by Sarah Helm
In the early spring of 1942 the women were worried they were beginning to starve. The bread allowance was cut from 250 to 200 grams and the soup got thinner. A disastrous harvest had affected supplies across the whole of Germany and all prisoners’ rations were cut. Wanda tried to protect Krysia from hearing the ‘morbid, drooling’ conversations starting up around them as ‘gaunt-faced women, eyes glistening, hallucinate about food’. It would start with a conversation about a trip to the theatre and end with ‘Where did you eat afterwards?’ and details of their imaginary feast would spill out.
The newcomers were starting to grow hair on their faces, hands and legs, and their expressions were grey and dull, except when the talk was of food. Irena Dragan saw a woman catch a bird that flew through the rafters, and eat it raw.
Now there were Goldstücke inside the Polish blocks. ‘There were some in every block,’ says Maria Bielicka. ‘When the food came you’d see them. They would always be pushed to the end of the queue and never managed to have anything at all. And the room leaders would always go for them. And they were in all classes, all nationalities. I knew one who was quite well off before the war but the change was so colossal she could not adapt. She was a landowner’s daughter.’
‘What became of them?’
‘They wandered out of the block one day and disappeared—probably picked up and taken to the punishment block.’
‘Did anyone in your transport end up like that?’
‘No, we were a strong group. They were one here, one there,’ and she points around the corners of her Earls Court flat. ‘And the difference was that when we arrived in the camp we arrived with nothing. Everything was taken from us except perhaps our glasses or sticks for the very old. And they carried on taking things. But after six months we had started to get something back again.’
Some time in early 1942 Maria Bielicka was picked out of the Verfügbar lines by Langefeld herself and sent to the bookbinding workshop. The camp was so self-sufficient now that it was binding its own ledgers and records. ‘She walked down the queue of women asking if anyone had ever learned bookbinding. I had once done a term of it at school, so I put my hand up.’ Working here, Maria was out of the cold, and she picked up news from Czech friends working in the nearby Effektenkammer.
Others were getting better jobs too. Another Polish Verfüg was assigned to one of the rabbit hutches, where the job was to clean out cages and collect angora fur that they could sometimes organise. Several Polish women, including Wanda and Krysia, were taken out of the Verfügbar and sent to the straw-sewing and weaving shop, which made straw shoes used as warm overshoes for camp staff, and also for soldiers in the Waffen-SS. The work was unpleasant and the manager of the workshops, a tailor called Fritz Opitz, was a brute. The women choked on dust as they sat at tables plaiting and pulling at large bundles of straw, which cut into their hands. But at least they were inside a barracks, with a better chance to survive.
Nobody had any doubts that the better jobs for the young Poles derived in part from Helena Korewina’s influence. It was six months since the Sondertransport had arrived, and in that time Korewina, the Polish countess-interpreter, had won Johanna Langefeld’s trust. The two were rarely apart. ‘Langefeld was full of affection for Korewina,’ recalled another woman in the chief guard’s office. ‘Langefeld depended on her absolutely and followed her judgement. One time, when fifty-two teams of outside workers had to be organised, Langefeld told Korewina: “You do it, and tell me what you’ve done.” It was like that. Needless to say the Kolonki [gang leaders] on the work teams were largely Poles.’
The Polish women with fluent German were also taking more and more positions in the offices and blocks. Maria Dydyńska sat in the Gestapo office, where she saw the prisoner transport lists and typed official correspondence that went to Berlin. The Polish dancer Ojcumiła Falkowska was working in the canteen. Poles were now working in every part of the camp, from the clothes store to the kitchen; they even cleaned SS houses. In the blocks, Polish Blockovas were now enforcing the SS rules.
But, also like their predecessors, few doubted that cooperating was the right thing to do.
The Polish military instructor Maria Moldenhawer even congratulated the Germans for their ‘honesty in finally seeing the worth of the Poles, who, as workers, compared with the asocial German women, who were depraved types, inspired trust in the camp authorities’.
