by Sarah Helm
The women passed the time waiting for their names to be called or watching out of a window where men—often a brother, father or husband—were lined up below to be taken to Auschwitz. Or they composed poems and drew portraits of each other on paper smuggled in by friendly Polish guards. Grażyna wrote in a note to an aunt: ‘Write if you know something about Papa, he left on the 22nd to a camp.’ Krysia too smuggled out secret messages to her mother, who sent messages back.
Some of the girls’ messages, so tiny they could be rolled into nothing and hidden in a palm, have recently come to light and are displayed in a Lublin museum, ‘Under the Clock’. Krysia’s daughter, Maria, found the tiny notes hidden in her grandmother’s old sweet tin. A handful of portraits are also displayed on the museum walls, including one of Krysia Czyż, drawn by Grażyna in the castle prison, her spectacles perched on a freckled nose. Drawings by Krysia are here on the museum walls too, including several maps, meticulously drawn, showing countless routes home to Poland, from Ravensbrück.
—
In September 1941 a train left Lublin for Germany packed full of women prisoners. As they climbed into comfortable passenger carriages, they felt happy for the first time since the start of the war, believing that change must be for the better. Zofia Stefaniak remembered: ‘We were all pleased to leave the castle. We didn’t know what was next but it was a change and it felt peaceful.’
They were leaving at a pivotal moment in the war to the east, and the signs of what was happening were all around, although they couldn’t read them. On the truck taking them to the station they had seen vast crowds of Jews herded into Lublin’s caged-off Jewish ghetto. On the edge of town they saw a massive construction site at the suburb of Majdanek; they had no idea that Majdanek would soon be the site of a new concentration camp.
Whatever the future held, these Lublin women felt that at least their lives had been spared. They were going to Germany, but what could be worse than what they had been through? Why transport them hundreds of miles to their death? If they were to have been executed it would have happened at the castle, of that they were sure.
On the station platform, relatives tried to pass last-minute packages. It was only when the speed picked up that the girls understood they were leaving Poland, with no idea if they’d find a way back, so they threw hurried notes out of carriage windows—to a mother or a sister—hoping the finders would send the messages on. Above the noise of the train, Wanda shouted to Krysia: ‘We’ve got to hold on, do you hear? We’ve got to come back.’ Grażyna held on to Pola. She told a friend that from this moment on, she would never leave Pola’s side.
Within a few hours the bombed-out skyline of Warsaw came into view, and here more carriages were attached, containing women from Pawiak jail, among them Maria Bielicka, the girl with the school briefcase, packed by her mother. ‘Later my mother sent another package on to Pawiak jail. It had my winter coat and ski boots, which I was able to take with me when we left for Germany on the train.’
It was dark when the train pulled out of Warsaw, Maria recalled. ‘We sang to cheer ourselves up, and I remember one of the tunes delighted the guard, so we had some fun at his expense. When we were passing through Łódź we sang “Hitler hangs by his tie” and the guard still smiled because he couldn’t understand. We always found little things like that to keep us going. Girlish pranks you could say.’
As the train moved on, word spread from the Warsaw women that they were heading to a place called Ravensbrück. Others from Warsaw had already been taken to this place, and some had managed to smuggle information about it back to friends in the capital. They passed through Poznań. Someone threw another letter out of the window. ‘We are heading into the unknown.’
—
As they cross the German border, leaving Poland behind, Krysia is asleep but wakes to hear a friend cry: ‘Dear God, let me die in Poland.’ Grażyna composes a poem as Wanda tries to see where it is exactly they are going. On the second night they pass slowly through Berlin, which is totally dark—the dark of the blackout.
At dawn on 23 September the girls wake from a half-sleep to find the train is pulling through woods and passing a glistening lake. Soon they see freshly ploughed fields where men and women are labouring. Almost in the middle of a field, the train pulls to a halt. There is a platform and a tiny station: Fürstenberg. A moment of silence, then shouting and screaming breaks out as ‘huge blonde giantesses’ appear on the platform below, with snarling hounds.
