could ‘do some good’, even as an arm of the SS. To Käthe, called already to parade before the ‘medical committee’, the situation two years on must have looked very different. Rosa went to Langefeld and told her she wouldn’t select. ‘Langefeld said nothing,’ said Rosa. ‘She seemed to understand.’

  Bertha Teege and Luise Mauer also made statements after the war claiming to have refused the orders, though of all the group, the testimony of the two Lagerältesten is perhaps the most contradictory. In one statement Luise explained that she and Bertha ‘were instructed to register all prisoners unable to work’, which implies that their job was to supplement the lists supplied by the Blockovas with their own selections. Luise says in a further statement that she and Bertha were ‘relieved of the duty and that Langefeld agreed they would not be punished if they refused’.

  On another occasion, however, Luise gives a more ambiguous account. She says that she and Bertha first consulted with the other Blockovas and went to Langefeld to ask to be released from the duty. This time, says Luise, ‘Frau Langefeld was angered by our refusal and threatened to punish us unless we got on with it.’

  Bertha Teege says nothing on the subject of making lists, but she says elsewhere that she was looking forward to being released from the camp in January, when Himmler was expected to make a further visit. Teege’s predecessor as Lagerälteste had been released a year earlier, and she had taken the job expecting to be released ‘just as Babette Widmann was’. In any event, the lists were certainly made, whether by the Kapos, the guards, or probably both, but by Christmas there was still no sign of Mennecke.

  Christmas 1941 was remembered for the bitter wind that howled around the camp, and an exceptionally hard frost, but there was no snow. During the Christmas Eve night shift in the sewing shop the guard on duty allowed each national group to sing a carol, and the Germans started with ‘Stille Nacht’. At first the Poles refused to join in, then they changed their minds and sang, but as they reached the words ‘Take my hand, O Christ child’, tears broke their song and they had to stop.

  On the way back to their blocks, the Christmas Eve night workers passed a Christmas tree erected by the guards on the Lagerstrasse; it even had candles. And in the SS houses Hanna Sturm, the Austrian carpenter, was putting up Christmas trees for the officers and their families. That night prisoners passed out tiny gifts to each other. Some had made stars and mangers out of straw. Olga’s Christmas gift to Maria Wiedmaier was her miniature atlas.

  Chapter 9

  Bernburg

  In early January 1942 snow fell almost constantly, lying six inches thick on the roofs of the blocks, but the skies cleared on the day that Fritzi Jaroslavsky arrived. She had travelled alone by train from Vienna, with just a single male guard. Fritzi was cheered by the blue skies. Just seventeen, she had spent twelve months in a Gestapo jail for helping her father’s resistance cell.

  In the New Year of 1942 more and more foreign resistance prisoners started to arrive at the camp, following a new German drive to root out insurgents in countries seized by the Reich. Fritzi’s father, Eduard Jaroslavsky, a social democrat and factory worker, was one of thousands of Austrians who, three years after the Anschluss, were still operating underground. Fritzi took helping for granted. Many friends were doing the same. Her role was ‘very ordinary—nothing’. She collected secret messages from a launderette near the office where she worked as a secretary; the launderette served as a ‘letter box’ where messages arrived for her father’s cell. ‘The manageress called me up from time to time and said, “Your washing is ready,” and I knew that a message had come and I was to go and collect it. I’d take it to my father.’

  Early in January 1941 the Gestapo arrested the manageress and seized her laundry phone book, with names of the entire cell. Fritzi spent the next year in a Viennese jail. In June 1941 her mother visited her, and broke the news that her father had been guillotined in Berlin. ‘My mother was asked if she wanted his ashes back and told she’d have to pay. She didn’t have the money.’

  The guard who accompanied Fritzi on the train from Vienna to Ravensbrück told her he had also accompanied her father when he was taken for execution. He was nevertheless quite kind to Fritzi, reassuring her that there was nothing to fear where she was going; she would probably work in the fields. At first, the camp seemed no more horrifying than the Gestapo prison. Much to her astonishment, other Austrians were ready to welcome her. They’d known she was coming: prisoners working in the Schreibstube had spotted a teleprinter message from Gestapo HQ in Vienna, and the news had been passed to Rosa Jochmann.