Through her influence, by Easter 1942 Helena Korewina had even secured Langefeld’s agreement that the Polish prisoners be reunited in adjacent blocks. Most remarkably, she enabled the creation of a Kunstgewerbe, arts and crafts workshop, where young Polish artists could work, painting, embroidering and sculpting little artefacts. The workshop was based at the side of the straw shoe-making barracks, and, under Langefeld’s orders, was given special protection by friendly guards.
According to Zofia Pociłowska, many of the girls who worked on the shoes, including Krysia, Wanda, Grażyna and others, were transferred to the art workshop in the winter months of 1942. How Helena Korewina persuaded Langefeld to agree to an art workshop is impossible to say. Perhaps she showed the chief guard the exquisite miniatures the girls were already making out of nothing, and Langefeld saw a way to help them.
How Langefeld persuaded Fritz Opitz, head of the sewing workshop, to allow the art workshop is not so hard to explain: Opitz took the artworks for himself and sold them. ‘He even ordered objects especially for his girlfriends. So we made what he wanted and the guards came and packed them away,’ according to one survivor’s account. And other guards turned a blind eye, knowing that they would be given a beautiful portrait, or a painted doll. Grażyna’s portraits soon hung in the SS houses, and officers’ wives flaunted exquisitely embroidered slippers.
Another of the Polish student group, Wojciecha Buraczyńska, remembers how Helena Korewina used to visit the art workshop and watch them at work. ‘Korewina was always elegant, even in her camp stripes. I don’t know how, but some people were.’ The Poles knew by this stage that Langefeld was to some extent protecting them. ‘We had always known she was our ally. She let us leave earlier from roll call if it was snowing, and she never made us stand there longer than necessary. We knew she wasn’t 100 per cent SS.’
As she spoke, Wojciecha hunted for her copy of Grażyna’s last poem. It was about a sunflower, she said. Sunflowers grew outside the block, and through the window they could see their bobbing heads. She pulled out sheaves of papers, letters and drawings, including a sketch of herself as a teenage girl—‘Grażyna drew that in the Ravensbrück art workshop.’ And Wojciecha found a tiny object and laid it in the palm of her hand, holding it under a light. It was a crucifix, carved out of the very end of a white toothbrush.
* * *
* Schmuckstücke was also ironic. Schmuck means jewellery, or trinket, so Schmuckstück is a piece of jewellery. Schmuck is also Yiddish for ‘poor man’, which might explain its use here too. Guards more often just called prisoners Stücke—simply ‘pieces’.
Chapter 11
Auschwitz
Wojciecha Buraczyńska was not the first to observe that Johanna Langefeld was ‘not 100 per cent SS’. Like the Poles, Grete Buber-Neumann, the former communist who later worked closely with Langefeld in the camp, came to see her as a woman torn in two by her conflicting instincts and beliefs. On the one hand she fervently believed in the ideals of National Socialism, dreaming of the day when the Führer would make Germany proud and great again. She also admired Himmler to the very end, certain that the Reichsführer SS had no idea of the crimes his thugs committed in his name.
Yet Johanna Langefeld never gave up her religious faith, said Grete, and found it increasingly hard to reconcile her Lutheran values with the SS order of terror, in which she was forced to play a part: ‘So she came to the camp every morning praying and begging God for strength to stop evil from happening. What a disastrous confusion.’
Despite her confusion, however, Langefeld’s life at Ravensbrück in the early
spring of 1942 seemed settled. She had made her own apartment, overlooking the lake, a happy home for Herbert, now fourteen, who was attending the local school in Fürstenberg along with other guards’ children, and played with them along the lake shore. And despite her disputes with Max Koegel, Langefeld could tell herself that at least Himmler still recognised her abilities, particularly her skill in keeping 5000 prisoners in line.
Just as important for a smooth administration, Langefeld had managed the growing ranks of female guards with success, and kept them happy. An efficient group of prisoners, mostly Germans, Czechs and Poles, were helping to run the camp.
In the spring of 1942, Langefeld even hit on the idea of setting up a hair salon for the staff, which made her popular with all. The German-Czech prisoner Edith Sparmann was amongst the very first to hear of it. One day on the Lagerstrasse, prisoners were asked if any had trained in hairdressing. Edith, then working in the Effektenkammer, said she had, and was ordered to the chief guard’s office.