The noise gets louder, the giantesses throw open doors and pull the women to the ground, and down they tumble, suitcases and bags all around them. ‘Ranks of five, ranks of five.’ The snarling hounds are unleashed. Wanda, Krysia, Grażyna, Pola, Maria, everyone lines up, but someone at the back stumbles and cries out. Nobody moves. The stumbler is kicked. Silence reigns. It is a dreadful sort of silence that they don’t yet understand, but will go through again and again. ‘Why can’t I lash out at these hideous women with my bare fists?’ Wanda asks herself.
Even the knowledge that they are all together doesn’t help. On the contrary it makes the humiliation more unbearable. Wanda thinks: ‘What the hell. I’ll go for the one that’s nearest and hang the consequences.’ The black cape comes nearer. ‘But what if she strikes me or Krysia? I’ll look her straight in the eye.’ The guard averts her gaze and passes on. As they march to the camp, the women pray under their breath. They stare at the woods and the lake and at the giant, sullen sheds in perfect rows, and as they get closer they notice symmetrical red flower beds around some of the barracks, and lines of small trees.
Waiting on the Appellplatz with their bags, they watch files of women in camp stripes, marching, carrying tools. The biggest shed sounds and smells like a kitchen. Skinny figures come dashing, hands to their mouths, signalling to the new arrivals that they should eat whatever food they have in their bags, as it will be taken from them. The arrivals signal back and offer their extra food. The skinny ones look terrified. They shake their heads, hissing ‘Bunker, bunker’—but the new arrivals don’t know what it means.
As they wait in the heat, some sit down on bags and are set upon by guards. They wait until late afternoon, and through the evening. At four in the morning they are still waiting and are finally taken into the bathhouse. Male officers watch as they strip. ‘They came close to us, tall with their bayonets, and they laughed,’ Maria Bielicka remembered. ‘They enjoyed it. Of course they enjoyed it—to look at our young bodies—but I don’t think it was sexual, it was more about power.’
Maria describes what happened to an older, obese woman amongst them, whom they knew as Granny Fillipska:
After her shower she tried to put on a vest, which was far too small. She had an enormous bosom and these men just roared with laughter as she struggled. She was very bulging, you know, and one of these men came up to her with his bayonet and played with her breasts, lifting them up to see them swing. They all roared with laughter again.
Like those before them, the Polish girls were now shaved. ‘Is that you, Wanda?’ said Krysia. ‘Is that Grażyna?’ Grażyna’s curls had all gone. ‘We looked like clowns, some with dresses to their ankles, some to their knees,’ said Maria.
In wooden clogs, they tripped out, trying to stay upright. More prisoners passed, who did not seem to notice the newcomers at all. ‘They don’t seem to have faces,’ Wanda said to herself. ‘Oh God, if you have a care in the world, grant that we keep our faces in this dreadful place.’ Krysia was obviously thinking the same thing. She grasped Wanda’s hand. ‘They all look exactly alike,’ she whispered.
Zofia Kawińska said all she could remember of the arrival was the din of the constant screaming of the giantesses. As they waited outside again, a handful of Polish prisoners came up and spoke to one or two of them, whom they knew from Warsaw. ‘Prepare yourselves. Stand firm,’ they told the newcomers. Maria Bielicka recognised a friend from Warsaw called Maria Dydyńska. ‘Maria looked terrified to see us and that frightened me
—as if she knew something.’
Another figure rushed out at them and hissed: ‘Sondertransport’—special transport. Sinister whispers echoed: ‘Sondertransport, Sondertransport.’
—
At first, nothing special seemed to happen to this Sondertransport. After the ‘bath’ they were given red felt triangles stamped with a black P. Almost all foreign arrivals were designated political and a letter printed on the triangle denoted nationality. The Warsaw-Lublin women were given numbers from 7521 to 7935. Wanda made sure her number was next to Krysia’s; they were 7708 and 7709. The new arrivals were marched in ranks of five to two quarantine blocks, set back behind a wire. Quarantine had been normal practice for several months, amid SS fears that arrivals from Poland would bring typhus.
