by Sarah Helm
Aunt Lenzi added that she hadn’t been told how Käthe died, but would pass the information on when it came. What came were of course the usual lies—Käthe had died ‘of heart failure’; the place of death was Ravensbrück. Franz Leichter remembers that when he and his brother and father were first told the news they believed the story of the heart failure for some time, knowing no better.
Countless others—relatives of imprisoned communists, Catholics, Jehovah’s Witnesses, prostitutes, down-and-outs, Jews and non-Jews—all over Germany were also receiving letters about the death of an imprisoned loved one along with urns full of fake ashes. Rosa Menzer died of ‘cancer of the uterus’, her family were told. Ilse Lipmann died of ‘a stroke’.
Ravensbrück officials often had no idea who to inform about asocials, as the addresses of relatives were usually unknown. If they were Jews, the entire family would probably by now have been deported. But the rule said next of kin must be notified, so letters and personal effects were sent to local police forces, who were told to pass them on. The personal effects of a Jewish woman called Sara Henni Stern consisted of a few coppers. When the local police couldn’t find a relative, they were advised to claim it for the German Reich. Julius ten Brink, who had been pleading for the release of his sister Mathilde for three years, received an urn with a package of possessions, listed as ‘one coat, one pair stockings, one vest; three pairs pants’.
While all the official letters sent to bereaved families during the 14f13 charade were grotesque, the letter sent to the family of Herta ‘Sara’ Cohen stands out for historical reasons too. Herta Cohen was the Jewish woman arrested in 1940 for having sex with a Düsseldorf policeman and infecting his German blood. She was among those loaded into lorries to be gassed in the spring of 1942. A few weeks later the Düsseldorf police received a letter signed by the Ravensbrück commandant, Max Koegel. The police were to find Herta’s sister, inform her of Herta’s death ‘from a stroke’, and tell her that if she wanted her sister’s ashes she should first establish that there was space in the local cemetery. The family should then send a letter confirming the space, along with the correct fee. If the letter hadn’t arrived at Ravensbrück within ten days the urn would be disposed of.
While this bureaucratic sham adds yet more tragic detail to the story, it is another part of the Cohen letter which gives it historical importance. The letter signed by Koegel about Herta Cohen’s case provides what may be the only documentary proof that the Ravensbrück transports were part of the 14f13 gassing programme.
It was almost certainly Himmler himself who ordered SS officials never to use the secret 14f13 code on any Ravensbrück correspondence; given the particular sensitivity over gassing women, the Reichsführer wanted secrecy increased. In Herta’s case, however, the precaution was overlooked. Perhaps because the letter was addressed to a police force, it was considered safe to note the code, or perhaps there was simply a slip. For whatever reason, at the top right-hand side of Koegel’s letter, next to the date (13 March 1942), is printed the telltale code ‘14f13’, which signalled to anyone in the know that every word about Herta’s death ‘from a stroke’, so carefully typed out below, was a lie: Herta had been gassed.
—
By early summer the screams in the night ceased, as the transports came to a halt, but the prisoners were still none the wiser about where or how the women were killed. Throughout the rest of the war, many in Ravensbrück continued to believe the rumours that the transportees of 1942 had been killed in a hospital or sanatorium at Buch, near Berlin. Even at the first Hamburg trial in 1946 some women spoke of Buch as the place of death. To this day there is much that is not understood about Buch, particularly in relation to Nazi medical experimentation at the hospitals there. It cannot be ruled out that some of the victims were trucked to Buch, either for experimentation or in transit, before being taken on for gassing elsewhere. Soon after the war, however, new evidence emerged about the location of the gassing.
When Hitler reorganised his euthanasia programme after the Church protests in the summer of 1941, two gassing centres closed, but two new ones soon opened. One of these was located in a former sanatorium in Bernburg, a pretty German town south of Berlin, on the banks of the River Saale. During the war there had been no cause for the Ravensbrück prisoners to think of Bernburg, or any other ‘euthanasia’ centre, as a possible destination; afterwards, when the story of the T4 programme began to emerge in the Nuremberg medical trials and elsewhere, the connection was made. Evidence came out that in 1940 Bernburg’s sanatorium was fitted with a gas chamber, disguised as a shower room. In this room, which measured 14 square metres, more than 8000 people were gassed. Adjoining the gas chamber was a crematorium with two ovens, a dissecting room and a mortuary.