At first I didn’t understand, so they told me they were setting up a hairdressing salon at the camp, so that the guards wouldn’t have to go into Fürstenberg each time. I said they’d need brushes and scissors and curlers and curling tongs and driers. They asked me to work there. I remember it became pretty well known on the Lagerstrasse that this was happening, and prisoners from my block said to me: ‘So you’ve got yourself a big career.’
The salon was constructed in an old workshop on the other side of the camp wall from the bathhouse, where new arrivals had their hair shaved. Three prisoners worked there all day. There was plenty of work, as most guards had an appointment at least every two weeks. ‘They liked to come to the camp salon’, said Edith, ‘because it was cheaper than the one in town—and just as good. The Olympia roll was all the fashion at the time’—she lifted her hand to her forehead in a flourish. ‘It was a single roll swept back from the crown.’
Edith got to know the guards well because they came so often. She remembered Dorothea Binz, though Binz was not one of her regulars. And she remembered Maria Mandl:
Everyone knew who Binz and Mandl were. When they ran the bunker they preferred to beat people themselves rather than have someone else do it.
Binz used to scream at people, but in the salon she didn’t shout at us. She was just like a normal client in a hairdressing salon. She didn’t really talk to us prisoners, only to say what she wanted doing—Binz had an Olympia roll too, but longer than the others. Shoulder length. She was very blonde. She was naturally blonde. Many dyed their hair but Binz didn’t need to.
And she would chat to other clients there at the same time. She’d ask what shift they were on or what they were doing in the evening. To us they were like normal clients too.
I asked Edith what sort of hairstyle Johanna Langefeld preferred, but she said that neither Langefeld nor her deputy Edith Zimmer ever came to the salon. She didn’t have her hair done—it was just pulled back in ‘a messy bun’, said Edith.
—
On 3 March 1942 Heinrich Himmler paid another visit to Ravensbrück. His desk diary states that he arrived at 11 in the morning and stayed for three hours. His main purpose that day was to talk to Koegel about a problem that had cropped up at Auschwitz.
Following the Wannsee meeting six weeks earlier, plans to start exterminating the Jews had advanced quickly. Death camps were being opened at Belzec, Treblinka and Sobibor, all in central Poland. A new department (IVB4: Jewish Affairs—Evacuation Affairs) of the Reich Security Head Office (RSHA), under the direction of Adolf Eichmann, was organising the exterminations and was about to send its first ‘official’ Jewish transport to Auschwitz. Twenty thousand Jews from Slovakia were due to arrive in only three weeks’ time.
On the face of things Ravensbrück was not involved in such arrangements. The camp was not designated as a Jewish killing centre, or death camp, and in any case, under the new plans, any Jews arriving at Ravensbrück in the future would themselves be moved on to Auschwitz.
However, at this late hour two facts had been drawn to Himmler’s attention. First, that among the Slovakian transport bound for Auschwitz were 7000 women. Second, that Auschwitz was not equipped to accommodate women. The camp had only ever held men, until now mostly fighters in the Polish resistance, or Soviet prisoners of war. Clearly there was no room for the 7000 Slovakian women Jews at Ravensbrück, and, in any case, Jews were no longer permitted on German soil.
At the last minute, therefore, Himmler ordered Rudolf Höss, the Auschwitz commandant, to evacuate an area of his camp used for Soviet prisoners of war, of whom few remained after mass executions, and set it aside for the arriving Jewish women. The area was divided from the men’s section by a wall and electrified fence.
It is perhaps surprising that Himmler should go to the trouble of separating women from men at Auschwitz, given that under the new Wannsee plans all Jews were in future to be exterminated by gas. But not all of those arriving were to be gassed on the spot. Auschwitz was to play a dual role in the Final Solution: slave labour as well as extermination. Jews would be spared the gas chamber as long as they were deemed fit for work.
And while they were in the camp, it was of paramount importance that the sexes didn’t mix, and possibly spawn more unwanted lives. The separation of the sexes was also a useful part of the camouflage devised to ensure that arriving Jews would not guess their fate. In Himmler’s view, placing women and men in separate sections would seem to them more normal, more in keeping with a regular slave-labour camp, which was what they’d been told Auschwitz was.