Increasing overcrowding had made cleanliness harder to maintain, so extra rules had been introduced: the soles of shoes were checked for specks of dirt, a lice-checking gang was formed. As the Poles were seen as dirty the new arrivals had to scrub their block several times a day with a brush made of rice stalks.
To begin with the cleanliness was a thrill. At Lublin Castle fleas had massed in black heaps, but here there were white sheets and every woman had her own utensils, as well as a cloth for cleaning them. One of the quarantine Blockovas, a Volksdeutsche called Hermine, constantly harassed the women, but at least her bullying produced order, which they hadn’t known for months.
There was no work in quarantine. Days passed sitting around in the block. They had been stripped of everything by now—snow boots, sketchpads, pencils—all taken away on arrival to be labelled and stored. Crosses were yanked from necks. Those with toothbrushes could keep them. And if they had them, sanitary towels were allowed; the knitted ones, supplied by the camp, had run out. But most of these women had stopped menstruating long ago, with the shock of the first imprisonment.
Now they lived in boredom, doing nothing, sitting in the ‘day room’ squashed on benches, or on the floor. They made up games and listened to the rhythm of the camp—the sirens, the tramp of feet, the shouts of ‘Raus! Raus! Achtung!’ and the howling of dogs. In the mornings and evenings they got half a beaker of coffee, which Wanda and Krysia guessed was made with acorns or from some part of a turnip. The bread had the consistency of clay and was mixed with wood shavings. The midday meal was a bowl of potatoes in their jackets with mashed swede or mangel-wurzel.
When the 9 p.m. siren rang for sleep, and Hermine drew the curtain around her Blockova’s cubicle, the girls lay close and whispered about their families, wondering what was to come. Prayer was forbidden. The wake-up siren sounded at 4 a.m. The quarantine blocks were counted indoors, but through the windows the women glimpsed women pouring from other blocks, standing for hours, often in rain. Krysia called these ‘deathly parades’. ‘But at least they can look up at the stars,’ said Wanda.
From time to time the girls saw grey figures flit past the block. Suddenly these same grey figures would appear from all corners and run towards something and pick at it, stuffing their mouths. Or they sank on all fours and licked the ground, then ran back to where they came from. These figures always seemed to be alone. Krysia and Wanda called them—ironically—Goldstücke: ‘gold coins’. As the Goldstücke wandered around, other prisoners passed them by and sometimes pushed them out of the way.
Every group arriving from now on would describe similar figures in the camp as their numbers steadily grew, but the Poles seem to have been the first to view the Goldstücke as a category. The guards had another name for them: Schmuckstücke, by which they meant useless, dirty ‘pieces’.* In fact these prisoners were simply the poorest of the poor in the camp. Denise Dufournier, a French prisoner who arrived in 1944, described the Schmuckstücke as ‘the most wretched, dirty, and ragged’. Always holding out empty mess tins, ‘they resembled the poor of every country in the world’.
A year ago, the SS would have cleared the Lagerstrasse of any such women; now they were mostly ignored. A collection of Goldstücke or Schmuckstücke always hovered at the kitchen block when the Kesselkolonne, the soup-gang, started its round through the blocks. The women were waiting for a spill, which often happened because these kettles—vast iron pots—weighed a ton and the carriers struggled to keep them upright on the barrow, shouting to the Goldstücke to keep away or they’d spill the lot, and they’d all be in the bunker.
Sometimes the Goldstücke came up close to the quarantine wire, and the Lublin girls recoiled. ‘Look at that,’ said Krysia the first time they appeared. ‘She has given up the fight,’ said Wanda. And they prayed to God that whatever happened to them, they would never become like that.
A few days after their arrival, the Lublin and Warsaw girls see a quite different group of women appear behind their quarantine wire. Krysia, Wanda and the others hear talk that these are Polish friends, who have been in the camp a long time already. They have come to greet the new arrivals and to seek news from home. This contact breaks all the rules, but Hermine must have been bribed or received orders to let them approach the wire, because the Blockova says nothing.