The victims arrived in big grey buses, but sometimes they came by train. Nurses led them to a room where they were asked to undress and examined; any with unusual physical or mental features were marked on the back with a red cross. In groups of up to 100, the victims were led to the shower room. Here they waited for water to come out, but instead gas poured out of the showerheads and they died, usually after a long and painful struggle. Once dead, the bodies with the red crosses were dissected in the mortuary.
The evidence showed that the first victims were brought here from nursing homes, but later came prisoners from concentration camps. On hearing this, a group of German Ravensbrück survivors, led by the communist Maria Wiedmaier, decided to investigate further, hoping to find out at last what happened to their comrade Olga Benario and other communists sent on the same transports.
The group, mostly members of the ‘VVN’ (Victims of Fascism) organisation, all recalled the secret messages that their friends had smuggled back, many of which had said: ‘Last stop Dessau’. A glance at a map showed that Dessau was the stop before Bernburg, so the VVN women wrote to the mayor’s office in Bernburg to ask for any evidence that prisoners from Ravensbrück had been gassed there too. The office replied that all documents relating to the gassing had been destroyed before the end of the war. Correspondence found at Gross-Rosen and at Buchenwald detailed transports sent from those camps to Bernburg, but the Ravensbrück files were all burned.
The man who could have solved the mystery was Irmfried Eberl, director of the Bernburg killing centre at the time of the gassings. Eberl was due to stand trial in 1948 but committed suicide before the case began. He knew his death sentence was assured: following his work at Bernburg, Eberl was the first commandant of Treblinka, the Jewish death camp in East Poland.
Over time the Ravensbrück survivors learned more about Bernburg. In another trial, one of the Bernburg doctors revealed that women were gassed there as well as men. ‘When the female prisoners arrived they were already undressed,’ he said. ‘From our room we took them directly to what was called the shower room, where they were put to sleep with carbon monoxide.’
In 1967 the Ravensbrück guard Ella Pietsch spoke before a German inquiry about Bernburg. In 1941 and 1942 Pietsch was a guard in the camp’s straw-weaving workshop, where prisoners were suddenly called out alphabetically and told to leave. This riled her, as it left her weaving shift short-handed. ‘There were always two to six who didn’t turn up the next morning,’ she said. So put out was Pietsch that she asked an SS officer where the women had gone, and was told ‘to a new camp’.
Guards were forbidden to ask such questions, but Pietsch persisted. ‘I learned that the new camp was the camp of Bernsdorf in the region of the Halle. They gassed people there.’ The day after making this statement Pietsch corrected herself, saying: ‘The name of the new camp was not Bernsdorf, it was Bernburg.’ Evidently an SS officer had let the secret slip.
Many families of those killed at Bernburg never learned the truth; many had no idea how to find it. Ten years after the war, however, Lina Krug, Else’s mother, was determined to learn more. Like others, Lina had learned that her daughter had died of heart disease in a concentration camp, but the news made no sense
. For one thing, she still didn’t see why her good Catholic daughter, who had left home all those years ago to seek work, should have been taken to a concentration camp. Doubting the story of her death, Lina therefore wrote in 1950 to the VVN survivors’ organisation asking if they knew why Else had been arrested and how she died.
As a communist body, the VVN was unused to receiving inquiries from the families of prostitutes, but Else was an exception. The story of the Düsseldorf prostitute’s courage was well known in the camp, as was the manner of her death. The VVN survivors therefore wrote to Lina Krug, informing her that Else wore the black triangle of an asocial. This told Lina, perhaps for the first time, that her daughter had become a prostitute. The VVN were also able to tell Lina that her daughter’s courage was ‘exemplary’. Else had stood up to the SS on several occasions. She had refused to beat comrades, and for that she had been sent to her death.