  The communist network learned of her arrival too—fresh from the Austrian capital, Fritzi was a potential source of information—so Olga Benario herself, with Maria Wiedmaier, came to find her in the admissions block. ‘I was told two important prisoners wished to speak to me,’ said Fritzi, talking in her apartment in Vienna. A youngster in the camp, at eighty-five she remains a youngster today by survivors’ standards. ‘I was told to go outside, as they wanted to talk to me on the Lagerstrasse. I was led out and saw two figures standing by the edge of a block. It was quite possible to talk but we took care nobody could hear. They asked if I had news from Austria.’

  Fritzi’s memory of Olga and Maria at work, gathering information, gives a rare glimpse of how these former Soviet intelligence agents—Jew and non-Jew—were working together, still trying to use their skills. ‘They made an impression on me,’ she said. ‘They seemed to know a lot, and it was clear they’d been there a long time. I was in awe of them of course. I was very young.’

  ‘How did they look?’

  ‘One of them smiled and told me I had friends here. I think that was Olga. But mostly they wanted to hear what I knew, and it wasn’t much. You see, I’d been in prison for twelve months.’

  Even so, Fritzi was able to talk of the underground arrests, and of the Jewish deportations from Austria, which she heard about in jail. On the train she’d heard passengers talk about the Allied bombing raids in the Ruhr and the Russian fight-back outside Moscow. ‘And I told them about my father’s work and what had happened to him. It was nice for me. I had the impression they would look after me.’

  A few days later, Rosa Jochmann fixed for Fritzi to move to Block 1, sleeping right above Rosa herself. Fritzi knew she was lucky to be out of the admissions block, where there were ‘women of all sorts’, but here in Block 1 she found women who understood each other. They could talk about people at home. ‘It was more like living with friends. It was easy to tell who was who in the camp. Those from other blocks didn’t look as clean or as well fed as us in Block One.’

  Rosa was able to organise all sorts of things for the prisoners; they even had coal sometimes to burn in their stove. For Fritzi she fixed a job in the Schreibstube. ‘I suppose she mothered me in a way. Yes, she always took an interest in the young ones.’ Everyone in Block 1 behaved and nobody stole, although once a woman was caught stealing bread from a cupboard and someone informed a guard. ‘The girl was given twenty-five lashes and sent to the bunker, where she died.’

  When they took their black coffee in the morning or their soup in the evening it was Rosa who served it in the day room. ‘She let us talk quietly,’ said Fritzi. ‘About the day’s work, or the news from home.’ Some of
the German women had husbands or brothers at the front and some had lost family or friends in the recent bombing.

  Fritzi’s table head was Anni Wamser, another German communist, who had the job of dividing the bread and putting it on the prisoners’ shelves. Maria Wiedmaier was on the table too, and so was Rosa’s German friend Cäzilie Helten—Cilli for short. Rosa and Cilli were rarely apart in the camp, said Fritzi, and they lived together openly as a lesbian couple in Vienna after the war.

  Through Rosa, Fritzi soon met up with Austrians from other blocks. Frau Lange was the wife of a man who had worked in her father’s underground cell. She was Jewish, though she’d been arrested for resistance. Fritzi would see her on the Lagerstrasse and they talked a little. ‘Everyone was desperate for any news about the outside world, but if anyone asked about my father I’d start to cry.’

  A Tyrolean woman, Fini Schneider, about thirty years old and also Jewish, took Fritzi under her wing. Fritzi looks back fondly on the friendships she formed in those first weeks: they were the ‘Austrian family’. She often saw Rosa Jochmann walking nearby with Käthe Leichter, ‘talking intently’.

  Himmler visited the camp about this time, which Fritzi remembered because a rumour went around that the Reichsführer offered to release Rosa but Rosa refused to go. ‘We heard she’d told him she was needed in the camp and didn’t want to leave.’ I asked if Fritzi thought that was true.

  ‘It could be true. But people didn’t like to talk about it.’