These long-established Ravensbrück Poles seem strange and foreign at first. The new girls call them ‘elders’ or ‘old men’, as some have grey hair. Most have numbers as low as 2500, which means they’ve been in the camp nearly two years.
The fresh intake are suspicious of the ‘old men’ and feel superior to them. These early prisoners were arrested just for living in disputed parts of Poland, near the German borders. They weren’t in the resistance, they didn’t fight in the war. They’ve been here so long their skin is grey. Some have hair growing on their faces. And their accents are unfamiliar, they use mysterious words when talking about the camp—Sandgrube, Bock. And they speak German, the language of the guards.
But over the quarantine weeks, as the ‘old men’ return, suspicion subsides. They seem to have good advice for the new intake: ‘Always save half your bread till the evening.’ ‘Never drink the water.’ ‘Pick out your lice.’ Later the ‘elders’ bring bits and pieces they have ‘organised’—the camp word for stolen or smuggled. A year ago the Poles were at the bottom of the social heap here, unable to organise anything, but by the time of the Sondertransport of September 1941 their position had started to change.
Exactly when these first Polish prisoners began to claw their way up the Ravensbrück ladder is hard to pinpoint, but it may have been thanks to a Polish countess and her fairy tales that their fortunes first changed. In early 1941 a group of Poles joined a gang of German asocials working in the vegetable cellar. During the long night shift they sat on top of mountains of swedes, peeling until each had filled twenty-five buckets—the quota the kitchen required for the next day’s soup. It was hard to keep awake, but no rest was allowed until they were done.
One day a group of the Poles began reciting poetry and telling stories. They captured the ear of every peeler, and as they spoke the buckets filled at double speed. One Polish teacher told fairy tales in the dialect of the Tatra Mountains, but the most popular storyteller was a countess from Poznań, Helena Korewina. Her Polish myths and legends filled the buckets faster than ever. Noticing how fast a nearby Russian gang was peeling, the storytellers projected even louder, enticing the Russians over simply by the sound of their voices, and speeding things still further.
Even the guards seemed to listen, and word of the storytelling reached Langefeld, who was looking for a Pole to act as her interpreter. So fast had the Polish population grown that it almost outnumbered the rest of the camp, but most spoke no German and couldn’t understand orders, which were often beaten into them instead. Langefeld preferred to be understood, and hearing about the Polish storytellers she called Helena Korewina to see her, appointing the countess as her interpreter.
By the time the students from Lublin and Warsaw arrived, the Polish countess had not only impressed Johanna Langefeld, but won the German blacksmith’s daughter’s trust. On Korewina’s suggestion, Langefeld appointed several Poles
as block leaders, as well as secretaries in camp offices. Korewina herself was one of the most powerful prisoners in the camp.
—
The moment the four-week quarantine is over the women are forced outside for morning roll call. Krysia says it’s too cold to look at the stars. One of the girls puts a towel under her dress for warmth. A guard sees and smacks her in the face. Now it is they who are stared at. As the newest in the camp they excite a kind of jealousy, as if something of the outside world still clings to them. Other prisoners try to touch them.
After roll call the group are back in the block, queuing for coffee, but they haven’t yet learned to eke out their bread, and the 250 grams shared out the night before has already gone, so there is nothing to eat before work starts.
Out on the Appellplatz again, for labour roll call, they learn they are Verfügs. As a Sondertransport, the new Poles are banned from working outside the camp, although no one tells them why. So they have to join the line of the Verfügbare, literally availables or leftovers, though to the Poles it appears to mean rabble—prisoners who have to pick up any work left over when all better jobs are allocated.
So as other gangs leave the camp gates, heaving kettles for lunchtime soup, the Poles join up with the Verfügbare and a Kolonka (short for Kolonnenführerin, forewoman) calls out their names. Certain Verfügs seem to fix with the Kolonka to get the plum jobs, but the new arrivals get to clear cesspits, shovel mud or throw bricks. The overcrowding has brought new rules for the gangs. Bricks, tossed from person to person, are counted so that a certain number is put in each cart; the amount of sand that goes on a shovel is checked, even if hands are bloody and raw.