Soon after the war, Käthe Leichter’s husband and two sons, Franz and Henry, visited Vienna and learned the truth about her death. They also learned that not long after receiving the news about their mother, Aunt Lenzi—the go-between—had been sent to Auschwitz and gassed.
Fritzi Jaroslavksy, the Viennese resister taken to the camp as a teenager, had never learned the fate of her friend Fini Schneider, who befriended her in the camp. She last saw Fini smiling bravely at her from the back of a truck. She had always assumed she must have died, but never really knew.
When we met in Vienna, I showed her a list of names of Austrians whose ashes had been returned to relatives in Vienna, and a cemetery list showing where the ashes were buried in a Viennese cemetery. On the list was Fini’s name, as well as Käthe Leichter’s. Fritzi took the list in her hand, and stared at it in silence for some time. Then she said she couldn’t understand how the ashes had got back to Vienna. Her mother had had to pay for her father’s ashes when they were returned. Who would have paid for Fini’s ashes? By then all her family were dead.
No urn or official notice announcing Olga’s death ever arrived in Rio, and it was not until the end of the war, when Carlos came out of prison, that he learned for sure that Olga had died, although he must have guessed as much, as her letters stopped in February 1942. If an official notice was sent to Olga’s mother in Munich we will never know, as Eugenia, along with Olga’s brother, Ernst, was deported to Theresienstadt concentration camp in 1942, and both were later gassed at Auschwitz.
PART TWO
Chapter 10
Lublin
The German police came for Maria Bielicka in the middle of the night, when she was asleep at her parents’ Warsaw home. She was nineteen. It was January 1941, and for the past eighteen months—since the Nazi invasion of Poland—Maria had been helping the resistance in and around Warsaw by delivering underground newspapers. Then one of her group betrayed her. A woman she knew was tortured into talking.
‘The police just beat down the door, walked into the flat and ordered me to go with them. So as they stood there I got dressed and my mother quietly went to the kitchen and packed my school briefcase, full of things I might need in jail: cold meat, sanitary towels and a loaf of bread. That’s a Polish mother for you.’
Maria talked to me at her flat in London’s Earls Court in 2010. She said she had rarely spoken of the camp before. When she first came to live in England after the war nobody believed what she had to say. ‘Nobody here even wanted to know about the camps.’ Since then she had ‘got on with life’, working for Barclays Bank. Now, aged eighty-nine, Maria wanted to talk. She had been diagnosed with pancreatic cancer and had not long to live.
She pulled out a photograph of her father, arrested by the Soviets for his part in the fight for Polish independence in 1917. Her mother sold everything and took Maria, a toddler, with her to Moscow, in order to bribe the Soviets and get him out of the Russian jail. ‘And she succeeded! How to fight for Poland was passed on through generations. My parents met smuggling secret books.’ She points to a crowd in the background of the photograph. ‘And that’s the Russian Revolution going on.’
I asked if her mother had not cautioned her against joining the resistance when the Second World War broke out, and she smiled. ‘You must understand that for a century and a half Poland was wiped off the map. Our mothers raised us to understand that the country must never be annihilated again. They raised daughters to believe that resistance was a role for young women as much as men.’
—
When Hitler’s blitzkrieg against Poland began on 1 September 1939 it swiftly became clear that Hitler was set not just on military victory but on killing Poland as an entity and absorbing it into Germany. Behind the tanks came SS Death’s Head units, under orders to sweep up, by stripping Poland of all possible leadership, as well as burying its history and cultural identity. In every town, city and village that lay in the path of German armies, schools, universities and town halls were closed and often burned, while teachers, priests, doctors, community elders were rounded up, tortured and shot.
Among those targeted were women as well as men. Whatever reticence the Nazis felt at first about brutalising German women, there was little restraint in Poland. In fact, so violent was the treatment of women during the German assault that after the war, even those later taken to Ravensbrück would recall what happened to them in Poland in these first days more vividly than anything that came later in the camp.