And not only should the Auschwitz women prisoners be separated, but they should be guarded by women. This too would seem more normal, not only for the prisoners but also for the guards. So it was in order to recruit women guards for Auschwitz in time for the first Jewish arrivals that Himmler visited Ravensbrück on 3 March 1942. He told Koegel that he expected him to supply the entire corps of guards for the new Auschwitz women’s section. In addition 1000 of his prisoners must work there as Kapos. They had to be ready by 26 March, just three weeks’ time, so that they were in position by the time the Slovakian transport was due to arrive.
Himmler also told Koegel that as nobody at Auschwitz had any experience of guarding women, the entire administrative responsibility for its new women’s section was to be placed under Ravensbrück’s authority, and the camp would, from now on, train all Auschwitz’s future women guards. Himmler wanted Johanna Langefeld to take charge of the new Auschwitz women’s section: she was the most experienced woman guard he had.
The changes meant huge upheaval at Ravensbrück, but Koegel naturally followed Himmler’s orders. Langefeld was dispatched to Auschwitz to reconnoitre the camp, returning a few days later. In the early hours of 26 March she set off again by train, this time taking with her 1000 prisoners to work as Kapos and a small troop of women guards.
We have little information about the guards who left for Auschwitz that day, but of the fourteen named later by Langefeld, several were notorious brutes. Margot Drechsel took a leading role in the roundups for the Bernburg gas chambers and Elfriede Vollrath, a Fürstenberg woman, was known as a beater, as was twenty-three-year-old Elisabeth Volkenrath.
The guards who left for Auschwitz, however, were vastly outnumbered by the 1000 prisoners sent to serve as Kapos. Among them were about fifty Jehovah’s Witnesses and a score of political prisoners, mostly German communists, including Langefeld’s favourites Bertha Teege and Luise Mauer. There were also a very large number of ‘criminals’ and asocials. It is surprising that such a large number of Kapos were thought necessary at the new Auschwitz women’s camp. However, given the shortage of trained women guards a decision had clearly been taken—probably by Himmler himself—to let these already brutalised and desperate Ravensbrück prisoners keep order and do so in any way they chose.
Again, details are scarce about who these women were. There were certainly several notorious names on the list, including Philomena Müssg
ueller, the Munich brothel-keeper and Strafblock terror Kapo, and another hated prostitute called Elfriede Schmidt. However, given the large number, most must have been picked at random. For example Agnes Petry, the penniless Düsseldorf prostitute, caught up with Else Krug in the first ‘Asoziale’ round-up of 1938, was among the group.
Else was now dead, transported a few weeks earlier to the Bernburg gas chamber for refusal to beat fellow prisoners. Now Agnes was on her way to Auschwitz to guard other prisoners facing the same death, though neither Agnes, nor any of the others on the train in March 1942, could possibly have known what their new camp would bring.
Apart from the Poles, who knew of the place because relatives had been sent there as resisters, few prisoners in Ravensbrück had heard of Auschwitz in March 1942. Even Langefeld herself appears to have known very little. On return from her visit she told Teege and Mauer that she had seen male prisoners ‘in terrible shape’, but that was all. According to Grete Buber-Neumann, so little-known was Auschwitz at the time that several Ravensbrück women volunteered to go there as Kapos in March 1942 thinking conditions might be better. As the train moved east, passing the ruins of Polish towns, at least one woman changed her mind and managed to escape.
—
Though little is known about the way the Ravensbrück women were chosen for their work at Auschwitz, we know a great deal about what happened when they arrived, largely thanks to Bertha Teege and Luise Mauer, who both left vivid accounts.
Their train pulled up at Auschwitz around mid-morning on 26 March, with just a few hours to spare before the first transport of female Jews arrived. At first the Ravensbrück women saw nothing to startle them. The landscape around the camp was more desolate than they were used to; instead of Ravensbrück’s woods and lakes, they saw grey, empty plains, pitted with bombed-out villages. And the camp itself was far larger in scale, its brick-built blocks starker than the painted wooden barracks they were familiar with. As they entered the gates the women’s section was deserted.