Stanisława Michalik was captured at her home in Terespol and taken with her brother, a priest, to the local Gestapo office. Here she found the town’s stationmaster, the headmaster of a primary school and ‘all the city’s intelligentsia’. For days she listened to the screams of the men being interrogated, and saw them return, broken and bleeding. Men were told to cut off their hair and eat it. Then came her turn. ‘They couldn’t get anything from me, so they ripped my clothing off and laid me on a block, as two held me down the others beat me on the breasts, and all over with rubber clubs. When I passed out they poured cold water on me and beat me again.’
Stanisława saw her brother pass by, his cassock ripped to shreds. Many other women were brought in, including a friend from Terespol, a corpulent woman. ‘She was terribly beaten, until her beaten flesh began to fall off. The pus literally ran off her body in streams, so the entire cell was filled with the stench of decomposing flesh.’ The Gestapo torturers were often ethnic Germans, called Volksdeutsche, who lived in the Polish regions and made willing collaborators.
Women prisoners might sometimes be spared physical abuse, but instead were forced to watch at close quarters what happened to men. One woman watched a doctor she knew reduced to a ‘bloody scrap’. Jadwiga Jezierska, a sociology student imprisoned in Warsaw’s Pawiak jail, saw the Gestapo chief shoot a man, then tell women prisoners to go and look at the body. ‘He took off his clothes and paraded naked in front of them.’
—
As the German advance moved deeper into Poland, Lublin, 100 miles southeast of Warsaw, braced for the onslaught. It was among the teachers and their pupils of this university city that some of the strongest resistance was now born. When the news spread that St Adalbert’s bookshop in Lublin’s old quarter was on fire, students ran to fight the blaze. Wanda Wojtasik, a wiry seventeen-year-old, shouted orders to others to form a human chain and to pass the books on to the next. Krysia Czyż, just fifteen, had the idea of taking the books for safety to the vaults of the nearby monastery. From then on both girls were active in the underground. Wanda distributed leaflets, while her new friend Krysia helped at a children’s bomb shelter, once using her scout’s ingenuity to tie an umbilical cord during an emergency birth, with a shoelace.
Secret cells were organised by the students’ own teachers, and by parents. Krysia’s mother, Maria, took a senior post as a major in Lublin’s Home Army, the AK (Armia Krajowa). During the First World War her mother had served in a field hospital with ‘the legions’—the armies that brought about an independent Poland in 1918—and she passed on all she knew to Krysia. Krysia’
s father, Tomasz, a teacher, joined the secret teaching programme in which teachers held clandestine lessons for children whose schools were closed. Teaching became a form of covert resistance, a way of ensuring that however many died, Poland’s history and culture would live on.
Michał Chrostowski, a radical intellectual, hosted a salon for Lublin’s musicians, writers and artists. His two daughters, Grażyna, aged eighteen, and Pola, aged nineteen, were in the flat when Hitler’s forces reached the city, making plans for an underground newspaper: Polska żyie—‘Poland’s Alive’. Pola, dark and tall, was a journalist, while Grażyna, with fair tumbling curls, had turned to poetry and art.
Such resisters stood no hope against Himmler’s local police chief, Odilo Globocnik, who by early 1940 was smashing all Polish opposition and sending the men to the first Nazi concentration camp on Polish soil, established at Auschwitz, in Silesia. Amongst those taken there was Michał Chrostowski. Soon Pola and Grażyna were arrested too, and taken for interrogation ‘under the clock’, as prisoners called Globocnik’s police HQ, with its seventeenth-century clock. Other women were rounded up in distant villages and then brought to Lublin across the snow in sleighs, driven by Germans in sheepskin coats.
By May 1941 Krysia and Wanda were also captured and imprisoned in Lublin Castle. Grażyna and Pola were kept there too. Nazi judges heard spurious charges against them and then passed sentences of death. From time to time a name was shouted out and a woman was called for execution. On 21 June 1941 both Grażyna’s and Pola’s names were called, along with eighteen others, but as a guard led them away to be shot the prison’s commandant passed by. A Silesian who spoke Polish, he angrily ordered the women back to their cells, saying this was not a day for such things; the German invasion of the Soviet Union was under way.
